A few months ago I was walking back downhill in Runyon Canyon after having reached the top and Mullholland, and I noticed it again. I was cruising along at a reasonable clip, not running but not dawdling, and one person after another meandered into my way as I overtook them.
This wasn’t a simple matter of me catching up to them and them suddenly being in my way. They’d be a dozen yards ahead of me with three or four yards beside them where I could pass, and as I approached they would just drrrrift into that formerly open spot.
I expect this with people wearing earbuds. Listening to music makes it harder to hear footfalls. Talking on the phone makes you walk like you’re drunk. But these were seemingly alert, undistracted people, maybe talking to a friend with them or maybe just getting some exercise, and it was like my actually somewhat heavy footfalls behind them just didn’t register.
There are at least two or three people like this on any given hike in Runyon, but that day last summer the whole canyon seemed full of them: speedbumps in spandex, weaving back and forth just in time to cut me off no matter how I tried to anticipate their trajectories.
I wondered why. It seemed to me a foreign way to be in the world, not accounting for the presence of others.
As I walked downhill I suddenly started thinking about supermarkets. That was something I absolutely hated about Berkeley. I’d be in the produce section of Monterey Market or the old Berkeley Bowl, my shopping cart tucked into the least obtrusive spot near me I could find, and I’d reach for some fennel or something and suddenly there’d be six other people’s carts randomly and temporarily stowed between me and the greens I was trying to reach. You know the kind of person I’m talking about. If there’s a narrow spot in a busy aisle, where the store staff has set up a center-aisle display of kitchenware or discontinued cereal or something, and if leaving a cart there is likely to cause an entire aisle to become impassable, then that’s where they leave it, and they take affront if you clear your throat at them.
I can’t do that. I can’t block an aisle without feeling painfully self-conscious. Neither can I walk on a trail without hearing every set of footsteps behind me, without watching the trail ahead to plan how I might best avoid the people I pass.
I had a friend a few years back who was a fellow dog person, and she and I used to send images of adoptable dogs to each other. I sent her one once that showed a sweet-looking, large white wolfy dog sitting demurely in a corner like a good boy, and her response was startling: “He’s trying to make himself as small as possible.” That describes me in supermarket aisles, I thought walking downhill that day in Runyon. It’s a submissive posture without the display, an attempt to be as literally unobtrusive as possible. But more than that, I thought: as the people in whose way you’re trying not to be shift and wander, taking no notice of you being unobtrusive because after all you’re pretty good at it after all these years, you have to stay alert at all times so that what was an obscure corner doesn’t suddenly become exactly where someone else wants to go. “It’s really kind of a skill,” I thought to myself, “to maintain that kind of hyper…”
Hypervigilance. That’s what it is, isn’t it?
Shit.
Hypervigilance is one of the things that’s diagnostic of PTSD. PTSD runs in the family, but I don’t think I have it. Traumas I have had here and there, but aside from a broken arm or three these hypervigilant feelings predated my trauma collection by some years.
Unless you consider my upbringing a long-term, rather subtle trauma, that is. I know. Whose isn’t? But that “making himself small” thing rings true. It’s how I spent my time at home as a kid, at school, singled out for attention, part of me wanting the attention, most of me shrinking into the wall to escape notice. Sometimes the attention was positive, but more often the positives were used as an excuse to berate, a situation with which anyone who was ever accused of failing to live up to his or her potential will empathize. My happiest times at home were the times when my parents were distracted or absent, and I could slip out the door, across the road and into the woods. Or — when no woods were available as on car trips for instance — hiding my face behind a book, a shield of seventy or eighty thousand words between me and my relatives.
It’s an odd thing to realize, considering I do public speaking rather comfortably and well. Perhaps that’s an issue of control. One disastrous early 1990s speaking engagement at San Francisco’s New College aside, when I get up in front of people they have generally stipulated that I have a right to exist in that spot, and then I collect whatever attention comes my way and then it’s over and I leave. Maybe the hypervigilance helps that, makes me a flexible and responsive speaker. Or maybe I’m kidding myself. I don’t know.
It wears thin, the needing to be small. It gets old as I do. It used to be that being in the desert by myself was a reprieve, no one around to have to hide from, almost everything there accepting that I am the size I am, if they notice me at all. These days I go into the desert and see places I love that are doomed, and am reminded that the people dooming them are perfectly content to pay me no mind no matter how loud I am.
Chris, I get the same thing is Supermarkets. If it’s an older person, I can understand. They’re tired, they’re oblivious, they’re ‘listening to the voices’, whatever. The one’s I can’t stand are these ‘UberMoms’ who spend a pleasant afternoon in front of the only decent Greek yogurt or whatever in the store, and WILL NOT MOVE! I gave up being civil. Now I let ‘em have it. Usually something like, “It must be nice to have nowhere to go and spend an afternoon in some free air conditioning.” That usually does the trick. Sometimes they take umbrage and say things like, I actually heard this once, “Well I never!” I told her she should try it sometimes. It’s fun.
It’s very difficult for me to function in cities or in supermarkets. I’ve been in the city the past couple of weeks and have one more to go before I can leave. Every foray into a store seems to go the way you’ve described. Have had different experiences on trails though. When Don and I used to hike here in eastern Ontario, we would be horrified by the number of Narceus millipedes crushed by hikers. Didn’t they see them? To us, the millipedes were so visible - they seemed so wonderfully huge! Apparently, not so to others. On one particularly horrid day, we found more than dozen crushed bodies within the first half mile. As I knelt to photograph a few remains as well as some live ones, hikers kept stopping to see what I was doing. I would show them the millipedes and they would invariably say, “Wow! I’ve never seen one of those before!!” Don and I would look at them incredulously. How could they hike these trails and never see a millipede - especially this large and highly conspicuous species? Guess they are just too damned small. Unfortunately, that’s why turtles get hit on roads, and why lots of other creatures aren’t being considered anymore. Just too damned small to be noticed by Joe Average.
Supermarkets, yes, and multi-use walking/biking/jogging/strollering trails, but most awfullest in airports.
As far as I can tell, many people simply have no internal concept of anything outside of their immediate visual field (i.e., behind them). It’s a kind of petty narcissism, a simple failure to be aware of the existence of anything they cannot actually see.
I really would not characterize cognizance of the other 55% of one’s immediate surroundings as ‘hypervigilance’. More like ‘simple courtesy’.
I have to make my way through university hallways all the time and I’ve noticed this tendency of amblers to drift into one’s path, as well as their tendency to occupy the middle of any hall or pathway they’re sauntering along in such a way as to make easy passing of them difficult. I think that it’s an unconscious tactic to control the space around them. They’re not oblivious to you, they’re interacting with you by denying you free passage.
I hope you don’t beat yourself up too much about “hypervigilance.” Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But sometimes, a cigar’s just a cigar, y’know? I was reared to be polite and general to defer to others. It’s not a badge of honor, but it doesn’t hurt to have it as a coping mechanism. Seems to me that making oneself small, for whatever the reason, isn’t necessarily a bad philsophy if you reharness the meaing of it.
But ditto, I have encountered all the classic boorish, self-absorbed, pushy, clueless types in airports, stores, city streets, and occasionally on trails. Yes, most of them annoy me. But I’m trying to work on not letting them get to me.
I live in a city. I was in the grocery store last night, and encountered a woman lost in the labels of canned cat food, blocking the narrow aisle. I can’t say I do this every time, but I just decided to stand and wait and not say anything. Ten, 12, 14 seconds or so later, she realized and apologized and I said, no problema and we both walked on.
For what it’s worth . . .
Sorry about all those little typos . . . I hope they don’t . . . well . . . get in anybody’s way!
Fascinating observations about the earbuds and cell phones. A recent Dateline (TV show) featured a “test” with a clown on a unicycle (not something you see every day) riding past several people on cell phones.. Afterward the cell-phone users were asked if they were generally observant people (all heartily agreed that they were) and then asked about their walk and what they saw. *None* of the people on the phone saw the clown. I found that damned alarming. A whole generation of people sleepwalking through life looking at text messages and missing the cool sights around them; not a pleasant thought at all.
As always, thoughtful post.
“It’s an odd thing to realize, considering I do public speaking rather comfortably and well. Perhaps that’s an issue of control.” It absolutely is, at least for me. I can lecture to 150 with ease, but a class of 15 will have me sweating an hour before it meets.
The last paragraph of your post was very effective.
remembering we had a 12 year friend of my daughter come with us on a camping trip. I was totally amazed when I pointed something out about, I’d get this totally blank stare back. like what is there to see or look at. it was as if she was totally blind to the beauty of nature. as if never having learned use our eyes. Interesting one of my daughter’s favourite lines now is. . . See with eyes that see. . Nature has so fallen out of favour with all the focus on book learning in schools which are looking more like jails each day.
interesting you mention about being fine with a large speaking audience while you get a grand case of the wee bee gee bees in from of 15 students. . I’ve never done either . . though in my mind’s eye have always felt I would be more comfortable in front of a large audience also figuring if I am meant to speak, it will happen in its own sweet time. as will, the reawakening of humanity discovering how the plants they grow in their gardens it the food that will doctor us back to health
thanking Alice Waters for sharing your other post that had me read more . . . glad I did
It’s been a while since I’ve been here and figures there would be a posting about something that really resonates with me.
I had a supermarket aisle experience tonight. No need to go into detail—it’s been described well in this post already. But the trail experiences really got to me. I day hike alone. It’s really the only time that my thoughts stop being verbal. I get into the rhythm of the hike, finding the point on the curve where exertion best meets motion and suddenly I go non verbal. I no longer have that voice inside my head. Things are immediate, thoughts and concepts are image-based and not framed in sequences of words. It’s a very special state to be in and it’s easily disrupted. I find I hate, just hate, hearing people speak on the trail. Encountering someone alone and simply nodding an acknowledgment is great. But encountering groups of two, three, or more people, talking about the same things they could talk about anywhere, drives me crazy.
It’s not fair, I know. The same trail I’m on may be the place where they can discuss things they can’t deal with anywhere else. But couldn’t they do it with their inside voices?
Ron