Loll

How long from Central Park West at 77th  St to 11th Ave at 27th? I don't know but by the time I got to the end of the march, I was foot-weary and overall tired. My poster, light as it was, was heavy on my left hand, exacerbating the spasms in the right side of my neck.

The crowd was tireless, however, raising a cheer at every blocked off intersection. The indefatigable drummers thumping on water carboys and inverted plastic tubs kept up a steady succession of rhythms. Chants--What do we want? When do it want it? --started up spontaneously. Regularly I and others blew on our whistles as we waved at the people on the sidewalks or up in the buildings.

At the end, everyone 'fell out' and crowded the curbs and sidewalk walls like birds on a wire. The People's Climate March, well-done. We were over 300,000 people speaking with our physical presence on site, in motion. We were there and we cared.

Getting out of the city was agonizing slow until I gave up on impatience, gave in to arriving whenever, and turned to talk to my seat mate.The distance I felt separated the people on the bus coming down had disappeared: we had all been part of an extraordinary event, and now were feeling very ordinary fatigue.

As we talked, I learned from the young, bearded man with the name of a constellation about new ways to make forests more fruitful (literally). We discussed 2 years olds (his daughter, my grandson), biking, the prospects of solar energy, the paradoxes of capitalism. I shared with him what I knew about safe nuclear power, explaining it in a way that impressed me with its clarity and articulation; he, soon after, fell asleep. Our defenses were so far relaxed that even shy people talked to shy people, and made each other smile unaffectedly.

Eventually, all the lights in the bus went off. The young man and woman across the aisle talking in the dark went through the whole gamut of conversation topics from professional projects to  religious convictions to bad jokes they would only tell someone they trusted and then they fell asleep, her head on his shoulder. On either side the long tube, heads were lodged, backs were hunched, no snores but the deep quiet of silent breathing.

Meanwhile, staring ahead down the long barrel of the bus and out through the windshield, I stared at road continually being created and consumed in the headlights. I felt like blessing all of us, myself included, but in whose name? Perhaps in the name of God-in-love, for we had given on behalf of the world as a place to be forever inhabitable. Thinking about it now I can see hospitality, friendship and exploration as making the march possible and, sooner or later, successful. But then, last night, in the peaceful darkness of sleeping comrades, I lolled off to sleep.