I awoke this morning from a very simple, unfortunate dream.
My uncle was driving a big old-fashioned school bus. This is true-to-life – he bought an old school bus when I was maybe 13 or 14 and renovated it into a kind of do-it-yourself motor home. These were called “hippie buses” in my experience, but my uncle wasn’t really a hippie. More a kind of anti-hippie.
But anyway, it was realistic enough to be riding with him in an old school bus. I was sitting on some makeshift seat on the passenger side, and he was driving. We were driving on a dirt road in Guatemala. This departs from realism, since mostly when I was with him we were in Washington State or Idaho – although often enough it was on dirt roads. It was clearly Guatemala, outside the windows – I recognized streets and things from when I stayed in Quetzaltenango in November-December of 1989.
The dirt road was climbing a steep mountainside, with a cliff embankment dropping off to one side. There was an old man walking in the road, pulling a hand-drawn cart or wheelbarrow. My uncle swerved to avoid hitting the man, and the bus’ wheels slipped off the edge of the embankment and everything began to move in slow motion as the bus began to tilt and roll down the mountainside. We were going to die.
My uncle said, matter-of-factly, “So. That’s it.”
End-of-dream.
I didn’t take or save any pictures of my time in Quetzeltenango. But here is a picture I found with a simple online image search, of the main plaza, much as I remember it.
