santiago: weather update

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After 6 months without even a hint of rain, fall showed up in mid May. They say it always arrives in May, but being from the Northern Hemisphere, this still seems ridiculous. Nevertheless, fall arrived drizzling, then dumping cold wet rain. For six days, there was a genuine attempt to right the summer’s deficiency of rain. The muddy smelly Mapocho running down from the Andes grew turgid and menacing, while the streets, clearly ill-equipped for the deluge, flooded. Similar weather ineptitude was mirrored in the south where rivers swelled, flooded, and blocked the Pan-American Highway, canceling all buses headed south. Commuters rushed about miserable and hunched against the cold and rain. The warm mouths of the Metro stations filled with the hawkers’ machine gun rapid cries of ‘paragua,piragua,paragua’ (the sensible name for umbrellas: para = ‘stop’ and agua = ‘water’). Though the foliage put on a pretty underwhelming show overall, the wind and rain managed to shake off the leaves that had tried out the fall color thing and turned goldish and reddish. The rain kept Santiago in a daylight twilight for a week with clouds sometime descending low enough to hide the hill in the neighborhood across the river. When the sun finally returned, the ash from the volcano down south in Chaiten and the brown smudge of smog that had covered the city for the summer was gone, or at least diminished, and the mountains dressed in new robes of white, loomed majestically over the city. At sunset they turned a hallucinatory pink; perhaps to remind the locals of what they have forsaken by filling up the valley with smog. The Santiguianos, bottled up for a whole week without protesting, took to the streets somewhere about town to yell about something or other. The GI Joe riot police poured out of their armored buses, parked the water cannon mobiles, and awaited them on the street corners around the Plaza Italia. A small pack of protestors managed to light some tires on fire in the middle of the Alameda and then hung around long enough to throw rocks at the police buses. After a week, everyone seemed to be pretty happy about getting back into the swing of things.

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