By Betty Miller Conway
The line of traffic stretches all the way down King Street as hordes of SUV’s, many with luggage carriers, snake their way towards campus. It is a warm August day, and everyone has their windows rolled up to optimize the refrigerated air in their cars. But occasionally, I see an open window defying the heat and exhaust smell as some enthusiastic young person in an Appalachian State University t-shirt leans out and waves excitedly at someone else in the car line.
I sigh as I sit (not so patiently) in this long line of traffic. Apparently, I have chosen a bad day to go the feed store. Boone traffic gets worse every year, and I should have known not to go out on a Friday afternoon to run my errands.
It is not until I complete my errands and turn (thankfully!) on Highway 194 towards home that I realize why the traffic is exceptionally bad. The big yellow school bus parked at the corner of King Street and Highway 194 gives it away. They park it there every August with a big sign that urges us to help “Pack the School Bus” with donations of school supplies and other necessities. That means it is back to school time for both college and public school students in our area!
Of course, I should have realized that it was time for schools to start back! The katydids and crickets have been singing for several weeks now, the nights are becoming cooler, and there’s that lonely, languid feeling in the air that heralds summer’s end.
The subtle signs of impending fall are already present. The apples in our upper orchard are starting to fall. Our hens, spent from a frenetic egg laying season, spread out their wings and rest in the sun. The horses are content to stand lazily in the shade. The chicks from early spring are now pullets, gangly and awkward, as they peck along the fence rows on their own, no longer in need of their mothers’ constant care. Any other year, I would have been preparing to send my own little chicks back to school—and busily planning to teach my own classes at the local university.
But this year is different. For the first time in over fifty years, I’m not going or sending someone off to school! I don’t have anyone boarding a school bus or moving into a college dorm. My girls are all grown up and graduated from high school and college. We had our last graduation ceremony (for now) earlier this year when Mary Ellis got her master’s degree. I’m not going back to school this year either. Retired after years of public school and university teaching, I haven’t worried about starting classes for several years. And it’s been far too many years to reveal since I stood at the bridge at my parents’ farm waiting, along with my older cousin Joan, for the big yellow school bus to transport me to Green Valley Elementary for the very first time.
I waited at that little bridge just about every school day for the next twelve years! After the first week of school, I was deemed independent enough to wait by myself. Joan returned to her own home to wait for the bus with her brother, Charles, and the Potter boys who lived just across the road. Until my little sister, Ann, joined me much later when she started kindergarten, I kept the school bus vigil alone.
I didn’t mind, as every day was new and different as I waited for that bus to roll up. There was plenty to entertain me. In August, the mornings were misty and all along the pasture fence the ironweed hung heavy with dew-bejeweled spider webs. In winter, the creek would be frozen along the edge, the ice making its own intricate lace as it reached out into the current. Sometimes my horse, Blaze, would stand near the fence and keep me company as I threw sticks into the creek on one side of the bridge so that I could watch them float out the other side. I remember once leaning over to see where my stick had gone and dropping my book satchel off the bridge! Luckily it fell on the bank of the creek instead of into the water, but I was terrified that the bus would come before I had clambered over the fence and down the muddy bank to retrieve it. I made it back upon the bridge just in time, red-faced and with soaked feet, glad not to have missed the bus.
Ann and I both lived in fear of missing the bus. My mom didn’t drive, and my dad worked all day, so we had no way of getting to school without the bus. Especially when we were little, we didn’t want to miss a single day of school! The inconvenience of the crowded bus ride was incidental compared to the welcoming smiles of our teachers and the joys of learning to read and write. And on the coldest of winter days, the downstairs hall smelled of the cinnamon rolls and french toast served by the motherly lunchroom ladies in the cafeteria. Of course, no school is perfect and there were some days—especially cold, wintry ones-- that Ann and I both would have preferred to remain in our warm beds instead of waiting in the cold for the bus and then traversing the sometime complicated landscape of elementary school.
Nevertheless, my mother bundled us up and sent us out to the bridge early. She stood at the picture window of the front room and drank her coffee, watching to make sure we didn’t fall in the creek. It was always such a relief when that big yellow school bus came into sight, brakes screeching and gears groaning as it lumbered to a stop to let us on. We were the last stop before the elementary school, so sometimes there wasn’t enough seating and we had to stand up, holding on to the seat beside us. We didn’t mind—we were so grateful not to be left behind that we would have ridden upside down without complaint.
As a young kid, I thought riding the school bus was, if not exactly fun, at least tolerable. After all, I learned some of my most useful vocabulary (the kind your parents don’t tell you about!) from riding that bus. Plus, I always had an older cousin or two on the bus to look after me and take up for me. In turn, I watched over my little sister and made sure that no one bullied her on the bus. I remember intervening when a girl named Laverne was mean to Ann and wouldn’t let her sit down, even when seats were available. By then I was in seventh grade and more than willing to rectify the situation without bothering the bus driver about it. One little discussion in the stairwell of the school and my sister never had trouble finding a seat again.
By the time I started high school, there was a different bus for the older kids. As a freshman I was sometimes heckled on the bus since I was new and lived on a different road than most of the other kids. Sometimes they didn’t let me sit down on the bus. My cousins had all graduated by then so there was nobody to take up for me. The young bus driver, a sixteen-year-old kid himself, certainly wasn’t any help! I was not a complainer, though, or a fink, so I never reported it. Nevertheless, I had nightmares about riding the bus that entire year.
But I was resilient, as most kids are, and that difficult situation passed, along with Freshman Algebra and Girls’ PE class. During my sophomore year, I rode a different bus in the afternoons to my job at the local dime store. One afternoon at the very end of the route, I had my first taste of booze on the bus—Lightning Creek wine—sanctioned and enjoyed by our teenage bus driver as well. It seems obvious now that having teenage students drive school buses was not always such a good idea! It was common back then, though. They went through extensive training and then were assigned a route. It paid decently well, and the students even got to take the buses home at night to park in preparation for the next day of school. They got to drive themselves to school every day (albeit with a bus packed with fifty or more rambunctious passengers)!
Eventually, thank goodness, I made enough money to buy an old beater of a car and turned sixteen. Despite my parents’ reservations, I started to drive myself to school and work. I wasn’t much of a driver at first, and I scraped the side of my car on the bridge railings the first day I was given permission to drive to school. Maybe that was the reason that my parents insisted that Ann, who was still in elementary school, continue to ride the bus!
Regardless of my bad judgment and driving skills, I eventually finished high school and then college and started teaching middle school. My students were the ones who came to school on the big yellow buses. And then many years later, I moved back home, and my own children started school at Green Valley Elementary. Since I remembered all too well the demands of waiting for the bus, I did not insist that they ride the bus in the mornings; instead, I dropped them off on my way to teach at the college. They did sometimes ride in the afternoons, though, when I was still at work. By then the teenagerly bus drivers had been replaced by the lunchroom ladies at the school so it was a much more hospitable situation.
My daughters rode to their grandparents’ house—the house I grew up in. Since it was still the stop closest to the school, they didn’t have to stay on the bus very long and it seemed to work out just fine. (Although I suspect they learned their fair share of colorful language during the commute. And they did come home with head lice a time or two!) The afterschool bus ride had its perks. Although my sweet mother had passed by then, my retired dad took her place on bus duty. He peered through the picture window and watched his granddaughters cross the bridge and walk the pasture-bordered driveway to the house. He made sure they did their homework and then sometimes let them help feed the chickens or ride a horse around the farm. They were never bored or hungry! He plied them with so many Little Debbie Cakes and apples that I could hardly get them to eat any supper at all.
Then later, after he was gone, they rode to my Aunt Margaret’s house next door, the old homeplace built in 1904. She made them full meals when they got off the bus—fried chicken, bologna sandwiches, chicken noodle soup, and french-fries. In an attempt to be healthy and appease me, she served cups of fruit cocktail for dessert. She provided all of this on tea trays set up in front of her stove in the living room. At that point, I gave up on them ever being hungry for supper again.
One by one my daughters became so involved in after school activities that they could not ride the afternoon bus at all. Instead, I picked them up after work in my little green station wagon. Since I didn’t have chicken dinners in the car. they had to make do with granola bars, fruit, and trail mix as we left town and headed towards Todd.
Later, they would drive themselves to and from high school. And then, in a blink of an eye, they drove themselves off to college—their SUV’s packed to the ceiling with linens, towels, and dorm supplies. After the first year or two, Walton and I made no attempt to caravan and help unload; instead we stood at the top of the driveway, waving and watching them round the first curve on Willett Miller Road until they got lost behind the fields of golden rod.
This year, I plan to sleep late the first day of school. I won’t have to worry about packing lunches, ushering kids to the car, or making sure they know which bus to get on in the afternoon. I won’t be anxiously waiting for a text letting me know that one of my daughters has arrived safely at her dorm and is sitting in a long line of traffic, waiting to unload. I won’t need to think about having my syllabus printed out and ready to greet my college students. I will stay home and just enjoy the sound of the crickets.
The yellow buses, packed with excited children, will still come and go on the winding mountain roads. But they will not need to stop at the little bridge on Chestnut Grove Road. Nor will they need to come all the way out to Willett Miller Road. Well, not for a handful of years yet, anyway, I’d say. However, I don’t suppose there’s any harm in making use of the pause to perfect my fried chicken recipe. Maybe I’ll also be on the lookout for a tea tray or two, just in case.
