It’s only been two weeks and I’m already carving out a routine. I love that: “carve”. It’s a word that carries both the laborious and interminable, but there’s also something affectionate about it, right? Like you imagine someone scooping away at a boulder, but to make a little place for themselves. Weighty and personal, I guess that’s a routine.
Part of this carving comes from seeing the same people over and over in the same places and, usually, in the same attitudes. Coworkers behind their desks, service workers behind their counters, and those who work in the same area drafting around the neighborhood at lunch time, enroute to cafés and lunch counters, 20 minutes left before they have to be back behind their desks, cheerfully hurrying along, slightly over-caffeinated.
I bike to work, which makes a big difference in what’s mundane. Instead of seeing tired commuter faces on the bus, I watch the fog roiling in the foothills of the Coast Range and the Humboldt Bay at various stages of ebb and flow, sometimes reflecting a clear sky over the ocean, sometimes clogged with mud and portraits of pampas grass mirrored in the puddles: the quiet terminus of oceanic voyages for all kinds of debris.
And then, when I get around the bay and come into Eureka, I see a lot of the same homeless population making their daily movements. One guy is always walking down the same block when I ride by. He’s usually looking straight ahead, so we’ve made eye-contact enough times now that I’ve started giving him a familiar nod. Of course, I’m usually a bit sweaty and slack-jawed by this time in the ride, so he probably doesn’t think much of me or even take notice of this wild-looking character on the bike; this, at least, was my impression until the other day.
Until mid-August, we work “four 10s”, meaning four 10-hour shifts, rather than the usual five-day spacing of a 40-hour week. I like it. The schedule suits the American temperament which can work without a break if there’s a compensation in time at the end of it. Our desire, for example, to skip lunch and just leave work half an hour early, I’ve found is not a very common thing elsewhere in the world. People want their breaks and aren’t in such a hurry to get home at the end of the day. In the country we are, after all, very focused on the next thing. Or maybe that’s just me.
So, it was Thursday and my last workday before the weekend. It’s been an almost excessively foggy summer, so the light was very typically early morning: silvery gray, like it is on a rainy day, but the humidity was not the sort that condenses into rain but just slinks along the lowlands until mid-day when the intensity of the sun finally burns it up. Of course, this conflict between sun and humidity is a duel and the humidity saturates the air as soon as the sun’s power begins to wane around 4 or 5, and evening has the same clammy, rainy day feeling as morning. Only one is a little more gracious to it, having enjoyed a few hours of sun. When the day ends, and the fog is piling up around the base of the mountains, one is glad for it. It’s a bit like seeing a blanket being drawn over the earth to prepare for evening and, indeed, it makes me tired as hell to watch it. The author of Grandfather Twilight must’ve been from this part of the country. His gauzy gray beard spreading over the sky as he walks to the shore with his pearl? That’s what happens here every afternoon.
But in the morning, even after two cups of coffee and a seven-mile bike ride, I’m still only half awake under that interminable gray blanket and riding to work under the eucalyptus and along the muddy estuary—elements which seem to generate their own fog— everything starts to go a bit dreamlike. So, it doesn’t seem strange when I get to Eureka and see the homeless guy who’s become part of my routine lift his arm and point, somewhat frantically, back behind me.
Up until this day, the guy has scarcely paid me any attention. I’ve been giving him my sweaty nod for about a week and his response has been to continue walking north, looking straight ahead. So, for him to be all agog, making such deliberate eye-contact, and pointing in this manner, well, our relationship has shifted very abruptly, it would seem.
I hate to say it, but my first impulse was to think he was pointing at something only he could see, that some condition which I wouldn’t understand, was inducing some vision in him and that it wouldn’t be worth turning around. It was a bit like in childhood with the whole “made you look!” thing. I assumed he was pointing just to get a reaction from me, or maybe, despite his eye-contact, he was pointing for someone else’s benefit. So, rather than immediately turning around, I swung my gaze back to the street in front of me, denying him my corroboration in whatever he was doing, but there was a visual echo of his intensity—this guy who was always so mild-mannered, so focused on his destination. And I was past him now, he wouldn’t know if I turned around anyway. So, expecting nothing, I glanced back—I tried to make it look mechanical, like I was changing lanes and checking for traffic—and immediately squeezed my breaks without thinking, acting on the same impulse that had made the man lift his arm, point and go all pop-eyed. I hate to say it, but I actually thought OMG!
Behind me, in the street, there was a movie scene playing out. While the sky remained as gray and impassive as ever, an SUV had rolled up onto its side and was rocking with the momentum which was still washing over it in waves like the wake of a boat recently passed. There was a cluster of cars behind it, perhaps some of them had crashed, or maybe they’ve all just been stopped by this catastrophe. The SUV didn’t just flip over on the curb, or a result of taking a turn too quickly, no, the reason for the derailment is pluming dramatically over the entire scene, a jet of water is spraying about 20 feet into the air. It’s Hollywood, that scene in so many movies where someone hits a fire hydrant. And having seen this so often before in movies, the man and I stand there watching it with a few people on the street, waiting to see if anything else will happen, waiting I guess to see if Bruce Willis will emerge from the SUV, bloodied but unstoppable, with a sawn-off under his arm.
But the scene goes static, returns to reality and the SUV ceases rocking. It doesn’t look like anyone was hurt, just a really lousy way to start Thursday morning for someone. But maybe so lousy that it might even be funny. It’s not impossible to imagine someone in that SUV laughing at the ridiculousness of the overplayed scene. In fact, there’s none of the ‘oh-my-god-could’ve-been-me!’ scariness to the scene. It’s just, like, “wow! Look at that! Gee!”
And then I remember that I could’ve missed it, could’ve just kept going were it not for my acquaintance who pointed it out to me. And, as I turned back to work and began pedaling, this gave me hope. I know now that when some earth-shattering tsunami or 9/11 scenario unfolds, people really will stop and point and signal to others: so many prairie dogs barking at the entrance of a hawk into the sky overhead. Despite our tendency to wrap ourselves in our own lives and carve out routines to build up the walls between us we’re still all wading through the same daily fog which, as it turns out, is more substantial that the boulder we’re trying to make something of.
I coast the rest of the way to work wondering how this will affect our interaction on Monday.
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