Green Tortoise: The Trip Counts, Not The Destination -- `Road Show On Wheels' Travels From Seattle To L.A. Twice A Week

It's a traveling commune. A road show on wheels. A new head space. Welcome to Green Tortoise Alternative travel; Greyhound was never like this.

An Eric Clapton guitar riff hangs in the air. The bus is redolent of tofu burgers and patchouli oil. Time for life-experience show-and-tell.

"It was like the end of Western civilization. Or the beginning," says Leslie Batchelder, 24, of Davis, Calif. She was in Berlin when the wall came down.

Nineteen-year-old Trevor Deighton listens intently. He's from either D.C. or San Francisco, depending. On one coast he's a bike messenger, on the other a rock climber.

Sprawled out on a pile of sleeping bags, Jessica Stone and her boyfriend, Eddie Allen, lie with arms entwined. They're taking suggestions on naming the child they just found out they're going to have.

Seventeen-year-old Raquel Valenzuela of Renton wants to take a journey, and maybe discover herself.

She'll get the chance. Everybody does.

A trip on the Tortoise isn't just about getting from here to there. It's about what happens in between.

Twice a week, the trademark green buses make a 48-hour trip from Seattle to Los Angeles for only $79 one way.

That includes eight hours of sightseeing in San Francisco and a three-hour layover at the company compound in southern Oregon complete with a vegetarian feast, sauna and - if you're lucky - an impromptu African drumming session.

At 7 a.m. on a clear Seattle morning, 30 passengers mill around in the cold waiting to board the bus.

Fresh-faced young women clutch sleeping bags and pillows, their long, loose hair making it seem they might be on their way to a slumber party rather than a bus trip.

The chaperone of this party is driver Steve Spahr, 38, a bear of a man with a mischievous grin and a wild black beard.

For him, driving the Tortoise isn't a job, it's a calling. He sets the karma for the trip.

"It's a 24-hour time-out. A place where you don't have to worry about playing the game," he says.

LEARN SOME TOLERANCE

Spahr presides over each trip's "nightly miracle" like a high priest of busdom. That's when the Tortoise's handcrafted interior is transformed into a vast expanse of cushions - enough to sleep 45 comfortably. Seats fold out and tables fold up.

Spahr then initiates new passengers into the intricacies of "the leg thing."

"Think sardines, people," he says, interlocking his fingers in illustration. Bundled in their sleeping bags, passengers lie perpendicular to the side of the bus, intertwined like the teeth of two combs.

And it's all perfectly respectable. Jolee Darrow, 39, of Vashon Island, and her three teenagers traveled to San Francisco recently to visit her sister.

She deliberately chose the Tortoise over Amtrak so as to teach her 15-year-old, football-player son Caleb a little tolerance.

"He's the one with the crew-cut over there," she points to the front of the bus where Caleb's in the middle of an energetic game of Hearts with a young man sporting a ring in his nose.

"He needs to see that people can be different from him and still be OK. It's a good experience for him."

This mobile sample of the counterculture was born during a '60s generation wanderlust. Kent Gardner, 46, was working at his father's upholstery business in Weymouth, Mass., in 1972 when he bought an old school bus and decided to drive to Central America with his wife and two children.

"It wasn't that uncommon a thing to do in those days," says Lyle, Gardner's 25-year-old son who manages the bus company.

"For a while when we got back Dad sold stuff from Guatemala on the streets of Berkeley. He didn't have the money to take us back to Boston for Christmas. But we had this bus. . . ."

So Gardner printed up fliers and sold $75 tickets for a "Home for the Holidays" cross-country trip.

He filled the bus with passengers, drove to Boston, made a profit, and a company was born.

"There were lots of so-called underground bus companies in those days," Lyle says.

"The Grey Rabbit, the Pink Flamingo. But we're the only one still running."

The Tortoise now has a fleet of 10 buses, a staff of 50 and its own bus-renovation garage in Lowell, Ore. They run West Coast trips and adventure travels to Mexico, Guatemala, Alaska, the Grand Canyon and New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

The Tortoise's annual revenue in 1992 was about $1.4 million, Gardner says.

On a recent trip, the San Francisco-bound bus arrives at 7 p.m. at the Cow Creek Compound, the Tortoise's layover site in southern Oregon. Generator-run lights cut a path through firs to the appropriately named "Thought-Provoking Structure."

Long, thin saplings are woven to form a huge oval room. Sandwiched between them, a layer of clear plastic keeps out the rain but lets the stars shine through. Hundreds of Christmas tree lights strung along the ceiling fill the room with a magical glow.

A VEGETARIAN FEAST

Passengers gather around a large potbellied stove to warm their fingers and sit on benches drinking tea and hot cocoa. While some prepare a vegetarian communal dinner, others investigate the sauna.

Down near Cow Creek, shrieks fill the air as 15 or more travelers burst out of a redwood sauna and plunge into the frigid stream. A snowball fight ensues before they race back to the steam bath.

At the Structure, a young French-Canadian woman just back from a year's stay in Mali, West Africa, brings out a drum and begins to play. Others join her on drums, guitars and spoons. Nineteen-year-old Anja Becker from Germany stops at the entrance.

`It's like a dream," she whispers as 40 strangers make music and dance to an undulating rhythm under the flickering lights.

The next morning, 46 passengers wake in a tangle of sleeping bags as the bus crosses the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. Spahr downshifts, easing the bus to a stop downtown.

Passengers spill out onto the sidewalk in the bright California sun, and there's a flurry of activity as address books come out for the ritual exchange.

"My parents will always know how to find me; call them," 21-year-old Leiasa Beckham yells as she cinches her sleeping bag to a backpack.

"Everybody got their bags?" Spahr says, peering into the luggage bins under the bus. Passengers hug Spahr goodbye, and one presses a leftover orange in his hand. Then they slowly disperse into the workaday crowd, tie-dyed shirts blending in among business suits.