This was NOT the most fun way to get back home after school....

Bus Number 10

I’m not sure how Dad came to be a school bus driver. The peak season for his normal trade—bricklaying—came during the summer. Bus driving gave him steady five-day-a-week work the rest of the year, plus driving for special occasions like away ball games. Between the morning and afternoon bus runs he had time to do work around the house (Our family home was still something of a work in progress) and see to his pastoral duties of studying for sermons and visiting sick church members. I suppose it all worked out pretty well.

Dad’s new school-year schedule worked well in another way too. Now it was no longer necessary for my brother and me to spend each afternoon after school at a babysitter’s house until Mom got off work. Instead we would simply board Bus Number 10 and go wherever Dad went. He would certainly always know where we were.

Each afternoon the big yellow monsters would congregate at the grade school lot and swallow such kids as had nobody to pick them up or lived too far from home to walk. From there they would roll to the middle school and repeat the performance. That’s where I got on. Dad’s bus was easy to find, since it was always last in the lineup. From middle school we would rumble across a few blocks of narrow streets, past the bus garage and the district’s tiny administrative office, to the high school.

By the time the highschoolers were on board we had a solid bus full. With Dad driving there was little likelihood of any serious disciplinary problems developing. Kids didn’t mess around with a six-foot-tall construction worker, built like a gorilla, who always looked like he meant business while behind the steering wheel. But of course that didn’t keep the bus from buzzing with the racket of dozens of juvenile conversations about classes, and teachers, and boys, and the day’s gossip, and whatever it was the boys were talking about over on their side of the bus. As long as nobody was screaming loud enough to be heard over everybody else, and everybody appeared to be staying in their seats, Dad didn’t worry about a little noise—or even a lot of it.

The first part of the journey was crowded, sweltering or chilly depending on the time of year, and frustratingly slow with the frequent stops. We went back and forth through a maze of streets on the edge of town, letting kids off every few houses. By the time we reached the city limits the crowd had already thinned noticeably. The noise had declined to what one of our teachers described as “a dull roar.” Now the real trip was about to begin. The kids who had gotten off while we were still in town didn’t know what they were missing. Or how lucky they were to miss it.

It was left to other buses and drivers to carry the riders who lived along the main and secondary highways outside town. We were heading out of town on a tertiary road maintained, if that was the word for it, by the county. At first the stops were still relatively frequent. Soon, though, we were past the open fields and the houses that were close enough together for their occupants to see each other. All you could see were woods and a narrow ribbon of cracked asphalt snaking along beneath trees whose branches nearly touched each other overhead.

The road wasn’t even divided into lanes. When vehicles met the drivers simply found a path as best they could between the oncoming traffic and the ditch on the right-hand side. When the bus met a log truck—and that happened frequently—there was simply no room to spare. Dad had to keep the bus’s right-hand tires running along the very edge of the pavement, and hope that the log truck’s driver did the same. That urban legend people told about the kid who stuck his head out the window on a school bus and was decapitated by a passing log truck seemed perfectly credible.

I recognized this stretch of road because it was the one our family lived on. About a mile and a half beyond the city limits we passed our very own driveway. But of course there was nobody home, with Dad driving the bus and Mom still at work at the bank in town, and so we kept going. My brother and I would be the very last kids off the bus. I was well aware of the irony.

Past our house the road ascended a very steep hill, atop which sat a small cemetery. Past this it was possible to see other houses and yards. Sometimes a couple or three houses would sit close fairly close together. Elsewhere we would see individual houses out of sight of any others. Everywhere you looked you saw either woods or timber clear-cuts.

The kids aboard the bus continued to thin out as we dropped them off in ones and twos at various houses. We reached the end of what passed for pavement and kept going on gravel. Eventually we reached the last house and dropped off the last kid. Then Dad eased the bus into that driveway and somehow backed out again onto the narrow road. We headed back toward town.

By now only a relative handful of riders remained. We still had a long way to go, though. At this point there was an unspoken relaxing of rules. The remaining kids now had the run of the bus. Everybody had his or her own seat. You could sit on either side of the bus regardless of gender and converse over the backs of the seats or across the aisle. As long as you weren’t too unruly about it you could even change seats while the bus was moving. But Dad remained vigilant through his rearview mirror for any horsing around, and he was ready and able to put a stop to it.

Instead of going all the way back into town, we turned off onto the Cutoff. The Cutoff was a truly awful stretch of road that ran for several miles between our road and another rural road like it. It was all holes and gravel, and trees close enough together to the road that they sometimes scraped the bus. I could see blackberries growing in the woods in season, just a few feet away from where we passing. The desolate woods through which the Cutoff ran had been a hilly backwoods farming community within living memory. Now there were not even traces of houses remaining.

A single family did live in this region. In more or less the center of it stood an exceptionally tall hill that everybody called a mountain. Atop that stood a forestry tower. In those days forest rangers still kept watch from those towers. The ranger on that tower lived in a small house at the base of it with her husband and two children. To deliver them to their doorstep Dad had to pull the bus off of the Cutoff and onto a one-lane driveway. Essentially it was just a pair of ruts running uphill through dense woods. The bus slowly rocked and bounced up that track, past a sheet-metal shack that served as a deer camp during the annual season, until it reached the top of the hill. There the track made a roundabout around the very summit where the tower stood. This kept Dad from having to back the bus back down the mountain.

From here we bumped down to the Cutoff and over to the other county road. We rolled a few more miles out on the road, dropping off the remaining riders at isolated houses and farms. Then Dad found another place to turn around and headed back toward town.

At this point it was just Dad, my brother, and me. With no more stops to make Dad gave the bus all the gas it could take on the narrow road. The bus’s big wheels made almost as much noise as an eighteen-wheeler. As it hit each of the many potholes it crashed and rattled as only a well-seasoned school bus can. We couldn’t converse very easily under these conditions, so we didn’t say much.

Back in town we returned to the bus garage. From what I can remember Bus Number Ten was always the last one in. The bus master was always there, looking over the big vehicles to make sure they were fueled up and in good condition for the next day’s run. He, Dad, and one or two other drivers would usually hang out around the bus garage’s cavernous shop and shoot the breeze for a while until we knew it was time for Mom to get home.

Sometimes my brother and I would wander around looking at the massive tools and puzzling machines that filled the space. Sometimes we’d just sit down on a couple of old chairs and read books we had brought with us. Occasionally Dad would give us quarters to get soft drinks from the garage’s vending machine. It was one of the old-fashioned kind with glass bottles that you had to yank out. It was the only machine I ever saw that carried “Red Hog”, a regional brand of strawberry soda that used a rampant University of Arkansas Razorback Hog as its logo.

We did this for about two years. Then Mom left the bank and went back to work teaching school. After that we only rode the bus as far as the high school. Hanging out in Mom’s classroom, reading the assorted donated paperbacks that served as a kind of classroom library, was more pleasant than riding a school bus all afternoon long.

Dad drove the bus for at least one more year. All the memorable things that happened to Dad in his bus-driving days seemed to occur after his own children stopped riding. That was when he ran over the grey fox by accident and tried to rescue and adopt her orphaned pup. That was the winter he managed to get the bus all the way to the top of the mountain under winter weather conditions so bad the family who lived there hadn’t been able to get their own truck up there for a week. And I think that was the year Dad and another driver synchronized the speeds of the fleet’s fastest and slowest buses (for some reason they had been teamed together) on a trip along the interstate to Little Rock and back by drafting the slower bus behind the faster one. Eventually Dad went back to construction full time, and our family’s connection with Bus Number 10 came to an end.