I Love Bus

Waxahatchee is back on the road

The seal on the tour bus toilet hole broke, letting pee fumes creep up from the tank below, turning the bathroom into the beginning of a hell sauna, jeopardizing the livability of the bus and the general wellbeing of all band and crew.

So Stephen, the bus driver, uninstalled the toilet and rebuilt it in a parking lot somewhere in Portland, Oregon. Thanks, Stephen.

Did you know? that pee that festers in a tank smells like poop even when there’s no poop in the picture. Most bus sanitary systems aren’t shit-enabled, so this dangerous piss air, that’s really all it is: pee. But it’s enough to make your eyes water. “Piss that smells like shit,” as one friend put it. We relish venues’ stationary, fumeless toilets.

If someone is feeling their most tour romantic, indulging the most gravely embarrassing similes, they say tour buses are like pirate ships.

I watched half of the first episode of Shogun the other day (giving it a whirl), enough to see a scene where scurvy-ridden Dutch sailors sleep in their hammock-bunks below deck, water dripping from above, ship boards creaking and moaning as the ship lists. As I lie in my bunk this Sunday morning, on our way to Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo, careening down Eisenhower’s unloved highways, I think of those drip-drip pirate holds. The wood slats that secure the bunks above and below me squeak with every bump, and the whole structure twists when we round a bend.

But the simile stops there. I don’t believe we’re pirates. We’re not swashbuckling or doing anything even that hard. It’s just a comparison of vehicles. Yo-ho, those travelers had a creaky mobile home. We do, too.

And I love it. Many musicians dream of tour-bus touring. Having seen several tour buses when I was a kid didn’t inoculate me from that longing. I guess it deepened it.

It’s not a wish for pirate life but something gentler and at least a little bit vain. Even when it’s noisy, when your body is sore from a sort of perpetual state of flexing with the rhythms of the country’s infrastructure, it feels cool. We’re in a band that can tour in a bus. We’re like our heroes. We’re lucky.

Maybe see you out here on this tour, the second half of Waxahatchee Tigers Blood in the US. It spans Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine.

P.S. I just found a gift from the previous occupant of this bunk—an Oreo! Yippee!