On the days when I drive home from work at a reasonable hour,
I often get stuck in one of the world’s most beautiful traffic jams.
It’s the road alongside Torrey Pines State Preserve between
La Jolla and Del Mar, where two or three lanes narrow to one lane for one
intersection with a light, and then broaden again into two or three lanes. We sit in our cars, crawling along, stopping
and starting, often for a mile or half mile, as we wind our way around the
curves in the road. Torrey Pines’ red, tree-covered cliffs and caves rise up on
one side, the valley slooping down to the lagoon on the other. Stopped there, I
feel like I’m in the woods.
Then the road curves west, and suddenly there’s the ocean,
shimmering blue and gold for as far as the eye can see, with the dramatic red
cliffs framing it high on one side, the bridge over the lagoon sweeping forward,
and the cliffs of Del Mar’s velvety beaches stretching north far below. It’s spectacular.
And I often get to sit there for 20 minutes just looking at
it, side by side, packed in with all the other people in their cars. Most of us sitting alone in our cars, with our
windows rolled up, looking straight ahead and stony faced, each in our own
bubbles.
One day, sitting in the bubble of my little silver blue Fiat,
staring out at the ocean, I looked up as a flock of pelicans flew by.
They glided in a straight line over the line
of the waves closest to shore. Flapping
their wings, then gliding, then flapping, on and on, in an instinctive
rhythm. Free, easy, and effortless. In the air.
Over the ocean. Not on asphalt. Not in a metal box with windows rolled up and
radio and AC on. No clothes on either.
Just beings in the air over the ocean, moving in harmony with the
currents of the air, the ocean, their bodies.
“How strange we must look to them,” I thought. “How primitive. How bound. How constrained and restricted. Needing some other thing to carry us. A hard metal thing spewing fumes, requiring
so much maintenance and energy, isolating us.
And sitting all lined up, when there were so many other ways to go, other
ways to move.”
Do they wonder when we will wake up out of our dream and
join them and fly free?
I certainly do.
Thank you, pelicans and dolphins and whales, oceans and
lagoons and waves, pines and cliffs and beaches, for being here and showing us
the way. May we roll down our windows
and get out of our cars and into the water and onto the ground and feel the
currents of air and water and look up and below and in every direction and feel
and listen and see what the big, wide world has to offer.
