Chronicle of a Shitty Trip
By Pedro Pablo Morejon
HAVANA TIMES – I thought I was going to spend several hours waiting endlessly for transport under this bridge on the highway. It’s normal.
Bridges are normally the places where people wait to be in the shade and wait until a driver takes pity on them. The vehicles can take the most different shapes and forms. From a Chinese Yutong bus, whose drivers almost always charge you for the ride, to a box on wheels that’s pulled by horses that we call “spiders”
Yep, some bus drivers take a risk and stop to pick up travelers during these pandemic times, and we still have artefacts from the Medieval Ages circulating on Cuba’s streets, in the middle of the 21st century.
Well, I had just got to the bridge and there were some 10 people or so who had been waiting hours for somebody to pick them up.
That’s when a Kamaz-3 dump truck stopped, which building companies use (which build very little in reality).
A good athlete could climb up the railings, but others weren’t in such good shape. A really large (border-line obesity) 50-something- year-old man stood out in the crowd. He really wanted to get on the truck, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have the necessary strength and flexibility to do it.
The driver waited patiently while we helped the man up, and a nurse too, whose white, spotless uniform seemed to be her greatest concern.
There was some dust from rubble, but that wasn’t the strangest thing. The most troubling thing was a free pig, without a rope, that was in the front part of the dumper. An almost three-meter diameter was dirty with feces, so we all sat at the back.
The tragicomedy began when the vehicle took off. The pig began to urinate and the wind made sure to move the unwanted liquid towards some of the passengers. Suddenly, a thought came to mind: “If this animal decides to shit, it’s going to be a great disaster, we’re all going to get caked in it.”
The pig moved towards us, as if it had read my mind. Some people tried to keep it at a distance by kicking at it, but it was in vain because the speed of his movement plus his body mass made sure that he came with the right amount of force to rub against many of the distinguished passengers. Force = mass X acceleration: pure physics.
Keeping the story short: Everybody got their fair share of crap. The overweight man and the neat nurse were the ones that got it the worse. They ended up like they’d just climbed through a sewer. Some of us had better luck.
When I finally got off that dung-heap, my trousers were stained by some small pieces of sludge.
I told myself “well, nothing soap and water won’t fix, the trip wasn’t that bad in the end.”