My Year of School Bus Life

The Fam

Back in the early '80s, when I was 8 years old, I moved from Seattle to Sedona, Arizona with my mother and grandmother in a converted school bus... or as some might say, a pimped-out school bus.

Our home on wheels was a 30 ft, 66 passenger, 1963 Bluebird with a gas engine and standard transmission, bought from a decommissioned bus lot.

My grandmother unbolted and removed all the seats, built wooden benches and shelves to create beds, living and dining room seating and storage. She covered the floors with new plywood and carpeted the entire bus.

She had to remove the driver's chair, which was proportioned for a much larger person… a larger man, really. As my grandmother said, "ladies didn't drive buses back in 1963."

DIY on Steroids

She built a bench seat using an old orange Foot Locker and bolted it to the floor, but still had to wear wooden clogs when she drove to reach the pedals and see over the hood at the same time.

The bus was tricked out with a porta-potty, a small electric fridge and a working Singer sewing machine that my mother and grandmother used to make “portrait dolls” and clothes, which they sold at doll shows throughout the summer.

I loved attending doll shows and was totally inspired by the fact that grown women could be even more obsessed with Barbie than I was.

Birthday in the bus, 1982

I slept in a bunk built across the back where the emergency exit window had been. Below my bed were several storage shelves for clothes, dishes, utensils, everything that didn't fit in the beautiful antique armoire that was bolted to the side of the bus near the front door, its heavy beveled mirrored door secured with bungee cords to keep it from swinging open in transit.

We set out in late September, driving down Interstate 5 towards Santa Fe, our planned destination.

My grandmother, who was 5'1 and barely 100 lbs, navigated the enormous vehicle with no power steering, power brakes or power anything. She managed well enough on the smooth freeways of the Pacific Northwest, but the challenge slowly escalated as we made our way through Northern California and into the mountains.

By the time we reached the red rock canyons of Arizona, it was a serious Hero's Journey. I didn't know it at the time, but captaining the enormous, unwieldy vehicle by herself made my grandmother a nervous wreck. She had driven VW buses and small RVs before, but this monster was on a whole other level, by far the largest she had ever driven.

For all her Sagittarian bravado, there were moments when she wondered what she had gotten us all into.

Downward Spirals

Steering was hard enough, but stopping and slowing down, especially in the hairpin turns that marked our entrance into the Arizona desert, on mountain roads that were so narrow and winding, turning at such acute angles, it seemed impossible that the length of the bus would make it without one end overhanging the treacherous cliffs.

Despite all the careful planning and bolting down of furniture, as we descended at what sometimes seemed like out of control speeds, books and kitchenware would often fly off the shelves.

Anything that wasn't strapped down by bungee cords or bolted to the floor or walls was in danger of becoming a projectile as the bus maneuvered around the highest turns.

Adding to the challenge was our fourth passenger, a 100 lb. Great Dane with floppy ears named Zeke. His two-foot long tail whipped back and forth as he nervously raced the length of the bus.

As we navigated some of the scariest turns, my mother and I held onto Zeke for dear life to keep him from running around, knocking shit over, and disrupting my grandmother's concentration.

Aerial view of Highway 89A as it looked in the early 80s

Valley of Fears

In one particularly hellish episode, as we descended into the Oak Creek Canyon on Highway 89A, my grandmother was standing up, leaning into the steering wheel to force her full weight onto the manual brake pedal, swearing and gritting her teeth, jumping up and down.

My mother and I clung to the inside wall of the bus, fiercely clutching Zeke's collar and trying to pile heavy items onto the bench seats next to us to increase the weight on the side farthest from the cliff's edge.

I remember asking if I could get out and walk, meet them at the next rest stop, as visions filled my head of the bus tipping just a hair to the right and plummeting over the preposterously low guardrail into the aptly named Valley of Tears.

A Quiet Blowout

At some point along the way, one of the back dual tires went flat but we didn't notice because it was an inner tire. The damage went undetected for about 30 miles. When we pulled into a truck stop to find a replacement, they told us it would take a few days.

We attempted to drive to a nearby friend's house several miles down the road to wait. Unfortunately, the flat was on the right side, an integral component in making one of the tightest turns at the first curve in the road. The bus keeled like a wind-tossed sailboat, sending my mother and me screaming into the aisle.

My grandmother was grimly silent at the time but later admitted she had been every bit as terrified as we were. She brought the bus safely to a stop and announced that we’d better camp at the truck stop until the tire arrived.

Stranded for five days with nothing else to do, we made the first of our winter preparations by painting the entire bus leather brown. It looked like a giant Hershey bar, except for the roof which was covered in roped-down boxes and trunks full of books, clothes, records and tapes.

Near the end of October we finally reached the tiny, then nearly unknown town of Sedona and spent an entire day leveling the bus at the campground that would be our home for the foreseeable future.

Home sweet home

We finished winterizing the bus over the next couple of weeks, something that proved crucially important, though never completely successful. The nights in Sedona were bitterly cold for people accustomed to the mild, wet winters of the Pacific Northwest or more tropical climates, like California and Florida.

Evening Rituals

We slept in sweatshirts and long johns, wrapped in sleeping bags, under layers of blankets. We went to bed early, almost as soon as it got dark, because it was too cold to do anything else once the sun went down.

Our small wooden stove only warmed the immediate area around it and with three of us plus a giant dog, it was impossible to comfortably huddle around it for warmth.

We would make hot tea or coffee and hop into bed right after dinner to watch our little black and white TV. MASH, The Greatest American Hero, and Code Red got us through many long, cold evenings. My favorite show was Knight Rider.

Morning Rituals

Mornings were the worst that first winter. As a child I always wanted to stay up late and watch TV but, eight hours later, it was nearly impossible to get out of bed, especially when I could see frost on the bus windows and the sun was barely visible through the trees that surrounded the campground.

I would get dressed inside my sleeping bag and pretend to fall back to sleep. Eventually I would emerge and have to hike up a frozen gravel road to the main highway where we waited for the school bus.

Even on weekends it was hard to sleep in. The noisy rituals of dog feeding and thundering paws racing up and down the length of the bus made it impossible to sleep in long past sunrise.

Zeke was an absolute sweetheart but also a comically absurd addition to our confined quarters. His tail would whip back and forth, knocking coffee mugs off shelves, and his manic pacing made the bus shudder under his weight.

The End of Bus Life

Our bus-dwelling days came to an end a year later when my mother met a nice man and we all moved into a house together several miles down the highway. We stayed in Sedona for another year before returning to the Pacific Northwest just in time for me to start 5th grade.

At first we moved to San Juan Island, then a tiny gold mining town called Skykomish near the Stevens Pass ski resort, before finally moving back to the city.

We lived in Seattle for several years before moving again, this time road tripping across the country to settle in Charlottesville, VA, but that's a story for another day...

Thanks for reading, everyone!

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