Campfyre Stories

These days I am seriously lamenting the lack of my computer.  I have some very cool pictures that I want to upload, but I don’t have the hard drive to save the pics or the computer to synch the Treo.  Blah.  My stories would be so much more easy to grasp with pictures…  ah well, they are coming.

I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday and she kept telling me how bizarre these certain things were.  I realized that I don’t really see things that way anymore.  I take for granted the things that other people rarely, if ever see.  I have become so accustomed to things that are out-of-the-ordinary happening to or around me so regularly that I often fail to be amazed by them.  I’ll give you an example.

The bus that drops me off in front of my building does not come onto the company campus in the late afternoon, so I have to walk to the bus stop.  Directly in front of the campus is a highway circle, so to get across I have to essentially cross the same highway twice - once on each side of the circle.

I walk around the outside of the campus to a concrete ramp, go up and across a bridge.  This leads me to a very dark, but fairly short tunnel.  The tunnel is covered in a good bit of excellent and artful graffiti, but since it’s dark and the light shines in the other end, it’s a little creepy and sometimes it feels like a passage into another world…  and what a world it is.  When you emerge from the tunnel on the other side, there is all kinds of greenery coming up over the sides of the path.  To one side is a huge weeping willow and the other side has a grassy hillside.  (Keep in mind that this is next to the highway circle).  The exit to the tunnel has vines coming up and down all around the entryway.  It looks like something you would read described in a novel, but it’s in the downtown area of a local city.  The greenery lasts until you get to the official bridge part to cross the last piece of highway and then leads to a branch-covered, tree lined path that winds down and dumps you out right at an entrance to the highway.  Lots of cars, very busy, as downtown as you could expect.

I really wish I had a way to put the pictures up, but they will have to wait.

Now this, in and of itself is unusual, especially since most of the people I know who are intimately familiar with the area have never heard of nor seen this path, but it got even stranger yesterday. 

I was walking with a friend and as we came out of the tunnel, a hawk landed on the bridge, right where the greenery ends.  The flapping wings in the bushes were what we first noticed and, at first, I thought it was a large bird catching something or fighting something.  My friend thought it was an owl, but upon closer look we saw it was a large hawk who had apparently come down just to say hello.  Out came Daisy and the hawk posed for a couple of pictures, letting me come as close as I dared to get the shots before he flew off, going about his business.

The thing was, though, that my friend was astounded and kept commenting about it for almost an hour.  "I can’t believe it…  that was amazing."  To me, though, this is the sort of thing I see regularly.  I can certainly believe it, even if it isn’t something you see everyday, because, almost every single day I see something that you don’t see every day.  While it was the most interesting thing that happened yesterday, it was by no means the most interesting thing I’ve seen all month, it was just a cool experience, especially to share with someone else.

There is a certain child-like wonder that a lot of people find when unusual things happen to or around them.  They are reminded of how many things they take for granted and how these very cool, strange things can happen from time to time.  I’m not sure if I’m jaded to them, but I think it’s more that I try to live every moment in child-like wonder.  I don’t take this other-worldly path for granted, even if I do walk it regularly.  I get this incredible feeling of having a secret every time I step out of the tunnel, and sometimes my imagination runs wild with the ideas of how one could be transported to a parallel universe in a similar situation.  I didn’t ignore the beauty of the hawk or dismiss it, but it didn’t astound me as this amazing experience…  I have them too often for me to think of them as amazing.

In one of the Sandman graphic novels, two characters are having a discussion.  (Paraphrased)

Do you believe in magic?

Not really, but that’s not really what you’re asking.  You want to know if I believe in weird shit.  I kind of have to, I’ve had a weird shit kind of life.

Yeah, weird shit, that’s a good way to describe it.

Me too, honey.  I’ve had a weird shit kind of life.  You acknowledge it, but when it keeps happening around every corner you turn, you stop noticing how weird it actually is and adapt your psyche to go with the flow.

Words just don’t do it justice.  I need to get my computer back so I can post pictures and better convey the experience.