Reflection

August 12, 2019

Greetings from the reflection,

It is round, maybe the size of a penny. On the back is etched a couple letters.   It is somewhat crudely connected to a piece of heavy metal wire, stiff but bendable, and on the other end, another amateurish braze holding a small metal clip.  It is a simple design, although you might not guess what it’s for by looking at it.  It’s small and fragile, and it has saved my life countless times.

On the narrow two-lane roads snaking through Oregon and into California there are huge trucks pulling double trailers with enormous logs strapped into them.  Wood that was only recently enormous trees towering in the dense rainforests of the Pacific Northwest.  These trucks are the lifeline of the lumber industry and they are on a schedule and they drive fast.  The drivers know every curve and hill and they can do the route almost without looking.

There is a white line, sometimes, that marks the edge of the road.  It is four inches wide.  The other side of the white line there is the slip of the road left over, maybe six inches, and then either gravel or dirt or grass or nothing.  The white line is where I lived.

I lived in large part to the incidental generosity of the logging drivers, who gave me the few inches I needed.  I lived also in large part because of the simple, small, fragile contraption that now sits in a box where my prized possessions rest.  In a different era, it would be a bowie knife or a compass.  In my era it was a mirror.

The mirror clipped to my sunglasses on the left bow.  It extended a few inches in front of my eye, positioned so that I could glance up to the left at about forty-five degrees and in the small circle I could see the world behind me.  Tens of thousands of miles I wandered around the country on two lane roads, my bicycle packed with the only things I needed, and among them a tiny mirror that kept me from being crushed by logging trucks.

For months after I was off the road, and then to a lesser degree for years after, I would instinctively glance for my mirror to know if everything was ok.  When I walked out of a building, or got in a car, or walked across the street, my eyes would automatically dart up to check.  I did it just now.  For a while, I did it so often my left eye would ache.

The logging trucks were violence and chaos, the lumber held in place between metal stakes and lashed by chains onto the bed of the trailer.  When they roared down the road it was normal to see bark swirling behind them, and mud and branches flying off the sides.  There might be seven sets of wheels that went by me, literally inches from where I pedaled.  I would lock my arms, my hands gripping the handlebars, focused on the white line, but watching the wheels to see if they slid too close.  I glanced in the mirror to know if there was another logger behind it because when the truck was past there was a suction that would pull me off the white line.

Once in a while I would look in the little circle mirror and see that I needed to dive out of the way or be crushed.  Dropping off the white line and into the shells or the gravel or the ditch, fighting with the brake, gritting my teeth, praying I would not fall sideways under the wheels. 

There were some places and some days when I would see no cars.  I could weave across both lanes and sing and ride no handed or eat while I rode.  In truth most days were like this, my view of the world was in front of me.  Vistas that held mountains and oceans and prairies and deserts.  I didn’t live by only looking into a penny sized reflection of what is behind me.

But I was aware.  Cars whooshed by, motorcycles, pick up trucks, farm equipment, ambulances.   A few times I was surprised and nearly dropped in behind a car only to find out it was pulling a trailer and narrowly missed being hit.  Greyhound buses, with the engines in the back, would glide up like whales, nearly silent, and then roar past.  I could have touched the doors where the luggage was stored.

I didn’t live my life through the mirror.  I experienced every day through all my senses, explored my own thinking, met new people, exchanged our stories.  I saw the overwhelming beauty, the desolate places, felt the rain and the sweltering sun, the burning pain of hard work, the hollow ache of loneliness, the triumph of sunrise.  The mirror, the tiny circle of what was behind me, served a purpose, but was not my purpose.

The logging trucks were not malicious.  They were not sharks trolling to feed on me.  They were a small part of life, the part that could hurt you, so worth paying attention to, but still only a part.  I will say that one of the lessons they taught me was that sometimes it was better to sit patiently in the grass and wait until the logging was done for the day. 

This morning when I looked at this fragment from another life, I realized how much it mattered. I looked into it countless times, not to see where I was going but to learn from what was behind me, and to know how to safely go where I was headed.  It seems like a good reminder no matter how I’m travelling.

  

Hope this finds you looking ahead,

David

Copyright © 2019 David Smith