One of the joys of being an English major is learning everyone else’s story. Unfortunately, by gradation your head is so full of other peoples stories that sometimes they become confused, or even begin to merge with your own. Occasionally, you forget which stories have happened to you and which to Ishmeal, or Henry IV, or, must recently to the bus-ers, Dante. This latest confusion occurred last night. Pulling into our campsite around nine the bussers were met with overcast skies, sweltering heat, and hordes of invisible mosquitoes, fire ants, biting flies, and other bringers of pestilence and itching. It was while circling a dying bed of coals at five in the morning, a task I had been performing for hours while sweating and swatting that I realized the Big Green Bus had parked in the ninth circle of the inferno. Or, as we had been mislead by a well meaning local, beautiful James County Park.
After a sleepless night only mildly assuaged by cortisone cream and a cold breakfast of wait for it… Clif bars! the bussers packed up and strapped in for the long ride to Atlanta. We made it as far as the campground parking lot before something on the bus both large and essential to forward movement stopped doing whatever it was it was supposed to be doing. I would love to tell you what that was exactly but that would be like a giant squid explaining the Second Law of planetary motion through mime – amusing but not very effective. Like most parts of the bus forward of the drivers seat (the engine) Lucas is the only one who really knows what happens in the tangle of hoses and wires and pumps and filters and heaters and something that looks like a large aboriginal boy’s fist, so essential to our project. Like always though, the intrepid Lucas had the mysterious something fixed in a matter of hours and we all packed up again and prepared to leave for Atlanta. We made it to the exit of the park this time, a small improvement over the last, before a new mysterious something broke (maybe the aboriganl fist thingy? hard to say).
For the next four hours we flew along the highway at the staggering pace of 45 miles per hour, sometimes 46 going downhill with a tailwind. (This coincidently had nothing to do with the veggie system, just one of the bonuses of driving a ten year old bus.) As you can guess, spirits were low to murderous, it was still hot, we were being passed by senior citizens in electric wheelchairs, and a never-ending bike rally seemed possessed with keeping anyone from sleeping. It was at this time yours truly suggested the ultimate pick me up, a Kurt Russel movie marathon! Great success. After exhausting our hunger for 80’s adventure films we moved on to musicals and it was at this point we pulled into the truck repair shop in Greer South Carolina.
For the next few hours Lucas and the mechanic worked on the engine. They seemed to really hit it off as soon the mechanic was showing Lucas his tool-box, complete with not only every wrench an engineer could dream of, but a lid plastered with pin-ups of naked women next to prom photos of the mechanic’s fifteen year old daughter. The bussers meanwhile, having been warned to not touch anything in the shop and barred from outside by a terrific thunderstorm, huddled together to watch Hello Dolly on a small cracked laptop screen. It was while the men of the crew had formed a chorus line and were singing along with Barbra the joys of love in the springtime that the head mechanic, covered in oil and carrying a very large wrench, came on board to let us know the engine was fixed. Completely emasculated they slunk to bunks in back and were not seen again.
The rest of the night went much better. The bus fixed we sped through the storm and reached Tom and Laura West’s home on lake Rabun in Georgia. After a midnight feast we settled into beds (!) and drifted off to sleep dreaming of cans of golden Wesson Oil and self priming sewage pumps.
- brent
Nate pumps grease into the tank during one of our many stops for Waste Vegetable Oil Fact-o-the-day: Red ant bites really, really hurt.
