Bus on a Hill

The school bus picked up speed even as Burton frantically pumped the brakes around each downward mountain curve. He watched her mirrors, the steep precipice of pines sloping off to his right, the bus just missing the steel guardrails that now seemed as useless as flimsy foil. He gripped the wheel with white knuckles knowing it was up to him to get this bus – and its young passengers - off this mountain safely.

“C’mon old girl, don’t lose it,” he said and wiped sweat from his forehead. “Ain’t no way we gonna slow this downhill ride without your brakes.” Burton watched the miles gradually tick over, each one a triumph. “Only one more to go ‘fore we reach the straightaway. Sure, you can do that. Easy as apple pie.”

But with each push on the brakes, there was more give, more slack. Burton could smell burning rubber and heard the high-pitched squeal of metal grinding against metal. Glancing again in his side mirror there appeared wisps of black smoke from the overtasked tires. When at last they rounded the final bend, Burton felt the brakes finally fail. Even so, he pumped with his left foot, then both feet, but the pedal was useless against the floorboard. He let out a short cry. There was nothing, now, in the way of gravity and momentum to stop the heavy vehicle from barreling down this mountain unchecked.

The bottom of the hill was just ahead. Burton could picture it, knew it by heart, and hope lightened his outlook even as he realized there’d be new problems once they leveled out onto the street. But for now, gravity and thrust were in complete control. He gripped the steering wheel like a drowning man grips a saving hand and glanced at the boys in his mirror. Finally aware of their dire situation, the boys were screaming for Burton to slow down. But there was no way to reassure them. He still hoped that once the bus reached the main boulevard that somehow it would slow down and he could gain back control. Because in this moment they were all trapped in a hurtling forty-thousand-pound roller coaster with no way to stop and no way to get off.

***

Earlier that morning, twenty-nine-year-old Burton Holmes had been on duty to drive twelve Catholic altar boys up to Pines Point Campground for a Saturday of exploration and fun. He knew, after years of experience, he would be pushing this particular bus to its limit, driving it up the steep mountain road to the day camp.

Burton had wanted to take the newer bus, the one that had recently had her yearly overhaul, but Father Neeley had handed him the keys to this one. The priest had put an optimistic hand on Burton’s shoulder. “This one’s got a full tank of gas,” he said. “You’ll be hauling twelve sixth grade boys to a day of games and fun,” the head of the diocese of Our Lady of Sorrows had told him. “If you stop for gas, do you really think you can hold a dozen young boys in a school bus when there’s a soda pop machine nearby?”

Burton thought Father Neeley had a point. And yet they weren’t going to be driving on normal surface streets. The road up to Pines Point Campground was steep and curvy, and he would have to drive it both going up and coming back down. Roads like that, Burton knew, were always a challenge, even for a car. A cumbersome bus on mountain roads, even in the best of conditions, was like pushing a bulldozer up Mount Everest. And they would be taking the oldest bus in the fleet.

But Burton had reluctantly agreed. It came down to driving the boys or going without an overtime bonus that day. With the kids aboard, laughing and excited, Burton exited the church parking lot and turned onto Santa Fe Boulevard. After a mile or so, they began their ascent up the mountain. The two-lane road wound at first through canyon live oak and coastal sage scrub but quickly gave way to stands of Ponderosa pine and incense cedar as they climbed in elevation.

Halfway up the hill he had felt the bus wheeze and balk a bit, taking the ten miles of hairpin curves like an old man puffing up a switchback trail. He kept checking her temperature, watching the gauge’s needle creep closer to the red zone. It had been a nail-biting drive to say the least. But when the old bus had finally pulled into the camp’s parking lot, Burton blew out a great breath of relief. And as the whooping boys jumped off the bus, Burton had settled himself on the back bench of the bus to take a long, Saturday nap.

Around a quarter to four, Burton was awakened by the weary laughter and tired chatter of his young passengers. Yawning, he made his way back up the aisle to the driver’s seat as the boys began to file into the bus to go home. Flushed and smelling like a school locker room, the boys jabbered on about the most awesome cuts and bruises and who had won or lost in the relay races. The bus, having been sitting in the sun for most of the afternoon, was now like an oven inside. But the boys didn’t seem to notice, and they slumped onto the hot seats after tossing duffel bags of athletic equipment into the back of the vehicle.

Burton exited the bus after they had all come aboard, to do a final inspection before heading back down the hill. He walked around her, checking for oil and fuel leaks. He scrutinized her taillights, axle, wheel rims and lug nuts. For luck he kicked her rear left tire. Satisfied she was going to hold it together, he climbed back into the driver’s seat and waited for the gauges to sweep through to a 13.9 voltage before starting the engine.

Some of the boys had opened the windows. He really couldn’t blame them. The fresh air would cool it down inside. “When we get back to the church don’t go bounding off to your parents before putting those windows up,” he hollered to them. He grinned and shook his head, remembering himself at that age. “They won’t do it,” he chuckled.

He patted the dashboard. “Well, old girl, you got us up here. Now all you gots to do is get us back down. We’ve rode these children to and from school for years. How does retirement sound after this? Tell you what. If you get us home in one piece, I’ll sign the out of commission papers myself,” and Burton started the bus’s diesel engine.

***

The road at the base of the mountain turned into a long, straight boulevard and a residential area of custom-built homes. In the summer of 1959, when Burton drove a school bus of altar boys up that mountain, a lot of the landscaping had started to fill in nicely – silver-dollar eucalyptus and lavender-blooming jacarandas shaded neat, mown lawns. Sidewalks bordered by boxwood hedges or red and pink begonias led up to stained-glass doors. To add to the custom feel of the neighborhood, the city planners had built a ten-foot-wide meridian down the center of the manicured street.

For the most part, the meridian served no purpose but to create a divider between north and south traffic. Oddly, the city did not beautify it with flowering plants or even some kind of pleasing groundcover. They did, however, plant evergreen acacia trees, known for their resistance to drought - and their menacing thorns. Growing about fifteen feet apart, the trees themselves provided little shade, sporadic as they were, and their four-inch thorns discouraged even the bravest kids from climbing them. But what was most hostile about this meridian of no purpose, was the soil. Infertile and barren as clay, the acacias grew alone in a landscape of ugly, brown dirt.

***

“Take cover!” Burton shouted. “Hold onto something!” he cried, too afraid to glance in the mirror and therefore take his eyes off the road. “And pray!”

Burton pumped the brakes again to no avail. Rounding the final curve the bus barreled down the nearly vertical grade picking up more speed. Far ahead Burton could see the usual line of slow-moving traffic driving south on Santa Fe Boulevard. And to his left, that damned meridian with its annoying acacia trees growing in unsightly dirt.

Bumping at last onto the level street, Burton immediately realized his monumental if not impossible task. Somehow, he must maneuver the runaway bus through a narrow path between the useless meridian and the long line of shiny cars parked neatly in front of the well-maintained houses, with little room for negotiation. If losing the brakes coming down a mountain had been terrorizing enough, this was going to be far worse. He must keep her moving straight and hope the lack of momentum would eventually slow her down. It didn’t help that boys were standing on the seats, holding onto the half-open windows, yelling and screaming in their own terror behind him. But then again, they were all barreling through a suburban neighborhood at fifty-seven miles an hour.

The first collisions were like screeching fingernails on a blackboard, as the rocketing bus veered slightly right along the parked vehicles, gouging through paint and sheet metal, and clipping side-view mirrors like pruning shears. The first hits knocked Burton, to his surprise, onto the floor, and he scrambled back up grabbing the steering wheel. On top of this, the bus was closing in on the slow-moving traffic ahead and Burton leaned on the horn, praying the drivers would hear and get out of the way, waving his hands frantically as if shooing away flies.

Miraculously, cars parted up ahead, some bumping up and over the meridian curb; others hastily pulling into random driveways to get out of the way. But the bus was still orientated too far right, still scratching the idle vehicles there, sending up sparks. Burton hoped all this contact would slow her down, but she was just too wide and heavy to be deterred. Then he saw it. Something sticking out in the road ahead. A large white box of some sort? It took a moment for his mind to comprehend that a car was backing out of a driveway. “Pull up! Pull up!” he screamed like it was an airplane instead of a car, frantically waving one hand sideways.

Ruth Perry paused in her new white ’59 Buick at the end of her driveway to check her lipstick in the rearview mirror. Her daughter was kicking the back of her seat, whining to sit up front. Ruth was not in a good mood. “No! I don’t want you up front - and stop kicking, dammit! Your shoes scuff the red upholstery.” Ruth turned up the volume on the car radio then putting the car in reverse, backed the Buick into the street.

Ruth Perry heard unusual noises above the radio’s music, like firecrackers going off. Her daughter, barely able to look out the high car window, saw a big yellow monster with two blazing eyes rocketing towards them, yet the car was still inching backward. She briefly thought of her mother’s admonition about sitting up front – but her little body bounded without thinking further and scrambled over the seat. She curled into a ball on the floorboard up front. Ruth frowned, ready to scold.

A second later, twenty tons of bolted, welded steel cleanly sheared off the entire back end of Ruth Perry’s car. Her sleek new Buick Electra exploded behind her, destroying, among other things, the shiny red upholstery, slicing the car in half like a sous-chef slices a tomato. The hurtling bus dragged the trunk, back doors, and passenger seat several yards before discarding them aside like used tissue. Burton glanced back in shock, then looked forward again. The speedometer still hovered at fifty-five. “Oh, God,” he said.

This impact caused the bus to swerve toward the meridian like a pinball. It jumped the left curb and hit the powder-brown dirt at full speed, driving down the left side of the meridian, belching up great mushroom clouds of dust.

Acacia trees loomed up quickly and the bus grazed their trunks and snapped two, three, four of them, and still, she did not slow. When Burton saw the telephone pole, he pulled her wheel hard left, nearly sliding off the seat again. He felt and then heard the right side of the bus scratch by, splintering wood, knocking the pole sideways. The pole teetered precariously held up only by the wires overhead.

But the pole proved to be her undoing.

Unable to stay upright, the bus tilted left on half her wheels, then abruptly fell over, crashing onto her side, sliding through the powdery meridian dirt and scudding across to the north side of the street, just missing several hard-breaking northbound cars. Steel and broken glass carved a trough through the asphalt, hurtling the bus up and over the far curb across the street. With a final rolling, booming rumble of small explosions, and then a sudden smash of collapsing metal, screeching high and shrill like a train whistle, she skidded another twenty feet, crushing a parked Christmas green Pontiac before at last succumbing to a brick retaining wall between two houses.

And there she finally stopped, enveloped in the meridian’s choking dust, the groans of twisting metal slowly subsiding, replaced by an exhausted series of ticks and hissing – and the terrified cries of sixth-grade boys.

The fine, brown dust gradually cleared, mingling with dark ashen smoke and the smell of diesel fuel. Two massive tires turned sluggishly, like a dying mastodon. All the right-side windows had broken leaving only jagged slivers. Wedged under this decimation, the Pontiac lay smashed beyond recognition. Neighbors came running, helping kids crawl out the back of the wreckage, some moaning, some crying, some just dazed. Incredibly, no one was seriously hurt but for a few cuts and bruises. Several men helped to pull a shaking Burton out through the shattered windshield, patting him on the back and asking if he was okay.

Burton dropped to his knees on the front lawn, grasping handfuls of grass, feeling the relief of just being still. Hearing that all the boys, against all odds, were for the most part unhurt, he looked back at the dying, demolished bus.

“You did good, old girl. Considering.” he whispered. “Guess you wanted to make sure you got that retirement.” Burton paused. “I expect you’ll make front page news for sure.” Burton looked around. “I gotta say, this place ain’t bad for your final destination.” And amid the blare of ambulance sirens and police cars, men helped Burton shakily to his feet.