This story was mostly relayed to me from my mother who had heard the story from one of the other neighbors. She had witness part of the incident and discovered the whole story after asking around about what she saw.
    As I’ve mentioned in past stories we lived on a dirt road. The elementary bus went down that road and dropped kids off every three or four houses apart, mostly in front of houses where the elementary school kids lived. The junior high and high school bus routes only went to the paved road at the end of our road. So some of those kids had to walk quite a distance to their houses.
    I’ve also mentioned that the neighbor kids rode their snowmobiles in the winter every night after school. They had two boys that went to high school and they would get home and get on the machines before I got home from Junior High.
    One of the problems with young teenagers operating a powerful machine like a fast snowmobile without adult supervision is that they get bored and brave. They’re too young to have any experience with an accident or how fast you could lose your life or a limb. Our neighbors had two boys in high school. One was in ninth or tenth grade, so he was young and out with the snowmobile one afternoon. It was one of those cloudy days where it wasn’t very bright out and he was zipping across the road between one field to the front yards of houses.
    The bus with elementary school kids approached and he jumped in front of the bus and zoomed around it. I don’t know the exact path he took, but it was a dangerous maneuver and he could have hit a small child. Fortunately, nobody got hurt.
    I need to stop here and talk about small towns. The place we lived was small enough that the bus drivers knew all of the kids. They had driven these kids to school for years and they knew exactly where they lived. Well, when the bus driver saw who was on the snowmobile, she knew where his parents lived. As it turned out, his house was just a few houses up the road from where that incident took place. So the bus driver parked the bus in front of his house and walked up to the door and had a conversation with their mother.
    I don’t know what was discussed, but I could guess at how seriously the mother took it because I didn’t see that kid on the snowmobile anymore. That was right about the time when snowmobiles stopped buzzing our front yard.