A crowded bus ride home

A man walks into a bus. A foot is stepped on. A computer is ruined. An iPhone is won. The bus is crowded tonight. It is 7:15pm. We speed home through the rain that has settled over the city for most of the day. Next to me is an older gentleman. His beard is full, his head not-so-much, and his belly is round. He won the iPhone or an iTouch at work tonight. I think it was an iPhone. He was looking over a multi-folded pamphlet as he sat down. This pamphlet he handed to the man standing in front of him now, urging him to look over what he won tonight. This man take the pamphlet, raises his glasses to the top of his head and peers down into the pages. With a little scoff and a look at that comment, he hands it back. They know one another, from work it seems. The standing man is younger than my neighbor. He wears a button down flannel-like shirt over his little belly ponch. His blue jeans end in leather slip-ons. He was wearing a bike helmet as he boarded. My neighbor and I learn that his laptop is dying after a short lived two months, but he isn't optimistic about returning it. He's uninstalled the evil-empire that is Windows and seems, tonight at least, to like the idea of getting stuck with a lemon. The woman to my right had her foot stepped upon earlier. She stated this in the direction of the offender. Neither of them, it seems, thought much more of the incident. She is reading a book. Either the book or the chapter is titled Read-neck, here I come. I think that was the chapter. She is now on ...till death do us part in what looks like a book called No shirt, No Shoes, No Problem. She and they and the rest of us are wrapped in our little cocoons of personal space. I have evening jazz in my ears. I've turned it back up, losing interest in the conversation between the iPhone winner and the laptop looser. We should be nearing Tacoma another fifteen minutes. The standing man raises his voice a bit. I turn down the jazz. He is railing against the IRS. It may not even be constitutional, he says. It could be done away with if this or that (something about sales tax I think) happened, ridding us of one of the most destructive and bureaucratic institutions of this country. As interesting as the conversation has become, I turn the jazz back up.

Off the shoulder of civilization

The train passes several makeshift campsites every day. From my window I see blue tarps draped in the form of tents. These tents are hung among little stands of alder that crowd together in the small pockets of undeveloped fields along the train's route. This time of year, the fields are drenched and soggy. Rain, now water, stands across much of these fields. It appears that the trees grow on the somewhat higher portions of ground. Their earth is merely wet and soggy. There are three tent sites within one particular pocket. One of the sites looks abandoned, as its tarp has been stripped away, moved to a more dry spot. What is left is a mish-mash of cardboard boxes, torn and partially dismantled. If the cardboard serves as insulation or padding, I'm not sure. Next to this site are two separate tents. What is within I cannot tell, as the construction leaves no obvious gap or entry way in which to steal a glance as the train speeds by. Further down the tracks there is another site. Unlike the last, this one has an actual tent pitched beneath the trees, atop a mat of summertime leaves turned mulch. Its fly is zipped. It looks recently pitched. I believe that the city of Seattle or a homeless advocacy group provides tents and such material to the homeless. I've seen other tents pitched along Alaskan Way, beneath the viaduct, as well as under overpasses and in sparser areas of south Seattle.

That these tents are plopped in the middle of, or just off of, civilization strikes me as very similar to recent readings of mine. Chris McCandless chose to live like this. Krakauer tells of how Chris camp just on the outskirts of town, sometimes for a day, sometimes for weeks. It seems like his sites were little more than a makeshift shelter and basic supplies. In reading about Seattle's history, after the city got going and displaced much of the native population, there were still sightings of pitched teepee and dwellings along the waterfront. It is my impression that these were temporary, set up by the natives when they had a need or a desire to camp in or near town to fish or trade or observe what was happening.

While it seems to me that these three instances are very different from one another with respect to quality of life and circumstance for being, all are instances of anomalies to our normal patterns of living that are generally unseen by bustle of activity around them. People in this society are busy. We do this to ourselves, by choice, as a way of filling our day and ourselves with purpose. A busy life is easily thrown off when the routine is broken, and taking notice of these outliers of society as more than a curiosity would certainly break the routine. I notice, but I don't act more than to write a few hundred words about it. I try to think about the situation, but it is only for me. I suppose it is part of my routine to notice and to think about these things. I wonder if the people who inhabit that one stand of tents are known to the people who live over the berm of the road in the housing tract. Have the kids who live there stumbled upon this site during their play? Do they fear it now, concocting some Injun Joe-like story to go along with the unknown of the tents? I wonder.

Late night commuting, barely evening for the rest of Seattle it seems

After a long day at work I set out to find a bus stop and a ride home. A few blocks from the office it sank in how strange it all felt. The leaving work after nearly everyone, instead of before anyone, the thought that Luke was nearly asleep by now and the evening's darkness were all hanging over me, telling me that something wasn't right. I should be home by now. Then I realized that the sun would up, bright and have another two hours in our skies if this were six months from now. It wasn't even seven o'clock. Everyone around me seemed to think it was early. People were eating dinner, having their first post-work drink. Some bars were just setting up to be open. Waite staff looked as though they just started their shift.

What a very odd turn my days have taken over the last few years. Before this job I was back to restaurant work to make the mortgage, working four tens at the newly opened Tulalip Casino, 11:00-am10:00pm normally. There were some days early on when I'd close down the store, getting out around 1:00am. And here I am, five years on, thinking that 6:45pm is the dead of night.

It is just different, that's all. Luke had a bath this morning, looked through some books, matched his new animals to their two dimensional counterparts and made bagels this morning. We got them mixed, rested, and rolled out. They are in the fridge for the next ten hours, maybe overnight. All in all, it was a nice full set of hours.

Right now it is morning, eight-forty-five, the sun is up behind misty clouds. Silhouettes of tree lines are stacked behind one another to the horizon. They end, swallowed by those same misty clouds that hide the sun. The commute is smooth. The man to my left looks to be transferring numbers from one cell phone's address book to another. The man across from me has headphones to his ears and two books in his hands. One is Zoro; the other is an English-Spanish dictionary. I'll be to work shortly. Shortly after that it'll be 6:30, the dead of evening having descended again.

Strength, determination, will-power

Last night I could feel my hamstrings tighten and resist my efforts to bend at the waist. This morning I'm all over sore. From my neck, to my back, to my abs, to my calves, I feel the effects my return to yoga. It is quite lovely. We've both started back this weekend, Shari on Saturday, Sunday for me. Just after rolling out the mat, laying down the towel and settling my bum down, I felt right at home. The heat of the studio quickly warmed my still chilled body. It had been nearly a year since my last visit, but it felt like no time had been missed. It was as familiar as stepping through our front door.

It is now nine a.m. and I'm on a bus headed for work, two and a half hours later than normal. Shari returned from six-thirty yoga at eight-fifteen, freeing me to hit the road. We are shifting the schedule a couple times a week to try to get more time at the yoga studio. It makes sense from the yoga perspective, but also from the Luke perspective. I've been constantly pushing my waking time earlier and earlier with the intention of getting out of the house well before everyone wakes. I now wake between four-thirty and five in the morning, out of the house and on a bus to Seattle by five-thirty, at my desk by seven. Luke, because of the shortened days or because he knows I'm up earlier, or because he's going to become a person who needs only a tad of sleep, continues to push his waking schedule up as well. There isn't much point now to getting out of the house early, as he is up a few minutes after I shut the front door. This morning we were up a little after five, giving us three hours together. What fun it is to have early morning, well rested Luke! The evening version is nice too, but has a day of wear, sleep creeping up quickly. I'll get more time with this new schedule, so will Luke. Shari will get three days of yoga a week to recharge and grow strong again. I'll get to Yoga at least once a week, twice after we see where it'll fit into the schedule best.

It looks like traffic at eight-thirty is a breeze. It is now nine-o-eight and we are passing Boeing field in south Seattle. This is about the same flow of traffic I get at five-thirty, maybe better. The only downside to all this is that I'll miss the night time rituals and possibly the start to some trashy television. 

Into the wild, part 2

I finished reading Into the Wild Saturday evening. If Jon Krakauer's interpretation is correct, and I'm inclined to believe it, Chris McCandless wasn't off his nut. He was young, willful, and gifted with the ability to follow the inner voice that told him to cut his ties and find himself the wilds of a life that he was not born into. The fact that he died in Alaska is the headline of his life, but his travels and trials and friendships leading to Alaska are powerful and fascinating.

The lives he touched and the friendships he made were real. The solo expeditions were real. What he lived was the stuff of boyhood adventure and fantasy, played out at the knife's edge of life.

In the end, he is dead, regardless of the rooting that you do for him as the book comes to a close. There is no alternate ending to tell of how he found a cabin to take supplies from, or how he managed to make his way to the gondola and then across the river, or how that trio of hunters moved their intended trip up by a few weeks and came upon a withered, but living, soul. It can only be the way it was.

Last year, David Kim and his family found their car hopelessly stuck in the snow on an Oregon pass. After days of waiting for a rescue, David Kim made the mistake of leaving the car to seek help. He chose the wrong direction and lost his life. As it turns out, there was a cabin stocked with supplies the other way down the road. It was a daring decision, made out of desperation and the love of one's family. I can appreciate that scenario, but it doesn't change the outcome.

Chris chose to go to Alaska, to seek out a life off the land. The Kim family missed their intended turn off I5 and drove into heartache. Their stories are not the same except that both men lost their lives.

I am glad to have read the book. Others should read it too, just as we should read Tolstoy and Thoreau and Hemingway. It seems that Chris did find answers in Alaska. It wasn't the suffering that was cleansing as I first wondered. It was the isolation, the time, and the entire string of experiences leading him to that point that were cleansing. His entire story is worthwhile, not just the finality of it.