(Photo courtesy Alan Murray-Rust, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)
People are hard to know; meaning comes dear.
I was out walking the trail. A bridge that was being demolished blocked my usual route, so I headed in the opposite direction, toward what might as well have been a foreign town, though it was just a few miles away. Humidity was back up, poison ivy crowded the underbrush, and the bites of no-see-ums and deer flies set off a histamine reaction of whole-body prickliness. I hoped to go 30 minutes out and 30 back.
Far ahead, down the tunnel of trees, an old man was making the motions of running. I tried to estimate when I would reach him at my pace. The section was remote enough that I did not want to have to pass him, since, for the first time I was aware of, a crime and other suspicious activity had been reported on the trail. It was three in the afternoon, but I did not want to make someone anxious or have to feel the awkwardness of being thought a threat myself.
The man’s gait was slow and wobbly but determined. When I closed on him, I saw he was tall, probably in his 80s, with a wide back and strong legs, as if he had played ball. I decided not to retreat and made some noise to let him know I was there. But as I began to pass, he side-eyed my motion and was startled.
“How you doing, sir?” I said.
He made comments on the beauty of the day in a boardroom voice that suggested stockholders’ opinions should not differ.
I said yes sir, except for the gnats.
“What?” he said.
“The bugs are bitin’ me,” I said, swiping a hand down my other arm to indicate it. I could not tell by his expression if he had understood the second time.
“You just keep going,” he said loudly.
I kept going and raised a hand farewell. At some point I looked back, and he was gone.
That night I told my friend Mike, who is retired, about the meeting, and he laughed. I said I could not tell if the old-timer meant that if I walked fast enough I would not be bitten by bugs, or that he wanted me to get the hell away from him.
Mike, being Mike, suggested the older man was saying, Keep on trucking in your life, you are a bit younger than me, things are good, make them last, enjoy. I said I had not thought of that interpretation.
“But, I mean, I wasn’t there,” Mike said gently.
Later I told my friend Larry all this, and he laughed with delight at so many possibilities in such a brief encounter. I expected him to try to adjudicate, probably by pointing to people’s goodhearted attempts to make the most of things. But Larry surprised me by saying I had just written a horror film: the old man was a serial killer who had been at it for decades, and all the while I had been worried about startling him, he had wanted me to “just keep going” and fall into one of dozens of “trap pits,” Larry said, he had dug in the woods for his victims.
Now I laughed. “Trap pits?”
Larry play-acted being defensive, but I told him I was listening. “[A] lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there,” many people are saying. The world is a mess, and even in the smallest matters it has become difficult to know what is happening unless you check your interpretations against others’.
