The Ballad of The Beauti-full Burning Bus

April 14, 2010 at 11:41 pm (Uncategorized) (Ahnika Delirium, Burning Bus Benefit, KatWise Mason Brown, Not Waving But Drowning)

So,

There once was a Magic Girl, who had a Magic Bus; when that bus caught fire, it blazed on all of us!  So sayeth Paige, in our invitation to The Beautifull Burning Bus Benefit, this coming Friday, April 16th at The Red Lotus Room.

Here, my friends, is my story of that Beautifull Burning Bus.

Some years back, my friend, an amazing Creatrix by the name of Kat, bought a full sized schoolbus, 1979 Chevy I think, in order to go on tour following the Grateful Dead. Being a talented imagist, she muraled the entire bus, inside & out. Bright colors, strange creatures, elements of collage & mosaic & a full rooftop platform with railings. Totally psychedelic, but with a clearly cultured edge. This bus, she drove, by herself often, for several years on tour, vending & adventuring along the way.

Finally, it was time to let the bus go. Kat made a friend, when I don’t know, whom I believe was for some time the wife of an heir to the Coca-Cola fortune. She had several houses & a very quirky alterna-sense of style & was something of a collector.

Kat sold the bus to her. Let’s call her Sue. Sue then, over the course of 10 years, replaced the engine, the drive shaft, the brakes & the tires as well as doing a smidge of work on the electrical system. Over the course of this 10 years, she mostly drove it in parades around the city (Atlanta), so the mileage on the new engine remained fairly low, as did wear on all it’s systems.

In the meantime Kat had become more & more well known for her recycled sweater-garments, really gorgeous well crafted wearable art. She also got a new short bus, now named Gua Gua (Which I think means “Woof Woof” in spanish maybe?), which is also a beautifully painted & sculpted bit of Magic.

As if all this wasn’t cool enough, she & my good friend Mason, whose band Not Waving But Drowning will be performing Fri. at the benefit, together bought 16 acres of land in upstate NY, witha lovely house, several rickity barns, a stream & a pond. So, having this land, Steppin’ Falls is a beta name being used for it, Kat decided it was time to get her bus back.

Enter me, Ahnika Delirium. Since obtaining Steppin’ Falls Kat had been commuting to her studio downstate & Mason had been commuting to the city for work, staying here at The House of Collection, me & Paige’s home.

One day when they were both staying over, they posited the idea to me that we take my pickup truck, Bessie, down to Atlanta, where we would pick up the bus & I would drive it back. After having visited Sue’s place about a year ago & having seen it’s many quirky wonders, as well as the big bus, I was eager for the adventure to ensue.

We drove down with no troubles. As it turned out, Sue was selling her house, & in so doing was giving a generous amount of her crazy collectionishisms to Kat! The bus was already half full of  amazing chotzky , with an offer for Kat to pick thru’ many other beauteous objects d’art that remained. It took us longer than expected to get everything packed intot he bus & to get on the road back to NY, a trip we expected to take 2 days.

We had a li’l snafu with the headlights before leaving, but the gracious mechanic that had done all the work on the bus over the years made a late night housecall to help us work it out.

Finally we got on the road. Made it Masons folx neighborhood in South CArolina & crashed the night. Headed out again the next morning late & were still on the road come nightfall. Kat rode with me in the bus, so I’d have company & Mason followed along behng in Bessie, to whom Kat & Mason gifted the surname Hummingbird, to contrast her speed & maneuverabi;ity to the big slow clunky bus.

This is where it gets juicy (long buildup I know).

We were about halfway thru’ Pennsylvania, about Ten o’ th’ clock, maybe an hour away from the first of a series of highway exchanges leading into NY. Having been up & driing on & off for about 4 days, we were all bushed. Mason pulled out ahead of the bus to lead the way thru’ the exchanges & I told Kat to get some sleep.

Right about then the fun started. The bus started jumping. & I mean like bouncing. AN intense vibration filled the whole bus & I started to lose power. I woke Kat & she agreed that we should pull over & assess the situation. I downshifted to slow down, but once in neutral I couldn’t shift into any other gear. We were just coming up on an exit so I slowed down & pulled off on the ramp, only to realize that it exited onto another busy highway, lots of 18 wheelers. At this point we were slowing down with or without the brakes & I stopped towars the end of the (now) entrance ramp.

Just as I cut the engine, an eightenn wheeler, laying on the horn, swerved in in front of us, slamming on it’s brakes so hard that it made smoking tracks on the pavement.

I opened the door & we got out, only to see the driver of the truck running towards us full speed, fire extinguisher in hand.

Very calmly I asked “Are we on fire?”

“YES YOU”RE ON FIRE!!!” he responded.

Says Kat serenely “I’ll find our fire exstinguisher.”

“BUT YOU’RE ON FIRE!” said the trucker, still freaking out.

“Well,… show me where it is.” Sez I.

He ran ahead of me to the back drivers side of the bus, where, between the two back tire, was a raging inferno.

He hit the fire with the extinguisher sveral times. It went out long enough for me to see that the rear differential was glowing orange. Then the fire re-lit itself.

Kat came around the other side of the bus & hit the fire from there, putting it out again, and it re-lit again. We kept hitting it with the extinguishers until it stayed out & the metal stopped glowing. We gently thanked the trucker, still surprisingly serene & he went on his way, needing to get to his next drop off on time.

Mason had driven on ahead & Kat’s cell phone was dying (I still don’t have a cell). We managed to tell him what was up & he managed to circunavigate a couple highways to get back to us.

We called around to folks we thought would still be awake, & thanks to ye’ olde interweb & the joys of voices in outer space (cell phones, satelittes) we not only found a tow service that could handle an oversize bus (remember the roof rack?) & transport it all the way upstate, but we also found a mechanic that could work on old buses only 20 minutes or so away from Steppin’ Falls.

We had to wait for an “assessor” to come determine the exact tow rig they needed, and once they did, waited for the tow truck itself to arrive. Once it did we made the realization that the bus couldn’t be towed forwards. It was then that, with the help of our really nice tow-truck driver, we determined that the oil in the reard ifferential had it’s own dipstick & needed to be changed seperate from the engine oil. Apparently this is common knowledge among many mechanics & the fact that the bus was only driven slowly & for short diatances had rendered the fact of the unchanged oil moot. That is to say it hadn’t mattered until now. The rear differential is where the drive shaft conects with the rear axle, giving the bus the force it needs to move forwards. Apparently the works had gotten so hot from lack of proper lube, that the bearing inside  had welded itself to the wall of the casing & then caught the little remaining oil sludge on fire. This made it so the back tires wouldn’t turn at all. Hence the bouning/jumping of the bus.

He decided to tow it from behind. Not so easy as it might seem. We were on an increasing busy trucking route, on the ramp of a highly trafficked exchange & he had to go down to the next exit, turn around, & drive the wrog way down the side of the highway, swerving around the bus with perfect timing to miss the 18 wheelers careening by on the ramp. This maneuver successfully  executed, he hooked up the bus to the tow truck & proceeded to back the whole shebang up the side of the highway to the next exit.

Phew! Quite the adventure. We were looking at the tow bill & the cost of the repairs, but no-one was injured & the bus wasn’t lost. We were on our way home. We were in the clear.

Or so we thought…

Mason & I spent the next couple hours following along behind the tow rig, alternating driving & sleeping. Kat rode along with the driver, who we learned had a mandolin playing mother named Patsy Kline.

We made it to the Kingston exit, not half an hour from Steppin’ Falls, just past dawn. We exited the highway & wre in line t pay the exit toll, when a state trooper pulled out in front of us & pulled over the tow truck & bus.

As it turns out, the safety regulations for towing so large a vehicle ar emuch more strict in New York than in Pennsylvania & the tow truck company was not registered to tow in NY. What’s more is that the truck was not given a proper log book ( the way truckers keep track of their driving hours so they know when they legally have to take a break) & the insurance was out of date. The cop came over & told us that he would be grounding our tow truck driver for 10 hours.

We’re a half an hour away from Steppin’ Falls & sleep. 15 minutes from the mechanics & the cop was saying we had to wait 10 hours.

Aggcckkk!!!!

Luckily, our tow truck driver (I wish I could remember his name!!) was charming. He convinced the cop to escort us to the mechanics lot, where he was then grounded for 10 hours.

Kat spoke with the mechanic & the potential bill was in the thousands. We still tried to keep a happy outlook, maybe it would only be a couple thousand…

We drove back to the cabin. Kat & Mason got some well earned sleep for most of the morning. I shoveled the driveway, unloaded a bunch of extra chotzky from Bessie Hummingbird & went for a walk in the snowy woods.

We went back to the bus to retrieve a bunch more pretties from it & exchanged contact info with our tow truck driver (whos ename I need to remember, now  that he’ll be staying at the House of Collection to come attend the Benefit.

So, to wrap it up, that night we went to a lovely local music venue/restaurant & at some point Kat stepped outside to talk on the phone. That’s when Mason & I concocted the idea of a benefit… now as the day approaches I’m delighted at what such trauma, drama, adventure, innovation & freindships can create.

This event is really happening.

The theme is patchwork, renewal, springtime, new growth, or steampunk flaming harlequin if you prefer, the metaphor being the patchwork of our spectacular web, our network of circles & crews, tribe, community, & the coming together, gelling, melting, sharing & partying down together has yet again found a new permutation &, in the guise of Kat & Masons upstate estsate, a new place to call home.

Yay!

xo- Ahnika Delirium

Picking & Packing the Bus in Atlanta

Picking & Packing the Bus in Atlanta

Sue also gave a super tall signpost with whimsical titles on the arrows.

Some metal flowers, all pastels & rust, that had been living in the backyard in Atlanta. Now upstate.

The tow truck dropping the bus off.

Can YOU lift a bus with one arm?

Full Length at dawn.