The Bus

 By Laura Cullen

On the bus everyone can hear you scream! I am speaking of an incident that took place near Kemmerer Wyoming in the spring of 1981. I was twenty-five years old and working for Skyline, a seismograph oil exploration outfit. We were a band of people whose core members had been together for five or six months. Although the total number of crew members was something like fifty people; the main characters for this narration are, Squire Meyer our headlinesman, Steve “Conehead” our front-crew boss, and I the “ecology technician”, that is I picked up the trash left over from the 75-lb surface charges that were set off along a flagged and surveyed line. As a crew we would sometimes travel fifty or more miles to get to our seismograph lines. The vehicle used to transport crewmembers to and from the field was an old Bluebird school bus. This bus took us over many miles of graded dirt back roads that aren’t on any maps. One day while Squire was driving and as we were using a road that we had not used before, we came to and bounced heavily over a cattle guard. Because most of the crew was groggy or asleep the jolt took many people by surprise. Those who were awake (myself included) appreciated the fun experienced from four of the bus’ six tires having left the ground. In fact we resolved that the next day we would attempt to get all six tires in the air!

The next day: many of the same people are on board and a few who were not. One of the latter was Conehead, who was suffering from a hangover. Steve, upon boarding the bus, walked all the way to the back and stretched out his 6’3’’across the bench seat at the rear of the bus. It being more than twenty miles to the cattle guard we completely forgot about Steve. There was approximately a ¼ mile stretch of road leading up to the cattle guard that was straight and slightly uphill. Squire had to push the pedal to the metal to reach a top speed of about 50 mph. Everyone was leaning forward in their seats with anticipation, and when we did indeed get all six tires in the air there were shouts of delight and clapping, but over it all there came from the back of the bus one blood-curdling scream. All heads whipped backwards and all eyes fastened on Steve, whose 6’3” body was pressed to the ceiling of the bus and who then, before our eyes, immediately fell back into his seat. Holy shit was he pissed! He told us that we were all a bunch of careless and thoughtless assholes and he was fed up with everyone taking him for granted and so on and so on. Between fits of giggling and outright guffawing we were able to calm him down and explain the situation. We reassured him that we were not out to get him, we apologized, and promised him that there would be no more cattle guard jumping on that day and that in the future we would be sure to notify him ahead of time. I guess some people just don’t appreciate amazing feats of school bus acrobatics!