What I learned from riding the school bus

A quilt of dancing shadows spread like long fingers as they filtered the morning sun across the dewy lawn. A tawny-haired three-year-old wandered restlessly about the front yard, his brown eyes happily smiling. Oblivious to the backpack sitting on the sidewalk, he chased a neighbor’s cat. The tiny feline responded by rolling it’s mottled coat in the grass as if the child might want to play. However, the giggling boy was off to the next thing that might briefly capture his attention.

I'm pretty sure this is how Asher sees his school bus.
(It's not nearly this cool)

Prompted by his mother to stand on the sidewalk, the boy instead made a game of jumping off the curb. He laughed in childish defiance, more playful than obstinate, as his mother told him, “Not in the street please.” As if to prove his independence  he stepped on the sidewalk, looked her in the eye, then jumped off the curb again. He laughed once more oblivious to the repeated chiding of his mother. Eventually a white bus appeared. It stopped and the doors yawned wide beckoning him to enter. Dad looked on, camera recording the event as the boy was about to board it for the first time. The child fully embraced the concept, apparently thinking that a big white vehicle whisking him away to adventures unknown was an exciting thing indeed.

I wondered what might be going through the little man's mind as Asher rode the school bus for the first time. My personal memory of the first day riding a bus to school is lost in the haze of many years. How many is none of your business—suffice to say it has been enough years that I no longer remember if that first day riding the bus was scary, exciting, mundane or a little of each. Of course things were different when I was a kid.

At five I walked several blocks to school by myself. The very concept of allowing a five-year old to walk anywhere unsupervised seems insane now. But when I was a kid we played outside all day whether it was cavorting in the woods, fishing at the local pond, wading in the creek, playing football or baseball at fields a mile away or riding our bikes a few miles to the General Store in the next state. I didn’t actually ride the bus until second grade after we moved. Even then we stood on a corner, a block from the house, with no parents in sight, until the bus picked us up.

For Asher, the trip to school is much different. The bus comes right to the house. I don’t have to worry about him being abducted or suffering acute hypothermic shock while standing on a corner somewhere. But I do worry about him riding the bus, because there are no good memories associated with bus rides for me. Yes, there’s an aid who makes sure he’s in his seat and not causing trouble. But the bad and evil things I remember happening on the bus are more powerful than the assurance of a county employee’s presence.

The first of these memories involved a rather odd character who I believe was named Chip. If Chip’s person had to be described in a single word of third grade vernacular it would be gross. He was particularly proud of the fact that he could release gaseous bodily emanations on command. In third grade a guy who can fart whenever he likes seems pretty cool . . . unless you have to sit behind him on the bus. Despite my misfortune of constantly ending up in one of the stinkiest portions of the bus, I tolerated this. Let’s face it, lots of elementary school kids smell funny anyway.

However, one very cold day, Chip decided that he would demonstrate how poorly the bus heater was operating. It was obvious to anyone that the bus was cold. However, the question on Chip’s mind was whether his spittle would freeze to the ceiling of the bus before dripping. He hocked a big loogie on the ceiling of the bus over his head. Sure enough it formed a disgusting little stalactite. Of course results need to be repeated to be offered as scientific evidence. Thus Chip made a second attempt. I don’t know if the mucus to spittle ratio was off, or the heater had raised the temperature of the bus just above the freezing point of disgusting, but this one dripped from the ceiling . . . right onto my head.

It marked the first and possibly only time in my life that I felt the raw and unstoppable urge to make someone digest a few of their teeth. I jumped out of  my seat, yanking Chip by the scruff of his neck. I threw a flurry of fists that might have maimed him for life, or at least bloodied his lip, had he not been wearing a snorkel jacket. He had the hood closed so tight that it seemed impossible that he was able to spit out of it—picture a prototype of Kenny in a blue jacket, who was apparently invincible rather than dropping dead every episode.  I punched him in the head approximately 47 times, with no discernible effect. Finally, he apparently became bored and threw a couple punches my way. Without the benefit of fist-proof headwear myself, I was relieved to see that we were pulling up to school where the principal magically appeared to escort both of us to his office.

My Middle School bus
driver as I remember her

Middle School brought with it more fun. Our bus driver was a rather nasty old-woman with the apparent singular goal of causing us bodily harm with her driving. Those fish eye mirrors that allow bus drivers to see children walking in front of the bus? I suspect they invented those to take away her excuse for running over bad children, “Oops!” Conversely they should have removed the large mirror over her head where she could observe our behavior inside the bus. I’m not sure how she ever delivered us safely to our destination while intently watching the mirror as if it broadcast nothing but Superbowl commercials.

To my recollection she never spoke, instead making her rules clear with offensive driving. In order to remind us that standing was unsafe, she would slam on the brakes. More than one child was transferred violently to a seat a few spaces forward of where they started when she employed this devious tactic. When the unsuspecting children who suddenly had an extra seatmate protested too loudly, she reminded us to be quiet. This was achieved by flinging the wobbly bus into turns at speeds that Micheal Schumacher or Mario Andretti would have balked at in a Formula One car. We routinely jumped to the other side of the bus in hopes that our weight would be enough to offset the centrifugal forces and save us. To this day, I’m certain it’s the only reason we all survived middle school.

Aftermath on Main Street of the typical
bus ride home from Middle School.

After each school day, our buses lined Main Street monopolizing both lanes in a quarter mile procession of bad children being returned to their parents. Had someone on a bike or motorcycle accidentally slipped between these lines of buses, I’m certain they would have been killed. Their likely demise would not have been the result of being crushed by buses, but by the multitude of things thrown back and forth between them. We viewed our buses like a pirate ship and traded broadside barrages with any takers. Pencils, paper-wads, a seatmate’s notebook, backpack, or shoes: these things all made excellent ammunition. My mother, not realizing my pencil was broken into tiny pieces for ammo at the end of each day, couldn’t figure out why I used so many of them. (This also spared me from the inevitable lecture on the likelihood putting someone's eye out with a pencil).

Once an enterprising deviant even managed to extricate the cushion from his seat. It was without a doubt the largest thing to ever go out the window, but not until we were far from Main Street and moving quite quickly. It bounced off the windshield of a Cadillac behind us. Fortunately the car’s driver, despite swerving wildly in the hope of avoiding it, managed to stay on the road. I’m sure he or she needed a change of underwear after the event. But as impressive as nearly killing someone with a bus seat cushion is, more epic was the most massive broadside battle Main Street ever witnessed.

Armed to the teeth with our bus-mate’s prized school possessions, we opened our windows as the parade of yellow buses came to a stop. Never before had two buses come to a complete halt side by side. We felt the monumental importance of the event with a surge of excitement. Surely, our opponents would remember the day we hailed school supplies upon them like brimstone. A flurry of graphite, paper, rubber and fabric ensued. The riders on both buses reeled with paper-wad cuts and the rare shoe to the head trauma. It seemed clear that we were prevailing. Then they broke with the traditional rules of gentlemanly battle; they released biological weapons. Moments before the buses started moving our bus was struck with tater tots, pizza slices weighing in at about five pounds each and dozens of half pints of sour milk. Those evil geniuses had repatriated cafeteria food, from the trash by the smell of it!

We lost what was perhaps the first food fight between buses in history, simply because we failed to have the forethought to bring food. Worse, our bus remained stained white with sour milk for weeks. Outwardly, our whitewashed ride marked the shame of our battle loss. Inside the bus it reeked like last month’s dairy processing plant explosion. The ride was revolting for some time. But the guy who had it worst was the one who tossed his seat cushion out the window. We all arrived for class each day with a foul odor imbued upon our sinuses, but he also had a sore backside.

High school was where things got even more interesting. The driver was a young guy. He apparently majored in something trendy in college then realized with a bachelor’s degree in pet rock psychology, the only actual job open to him was bus driver. In spite of this he didn’t seem bitter. He was the cool bus driver in fact. He didn’t mind that half the kids on the bus lit up a smoke for the ride home. Hey, school is tough, why would the bus driver deprive a bunch of fourteen and fifteen year-old kids of their relaxing end of the day nicotine fix? Of course he didn’t need to protect the rest us from second hand smoke since we were impervious to its effects (we didn’t need seat belts either, people were much tougher in my day). Nonetheless, this eventually led the smokers to question, “If the bus driver is cool enough to let us smoke, will he let us smoke pot on the bus too?”

It only looked like this when the door opened to
let us off the bus.

Of course the driver didn’t care. He was a college educated guy driving a bus. If he faced this issue it might bring his facade of calm toppling down with the requirement of also facing how poorly life had turned out. With his psychology degree he likely knew that burying the truth was his only hope at false happiness. Furthermore, the deviant smokers were at the opposite end of the bus from the steering wheel. No one had coined the term plausible deniability yet, but he was using the tactic. I’m sure he’s in politics now (if he’s not still driving a bus).

Eventually, the fact that I smelled like someone had tossed an ashtray and some bong water on me at the end of each school day led my parents to ask some serious questions. They didn’t believe that a bus driver would let people smoke anything on the bus. The recovery of the remnants of a matchbook  from the laundry seemed further damning evidence. If it came from my pocket it was used  to set off illegal fireworks, not to assist in smoking anything. While I was reasonably sure we always used a lighter rather than matches when blowing things up, I certainly wasn’t going to plead my innocence by entering a guilty plea to something they didn’t know about. So I was sentenced to a hundred years of hard labor on a purely circumstantial case despite my actual innocence in the matter of smoking. I have since escaped the labor camp . . . but that’s another story.

So what have I learned from this? Buy my son a snorkel jacket for warmth and self defense. Make sure his bus has seat belts and he wears a helmet to middle school. Inventory his school supplies and if he is consistently short on pencils suggest he take a dozen eggs to school daily (just in case). Lastly, if he comes home smelling like pot after a bus ride, I’m going to want to believe him when he tells me it’s the other kids on the bus. But I’m still going to sentence him to 50 years hard labor. Why not a hundred? I’m a softy.