Reject Rides

Transportation to and from my site is provided by a fleet of 3 rickety, reject school buses from the States. The bus-of-choice to get from my site to Santa Barbara is light blue, from Portland and currently out of service. None of the buses actually depart from my site, but usually a truck is sent up to take people down in order to catch the bus. However, on Thursday, I awoke at 5:15 in the morning to wait in a dark, cold rain for a truck that never came. Thankfully, it came the following morning or I might have walked down the mountain.

After leaving my site at 5:45, we made it to Santa Barbara at 8:30 am. In terms of distance, it's really not that far from my site to Santa Barbara, nor is the road that bad. However, it is precisely the kind of road that sane people would never venture to take a school bus down, especially not one filled beyond capacity.

That said, I am under the impression that most bus drivers are simply not sane. I'm still not sure what my parents were thinking putting me on the school bus each morning as a child. As I recall, those one hour bus rides through the Illinois countryside were cause for concern - veritable roller-coaster rides sans seatbelts. The best seats were at the back, where a hill would send you flying into the air. I wouldn't be surprised if the bus even got air. Of course, if the school district had screened its drivers, the rides would have been less eventful. I remember one of our drivers was frequently late and once he just didn't show. He was promptly fired, as the bus company finally realized that he was a drug addict. There was also Carl, the man who drove us to school for several years. I suspect that Carl took up school bus driving as a hobby in his retirement years because he must have been in his seventies and his glasses were thicker than the windshield. Carl alternated between reading the bible and the dictionary. His favorite refrain, always shrieked, was, "Get your seat of the pants on the seat of the bus." Despite his obvious lack of vision, he drove that bus like a race car driver. I recall that once, during the same ride, he took out one of the middle side windows with a tree branch and later backed into a huge oak tree that a blind person could have avoided. Nonetheless, for kids on a country school bus, these rides were just normal.

Much as the school bus ride was for me, for most of the passengers, particularly the elderly gentlemen, the ride to Santa Barbara was like a jovial social hour. I enjoyed the ride, despite being a little squished, by taking in the beautiful view - a mix of forest, coffee farms and cornfields. A mere 3 hours after arriving in Santa Barbara, I resumed the bus ride again to return to my site, arriving at 2 pm.