Riding the route
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
School buses are stirring up dust in the countryside.
And they’re cruising around town, too. One just drove past my house carrying a thousand pounds worth of children.
It’s been many years since I climbed aboard one of those yellow buses and entered the canyon of green vinyl seats.
I was lucky enough to ride because I had friends in high places: my dad was a bus driver. For 18 years he drove bus No. 4 for the Pawnee Rock Schools.
Where I came from, only country kids rode the bus; I was a town kid. And at 4-years-old, I was the youngest rider.
On days that my mother worked, my brother and I rode with Dad on his morning route. Then Leon went to school and I tagged along with Dad all day, often riding in the afternoon as well.
It wasn’t an everyday thing, so the buses were still other-worldly to me, a novelty, sort of like watching a TV that could receive more than one channel.
Today, as the yellow buses lumber past my house, I’m pulled back to the ’60s, into that bus of yore, with its bench seats, the humps in the floor over the back wheels and the ratchet-like sounds of windows being raised.
Pawnee Rock had four routes and my dad’s bus covered the western region.
On his route, we crossed the Arkansas River and drove through the sand hills to stop at Kasselman’s place. On the circle drive at the Mull family compound, I sometimes held my nose, as 4-year-olds are wont to do, because next to Glenn and Jeanine’s house was their father’s feedlot.
And somewhere south of town, we picked up the McGinnes kids — one of whom was Viola. I coveted Viola’s multicolored sneakers. The cloth tops had a patchwork quilt design and were snazzier than my plain, red Keds with their rounded toe and special rubber toe guard.
I learned the names of all these big kids. Some were first-grade students, some seniors. And at home, I memorized their photos in the school yearbooks.
These big kids probably thought of me as the little monkey of a girl who tried out every seat in the bus, opened and shut windows and, more than likely, put paw prints and forehead prints on the glass.
I should add here, for the benefit of my father, that I never swapped seats while the bus was in motion; that was forbidden. (Well, maybe I did a couple of times.)
Often I sat in the seat behind my dad to watch him drive, to see him extend the stop sign with his left hand and open the door with his right.
From behind, I could study his face by looking in the mirror that hung over the windshield. That mirror allowed him to keep an eye on his passengers.
When a whoop or a holler came from the back of the bus, Dad’s blue eyes shot up toward the mirror and the bus quieted down without a word.
Over time, I came to know where each family lived, figured out which roads led to whose houses, and became familiar with the Etch-A-Sketch path of 90-degree turns that my dad made every day of the school year.
Twice a day.
You never know what activities will leave notches in a kid’s mind. Maybe those afternoon rides, listening to the chatter of junior high and high school students, made me feel a part of something bigger.
As I watched these kids I saw what I could become. And I wanted to be like the sparkling-eyed Jeanine Mull whose brunette hair fell across her face as easily as her smile. And who knows, maybe riding the bus helped me learn to love the grid of landscape, the furrowed fields, the soft hills on the Kansas plains.
We’re merely an accumulation of our miles and our days.
And many of us logged some of each in those long, yellow school buses.
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net.
F Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.
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