Field Tripping Through Time, Space, and Anxiety

The bathroom door of the bus clattered open and closed repeatedly as my anxiety spiked. Someone was going to end up locked in or locked out or locked upside down, and it was going to cause a whole scene. The scary school administrator would stalk down the aisle, push her glasses up her nose with one finger, and reprimand the boys in the back of the bus in her terrifying voice.

The sixth-grade boys messing with the bathroom door were in my field trip group, of course, so I was ostensibly responsible for them. That left me in a precarious position. To prepare for the coming catastrophe, I did some visualization exercises. When the administrator started laying into them, I pictured myself nodding my head with sufficient gravitas, indicating my agreement with her words. Then, when the administrator caught my eye, I would give a little shrug and raise my palms ever so slightly to say, silently, “What are you gonna do? I tried to warn them.”

That was a solid plan. It could definitely work. If it came to that. Whether it’s about world events or relatively minor bathroom-related squabbles, I’m prone to catastrophizing, so the possibility remained that everything would be fine. Nobody would end up drenched in toilet water, and we’d get to our destination without an embarrassing incident.

However, I wasn’t particularly optimistic.

The field trip was to NASA, or to be more exact, the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Center. The bathroom kerfluffle took place on the way back, so we were all pretty worn down after a long day in the hot sun. After a somewhat cold winter, we skipped straight to summer with temperatures already topping out near 90 degrees.

It didn’t help matters that about ten minutes after departing the Space Center, our bus lurched over to the side of the road and pulled to a stop in the grass a couple of yards from the edge of the Intracoastal Waterway.

There was a flurry of activity at the front. The dean was on her cell phone, and then she exited the bus in a hurried manner. A parent who was apparently looped in for some reason walked to the middle of the bus and announced that a group had been left behind at the Space Center. The dean was going back to get them, and the other two buses had to wait on the side of the road. The dean wanted us all to arrive back at the school together to improve the optics of the situation.

The children groaned. Several boys became panicked. Apparently, their bus had a similar incident the year before, was struck by a car while waiting on the side of the road, and they ended up being six hours late getting back to school. (I have no idea how much of that story is true, but that’s how they remembered it.) One of the moms in the back of the bus and I worked together to allay their fears. We assured them there was no need to catastrophize. We’d be on our way in fifteen minutes, twenty minutes tops.

Calm, cool, and collected. I was the picture of equanimity.

We were all going to die. I knew it.

An 18-wheeler would plow into us at any second, sending the bus careening into the brackish water. The alligators would eat us alive. The only survivor would be whichever kid was locked in the bathroom at the time.

To take my mind off of our impending doom and the fact that one boy was inexplicably going into the bathroom for the 27th time, I tried to think about happier things, like the passage of time and how nothing lasts.

My dad worked for NASA, so I grew up in a town called Titusville, which is located right beside Kennedy Space Center. I have a long history with this place. When I was a kid, the Visitor’s Center was little more than a bus depot with a cafeteria where they served slimy hot dogs. Now, it’s like a mini theme park complete with simulators, rockets everywhere you look, IMAX theaters, and a Starbucks.

Paradoxically, as the NASA space program has slowly died, the Visitor’s Center has grown. Blossoming into a monument to what once was. A commercialized eulogy to an era of hope and exploration, and a country’s shared goals. It provides an overly simplified and romanticized version of how things were, but I’m still a sucker for it. When propaganda is served up in a space-themed package, I’m all in.

Our school system takes field trips to the Space Center in third grade and sixth grade, so I chaperoned a few of the same children three years ago when they were tiny and extremely eager. I remember my son and his main friend group at the time playing together in a replica of the Space Shuttle cockpit. Chattering away. Running from place to place, their small hands pushing buttons and flipping switches. Excited voices counting down to lift off. One of the boys, who was again in my group for this sixth-grade field trip, asked me to reach the switches on top of the cockpit because he wasn’t nearly tall enough. He’s easily tall enough now.

We stopped by that same display on this trip, and while the kids still enjoyed it, a lot of the magic was gone. Worn away by time and age and familiarity. Time moves in only one direction. And never do I feel that more than when I visit a place filled with so many memories.

After a mercifully short delay of maybe twenty minutes, the bus lurched back onto the highway. We survived! The kids cheered, the bathroom door stayed closed for a few precious minutes (the administrator never did come down that aisle), and these sixth graders, who now exist in this weird space between childhood and adolescence, began singing “The Wheels on the Bus.” They were being ironic, I’m sure, but it was impossible for me not to look around and picture them as the very little boys and girls they were just a few years ago.

Three years from now, these kids I’ve watched grow up will be in high school. I hope they stay safe and healthy. I hope that they find something to replace their current infatuation with charter bus bathrooms. And I hope that, no matter how cool or aloof they become as teenagers, their eyes still light up when they see a spaceship.

Words by me, Andrew Knott. Best known for duck… and Baby-sitters Club.

My books:

Love’s a Disaster - contemporary fiction about a marriage proposal gone wrong, complicated families, mini-golf, second-chance love, Florida, sword fighting, and punk rock music.

Fatherhood: Dispatches From the Early Years - essays and humor about the very early years of my parenting journey