SOMEWHERE IN NEW JERSEY -- Greyhound 1612 had battled midway up the turnpike when Mike Duffy, his bag and wallet somewhere back in Vegas, started selling the stuff he hadn't lost.

"I'll take five dollars for the headset. It's really worth $50," he said. Headset sold. Next up: a collection of scorpions and tarantulas frozen in plastic domes. Passengers wondered where he got them. He wonders if the cops will find the guy who lifted his wallet. The road is crowded with mysteries.

Across the aisle, Frank Young worked his cell phone.

Yes, he could switch from Stockholm, N.J., to Hackensack, he told the dispatcher. He shuttles cars for a living and works off his cell phone, a $750 travel pass good for 60 days at a stretch, and whatever pillows he doesn't lose between stops.

"The bus is always my office. Every three days I'm on the bus. I'm on the bus more than anyplace else," he said.

The phone rang again. A pickup in Nashville? Sure.

Long departed was the soldier on four-day leave who hopped off to see his girl before he ships to Iraq.

The convict just out of the state prison in Forest County was gone, too, waiting for family at the Philly station. The guy in row three, who fretted about his girlfriend, was now in Valley Forge, setting up displays for a gem show.

Eric Tibbs sat up front, his life's dream in his grasp in the form of a steering wheel. From the time he was a 14-year-old in Steubenville he wanted to drive a Greyhound bus. Now he was rolling into the dusk, contented, his next stop Manhattan.

"I remember faces. I rarely remember names," said Mr. Tibbs. "I go through too many people through the course of a year to try to memorize names. Most people remember me, one way or another."

It has been 40 years since Paul Simon haunted listeners with an elegiac song called "America," in which the singer boards a Greyhound in Pittsburgh, plays games with the faces of fellow travelers, and confesses his sense of being lost as he counts the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike.

It will be another week before the Pittsburgh station where that narrator embarks on his search officially reopens -- a scrubbed, well-lit substitution for the dingy, forlorn hall that preceded it on the same corner at 11th and Grant.

The upgrade speaks to the homogenization of the country: the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh stations are indistinguishable one from the other, just as the melange of diners and mom-and-pop motels along the highways from a generation ago have given way to chains.

The bus, though, still mixes an American stewpot.

Budget-strapped families sit beside itinerant laborers. Businessmen unable to schedule a quick flight look across the aisle at homeward bound men in prison-issue blue shirts. Workers, schemers, the lost and the searching sit beside vacationers and college students.

"Everybody's got a story to tell. Everybody's important to me," said Theresa Perry, operations supervisor at the Pittsburgh station.

All come to look for America -- or to be it.

Debbie Davis ' car had broken down at the corner of Liberty and Grant, just outside the Greyhound station, when she saw her old friend, Ms. Perry, the operations manager.

Already a night manager had chased off a couple engaging in an amorous commerce on the sidewalk. Now, as the big, diesel-eating buses nuzzled the curb and rumbled, passengers strolled.

One was sprawled on a bench outside the Travelers' Aid office to await the 9 a.m. opening.

He complained that someone had stolen his bags. He threatened to walk the rest of the way to Connellsville, gave up, turned up with a few snorts of liquor inside him and fell asleep.

"I don't understand how people can sleep in foreign places," Ms. Perry said.

Rose McIntosh, who works the desk at the aid office, has seen them drift in and out, always in need: the people who came for family funerals but couldn't scrape up the return fare; people on layover, whose trip has outlasted their cash supply; the kids who show up to answer ads in their hometown papers to sell magazines and arrive only to find out there are no jobs.

"A lot of them go back to other places, domestic shelters and different things," she said. "Sometimes they come off the bus. Sometimes they live here. It varies."

Some get tickets. The hungry ones get meal vouchers for the snack shop across the hall. Nobody gets put on a bus until they verify a home address.

By 9:45, the New York bus, inbound from Columbus, was hung up in traffic on Green Tree hill and Ethan Carlisle was running a mad circuit around the benches.

His father, Chris, chased him down, wrestled a little, jokingly pretended to box him a bit. Chris Carlisle and his wife, Nicole Banks, were finishing out their third day on buses. They started in Kingman, Ariz. If they keep their sanity and their legs don't finally lose all feeling, they'll complete the trip in Harrisburg.

"You get aggravated real easily," said Mr. Carlisle.

"It's cramped."

This, added Ms. Banks, has been their life: "Sleep on the bus. Eat on the bus. Be cautious about using the bathroom on the bus, 'cause you're constantly going from side to side, back to back. Ugh."

The couple were busing it for two reasons: it's cheap and Nicole hasn't quite accepted the theory of aerodynamics.

"Too many Rescue 911 shows," she said, "where the plane's still flying but there's no roof."

Ethan made another circuit. His father solemnly warned him. The kid kept running.

"He's very anxious to get back on the bus and anxious to get off the bus," Ms Banks said. "Wants to touch everything and everyone."

A station agent with a bullhorn passed. Time to board. The announcement was good news to Richard Fisher. En route to Lancaster from the state of Indiana, he missed a connection because the public address system wasn't working.

"I've been in this station four hours," he sighed.

He's ready.

Greyhound began as a single Hupmobile ragtop that Andy Anderson, an immigrant Swede, could not sell to anyone in the town of Hibbing, Minn. in 1914.

Desperate, he began to offer commuter rides between Hibbing and the town of Alice, charging 15 cents a head.

"Talk about Americana. There's a great story on immigrants," said Gene Nicolelli, the 82-year-old founder of the Greyhound Bus Museum in that town. Mr. Nicolelli stumbled into the museum business much the way Mr. Anderson entered the transportation field: pure accident and a bit of twisted luck. Planning a bicentennial celebration years ago, he found a plaque on a building that honored the founding of Greyhound.

"I bought gas from Andy 'Bus' Anderson as a young man," Mr. Nicolelli said. He took the plaque to the local library where someone promptly lost it.

Eventually, Mr. Nicolelli pieced together the story: Mr. Anderson had put up a company called Mesaba Transportation. Friends bought in and out until eventually one partner, Carl Wickman, took his part of the company and expanded the bus lines while Mr. Anderson stayed with Mesaba. By the end of the 1920s, Mr. Wickman had formed Greyhound Lines.

The company itself has traveled. It was headquartered in Hibbing. It was sold to the same company that owned Armour Meat Packing and Dial Soap, and taken to Phoenix. In the 1980s investors moved it to Dallas where it is headquartered now.

As the post-war generation bought their own cars and airlines offered to shorten travel time, Greyhound found itself cutting back.

At one point in the 1930s the line had even attempted to compete with railroads, putting double-decker buses on the road with sleeping compartments, dining areas and hostesses.

Today, the line is reorganizing with a new fleet of buses, but to see a Greyhound in Hibbing, you'll have to visit the museum.

"They don't run to Hibbing," said Mr. Nicolelli. "They discontinued basically all of northern Minnesota.

"Sentimentality doesn't pay the bills."

Frank Young, who shuttles cars and trucks and uses the bus in between, got another call outside Newark.

Change of plans. Hackensack.

He's off in Newark, then, right? Yeah, the dispatcher told him. At a detail shop.

Into his 50s, Mr. Young worries sometimes that his work years earlier in a lead plant has dulled his short-term memory. Then he reeled off a dizzying schedule that put him between Hackensack and Altoona, on to Stockholm, N.J., to Nashville then to either Philadelphia or New Jersey and, from there, maybe a Greyhound home to Indiana.

He shifted in his seat in search of a posture he hadn't yet worn out in the 10 hours riding the grey dog.

"I had two pillows but I left them on two different buses. I gotta get me another pillow so I can get over here beside this window. That's why I like the window: I can throw my pillow up here and I'm gone," he said.

He sleeps between stops. Sometimes past them.

"When I'm out, I'm out for the count," he said.

Eric Tibbs pulled into Newark with a hiss of brakes.

New friends clambered off, probably never to be seen again.

Mike Duffy hurried home with the worried look of a man whose wallet was traveling separately.