22 September 2007

Manitou

It was late Friday afternoon. I was driving with the top down on the Mercedes, since it was warm and the sun was bright. It is still summer, and it felt like it, even if the autumnal equinox is going to roll over cocktail hour on Sunday. I was leaving the office early, intending to sequester myself at Big Pink and do some serious technical writing.

There is a project that needs ten or twenty hours of over the weekend, and I wanted silence to gather what passes for thought. But the warmth of the sun bathed me in a sense of longing for the passing of the season.

Passing the Harris Teeter Grocery Store on Glebe Road, the tone for an unidentified caller went off on my Bluetooth earpiece. I can't hear well through the device when the top is down, and the very act of driving that way is an assertion that I am not connected everywhere I am.

It is bogus, of course, and I pushed the button on the earpiece. It was Baghdad on the phone. There was more information, corrections to the public account of the alleged Blackwater shooting incident. The company logo is the print of the mighty black bear, and it is again conducting seurity operations.

“There is more to the story,” said the voice. Don't try to make sense of it there in Washington until you know what really happened.” The voice had excellent access to sources in the Ministry, and there was urgency. It is very late there, I thought, and the voice sounded tired.

I promised I would not try to contextualize the incident, and I think the words got across before my Blackberry decided to recycle itself and the connection was lost.

Baghdad was gone, and I lurched back into Virginia, finding myself behind a Metro Bus, drenched in sunlight and the fumes of bio-diesel fuel. I tried to contextualize the conversation, war to peace, feeling inadequate and uneasy.

The amount of sunlight is just about twelve hours at the equinox. By the time I got the top up and the car put away, the lowering rays flooded the apartment as I set up the company lap-top in my office. Looking down, I could see the Latino crew chipping at the rim of the empty swimming pool, prepping the surface for a new coat of sealant.

I worked for a couple hours, attempting to contextualize in plain English the relationship between multiple critical mission areas of a large Agency in town to the national needs process.

The grinders whined on the pool surface. The sun was warm through the window, and it drew me to it. I looked at the clock and saw it could be quitting time, if such a thing existed anymore. I put on my walking shoes and descended the concrete stairs to the pool and struck off for the Lubber Run Park.

The Pagans observed quitting time, though their method of calibration was measured by the sun's slow transit over known landmarks. Of late, the American Wiccans have taken to calling the Autumnal Equinox “Mabon,” or the feast of the harvest. It is too early for that here, and will never challenge the legal Thanksgiving holiday, which comes with a day off.

The leaves are still rich and green. The clocks are still adjusted to give us a little daylight when we get home from work. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 pushed the time change back to the first Sunday in November, though Congress has retained the right to change the movement of the sun. We will have a little daylight for walking for another month or so, and can ignore the real equinox.

I walked down the hill to the valley carved by the ancient stream. There is a new footbridge that the County has installed to get down to the stream. Six traffic lanes of Route 50 effectively dam the old course of the river, which is forced into a giant culvert that serves as a path for wildlife, an alternate highway under the highway. The flanks of the highway rampart are covered in verdant green that cloaks the run.

Down at the bottom of the steep ramp the highway sound disappears. The rich smell of mud and dank decay rise. The sun is hidden by the leaves. The silence is punctuated by the rattle of falling of acorns on the asphalt path.

Nature lives here in serendipitous proximity to the city. Artificially truncated by concrete, this stream runs from Carlin Springs under the shopping mall down to the Four Mile Run and the Potomac.   There are animals in these woods that have adapted to these islands of green in the cement.   

There is a hoard of squirrels, of course, and I see deer periodically, though only when my clumsy movement startles them into flashing motion.

I trudged along, alone in thought. The phone rang in my pocket. I put the earpiece in and pushed the button. It was a call from a distant state in another part of the equinox.

My voice was muffled by the vegetation, though the signal strength was good. My friend told me she had met a bear that day, on a walk taken in the growing light of dawn far away. There was a road, and the big animal was walking along it. As my friend drew closer, there was no fear, no aggressive behavior.

The bear was a large mature male, with sleek black fur and a sassy belly, well prepared for Fall and the coming long sleep. As my friend approached him, the bear sat back on its massive flanks, assuming the lotus position of the Buddha. There was no menace, only a benign sense of well-being in the dark eyes, and a smile on the furry muzzle.

“Weren't you afraid?” I asked. “Those things are big, and they can run as fast as a horse.”

“I never have felt so peaceful in my life,” said my friend. “I would like to meet that bear again.”

“How long were you with him?”

“Just a few minutes. A car came down the road, and the bear rose and ambled off into the trees.”

I looked at the green all around me, the Run on the cusp of Fall.

Something occurred to me. “Maybe it was a Manitou,” I said. “You know, a manifestation of the spirit. The Indians that lived around here used to think everything was connected somehow. Sometimes that was shown in the aspect of an animal. It is the time of the season, and it is a good omen that your bear was friendly. It could mean something really good.”

“I don't think so,” said my friend. “I think it was just a nice bear.”

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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