Ben Tibbetts Studio: Piano Performances and Original Music

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The Great Bus Fire of 2009

Warning: contains adult language

This is an original short story, based on real events. I performed it on the ATX Underground television show (season 1, episode 6) in September, 2022.

You can watch the performance via YouTube (above). This footage was obtained with permission from MVB Productions, which produces the ATX Underground.

You can also download this video as an mp4 file or listen to it as an mp3.

Edited Transcript

You may not guess this from my "relaxed exterior", but I was raised very religious. By religious, I mean Southern Baptist. Growing up in central Maine, up in northern New England, near Canada, that may seem like a contradiction, but we were definitely south of something...like Montreal.

I say I was raised religious. The truth is I was almost, in a way, born religious. If there is a religiosity gene, I probably have it. I was very serious about going to church, about praying, about evangelizing. At a certain point, even as a young kid, I thought about being a preacher. It didn't work out, obviously, unless you count this as a sermon, which it isn't.

But as I got older, I started to feel my faith being shot through by doubt. I started to have questions that I couldn't answer, like if there are so many religions in the world, why should I be so certain that mine is correct?

And the idea of free will and evil bugged me. God created us and He's responsible for the way we are, so isn't it hypocritical of Him to blame us when we screw up? There's a line in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov where one character says, "He created us sick, and then ordered us to be healthy." It was feelings like these that led me to doubt.

However, I was earnest and I wanted to believe, so from time to time, like somebody going on a diet, I would get very into church. I would plan, "this Tuesday, I'm going to pray really hard," or whatever. I tried to save my faith, to revitalize it as I got older. What I'd like to tell you about today was probably the most extreme version of that, which was when I was in college.

I went to the University of New Hampshire up in Durham. It's a beautiful campus, rural and verdant. They had this thing called Intervarsity, which was a loose, multidenominational Christian fellowship. They were doing a program in 2009 where, for your spring break, you could volunteer to go down to New Orleans, and help people recover and rebuild after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

I thought this was very cool, and I thought, okay, this is my big chance. I'm going to believe again. So I signed up. I gave it my spring break, and I took a twenty-five hour bus ride down to New Orleans, and I spent the week there.

And it actually was kind of cool. We did some good work. Of course, none of us knew how to build a house, so we were pretty much useless in that respect, but I could at least haul around dirt and nail nails. So, it was fine. I had a good time.

But at night, I'd go back to the church where we were all were staying, and I'd feel like everybody was confident in their faith. They believed, really believed, or seemed to. And I simply didn't. The whole week, I felt a very specific sadness. Looking back on it, I know exactly what to compare it to: it felt like when you've had a great relationship that isn't great anymore. It's ending, and you're going through that long, slow, miserable death. You're gritting your teeth: "Everything's fine...! It's wonderful...! There's an issue over here, but we'll solve it. We'll fix it. We'll find a way to make it work." That was the sensation I had. Do you know what I mean? Have you been there? Have you felt that in your stomach...?

I came away from this week, taking the bus ride home, thinking about this and feeling alone in my doubts. And it was on this bus ride home that something strange and extraordinary happened. I have to stress that this is true. I won't say the name of the bus company, though...perhaps we'll just call it "Silver Dog". That way their organizational anonymity is totally secure.

So we're driving home, courtesy of Silver Dog. We're five or ten hours in on this twenty-five hour bus ride, and suddenly the bus tilts sideways, violently. It was very random, and very scary.

The bus driver handled it like a champ. We were in the center lane on a highway going probably 65. We couldn't immediately pull over into the breakdown lane. We went on that way maybe about ten or twenty seconds. That was a long twenty seconds where nothing felt right.

We finally got over to the right lane and then into the breakdown lane, and then we'd parked. We were calming down. The bus driver got on the intercom and said, "We've just hit a really deep pothole. I think the front right tire is completely flat. We're going to call another bus. Don't worry, we'll take care of this. Everybody, please, in a leisurely fashion, get off the vehicle." Crisis averted, so we think, and we begin to mosy off.

Then the bus driver got back on the intercom. This time her tone was completely different. She said, "Everybody off the bus now. There's a fire." And when somebody says "fire" in that tone, and you realize it is not a joke, and it is not a drill, you know exactly how fast to run.

As we hustled off the bus, we didn't grab any of our stuff. We didn't even have phones. (Actually, this was very slightly pre-cell phones, or at least at the point where they were not yet ubiquitous.) We ran off the bus, and sure enough, the area around the wheel was on fire. It seemed the rim had made contact with the highway, and caught on fire during that interval when we were still moving at full speed.

Someone called 9-1-1. A fire truck eventually pulled up and started hosing it down. We were a safe distance away, just watching it all happen. At a certain point, a firefighter says, "We think that the fire has spread below the bus, and we're not sure we can get to it. We need everybody to stand very far back and watch out." Sure enough, over time--not that much time--the fire spread beneath the bus, and ultimately hit an almost full gas tank.

Now, when I tell you this thing exploded, I mean exploded. It was like an action movie. It felt, looked, and sounded exactly like you imagine. It was terrifying.

And I remember as I watched this fire going up--it was like a mushroom cloud--I had a feeling of relief. I was looking at it and imagining that my faith was rising up with it into the sky. Maybe it sounds strange to call it that, but truly, I felt relieved. And I thought, "I'm never doing this again." The fire rose into the sky, and I thought, "I'm finally letting this go. It's not worth it."

There's a coda to this story. It's just a brief aside, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

This Silver Dog company saw fit to take us to a hotel afterwards. There we met with a very professional-looking woman, dressed in a suit. She stood very sternly in front of a table, on which was placed a blank piece of paper as if straight from a printer, and a pen.

She said, "Hello, everybody. My job is to assess what happened here today. I'm going to need you to write down your name, your contact information, and an estimate of the value of the property you lost."

And it was then that I witnessed a hundred pious, beautiful, righteous young Christians line up in an orderly fashion--I mean, they were so organized--and, one by one, commit insurance fraud. All of them: "Oh yeah, I had, like, a $3,000 camera in there; the backpack alone was five hundred. Seven thousand total, absolutely."

And then, I swear to God, I was halfway through the line; I caught the eye of the insurance agent, and she smirked, and she winked at me.

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