August 22, 2005, [MD]
So I just got off the bus in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a little town half an hour from the Wal-Mart world headquarters, and two hours from Bill Clinton’s presidential library in Little Rock. It’s a tiny bus station, not Greyhound like I’m used to, but Jefferson Lines. I am not meeting my hosts for a few hours, so I go in and ask the man behind the counter if I can store my luggage there for a few hours. He tells me to put it across the room on one of the benches. I ask him if he would keep an eye on it. He says: “People don’t steal in Fayetteville. Besides, nobody would bother with that big thing even if it was full of 100\$ bills.”
Not really my normal modus operandi, but I took out my mp3-player of the bag and trust my laundry with faith… Hopefully it will still be there when I return in an hour.
(I still have stories from Denver and Kansas City, but they’ll have to come in non-chronological order).
Update: Three days later, as I went down to the station in the morning to take the bus out of Fayetteville, another man with several bags asked the same Jefferson Lines’ attendant whether he could leave his bags behind the counter. He got the same reply, that nobody steals in Fayetteville. When he pressed the issue, he was told that being in Fayetteville is like being in a mother’s arms, and that someone had once left a bag for two weeks there, without problems. (Apparently he forgot where he left it.)
Stian\ (from the friendly University Library at Arkansas U)
Stian Håklev August 22, 2005 Toronto, Canada comments powered by Disqus