It’s been a strange night.

The day was good—I was ticking pesky “to-do’s” off my list all day long. It was blissful. When I finished my last class at 7:30 this evening, I went down to the metro (subway) station for a quick (one-hour-long) trip home to trade off my computer and text books for dancing shoes, o algo así. I was planning on turning right back around and heading downtown to meet a couple friends a little later.

But then

The metro was PACKED. After my classes end, I usually putz around downtown until rush-hour starts to fizzle. But, facing a bit of a time-constraint tonight, I decided I’d have to cram myself onto the metro with everyone (and I do mean EVERYONE) else.

I couldn’t do it. A train came, and I watched it go. And then another. And another. And as I watched a metro attendant straining to make the doors of the train shut after shoving a woman and her protruding backpack onto the train, I decided to head above-ground to find a bus that would take me in the general direction I needed to go. – Things are still reasonable, thus far, no? Traffic, that’s all.

But then

I wandered up and down the block for a minute, observing where buses were going and trying to synthesize a mental map of Transantiago*. Concluding that I would need to go “up” the city and not “down,” I crossed the street to catch a bus in the other direction. This is a very big street—it may even be two streets, I don’t really know. There’s a median, of sorts, in the middle. Well, it’s more of a park. You can really only cross one section of the street at a time. So many details.

This area that I work in—it’s the center of both the city and the country. With the equivalent of the White House just down the street, there are always sundry officers and guards around. And since it was rush hour, there were a number of carabineros directing traffic, a few others standing around, and a couple more pushing a car—hood and trunk wide open, lights off. The entire family, it seemed, plus two police officers were pushing this out-of-service vehicle to some better place. When you find yourself in the middle of a very busy intersection, I imagine that’s a complicated task.

But things are starting to get strange. (i.e. Broken-down car, I can understand. No lights on in the dark, I can imagine a reasonable excuse. But the hood and trunk wide open? In the middle of dense traffic? I don’t know about that.)

I’m in the middle of the street now—on the median/in the park. There was a lazy officer there, just relaxing while his comrades were busying themselves with silly tasks, like pushing cars to safety. Knowing that I sometimes get turned around, and consequently picturing myself ending up in Maipú, or some other still mythical place, I took it upon myself to verify my understanding of the layout of Santiago with this kind, but lazy, police officer.

Providencia está en esta dirección, no?

I was, generally, right.

Sí…pero…adónde quiere ir?

But, where specifically—

And then the crashing/crunching of metal, stopping of traffic, turning of eyes, gaping of mouths. MotoBoy down!

The lazy officer, being otherwise detained, left off giving me directions. I stood, still gaping, for a minute. I tried to convince myself that what had happened, hadn’t happened—that it was a cart of replaceable goods that somehow got pushed into the street, and not a mangled motorcyclist. But when I saw someone pick up a helmet off the ground….they don’t sell helmets from those carts. Traffic in the street hesitantly took a collective breath. For just a moment, the intersection cleared.

Immediately, the dogs took to the streets. They went nuts. It was as if they had planned out (not well, I must say) their coup d’etat at Moneda, saw their chance, and rallied together to topple the Chilean masquerade of order. From all (eight) corners of the intersection, dogs came running. A few looky-loos trotted over to see what all the commotion was about, but they soon caught up with their devious cohorts, distracting me from the mournful scene where the MotoBoy still lay, a small heap in a snarl of traffic. By this time, there was a throng of dogs—I’m not joking; I lost count at fifteen—running in a circle around the very confused intersection. They ran up and down the streets where cars were not, ending up in the grassy park-like median.

I don’t know what their next step was. Poor planners, these canines, you see?

Wanting to get home, or at least somewhere else, I began wandering down the opposite bus mall, searching for any bus that I could possibly make work. Found one. Got on.

In the ten minutes between the crash/crunch and my passing the scene of the accident on the bus, nothing changed. Police directed traffic around what I can only guess was the very broken body of a motorcyclist. Traffic is so bad in Santiago that emergency vehicles don’t get anywhere fast. We passed an ambulence three or four blocks up the street. I imagine it took them another several minutes to reach the intersection. Ironically, an ambulence, “rushing” to see about some other matter of life, passed by the MotoBoy just moments after the accident happened.

Although preoccupied with thoughts about the obvious underdog in this story, I was glad to have a seat on a very empty bus, heading AWAY from the metro, the moto, and the mythical land of Maipú. Of course the bus driver was madly road-rageous, and of course I almost fell out of my seat a number of times. Of course there was never a car, bus, or pedestrian that he didn’t honk at. Of course he swerved that huge bus around taxis. Of course he rear ended the bus ahead of us. Duh.

God damn! They don’t joke around in Santiago.

I decided not to go out after all.




* There are far too many buses to do that with any accuracy. I don’t know what The Decemberists are talking about in that song “On the Bus Mall”…but, if you try to picture a “bus mall” in your head—you would probably come up with something strikingly similar to Avenida Bernardo O’Higgins at rush-hour in Santiago.