Along the barge canal

Dear You,

Hamlin Garland once observed that the highway is traveled by all sorts of people, but that the poor and the weary predominate. Still true today -- probably moreso. Yet I find in my time and in my place, the places where I find myself most often, the poor are invisible.

It was with surprise, then, that I came upon a vagrant yesterday. I was cycling along the barge canal just outside Pittsford (where per capita income is unarguably rather high), and I spotted what I took to be a pile of discarded clothes in the weeds beside the trail. As I passed I could see worn boots on one end and a cradled mass of hair at the other. My next thought was that it was a corpse and nearly stopped. Then I realized that this man was no doubt sleeping in the afternoon warmth, and the other bikers, hikers, joggers that were taking this path would surely have determined whether someone were dead or not!

A half hour or so later, as I was returning to where I'd left my car, I passed him again; this time he was afoot. Thin. Shambling along. Eyes downcast. He looked up, nodded. I nodded.

But for those two separated moments he exists only in my memory. Awhile later, as I sat outside a coffee shop, I watched people feeding the ducks, tossing crumbs from their bags into the water. ($1 a bag; available from the table near the door.) Young people walked by wearing tee shirts with names of universities across their chests, talking on their cell phones or discussing the contents of their shopping bags. Briefly I took notice of the young woman who selttled next to me on the bench to adjust her inline skates. Then I wondered -- again -- if the rumpled man was still walking along the canal . . . and where? Bushnell's Basin? on to Fairport? All the way out to Palmyra? Where would he find his dinner, and where his bed that night?

I can't know the answers because I did not stop . . . neither in the going out nor the coming back. I didn't stop to ask.