Get on the Bus

As you drive through the hills of rural East Tennessee, it is not uncommon to come upon houses that have some or all of the following items in the yard or on the porch: a refrigerator; an old, extremely worn out and dilapidated couch; a couple of old tractor tires; an ancient car or truck sitting on blocks; and perhaps an old school bus.

I was talking to some new friends from various places around the Northeastern U.S. today, and they were all quite astonished to hear about these yard decorations. They thought that we were kidding, but I can assure you that we were not. I have seen all of these things in the yards of rural homes (and some not-so-rural). The couch and refrigerator are usually out on the porch, protected somewhat from the wether. The couch is there for obvious reasons. It became too worn to continue to be furniture in the house, so it was relegated to the porch. Porch visitors, as opposed to house visitors, can set down and rest a spell on the old couch, which is fairly comfortable, for all its looks, as long as one knows where the sprung springs are and avoids them. Of course, there are more porch visitors than there are home visitors, as the porch is a brighter, cooler place to be during the dog days of an East Tennessee summer. So the old couch sees more service than the the couch that replaced it in the living room. Despite the protection of the porch roof, the fridge is rusted on the outisde. It may or may not be in working order. If it's working, it almost surely is stocked with beer and maybe a few half-empty cardboard cartons of earthworms to be used as bait. However , it's just as likely that it does not work and that the residents of the house meant to haul it off to the local dump (or illegally dump it in some nearby woods), but their truck wasn't running at the time. So there it sits.

But that brings us to the car up on blocks. This car was manufactured sometime between about 1950 and 1984. The tires are long gone, thus the cinder blocks that hold it up off the ground. It is sitting there, rusting, because someone is going to get it running some day. All it needs is a new transmission or a new motor or something like that (no one seems to remember now what was wrong with it when they put it up on blocks), and it'll be good as new. Junior Sparks, who lives down the road a ways, is keeping an eye out for the particular make and model of your car to come in that you might get some used parts of off. You've been waiting for a while, but you haven't heard from Junior yet.

Now, the tractor tires clearly serve the purpose of containing a small flower garden. The tires are almost always painted white, to improve their aesthetic appeal and perhaps make them look a little less obviously like, well, tires. The flower garden may or may not be in current existence. It may have been an idea that someone had but never got around to following through on. Or there may be a few bedraggled pansies struggling against the summer heat in the long-forgotten tire garden.

But the item of prime curiosity at this point, the “piece of resistance,” as my Aint Jo says, is the dilapidated school bus. It usually sits off in the side yard somewhere, some distance from the house itself. There are several reasons that a person might have an old school bus in one's yard. You might be—or at some point have been—a school bus driver. You parked it in the yard one day, and for whatever reason, your services were no longer required by the local school district, and you just left it there, in case you ever get a call that you need to go pick up some kids again. Or, you may have gotten a great deal on an old school bus, maybe someone was getting rid of it for around a hundred bucks, maybe less. And you thought how handy it might come in for storage or if you have guests who need a place to sleep or something like that. You plan to perk it up someday by maybe painting it, and you might strip out the seats to make room for beds or shelves or something like that, but you haven't quite gotten around to renovating it yet because you just can't decide which way to go: storage shed or guest house. So, there it has sat since about 1974, give or take a decade or so, until you decide what to do with it.

Now, you are probably most likely to find this yard décor if you get lost somewhere near the Smoky Mountains—the part of Appalachia that runs through East Tennessee and Western North Carolina. The farther you get from Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge—we are talking about really lost now—the more likely you are to find a yard such as the one described here.

But if you haven't the time or patience to get lost in the Smoky Mountains (Warning: if you are not from around there, do not stop at some tiny gas station to ask for directions to civilization. They will recognize your accent as a foreign one and will probably be somber, silent, and utterly unhelpful until you leave. They don't mean to be unfriendly, it's just their way. Plus, they can't understand a damned word you're saying.) Anyway, if you don't happen to get lost in the mountains, you can still find the domestic scene that I've described here by just driving around in small communities anywhere in East Tennessee that do not have neighborhood associations and the regulations that go along with them, and enough yard space in which to compile the necessary elements.