I spend most of my walking time looking down, either at my feet or a few steps in front of them. Rarely do I look up and out any further than the length of Posie’s leash. Maybe I am not alone in this.
Every now and then I try to break the habit. That’s because in those few odd moments when I have actually looked up into the sky or tree canopy or straight forward at the broader panoramic view of a walk, I realize there is a whole other world of discovery just waiting for me above shoe level.
Unfortunately, I have a fairly strong aversion to stumbling -- especially since my dramatic face plant on the cobblestones of Paris a couple years ago which resulted in four broken facial bones and a goose egg-sized swelling in my cheek. I was looking up at a gothic church spire.
So, you can see why, mostly, I look down.
Thankfully there are discoveries to be made in both directions, up and down. And, more thanks, thankfully, I see stories written all over the ground. Stories and patterns. A poetry of space that moves with me as I walk. The ground is covered with stories and things that capture the mind and imagination. When I lived in Los Angeles, for example, I often found myself seeking out the imprimatures of sidewalk cement layers. Those are the stamp marks, usually round bearing a name and date, that get pressed into the cement to show who laid any particular sidewalk in any given neighborhood. There are hundreds of different sidewalk imprimatures across the city, maybe thousands. They are part of that city’s story, an outline of when and where neighborhoods came into being. Whenever I found one, I couldn’t help but wonder about its history. Who was the person who poured the cement before leaving the mark? What was happening in that time and place when the mark was laid in 1944 or 1972 or 1997?
Looking down I see things and come to my own conclusions about what they mean. For example, no matter where I roam, I come across heart-shaped rocks. When I least expect it, one will jump out at me on the wilderness path or in the middle of rocky beach like a birthday surprise. I know they set my romantic mind to work, shaped as they are like the Valentines, double-humped with a V at the bottom. I read signs and too much symbolism into them, based on their size, color, heft. I see a narrative in heart rock, certain each one is a message either for or from someone I love.These rocks are a form of magic and mysticism drawn from my own heart, reward for my downward gaze.
When I stroll, I also see a considerable amount of waste and discard, things no longer wanted or needed and haphazardly cast off but which could potentially tell future generations something about who we were in 2020 and 2021, what we used, what we ate, what we cared about as a society, what we didn’t.
If cardboard boxes didn’t decompose so fast, they’d be boon for future archeologists. Uncovering them they would learn that 2020 was a big year for large screened computers and televisions. On my daily Seattle walks I’ve come across these boxes in every neighborhood, tossed in alleyways, mysteriously unloaded on a busy public bike trail, under bridges, far from recycle bins. They are part of our pandemic story.
Walking through 2020 and into 2021, the COVID pandemic played out at my feet.
Before last March I didn’t see a lot of masks outside of Halloween. Maybe once in a long while, as a newspaper reporter, I’d come across discarded face masks on the ground near a hospital, or a crime scene, or a disaster zone, or construction site. But not enough to burn the image in my mind. And surgical masks on a paved walking or riding path like the Burke Gilman Trail in Seattle? Never.
Over the last 10 months I’ve seen more discarded face masks than I can count. Limp, discarded bits of blue and white surgical mask paper laying on the side of the road. Half bra-shaped fabrics bunched up in the middle of a footpath or hanging from shrub branches low to the ground. Disintegrating disposables pushed into water run-off drains by the rain. At the point I saw so many I started taking photos of them, I came to see each one as a relic. Each one is part of a worldwide story of pain and panic and, at the same time, part of one individual’s story.
Have you ever passed by a single boot or classy pump or baby shoe laying at the side of the highway? They are a mystery, aren’t they? When I see one, I always think the same thing. How did it get there? How did one shoe end up here, in the middle of nowhere? Is the owner walking around in the other?
The masks at my feet are like that.
Today on the 4-mile walk from my house to Gasworks Park, I saw five masks on the ground. Five new ones. I walk this path regularly and every time I do I find a new batch.
I wonder what the people who stripped off these masks were thinking or doing at the moment of their unmasking, as protection from an angry virus hit the ground. Did she pull hers off in frustration, unable to get enough breath beneath the knitted cloth? Did he, COVID denier, rip off his mask in anger after being forced to wear it in a grocery store? Did they decide they’d formed enough of a safe pod that they could go maskless while walking and chatting? Did they drop them accidentally, thinking they were stuffing them into their pockets? That tiny polkadot one; Did a child toss it from the bike stroller her dad was pulling? Did he panic when he stopped and found her maskless?
I know, eventually, masks will disappear from the ground. The pandemic will be contained. Our mouths will be revealed in public once more. We may even forget this year or two of forced coverage. The emotions I feel when I find a mask will settle into memory and fade -- the sadness, curiosity, the pangs of worry not for myself, but for the unmasked people these swaths once protected.
Even as I write this, masks already on the ground are starting to sift lower and lower into the dirt beneath us.
But I wonder, if they are somehow preserved through years and layers of the earth, whether future archeologists who find them will be able to read in them their full story.
Will they read the universal story behind our lost masks, and the worldwide experience of fear and loss and resiliency and patience they represent?
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