I am writing this blog on a new devise that I bought because it was such a good price. I bought a Samsung galaxy tab 4 with a 7 inch screen. Currently I am hating the fact that I can't actually see what I am typing because it is hidden by the keyboard when I hold it horizontally. So I have to keep it vertical.
The topic of today's blog is riding a bus to school. I grew up out in the country which meant that I took a bus to school and back every day. Because of where we lived, I always (except for one year) had to walk down the road to the intersection where the bus would pick me up. In retrospect it wasn't terribly far but when I was young I felt hard done by and wished to be like other kids who were picked up at the end of their lanes.
Riding a bus was a normal occurrence for me. There was the usual pecking order of who got to sit in the back seats. There was no such thing as a seating plan in those days. You sat according to what grade you were in essentially (or how cool you were, which I never was) with the big kids at the back and the little kids at the front. If things got too loud, the bus driver would hit the brakes, pull over, and blast you with threats of kicking you off the bus and making you walk home. I don't think it ever happened but there was a healthy respect anyway.
When I was quite young, before my parents moved to the house they built, my bus route included a road that was quite rough and had a few ridges in it (maybe due to frost heaves or bad road maintenance?) Our bus driver was a good natured sport who delighted us by hitting those bumps at a pretty good rate of speed. In fact, the kids would start getting ready by bouncing up and down in their seats and talking excitedly to each other about "the bumps." When the driver hit that sweet spot in the road, kids would fly up in the air and jolt back down, sometimes achieving remarkable heights! We loved it. I have no doubt drivers would never take the chance of doing something like that now, likely for fear of some irate parent phoning the bus company with a complaint of injury or lack of safety. I'm glad that we weren't wrapped in the protective "bubble wrap" that some youngsters experience today. We knew the consequences. If you didn't want to fly in the air and smash back into your seat, don't start bouncing, sit closer to the front, and hang on tight.
When you spend a daily portion of fourteen years on a bus, you find ways to pass the time. There were no such things as I pods or cell phones in the early 1970's with which to pass the time. So, you talked to your friends and played games with toys you brought with you for that purpose or if you didn't get motion sick, you read a book or drew pictures. Homework is tough on a bus due to the fact that writing neatly while rolling along over gravel roads as well as stopping and starting all the time is almost impossible.
Winter time on a school bus presents its own unique experiences. First of all, you are already bundled up in multiple layers including snowpants, a hat, and miittens. Picture Randy from "A Christmas Story" and you have the idea. You might be on the bus for five minutes or forty-five minutes depending on where you live on the route. You can get pretty heated up, especially if you sit near the heater a few rows back. There would be gradual shedding of layers as time went on so you didn't end up with a sick headache.
On very cold days, with the sweaty little body heat combined with the frigid temperatures outside, you would be delighted to find beautiful frost patterns on the windows, reminiscent of feathers or paisley.
These patterns were not only beautiful to look at, but they also provided us with a canvas. We would scratch off sections with our fingernails (and no doubt ate the resulting mini piles of "snow). We would write our initials in the frost or messages with "t i d", "t i n d" beside them, which of course meant "true if destroyed" and "true if not destroyed".
Another artistic endeavor on the windows was the creation of footprints in which you used the side of your hand and then your fingertips to create a rather convincing bare foot print.
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| A Google image of someone who obviously lacks the artistic abilities we possessed as children! |
School bus floors were usually coated with a slurry of slush, mud, and bits of gravel, or even straw or manure depending on if you wore your boots in the barn or not. The bottoms of our school bags, snowpants, and even knees would become soaked with this mixture throughout the winter months. I know my mother washed my snowpants on a regular basis.
Our own children also took the bus to school. Our sixteen year old son still does on the days when he doesn't have some commitment before or after school. I suspect some of their experiences were similar to my own. Do you have any frosty window or school bus memories of your own?
