Zen & the Art of Traffic Dodging

“Recently?” people ask, looking at me questioningly. “You were driving,” they say, wanting
to affirm I hadn’t been on foot.

No, I was walking, into town, in Portland, Maine, enjoying an unseasonably balmy morning and some unhurried time. The light was green at State. I looked left—no cars—and started across, toward Longfellow monument, comfortable in an amplitude of space and time that seemed to spread around me, enjoying the walk, thinking. . .

State Street is a wide thoroughfare. I looked up to the landscaped curb of the square
ahead, only several feet farther. If there were any crows in the surrounding trees whistling me warnings, I didn’t hear them. Maybe some morning sparrows fluttered nearby.
Something—not anything I can put a finger on—called attention to my left. I think the car was red and remember noting the hood sloped low toward me. Headlights, chrome bumper and grille came on in several stop frames, that is, flow time stopped, the car growing
in a sequence of stills—blowups, each bigger than the previous one. Though the frames advanced rapidly, I had time to think I might be killed. I joined hands, lifted arms overhead and threw myself shoulder first up and toward the car.

Next, I remember sitting on the pavement, car stopped before me, the driver’s door open, a woman standing there crying, “Oh, my god! Oh, my god! I didn’t see him.”

Another woman came and kneeled before me.

“Don’t move,” she said, and asked where I hurt. “Here,” I said, exploring the side of my foot above the ankle with a hand. “And my hip,” thinking then I must have come down on the hood.

“I saw you, I saw you!” a man who had rushed over and was encouraging me to lie on his coat was saying excitedly. “I saw you flying through the air!”

That’s how I almost died a sunny morning in snowy Portland, one Christmas season. But
I didn’t. I rose from the tarmac and walked to a waiting ambulance; and later, after much waiting and listening to choruses of the newly injured, I emerged from the emergency room into that same beautiful day and walked home. And, finally, this isn’t a story about one more foolish death on the road but how I saw my life, the way I would like to live it, the way it was for a moment that seemed to be without time or fear.

I have told this story five times, and then five more. And again, I want to tell it to you, because each time I am still left with the feeling I haven’t told it. What’s always missing
is that moment in which I functioned perfectly, without thinking. Try to teach me a dance step, and I am lost. If I had thought about what to do, I think I would have froze and been killed, at the least seriously injured. The car’s bumper certainly would have broken my leg. Yet I can’t remember what was happening in those moments I was saved, between when I first sensed the onrushing car and when I found myself on the pavement.

What faculty warned me? Did I close my eyes while flying through the air? I missed
a peak moment in the show and needed that bystander’s shout to learn what happened.

Isn’t it possible both to live such an experience and hold onto it? I read in the newspaper two pedestrians were killed that New Years Eve and morning. What is this world, anyway, when someone else’s bad news seems more real than getting hit yourself by a ton on wheels?

And how was time slowed, changed into the sequence of blowups I experienced, so that I was able to react within the slim moment everything took place? I have heard this phenomenon described in Zen teachings as instinctive evasion, in which there is no time lag, not a hair’s breadth, between perceiving and avoiding some danger.

I walked out of the hospital emergency room with a bruised hip into the sunny, winter afternoon, feeling the day just begun. Sunlight splashed over the sidewalk, in windows, off cars and trucks. The afternoon shook out fresh, bright sheets, the way it really is.

Martin Steingesser
First published in Maine Times
January 15, 1998