When the earthquake hit, Molly and I were on a bus travelling south from Santiago to Puerto Varas. We never felt a thing, fortunately, as we were sleeping and any shaking that may have awakened us was quickly excused in our still sleeping minds as the bus going on a rough patch of road – ridiculous as it may seem given the strength of the earthquake. When I fully woke up before dawn, the bus was stopped. With the earthquake happening around 3:30 am, this was probably right after the earthquake hit, but having no idea what had just happened I assumed we had made a stop to pick up more passengers and I never checked the time. When I woke up again after dawn, it was to an ominously foggy day where we could see cars and semis parked alongside us stretching into the cloaked distance. We saw families walking and riding bikes south while staring at all the vehicles stranded on the highway. Still having no idea what was going on, we mumbled angrily at the static radio playing on the bus speakers and asked the bus attendant what was happening and if he could turn off the radio. He told us that an earthquake happened, some people were hurt, and that was it. Molly’s further questioning yielded nothing from the attendant as well as from the other passengers and our bus stayed waiting for the next four or five hours.
When we were finally able to move, the bus had to be backed up and pulled onto the opposite side of the highway to make it to a makeshift dirt road to keep going south. When we saw that a pedestrian bridge had fallen over the middle of the highway just ahead of where we had stopped, crushing at least two cars that had been blocking our path, we had only begun to understand that something bigger than what the attendant had alluded to was happening or had happened. When we passed another downed pedestrian bridge off the side of the highway, this one crushing a semi carrying fruits and vegetables, a fear began to take hold out of our unanswered questions. In a sad attempt at distraction, the attendant put on a terrible Nicholas Cage war movie for much of the rest of the trip as we looked for more evidence out the window of what had happened to no avail. Alas, the volcano-dotted horizon of the Lake District we were now driving through calmed and distracted us from the unknown terror that had literally happened outside, and the ridiculous fake Hollywood-style terror that the Spanish-overdubbed Nicholas Cage was apparently saving everyone from on the loud TV screens.
We finally got to Puerto Varas about 6 hours behind schedule to a completely normal, albeit quiet, Saturday afternoon. We found a hostel after two failed attempts and made our way for much needed showers when we saw what two girls who were using the hostel’s only computers were looking at: BBC coverage of the earthquake of the 8.8 magnitude earthquake. We asked them if they had felt anything in Puerto Varas and they said that they indeed had been woken up by it and had only been able to find information on the Internet within the last 20 minutes when it was working again. We asked to use the computers to check our mail after they were done, only to find a mountain of concern from our friends and family back at home via email and facebook. It was then, some 13 hours after the earthquake, that we finally understood the enormity of what had happened and, moreover, how lucky we were to not have been affected by it. It was a moment for us somewhere between serendipity and privilege to have escaped all of it in Santiago by a single night due to the opportune timing of Molly’s spring break from her university, and our decision to go down far south for it because of the simple fact that we could afford it. We spent the next nine days travelling the south between Puerto Varas, the island of Chiloe, and Valdivia living amongst those Chileans largely unaffected personally from the recent tragedy, but all collectively quietly reeling from its effect on their nation.
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