Guardrail Man
I walked alone along the ocean in the early morning. The ocean rolled flat, green, almost silent. Above me, traffic motored up and down a remote stretch of Highway 101, mostly trucks and log trucks transporting goods and dead trees. Why we're still clearcutting in Oregon is beyond me. It's an ecological obscenity perpetrated against our watersheds, which of course, is ourselves. When will people finally realize this?
Here and there a large rain drop fell, hitting me on the face and hands. It is a unique sensation to feel a single fat rain drop make first physical contact with one's being. I like it a lot. It is the feeling of being alive and present.
A noise shattered my concentration. I heard someone above me. I looked up to the highway and saw a man, thin, somewhat young and homeless in appearance, some 150 feet away, screaming to the sky. Or was it a conversation? I couldn't tell. I couldn't make out the words.
He carried no gear. He stopped and climbed over the guardrail and onto some rock fill that supported the highway. He knelt down and began sorting through the rocks. It made no sense but it's starting to make more sense to me every time I witness such a thing, and that's at least once or twice a day, whether it's in the big city or on a remote stretch of the Southern Oregon Coast.
What is his story? I thought. Did he need help? Should I try and render assistance? What might that entail?
Here we were, just past dawn, a young man was in distress, perhaps of his own doing, or not, and I didn't know what to do. I had no phone with me, so I couldn't have called even if I wanted to, and I really didn't.
I watched him sort rocks for ten minutes. Then I found the trail for home. I walked within 50 feet of him and he didn't notice me. He was lost to another world.
These stories of the New American Diaspora keep coming at me. I seem to walk into them every morning, whether in the city or the country.
I'm not really doing anything with these stories except writing them up in a manner that sometimes feels superficial but other times feels important. It is my hope they all cohere one day and find a larger purpose.