More Cardiff. 

Okay, so this is the bad part.  Kristyn really wanted to see a hockey game, so we bought tickets to see the Cardiff Devils—which is wayyy more exciting than it sounds. It was pretty cool, even though I know nothing about hockey.  It’s a pretty fast-paced game and really easy to lose track of the puck.  The Devils won, which was good.  The Devils fans also liked to do this thing where they took off their shoes and held them in the air whenever something happened (I was never clear exactly what that entailed…) But so yeah.  The game was fine.  It was what happened before we arrived that was the bad part.

We had to take a bus there.  And the bus, being a typical city bus, took us all over the place, meandering here and there through first nice, and then slowly grimier and grimier neighborhoods as the bus slowly ambled outside of the city.  We came up to a three-way intersection and saw a stopped red car off to the right side (i.e. the wrong side of the road here) and, thinking it hit another car, I looked at my seatmate and said, ‘Oh, that sucks.’  The bus slowed down to swerve around the car and as we passed it, we realized there was a man lying facedown in the road, halfway under the red car.  His jeans were torn, exposing the flesh underneath, and his arms were above his head as if he had tried to brace himself before he fell.  By his side, about 2 meters away, lay a bent, damaged motorcycle.  He wasn’t moving, and a little circle of people had gathered around him in a semicircle.

On the bus, there was a collective gasp as people stared at the man, unable to look away. There wasny any police there, no ambulance.  No one was doing anything.  And we just sat there on the bus, watching the scene outside.  The three rowdy men in the back actually stopped the bus and jumped off to ‘see what was happening’…pretty sick, right? And then the bus turned the corner and he was gone. 

Yet I couldn’t get him out of my mind.  That picture of the man, just lying there, unmoving, with the group just standing around him was burned into my eyes.  It really disturbed me, that feeling of helplessness, that I didn’t—couldn’t—do anything.  For days, I couldn’t get the image out of my mind, instead, sharing it with anyone who’d listen.  What did they tell his family? What was he doing there anyway? Why didn’t they pay better attention? Why do people ride motorcycles anyway, as dangerous as they are? I’m pretty sure that this experience, this image, as fleeting as it was, changed something in me.  I’m not sure what, but things suddenly seemed a little different, life suddenly seemed a more important. 

Thanks to some Google research, I later found out he died right there on the scene.  When the bus drove by, when I looked out that window—he was already gone.