This Little Life Of Mine - Chapter 37 Missing The Bus Thomas M Parsons

37. Missing The Bus

We didn’t have kids of our own to take care of, but we certainly had plenty of other people’s kids to minister to. Church camp was one of those ministries.

A few weeks before camp was to begin, Pastor Christen asked me if I would be willing to learn how to drive one of the church buses so I could take a group of kids to camp. He would drive one of the two weeks, and I would drive the other. I would need to get a commercial license to do so, and that would involve some training.

My friend Eric of Eric let me see your pearl clusters fame as a public school teacher and driver of a bus for our church’s bus ministry took me out and gave me a lesson or two. Just the basics. The main thing, he said, was to watch turns. You had to have more room to make a right turn because the bus was so much longer than a car. I drove the bus around the residential streets surrounding the church and Eric thought I should have no trouble. Right.

Getting the commercial license necessary to drive kids around was easy. I do not remember having to take any tests. My good driving record was about the only thing checked. A few minutes of time and a few dollars purchased me the license to tote kids over one hundred miles across the state in a vehicle much larger than I had driven more than around a few blocks in Flint. Life was simpler in the seventies!

The big day came. Pastor had driven the junior highs to Camp Manitoumi the week before, and he said the bus “just perked along.” No problems. Well, that was about to change the week I drove the bus.

About a dozen or so senior highs, mostly kids I had already worked with for two years, loaded their luggage and themselves on the blue bus selected from the fleet for the trip. Parents waved their tearful goodbyes as little Johnny and Susie prepared to leave. They were in high school and would be gone Monday through Saturday, but some of the parents acted like they were two and would not be back until they were ten.

The bus, as pastor said, perked along Interstate 75 north out of Flint, then northeast on US 10. I believe it was at Clare that I was to stop at a restaurant along the highway where the family of another teen had made arrangements for him to travel with us to camp. He was where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be and he got on the bus and we proceeded on our way to the camp which is located near the town of Lake Ann. State Route 115 took us from Clare to Mesick, and then we proceeded north on State Route 37. It was here that things began to be a problem.

Michigan’s lower peninsula is mostly flat. But the northwest portion is hilly. SR 37 undulates up and down the hills. Most are small rises that do not amount to much. But there was one hill that was long and somewhat steep. What little training and experience I had operating a bus was on the flatlands from Flint to Mesick. I was supposed to downshift to give the bus more power to make it up the hill. But I had not been taught how to downshift. The result was that the long incline caused the bus to greatly slow down, and the slower it went the harder it was for the bus to make it to the top of the hill. Thirty miles per hour. Twenty-five. Twenty. Some of the kids began to get worried. Others tried to help by leaning forward as if that would somehow give the bus more momentum. Fifteen. Ten.

Finally we made it to the top of the hill. Now the problem was to control the bus as it picked up speed going down the other side. I had driven this route several times before in a car without incident. But this was a bus, a manual shift bus. And no one had taught me how to handle it in the terrain I was in.

Eventually the road leveled out, and I was okay again. That would be the worst of it for that day. But there would be the trip home up and down the same hill going the other way. I decided to have one of the more experienced drivers at camp show me how to handle the bus on hills before Saturday came and we would have to make the trip back.

Of course, no opportunity to do this afforded itself. Instead I was asked to drive the bus to the Sleeping Bear Dunes area west of the camp on an outing for the kids. I had been to Sleeping Bear before, in my car. It had a lot of hills. After all, it consisted of several sand dunes. I was reluctant to drive. I tried to get someone else to do it. But they needed our bus. And there were no other drivers available who were not already driving a bus. I agreed with much reservation.

I am sure the kids thought the trip was awesome. I was less than enthusiastic about what happened on the trip. For the most part I did okay driving the bus. Except at two locations.

I was the middle vehicle of three church buses making their way to the dunes that day. The lead driver had many miles of bus driving under his belt, as did the driver behind me. The plan was, if I got into trouble, there would be someone in front and someone behind to help.

The lead driver had a lead foot, or at least I thought he did. It was challenging to keep up with him. We came to a “Y” shaped intersection. We were to go to the left. The lead driver made the turn. I could see a motorcycle approaching on the right leg of the “Y” but I thought I could complete the turn before he got to the intersection. I really didn’t want to have Mr. Lead Foot twenty miles down the road before I could complete the turn.

Well, it was close. The motorcycle had to swerve a bit to avoid the bus. I cringed. “Did he make it?” I asked the kids in the back. “Wow. Did you see that?” they said. "He was so close. But he made it!”

But that was not the worst of it. The pleasant Pierce Stocking Drive winds up and over and down again along the sand dunes. I had driven it in my car at least once before this time. At one point, four sections of the loop road convene at the entrance to a small, covered bridge. Since the road is a one-way loop, it is necessary to make a very tight right turn to proceed through the bridge. There is no other option. And, of course, the turn is at the bottom of a hill. If the driver

The photo shows the covered bridge on the Pierce-Stocking Scenic Drive in the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore in Michigan. It was here in the early 1970's that I thought I might drive a bus filled with teenagers over a drop off.

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does not make the turn tight enough, the vehicle may go off the road and into a fairly deep drop off.

The lead driver made the turn without a problem. Then it was my turn. I remembered Eric’s instruction about making right turns wide. With one foot on the clutch and the other on the brake I proceeded. My turn was too wide. The bus was headed for the drop off. I stopped the bus before it went over.

But now I had a problem. In order to get the bus into the right position to complete the turn, I would have to back up. The driver behind me realized this and backed up a little to give me some room. But I discovered I did not have enough feet. I couldn’t put my feet on the clutch, the brake and the accelerator all at the same time.

Whenever I took my foot off the brake to press the accelerator, the bus rolled forward a little toward the drop off. This was a serious predicament. I did not have the required experience or confidence to engage the clutch with the bus in reverse and get the accelerator going the right amount to get the bus to move back up the hill. Andy, one of the older kids (about seventeen), came forward to help. He pressed the accelerator as I slowly removed my foot from the brake and got the bus moving slowly backward. Kids in the back told me when I should stop. I put the transmission in forward gear and we made the turn and proceeded through the covered bridge. No lives lost. But two or three years of my life seemed to go over the edge, even though the bus did not.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. Just the way I wanted it.

But we still had to make the trip home on Saturday. The trip home started out routine. By now I was a little more comfortable driving the bus, and looking forward to returning to the flatlands of Flint where I was a little more used to operating the bus. The kids had had a good week at camp, and were enjoying visiting with each other as the bus, as pastor liked to say, perked along. Then I noticed something I did not want to see. Smoke, or probably steam, was pouring out from under the hood of the bus. I pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. The bus driver from another church that had been to camp, stopped behind me.

The bus was clearly overheating. But why? Neither of us knew. The other driver, a veteran of driving church buses which were often old and had problems, knew of a mechanic not too far away who might be able to offer repairs. We let the bus cool down, all the while trying to keep teens from both buses on the buses and out of potential traffic. Fortunately, where we were did not have a lot of traffic. I drove the bus to the mechanic, the other driver following. But at the repair shop, he had to continue on his way with his load of teens whose parents were expecting them back at their church. His helping me had put him behind schedule.

I was hoping the problem would be a simple one. Of course, it was not. It never is.

The water pump. I think that was the problem, although my memory is not all that accurate, and I don’t have it written down in any of the records I kept. And, of course, this small-town mechanic in northwestern lower peninsula Michigan did not have a water pump for the five or six year old bus I was driving. Great. I was thinking I would have to spend several hours entertaining a bunch of teens while someone from church drove another bus up to pick us up.

But wait. Mr. Fixit had a suggestion. He could drive into Traverse City, a sixty mile round trip, and purchase the part. He had already called, and they had the part. What I had to do was contact the church to authorize repairs. I called my beautiful bride. She called pastor. Soon the authorization was made. I would put the repair on my charge card and the church would reimburse me when I got home.

I tried to keep the teens busy while we waited for Mr. Fixit to make the trip to Traverse City and back, and then while he tore into the bus to install the new part. Fortunately, his shop contained a convenience store of sorts, and the kids kept busy buying and eating candy. They had a sack lunch from camp, intended for the trip home, and they ate that, too.

It was well into the afternoon when we finally said “Goodbye” to Mr. Fixit and his helper. All of us said goodbye to them. All of us. Every last teen. And we each thanked him for helping us in our hour of trial. Make that hours of trial. Of course, there now was a big fat charge on my credit card, so he didn’t do too badly. It was probably the biggest job he had that week.

As I drove the remaining one hundred or so miles to Flint I wondered if anything else could possibly happen. It didn’t. About three hours later, we rolled into the parking lot of Emmanuel Baptist Church. Parents had been kept informed by my beautiful bride, and so they were not alarmed, but grateful to have their teens back. One mother was upset, but not with me or with the bus. As her son got off the bus, his suitcase fell open and all the clean underwear she had given him for the week fell out, still clean, still unworn.

That was my first and final attempt at driving a church bus. And this is one bus I don’t mind missing at all.

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