"Connections"

The seedy little Seventh Avenue storefront that serves as Hendersonville’s Greyhound bus terminal was locked up and dark except for the pale fluorescent glow of a soda vending machine. I was there to meet a friend arriving on an evening bus from Atlanta which, according to a hand-lettered schedule taped to a window, was already half an hour late. There was a phone number, presumably the station manager’s, but with the very bold stipulation, “Drivers and emergencies only!” Earlier in the day there had been scattered but severe storms throughout the southeast and I had anticipated the possibility of a delay, so, despite a propensity for impatience, I resolved to sit in the car and wait.

In recent years, the city has “cleaned up” the Seventh Avenue area, which has basically meant pushing criminal activity a little farther into the darkness and a more comfortable distance from the heart of downtown. Even so, especially at night, it is still obviously inside the perimeters of blight, and the energy there is palpably darker and harder than it is just a few blocks to the west.

Sitting in the car with nothing to read and nothing to do but watch, I began to feel increasingly like a hunter in a blind - not invisible, certainly, but sufficiently camouflaged that so long as I was still and did not disturb the flow of the neighborhood, it seemed oblivious of me, moving and unfolding in its normal ways and rhythms. Indeed, the old Dodge looked more at home in that environment than in my own driveway.

Across the tracks about half a block south was an old single story building that appeared to have had several incarnations, the most frequent, so I judged from the predominately teenage clientele, being an arcade of some kind. I listened to the swells and ebbs of animated chatter coming from the parking lot, punctuated with an occasional burst of raucous laughter or a rough shout. Now and then a police cruiser pulled slowly through the lot, making its presence felt, and with each pass the exuberant sounds would subside until the cop was gone. It reminded me of the way nesting blackbirds in a cattail marsh fall silent during the slow, gliding approach and departure of a hawk.

A shabby old man in a tattered coat emerged from a shadow, then stepped into another one only a few yards from me where he urinated on a wall and went his way either without seeing me or without caring about my presence.

In the rear view mirror I noticed a young couple approaching. I guessed them to be in their late teens and surmised from their casual demeanor and the way they were dressed that if they were not actual denizens of the neighborhood, they were at least familiar with it. The girl carried an infant wrapped in a blanket, the boy carried a heavy suitcase. They stopped at the door of the closed terminal, tried the latch, stood for a moment as I had done earlier and tried to make sense of the schedule. They exchanged a few words, shifted their respective burdens a bit, then walked slowly on down the street, across the tracks, through the parking lot of the arcade, and then went inside. They seemed weary, and I wondered if they were seeking a place to nest with their fledgling out of the sight of hawks.

Underlying all of this was the low grade rumble of the city, of traffic, of machinery in constant motion like a huge automaton mimicking nature, but unable to abide stillness. I realized that anyone sitting still on a city street for very long would be suspect, especially here, and the hawks of one kind or another would eventually come. I had, in fact, noticed the cruising police beginning to pay attention to me, could almost feel them wondering whether I was waiting for a late bus as I seemed to be doing, or was, in their jargon, up to something. And this fueled the reverie that was beginning to turn as dark as its context.

Although much less illumined than the rest of downtown, there is enough artificial light on this stretch of Seventh Avenue to obscure the stars. I looked around for a tree and saw none. Nor could I see grass or even a small patch of bare earth showing through the concrete and the asphalt. I could just as well have been parked in Chicago or New York or Miami. No horizon was visible, only the artificial surfaces of the machine we call civilization, and I was sitting inside a smaller machine waiting for another machine to bring my friend.

This incipient awareness of disconnection became almost overwhelming. I saw that in this environment of our own creation, nature has become a backdrop to the purposes of the machine and cannot even be readily perceived. Although I have done so in the past, I could not imagine ever again willingly spending my nights and days in a place where my senses could touch only artifice and machinery. And out of this came a secondary awareness of why such neighborhoods exist in such abundance in, paradoxically, a civilization that purports to be enlightened as well as prosperous.

It is because we have allowed our natural interdependencies to be supplanted and replaced by artificial ones. It is because we have acquiesced to the potent seductions of consumerism while the machine steadily usurps the role of the animating force. The people, the human beings, who populate such places are obsolete for the purposes of the machine. Where its purposes are not served, it bestows no reward, no largess, and very little mercy.

Seeing the machine for what it is, one does not have to look far to see how dangerously close we have come to assimilating its values, or utter lack of them, to the denigration not only of the planet, but of our own spiritual well being. It has interposed itself between us and the earth, which is the only context in which we may authentically connect with divinity.

The bus finally arrives an hour and a half late, and my friend is the only passenger to debark. It takes the driver less than a minute to retrieve her baggage from the hold in the belly of the machine and then drive away. When she is settled into the old Dodge and we are heading home, she asks brightly how I am. I tell her I feel like Ishmael.

Only I have seen the missed connection, and I wonder if the kids and their baby have a place to sleep. I wonder if they thought they had come too late to make the connection that in fact came too late for them.

~ J. W. Mozingo (Walker) was Unity’s sexton. Sometimes he succumbs to an existential funk, but it never lasts long.