No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life

The School Bus Driver

The School Bus Driver Waved One warm spring day, driving north to my ranch on a Wyoming back road with all the car windows open, I was thinking about unpaid bills when I noticed someone mowing the borrow ditch. When hay is sparse because of drought, many ranchers and farmers take their mowers into the roadside ditch (“borrowed” from the highway right-of-way) to harvest the hay there. After all, it belonged to the landowner before the government decided to borrow it for the common good of transportation. I slowed down and noted that the mower was a white-haired woman wrestling an old tractor along. She grinned and waved while I was still looking her over, so I scrambled to wave back, surprised. Driving on, I wondered what caused her to greet me. She saw a woman with efficiently short gray hair, elbow out the car window enjoying the sunshine . Perhaps she appreciated the fact that with my window down, I was paying more attention than many drivers do to the country where she lives and works. She could not have known how fully I recall and miss her life, that I know what it’s like to drive a tractor in the itchy heat hour after hour. She may have been grateful I showed concern for her safety by slowing down to pass her. For a few moments we were linked in our enjoyment of the day. Though I have driven that highway once or twice a week each summer for more than fifteen years, I had never seen her before. Yet both of us “took the time” and “made the effort” to wave and cheer each other in our separate journeys. If I’d been on a cell phone, I’d have missed that spark of connection. 42 Nn no p la c e li ke h ome when i was a child living on my family’s ranch in western South Dakota, my father waved to the driver of every car we met on the way to town, and that driver waved back. My father might say, “Oh, Gus got a new car,” or “Cliff ought to get that headlight fixed.” Of course he knew everyone in the neighborhood, but he waved whether he knew them or not. Since I started commuting to the ranch several times a month, the people who know me still wave if they spot me on the road, in spite of my Wyoming license plates. I like to think that they are acknowledging that I am still part of this community. Promoters caused our paved two-lane to bloat into a divided four-lane, though Department of Transportation surveys indicated the larger highway was not really needed for the amount of traffic that exists now, or is expected into the next century. This mutation is, I believe, symbolic of the divisions destroying the rural West. Like other tools, notably pistols and cars, a highway can be useful or destructive, depending on how it’s operated. On a four-lane highway, the average driver wouldn’t notice her own mother dying of heat stroke in the opposite lane; its size invites and abets anonymity, speed, competitiveness, ignorance of the surroundings—the opposite of what most people say they want in the country. Most four-lanes collect convenience stores and developments the way a prairie dog draws fleas, destroying the countryside we profess to love. If you love the country, I heard someone say recently, live in town. The South Dakota Department of Transportation condemned part of my pasture land to build the additional lanes for the four-lane. A green street sign now calls my driveway Windbreak Road. Waiting to pull out on a spring day, overwhelmed with the sense of loss, I devise a test of community connection. Waving in the country has been the subject of too many humorous essays , often written by city folks, so I want my signal to be simple and clear. With my right hand at the top of the steering wheel, palm out, I raise my index and middle fingers. I make this gesture when I can see the oncoming driver’s face, allowing time for a response. My first waving experiment lasts twenty-eight miles, from my turnoff to The School Bus Driver Waved Nn 43 Hot Springs, South Dakota, and includes eighty-four vehicles. Greetings are returned by six. For...