I am driving up the road north of Gilroy. I muse about going to Hawaii tomorrow, leaving chilly nights and gray surroundings behind. The car is moving, yet inert and lifeless, and I accept it without thinking, detached, only peripherally aware of anything.
I have driven for miles across a dun-colored autumn landscape laced with concrete roadways that serve us with smooth cunning; we are soothed into complacent living this way. I used to ride my bike everywhere and was a more fit human being then. That was years ago, and I have changed, I often say.
Glancing up at the sky, I see slate-gray clouds mounded over the coastal range to the west and the more distant hills to the east. But look there! High over the Santa Clara valley is a rose-colored beehive-shaped cloud formation that's reflecting the setting sun, now out of sight beyond the western hills. It's gloriously incongruent, soft and formless, with shifting vapors that seem turbulently alive, energetic, free and lovely.
I can imagine there are black insects buzzing around it or that it's a whirling fat tornado of pink migratory birds, like the blackbirds that flock in their millions over marshes and tidal flats. What does it mean, I wonder. Would a wizened soothsayer glean information from such a cloud? Imagining myself to be such a crone, I try but fail to see the future, discern new wisdom. Nothing else anywhere is anything but a shade of gray; the cloud fairly shouts its existence to me.
Who else sees it? Who are all these people traveling on the highway as I travel alongside them? I always wonder and never know. In our billions, we hardly know anyone; we are faceless, sometimes even to ourselves. It's the oddest thing, the anonymity of our existence most of the time. What do they notice, those people I cannot see hunched in their cars; what stirs their hearts and sparks their thoughts? That cloud? The evening sky? Or all those headlights and engines?
The evening twilight is dimming away, the air cooling and the pink cloud now far behind me. I drive on into the night, my destination a large hotel and a warm meal. I am plunged back into the rigid world of our human construct. My mind and soul remain abstracted, extracted from the right angles and petroleum products that surround me everywhere.
Incongruity as a cloud above the highway: The natural world will not be denied. I am better for the reminder of it all, and thank every single lucky star emerging in the night's dark veil.
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