Carolyn J.
Rose
In early June I went
along on a school field trip to a camp up the Washougal River Road. As the crow flies,
the trip wasn’t a long one. As the crow rides a school bus, the trip seemed
endless.
The road twisted,
turned, and doubled back, threading its way into the hills. Signs warned of
slide areas and the pavement dipped and rose like swells out on the open ocean.
The bus rocked along, windows rattling, students jouncing and swaying with each
bump or turn.
By the time we reached
the camp, my head ached and my stomach roiled. I felt as if I’d been sucked into
a cosmic wormhole and carried back more than 50 years to the bus rides of my
youth in the Catskill
Mountains.
I didn’t measure the
distance from my home in Bearsville to Onteora Central High
School in miles, but rather in landmarks. There was
where Eddie got on while his mother stood in the doorway watching. There the
road curved along a stream and crossed a narrow bridge with chuckholes at the
end. There was the spot where the bus slid into a ditch one snowy day and the
older boys were allowed to have all the fun and push us
out.
Tedious and nauseating
as the ride to school was, what I truly dreaded was arriving at that long brick
building and beginning another day of what I thought of as drudgery verging on
torture. But I really dreaded the
days when we arrived to find the principal and assistant principal waiting with
stopwatches and clipboards.
That meant a fire
drill.
A two-door drill or a
front-door drill wasn’t bad. I generally sat up front and could get off without
being shoved down the steps.
Back-door drills,
however, were something out of my nightmares. The back door was high. An
ankle-snapping height. And there was no time to cut that distance by squatting
or sitting, no time to turn and lower myself.
When the principal
clicked his stopwatch, the older boys swung the door wide, leaped to the ground,
spun about, and reached for the next kids in line. They gripped our arms and
yanked us from the bus, flinging us through the air. The unforgiving asphalt
rose to meet us.
For them, it was a
competition. Could they empty their bus faster than the others? And, of course,
speed was important. Never mind
skinned knees and twisted ankles, if there was an actual fire, their technique
would get us out alive.
But back then, I never
thought of it that way. Back then I was more frightened of the drill than the
fire. The drill, after all, wasn’t merely a possibility. It was inevitable. It
would happen. And unlike fire,
there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
