True Bus Story

Sometimes you just have to say, What the fuck.

Dec 11, 2020

My creativity quotient is cratering today, so I am going to tell you a true bus story. Like true crime, but it involves an old school bus.

I have many old school bus stories.

This is because for decades I have run a business on a shoestring and the only type of buses I could afford were the ones school districts were no longer allowed to use. To be honest, I have run a business on less than a shoestring but I don’t know what you would call that - slip on? Loafer? Flip flops?

Anyway, incredibly this story is not about a school bus breaking down. I have many of those stories as well but this is not one of those.

For more than twenty river rafting seasons, my company operated out of Seattle. How we managed to do that with large vehicles and trailers is a mystery. Honestly. It’s a mystery. Like pain, I have forgotten how we managed to find a place to store a plethora of boats, neoprene suits, metal frames, large coolers and the typical detritus of any river running operation.

Warehousing all of the stuff was a pain in the ass. Managing all the stuff was a pain in the ass. Finding people to drive all of the stuff to hell and gone out in the Washington wilderness WASN’T a pain in the ass, but I don’t know why it wasn’t.

Of course, we also needed a place to park our decrepit river vehicles. During the season and during the off season. As you might imagine, finding parking in Seattle was never easy. Finding parking for months at a time took due diligence and a willingness to take whatever you got.

One winter the best I could do was a plot of vacant land just north of Lake Union that the owner was allowing a sketchy variety of modes of transportation to be plunked down on. It was a bouillabaisse of oddball items from our school bus to raggedy old trailered powerboats.

The best part was it was close to where our gear was being warehoused, and fit a flip flop budget.

The bad part was it wasn’t secure. Not even a fence.

This was one of those times when I just said to myself, “What the fuck.”

Spring came around and I had managed not to have given another thought throughout the drizzly and perpetually overcast Seattle winter about the school bus parked just down the slope from where I lived. But with spring comes not only flowers but rising rivers and, at some point, I needed to get the vehicles up and running for another season.

I went to check on Frank. If you’ve been reading a while, you’ll remember Frank the Bus from his intrepid trek from Seattle to the border of Panama.

When I arrived at the lot and entered the bus, I was floored to find mounds of random items in each of the 44 seats. The knob for the stick shift had been spray painted fluorescent orange. The steering wheel might have been painted orange as well. The stuff in the seats was not exactly trash but, as far as I could tell, there was nothing of value and no rhyme or reason.

It was like phone books, bank deposit envelopes, rags, weeklies, empty detergent bottles and paperbacks. (If you ever wondered, during that era, why there weren’t any available bank deposit envelopes, well, now you know.) And the thing was - everything was neatly lined up in every seat like they were purposeful collections. And the seats were full of whatever item it was. It wasn’t just a few of them.

Three quarters of the way down the center aisle I found one seat which appeared to be where whoever had created this impromptu museum of modern mundanities slept. I decided to await their return.

A transient of undetermined age showed up. I suspect he had wandered off somewhere to find a bathroom. I politely told him that this was my bus and I needed him to vacate it. He responded by insisting he knew the owner of this bus and it wasn’t me and, for a brief moment, I questioned if this WAS Frank. He was that convinced, and convincing.

I stood my ground and told him I would give him until tomorrow afternoon to vacate the bus and take his stuff with him. It never even crossed my mind to involve the police. I left him shaking my head - partly at how adamant he was about who owned the bus and partly at how stupid I had been at parking Frank in an unsecured lot for six months.

I returned at noon the next day accompanied by my brand new intern from Western Washington University’s Parks and Recreation program. It was his first day on the job. Our transient had, thankfully, cleared out, but he hadn’t removed any of his rubbish.

We tried to fire the bus up in order to drive it down to the warehouse location. Frank was usually very reliable and Seattle winters are so mild I never needed to worry about the batteries deadening.

Nothing.

Meanwhile, my intern investigated all of the stuff in the interior. He began noticing that shreds of paper from matchbooks, or bank deposit receipts, or - really - any smaller easily available paper product you could imagine, were stuffed into every crack, crevice, nook and cranny in the bus. We figured the guy was doing his best to install some kind of insulation.

Seattle winters are mild, but damp cold is pretty damn cold.

I decided to check the two humongous batteries which were accessible by a pull out tray along the side of the bus. I was hoping jumper cables could spark Frank to life. When I pulled the tray out, my intern was looking over my shoulder and what we found were all twenty four vent caps were missing.

In their place? A multitude of Q-Tips.

In other words, every cell where you would normally find water was chock full of cotton ear swabs. That was when I turned to him and said, because remember, he’s an intern, he was there to learn about running a small recreational business, “So, dear, how was your day?” And you’ll say, “Well, dear, I spent my day pulling Q-Tips out of a bus battery of course. How was yours?”

One last thing.

We got Frank running once the batteries were refilled with water and new caps were purchased. Cleaned up the mess inside and removed the orange paint. Frank was then driven over to Leavenworth to begin his season as a shuttle bus on the Wenatchee River.

On his first commercial shuttle some of the guests were chilled and asked if we could turn on the heat. Somehow it was the first time the heat had been used that spring. I flipped the switches and cranked open the vents. Turned the fan to its highest setting to pump out the heat throughout the bus.

Initially, it seemed like it wasn’t going to work.

And then there was a blast of air along with a ton of confetti from every heating vent.

It startled us all. I could only laugh.

Share The Backeddy

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Found this posted somewhere. Thought I’d share the sentiment.