Still tingling with the dewy warmth of my cobalt blue dragonfly shower morning, I pulled into a small visitor center parking lot just twenty minutes north of that magical site. I had floated down from the captain’s chair and was absently reading details I wouldn’t remember about the nearby lagoon when a timid, “Hi,” wafted through my haze.
“Can you …? I mean … I need gas. I have this.”
He was holding out an empty gallon milk jug, and his eyes and posture were weary—poised for rejection.
“Okay,” I said. “You wanna give me the jug, and I’ll fill it and come back?”
His eyes met mine, blue and appreciative. “I have money too,” he said.
I accepted his four dollar bills only because my debit card had recently been compromised, a theft my bank had quickly caught. But I was currently out of cash or a way to get any till I got to the next town with a branch of my bank—a couple hundred miles down the road.
“I’ll be back,” I told him.
“Thank you,” he said effusively. He was sunburnt and too thin, his red T-shirt was worn, and his blond hair was thinning, but at that moment his entire body seemed to sigh a breath of relief.
Back at the quirky gas station I’d first seen before finding the dragonfly spot, I was glad for the chance to use the old-timey gas pump to fill the gallon jug and to check out the minutia of the station’s interesting details. But there was a heaviness there—something oppressive. And what had called to me as friendly and kitschy when I’d first seen its playful colors from a distance in the dark now seemed stiff and unrelatably garish in the full sunlight—like an actual consideration of nostalgia for the 1950s. The gray-bunned woman behind the counter fixed her gaze on something behind me in a way that left me wondering if she was blind even after she had once seemed to pin her eyes on me.
When I got back to the visitor center, the guy with the red T-shirt accepted the jug with gratitude, and I saw he wasn’t alone. A wispy woman with blond pigtails and a face and bright dark eyes etched deeply with exhaustion from not just the day but a lifetime of wearing her heart on her sleeve and being kicked in return far too often. She was overly thin like him, in a way that suggested cigarettes and perhaps other substances had replaced many a meal over the years.
They’d been out there for six hours—being told no over and over. The man at the visitor center counter, who clearly had gas in a shed behind the center, had insisted he simply couldn’t leave the counter. In the brief time I was there, two cars besides ours had come into the large lot overlooking the lagoon. The people inside had slid out and sauntered around momentarily before climbing back in, not even glancing toward the likely nearly always empty visitor center. Stoppers by simply shook their heads and climbed back in their cars.
“No one would even take me,” the woman told me. Her eyes conveyed a pain not dulled by the lack of surprise that comes with repeated disappointment. “Little old me. What am I gonna do?” She sighed.
“I’m sorry,” I tell them sincerely.
“Do you have any aspirin?” she asked me. She had a splitting headache. I’m guessing they’d been in the sun much of the six hours and had likely had little if anything to eat.
I got her some Advil.
They were from Kentucky, and we exchanged brief pleasantries about how far they’ve come before we parted and went our separate ways. I wished them good luck and wished to myself only after their beat-up once-white Toyota Corsica was in my rearview that I’d offered them some of the dried fruit or lemon cucumbers I had.
How great does the frequency of rejection in a person’s life have to be and for how prolonged a period until being told no is what he or she comes to expect? And when that pattern starts in youth, how manifestly does life train the shape of one’s body to resonate with the expectation of denial—of being shunned, left out, looked down on—until it becomes the norm? How absolute shit is it that those who start with a deficit, more often than not, just keep bowing under the weight of more and more of the same piling on?
How much do I—a white woman with a friendly smile and a generous network of familial support, for whom life has opened more doors than it’s shut—take for granted the privilege that nets me the help of strangers easily and often? The ability to be annoyed and firm with, rather than fearful of, the young police officer who will tap on my van door one 2 am a few hundred mile later?
If like likes like, how do I foster first in myself the ability and compassion that will enable me to see all the other humans (even those whose political agendas make my skin crawl; hey, we all have our challenges) as like me? And if that’s not daunting enough, how bewilderingly trying is the desire to see that—all of us seeing each other as like—perpetuated throughout the world?
I borrowed this photo from Wikipedia. I thought I had snapped a few shots but seem to have captured neither the lagoon nor it’s tiny visitor center.