As dusk began to settle, and the atmosphere grew gauzy and translucent I decided to relieve my sense of isolation and career frustration by going for a walk along the creek. I pulled on a pair of running shorts prior to leaving on my walk, and had strapped on a 9mm IWB (inside the waistband) holster with a length of nylon webbing. My theory is that carrying a weapon is a sort of public service, realizing full well the probability that I'll ever use the device "in the gravest extreme" is practically nonexistent. What was it Churchill said? Oh yes: "A man rarely needs a pistol, but when he needs it, he needs it very badly." It occurred to me some time after the 9-11 attack that depending on the other guy to carry a defensive weapon was just irresponsible. Prior to the heroism displayed on that day, by passengers of a plane destined to crash in rural Pennsylvania, I had been staunchly anti-gun. So anyway I had this gat, and was heading out into the glowering gloom...
I had tucked my concealed carry permit inside the nylon belt along with my apartment keys, as I locked my apartment. I walked on the path past the volleyball court, which floods every time there's a major thunderstorm, to reach the bank and turned left to follow a winding and wet path barely discernable in the twilight. Still, it was a very nice evening and my thoughts wandered. There's a place where I often cross the creek to run on the Marine base, and I decided to see if it were still possible to cross the creek in this place by stepping on a series of stones. I saw that I could probably get across, but that I'd have to climb the opposite bank in the dark, so instead of crossing I turned around and headed back up the bank. At first I thought about passing a huge old tree by circling it on the right, but after a false start up the bank on that side decided it was too steep and went around on the left side of the tree circling it counter-clockwise from 6 o'clock to 12.
I continued past the picnic tables by the side of the creek, and when I reached another standard crossing place got about nine-tenths of the way across the lazy water before deciding, again, that the opposite bank was probably too steep and mysterious to chance in the dark. By this time I had arrived at the driveway that encircled my apartment complex and simply followed the road, and then the sidewalk, back to my apartment building. When I arrived at my door I reached down to retrieve my keys, and discovered that they were no longer tucked under my belt. Somewhere in that acre or so of ground that I had covered during my walk, now engulfed in darkness, I had dropped my keys. I was locked out.
Well, I figured there was still some small amount of light, and decided to retrace my steps just to see if I could chance upon my lost keys. My alternative was to accost one of my unknown neighbors, borrow their phone, and call property management to let me into my apartment... a prospect I did not relish. For one thing, I didn't really know what number to call since property management wasn't "on campus" after 6:00PM and I had not memorized the number. Add to that the fact that I wasn't feeling too friendly toward my neighbors after their Saturday night partying had kept me awake the previous night. I started having visions of sleeping on a park bench waiting for the dawn.
But I slowly retraced my steps, and though I could barely see the ground I scraped it hopefully with a small stick I had found. I figured that if I struck the key chain I'd hear a jingle and be able to recover the keys by sound. After covering about half the route I decided that it'd be really fortunate to find the keys on the paved road that was the last part of my circuit, so jumped ahead to check out that section first. It was a sort of "look where the light is brightest" approach, but it seemed to make sense because I hadn't yet checked that section, and if that's where the keys were they'd be relatively easy to find. I could see the roadway and sidewalk fairly well, but alas there was no sign of my keys. I walked all the way back to my apartment before turning back to investigate darker and wilder sections of my evening walk.
After that I investigated the section of my route where I had gone nine-tenths of the way across the creek, looking carefully at the ground and gently probing with my improvised blind-man's cane I finally worked my way back to the place where I usually cross the creek for my run. I crabbed down to the right of the big tree protruding from the bank. I checked the edge of the creek, and again probed in the shallows, but there was nothing. It occurred to me that the chances of finding my lost keys in the dark, which could have fallen in the grass and sandy soil, or even in the creek itself, anywhere over an acre or so of territory, would constitute something of a miracle. I began to resign myself to knocking on my neighbor's door to borrow their phone to call a number I didn't know so that a property manager could let me in to my darkened apartment. That was my most optimistic thought.
But just before heading home I decided to check by the huge tree, and I recalled that the first time I had really stretched my torso was at the place where I had attempted to go around the tree to the right and had encountered an unexpectedly steep bank. I thought, somehow, that this was probably the spot on my route that had the highest probability of being the place where I had worked the keys out from under my belly band. I looked carefully over the ground, but saw absolutely nothing except shadows and the same ground cover I had seen dimly through the gloom everywhere else that night. Nonetheless I bent over and groped toward the sandy ground just inside a shadow that extended to the right of my foot, and the first thing my hand encountered was my key chain!
So, instead of waiting for hours outside my door for a property manager to show up and let me in, I'm typing this post, and thinking about what sort of "sign" this whole lost-key episode really represents. I never saw my keys during my search. Not once. I never heard them either. I found them solely by touch, and did so the first and only time I reached down to touch the ground. My thought processes played an important part, no doubt, in recognizing that spot as a likely place, but it occurs to me that the part played by grace may have been larger than the part played by intellect. I'm not sure why I think that, but I reached down once and only once that evening. And the first and only thing I touched, the only thing I touched with my hands that evening besides my makeshift cane, was my key chain.
It reminds me, in a vague but meaningful way, of the story of my uncle's dog Tige who became separated from my uncle when they returned to New York City after years flying fighter missions in the skies over Italy and Germany during WWII. Tige had sat next to my uncle through hundreds of dangerous combat hours, and after the separation in New York the dog (although it's not clear that he was only a dog) managed to find his way back to my uncle trotting over a thousand miles of roads in the 1940s to my uncle's new residence in Texas. There is simply no rational explanation for the story of that reunion whatsoever, at least not one that doesn't admit some rather exotic animal perceptions that one might as well call miracles. (What else would you call them?) My hand unexpectedly touching that key chain in the vast darkness of this night seems to distantly reflect my uncle's experience of grace as he saw his war time Labrador Retriever companion again, after having lost him forever in the canyons of The Greatest City.
I just don't quite know how to register the situation, but conceive it as a minor miracle that, in its turn, verifies and legitimates larger miracles of war and comradeship in my family. How many stories, over how many generations? My uncle died just last year, largely recognized as a military hero and dog lover, immortalized along with his pooch in a chapter of Ernie Pyle's Brave Men. I feel that whatever touched my uncle on that day in 1946 reached out and touched me tonight, and retelling the story doesn't half do it justice. I've done my best.
Posted by Demosophist at September 24, 2004 11:09 PM | TrackBack