Two ordinary farmers
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Sean of the South
Sean Dietrich
Lavina, Calif. – It was an average day. A sunny September morning, with highs approaching the 100s. Hot enough to melt commercial truck tires and sauté small woodland creatures on the pavement. (But it’s a dry heat.)
It was a rural area. Hundreds of acres of almond trees. The scent of organic fertilizer filling the air.
Two farmworkers were repairing a broken tractor near Avenue 8 and Road 23.5 in Madera County. That’s when they noticed something.
The men saw a school bus on fire.
There it was. A big yellow vehicle sitting in the nearby intersection. A Madera United School District school bus, emitting massive plumes of black smoke.
There were children aboard.
The two workmen dropped their tools and rushed toward the bus. They charged aboard, fighting through billows of dark smoke to reach the final children who sat in the back rows.
They removed all the children from the bus only moments before the vehicle burst into flames.
Within minutes, the yellow school bus was completely engulfed. And as the vehicle’s steel frame creaked and groaned beneath high heat, and as tongues of fire consumed the body of the vehicle, 20 school children waited on the shoulder of the highway. Alive. And safe.
Miraculously, nobody was hurt.
Recently, the two men were honored by Madera County Board of Supervisors, along with a crowd of people who gathered to recognize them.
The two workers showed up in jeans, boots, work shirts, and ball caps. The uniform of the American farmer.
The men were quiet, unassuming, meek. They gently accepted their certificates, posed with county officials for photo ops, and even gave a few interviews to local news stations.
But beneath the celebrative activities, you could tell these men were uncomfortable in the spotlight. Most real heroes are.
Even so, the whole story seems remarkably unreal. Think about it. A bus catches fire in a remote area, surrounded by farmland, amidst secluded almond fields. And at this precise moment in history, within this exact geographic location, there just HAPPEN to be two able bodied farm workers, waiting to save the day? What are the odds?
When asked how it all happened, Carlos Perea Romero and Angel Zarco have only one theory:
“Dios te puso en ese lugar por una razón.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
