Dueling Transit Buses
Thomas Kendall '93
photo
As might be expected on a hot and hazy Saturday in May, the landscape up around the Mullins Center is teeming with lacrosse and soccer players. Down here at Lot 25, what's teeming is, unexpectedly, UMass transit busses—screeching, groaning, blue-and-white transit busses, caroming around a several-acre expanse of asphalt, sideswiping barrels and orange safety cones, and occasionally sending one flying through the air.
Has someone hijacked the busses? Is this what goes on on campus during the weekend?
Well, not every weekend. But every May for the past twenty-eight years, the Annual Transit Safety Rodeo has materialized like a manic mass-transit Brigadoon, with dozens of student bus drivers trying their college best to negotiate a tough course with serpentine curves, tight spots, and encroaching barrels—all while offering a smooth ride, in less than seven minutes.
The top prize is $200 in cash, and senior Spanish major Melissa MacPherson is pretty sure she has what it takes to win. "Oh, yeah," she says. MacPherson has "almost 3,000 accident-free hours" behind the big steering wheel. And she has the hunger. "I really need the cash, so I want to win."
But first it's MacPherson's turn to judge for a while, along with fellow driver Charity Musielak. Their assignment: the right turn. Musielak, a slender, freckle-faced blonde who's been a driver since 1993, wears a cheerleader's jumper with a picture of a bus on the front. As each bus lurches up to the turn she jumps up and down, waving her pink pom-pom like crazy and shouting "You can do it!" The shorter, stockier MacPherson keeps score on a clipboard. Her cup of coffee—beverage of choice for bus drivers—is festooned with a cocktail umbrella; the boom-box is blasting Ricky Martin; Lot 25 broadcasts a festival air. The rodeo, says MacPherson, "is one of the crowning achievements we look forward to every year. Events like this just drag people out of the woodwork."
By the looks of things, there's nowhere that the fifty or so big-wheel aficionados who've shown up here today would rather be. UMass students have been driving transit busses since 1969; last year, they hauled 2.6 million passengers 1 million miles. They make $7.50 to $9.50 an hour. But for these students, driving is more than a job. It's a way of life.
"A lot of people
meet their future husbands and
wives here," Musielak says.
"We both have transit boyfriends," adds MacPherson.
UMass bus drivers don't just drive off into the sunset when they graduate. They keep coming back to the rodeo. Jim Aspach '90S, '93 and three fellow alumni spent last night camped out in a vintage bus he bought for $3,000 and converted into a camper. It sleeps six and features a fully equipped kitchen and bath." It's nicer than my apartment," says Aspach of his pride and joy.
Aspach and friends are eating eggs and hash produced in the bus while judging the curbside stop, and sipping Virgin Marys with tall stalks of celery. By day, Anspach reveals, he teaches landscaping at Dean Tech High School in Holyoke, but he dreams of racing busses someday. He returns to the rodeo with a group of fellow alums in red mechanic's suits with logos reading "Full Moon Racing." It's a fictional company now, he acknowledges. But one day, who knows?
MacPherson, it turns out, doesn't win after all. She has a little trouble maneuvering at the loading-dock stop, and it takes her ten minutes to get through the course.
She shrugs philosophically. "This is not an easy thing to do," she says. "And I did really badly. But that's OK. This is all about fun." She's looking forward now to the post-rodeo barbecue, where there's plenty more fun to be had.
– Mary Carey
