Notes from an Accident

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I was on the New York to Boston bus earlier today that ran over a man in Chinatown (NYC). Most of us on the bus didn’t actually see it happen so we had no idea what was going on. It felt like we had gone over a pothole as we were turning from Canal St. onto Essex St. There were a couple of gasps from inside the bus. The young woman on the sidewalk looked horrified and was yelling for us to stop, which we did right away.

A passenger said we had hit someone just as the woman outside the bus was looking under the bus and yelling to someone not to move. “What man?” most of us asked. Folks outside were starting to freak out. 5 – 6 people on the street were calling 911. Someone in the bus started to call 911 as well. The bus driver was now looking under the bus from the curb. I started to think about our weight on the man and the fact that we just needed to be off the damn bus. I muffle something about getting off the bus as folks shift around and 2 or 3 people in the front get up and get off. We grab our stuff and get up as the driver asks us all to move out of the bus.  People were still screaming for the man not to move.  They screamed at someone who wanted to help the man move.

10 minutes earlier we had been joking with the bus driver with someone shouting “Let’s go. It is 11:30 already” (which it wasn’t). It was clear that the regulars recognized the driver and liked him coz he was funny and he drove well. The woman with the Russian accent called him “the best driver.”

From the curb, some of my fellow passengers were looking under the bus. I just couldn’t. About 5 fire trucks, at least one ambulance and a bunch of cop cars showed up pretty quickly. One of the original people on the curb took the man’s grey walking cane and 3 red plastic bags to a police officer. The sidewalk was packed. A man on his phone was wishing all kinds of horrors on the bus passengers. “Don’t ever get hurt in NYC.” I deflate the neck pillow.

The fire fighters were great. Moved very quickly. They brought in boards and platforms and little hydraulic things and a lot of thinking on their feet. The driver had hold us as we were getting off the bus that another bus was on its way. They walked us around the corner to the waiting bus. We wrote down our names and numbers which the driver gathered to take to the cops. When we walked back to the 1st bus to see how things were going, they had moved the man from under the bus.  The pool of blood and what looked like personal objects by the bus I hadn’t seen before brought everything back into focus. No one around knew what the man’s condition was.  We were back on the road with a new driver and bus about 10 minutes later.

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