137 years ago, Clarence Stevenson hitched a team of horses to a wagon, and carried paying passengers, from Yale, British Columbia to Soda Creek. From that trip, Greyhound was born - its now the largest bus company in North America. I wonder what Clarence would think of bus terminals today. Contributor Alix Spiegel spent a day at New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal, to see how the people moving through such a place give it life.

Feature: Peoplewatching at the Bus Terminal

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There's a man chain smoking by the exit ramp of the port authority bus station, and at the main entrance a mother is fighting with her daughter. From my post in front of the security monitors at the Port Authority Operations desk, I can see the black and white image of the daughter crying, but I can't hear anything she's saying. I only see the look of disgust on the mothers face, and then the hopeless shrug of the girl as she turns her back on her mother - wheeling her luggage around in a short circle and then into the sidewalk traffic of 8th Ave. From my position in front of the 21 monitors, I can see three people enter room 210c, and a line of passengers at gate 311. I see a sloping road labeled 'Main Plank", and the outside of the bowling alley, and on a monitor labeled Sanitation - a man reading a newspaper as he waits for his girlfriend to get finished in the bathroom.

200 thousand people pass through this place every day - 55 million a year. There are 3 dozen bus lines - 17 hundred buses - and close to 400 gates. The building itself is the size of two city blocks, a beehive of tunneled roads, waiting rooms, and fast food resturants - busy with constant motion.

I leave the operations office and make my way out onto the floor of the station. For the rest of the day as I travel around the building my image will move from monitor to monitor inside this office. A black and white figure with a hooded jacket and foot long microphone - asking the other black and white figures where they're coming from, and where they want to go.

Houston: "Coming from Live...yes I am the man..."

Houston: "OK...I left...wound up staying 30 years..."

Houston: "I beat 'em five years in a row...!"

So I ask Houston if this was one of his freedom rides... if he's seen any good-looking country, or met any good-looking ladies, and Houston kinda stops. He blinks hard and his face becomes serious. Then he tells me the answer was no.

It was cancer. The same disease which had taken Houstons grandfather and Houstons older brother. It turns out that Houston, who is only 58, has taken a lot of bus trips down to Florida to go to funerals, and that this used to bother him quite a bit - but recently, after two more deaths in the family, he's gotten used to the idea.

We stand in the hallway for a while, talking about how people learn to live with death, the importance of church and family, and then the doors to the Syracuse bus open, and the passengers start filing up the stairs, and Houston picks up his suitcase. Before he turns to go he smiles at me, the white of his teeth set off by his dark brown skin and the deep purple of his shirt... he has a message he says, for my listeners...

Houston: "Tell them if they're ever in Syracuse..."

Roosevelt knows all the songs of all the greats...and he also writes his own music. He tells me he's been working on this one song for about 10 years, because he wants to get the song absolutely perfect before he goes into the recording studio.

Now Roosevelt is pushing 65, and as I look at the deeply wrinkled circles around his eyes, it's difficult to imagine that at this advanced age the song he's been working on for close to a decade will ever see the inside of a recording studio. But, I'm not sure it matters: Roosevelt already has an audience. As he sings, the other workers at the shop bob their heads in time with the rhythm. Even the suits on their wooden thrones are smiling. When he's done they ask for another. A scratchy tune to help relieve the tedium of the day...

Gate 73. A girl runs into the bathroom. She's bleeding - there's a cut on her hand and blood's pouring out all over the counter, all over the floor. One of the attendants passes her some paper towel she's pumped from the dispenser on the wall, and then rushes back to pump some more. Meanwhile the girl is crying. She's late, she says, for her bus. Her hair is dyed. Or at least, it used to be dyed - now there are three inches of dark roots and the rest is a frizzy nest of yellow and orange streaks. As she runs her hand under the faucet water I can see that she has scars all up and down her arms. Then, without warning she runs out of the bathroom, and a trickle of blood follows her out the door. I wait a moment, shocked, and then follow too...but she's already disappeared into the crowd so I trace the drops on the floor, trace them all the way back to gate 73. There she's standing, clasping her arm under a sign with a long list of stops: Delaware, Baltimore, and beyond. I hear someone ask her if she's OK, and I hear her respond that she's terrible. She says she spent the night in jail. That her boyfriend - the bastard - left her in New York, ("In jail in New York! The bastard!") and now she needs to get home. Then she walks through the doorway and up the stairs, onto her bus. The doors close, and she's gone.

On the lower floors of the Port Authority Bus Station long distance travelers shoulder heavy backpacks, they are impatient and a little bit grubby, waiting in lines for the buses that will take them to distant states. But on the upper floors of the station you find a very different scene. These are the floors for commuters. Instead of backpacks there are smooth leather briefcases, instead of rumpled clothing - neatly pressed suits.

Gates 310 to 326. A commuter's purgatory. By quarter past 5, a literal army of commuters have invaded the floor and most are more than a little impatient with my questions. I don't take it personally though - it's not that they don't want to help - it's just that these people are tired. Bone tired.

Think about it. 20 hours of travel a week, almost a full day spent crammed into narrow seats, (watching the grey roads pass beneath them) cursing the tunnel traffic. And if you ask, as I did, what work brings them this distance, their leave you with no better sense of how they spent their 8 hours than if you had never asked at all...

Whatever their titles they seem to like their jobs. When I ask they talk about the great people they work with, the rewards of a good challenge. Of course, in the next breath they'll wonder out loud if they'll be able to retire early. It's the travel that gets to them. Too many days spent in late afternoon traffic jams while their families settle down to dinner.

But they do it. They do it because they want their children to grow up in a green place. Where there are trees to climb and grass to mow, and of course, well-heeled suburban schools. I guess, looked at a certain way, the story of the second floor of the Port Authority bus station is a story of sacrifice. No matter which direction you look, your eye will meet a man or a woman who has endured the harassment of the modern commute for the sake of their families. And, to a man, they promise themselves that this torture will not go on forever. That one day soon they would find employment closer to home. Or in one case, a man in sales with two children yet to go to college - just have a good year, a very good year, and retire.

I make my way back to the Operations desk. There's a new guard sitting in front of the monitors now, a middle aged man in a Port Authority uniform with a sandwich balanced on his lap. The sandwich is unwieldy - practically bigger than his mouth - and you can see he's working hard to take a bite. Meanwhile, hundreds of people hurry by all around him. They are going to funerals, or coming home from a long day of work in the city. Or maybe they're thinking about a song their writing. A little blues number they've been working on for 10 or so years. But the guard doesn't notice, and probably, he doesn't care. He quietly eats his sandwich - a model of calm concentration - as the rest of the Port Authority Bus Station swirls steadily around him.

I'm Alix Spiegel for the Savvy Traveler.