Yellow lines crawled away. Gaining momentum, stripes crisply zipped until running together, turning to a ribbon splitting asphalt in half.
If one had superhuman abilities, such as freeze framing within optical organs, you could hold onto District 147, a faded muted black stencil halfway up golden canary yellow sheet metal. Once the part-time driver got the beast over 45, freeze frame became mere memory bored into reality.
Bored out of their gourds, idle chatter rapidly succumbed to nodding. Field trips, no matter how intoxicating intellectual stimulus created, always drained. Kindergartners could fall asleep in line waiting to get back on the bus. Budding teenagers would brave it out, holding up until they turned onto the highway. High school juniors were beyond putting up a front, getting comfortable before the bus pulled out of the sand-covered, eroded asphalt lot.
photo by Daniel Agee. All rights reserved.
Three teachers, all science, one cut from the crust of geology. Aside from teachers, two other adults were present, mothers posing as teachers on the ride-along as chaperones in case the field trip turned to a dance. 57 hormonally-challenged, synapse-snoozing teenagers trying to keep collective hearts aflutter despite continual monotone detailed explanations of tectonic plates within the Eastern United States, their massive collisions, upheavals, forming Adirondacks, Appalachians and the eastern coastline. One part-time bus driver, a senior and former truck driver who once took a snooze on a 17-hour haul across I-10, dumping a load of avocados and peppers two miles outside Mobile. No harm done except for a few cars slipping on a delightful guacamole spread across four eastbound lanes.
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