Harrowing Tales from an Out-of-Control School Bus: West Des Moines Editor's Notebook

Those kids on the bus that slid out of control on an icy West Des Moines street Monday won’t soon forget the experience.

There were no injuries and everyone lived to tell about it. It’ll be a legendary story, to be repeated in years to come at class reunions.

I know this to be true.

Related:.

I may have been in high school. Exactly how many years ago that was is irrelevant. Let’s just say I was old enough to know that if the brakes failed once, it wasn’t likely they’d work again, as if by magic.

And fail they did, right after the bus breezed by the usual stop in front of some kid’s house on a dusty gravel road and careened – at least we were careening in my mind’s eye –  toward the little town’s sewage treatment plant.

I remember this distinctly. It was one of those late fall afternoons we Midwesterners cling to, when the sun shines down warmly and gives us one last taste of shirt-sleeve weather. The lagoon was in full stink bloom that day and in that moment, I worried the bus might actually gather enough steam to overtake the berm surrounding it and dump us into the muck.

But the driver used the emergency brake to stop the bus, managed to find a place with a large enough berth to turn it around, and we crept back to the school and the maintenance barn.

Now, the large parking lot was deserted when we returned to the school. To this day, I do not know why the driver didn’t just drive around in circles until the bus finally stopped. He probably doesn’t either. This may be the last thing he wonders about this side of the grave.

He drove right up to the closed bus barn door. We were traveling less than 5 mph, so maybe he thought it would be like slowing down on roller skates (the method used by those of us who never learned to use the toe-stopper without falling flat on our faces) and stopping by simply rolling into the wall.

A soft impact. No harm, no foul.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way.

We plowed right through that door, sending pieces of plywood flying like debris from a cyclone. The little kids on the bus were probably scared, but for those of us who were older, it was high comedy.

Eventually we stopped, inside, fortuitously for the mechanics in their work area. With any luck at all, Indian summer would hold on and they wouldn’t miss the door before they got it fixed.

We lived to tell about it. And tell about it. And tell about it.

What’s your most harrowing bus story that worked out well?