The mystical Bonanza Bus ride

For 20 years ­— 1973 to 1993 ­— I took the Bonanza Bus from Canaan, Connecticut, or drove from my home in Clayton, Massachusetts, to Manhattan. Because Route 7 follows the course of the Housatonic River, the ride can be a bit dizzying, and the tall, handsome driver who sped us on our way had acquired a nickname: Professor Curvy. Another driver — a lean, dapper man — was known as the Bing of the Berkshires, though why I couldn’t tell you. His uncle, who lived in Pittsfield, hunted rabbits in the hills around Clayton, he told me, and brought a ferret in a bag, letting it drive the rabbits out of their warrens and onto the grill.

Among the cast of Bonanza characters was a woman with a neat bun of graying hair who boarded the bus below Cornwall Bridge and whom I took to be a psychiatrist. It turned out that she was a medium who spent three days in Manhattan seeing clients and who also gave voice lessons to, among others, the actress Beatrice Straight, who in 1977 was awarded an Oscar for her supporting role in the movie, “Network.” The name of this medium with whom I often shared a seat on the bus was Ethel Johnson Myers.

On one curvy ride Ethel shared with me the story of a client who, one evening, had felt himself rise up through the ceiling of his living room as his spirit set out to find Ethel. He had looked for her on Long Island; not finding her there, he had traveled to an apartment on Manhattan’s East Side — and, lo, there she was! And Ethel could vouch for his presence there; on the evening he found her, she had caught the scent of hay, which she associated with her client.

Another day brought another tale: this one of her being driven out to the famously haunted Amity Hill House, on Long Island, to see if she could put an end to the hauntings. After waking from a deep trance, she knew that the hauntings would cease, because the air in the room smelled of ozone. 

More moving than these tales was her account of how she had come to be in touch with the spirit world. This happened when, after the death of her husband, he suddenly appeared to her in a blue cloud, and she had begun to write what she heard him saying to her — writing, moreover, in his handwriting. It was he who connected her to the spirit world. In due course, she acquired a local reputation as both voice coach and psychic, leading to an invitation by the American Society for Psychical Research to come to New York and see clients under controlled conditions in the Society’s office. Ethel recalled standing at the window of the Society’s brownstone, looking for her first client, and seeing a bearded man wearing a coat with an astrakhan collar talking to another man on the sidewalk. 

When the client entered, Ethel asked who that bearded man had been. Her client — John LeTouche, a respected lyricist who had contributed lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s Candide — said he had not stopped to talk to anyone. Who could it be then? Ethel asked. “Was there anyone whom he admired more than any other?” Well, yes, there was: the novelist Joseph Conrad — who was known to have a beard and to have worn coats with an astrakhan collar.  

For the two of them, that settled the matter: Ethel had seen the man in the mind of the librettist which the client himself could not see.

Jon Swan is a poet, journalist and former senior editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.  His writing can be found at www.jonswanpoems.com.