Right Turn on Red

It’s a Sunday afternoon brimming with hazy sunshine, the kind of day that leaves you lethargic, but still feeling okay about things. I want nothing more than to lie around, perhaps in my hammock reading, maybe dozing off into a rare and glorious oblivion, and to keep my agenda open. Unfortunately I’m driving to work instead, the antithesis of what I truly need, and I can feel any potential for some tiny sliver of tranquility ebbing away. The icing on my cake of sad lament is spread indiscriminately by unknown bureaucrats and civil engineers who’ve determined that it’s in my best interests to have only one route available between my home and my place of employment. I’ve tried my best to be accepting these many long months, envisioning some future thick with smoother sailing, but to no avail, and I find myself once more meandering along with my fellow travelers at a snail’s pace, my watch ticking away precious seconds turned to minutes as I prepare my psyche for the good-natured ribbing I’ll receive as I show up late once again.

This route to my own personal salt mine spirits me away from East Ventura via Los Angeles Avenue to Santa Clara Road and eventually onto Highway One, arriving twenty-one point seven miles later at Naval Air Weapons Center Point Mugu. It’s cracked two lane black-top for more than half the trip, and I share this malnourished asphalt with untold legions of displaced and equally displeased drivers piloting massive big rigs, family vans and SUV’s, tractors laden with chemicals bound for the fields, and those infernal larger than life motor homes. An occasional hybrid fights its way among these bigger brothers, and we’re all overtaken on a regular basis by precise clumps of manic bicycle riders enshrouded within the bogus refuge of neon, spandex, and blustering health, hell-bent on arriving somewhere and anywhere, sweaty, exhausted, and quite possibly before the rest of us. My own lonesome journey is painfully broken into increments of two-hundred yards—stop!—a quarter mile—stop!, and so on. Road rage isn’t even an option as my fellow drivers and I are equally mired upon the same long serpent of misery, so I turn up the radio and try to let it all go, nothing to be accomplished right now other than the waiting and the enduring.

On this particular day I end up first in line at the intersection of Los Angeles Avenue and Santa Clara Road, having just missed the light and needing only to make a right turn to continue my journey. The traffic spilling from my left off of Highway One Eighteen swarms infinite, and any attempt at “right turn on red” stifles under this onslaught. After passing through this intersection with such cruel regularity these past months I know it like I know breathing. Staring into the surrounding citrus groves and strawberry fields with only the aroma of chicken manure as pungent witness and companion, I feel my disgruntled self rearing up in revolt at the prospect of two more minutes wasted as the damn stoplight controls the next several moments. “Jesus”, I think, “Why do we live like this?”

I hang from the steering wheel with hands draped at the “ten and two”, and trouble myself with half-hearted acceptance of this fate that we in the western world have wrought squarely upon ourselves, unable it seems, to reverse our course towards better days. As I hunker down and gawk into the quick voids between vehicles wading by in both directions, I catch intermittent glimpses of something, or rather someone, on the far side, and I feel my interest swell as I consider this small mystery suddenly manifest just beyond the incessant din of metal and internal combustion.

New signal lights have recently been installed at this intersection, each imbued with a predetermined hierarchy of red, yellow and green, their effervescence dangling just below giant metal talons arched high over the center of Santa Clara Road. Each sprouts from a broad concrete base and looks far too substantial as to trifle with the mundane task of persistently controlling our movements, and sometimes our will. An old man of perhaps sixty-five or seventy sits atop the far concrete base with his back curved away from the cold steel, placid and unmoving, as if a small tear in this immediate reality has opened just enough to allow him entry from some obscure ‘where’, and now, worn thin from the trials of his journey, he rests.

He’s wearing a black suit over a white shirt, a necktie evenly banded with oblique blues and reds, and tired white socks that sag above black leather shoes rimmed with light brown earth. Everything about him looks dusty, and I wonder if the fields have ordained him as their Prince. On his lap camps an old attaché case, the type that fathers with important jobs used to carry, held shut by those little brass latches that twang open when the button is pushed. The old man’s arms press into the case’s top and the firm grip of his hands upon its handle suggests that just maybe something of great value nestles inside.

His face tips down and I can’t tell if he’s half asleep or just fully steeped in the contemplation of some impending fate waiting only for him. I wonder how he got here, all at once so entirely surrounded by the impatience of modern living while appearing to be anchored firmly in the middle of nowhere. His perch flattens against the rush of cars and trucks, mankind’s tumultuous reach just there at his feet, and I marvel at this image of someone so oblivious to, and at the same time, so at peace with such chaos.

The last of the crossing traffic passes and I see him clearly and continuously for the first time. He’s short, his feet hanging quietly several inches above chalky-fresh gravel newly spread round the base, and the wind is caressing thin strands of wintered hair against the grain of his life. His ears flair grandly away from his head like proud flags on the Fourth of July, and I think the breeze must be singing to him as it whistles and slides along these contours. His old face droops like stretched leather on an old sofa, and deep brown creases seem to map out hardships survived and things best forgot. He looks like magic fallen from the sky.

Someone in the glum tail of cars behind me honks and cracks my spell, and I see that I’ve bungled the opportunity to “turn right on red”. I imagine the green light smirking at my lack of attention as I quickly turn the corner, hotly embarrassed, and watch as the old man slips away, the last proof that he exists his tiny profile reversed in my side mirror, his perfection now captured only in the mind’s eye. I try to focus on the road ahead as I grapple with a strange sense of loss flowing into me, some extraordinary regret forged by the passing of something precious, but not quite understood.

I want to turn around and go back and park my car, maybe throwing the keys deep into the fields before stealing quietly there beside him to sit, silent and peaceful. I’d like to ask him a single grand question if I could, and see him smile the answer. We could sit together and wave at all the hurried drivers, imploring them to just slow down and consider other possibilities, that perhaps life isn’t hardly ever what we think, but instead how we think it. I’d like to tell him that I don’t care much for this life of jobs without meaning, all the hustle and bustle, so much angst carried along in the wake of our insipid competitions, this life of too little love and never enough beauty, this life of too much pride and too little empathy. I’d like to toss my lot into responsibility’s hat and walk away from it all, with him, into some other dimension. I’d like to explore the treasure in his battered case and the mysteries in his heart, and then help him defend these secrets as if they’re my own gospel too. I want to show him something genuine and make him believe that every now and then his miracle does indeed rise above the clamor of ignorance and appearance.

Instead, I continue my drive to work with all these ‘wants’ riding shotgun, each a glimmer of some other me that must be decisively squelched before I can step into the muddle and ego of my work. This makes me sad, sadder still that I can’t conjure up the courage to embrace a good and reckless abandon. To each ‘want’ I say good-bye, if only for this day, and lonesome once more I struggle my way back into the world of man and machine.