The Man by the Side of the Road

I'm not sure if this is coastal, but I can't get it out of my mind. G. and I drove to Cedar Island Refuge a few Sundays ago. We turned left at an intersection in one of the small communities on the way... Davis, I think. It's a tiny place; one of many along the coast branded by the sea and fishing.

I can't help but wonder about these communities as we pass through; how they must have changed over the years as fishing declines as a way to earn a living and tourism inevitably invades. I wonder too if their legendary closeness and community identity have eroded.

I digress. As we made the turn, I saw a man lying on the shoulder of the road, right in the intersection. He lay motionless and non-reactive; his head cradled in the lap of a distressed man, who appeared to have stopped to help.

Behind the pair, another man talked urgently into a cell phone. Others looked on from across the road.

"Drunk," my husband surmised.

"I don't know," I said. "It seems unusual to me for a drunken person to pass out so near the intersection. He could be ill."

I thought about the scene for the rest of the day. I have reflected upon it since then.

My curious self wants to know more. The stricken man was weathered; my version of what a lifelong fisherman might look like. His clothes had seen many wearings, possibly many days of work. His face was a sick pale beneath his ruddy complexion; his eyes closed. He looked an anachronism cradled against the clean young man and spread out before the man in a polo shirt talking into his cell phone.

Did they know him? Was he someone they saw everyday? Was he a lifelong member of the community, their families telling stories of a long shared history? Was that the cause of their concern?

Or were they stangers? Good Samaritans compelled to stop by a man who could not be left lying in the road, especially on Sunday. Were their hearts broken open by this man's distress, or were they disgusted by a Saturday night drunk gone wrong?

Obviously, I don't know: I never will. I contemplate the potential richness of the first story, and I admit that I want that to be the genesis of the scene I witnessed. I worry that the second story is true, and the vignette I witnessed was no more than a temporary interruption in the lives of the men who stopped to help.

I worry that the man beside the road was without community, without people who knew him and cared whether he lived or died. I worry that he died.