Every bus route has its regulars, its quiet watchers, its talkers who never quite find the brake pedal on their own mouths. On the 5:30 a.m. run from Dubuque to Elkader in August 1955, Bus Number 43 looks like any other small-town coach: a tired driver, worn upholstery, and thirteen passengers who expect nothing more dramatic than a few stops along Highway 52.
By noon, that same bus will have passed through an impossible column of light and landed forty years into the future.
But before the headlines, the laboratories, and the government attention, Bus Number 43 is simply a moving room full of people carrying unspoken grief, quiet hopes, and decisions they haven’t quite admitted to themselves yet. Meeting them is part of the emotional pull of the book—because once the light takes them, nothing about their “ordinary” lives will ever be ordinary again.
The Fischers: Routine, Grandkids, and a Future That Vanishes Overnight
At the front of the passenger story are Walter and Margaret Fischer, a couple in their sixties who have turned Bus 43 into part of their family rhythm. Every other Tuesday they make the same trip, heading out of Dubuque to visit their daughter and the growing cluster of grandchildren on a nearby farm.
Walter has spent his life at the foundry, the kind of work that leaves its mark in the lines of a man’s hands. Margaret’s world has been built around home, children, and the quiet steadiness of a long marriage. Their bus tickets are not symbolic to them—they’re practical. Affordable. Reliable. A way to show up for the people they love.
When Bus 43 reappears in 1995, the outside world has lived forty years without them. The baby they were going to visit has become a middle-aged adult. The grandchildren they knew only as toddlers are older than they are. Whatever plans they had for retirement, for watching children grow and weddings unfold, now sit on the other side of a gap time has carved into their lives.
The Fischers are the book’s heartbeat of “broken dreams” in the most everyday sense: they did everything right, followed the schedule, trusted the system—and still had their entire expected future stolen by a freak moment on the highway.
Grace and Her Child: Survival Mode on a One-Way Ticket
Grace Holbrook boards with a four-year-old who has already learned not to trust easily. Nothing about her presence feels casual. There is history in the way she watches the room, in the way her child clings but also studies strangers with a sharp, guarded gaze.
Grace’s story carries the quiet tension of a woman who is used to life going wrong. Whether she’s leaving something behind or running toward a thin sliver of hope, she steps onto the bus with the wary energy of someone who expects trouble and has decided to move anyway.
The time anomaly hits her in a different way than it hits the older passengers. For Grace and her child, the lost decades tear away the chance to build a stable life the “slow” way. Instead of a natural progression—school, work, friendships, community—they are dropped into a future they didn’t get to build themselves. The world has advanced. They haven’t.
And yet, because of what the light does to their bodies and minds, they also receive a second chance they never would have dared to ask for: health, resilience, and a kind of inner strength sharpened by the experience. The question that follows them through the book is not “Can we survive?” but “What do we do with survival when everything familiar is gone?”
The Quiet Pillars: Pastors, Teachers, and People Who Keep Things Running
Pastor Eugene Miller is not the type to command a room with volume. He’s a Lutheran minister with the kind of presence that settles over people rather than pushes at them—calm, reflective, someone others confide in on long rides when the miles make honesty easier.
Alongside him sits Eleanor Schmidt, a schoolteacher on her way to a summer obligation, red-pen life in hand. She’s the sort of person who grades papers on the bus, who believes in order and preparation and the idea that small acts of diligence hold the world together.
These two represent the quiet infrastructure of mid-century life: the spiritual and educational anchors who rarely make headlines but shape communities in small, consistent ways. When Bus 43 is thrown forward to 1995, their roles are shaken to the core. Faith is tested not in abstract sermons but in a world that has jumped ahead by four decades. Education, too, becomes something different when the textbooks, technology, and cultural assumptions have all moved on without them.
For Pastor Miller, the anomaly is not just a scientific impossibility. It is a theological earthquake. For Eleanor, it shatters the belief that careful planning can protect a life from chaos. Yet in both of them, the book explores how conviction—religious or moral—can become a lifeline when time itself has betrayed you.
The Women on the Edge: Runaways, Widows, and Girls Who Don’t Plan to Come Back
Betty-Lou Mae is nineteen and carrying a suitcase that looks like it holds everything she owns. She is the kind of young woman people judge at a glance: too young to be traveling alone, too determined, too frightened, too stubborn. The story hints at trouble—a pregnancy, a family conflict, something severe enough that a dawn bus ride feels like the lesser risk.
Clara Holst, sixteen and painfully thin, looks out the depot windows as if trying to memorize every building in Dubuque. There is a finality in the way she watches the city slide away—like someone who has accepted that this might be the last time she sees home.
Then there is Diane Baker, early thirties and newly widowed, wearing her grief like an invisible weight. Her husband is gone, and she holds herself together not because the pain has faded, but because there is no acceptable alternative to “functioning.”
All three step onto Bus 43 with lives already in transition. The anomaly doesn’t only interrupt their plans; it overwrites the entire script. Runaways who hoped to disappear into a neighboring town find themselves erased from history instead. Widows who were just beginning to piece themselves together wake up in a world where their loss is no longer recent—but for them, the wound is still fresh.
Their “second chances” are complicated: yes, their bodies are enhanced, their resilience increased. But they must also confront the fact that the people and problems they were running from are either long gone or changed beyond recognition. The question becomes: if the past can no longer chase you, who are you now?
The Men Who Talk Too Much and the Ones Who Don’t Talk Enough
Every bus has a Jerry Vance—a twenty-something who smokes too much, talks too loudly, and has opinions on everything from politics to football, whether anyone asked or not. Jerry brings a restless energy to the bus, a frustration that feels bigger than the trip itself. He’s hungry for more than what his life has given him so far, even if he can’t quite articulate what “more” looks like.
On the other end of the spectrum is Arthur Reeves, a retired railroad man in his late sixties. The bus is his way of filling the silence left by his wife’s passing. He doesn’t need the ride as much as he needs the motion, the feeling of being among people without having to explain anything to them.
Robert and Patricia Hayes, worn-down farmers in their forties, sit somewhere in the middle. They carry the fatigue of too many bad seasons, too many bills, and too little certainty. Their presence on the bus hints at errands, obligations, maybe one more attempt to keep things afloat.
When Bus 43 emerges into 1995, all three types of men—the restless, the quiet, the exhausted—face the same hard truth: the world has had forty years to move past the problems they were wrestling with. Their debts, their industries, their communities, even their identities as “young men” or “working farmers” have been edited by time without their consent.
Yet the book also lets them discover strengths they never recognized in themselves before the light. The noisy one learns to listen. The quiet one finds new purpose. The exhausted ones discover that starting over, while brutal, is not the same as ending.
Mrs. Helen Kretz: Stubbornness, Age, and the Strange Gift of Not Being Done Yet
And then there is Mrs. Helen Kretz, in her seventies, hard of hearing and harder of convincing. She is the sort of older woman who corrects people without apology and believes that stubbornness is a survival skill.
In many ways, she represents the generation that expects to be nearing the final chapters of life. Her routines, her aches, her habits all belong to someone who has already lived through enough change. The last thing she expects from a short bus ride is a complete re-writing of her remaining years.
The time leap gives her something extraordinary: decades she never thought she would see. But it also steals the context that gave those years meaning—friends, family, familiar streets, and a culture she understood. Her presence in the story raises a haunting question: is it still a “blessing” to live longer if everything you recognized as home has been erased?
A Bus Full of Interrupted Stories
Taken together, the passengers of Bus Number 43 form a cross-section of mid-1950s small-town life: grandparents and young mothers, widows and teenagers, farmers and preachers, loud talkers and silent watchers. None of them board the bus expecting adventure, glory, or tragedy. They are simply in transit—between home and hospital, farm and town, past and possible future.
The light on Highway 52 doesn’t just fling them into 1995; it cracks open every quiet storyline in the bus. Broken dreams are exposed. Old griefs are dragged into a new century. And in the middle of this upheaval, each passenger is handed an unasked-for second chance: stronger bodies, sharper minds, and the opportunity—if they can bear it—to build a life from the ruins of lost time.
Bus Number 43: The Midday Run works so well because it never forgets that behind the mystery and the science, this is first and foremost a story about people. Meeting the passengers is more than an introduction to the cast; it is an invitation to wonder what any of us would do if a routine ride turned into a one-way trip out of our own era—and into a future that has already learned to live without us.
