Rain rain go away...

I came down to Santo Tomas on Thursday, in order to use the internet and take care of a few errands. After eating lunch at the clinic with Sheila, I was ready to go back to the school. It usually doesn’t start raining until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, but unfortunately the downpour decided to start earlier on this particular day. The sky was darkening ominously as I washed our dishes, and by the time I was leaving the clinic clouds had already opened to flood the world. I have to walk several hilly blocks to the street where trucks depart for Xejuyup, so I popped open my umbrella, clutched my bag to my body, and pressed forward.

The rain came with vigor, pounding at the streets, drops beating their way to the bottom of filthy puddles. Thin sheets of water rushed down the steep roads, pushing against the shoes of the besieged pedestrians and soaking our feet. I wielded my umbrella like a shield, determined in protecting my backpack (containing my laptop) and myself. My hand gripped the shaft handle, holding my little tent aloft, creating a small haven of near-dryness in this suddenly underwater world.

And then, just as abruptly as it had arrived, the rain stopped. It took a moment to process, after spending several minutes committed to the mission of traveling through the aquatic onslaught, after dedicating all of my energies to the simple goal of staying dry. It was like a small window into the psychology of retirement: after throwing all of your being into one specific aim, you suddenly find yourself without that objective. In short, momentarily shocking.

I climbed into the back of one of the Xejuyup-bound trucks, hoping that the rain would hold off until I arrived back at the school. My desire alone, however, was not enough to control the weather. Shortly after boarding the back of an empty pickup, I felt the fat drops recommence their fall. I stood, waiting, unsure of what to do. So far, sheer luck had kept me from traveling via pickup in serious rain; I wasn’t sure what the protocol was. I could put my umbrella up, but other people were beginning to get in around me, and an umbrella would surely bump into them. Besides, I’d seen pickups like this with tarps draped over the top, protecting the passengers from a sure soaking.

These public-transport trucks have metal frames around the bed, extending up to about mid-chest height. They stand up straight from the sides, and additional bars extend inward and slightly upward toward the middle. Meeting there, they form an inverted “V” down the back with a single metal shaft joining the lateral beams. The tarps drape over these tent skeletons. Hopefully we’d soon be using ours.

No one else was opening their umbrellas, and I didn’t want to stand out as the single strange gringa anymore than I already do. I hoped that someone would soon make a move to pull a tarp over us, as my backpack was getting drenched. Finally, our chauffer, the man in charge of making all the big decisions, a short pimply kid who was probably fifteen, came to the conclusion that the rain was hard enough to warrant breaking out some protection. He scrambled into the truck bed and began tying and untying an elaborate system of knots behind the cab, finally freeing a tarp to cover us.

Once our shelter had been created, I reached a much greater understanding of its bittersweet nature. Yes, I was no longer being pelted by ping-pong ball sized drops of rain, and my computer was momentarily safe from heaven’s own inundation.

However, I was standing near the side of the truck, at the lowest level of the cover’s frame. This meant that I had to bend over steeply, attempting to balance my backpack on a tiny ledge above the flooded floor and limiting my available air supply to only the hot, sticky, stagnant air squeezed in between the bodies of human and fowl which crowded the truck. Upon filling with enough passengers to satisfy the driver, our ride lurched forward, jostling the pack of damp bodies into one another.

Normally, I love the truck rides up and down the mountains, delighting in the great flying leaps which we take over potholes, the sudden zigzagging maneuvers executed with precision to avoid animals, other vehicles and temporary rivers running through the street. However, all of this is only fun when accompanied with the benefit of anticipation. When blind to your surroundings, uncomfortably soggy, ungraciously twisted and left with little to grasp for support, things are different.

I rode along in misery, violently wobbling and wondering how I would ever know when we’d reached Xejuyup. With no ability to gauge our relative position in the world, and distracted by the stench of the drunken crazy to my left, I was sure it would be difficult at best. I resigned myself to the inevitability of a long, agonizing journey, and tried to find reassurance in imagining worse possible scenarios. At least no one seemed to be hacking a TB cough into our close, contained quarters. And although people had brought birds aboard, there certainly weren’t any stinky goats or sheep running around. Yeah, this wasn’t so bad.

Mercifully, a mere quarter of an hour into our trip, the rain ceded its campaign against our comfort. As we jolted along the bumpy road, the passengers began pushing the tarp forward, uncovering the load of human cargo, exposing us all to the great outdoors.

It was like being born. I stretched my face upward, extended the crooked muscles in my neck and back, and breathed in the fresh breeze blowing past. It was a drastic change from the moribund, tepid air which had been slowly suffocating us. Instead, it was clear, crisp, cool, tinted with whiffs of smoke from nearby cooking fires and the sweet jasmine-esque flower held by a man standing beside me. Filthy, skinny children and their filthy, skinny dogs played in the dirt outside homes as we sped past. Despite our period of isolation beneath a blue nylon prison, the world had continued around us. In no time at all, I was reunited with the joy and excitement of flying over the earth, the adrenaline rush created by constantly feeling out of control of my own safety. I thought to myself, as I leaned forward over the truck cab, “This is how Christopher Reeves would have felt had he ever regained the ability to walk. Suddenly, preciously, unequivocally alive.”