June 25, 1971, Part 2

Exhausted. Moved out. Couldn't have done it without the friends. The landlord showed up to get the keys and tried with only middling success to be nice. We pulled out. The cat freaked out, we forgot to put water in the chemical toilet, N and A were bratty. The little television went up on a poof of smoke, the stove blazed and burned the dinner. Two blocks away from the house, we went over the curb at the gas station and the icebox turned over and spilled milk all over everything. The kids found a dead whale and a sick sea lion on the beach. 

But now that everybody but me is peacefully asleep and the surf at Half Moon Bay pounds and the candles and lanterns flicker, I think we may have succeeded after all in whatever it was we set out to do.

Bus mileage 41,765.  Gas fill-up $6.50, groceries, $6.50, newspaper, .15, allowance for V (a friend of the boys) $1.00, N allowance, $1.00. Water tank full; still using previously purchased cookstove fuel and ice and vegetables from home.

Bus Log, May 29, 1971 (by JF)

Left bright and early--for us (9:30). Drove down the coast to Half Moon Bay..not a very exciting place, so we drove on looking for greener pastures. South to Santa Cruz, then north on Highway 9 to Big Basin State Park. Learned to our dismay that, this being Memorial Day weekend, all parks were booked solid. Meandered around mountain road looking for a good place to stop. The bus handles very well and is surprisingly easy to control on curves. Did notice with all the uphill driving she began to heat up. But no problem arose. We finally found a nice place to park and went hiking some into the woods, everyone excited to be amongst the trees. Pooped, we hiked back out, ACW falling asleep on my back; played for a while and then had an elegant dinner. Some time after dinner and more playing, a Ranger with cold eyes and matching heart informed us that we couldn't park there overnight. It was dusk by this time, so we just pulled down the road a piece and parked. With a nice warm fire and some popcorn, we sat around and swapped gory tales and then turned in.

Log of the Odyssey of Number 18

September, 1970:  We bought a wonderful yellow bus on a sealed bid to the Tracy School District. After sending in our bid for $601, we changed it on impulse to $700. The next highest bid was $650. JF's friend Charles drove him to Tracy and JF drove the yellow bus home, getting stuck in the Bay Bridge toll booth briefly. He parked the bus on Winfield Street. I couldn't even look at it. It was too much bus to fit into my mind, 35 feet long, 14 feet wide, seven tons heavy. I was sure THEY would come and haul it away as a public nuisance until I realized the implications of trying to tow a seven-ton vehicle.

Finally we parked the bus around the corner, on double-width Esmeralda Street, where the children wouldn't have to cross a street to reach it, and we began to make it ours. Over a period of nine months we gradually moved out of the house and onto the bus. We had the seats hauled away, carpeted the walls, ceiling and floor with collages and mosaics of rug scraps a nearby carpet layer saved for us. JF built in bunks, kitchen, toilet. We added refinements such as a piano and a wash stand and a wood stove, using our friendly neighbor Schielein's water and power.

An oak barrel we bought, thinking to use it as a bath tub, proved to be saturated with some kind of strong spirits. We put a little hot water in the tub, sloshed it around and let it sit a few days, and suddenly we had free cocktails when we were exhausted from working on the bus. The neighborhood never complained about the loss of three parking places and were so generally helpful and cheerful that we gave them a big party on the bus before we went on our first shakedown cruise.

We broke a bottle of champagne over the front bumper and headed out for high adventure.

An Odyssey

In 1971,  when gasoline was about 35 cents a gallon, our family of two adults and three children, aged four, ten and thirteen, set off on a mobile adventure in home schooling.

The best teaching, (as well as the best writing, the best art) we thought, would be showing rather than telling. We wanted to live in a closed system together, to live with limited resources, and to study Bricolage and Kyriology. When I went to my college Webster, these words were not there, but Bricolage is the art of making do with what you have, and Kyriology is the study of important things.

We bought an old 35-foot school bus at auction and fitted it out with mostly recycled materials. When we left San Francisco, the bus had bunks, a piano, a wood stove, a 50-gallon fresh water tank and holding tank for grey water. It had a chemical toilet, a pump-up Coleman stove and an ice box. We carefully selected a library, facts only, no opinion. We signed up for the Calvert School, which offers a correspondence course which can be conducted by parents and mailed in.

The children helped navigate, budget, keep a journal, deal responsibly with water and waste disposal. We had many adventures, not all of them pleasant. At the end of the trip, the children were only too glad to return to public school (one of them was put ahead six months) and I was only too glad not to have to cook brown rice any more. The Bus Trip furnished material for many school essays.

Thirty-seven years later, one Bus Trip alumnus is an architect dealing with green design and construction; the other is a high school principal. Between them, they have five children and five degrees, with a Ph.D on the horizon. Each has been married for more than 25 years.

The pages to come are the Log of the Odyssey of Number Eighteen.