She looked at the gorge wall above the ledge. Above the road — or where the road had been — the rock face went up steeply, raw limestone, in places almost vertical. But not everywhere. To the left of the bus, where the embankment had slid, there were sections where the rock face had natural ledges and holds — not a cliff, but a slope, the kind of slope that was technically climbable. She was not a climber. She had never climbed anything. She looked at the slope and thought about thirty-two children of various ages and sizes, including one with a possible wrist fracture and three with head wounds, and she thought about what "technically climbable" meant in practice and whether it was better or worse than "on a bus above a rising flood."
Inside the bus, she had managed the children into a functional state. The crying had reduced — not to nothing, several of the Class 6 students were still intermittently tearful, which was appropriate and honest and she was not trying to stop it. But the active panic had been channeled, which was the thing that mattered. She had given each child a job.
It was not a strategy she had read in any emergency training manual. It was a strategy she had developed in three years of substitute teaching in classrooms where thirty students had nothing to do and were therefore generating the specific entropy of children with no direction. Children with a task were different from children without one. They had a point for their energy. They had a reason to be focused rather than afraid.
