The bus
In order to commute to school, we rode the public school kids’ buses. Like the Amish catching rides with the English, we intermixed to get where we were going.
I have spent thousands of hours on the school bus. Such is the life of a Christian school student. My peers were spread over a 20-mile radius, piped in from far reaches to get an evangelical education in the heart of Delco. Classmates hailed from Wilmington, Upper Darby, and Plymouth Meeting. It was common that a best friend or love interest lived 30 or 45 minutes away. Just the price of doing business with the Lord.
The whole set-up put us at odds in our neighborhood social scenes. When the last bell rang and school let out, we climbed aboard our respective buses, suspended there between two worlds. One, Christian and insular, held our precious egos safe. It celebrated our chastity and not-knowing of worldly things. The other, secular and limitless, held Spencer’s Gifts and curse words and Madonna. Our market value dropped significantly out there, like a beach house in February, where our egos and straight-edge personalities were less palatable. It wasn’t too much of a concern on my rural street where there was no social scene to begin with, but for others, academics and religious status were markers of “difference,” the bane of adolescent existence.
For most of my elementary life, I felt terrified of and inferior to public school kids, even the ones at church. They had an ease and a knowing that was inscrutable to me, and I envied them for it. I could also envision “us” from their perspective, how they saw us, and we looked like a bunch of assholes. We had our special shuttle buses that waited to take us to our special little school. We wore our collared shirts tucked into our slacks — never t-shirts or jeans. We were a nervous type.
Due to Pennsylvania law, our native school districts had to bus us back and forth to our private Christian school. A suburban fleet like the U.N. awaited us, each bus representing a local region, each with its own personality. The West Chester kids were cool, the Haverford kids were trouble, and the Wilmington kids were eccentric. Our bus always parked behind Wilmington’s and we spent about 20 minutes a day sitting idly in single file. Two marigold shuttle crafts, waiting as their seats filled for departure. Some kids would climb atop the mountain range of seatbacks or convene conspiratorially in the last few rows, clustered to gossip in harsh, hushed voices. Others sat orderly and task-oriented in the front with thoughts only of home and homework, not a trace of evil to hide from the eyes of our benevolent driver. I usually sat near the middle, not falling into the social chaos of the back but also not a front seat baby. On lucky days, I’d get a wheel seat about two thirds of the way back, a protruding rear tire hump creating the perfect footstool for the ride home.
At some point, the kids on the Wilmington bus figured out that one of their own had a “Fly Girl” routine like the dancers on In Living Color. They’d chant and cheer until she’d agree to perform, sometimes daily, and back down the steps she’d go into the empty parking spots behind the looming bus. She’d kneel down to gather focus, then explode into choreographed dance, a one-woman show, as the Wilmington kids hung out of their windows, hooting and applauding in delight.
“She’s doing Fly Girl!” someone on my bus would yell, and we’d lean out of our windows too, to catch a glimpse.
Walkmen were a tremendous asset for career bus riders like me, much like the Kindle during my breastfeeding days. The Walkman enabled a level of escape that bordered on nirvana. “Josie’s on a vacation far away/ come around and talk it over/ So many things that I want to say/ You know I like my girls a little bit older…” Stop. Rewind. Play. The predatory tunes of the early 90s pulsed through a direct pipeline to my brain. Whole bus rides were spent in communion with bangers ripped from the radio onto cassettes with little clips of the local deejay’s voice at the beginnings and ends. The advent of the sport walkman in its heavy-duty school-bus-yellow shell brought a professional level to school bus listening. It’s rugged exterior suggested it could take a little abuse but I was too enamored with the device to handle it with anything less than extreme care.
Catholic school boys brought an unsettling dynamic to our commute. They were shuttled over to our school for rides home in the afternoons and seemed to draw from deeper wells of energy and mania than most people I knew. Their school existed somewhere on the Main Line and was named for St. Aloysius, who had been a rich boy, too, centuries ago. We knew them as “the Saint Aloysius kids,” and the bus drivers knew them as a headache. They were bright-eyed and rambunctious, minus a few quiet ones, and they filled the back seats of our bus with anarchy. The more daring of our male Christian school peers would join them there sometimes, and an intricate dance of conflict would begin. Our afternoon driver usually allowed them a surprising degree of free rein before we departed. She had the ability to leave the bus and go chat with other drivers. I could only turn my Walkman volume up and wait. Once it was time to depart, the driver told them to “SIT DOWN,” and they pivoted into stealth mode, hiding their mischief and tamping the chaos. Once, somewhere on the spectrum between misconduct and violence, a Saint Aloysius kid lodged a pencil tip into my brother’s back where it broke off and remained. Escalated grown-up discussions around the alleged attack received no acknowledgement or apology from the perpetrator’s Saint Aloysius mom. I mostly just endured the Saint Aloysius kids, save a rogue confrontation if they hit me with a projectile, and I doubt there was much other choice. I knew I’d have peace once we reached Beverly Lane, a luxurious new neighborhood where the last of them finally disembarked each day to their awaiting Mercedes chariots.
I lived in a rural part of a suburban district called Rose Tree Media. Its terrain and infrastructure varied from backwoods colonial relics to a glitzy one-million square foot mall. In endless loops my bus traveled through. It snaked through a state park forest and climbed steep backroad hills. It shimmied in cul-de-sacs and coasted over a bridge that revealed a twinkling reservoir in which my father swam as a child. I loved when we’d crest a hill and the bus fell silent, so silent it sounded like engine failure. We’d free fall for a moment, cruising down the hill in gravity’s grips, before inevitably leveling out. If the landing strip was smooth, like a gently sloping hill, the bus driver never hit the brakes and, for some wondrous and wild moments, we’d float untethered, answering only to physics.
Unlike a bouncy, lightweight car, a school bus bears down and grits. Our bus was a behemoth animal — a whale or an elephant — and our driver, Mrs. Battey, its handler. Its creaks and groans echoed the terrain underneath, in protest or effort or complacency or rest. Together Mrs. Battey and her beast pulled off daring feats. They took on tight angles, narrow streets, and sharp forks with confidence and rogue interpretations of the law. They could not take ordinary bends or twists for granted. Nearly every maneuver required a thoughtful, rehearsed approach. At the end of my street, an acute angle awaited each morning, and they’d crush it. Slowing down in a passing nod to the stop sign’s message, they’d align with the center of the odd, triangular intersection and coast straight ahead. At the last minute, when it felt like we’d follow the natural curve of the road to the right, Mrs. Battey would fling the steering wheel left into infinity, as if chartering a massive yacht away from an iceberg, while simultaneously accelerating so that, for a quick moment, we hurtled toward a giant oak whose body dipped precariously into the road, before at the last minute fitting perfectly into the tight, awkward, left hand turn leading upward and onward on our route. We’d use what little momentum remained and chug on to the next feat or bus stop, whichever came first.
I knew the shape of the land intimately, for within the mango shuttle my senses melded with the topography underneath and around. I felt our passage through time and space, the challenges and delights of the landscape we traversed. I braced instinctively ahead of sudden turns and anticipated the fleeting relief pine forests cast over us from their shadowland. I knew the ride in a corporeal way, leaning against the window’s metal lip, my knees pressed into the rubbery forest green skin of the seat in front of me until my back fluttered in pain and I’d sit up straight. The stink of leftover sandwiches or potato chips or farts, the canvas Jansport bag under my arm, its jumble of pencils poking from its front pouch. The disgrace of a speed bump, felt twice, tossing us around like stuffed animals.
Missing the bus was a dramatic event. In the mornings we’d dress and eat, which is to oversimplify the former feat, and sort of freefall through time towards 6:15 a.m. when pickup neared. We’d make our way down the long, curving driveway that obscured the house from civilization by design with two wooded acres between us and the road.
If we didn’t journey downward for the bus on time, we’d risk the calamity of eating its dust. We’d usually hear it before seeing it, like a terrible storm. And then it would appear, a marigold ship dappled behind the many trees of our property. A humiliating, urgent downhill race would ensue, our backpacks slapping against our backs rhythmically as we charged desperately towards the groaning beast. If we made it, which we usually did thanks to the generosity of our busdriver, we’d race up the steps and hurl ourselves into safety. Sweaty, but safe, an interminable day yawning before us.
The bus was a floating universe, a world to itself. Every day we sat trapped within an expanse of time, confined yet free. We were still, yet in motion; unmoving and moving all at once. It was a place to receive instead of speak — to tune our dials to worlds only we knew. One in the past, one happening next, and one passing silently by our window. The bus enabled a deep processing like dreams do; a withdrawal and reboot.
Whether we were captive there on that bus depended on perspective. It was compulsory, sure, but also temporary. It could feel like a dungeon, or like soaring.
I look for those places now, found in endurance and waiting, mixed in our minds with what’s already happened and everything to come. All around us an infinite expanse to unlock as we journey atop the behemoth beast.
