School bus drivers have their regular routes that they cover every school day. Then there are the special activity runs. Bus drivers want their share of these trips mainly for the extra money it brings. I like the extra money well enough. I enjoy being with the kids on these special activities even more.

Special activity runs range from overnight trips in distant towns for sporting tournaments to a two block drive to the school district office so the choir can perform at a luncheon. These special activity runs have taken me to towns I never would have seen before and to events I never would have experienced. They are as exciting for me as for the students.

Girls’ soccer is a new sporting event at our high school. When I drove the soccer girls they were still classified a club instead of a team. The first time I drove the girls to a match the acting coach told me that this was the second time most of them had ever played a match. I don’t have much interest in soccer and in spite of the sunshine the wind was nippy that afternoon. I stayed on the bus and read a book for a while, but then curiosity got the better of me. I raised the hood on my hoodie, zipped it up to my chin, and ventured out of the bus to see how the girls were doing. The score was 3-0 when I arrived at the field. Our girls were losing. I didn’t have to watch long before I was impressed, in spite of the score, at the teamwork of our girls. They were passing well and showed a lot of hustle and determination. If they were cold, and I’m sure they were, they didn’t show it.

On the bus after the game one of the girls asked the coach what the final score was.

“5-0,” she answered.

“Again?” another girl said.

“My dad came to the game,” the coach said, “He asked, ‘This is their second game?”

“Was that a good thing?” a girl asked.

“Yes! He thought you were playing far better than such an inexperienced team.”

The girls, losers at 5-0, cheered.

It was dark by the time we headed home. It was even darker being on a remote highway on a moonless night. The darkness lightened by the strains of music I heard coming from the back of the bus. The music wasn’t from an MP3 player or an iPad—it was from the girls themselves. Several of the soccer club girls were in the concert choir. They were singing choir songs in harmony. It was delightful. You don’t get that when you drive boy teams. The only selection I ever heard from the boys was when the track team sang “One-hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” They didn’t miss a bottle.

I took a group of boys to a summer basketball tournament in a town located four hours away. I picked them up two days later. It was hot. Really hot. The temperature was 114 degrees. School busses don’t have air conditioning. As we started the journey home most of the windows were down. We hadn’t gone five miles before the windows were closed. The wind coming in the window was so hot it was slightly less miserable to bake with them shut. There were plenty of seats up front, but high school students are drawn to the back of the bus like moths to a porch light. The bus engine is in the back. This raised the temperature in the back easily ten degrees compared to the front of the bus. I told the boys this, but they wouldn’t move up. Instead, a few of them just took their clothes off. They sat there in their underwear sweating profusely. The bus overheated three times and we had to stop to cool the engine. It was a miserable ride home.

One day I drove choir members to a regional competition. Kids sang in duets, quartets, and octets. Eventually the special choirs would compete. While the kids waited for the choir competition to begin they hung out in the gym. There happened to be a keyboard and a basketball present. A few kids, in their tuxedos and concert dresses took up the basketball and started shooting hoops. Another boy sat down at the keyboard and started to play music the choir had practiced. He started with “A Bridge Over Troubled Water.” A few kids circled the piano and started to sing. Soon more ran over to join in. They moved on to more difficult and more sacred pieces. They ended with “Jaberwocky,” a silly, but very difficult piece. By then most of the choir was present. There was no audience other than me and there was no choir director. The kids were singing for the sheer joy of singing. They sang in each other’s faces and acted out the parts, all things they couldn’t do on stage. The joy and fun of it was palpable in the air. Even the kids playing basketball were singing along.

I’ve driven the wrestlers, the girls’ basketball team, the boys and girls track teams, the drama club, elementary school field trips to dairies and zoos, just to mention a few. I’ve had many very memorable trips along with a couple of nightmares. The trip I had the most fun was the concert choir to state competition. The location was good for the choir (a concert hall on University of Utah campus), but bad for bus drivers. After dropping the choir at the venue it was every bus driver for himself to find a place to park and wait in that congested part of the city with the narrow streets. The fun didn’t occur until we got back to our fair, little town. Juab high is a small town high school, but in the arts it has to compete against the big city high schools. On this day the Juab Concert Choir scored right up there with the big schools. The choir director thought it appropriate to have an impromptu parade through town. She called the police and arranged for official emergency vehicles to meet us at the exit. Kids called their parents so they could join the parade.

Escort vehicles in front of the buses.

When the parade started we had a police car, an ambulance, two fire trucks, two busloads of choir kids, and about six family cars in the procession. The emergency vehicles ran their lights and sirens. The other bus driver and I blew our air horns to our hearts content. The kids stuck their heads out the windows and cheered. Cars pulled over wondering what this was all about. Many honked their horns and cheered with us. People stopped and stared in the parking lots. Some families quickly made up congratulation signs and got balloons and stood on the street corners to wave and yell. The police blocked traffic at the one red light in town so we didn’t have to stop. We made a ruckus and had the most fun on a school bus ever.

I’m just the bus driver. I’m not a part of the clubs, classes, and teams that these kids and their teachers and coaches are. I just haunt the edges of these events like a ghost observing life after his own is over. But the life of the kids and the excitement of the events are strong enough that they spill outside the lines and I get to bask in the glow anyway. I’m just the bus driver, but that still makes me lucky.

Why would anyone want to be a school bus driver? I don’t think I have met anyone who planned on being a bus driver. Most bus drivers ended up in the job because they needed a part-time job when the opportunity to drive a bus came along. The pay is pretty good for a part-time job and the hours aren’t bad. But driving a school bus isn’t for everyone. Recently in just one week three “bad bus driver” stories hit the news. The bad behavior of the bus drivers in response to the bad behavior of the kids was appalling. The interesting thing is that when most of us bus drivers hear these stories we usually don’t rush to condemn the offending driver. We don’t try to excuse him either. Our response is tempered by the fact that we understand how the bus driver was feeling when he acted so badly. Perhaps we have had days where we stood close to the line that shouldn’t be crossed and seen clearly the other side.

Most days are not like that. On most days there is at least one thing about being a school bus driver that I like. For instance:

I like the kids. It’s true that some kids are easier to like than others, but generally I like them all. I like the energy I feel from their youth. I like their laughter. I like their smiles. I like to read their t-shirts. I like to listen to their banter. Each of these things can go bad at times, but usually it is a positive and invigorating experience.

I like the way the five-year-old who sits behind the driver’s seat will pat my head after I get my hair cut. My hair is cut in a flattop and she likes the way it feels.

I like the way one six-year-old showed me her loose tooth and asked me to pull it. I respectfully declined.

I like the way kids will move to the front seat on the passenger side just to talk to me. The seat is left open for troublemakers who need a time out. Every-once-in-a-while I will look over to see a child I haven’t called up sitting there. After a mile or two of silence they will call my name and start telling me a story from their life. They will continue to sit in that seat from anywhere between two days and a week. Then, when their need is over they will move back to their regular seat.

I like the way one precocious eight-year-old takes the time to show me her color coordinated socks, pants, shirt, and hair-bow. Sometimes there are even matching earrings.

I like the way some kids will sometimes stop and turn around when they get off the bus so they can wave to me. One boy often turns and says, “Thanks for the story.” He asks me to tell him one every day. The look on his face is so sincere. At another stop the kids cut across a parking lot after I drop them off. I catch back up with them when I turn the corner. Sometimes they run to race me. They yell and wave when I honk the air horn.

I like the way the middle school girl stopped and slowly and deliberately thanked me before she got off the bus. For some reason she had forgotten to get off at the middle school. I had delivered the rest of the kids to the elementary school then drove her back to the middle school.

I like the way the kids gently wake up a first grader who often falls asleep on the way to school. I have to hold his shoulder and steady him for a moment before he goes down the steps to make sure he’s fully awake.

I like it when some of the older students will take the time to respond to my greetings or questions with more color and energy than the usual grunt. One girl descended the steps then turned and spoke to me about her new hair cut (she thought it was too short). A boy took a moment to describe to me how, Joe, their mule, can unlatch the gate to his corral with his lips. I actually saw Joe do this once. These unexpected, brief communications are always a pleasant surprise.

I like the playful laughter I hear from the back of the bus on the way to one of the last stops. It’s coming from eight kids who are brothers and sisters and cousins. All the seats between me and them are empty. I can’t hear what they are saying, only the fun energy they are saying it with. Often there is something one group is trying to grab from another group. Every-once-in-a-while it takes a few words over the intercom to get them back in their seats. The life and fun they are creating leaks like liquid sunshine from the open windows of the bus.

At the very last stop four siblings get off and start up the gravel lane to their home. It’s a half-mile walk. They range in age from fourteen to five years old. The five-year-old is the little sister. The others are her three big brothers. They are a beautiful sight as they start off down the lane side-by-side.

There are plenty of things that can make being a school bus driver miserable. In-between all the “things I like” are the mundane, the annoying, and the downright irritating. But “the things I like” are such beautiful jewels that I am inclined to overlook the gravel and dirt in which they are found.

What do I know about Zen? I know how to spell it. I know about Zen gardens: some sand, a rock, and a little rake to make lines in the sand. I’ve read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. So, actually, I know very little about Zen, but I do know a little about school bus driving.

I’ve learned that school bus driving isn’t for the faint of heart. In saying this I don’t want to mislead you. School bus driving isn’t particularly dangerous. The children in our district don’t seem prone to violence or delinquency; but five days every week a school bus driver has to face the fact that for a two hours a day his will alone stands as the barrier between order and total chaos.

From my college freshman physics class I learned that the law of entropy has to do with ordered states naturally moving into disordered states. The law of entropy is especially apparent on school buses. On a normal day I can feel the energy on the bus contained in the kids behind me pushing and bending the space-time continuum.  It is my presence, and my presence only, that keeps a singularity from occurring. This is hardly fair. When Yoda or Professor Charles Xavier confront the forces of chaos and destruction they get to do so with their full attention. School bus drivers have to confront these forces while keeping both eyes on the road. Can Yoda wield his light-sabre magnificently while safely driving a school bus? No he can’t—not even with the help of a green screen.  Okay, I’ll give you that the students on the bus aren’t bending the metal like Magneto or using the Force to send other students flying through the air like Darth Vader, but with all the energy seething behind me almost anything could happen.

In my imagination I’ve looked up into the mirror to see sixty-five students sitting correctly in their seats talking quietly and happily to each other as they await their stop. That’s only been in my imagination. In reality I will look up into my mirror to see kindergarteners standing on their seats facing the back, middle-schoolers  with knees and heads out in the aisles so they can conference with kids on the other side of the bus, and high schoolers sitting high in their seats with their backs against the windows. Third graders will be singing about chickens farting, a fifth grader will be walking up the aisle to get a tissue, and hidden behind one of those tall seatbacks a fourth grade boy will be having a screaming contest with a fourth grade girl. This is what happens on a good day.

First and foremost a school bus driver has to worry about what is happening on the road. Other cars and trucks pose the greatest danger to the kids. In the event of an accident the kids have the potential of becoming flying objects injuring themselves and others if they aren’t sitting properly in their seats. Ironically, trying to minimize the “flying object” risk inside the bus increases the collision risk outside the bus by taking the bus drivers attention off the road.

My greatest challenge is trying to find an inner peace and composure with the energy on the bus so that I can keep my awareness level high on what is going on outside the bus. Some days I achieve what I call the Zen Zone. With quick glances in the mirror and efficient use of the intercom I am able to keep the energy on the bus reasonably contained while being aware of the car unexpectedly braking in front of me or the kids darting out into road. Other days the Zen Zone is harder to achieve and I become a surly curmudgeon snapping at the rule-breakers over the intercom while spending less attention on the road. Twice on these kinds of days I have grabbed the radio microphone instead of the intercom microphone and told all the other bus drivers to “turn around and sit down and don’t make me ask you again.”

The bad days happen when I start taking what is happening on the bus personally. Billy will suddenly leap into the aisle and meet my eyes in the mirror. He knows the rule about staying out of the aisle. He’s been told of the danger. Yet, for no apparent reason he steps into the aisle and stares at me. Is this not a personal challenge? It probably it isn’t. A simple, “Back in your seat, Billy” gets him to sit back down. Maybe his legs were cramped. Maybe he just wanted a little adult attention. I don’t really know. I do know that if I start taking the students’ rule infractions personally my driving becomes more dangerous. I tend to drive faster. I hurry to the next stop just so I can let more students off and be done with them. At some stops where I let up to seventeen off at once I feel the same relief as when a boil is lanced and drained.  This isn’t a healthy state-of-mind for a school bus driver. I’ve been learning that what happens on the bus really isn’t about me. The kids are just living their lives. I do have to enforce rules now and then to keep chaos at bay, but mostly all that energy is just being dissipated in friendly talk and laughter.

I carry quite a load of middle-schoolers. There is a lot of angst amongst this group. Even so there are a few who have enough self-confidence to talk to the bus driver. Most of them seem almost afraid that I might talk to them. It’s strange. They walk by and look the other way just as they reach me.  There are two girls who get off together at one stop. Several times I’ve said, “Bye” or “See you tomorrow” only to be ignored. I’ve seen them put their heads close together as they cross the street in front of the bus. I imagine they are saying “Can you believe he spoke to me? The nerve!” It’s a scene with the “mean girls” from a Disney movie.  One day I noticed that one of the girls was wearing a necklace with an old-fashioned bicycle hanging at the bottom. It caught my attention that such a young person would wear such a unique decoration. She was wearing it the next day as well. She got off alone on this day. As she passed I said, “That’s a great necklace. I love the bicycle.” I feared she might be offended that the bus driver liked something she wore. She mumbled something as she went down the steps. I didn’t catch what it was. As she crossed in front of the bus she ignored me as usual, but I saw her smile slightly and touch her necklace. Maybe she was pleased to have her necklace noticed? We’re not going to be friends anytime soon, but it made me feel good to know she heard me and didn’t resent it.

Today a third grade boy walked up the aisle at one of our stops and handed me a ticket. It was from the Nephi Police Department. Apparently I was in an oversize vehicle and the fine was $10,000. This would have disturbed me if the ticket wasn’t written on a lined sheet of paper torn out of a pocket notebook. It also helped that it was written in pencil in third grade handwriting. Do the creators of this ticket have it in for me? Are they wishing me ill? I can’t tell for sure, but the truth is I enjoyed their creativity. I saw them in the mirror watching me as I read the ticket. They were delighted by my mock consternation.

I drive more slowly now whether the bus is quiet or loud. Every-once-in-a-while I have to call a kid on a stunt he or she pulls, but mainly the noise I am hearing behind me is just the noise of kids growing up. I am capable of giving someone the “eye” to influence them to “stop it,” but I am just as capable of being   a cheerful “hello” and a “smile” in their day whether they like it or not.

Not once in all my years did driving a school bus cross my mind. Not when I was in elementary school (I was going to be a fighter pilot). Not when I was in high school (I was going to be an astronomer). Not when I was getting a master’s degree in college (I didn’t know what I was going to be then, but it wasn’t going to be a school bus driver). All I knew about being a school bus driver was from the TV show “The Simpsons” with its long hair, acid rock listening, slightly stoned-sounding bus driver. It wasn’t until I reached a slightly more desperate time in my life when a friend and school bus driver made me aware of an upcoming opening on the school bus driving force. I was ready.

I remember the first time I climbed into the driver’s seat of the bus, popped the parking break, and eased out of the bus compound onto the public streets. In my youth I had driven a ten-wheel truck during the potato harvest in Idaho. While in college I had driven a dump truck and even a garbage truck (that was fun). I had never driven something forty feet long where the front wheels are six feet behind me. It was exciting.  What made it so exciting was that driving the bus felt like I was driving a truck—you know , the big semi kind of truck. Every man has thought at least once of getting behind the wheel of one of those and rumbling down the freeway. My bus had air brakes that hissed and squelched. It had clearance lights along with many other exterior lights that lit it up like a circus. Best of all, I had an air-horn just like a truck. Yes, I pulled the cord a few times just for the fun of it.

On my first highway drive  I passed a semi going the other way. The truck driver and I looked at each other levelly in the eye. I commented with pleasure to my trainer, “I’m sitting as high as a truck driver!”  She just smiled.

Even though my bus had everything a semi had it was still just a school bus. I may sit as high, have as many lights, and have an air-horn, but I’m still not driving a truck. There is a difference seeing a bright yellow, flat faced school bus coming down your street and seeing a semi with its long trailer rolling slowly past. It hadn’t occurred to me that I had passed the same test that truck drivers passed. The only difference was that I took the passenger angle of the test while they took the cargo angle. Yes, I had a Class C commercial driver license. Us professionals call that a CDL. I had no reason to feel inferior to the truck driver because he carries frozen potatoes and I carry eighty-four screaming kids. (Actually the kids aren’t screaming most of the time.)

It wasn’t until I was driving the choir on a special event trip that I became validated as a professional driver. The freeway was busy. Cars and trucks weaved in and out as they sparred for position. Buses aren’t particularly fast, but on a hill I passed a semi which must have had a full load—it struggled a little. I signaled that I was going to pull back in front of him. In my rear-view mirror I saw him blink his lights at me to let me know that I was clear. What a thrill. I had seen truck drivers do that for each other throughout my years of driving, and now one had done it for me. He had shown me a professional courtesy. I sat a little higher in my seat. It wasn’t too many more miles down the road when I passed another semi. I looked over as I passed. The truck driver gave me the two fingered salute that starts at the brow and swings forward. It’s done casually like, “we professional drivers understand each other.” I almost gasped with the thrill. He had shown me the respect of an equal. Now I sat completely straight in my seat. (It’s an air cushioned seat, by the way.) I held my head high and proud.

A month later I was driving the girls’ basketball team and their coaches to a game in Coalville, UT. To get there I would have to drive 101 miles and navigate the 7,120 foot Parley’s Summit.  In  Nephi, where the trip began, the sky was overcast, but the roads were dry. By the time we reached Salt Lake City the overcast skies had gone from gray to black. When hail-like snow started hammering against the bus I saw drowsy heads pop up behind me to see what was going on. They should have kept their eyes closed because it only got worse. By the time I turned onto the belt-route it was snowing heavily. The roads were covered. Oh, great, I thought. My anxiety level was rising. By the time I reached Parley’s Canyon we were in an all-out blizzard. Snow wasn’t falling; it was attacking. The wind drove it angrily across the road. It would swirl and rise back up into the sky against the current before falling suddenly again. I saw what looked like 100 trucks pulled over putting on chains.

I slowed down to residential neighborhood speed and wondered if I should drive on. I contemplated how I came to find myself in the driver’s seat of a bus full of kids on a mountain road in an angry January blizzard. I could feel the weight of their lives on my shoulders. I wondered if any of my passengers were scared. I was. The answer came when one of the coaches made his way up to the seat behind me. Leaning around the side he asked, as casually as he could,

“So this is your bus?”

“Yes.”

“You drive it every day?”

“Every day.”

“Okay,” he said. He returned to his seat.

Translated, he was asking “How experienced are you and how scared should I be?” My answers were as vague as his questions, but he seemed satisfied.

The drive was slow.

“What time does the game start?” I asked a coach.

“They won’t start without us,” he deadpanned.

The girls were fairly quiet in the back. The windshield wipers groaned on every other stroke. We passed several cars along the way that had pulled off to the side to wait out the storm. The drivers looked up at me with frightened, questioning eyes as we passed. The storm didn’t let up until we reached Coalville.

After I dropped the team off at the high school I felt euphoria come over me. It was the same feeling I felt after coming through Haystack Rapids on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. The chaos and danger was behind us. I had driven safely and in control the entire way. This was an accomplishment I was proud of as a professional driver. The safe arrival also made me feel grateful and humble. I know I didn’t want to drive back through that storm. Thankfully, I didn’t have to. The storm had passed south by the time we returned.

It was some weeks later when I was driving the girls’ basketball team to another game. We had to drive through an even nastier canyon to get to this one. Fortunately the skies and roads were clear. After the game and after we had stopped to eat the girls were boarding the bus. There was a lot of chatter and laughter as the girls filed past me. Suddenly one of the girls stopped. She put her fingers on my shoulder to get my attention. It worked. Passengers never touch the bus driver.  “I just wanted to say thank you for driving so safely through that blizzard a few weeks ago. I was so scared.” Then she went on to her seat. I don’t know who she was. It was dark and I couldn’t see her face. Can teenagers be so thoughtful and kind? A school bus may not be a truck, but the kids we haul and the pleasant surprises they bring make up for it.

I woke up the other morning to five inches of snow. More snow was falling. It was just about six a.m. when I pulled out of my driveway. The street had not yet been plowed. There was one set of tire tracks in the snow. I’m pretty sure they were made by the other bus driver heading into town. She always leaves just before I do. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself having to get up at five a.m. to get ready to go to work. The freshly fallen snow told me a story that took away some of my self-pity. Along with that first set of tire tracks I saw tracks coming from the driveways of four more houses. They had all left before me.

My Cummings diesel engine growled from behind as I pull out of the bus compound at 6:50. The houses across the street are still dark in sleep. I wonder if they are accustomed to my morning routine. Perhaps they use the sound of my engine and the flash of my headlights across their bedroom windows as an alarm clock.

I pick up my first stop of fifteen kids at the edge of town. Everything from kindergarteners to high school seniors get on. As usual, one kindergartener trips on the second step.

“Watch yourself,” I say.

It’s so routine that generally there’s no response. The child just files silently past me with the rest into the dark seats beyond.

“Merry Christmas,” I say to a tall high school boy as he climbs in. I’m surprised when he actually gives me a grin for this.

In just two blocks I reach the train tracks. On go the emergency flashers. I open my window, pop the parking brake and open the door. I press the noise canceller and all the blowers on the bus turn off. The morning murmurings of the kids die with the blowers. I like to think they are helping me listen for trains, but I think they are only embarrassed to have their voices heard in the sudden silence. When I let go of the button the blowers kick back on and the murmurings begin again.

Once I enter the country I enter a world of black and white. It is black above and white below. The snow is falling heavily, but it isn’t an angry storm. It’s more of a scolding from someone who loves you. The narrow road is nowhere to be seen. The snow is level from the field on the right to the field on the left. There are fences on both sides of the hidden road. I place the bus right in the middle and drive on faith. At the next house three of the four brothers and sisters are wearing Davy Crockett style raccoon hats. Furry tails trail down their necks and disappear behind their coat collars.

“Tory! Tory!”

The little girl with the raccoon hat calls me from two seats back. She asks me if I like raccoon hats. I tell her I used to watch the Davy Crockett show on TV when I was a kid. She moves to the seat behind mine and tries to put her hat on me.

“Your head is too big,” she says.

She tells me about her mom “petting” her dad’s hair during morning prayer.

“He said, ‘I don’t even have my Crockett hat on.’”

I drive down Airport Road watching the big flakes of snow arc into the oversized windshield. I feel a childish gratification at making the first tracks on this road. Telephone poles on each side of the road give me my bearings. As two poles pass by me two more appear up ahead standing solid against the moving snow. Eventually I see the lights of the home that is my next stop. I squint and see three shadows moving up the driveway toward the road. Clusters of flakes lay on their hair like lace when they board. Their eyes show delight at the snow. I drive five miles to pick up one elementary girl. She walks slowly down her driveway and across the road—much more slowly than usual. She seems to be floating with the falling flakes. I sense that her mind is elsewhere as she boards.

After dropping off the high schoolers I make my last elementary pickup in front of a church. One of the kids tells me that three of the others still haven’t picked up “their rocks” that they threw in the church parking lot the day before. I call them up to the front and tell them to go put their rocks back. They obey without even a roll of the eyes. Three other boys ask if they can help. It’s a chance to stretch their legs and get out in the snow. In thirty seconds they have the landscaping rocks back where they belong and we are driving to their school.

The snow has made us late arriving at the school. Four girls from the back of the bus take their time getting off. While the other kids make their way toward the school doors these girls stop to play. They don’t seem to be aware that they are late. One girl puts snow in her mouth to eat. A second kicks snow at the others. Another girl, the one with the brown eyes and freckles, bends over trying to escape the snow in the fourth girl’s hand aimed at her neck. She is laughing and waves to me as the bus doors close. Today there will be atrocities and horrors committed around the world, I know. But the beauty of this morning will be every bit as real and even more lasting.

My bus route covers thirty miles. They call it the West Fields Route. Nephi is a town of about 3000 people. The amount of space that Nephi covers would hold 20,000 or more in a bigger city. Still there are people who like more space and live west of town out in the fields. On a couple of roads, out in the middle of nowhere, there is suddenly a row of houses all on the same side that look like a neighborhood in the town. Mostly the houses are far apart, separated by fields and pasture. There are children growing up out there that need to get to the schools in the city. Each morning I take my forty-foot bus and collect them. Each night I bring them back.

Every bus route has its nuances. In the morning mine starts with a girl standing by herself in the dark. In the winter she is typically standing on top of a pile of snow the snow plows have left. I teased her once about being queen of the hill. She is a middle-schooler. Mostly they don’t talk to their bus driver, but this girl is friendly. When I called her queen of the hill, she stopped and considered it. She smiled and said, “Yes, I am.” One morning she stopped by my seat to show me pictures of the moon she had taken on her school iPad. The moon was full that morning and setting in the West. “Cool,” I said. Then I watched as she made her way down the narrow aisle to the last seat on the driver’s side—her skinny form a silhouette against the back window. She often reminds me not to start rolling until she gets to her seat.

The roads are narrow out in the west fields. They make odd, unexpected turns as they adjust for property lines. On one intersection the front end of my bus swings out over a ditch on the far side of the road while my rear duals clip the corner of another ditch on the near side. Not too much later the road turns ninety degrees to the right. Eighty feet later it turns back ninety degrees to the left. Sometimes I will meet a farmer’s truck carrying hay there. One of us has to wait for the other to negotiate the turns. There is always a friendly wave. The funny part of this route is that after picking up the kids on this road I drive to a lonely intersection where there are no homes or traffic, do a three point turn, and go back the way I came. This is the only practical way to get to the other kids.

There are three stops where just one house sites off the narrow road far down an even narrower lane. The kids at these houses have to be brought up to the road to catch the bus. Some mornings they are late. As I approach the corner I will see headlights swing out from the driveway and then a plume of dust as the car speeds up the lane hoping that I don’t pass by. I turn on my yellow flashers to let them know I see them.

There is a dairy on my route far out on the west side up on the hill. Several houses were built for the families who work at the dairy. The houses sit further back and up higher on the hill. I can see them from miles away as I make my way across the valley. I’m sure they can see me, too. I look for taillights in the driveway at one of the houses. This car is often late to drop off point down at the dairy. When I see the taillights I can envision the harried mom trying to hurry the three kids to the car so they don’t miss the bus. They missed it once and she followed me five miles to the next stop.

At one point I turn onto the airport road. The stretch is three miles long. There is only one house in that length and I don’t stop there. There are cow pastures on the right and further down the road on the left sits the quiet, little airport with its lone green and white light rotating atop a striped pole. One day we passed three bald eagles sitting out in a field. Another day a red fox with its bushy tail ran across the road in front of me. I have to take this road so that I can turn right where it Ts off, go down a field length, and then turn onto another road and go back two miles the way I came. It’s the only way to get to another line of houses on the way back to town. One morning four kids came running out of one home. Three of them slipped and fell on ice covered by a skiff of snow. One of them fell twice. They were okay and got on the bus grinning sheepishly.

Two little seven-year-old girls sit on the seat right behind me. Both are cute as buttons. Both have a lot of energy. At the high school one of these girls hopped over to the seat by the door and touched each student on the head as they came up the stairs. Most ignored her. A few gave her the evil eye. She didn’t seem to mind. At times I will be driving a long and suddenly I will hear in my left ear, “Bus driver! Bus Driver!” One of these girls has stuck her head between my seat and the window to talk to me. Her face is so close to mine I can feel her breath on my cheek. This is a little disconcerting. I have to scold her back to her seat.

Some of the kids are on the bus for over an hour. Twice now a third-grade girl has called to me, “Could you hurry? My little brother has to poop.” I can only hurry so fast while keeping it safe. My bus is a new bus with the padded, high-back seats. The seats are a safety feature. The problem is the kids can’t see over them so they stand up or hang out into the aisles so they can talk with the other kids. It’s a constant battle for the bus driver to keep the kids down in their seats for the duration of the ride. One day I noticed a middle-school girl leaning across the aisle to show a friend something on her phone.  Using the intercom I called her back to her seat. Our eyes met through the rear-view mirror. Hers told me very clearly that she couldn’t believe she had to put up with this.

My last stop in the mornings is in town. There are about fifteen kids who get on at the church parking lot. Some of the kids will still be walking to the stop when I turn the corner. When they see me they break into a run. Sometimes I will honk the air horn for their pleasure and mine and to hurry them along. The other kids are sliding on the ice in the parking lot or playing with bouncy balls. One cold morning they told me excitedly that they had been trying to build a fire to stay warm. I looked where they had been huddled together on the sidewalk. There were no signs of a failed fire. It made me wonder, though.

Every day those thirty miles are an adventure. Some days the bus feels happy. Other days the stress level is higher. Each child is an ingredient, but even though the ingredients stay the same the recipe never produces the same results on any given day. There is only one thing that is the same every day—the quiet after the last child has steps off the bus. This quiet would be sadder than the relief it is except for the knowledge that tomorrow we are going to do it again.

At 6:45 a.m. on a morning when the temperature was -20 F I received a call from the bus coordinator. Two of the three buses in our little town wouldn’t start due to the cold. He asked me to see if my little bus would start. If it would I was to pick up as many kids as would fit and take them to school. The school was located thirteen miles away in the neighboring community. Our little town may be tiny, but there are a lot of children. The three regular buses are normally fairly full.

I dressed for the cold and ran out to my little bus. Compared to the big buses it looks like a baby bus. It’s not nearly as tall and far shorter. A normal bus has seats for eight-four passengers if you squish three to a seat. My baby bus had seats for only eighteen. The only reason I had a bus at my home was because I drove the activity bus to our little town the night before. The activity arrives at the school at 5:30 p.m. to bring any kids who have stayed late for tutoring, sports, or other extracurricular activities home. There aren’t that many kids staying late from my community so I use the baby bus to save fuel. Instead of returning the bus the same night I take it back the next morning since I have to go to work in the neighboring community anyway.

It was cold. My door opened with a crack. My bus had an engine core warmer plugged in, but so did the other buses that wouldn’t start. I turned the key. The bus belched thick, grey smoke, but then the diesel engine started to chug. I got in on the radio and told the supervisor the bus was running. I could hear the stress in his voice as he repeated his instructions to pick up as many students as I could safely fit. He had 150 kids to get to school from this community and not enough buses to get them there. I was thinking the eighteen kids I had seats for wasn’t going to help much.

The other bus that was running in town radioed and asked if I would go to the west side and pick up kids there. When I turned onto 4^th South and the line of kids saw me they broke into laughter. Their smiles pushed so hard against their frozen cheeks I thought their cheeks would shatter like ice. The baby bus doesn’t get the same respect as the big buses. The baby bus is the “Little Train that Could” compared to the big diesel locomotives. When I pulled up beside them and opened the doors I heard one boy say incredulously, “No way!”  He was wondering if he could survive the indignity of riding such a little bus.

More than three-quarters of my eighteen seats filled up on that first stop. Normally morning runs are quiet because all the kids are still half-asleep. The severe cold and the surprise of the baby bus had fully awakened the kids. They chattered and laughed loudly as we continued. There was a large number of kids at the next stop. Like the first group they looked at the baby bus with wide eyes and grins as it pulled up beside them.

“Three to a seat,” I called as the new group started filing on.  Three to a seat was asking a lot since all the kids wore bulky winter clothing and toted backpacks. I got up to help arrange kids. A mother, who had walked her student to the bus stop, stood outside saying nothing but giving me a look that said, “You really think you are going to get all those kids on that little bus?” I was thinking the same thing.

The seats ran out very quickly. However, there was a large empty space in the back of the bus. It was there because six seats had been removed to make room for a wheelchair lift.

“Shall we stand in back?” asked some of the high school students. The sign in the front of the bus announced an occupancy limit of 32. That’s how many could be seated if all the seats were available.

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t want to leave any of the kids at this stop waiting out in the -20 F cold for another bus that might not come for thirty minutes. Bigger kids gave their seats to the younger kids and squeezed shoulder to shoulder in the back behind the seats. No one complained. They laughed at the fun and felt warmer standing close. One of the students counted heads. I had thirty-one on that little bus when I pulled away. The other bus that was running was packing them in. Somehow she was able to pick up all the remaining kids in town. They were sardines in a can, but no one had to stand.

“It was kind of like the miracle of the fish and the loaves,” said the supervisor, with relief, when all the kids had been taken care of. Several parents had taken their kids to schools rather than have them wait in the cold. That had helped.

I drove slowly and carefully to the high school. If anyone was watching the kids unload they might have thought they were at the circus watching a large number of clowns pile out of a tiny car. I had a difficult time keeping the grade-schoolers in their seats on the way to the elementary school. They wanted to stand in the back.  They arrived at school late, but they arrived alert and excited. All the buses were running by the afternoon run, so the stress was over.

I attended the town Christmas celebration that night. Several elementary students waved at me excitedly as I got in the chili line. “Hi, Tory!” they called. They had been on the bus that morning. After getting my chili and a roll I found a seat near a covey of middle-school girls. Middle-schooler’s generally won’t make eye-contact with their bus driver let alone talk to them. That’s why she had to speak twice before I realized she was speaking to me.

“That was crazy this morning,” she said with a smile.

“It sure was,” I answered.

The girl next to her chimed in, “I was, like, ‘that little bus isn’t going to stop for us.’ When it did I was, like, ‘No way!’”

“Everyone at school was talking about it all day,” added the first girl. “It was so much fun.”

“I don’t think it would be so fun a second time,” I said.

They laughed, but I don’t think they were so certain. There was no need for a second time. That was a bus ride I will never forget. I will never look at “the baby bus that could” the same again.

Driving a school bus involves anxiety. The first thing that comes to many people’s mind when they think of driving a bus is having to deal with rude and riotous children. Yes, there is anxiety in that. The anxiety is even worse when you have a load of forty high schoolers and you are trying to change lanes on the freeway in heavy Salt Lake City traffic. You can hear the kids in the back teasing and laughing oblivious to the semi-truck on your right, the mini-van on your left and the wave of brake lights rising up in front of you. The anxiety gets even worse after you are shown a video during the yearly bus driver safety training. The video features a man who had been a bus driver for fifteen years. He is of a humble disposition—maybe even a little broken in spirit. We quickly learned why. During a moment of distraction, after unloading two little boys, he unknowingly ran over one of them. The boy died. When the video ended one of our longtime bus drivers broke the silence saying, “I quit.” Yes, there is anxiety involved in driving a school bus.

There are a lot of rules we are trained and retrained on aimed at keeping the kids safe. Most are involved with loading and unloading. When you approach a bus stop most of the kids are already in a huddle or a line waiting for you. Often you will see others who are late running for the bus stop. They might be approaching from the rear or running across the street in front of you. There might be some shoving going on in the line of kids and a child might be pushed out in front of the bus. I’ve seen frisbees land in the road and a child will ignore the approaching forty foot bus to retrieve it. We are taught to turn on our yellow flashers before we arrive to let following cars know we are stopping. The yellow flashers turn to red and our stop signs extend when we open the door. We keep the bus well out in the road to help discourage traffic from passing. We stop before we reach the line of kids to make them come to us.

After the kids load you take the time to look in all your mirrors to make sure there are no kids standing beside the bus, or worse, crawling under the bus after something they dropped (it happens). You close the door and let the bus roll forward without pressing the gas pedal so that you can stop more quickly just in case you suddenly see something you didn’t see before. Doing these things isn’t necessarily difficult. What is difficult is doing these things consistently day after day week after week. You might be distracted by difficulties at home, a headache, or a student who is having a bad day. Keeping the safety focus is difficult for a human being.

I was unloading children at various stops along a highway that sees a lot of traffic. A car was following close behind my bus. I’m sure the driver was frustrated each time he saw the flashing, red, “STOP” sign extend. As I braked and stopped at the house with the cute, little, miniature horse out front my attention turned to a ten-wheel dump truck that was approaching. I had turned my yellow flashers on before I stopped warning him of what I was going to do. If he was empty he would have had plenty of time to stop. He had a full load of gravel. I had a brother and sister who were getting off and who would be crossing the highway  to their home. The speed of the dump truck and the look in the truck driver’s eyes told he wasn’t going to be able to stop. His load was too heavy. His brakes were squealing, but the truck wasn’t slowing. He was imagining what I was imagining—that kids would  run across the road as he arrived. I was able to stop the kids before they got out and the tragedy in my imagination didn’t happen.

On another day I stopped on a residential street to unload a boy. Two cars obeyed my red STOP sign and stayed behind me. In my rear-view mirror I saw the boy who was to get off stand up in the back of the bus.  I looked out my windows and in my mirrors while waiting for him. When he didn’t reach the front I looked again. He was still in the back. He was working his way toward the front, but was taking time to hug each person on the bus as he went. I was substituting on this route and didn’t know this boy. Apparently he was mentally handicapped in a manner that made him very friendly. I watched the other student’s reactions as he reached them. Some smiled and hugged back. Others just endured the love. I was aware of the drivers waiting behind the bus. I imagined them slapping their steering wheels in impatience. I was tempted to yell at the boy to stop it and hurry and get off. When I checked in the mirror again I decided to keep my mouth shut. Seeing the boy’s good will and seeing the good nature of the kids being hugged, I didn’t want to stop such a happy thing.

As he finally approached the front of the bus I looked at the twelve-year-old girl who had been giving me directions and said, “Here comes your hug.” She rolled her eyes in a cute way and nodded. When the boy hugged her I saw her grin. He got off and I turned the corner letting the cars behind me escape.  I don’t know how impatient the drivers’ of the cars actually were, but I thought they could probably use a hug.

Buses have personalities. Every school bus compound is filled with a variety of buses built over a decade or two. School buses are always assigned numbers. That seems a shame to me. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if the buses had names? The middle school bus with all its unruly seventh and eighth graders could be The Beast. One of the buses that make the long run to Rocky Ridge would be Geronimo. The bus with the sweet, little kindergarten kids might be Serenity. The daily bus ride could be more meaningful if each bus had a name. I think Tennessee Williams understood this when he wrote “A Streetcar Named Desire.” But of course we are dealing with the public school system—“public” being the operative word. You mix creativity with “public” and you are going to have trouble. Someone is going to suggest we burn “Huckleberry Finn” for being racist, or destroy Michelangelo’s “David” for being obscene. No, we give our buses plain, inoffensive numbers.

In our district the bus numbers represent the model year. Thus, 097 is a 1997 model and 014 is the 2014 model. If two buses were purchased the same year you might have 011 and 011A. You might think that bus drivers would jump at the newest bus. They don’t. They tend to stick with the bus they trust. The driver of 006 has been driving twenty-two years. With her seniority she could take the new bus when it comes in. But the new bus is unproven whereas 006 has never let her down badly enough to be fired. She forgoes the heated seat and exhaust brake to stick with her partner—006.

The other morning it was 22 below zero. The temperature was in the 40’s the day before. We were all caught off-guard. In-spite of engine block heaters and anti-gel additive in the diesel some of the buses wouldn’t start. Pneumatic doors wouldn’t open or close. One windshield defroster couldn’t keep up with the moisture emitted by seventy breathing kids. The bus driver had to stop because she couldn’t see.

I was called at the last moment by a driver whose bus wouldn’t start. This was her backup bus. Her regular bus’s transmission went out the day before. She keeps her bus at her home, fifteen miles from the compound. She couldn’t get to another bus in time. I ran out to 001 and started my bus. It struggled desperately before dieseling properly. The cloud of half-burnt diesel that engulfed my house could have gotten me a citation from the EPA. When I finally put it in gear and gave it a little throttle the bus wouldn’t move. I checked the park-break, but it was already disengaged. I gave it a little more throttle, there was a crack and the bus started rolling. The heat pump was on, but it would be twenty minutes before it produced any heat. A frosty windshield and thick ground fog—the kind with a blue sky above—shrouded my way. I had to drive slowly. It was so cold that kids who had been waiting on time at their stops had run back to their homes. I stopped at one rural home to see if the kids would come out. Sure enough the door opened and two faces peeked out. A brother and sister came running up their long driveway (more of a country road).

“Where were you? My hair froze solid!” the sister tells me.

I apologized.

Two other boys came running out of their home when they saw me. They were a block from the official bus stop, but I stopped anyway.

“We waited,” they told me, apologetically, “but we went back home.” I felt bad for being late. The other kids normally at that stop weren’t there. I didn’t blame them.

There was loads of chatter on the radio. Arrangements were being made for drivers to pick up another driver’s kids.

“014, after dropping off your kids at the elementary can you go back out 012’s kids on the highway?”

“I’m at Bursten’s Road. I think I’m closer,” says 002.

Complaints about non-functioning doors were coming in. Suggestions were being given on how to defrost the windshield. Another driver whose route overlapped mine called to ask me where I was. She told me she would tell the frozen kids I was coming. I turned a corner and there was a large group huddled together. Their breath rose into the sky as if from a smokestack. There were several running vehicles sitting there with slightly warmer kids inside. I opened the door and the kids started filing in. Wouldn’t you know it, they were smiling. At least the elementary students were. The teenagers—not so much.

“Cold, cold, cold,” exclaimed one girl as she passed. She wasn’t even three-feet tall yet. Her cheeks and nose were red. Her blue eyes peeked out from under a penguin hat. Fuzzy tassels ran down each side of her face.

My door still wasn’t closing all the way. I asked a little fellow in the front seat if he would step down and push on it for me. He happily complied. The door shut and the stairway light went out.

“At each  stop I have to push on the door, okay?” He felt important.

We came around the corner and I saw 008 sitting in front of the fire department. It was the bus that had broken down there the night before. The tow truck hadn’t come to get it yet. All the windows were frosted over. It looked lonely and out of place. I could almost sense its sadness as all of the kids that would normally ride it passed by on 001.

“Don’t worry,” I tell it silently as I steer 001 out of town. “You’ll get better and they’ll be back.”