I walk against traffic. Always. There are no sidewalks. Winding, two lane roads through heavily wooded areas. I have an album in my phone of photos from my walks. Mostly dead animals. Sometimes I catch them in action; deer, foxes, birds. Sometimes I spy colorful feathers, a lone purple glove, a baby toy or empty, tiny liquor miniatures. I see a surprisingly large quantity of bottles filled with urine. I don’t understand this and it makes me angry. Where are you going and for how long that you have to pee in an empty bottle and throw it out your window?
I walk defensively because people drive fast and distracted. I try to make eye contact and wave when they give me a wide berth. I curse the ones that don’t slow down, don’t shift just a little, blow my hair back and think, you or someone you love have never walked like this and it shows.
A few weeks ago a police car approached and I didn’t think much of it. In a beat, I realized it was slowing down, lowering the passenger side window. I took out my airpod, paused my playlist. It went like this:
Me: Hi?
Officer Friendly: Good morning. How many miles are we doing today?1
Me: uuuhhhhh2, about 4.5?
OF: Well, you be safe out there.
Me: Why, is something wrong? Did something happen?
OF: No, no not all! I just saw you walking and wanted to pull over and say hello and have a good day. (Wink.)
Me: Ah. Oh. Okay, well thank you. Have a good day.
I put my airpod back in, hit play and kept walking. My heart had picked up the pace. The ol’ blood and guts started reacting before he even came to a full stop. I was caught off guard and annoyed but I didn’t know why yet. He was nice! What’s wrong with me! I sat it with it for a while, told Jimmy the story later and tried to put it down.
When I was about ten years old, my mom and I would go for walks together in our neighborhood some afternoons after school. One day we hadn’t gotten very far, but I could tell you exactly where we were, and a man pulled up to us. We were walking against traffic and he came up from behind, veered closer toward us. Window down, he was completely silent, his mouth open and masturbating.
I don’t know what we did or said. I don’t think we said anything. And I don’t know for how long. Except that it’s one of those moments that expands and feels much longer in the movie in your mind. His face is still burned in my memory. He didn’t say a word and eventually drove off. I remember my mom turning my body around, pointing it back home and we walked even faster until wordlessly and simultaneously, started to run.
It gets blurry for me here. But I know we called the police and an officer came to our house.
I called my mom last week to ask her about this story. She has an excellent memory and recalled it immediately. And in more detail than I remembered. Her retelling of it jogged fractured little details loose for me.
She said we actually saw him twice. The first time she got only a partial license plate number and a little bulb switched on, I could hear us again in my memory. We actually didn’t walk/run back in silence. She asked me if I saw his license plate and stunned, I hadn’t. She said the partial she caught out loud and made me say it back with her over and over. A little chant on repeat until we got back to our front door.
“Do you remember who was walking on the outside, you or me?” I didn’t, I told her. I just remember feeling like he was so close, right there. “Well, if I was a good mother, I’d have been on the outside, between you and the car.” Funny, all these years later and she’s criticizing herself in this scenario. Like, we should have done bodies-in-space-on-a-neighborhood-walk better. I said, “Mom, stop. It didn’t matter.” We had no warning. We both turned our bodies 90 degrees, we both saw the same thing.
“Do you remember identifying his photo?” (Whaaaa?? How did I block this?)
“Oh yeah I can’t believe you don’t remember this. A detective showed up after we saw him the second time and got his full license plate. He opened up a binder of photos, about 6 men. You and I pointed to him at the exact same time and said, ‘that’s him.’ In fact, the detective said something like, ‘wow, I wish all witnesses were as sharp as you two.’”
We don’t know what happened after that. We never knew his name and we never saw him again. The detective told us he’d been doing this to several women and girls in various neighborhoods. He told us he was a father and a husband. A fact that my little brain couldn’t reconcile at the time.
But now we were on a roll.
My mom: “did I ever tell you about the time in the parking lot at my first nursing job?” It was the late 1970s. After a hospital shift my mom walked to her car and there was a man masturbating between parked cars in the lot. She walked across the street and stood in front of a department store and called the police. A young officer showed up and spotted the name tag on her nurse uniform. He asked if she was related to Dr. Spinelli and she confirmed yes, he was her dad. The officer said his mom was a patient of his and then, (buckle up, folks!) proceeded to awkwardly ask my mom out on a date. No rest for the weary.3
Then I recalled a time I drove to Chicago with my friend/mentor Jill to see some arthouse black-and-white film. The theater was mostly empty but partway through a man came in and sat directly behind us. You can see where this is going. My mom asked me what I did. I said I didn’t do a thing. I stayed still and waited it out, didn’t turn around. Deer in headlights, all around.
A few days after the friendly cop, I told Jimmy I figured it out. I called my mom back too. Here’s what creases me. He wouldn’t have stopped if I was a man on a run. And inversely, a female officer probably wouldn’t have stopped to talk to me either. The neighborhood guy when I was a kid wasn’t pulling over for men and boys. The movie theater guy didn’t sit behind the other handful of single men dotted throughout the theater.
What gets me is the approach. That’s all it takes. It’s all over by then. Whatever flimsy spell of safety has been broken. The walk or thought or song is temporarily derailed. By the time my logical brain has caught up to their intentions, it doesn’t matter. To my limbic system, it’s all the same. The threat is in the overture and my body doesn’t know the difference. And it’s a safe bet for them, house money. Of course, I’ll stop or look or freeze. More likely than not, I’ll be quiet or friendly too.
I am arguably more at risk of being hit by a car on my daily walks. I know this. But it’s like driving versus flying statistics. I’d prefer to be on the ground. I’d prefer to take my chances and have my hair blown back by a moving, oblivious vehicle then enter into a some murky, relational negotiation about…whatever it’s about. Shock, power, vulnerability. That’s an entirely different can of worms and frankly, I don’t really care.
In the meantime, eyes up. Head on a swivel.
Ah yes, we - like we’re pregnant
Buying time to mask my shock and confusion that we were stopped in the middle of the road to talk about my fucking mileage??
Wahmen
So good Kate! We're so conditioned for threat, right or wrong. I've been harrassed a few times on my runs over the years, it's always left me unnerved but I also love my runs and go out over and over to reclaim my space.
“To my limbic system, it’s all the same. The threat is in the overture and my body doesn’t know the difference.” And if you hadn’t answered the officer, then what? (Brilliant writing, Kate.)