Hauling inestimable cargo in winter

Cliff Mooney carried his knowledge of school buses and their ability to get-go through backcountry snow, quietly on his sleeve like a coffee stain.

The former transportation supervisor for a small town Idaho school district, Mooney preened his fleet of buses like a herd of 4-H Jersey cows, ensuring they were well fed, got the proper nutrition for powerful coats and teeth, and that they were well-groomed, orange and happy.

There was, of course, a pragmatic side to his endeavors. Mooney was responsible, for almost two decades, for getting hundreds of school children from the gravel, mountain-road fringes of the St. Maries district safely to the classroom at four schools each day, and return them home in similar fashion: warm, a day smarter and without snow in their boots.

At this, Mooney was as near a magician as a person of civil servitude could be. He not only loved his work and excelled at it, he dotted and crossed its letters, let it live in his home, drank it with his coffee, got some on his sleeve, and he cross-trained in meteorology and weather science.

If you wanted to know what the weather was doing in a mountain drainage 37 miles away where his buses traveled for the children whose family he knew by name, Mooney would know.

For the weather, call Cliff.

Superintendents did.

Sure, there were snow days. School was a few hours late sometimes to make certain the county plows, which often worked nonstop it seemed, for weeks at a time, cleared what they could. Then the buses, rocking like seiners in a bumpy sea, picked up the cargo of kids who had all night crossed their fingers for a snow day.

Everyone has snow stories and anyone who relied on a school bus in the northern climes in winter can probably still smell the bench seats, the wet film on what looked like a linoleum floor — rubber later — and recall the fogged windows and the bus driver at the helm.

Ray Rippentropp said he drove bus for egg money, and we knew it meant money to supplement what he made with his dairy herd, which often gave the bus a faint barnyard smell.

It also meant Ray meant business.

No standing, stay seated, don’t go out the back door, watch your head, and keep your voices down, were a few of the signs meant to remind.

And Ray didn’t need to remind. Not much anyhow.

He would stop a bus, turn on the flashers and with his neck bent because he was too tall for the inside, walk back wearing barn boots and a Carhartt jacket from which his wrists protruded, carrying heavy hands, to stymie shenanigans.

When Ray stopped and came walking, you hoped it wasn’t for you.

We were pleased most of us, when the doors swung open in the half-light of morning, as snow flurried or whipped across the road, and Ray looked down at us from his jaybird seat to say, how you doin’ today?

He was a picture of confidence when temperatures were lower than the visibility, but not by much.

We knew his were good hands.

A woman I know remembers her coach as the best bus driver she had, carrying a lot of players to a lot of games all over Idaho in the thick — for the most part — of winter.

He would make short work of trips to gyms in other towns, so the girls could pile out and warm up, practice, and usually win.

“That’s how we put trophies in the trophy case,” he would say.

And the trip home was fast too, and safe.

He is still among the drivers at Cliff’s transportation department, which won kudos for efficiency, and probably still does even though Cliff’s no longer there.

It takes training to haul inestimable cargo around Idaho’s back roads.

And good hands.

North Idaho school bus drivers have both.