On Saturday I met my friend Stephanie in Dupont Circle, and we biked down to Gravely Point in Northern Virginia. This small park sits on the banks of the Potomac River, right at the end of the runway of National Airport. We watched planes glide in scarcely a hundred feet over our heads, with their slick-skinned bellies and Byzantine roars. We talked about loads of things.
Shortly after one plane passed, there was a bizarre whistling noise just over our heads, emanating from no visible source. Apparently the plane had created some kind of turbulence in its wake that was producing a sound like crickets' wings. It was like the air itself was rubbing together, or tearing open like cloth. The noise lasted about ten seconds and then ceased suddenly. We didn't hear it again when other planes landed.
On Sunday Susan and I finally fulfilled out social obligation to see The Phantom Menace. I found this movie incredibly uplifting, because it suggests that even extravagant special effects and well-paid actors cannot keep a bad movie from being terrible. Perhaps there is something more to crafting a good story than festooning it with money.
Friday night was my overnight shift at the ambulance. Again I was put on the paramedic unit, which is frequently sent on more serious calls. Midway through the evening, we were dispatched for a patient whom I didn't really believe would live beyond the immediate future. The back of the ambulance was a scene of controlled chaos, as if the endangered life itself was flitting birdlike around the inside of the moving rig, and we were all furiously trying to hold on to it. It was like we were all locked into one of those wind-tunnel phonebooth contraptions in which someone has to grab as much loose flying money as possible in a minute. I like this image because it takes a grave situation and transforms it into something almost comic. As odd as it sounds, events on an ambulance sometimes seem caught halfway between desperate and ridiculous.
After we had brought the patient to the hospital, we stood back and watched the ER staff mobilize to work on him. It is a dramatic sight, watching everyone focus everything they've got on keeping one person alive. As my adrenaline cooled, I receded to a quiet hallway to clean blood off the ambulance cot, and then went out to help another EMT clean the ambulance. He was sweeping out various trash items -- bandage packaging and the like -- when I heard something plastic hit the pavement. It was a button off the patient's shirt, probably yanked off during our efforts to treat him.
I held the button in my palm, and experienced a powerful impulse to put it in my pocket and keep it. I felt pretty certain that this patient was going to die, and that knowledge invested this tiny item with a strange power. The button was a talisman against some greater evil... or perhaps it was nothing more than a macabre trophy. I don't know what impelled me to want the button, but I sensed if I didn't get rid of it right away, I was going to be stuck with it forever. I threw it back in with the rest of the trash, and felt immediately lighter.
Later that night when we brought in another person to the ER, I heard that the first patient had lived, and was doing better. So much for my judgment in both medicine and talismans. It was a tremendous relief that I hadn't pocketed the button, although I couldn't explain why. It's far too easy to start indulging in magical thinking about such things: believing one can know the deep connections between events, and then thinking we can control fate by manipulating the hidden strings of the universe.
In other news, small tomatoes are beginning to appear in droves on the fuzzy vines of the tomato plants I put in this spring. I'm so fond of my nascent tomatoes that I have almost fatherly feelings toward them. Of course, in the natural world, things frequently end badly -- I will eat my young. They will be delicious.