Lone Trumpet Under the Overpass

May 15, 2005

No one expects to be falling a hundred and twenty feet. It’s usually a surprise. Darkness enhances the seconds of enlightenment that precede infinity. I think he only meant to be ducking out to take a piss. He and his buddy had come across the check stop and after crawling down the gauntlet of glowing red road flares his buddy had been asked to pull over and step out of the driver’s seat. It was wet on the road but not raining. Muted moonlight and muted reflexes melded with his general sense of devil may care confidence. The urge to relieve himself had fully populated his “one track” state. It would all be OK with his friend because his friend was truly the designated driver. Buddy may have had a sip of beer but that was it. The smell in the car was a result of one Kokanee hitting another in the plastic shopping bag they’d thrown so hastily into the back seat. It would take a week to get the smell out. All it was going to take was a little explaining and, at worst, a Breathalyzer to clear his buddy’s good name. He got out the passenger’s side and headed off across the road. They were parked on an overpass. Two guardrails a few feet apart separated the two sides of the roadway. Waist-high railings topped the barriers. He took two running steps at the first railing, put his right hand on top and swung his legs up to the left as if he were jumping the boards for his shift in the game. He thought he’d land in-between the two railings, repeat the move again, and be over on the other side of the road for a quick pee. Instead he fell through into darkness.

There was nothing between the two bridges that formed the oncoming and outgoing lanes of the overpass. To him there was something there. There was a void as empty and vast as the emptiest thing he’d ever tried to imagine. In this void his senses sharpened to a point. He felt each element of his surreal situation. The wind began to whistle past his ears and the temperature dropped slightly. He could smell the forest around and how the recent rain had extracted more of its fragrance. He hadn’t realized he could tell the difference between the smell of deciduous alder trees and the needle bearing hemlocks and spruce. He made the connection between the sound of rushing water over the rocks below and the mirror image of tires on wet pavement above. This all happened in just under three seconds. These were very long seconds.
There was one sense he didn’t know he had. He now tuned into an emotional language he didn’t know he could speak. Things didn’t come to him in words or visual images. He was aware of the sound of a trumpet. A lone trumpet played notes softly and with great feeling. The intervals were soothing and wide and each note reflected off each leaf and each stone and came back to him with answers. The sound spoke of his situation. If a picture told a thousand words then this music spoke a million things that could not be described in words. The trumpet explained everything to him with the feeling it created deep in what he now knew was his soul. His soul had been such a nebulous concept until now. Just before he made the transition to the next plane of existence he truly understood the core of what made him who he was. He smiled broadly and disappeared into another world. He disappeared into the trees, the flowing creek, the soil, the ferns, and the rounded stones.

Everyday, before and after, the man ran down the trail beside the creek with his dog. He did this for the dog and he did it for himself. There was creative energy on this path. As he passed below the overpass he made it a point to acknowledge the two makeshift monuments to the fallen. It had happened twice before they built the metal latticework high up between the two sides of the overpass. Once was a freak accident. Twice meant someone had to take action. The homemade memorials were always well kept. Trees tried to reach up to the sides of the spectacularly high arches of the concrete bridge. The creek ran gurgling below and colourful tags of graffiti painted the cornices and corners underneath. With candles always burning and red flowers layed out on the small crosses by the water a massive natural cathedral was created. The odd busted shopping cart and discarded spray can accentuated the sense that this was a place that hadn’t escaped a touch of tragedy. The constant rush and low-end rumble of traffic way overhead could sometimes make you feel that you were in a subterranean world filled with natural light.
Today the man let the dog out of the car at the trailhead and followed the wagging hairy beast into the green tunnel of fragrant forest. It had rained an hour ago and everything was bursting with life. He thought he heard a band playing somewhere down the trail. It was a brass band but from a distance all he could pick out was the trumpet echoing up through the trees. As he moved down the creek side, toward the section where the trail moved under the giant arches of the overpass, he realized there was no band. The dog slowed to a walk. The man also slowed to a walk and rounded the corner to see a lone trumpeter standing on the concrete footing at the bottom of the arch of the overpass. He played with the bell of his trumpet pointed down toward the memorials and seemed to be reading the music for the first time. He wore a tweed driver’s cap and had set his backpack down beside him. The horn was silver. The notes were soft and full of something the man couldn’t understand. The trumpeter stumbled often and never stopped. He was looking for the right way to play the piece. The man and the dog stood quietly as the notes combined and echoed off the curves on the underside of the bridge. The tail end of one note overlapped with the soft entry of another and then curled off into the trees. The dog seemed to know more than the man. He looked at her and she had that physical presence she always had when totally relaxed. How could a trumpeter appear here in this strange place and fit in so perfectly? The imperfections in the playing only made it make more sense. The man listened for a while and began to walk away. He realized the trumpeter had explained a situation for him that he could never quite reconcile. The music had said everything that could never have been said in words. A lone trumpet spoke out into the water and trees and rocks and soil. The man couldn’t explain it but he knew that things had just fallen into place.