Because we are standing on the banks, attending to our lives.
The leaf cannot be blamed for our missing it. Nor, from its perspective, should it care that we missed it. For its part, it is merely floating down the river on its back, caught up in swirling little curlicues of water, looking up at the stars. Perhaps, in the end, it is a matter of perspective after all. Perhaps if the leaf were to notice us, standing there on the shore,we would seem like mere details. Perhaps the leaf would think that we are just details among many other details, standing there along the banks, trying to be seen or to avoid being seen.
But sometimes even that is not the case.
Sometimes we are the leaf.
We get caught up in ourselves, in our own bodies, or in the stream. We are running, or driving, or riding, but almost always we are in motion. The details, the narrative flow of our lives, the events, they simply stream along past us. Drawing from the past, pushing toward an unknown future.
Perhaps we can be blamed for what we miss, we who are in perpetual movement. Perhaps not. We feel the miles roll by underneath us on the highway and feel them to be, like the stars overhead, endless, when they are not. We drift along on those details, noticing them as if they were standing on the river waving to us as we stream along. But we do not really notice them—the details—not really. Because we are on automatic pilot, just lazily floating down the river.
This happens even in catastrophes. We miss the signs.
It was almost midnight, and Veronica and Stephen had covered an incredible amount of ground on their bikes in two straight days of riding.
They’d ridden across Staten Island, and then into New Jersey, and on into Pennsylvania. If you had asked Veronica to tell you her plan—what she hoped to do—she would simply have pointed to the ground and said: “Get as far away from here as possible.”
After crossing the Verrazano Bridge, they’d passed through the destruction of the storm called Sandy on Staten Island. There were still boats in people’s yards, some sitting on roofs of houses, and rubble and debris were everywhere. The Island was all covered with snow now. Here and there, the rubble peeked up through the piles of snow, as if to remind the people that it—the rubble—was still there.
Veronica and Stephen rode along through the broken city and past the destruction, past the piles of snow. Here and there they dodged rats that skittered across their pathway. Their hazmat gear barely raised an eyebrow as they rode along the coastline, and they rode on through the frozen fog likes ghosts, their yellow suits shimmering with a light glistening of moist sea air.
They rode past the piles of broken boards, the twisted pieces of siding, the musty old couches, all frozen under snow piled high along the rubble’s edges in heaping white mounds. They passed by in silence.
They passed into New Jersey and into the suburbs and crossed bridges and hills and streams. They pushed forward like pilgrims, seeking a celestial city, or at the very least, a better country.
Closer to the cities, the people were fleeing. The crowds were fleeing. They were on the bridges and the byways. They pushed like cattle through a chute where the roads narrowed around the debris of cars and trucks strewn through the streets. Vehicles and obstacles caused the waters of humanity to bulge around them like boulders in a stream, and, at the overpasses, the humans would stack up and bubble and roil until the waters made their way to the narrowed passage where they would gain speed and pick up momentum before shooting out of the other side. The people streamed along as if they were being drawn out of the cities and into the countryside by gravity or some other force of physics. They all walked with purpose, heading… Where?
Veronica and Stephen had passed through the crowd as if in a protective bubble. Their hazmat suits worked like talismans. The crowds opened up around them as if they had the plague, as if they were aliens just landed on earth, and no one wanted to get too close.
Veronica and Stephen traveled as if under a star.
As darkness began to fall, the crowds thinned. Then, eventually, they disappeared altogether.
It was almost midnight.
Veronica and Stephen cruised along the back country roads that spread across the Pennsylvania countryside like a capillary system, drawing the goods from the richest farms in the world to market.
Every once in a while, they would get off the bikes and walk them for a spell. Or, they would stand and rest for a few moments and look at their surroundings in excitement and wonder.
“These roads once all led to Hershey,” Veronica said. She pointed off in the distance to a skyline that was darkened except for what was illuminated by the moon.
Stephen smacked his lips. “Man! If I only had a Reese’s cup right about now!” He poked her in the ribs.
“Naughty boy. One day, I will show you your Gramam’s recipe for chocolate. It is twice as good!”
Stephen just laughed and they stood with their bikes and looked down the fence lines at the farms along the road.
“These farms are among the most productive in the world, and the most beautiful.” She indicated with her hand to the farms. “And see how the fields spread thick with snow in wide, white blankets?” She pointed with her hand to the thick white swatches of color in front of them. “They look like that most winters. The snow lies there and replenishes the earth. And in spring they turn the pig manure under. Ewww!” She waved her hand in front of her nose. “Then the whole county stinks, but it’s not so bad when they use horse or cow dung.”
“How do you know all this, mom?”
“I learned how to read, boy. You should too.” She looked at him sideways. “You with your video games.” They shared a look and remembered where they were, and what the world was like now.
It wasn’t really hard to do, the remembering, standing there, as they were, in the midst of the wide blue world, the ancient winter of Pennsylvania farmland rising up around them in a glow, their bright yellow suits shimmering with moisture in the moonlight.
“Dude, I saw this interview with Manson once. He said the difference between him and the regular people out there is that—” The tattooed teenager paused and leaned forward. “Give me a loosie.” The other young man handed him a cigarette. He lit his match and fired up the end, and then he indicated to the world with the cigarette. “If the regular guy out there, if he stepped off a bus in Des Moines at 10 p.m. and called his Aunt Gertrude and she wasn’t home…,” The tattooed young fellow blew out smoke in tiny little circles, and coughed. “…and Aunt Gertrude was his only ride, and if he was flat broke, the average guy wouldn’t know what to do with himself. Whereas he—Manson—would dip into an alley and grab a tire iron and he’d be in business.”
Snort. Hmph! The second young man, who was listening to the tattooed young fellow rattle, gave only this harrumphing series of audible gesticulations as retort, and this conversation continued thusly for a while.
The two teens were sitting by the roadside, crouched low to the ground in a ditch. They were part of a militia patrol unit sent forward to scope out the road. Actually, they were scouts for a group of bandits, but they liked to think of themselves as a militia. They’d copped some uniforms, and several of the older bandits had some military experience, so they’d received a little training, but not much. They called themselves the Pennsylvania Anarchists Corps, the PAC, or usually, “The PACK.”