The Wheels on the Bus

Dear Reader, I have made a disturbing discovery: I have passionate feelings about school buses. Someone posted a question on my Babycenter birth board asking, “How do you feel about a stay-at-home mom’s kids riding the school bus?” I was shocked to find that a significant number of people think that stay-at-home moms should show their love for their little ones by disregarding the environment and making two unnecessary round-trips a day.

So I decided to explore my feelings about school buses. My memories of riding the bus in 1^st and 2^nd grade in Illinois are hazy. It was a long bus ride (if I remember correctly, we were white kids being bused to a faraway school for racial balance) but I remember it positively as my first exposure to 80s music. (My mom insisted that music from the 60s and 70s was superior.) Another one bites the dust…. Put me in, coach…. And, of course, Like a virgin….

When we moved to Pennsylvania in 3^rd grade, the bus picked us up at the end of our street. Every morning, we’d put our bags and lunchboxes down on the curb in order to determine who would get on the bus first. The older kids played Monkey in the Middle with a tennis ball, and I talked to my friend Stephanie. On the bus Stephanie and I sang obnoxious songs: “Girl Scout Camp” and “You Can’t Ride in My Red Wagon,” as well as more violent fare, such as “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school” and

On top of Old Smoky
All covered with sand,
I shot my poor teacher
With a red rubber band.

The only non-singing memory I have of that bus also involves Madonna: a boy was talking about the song “Like a Virgin” and asked if I knew what a virgin was. Ever the scholar, I looked it up in the student dictionary I was carrying, but we agreed that “pure, spotless” didn’t seem to have much to do with the song.

The first day of middle school, the bus shocked me. On the crowded, 45-minute ride to the other part of town, some boys spent the entire time making crude, lewd comments. But I developed my strategy for dealing: I sat by the window, looked out it, and ignored my busmates. Some days, I calculated the minutes, hours, and days of my life that were being taken up by riding the bus. Other days, I watched the sun rise over the mountains and tried to describe it in my head: The sun rose over the cauldron of the mountains or In winter, the sky glowed pink over the tawny fields. I experimented with positive thinking, and found that by telling myself, I am very happy, I could start to believe it. Although sometimes I hated the bus, it was certainly no worse than middle school in general, and it gave me time to think.

When I stayed after school to work on a play, I took the late bus home. The late bus took only a few scattered students, mostly athletes, home through the darkness. I remember sitting quietly and eating Cheese on Wheat Crackers as it took the circuitous route home.

In middle school, our regular bus driver’s name was Ken Wildsmith. He had a pointed moustache, and his face turned bright red when he got angry. Often on the verge of rage, he spoke in controlled bursts, using big words and saying, for example, “vacate the vehicle” instead of “get off the bus.” Of course we (and I say “we” even though I’m sure I never opened my mouth in his presence) made fun of him relentlessly, and then he would turn red and yell. One day, we behaved so badly (I think people were throwing things) he turned around and drove us back to the middle school, and the assistant principal came on and yelled at us some more. I was intrigued by this angry, comical, pathetic man—easily one of the most interesting people in my middle school life—and wrote a long description of him in my journal. Someone said he also worked as a pizza delivery man on the weekends, but that when he delivered a pizza to students he knew, he just turned red and took the money without saying anything.

The high school bus was a relief. More students had cars by then, so the bus was emptier. The bus driver was young, and he treated the students more like friends than unruly charges. In 9^th grade, I had a crush on Tony, the 10^th grader who sat in front of me. He loaned me Stephen King novels, and even though I hated horror stories, I read them. Although we never dated, we became friends, and he and Sam, a girl who also rode the bus with us, invited me to go bowling with a group. Those evenings weren’t terribly exciting—we went bowling and everyone wore Umbros, for some reason—but they were my first mixed-group outings. Later, I was somewhat traumatized on the high school bus to hear someone share with the bus driver her story of giving birth, but that just strengthened my view that the high school sex-ed we were given was woefully late and inadequate.

By 11^th grade, I had my driver’s license, and I drove myself to school. I loved the old gray Nissan and the freedom that came with it. My bus riding days were over.

I’m still trying to figure out what riding the bus meant to me. From a practical perspective, I intend to outsource Ben’s education to the public schools, so it seems only natural to outsource the transportation as well. From an environmental point of view, it makes more sense to have kids ride a bus that would be making the trip anyway than to have every parent waste gas. I also see bus riding as one facet of being a public school student: taking part in a communal ride and learning to deal with kids you might not see much of otherwise.

But riding the bus is also a rite of passage. We have pictures of my little brothers boarding the bus, bravely waving and shouldering their new backpacks as they headed off for kindergarten. Hard to believe that some day, it will be my baby, impossibly school-age, who boards a bus and heads away from me, off to new adventures.

For another perspective on riding the bus, click here. Photo by Dirk Olbertz on flickr.com.