The guy in the mask comes down to take a break from renovating a church in Bowling Green. He’s dark-complected and speaks broken English, but he’s better suited than most Latinos I met to carry on a conversation. His name is Fillmore Wilson. I immediately think that sounds so fake, that this guy is definitely an illegal.

A lone usher takes a cigarette break outside Diddle Arena during the first half of Saturday’s women’s basketball exhibition against Louisiana Tech.

Adam Pape said it just about as well as anyone could. “You just can’t waste a beautiful day.” The mere mention of the mall or a movie theater made the students standing around me cringe, Pape said. But they could have just been shivering from the cold Barren River water.

The clich?s don’t apply. There’s no faint smell of urine. No homeless or graffiti tile wall. It’s the bus station in Nashville and it’s not what you know.

These people are waiting and quiet or maybe full of talk, but either way they have stories. This is how they travel because this is what they can afford.