The Crossing

Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.
-Robert F. Kennedy

On December 14, 1961 a fast moving train slammed into a school bus just outside of Greeley, Colorado. Thirty-six children were on board. After the impact ripped the back of the bus from the rest of the frame 16 children, along with the driver, were still alive. Who lived and who died seemed random. One girl sitting between two other girls lived while her friends died. One child switched seat with her brother minutes before the crash; she lived, he died. Two families lost all their children. One family lost one child and had another injured. One family lost two children while another one was injured. One little girl wanted to stay home so she could visit her father in the hospital; she died in the crash.

Other children who normally rode the bus were not on it that day. Two because they overslept (sisters), one because of illness, and another because he wanted to get to school a little early that day and had caught a ride with his older brother.

I was ten years old when this happen and do not remember hearing anything about it. Two and a half years later it was the main focus of my life. That was the summer my brother, sisters, and I spent in foster care. I always thought we had spent the entire summer in that place and was surprised to find out years later it was only two weeks. However long we were there it was enough to...I wanted to write "change our lives" but that is not correct. What it changed was us.

Before we went in my brother was best friends with another boy who came over to see us when we got back home. I remember standing in the backyard with my brother staring at this poor boy as he talked to us and thinking what an immature jerk he was. My brother must have been thinking the same thing because as the boy kept talking he, the boy, started getting nervous. He was getting no reaction from us. We stood there, stone face, waiting for him to stop talking. When he did stop we had nothing to say to him. He quickly left and never came back.

(Another thing that stands out for me about this experience also involved my brother. When we went into foster care we called my brother "Ricky." When we came out we were calling him by his full name, Richard.)

The woman we were placed with had been taking in foster kids for quite awhile. Long enough for her to decide that foster children were not worth the time, effort, or money she put into them. Her anger radiated off her like heat off a hot stove. Maybe at one point she took in kids because she wanted to help them but by the time we got there she was only in it for the money the state paid her for each child she housed. Once, as she fed us dinner, she told me that the only reason we were there was because our parents no longer wanted us.

We were in a place that had no toys (foster kids only break them), no books (only Reader's Digest Condensed Books), and (after she caught me watching the Republican National Convention on TV) no television. Then I found a copy of Reader's Digest Magazine. In it was an article about the Greeley school bus/train accident. I read it again and again totally engrossed in the details and the photographs of the children who were killed or injured. I would carefully examine each school photo and think about who lived and who died. The one person I identified with the most was the girl who had survived while her two friends sitting on either side of her died. How could that happen? Was it luck or did it happen because somebody up there liked her? How can your life change in an instant through no fault of your own? Why is life so scary? Who can I trust? Who will take care of me if something goes wrong? Will I survive everything that happens to me? All questions that I could not articulate or even consciously think about at the time. All questions that I was trying to find the answers to by reading and re-reading that article every day of my life sentence in that foster home.

Why am I writing about this now? Because I have been reading a 33-part series of articles about the accident in The Rocky Mountain News. The articles cover the accident, the aftermath, and how it reverberated thorough the lives of the children, the families, the bus driver, the train engineer, and the community since then. Reading these articles has been hard for me. Telling their story has been even harder for the people involved. My heart goes out to them all.