I let it ring twice, looked out the window at the weather, picked up, and it was Marlene Craghead in dispatch, and she did not say hello.
She said, Ray, we have got a bus on its side at the quarry curve.
Nobody on it but the driver. Fifteen minutes ahead of pickup, running the new route in the dark on four inches of fresh. The driver is twenty-six and he walked out of it with a bruised collarbone and he will be all right.
Fifteen minutes. That is the whole story of that morning.
I went. Truck, chains, a bag of sand, and I was up there before the wrecker, and so were four other drivers who had already put their own buses back in the yard.
Now the part that is not mine.
That division has a transportation plan. It is a real document, updated every few years, and there is a hazardous route determination in the back of it that has been in there since 1988.
Bent Mountain Road above the quarry, switchback to crest, no student transport in hours of darkness. Not a guideline. A determination adopted by the school board in 1988, reaffirmed in every plan since, and it was in the one Kessler was handed in August.
The man who wrote it was Wendell Pruitt and he put his reason in one sentence under the entry.
Adopted after the wreck of 12 January 1988. The curve holds ice after every other road on this mountain has cleared and it cannot be seen into from either approach. We are not going to learn this twice.
Kessler routed buses through it in the dark because the software does not read the back of a plan and neither did he.
I did not say one word about that to anybody. Marlene did, at the board meeting on the eleventh, and she had the page.
He is still the transportation director. I want to say that plain, because about nine people in this county are unhappy with me for not wanting his job or his head.
He is thirty-four, he came out of a logistics company, and he moved buses like freight. He has learned something he will carry a long time and he learned it cheap. A collarbone is cheap. It could have been the seven fifteen run with thirty-one kids on it.
He drove out to my house in January, sat in my kitchen, did not make excuses, and asked me to come back.
I did not take the route back. My eyes are not what they were and I know it better than he does.
What I took is route review. Every proposed route in that division goes to a committee of three drivers now, one of them me, and we have moved eleven since spring and killed two outright.
The dark run on Bent Mountain is gone. It went back to what it was in 1989 and it costs the county forty minutes a morning.
He called it some hillbilly’s feelings about a curve. There was a school board determination sitting in his own plan, adopted the winter I turned thirty, that said the same thing in fourteen words, and nobody in that building had read past the table of contents in twenty years.