Proper greetings in desolate places.
In reporting on the effects of the largest wildfire in LA County history over the last week for a documentary project, I’ve been driving way out into some newborn wastelands. The scenes in the hills outside the city are eerie and beautiful— naked slopes, black trees curled like claws, charred metal that once was a car or a road sign or a swingset. But in the midst of all this, something very familiar.
There aren’t many people out here, out past the Road Closed signs and barriers. My partner on the project and I drive slowly past workers repairing guardrails and melted signs. Occasionally another car will slowly pass going the opposite way, and I greet them in the only way that seems natural: extending a single index finger off the steering wheel and saying “Howdy.”
When The Boy and I are driving out in the Texas countryside, itself a barren place, he is forever reminding me to greet fellow travelers way out there with the single-finger and “Howdy” combo. Except it’s supposed to come out “Haddy.”
That, in The Boy’s opinion, is the absolute zenith of etiquette in desolate places.
He’ll howl every time I pop that finger up and, in his words, “do Howdy” to some oncoming traveler. In the few seconds of engagement before the other driver flips into our rearview, The Boy looks to see if our greeting has been returned, either with the slight raise of a hand — primordial ancestor to the wave — or the simple, classic, elegant single-finger-raise. Haddy.
Back in the savage emptiness of the Angeles hills, I catch myself wondering why this tendency returns, here, out where there are many fewer people than in the populous city below. In part I think it’s that it would be foolish and exhausting to lift a single finger to every driver in the city (certainly this happens often, but it’s usually a different finger). Plus the infrequency of the tasteful index-finger-raise adds to its cachet. It’s the bright pocket-square in the closet of gestures.
But also I think it’s got something to do with the very desolation in which it thrives. There’s a point at the edge of civilization where it becomes assumed that those few travelers encountered on those lonely roads are united by some similar purpose — a boundary of shared intention. That we’re all out here in this empty place for reasons that the masses in the city do not, will not, understand, and that we must acknowledge one another accordingly. The greeting is a recognition that this wasteland is our covenant.
Our drive through the California hills takes us into a valley where two dozen families have lost their homes to these fires, their known worlds taken up by a sea of flames. Along this street the chimneys stand like tombstones and the residents crawl through nameless jetsam, looking for any memories in a broken teacup. We’ve been talking to these people about what happens next, now that they are scattered by the need to find new homes.
Many have left their beloved valley for the city, at least for now, but they still meet as a community to talk about what, and how, to rebuild. Because they know what unites them is not a shared tragedy, but something else, something as simple and difficult to explain as the raising of a finger, and a finger raised in return.
Oct 25rd, 2009 2:50pm
