Wildfire Means a Solitary Bus Ride

Garrett Barnella can always get the best seat on the bus that takes him from this mountaintop hamlet to his new school thousands of feet below.

In fact, the 10-year-old straight-A student can get any seat; he’s the only school-age child still living on the mountain.

A wildfire that destroyed much of Summerhaven this summer also drove virtually every family with children down into the Tucson valley below.

As a result, the county opted this year not to open the one-room schoolhouse that Garrett had attended on the mountain, setting the stage for his daily 25-mile commute to Agua Caliente Elementary School.

The fifth-grader’s trek off Mt. Lemmon begins about 7 a.m., when the sun is just peeking through the fire-tattered tree line and the temperatures at the 9,100-foot elevation are still hovering around freezing.

Over the next hour, the 10-seat bus will make its way down a winding road -- bus driver LeRoy Day says he’s counted “a little over 277 curves,” including through a five-mile mountain highway reconstruction project, to get Garrett to class.

To help pass the time, Garrett varies his routine.

He sits in a different seat on each ride.

He reads. “I can read on the bus and not get sick,” said Garrett, who has completed all the Harry Potter books and is devouring “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”

He looks at rock formations, including his favorites: a cliff that resembles a bear and rocks that resemble a giant dog.

“I have like 35 named,” he said.

Before the Aspen fire, which blackened almost 85,000 acres and destroyed nearly 330 homes and cabins in what had been a cool-weather playground for Tucson residents, Garrett had attended the Zimmerman Accommodation School.

The 50-year-old school served the children of Summerhaven’s few full-time residents from kindergarten through sixth grade.

In recent years, attendance varied from as few as six to a dozen students. The school has only been closed twice before, in 1986 and 1991, because of low enrollment.

In past years, Day has normally taken at least a few children to Tucson-area schools, including those needing special classes and those in seventh grade and above.

“As far as the kids going down [the mountain], it got pretty skinny a couple of times,” Day said. “There’s only been one family with two children going down, and that was why this year it was very iffy.”

But in light of the Aspen fire, accommodating the needs of Garrett, whose parents work for the Mt. Lemmon Fire District -- his father is the fire chief -- became part of the mix.

It costs the county more than $21,000 a year to operate the bus, including Day’s pay for driving.

Day, 49, who lost his two-bedroom cabin in the fire, said he never tires of the trip -- not even when, as in years past with several students, he made three daily round-trips.

Different areas are changing colors, with leaves yellowed this time of year. In the spring, the process reverses as different levels of the mountain turn green.

“So it’s always different every day that you go down,” he said.

Change -- from a school with about half a dozen students to one with several hundred -- has been no impediment for Garrett either.

“It was better having like 20 friends rather than five friends,” said Garrett, who also plays soccer and has a black belt in taekwondo.

And he made one special friend in August, the same day that he enrolled at his new school.

Garrett met President Bush when the chief executive took a helicopter tour of the fire’s aftermath and delivered a mountainside speech endorsing forest legislation.

Garrett and the president shook hands and posed for a photograph.

Later that day, as Garrett’s parents enrolled him at Agua Caliente, an office attendant welcomed him and told him: “You’re probably going to meet a lot of cool people.”

“And I told her: ‘I already did. I met the president today.’ ”