We pushed a 4 ton bus down a hill
104 degrees, Birmingham Alabama in July, in the middle of a McDonald’s drive thru, and our 1985 30 passenger people mover we’re touring the country in just died.
It’s 2008 ish and this is my band’s first tour with our “new” touring vehicle.
Just before summer we found this old church shuttle bus and gutted it. We built bunk beds into it (or should I say my dad did) and even had an inverter to watch movies and charge our Nokia cell phones.
It didn’t have AC, smelled like exhaust fumes, and topped out at about 60mph but it was home.
And now home was sitting immobile at the McDonald’s pick up window while the angry cheeseburger eaters behind us let us have it with their horns.
4 of us get out and begin to try to push this monster 50ft to a parking spot dead ahead.
Once we get situated in a parking spot and finish our dollar menu items, I start trying to figure out what’s wrong with our bus (I’ve been elected the tour mechanic btw. Wonderful)
Even after a jump it won’t start, so it’s becoming clear that we aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Which is no bueno, because if we can’t get out of this McDonald’s parking lot, they are going to make us call a tow truck.
Did you catch where we are eating off the dollar menu? We can’t afford a tow truck.
As luck would have it, there’s a Walmart across the street. Walmart is basically our home away from home because this was back when they were open 24 hours and were cool with you parking and sleeping in their parking lot.
But there’s a problem.
The McDonald’s we are sitting at is at the top of a very large hill.
At the bottom of the hill there’s a busy stoplight intersection, and just beyond that, the promised land. The Walmart.
The other issue is that the parking lot itself is slightly inclined, so we need to push the bus up this incline to get out of the parking lot just to be in a place where we can make a run down the hill.
So with 4 of us behind the bus and one person at the wheel, we begin to try to push the bus out of the parking lot.
We push as hard as we can and the bus moves about a foot, but as soon as we let up, it rolls backwards 2 feet.
Shit.
We devise the plan that because of the incline we are on, we are only going to be able to push it a little bit at a time, and between pushes one of us will have to scream “Brake!!!” so that the driver knows to hit the brakes so we don’t lose our progress.
It’s still 104 degrees.
Several curse words, arguments, and driver seat shift changes later, we’ve finally got the bus just out of the parking lot.
One more solid push and we should have enough momentum to get the bus started down the hill, and hopefully have enough steam to get us into the Walmart.
But because of the light at the bottom of the hill, we need to time it perfectly so that the light is still green by the time we get there.
Our light is red. We wait. Cars are going a million miles an hour through the intersection below us.
I’m seeing a future where we mistime our run and our 30 passenger church monstrosity annihilates an unlucky Prius as we T-bone them into oblivion.
I snap out of it as I see the other light turn from green to yellow.
“PUSSSHH!!!!!!”
We give it everything we have.
The bus starts rolling, and as we go from incline to decline we are picking up speed. And fast. (This was not planned well)
We get going so fast that there are only two options, let go and eat pavement, or hop on and hold on for dear life.
And in perfect unison like a 4 man bobsled team, we jump on the sides of the bus, grabbing hold of whatever we can to stay attached.
30, 40, 50 mph as we BLAZE through the intersection at the bottom of the hill attached to the sides like a pack of emo firefighters.
It. Was. Glorious.
As we coast into the Walmart parking lot, we are cackling.
I can’t believe it worked.
We spent the next 24 hours in that Walmart parking lot, as I worked on the bus in the sweltering heat with my dad guiding me through what to do over the phone.
But before long, we were back on the road to continue our adventure.
A lot of the time I think we make the mistake of thinking that if we are on the right path then things will go smoothly.
That if we are headed the right direction things should just feel easy.
But more often than not, things break down.
And when they do, it’s important to remember that with enough patience, and with the right support, that as long as we keep pushing even just inches at a time, we too can coast down through an intersection like absolute badasses holding on to 4 tons of junkyard steel and into where we want to be.
Having that right support is what makes all the difference. The only reason that bus ever ran again was my dad walking me through it over the phone, three states away.
I had no clue what I was doing. He did.
So if your bus is broke down in some McDonald’s parking lot right now, keep pushing.
Inch by inch still counts.
Caleb
