It was a big, noisy bunch of abut 40 school kids - or whatever number might fit into those highway busses. They had, in a way, invaded a fast-food restaurant along the highway for a lunch break.
They were from the city. You knew that they had to be from the city, because they looked like a miniature of all the cultural diversity of the UN.
They were headed north for a week at an outdoor camp or resort in snowy country. A week of learning and fun. The teachers with them were anticipating reaching in a natural setting. The kids were anticipating fun.
A short while later, the teachers counted heads and the whole mass roared northward. The bus rocked to the beat of whatever tunes were playing on their electronic gadgets.
Later that afternoon they were joined by two other equally noisy buses and their entire cargoes were discharged at the resort or camp where the snow was three feet deep, powdery and white and where the clear blue sky seemed to be held up by a forest of giant pines. And all of it was big enough and deep enough to absorb all the noise the kids could make and then some.
That evening, the noise was once again absorbed and teaching made superfluous when the kids stood under a black, frosty sky to look up and see more stars than they ever thought possible.
Well maybe there was some noise. If you had been there to listen, you might have heard a collective gasp and a big, “wow...”
Their thoughts, and that expression, was probably similar to that of Carl Gustav Boberg, a Swedish hymn writer, in the late 1800s when he wrote the words to the hymn, that in English say: “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder/Consider all the worlds thy hands have made/I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder/Thy power throughout the universe displayed...”
And in Swedish, he might have said, “wow...”