FOG by Carl Sandburg

The fog comes on little cat feet.

It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches

and then moves on.

Backing Into the Abyss

As some of you may know, I currently earn my daily bread by operating a school bus. By and large the work is simple, undemanding and poorly remunerated. As with most human endeavors, there are a few exceptions that will be discussed further on.

On most days students are either sleepy and present no threat, or they’re fully absorbed in their own activities, largely unaware of anything outside of a narrow sphere. I have observed that they are troubled by the mere thought of being seen stepping off a bus. In a typical student’s estimation, one ought to arrive at one’s tutelage chauffeured in one’s own vehicle, preferably something European. A bus is incommodious, reeking of stunted status. I’ve noticed that my youthful charges carefully scrutinize the concrete drop zone as the bus rolls up to the school. Apparently being witnessed exiting a bus is mortifying. The bus kids crave anonymity. They cover their faces in a chador of embarrassment as they walk off, hoping the others will not recognize their angst.

Most days the trip is remarkably similar to the day before. In my business, uneventful repetition is the gold standard. However, from time to time disconcerting things happen. One such event occurred this morning.

My route (pronounced root in the Midwest) begins each morning when I leave the Bus Barn, a colloquialism referring to a place where, like cattle in a barn, many busses are housed overnight. A tall barbwire fence to prevent vandals from stealing the vehicles surrounds the "barn". It is beyond me why anyone would steal a school bus. They are slow, awkward and perform poorly in a high speed chases.

Even though they reside in barns, busses do not moo as cattle do. They require diesel, the oat equivalent. A bus is cavernous, chilly. Busses are irritable when one turns the key. I can’t say as I blame the bus. If someone stuck a key in me and turned it violently, left or right, I’d moan too. Bus transmissions, like my aging joints, are stiff and cantankerous first thing in the morning. The massive diesel engine, coupled to a slipping four-speed transmission, grumbles audibly when I jam the throttle to the floor. My abuse is absolutely necessary. The barn empties onto a state highway shooting gallery, a NASCAR track awash with crazed commuters chatting on their cels, some applying make-up at 65 miles per hour, all in the pre-dawn. Even when the engine is warmed, the Brobigundian vehicle requires nearly a mile to clamber up to speed.

Once I’ve achieved escape velocity, folks are wary. No one wants to get caught behind a bus. Drivers perform remarkably stupid acts to avoid being trapped in my wake. They pass on the right. They pass when the oncoming traffic is perilously close. They sneak up on the right at stop signs, hiding cleverly in my blind spot, a large area.

Navigating the community is a crapshoot. I must second-guess what others are thinking. I must read the minds of mindless operators. I must anticipate the thousands of potential disasters coming from all directions, all the while watching in my student mirror to make certain that 1: everybody is seated, 2: nobody is wielding any weaponry,

3: no one is making out, 4: students are not flipping-off cars behind the bus, 5: that ADHD child sitting right behind with the full Coke can me is not about to wing it at the back of my skull. Simultaneously, I must answer a stream of questions from the child who always sits in the first seat across the aisle. The youngster is plagued by curiosity and is always the most erudite person on board. "What happened to your finger, Mr. Bus Driver?" is the usual conversation starter. From there the questions run amuck. "What can I do about my mom’s new girlfriend?" "Would you do my homework?" "What do you think about the new Luda-Kris CD?"

And so it goes. However, I have diverted from the original intent. I wished to describe events that took place this morning and I have strayed. I apologize for my wandering.

So, as I left the barn, the weather was cool but not cold. The temp hunkered down at 39 degrees. The air was still.

Ideal conditions for the creation of fog. And so it did - create fog that is.

There are, according to Wikipedia, 13 types of fog, my favorite being Garua fog.

(italics mine)

My bus route does not extend to the western coast of Chile. Students may only be on a bus for sixty-minutes or less according to District 509J rules and regulations related to the transportation of students. Chile would require significantly more than one hour.

I too was forced to use windshield wipers as I made my way. About half of my daily routine takes me far out into farm country where I pick up two or three rural students. These are kids who wish with all their hearts to live in town. They see themselves as victims of their parents’ poor choices. (Don’t we all) At any rate, as I was plying the dirt roads of rural Corvallis, the Garua was hitting the fan. Pea soup does no justice to what I was up against. My low beam headlights barely penetrated the veil. Even though I knew better, occasionally I would flip on my high beams. The dazzling light bounced off the Garua, a sparkle ricocheting back into my wide-open retinas, causing near blindness. Back to the lows. Conditions were awful.

Without warning, another set of headlights was upon me, appearing out of nowhere. Jerking the steering wheel hard to starboard, I headed for what I thought was the side of the road. With no centerlines and no hard edge, the dirt road was a mush of non-definition. I felt my right front tire being sucked into a ditch. Looking up, I saw the monstrous farm truck nearly in my face. We were so close I could see the other driver. His panic was palpable. I jerked the wheel hard left to pull the bus from certain doom. The truck slid by, a wraith in the dark. Phew!

Slowing down, I was crawling along at perhaps six or seven miles per hour. At this rate, I knew I’d be running late. Being too early or too late in my business is anathema, grounds for dismissal. The boss doesn’t care about Garua. The parents don’t care. They want to be rid of the kids. Fog or sleet or hail be damned. "Be on time," is the mantra. I wasn’t.

I’d picked up three students thus far and was on a dead end dirt road. Time for a turnaround. For those of you who know about such things, doing a turnaround involves backing up the vehicle. It is a tricky procedure in the day light under good visibility. In the fog, in the pre-dawn, it is a hair raising, spine-chilling, bloodcurdling process. This particular turnaround forces one to manipulate the bus around a 90-degree angle that is fenced and anchored by a 12"x12" post certain to do major damage if contacted. Once you manage to crank the wheel hard enough to make the right-angle turn, you must continue backing far enough to straighten the vehicle out, but not too far because the turnaround is short. If one backs too far, one finds oneself on the precipice of a steep cliff. The person who managed to find this spot for a turnaround – what a sadist.

Because it is dark, because it is fog-bound, because my rearview mirrors are coated with Garua, I must perform the vehicular pas-de-deus using what we drivers call "route memory," a sort of instinctive phenomenon. I was suffering mightily from what psychologists call a "Flight of Ideas." The term is defined as follows: " In mania and hypomania, thoughts become pressured and ideas may race from topic to topic, guided sometimes only by rhymes or puns. Ideas are associated though, unlike thought disorder."

Indeed, my thoughts were racing even though my Bus Driver Training Instructor had mentioned several times that I should always clear my mind. "One must be in the present to operate a bus properly," she intoned. I wished I’d listened more closely. When she was telling me these things, I’d blown them off as some New-Age gobbledy-gook. Now the test was here, just to my rear. Was I made of the right stuff?

I threw the bus into reverse. The back-up lights came on, glaring into the fog uselessly. My mirrors were dripping with moisture. Worthless! Releasing the foot brake, I crawled backwards for three seconds, enough time I estimated to get the rear of the bus aligned with the narrow slot I had to hit. Cranking the wheel hard right, I prayed.

The back-up alarm was beep-beep-beeping. The students were mostly sleeping, safe in their dreams. The bus swung hard and I saw the massive fence post glide silently past my right side door. I’d made it thus far. Now, cranking the wheel frantically to straighten the bus out before the rear crashed into the barbwire. Thinking, guessing, hoping that I’d gone far enough but not too far, I decided it must be time to bring the yellow beast to a stop.

And then it happened. Just as I touched my foot to the brake pedal, the rear wheels dropped. The bus began tipping over backwards. In what must have been a second or two at most, the vehicle was standing nearly vertical, rocking on the edge of the cliff. One student woke up when his books began tumbling into his face. Another started falling toward the rear of the bus, screaming as she slammed into the emergency door. Looking into my student mirror, I saw the third passenger, a freshman girl, making the sign of the cross as tears streamed down her face. Alarms sounding. Lights flashing. The bus broke the fulcrum of dirt and rock and began a rearward plunge.

Now I began suffering from a form of mania, characterized by an intense euphoria and loss of insight. Unlike my panicking students, I had experienced a falling phenomenon in my past. I think it was when I ingested too much peyote on the shores of Lake Superior one evening and felt like I was drowning pleasantly in a sea of love. As a result of this collected wisdom, I decided to live in the here-and-now. I would not panic while all those around me were. I was simply along for the ride, wherever it went.

As the bus continued dropping, picking up speed, a calm came over me like a warm down comforter on a cold winter night. Soon we were falling at near light speed and everything appeared to be in slow motion. I thought perhaps that we, the bus, the students and I, might free fall forever. Thank goodness I’d packed a sandwich.