HAVERHILL — Brayan Escalera sweeps the 35-foot MeVa bus floor from back to front on this fair Friday, the first day of spring.
He holds a towel to wipe chairs, poles and hand rails, as needed, and then drops into the driver’s seat, pulling forward in the tunnel-like wash rack.
All that’s missing is calliope music and grinning horses to give the tropical-colored bus interior the feel of a carousel ride.
Escalera is a MeVa fueler, which in bus lingo means he and his four fellow fuelers indeed fill the fleet. They also clean them.
Both tasks take place in waves over eight hours in the wash rack, a tall drive-through building topped by a pitched roof.
The fuelers start cleaning the convoy of 75 buses at 4:30 p.m.
“Every single day,” he said.
Through the windshield we see crew wielding long-handled scrub brushes and spray hoses over the back of the bus in front of us.
They make short work of it.
It’s an efficient operation, which, like getting to Broadway — as the saying goes — takes practice, repetition.
“And we don’t try to sell you any undercoating,” said MeVa Administrator Noah Berger, joining us for the run through the bus wash.
It’s much like a car wash, without the changing LED lights some establishments sport.
The bus ahead eases through a flood of sprayed water and rotating red brushes, called spinners, and into the curtain of hanging black strips that swipe bus surfaces clean.
MeVa also has a bus-roof snow scraper in the yard, a towering arched steel frame with short black bristles.
The golden arch stands well outside the wash rack and combs snow from the roofs of buses that pass under it.
Now the windshield floods with water, which, on the road, would be disconcerting.
Somehow it’s appropriate to be in the presence of Noah, except the flooding lasts 40 seconds or so, and the only creatures on board are us.
The red spinners are whirring dervishes, whisking the sides.
The curtain’s tentacles drape noiselessly over the bus.
The main sounds are a regular beeping, indicating the bus is in motion, and the swish of water.
A clean bus is a happy bus, and a happy bus leaves riders feeling likewise.
MeVa moves some 3 million passengers a year, and they, for the most part, leave the buses nice and neat for the next riders.
A few pieces of paper get left here and there, Escalera said, but otherwise the bus remains largely clean.