How many horrendously long hours have I suffered on busses? In this country and in others, it has been my lot to depend upon public transportation. Recently, I traveled from Bolivia to Peru, from Juliaca to Cusco, transferring busses several times, on an impossibly long journey. A true test of human endurance.
I have found that from the outside, aside from a needed coat of paint or cultural ornamentation, most busses appear basically the same. The true guts of a bus lie hidden away. These ever so important entrails are: number of seats, amount of cushion, and finally, area surrounding each. Yet the comfort of a human being finally depends upon the actual number of life forms sardined together. Our driver had taken on triple the number advised on a warning plaque by the company that manufactured the vehicle. There were at least one hundred souls trapped on my nightmare.
Moreover, unpaved surfaces do not deter motivated drivers of public transportation. We barreled across rocky terrain without help of asphalt. I was jostled and shaken so much I thought I'd taken up a new diet plan. It was excruciatingly uncomfortable. There was absolutely no cushion on the seat for my posterior, and my black and blue knees, at each bump, jammed into the metal of the seat before me.
Worse still, I could not tilt my chair at any other angle than perpendicularly stiff. It was exactly like being imprisoned in a torture chamber for fourteen hours. Then, just when things could get no worse, came the ultimate affliction: sometime in the beginning of the night, a small child capitalized on a crucial, momentary hesitation on my part and placed his head directly underneath my feet, or rather where my feet should have been. This was the end of my mental rope; toddler or no, I began to shove his tiny cranium with my steel tipped boots. And he began to snore.
Weeks before I had climbed a small mountain in Ecuador called Mandango. The path linking its peaks is extremely narrow, at times no more than five inches across. The mountain's sides slide out and away from the path at a precipitous angle. There is a cross which can be seen from the village below and a large, rocky outcropping beyond, but you must follow the path to get there. A foot placed in error could propel you into eternity. The difficulty is to remain balanced.
I fought with the child's head for hours until eventually I gave up defeated, and remained miserably uncomfortable in my seat for the remainder of the journey. The child snored the whole night long. Maybe he had taken this bus trip before and was used to squeezing his body between metal seat anchorings while lying on filth. It didn't seem to matter where he was though, he was resting comfortably. The next morning he lifted his head as soon as the bus stopped and skipped merrily away with the rest of his family, while tortured soul that I was, I remained wallowing in my bad humor for several days. The trick, I have learned, is to remain balanced on an absurdly narrow path, satisfied with the lot you have been given. |
