Did you know that one of the longest bus routes around is the Gunflint Trail in northeastern Minnesota? Every morning a school bus travels 50 miles each way to transport students to and from school in Grand Marais. To a Southern California driver like myself, that seems like one long and hard commute.
Or is it? Maybe it’s a piece of cake compared to the what Gunflint Trail families endured to get their children an education back in the 1940s. As a mom, I shudder to think of what it was like for them to send their children off to school Monday mornings, all the way to Grand Marais, where the kids had to stay with families living near the school through Friday— a rural version of boarding school without the luxuries we now associate with such schools. “Boarding their children in Grand Marais during the school week was the only option for Gunflint Trail parents,” according to a recent Gunflint Trail Association blog.
In an oral-history interview with the Gunflint Trail Historical Society, Cheryl Daily recalled her experience of boarding in Grand Marais, saying, “The school bus [driven by] Bud Kratoska (owner of Trout Lake Resort) used to come all the way up for us on Monday morning and we’d take our little suitcase and the suitcase would sit at the front of the bus… and then we’d walk our suitcase down to wherever we were going — you know, staying. And then, on Friday morning, we’d have our suitcase packed up and we’d go home.”
School bus driver Jean Dailey of Seagull Resort, who drove this route from the late 1950s through the mid ’60s, said in A Taste of the Gunflint Trail, “It was quite a task to drive the Trail in the winter. Of course, it was not paved at that time. Many mornings I had to get up early to put an electric heater under the motor to get the bus going. It was often like driving in a tunnel, as the snow was so deeply piled on the sides of the road.”
Brrrrrrr! I know I can’t complain about the weather since I live in California, but that does not sound fun. Thank goodness that school bus drivers, then and now, have the fortitude to push ahead — whether the challenge is snow piles or bullies or bumper-to-bumper traffic. Their jobs are far more difficult that any of us can imagine.
The students who face long school-bus rides every day should also be commended for making the best of a difficult situation. Even today, Gunflint Trail kids will spend 14.5 days each year on their school bus!
