Precious Cargo: My Year Driving the Kids on School Bus 3077

CRAIG DAVIDSON

Stats for my copy: Trade paperback, Knopf Canada, 2016.

How acquired: Via Bookcrossing.

First line: I trudged across a field against a late-September wind that flattened my jacket against my chest.

My thoughts: Broke after some early success as a writer, Craig Davidson was desperate for any job that could provide some income. He had just applied for, and not gotten, a Lunch Supervisor position, when he found a flyer for bus drivers wanted. He called, and wound up driving a “short bus” with six special needs children.

I was a bit astounded at how easily he was hired to drive a school bus. I guess I just assumed that the drivers who pilot our kids around go through a rigorous screening process first. Of course, this is in Canada, and I live in the States (and in the interest of full disclosure, my kids only rode a bus for a few days of one semester and hated it so much I drove them after that), but maybe it's also that easy here.

It took me a little bit to get into the book. I guess I just wasn't that interested in the author's life before he began driving the bus. And at first the occasional excerpts from the “unpublished novel” irritated me and seemed pointless. But once Craig started his training it began to pick up for me, and as time went by the excerpts began to make more sense story wise.

And once the actual driving begins and Craig meets his charges, I was pretty riveted. I won't go into detail about each child and the challenges they faced, but his descriptions of them were vivid and thoughtful. As he gets to know the kids better, driving the bus becomes more than a job and his relationship with them becomes more than just being their bus driver. So it kind of puzzled me that when the school year ended, he just quit being a bus driver, and never really said why or what he was moving on to. Though I guess it started out as just a means to an end, to generate some income so he could afford to continue writing.

Regardless, this little peek into the lives of five extraordinary kids and their bus driver is heartwarming and feel good.

Goodreads synopsis: With his last novel, Cataract City, Craig Davidson established himself as one of our most talented novelists. But in his early thirties, before writing that novel and before his previous work, Rust and Bone, was made into an Oscar-nominated film, Davidson experienced a period of poverty, apparent failure and despair. In this new work of intimate, riveting and timely non-fiction, based loosely on a National Magazine Award-winning article he published in The Walrus, Davidson tells the story of one year in his life--a year during which he came to a new, mature understanding of his own life and his connection to others. Or, as Davidson would say, he became an adult.    
                                                                    
One morning in 2008, desperate and impoverished and living in a one-room basement apartment while trying unsuccessfully to write, Davidson plucked a flyer out of his mailbox that read, "Bus Drivers Wanted." That was the first step towards an unlikely new career: driving a school bus full of special-needs kids for a year. Armed only with a sense of humour akin to that of his charges, a creative approach to the challenge of driving a large, awkward vehicle while corralling a rowdy gang of kids, and surprising but unsentimental reserves of empathy, Davidson takes us along for the ride. He shows us how his evolving relationship with the kids on that bus, each of them struggling physically as well as emotionally and socially, slowly but surely changed his life along with the lives of the "precious cargo" in his care. This is the extraordinary story of that year and those relationships. It is also a moving, important and universal story about how we see and treat people with special needs in our society.