Bus Ride in the Rain

Lightning strikes a couple of hundred yards away and the peal of thunder is immediate. Rain travels across the bleak yard in a grey curtain while wind rips and lifts water from the streams that have formed in the ditches. I better get inside I tell myself but continue to stand under the overhang as rain blows under. Yard after yard fills with the flood. The visitor bus driver sees me under the awning and veers off the main road and down the drive to Santa Rita. He speeds through the rising waters and sends a graceful wing of spray out from the keel of the wheels. He is loving it.

I am soaked to the skin immediately as I enter the downpour but walk with the tubs. I shiver but feel good to be cold. 

The driver is a young guy with holes on his ear where plugs used to be. No jewelry here. He has cranked up a heavy metal station on the radio, but that cannot compete with the peals of thunder all around us. He smiles. I see he is as wet as I am, his orange shirt  clinging to his muscled shoulders and back. 

“Just did shift change,” he says explaining why he is wet. His hand is on the lever and he waits until I sit down to swing the door shut. I sit on the plastic tandem seat beneath a blast of A/C. We head over the maximum security unit where we will pick some other straggling visitors. 

Two old women wait under the overhang. One removes her sandals to cross the flooded walkway. It is up to her ankles, but she does not complain. Instead, she moves like a schoolgirl, soaking in the lusciously warm runoff. The other keeps on her sandals and tiptoes. They climb in with help from the driver.

They chat with the driver like we are on holiday with him as the young tour guide.

“Yeah, when it rains out here, the rivers run deep and fast.  All that water has to go somewhere.” He speaks with the calm authority of the local, the native, the one with the inside scoop. We could be in Greece or Nepal but for the razor wire and memory of division between the free and the imprisoned.  For just a minute our roles evaporate and we are just people on a bus traveling through the rain.