Strange Gifts
Sunday night I just couldn't sleep so I went for a bike ride I'd been thinking of for weeks, ever since a midnight excursion to the wildlife refuge in South Carolina. I whooshed swiftly through soft velvety air and the drowsy downtown to climb the suspension bridge over the Savannah River. Almost everything within a hundred miles is as flat as a pancake, so this is the only significant road climb around. The traffic was light and there's a significant shoulder, so I felt fine about it except that it's illegal. I doubt any cop would bug me about it, especially if I plead ignorance and/or cry about how much I miss the mountains. So I just parked at the top, and sat prominently on a fluorescent orange barrier barrel.
It's been very gusty and turbulent here lately. On the bridge, it was a steady north wind of about 10-15 mph which felt deliciously different-- not unlike what I'd experience on some of my favorite peaks. This is an almost ridiculously lower place; but after being stuck to the ground almost nonstop for many moons, I found it inspiring. I always feel calmer and clearer when I'm up above things, looking at them like a living map-- except in airplanes, when I sometimes start to feel too distant, although that's still a wonderful experience. Distance lends perspective to everything; and there's a distinct comfort, amidst mental turmoil, in being as alone as one feels.
I felt surprisingly relaxed and unhurried up there, considering I had to get up for work in about five hours; but reason impelled me to head down after about twenty minutes. Just as I was about to, a huge cargo container ship glided through beneath me. It would have been startling, if it weren't so whispery quiet. (Perhaps it was merely floating on the downstream current.) It was but a stately serene procession of huge boxy hues-- flat, night-shaded and completely saturated-- commanded by ladder-wound white towers and, in a crowning intrigue, a slowly whirling semblance of helicopter blades. Perhaps that was part of some mega gyroscope? It reminded me keenly of the propellers on fantastic airships in Miyazaki movies; and the entire vessel, despite lacking a single turret or wave motion gun, recalled the beloved Space Cruiser Yamato (re: Star Blazers) of my youth. Whimsical, I know; but I was helpless before such an epochal allusion. Yet it also suggested newness and reinvention.
I was merely two hundred feet up, overlooking a small city on a tide-swollen river: all three of us, perhaps, equally afflicted by delusions of grandeur. Yet within such limited contrast, I was blessed with my vision of this giant boat in both mundane glory and abstract embodiment of hidden dreams. It didn't matter much, just then, if those dreams made sense of themselves or anything else. I was glad to know they're there, and how suddenly my surroundings may evoke them.
I was okay enough to revel in the rush of the fast free downhill toward home, and a somewhat readier bed.