The Reason My Kids Won’t Ever Ride the School Bus
A rural town hires fringe people to do a fringe job
My kids won’t ever ride the school bus. I put too much time and effort into raising them to turn them over to some fringe lunatic for any amount of time.
Let me back up.
I’m sure there are good school bus drivers out there. The grandfather of one of my daughter’s friends is a school bus driver. He’s the nicest guy you’ll ever meet. I’m sure he takes the job seriously and he treats every one of his charges with the proper care and attention.
But that’s not the bus driver I had when I was growing up.
My bus driver was a psychopath.
I lived in a rural area of northern Wisconsin. It’s not the kind of town where you could declare your preferred gender pronoun. If you tried to do that where I grew up, you’d be beaten. You probably would still be beaten.
People didn’t talk about things like personal identity. They talked about fishing. They talked about hunting. They talked about the Green Bay Packers.
That’s it.
If you weren’t interested in one of those three things, you couldn’t even comment on the weather. You were an other. You were sub-human.
The whole town was a fringe community, and the people they got to drive the buses were the fringes of the fringe. Think of the bus driver character on South Park. I had that driver among many others.
By far, the worst of them all was this young guy who only drove us for a couple of weeks. He looked a bit like Jeff Foxworthy. Blond hair, moustache, baseball cap, flannel shirt, and blue jeans.
I think he was the type of guy who took a job as a bus driver so he could flirt with the girls.
I was probably a Freshman or a Sophomore when the incident took place.
The older kids always sat in the back. That was the law of the bus jungle.
Most drivers just left you alone, but this guy kept wanting to talk to us. He was staring at us in the mirror. He stared at us in the mirror more than he stared at the road.
Did he want to be friends or something? What was going on?
But then he got angry.
“What are you guys doing back there!”
He shouted it a bunch of times. All the little kids on the bus were terrified. We kept looking at each other in utter bafflement. Nobody knew what he was talking about.
It’s not as if I never misbehaved when I was in school, but in this instance, we were legitimately not doing anything. There were four of us, another boy in my grade and two girls. We all had our own seats.
We weren’t doing anything.
We weren’t throwing anything.
We weren’t making out.
We weren’t yelling or screaming or making any kind of commotion.
We were just sitting there talking about our day.
We were laughing like kids laugh, but it wasn’t malicious laugh. We were just glad to be done with the day.
But the psycho bus driver thought he was on to something and he wouldn’t let it go.
“We’re not doing anything,” somebody said.
“Oh, do you think I’m that stupid?” he sneered.
That made us want to laugh again.
Honestly, we were nervous. When high school kids are nervous, they sometimes start to laugh. It’s nervous laughter. It’s terrified laughter. It’s laughter that says, this situation is absolutely insane, maybe if I start laughing this crazy person who is assaulting me will leave me alone.
The problem is, laughter often provokes insane people.
He kept staring at us, and we said nothing. We kept our eyes downcast like dogs that knew the master was mad but didn’t know why. Submission! Sometimes the tension got to be too much and somebody giggled.
When this happened, the driver would jam the bus in gear to make it leap forward. He wanted to catch us unawares and smash our heads into the windows on sharp turns. He must have put 100,000 miles worth of wear on the bus in that one-hour drive.
He kept getting angrier and angrier and there was nothing we could do. Maybe he was hot for one of the girls and was angry the rest of us were talking to her. Maybe he was furious every time one of the boys didn’t get off the bus so he could be alone with her for the rest of the ride.
Thank goodness we were there.
Late in the ride, there was a dip in the road that caused the bus to bounce if you hit it too hard. By the time we got near that dip, the driver was livid. He had worked himself up to a deranged fury. He wanted to kill.
We knew we were in trouble when he started to accelerate. This was on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Maximum speed on that road should have been about 25 miles per hour.
He put his foot down and kept it there, staring back at us as if in challenge.
We were kind of laughing, we were staring at each other, laughing that nervous laugh, but as the bus kept accelerating we knew we were in trouble.
“That dip is coming up.”
It stopped being funny shortly before we hit.
Do you know how reckless you have to be to make a 15 year old boy nervous? We thought he was bluffing right up to the last moment.
He wasn’t bluffing.
When the dip came, he must have hit it at 80 miles per hour. The bus bounced so hard it nearly broke in half. The kid in the seat behind me flew up and smashed into the roof of the bus, then crashed down on his seat behind where he’d originally been sitting.
The bus skidded and went into a fishtail. If another car had been coming we would have been in a head on collision and everyone would have been killed.
Kids were crying. Some of the little kids must have gotten smashed against windows.
The driver wrestled with the wheel frantically for what seemed like forever. Finally, he got the bus under control.
Silence descended.
The driver didn’t say anything. He just continued on his route. Kids were crying. We were asking them if they were okay. Driver didn’t say anything.
I got home, got off the bus, told my parents, they didn’t care.
The parents of the other kids didn’t care either.
He was our driver for the next month, but he never hit that bump that hard again.
Eventually, he was replaced. Who knows why? It wasn’t because of what he did to us though. Maybe he killed somebody. I don’t know.
So, yeah, maybe bus drivers are more regulated now. Maybe they’re all kind people like the grandfather of my daughter’s friend.
But I will take a job that pays me half as much just to make sure I have the time necessary to drive my kids to school and pick them up every day.
I won’t trust them to a bus driver.
Never.
That’s just the way it is.
That’s the way it’s going to be until they graduate.