Morning howl

May I just say that my hair is right now standing on end?  Holy cats.

One thing I hate about driving around the university is the propensity of the students who are on foot to think that, because they are attached to the university, it is impossible for them to get run over.  Even outside of a cross walk.  Not only that, but when the traffic does obediently pile up at crosswalks (more for fear of traffic tickets than worry about the dang students), the students drift slowly across the street, seemingly unaware of the lives they have stopped in motion – they make no eye contact, they hurry not, neither do they politely tuck tail and scoot.  And when this happens, not even knowing them individually, I hate them collectively.  Yes, even at BYU, interaction with students is a fine exercise in not murdering people who seem to be begging for it.

They are, after all, entitled to the space.  Aren’t they?  Public road or no.  They are the only real thing in the universe.  The rest of us? Just pesky wind.

My pasture.  It sits on the main east/west collector of town, down in the rural open spaces.  People pass us on the way to the airport, the tiny, full of itself airport, into which presidents and vice presidents and kings and CEOs fly on the way to making personal appearances.  Oh, and Robert Redford and his buddies.  So our grass has seen a lot of things whiz past in the last many years.  Our end of town is also evidently desirable fodder for things like Iron Man triathlons, bike races and marathons.  Which is kind of fun.  Until suddenly, the natives are reduced to inconveniences and the world is taken over by the interlopers.

This morning, I drove down to let the horses out, only to find that a good third of the road, half the east heading lane, had been commandeered for – something.  I’d had a hint of this last night when I found myself wondering what had possessed my good neighbor—who had evidently decided to install a porta-potty on the shoulder of the road right next to the edge of his driveway.

This morning, there was a table with coolers and young people in matching shirts supplementing the porta-potty, and there were orange cones all down the street, and a few early leading runners.  At first, I found this interesting.  But it didn’t take long for things to get alarming. 

They had chosen to put the race on the side of the road OPPOSITE the side that’s already truncated with the bike lane.  Thus, we have effectively one lane (in the middle with a double yellow line down the middle of it) and no traffic control.  Mix that with rubbernecking drivers (this IS a collector) and bike riders and people out doing their morning jog – not on the sidewalk, but in the bike lane.  My hands began to sweat.

The people whose lane had no cones were staring at the runners while they missed the joggers by inches on the other side.  They also failed to realize that cars coming towards them actually had to use PART OF THEIR LANE.  Nobody was looking.  Somebody was going to die. And Guy is out there somewhere on his bike.

I got down there without killing anybody and scooted into my driveway.  But on the way, I noticed that my east side neighbors, who had hung balloons on their front gate for some reason, had lost the mass of balloons, now rolling down the shoulder of the road, pretty much in step with the runners.  So I ran after the balloons.  Me in my pasture clothes and standy-up hair and rotten manure shoes, alongside the spandex and visored set.  It was during this little sprint that I saw the trash.  The gator-aide water cups.  Mounds of them carpeting the shoulder of the road, rolling slightly in the wind. 

Yeah, I know runners need water.  And marathons are wonderful things, yadda, yadda.  But as I walked back to my place and watched the runners snatch the water out of the volunteers’ hands, gulping then tossing the cup with no attention to where it fell, no concern about what they were leaving behind, I really had a bad reaction to it.  It just seemed like a very raw, very honest allegory for almost everything I see happening around us in the world:

If you are serious about doing something, something that seems to you to be really, really important, the whole rest of the world just doesn’t count.  What you need as part of this thing? It’s yours.  Take it.  Use it up.  Toss it aside and move along.  Lesser creatures will pick up after you.  Lesser creatures will take care of the dirty clean up.  But YOU – you’re a hero because, by George, you’re focused and trained and uber worthy.

When I got into my car, having to back into the road so I could go home, I checked out the runner traffic.  One woman, very close, coming along but moving not so fast, then a huge field of runners, coming along briskly half a block down.  I needed to get out of there.  I backed up a few inches, which can be interpreted as: Lady, move it.  I need to back up my car.  Runner: walk even slower.  I bump backward another two inches, watching that field come roaring down the street at me.  Runner: oblivious, walks even slower.  Me – handfuls of hair, considering rolling down the window and screaming at this woman.  Woman, slowing almost to a stop squarely in the middle of my bumper.  Me, making a mantra out of Heaven loves this woman and so should I –

As I drove home, I was amazed – people in the privileged, non orange coned lane, evidently couldn’t see the cars heading east (in other words, right at them) in half their lane.  All I could do was stop and pray they’d look at the road before they hit me, because the only alternative for me was running down the ten or eleven sweating runners spread all over my lane.

Car: Ummmm – 3300 pounds of steel heading for you here . . .

Runner: Duh, I’m in a MARATHON.  You CAN’T hit me.

By the time I got home, I was a nervous wreck.  And I was remembering the time we had one of the university’s premier performing groups come down to the studio to record a show.  The kids showed up in a million cars, roared down our road showing off for each other, helped themselves to our backyard, commandeering the little kids’ lawn furniture (leaving the little chairs bent and ruined), hung out on our lawn, laughing and yelling and messing around like there were no houses full of strangers around them, and when they left, cut screaming U turns and sped off down the street.  Later, I wrote them a nice letter.  It said, “Nobody in this neighborhood knows or cares who you are.   What they’re going to care about is if you run over their kids in the street because you’re so busy playing pheromone tag.”

Marathons are great.  Really.  I guess.  For the people who care about them – yeah.  Whoopdie-do.  But this morning, I am wondering – how many things am I doing that seem just hugely, globally important to me, how many times do I expect strangers to get out of my way and cut me all kinds of slack because I am doing THIS? 

I guess it’s human to be myopic. But it’s also kinda dangerous.

Well, sorry for the tirade.  It just, I was already starting the day out with my hair standing on end —