LAST STOP
O O
As beautiful as the countryside is, there is a relentless effort to trash it. On almost every farm, there are wonderful ravines full of old cars and washing machines. Rusted out farm machinery fills rolling pastures. Trees grow through abandoned tractor windows. One nearby gulley is filled with twisted metal, an old mobile home long since buried and grown over. One summer a fox raised her kits in a cave under its corrugated side panel.
In the field behind us there was an old school bus. It was buried in the ground up to the bottom step. There’s no access to that field, and it’s a good half-mile off the road. I have no idea how it got to its final resting place.
Our little seven-year old friend spotted that bus in an instant. We set out through the marsh. When we stepped inside, it was clear someone had actually lived in there. It had a refrigerator, chairs, dishes, old bus seats, and broken glass throughout. The arrangement had to be the result of a rollover.
This was a little boy’s dream. He sat in the moss covered driver’s seat and turned the huge steering wheel. He shifted, checked the gauges, pulled knobs. He stood on top of the bus, king of the swamp.
Turns out the bottom field wasn’t the final resting place for that bus. One day it simply disappeared. It didn’t sink into the earth like the cow did. (See entry for 2/22.) It would have taken a crane to lift it, but the crane would have to be airlifted in. I believe I’d have noticed that. And the bus was such a rust-bucket that surely it would fall to pieces under its own weight. The more obvious question, of course, is who wanted that pile of rubble? This carjacker must have been smoking pokeweed.
A few weeks later I was driving along a country road and spotted the bus in a farmyard 2 miles away. It was above ground, but it didn’t look any better. That bus did not need restoring; it needed resurrecting. If they get ‘er done, it will be the triumph of hope over impossibility.
