Shame on Wheels (2016 Flashback)

Note: I wrote this for an essay class I've been taking at Hugo House. The assignment was to "plumb a moment of shame that challenged your sense of self." I've been reluctant to post it, because it brought up so many crappy personal and political issues that have continued to fester for the last three years... but my kids tell me it's worth sharing. So here goes.

It’s a damp and dark November evening, particularly damp and dark here on the sloping curve of Columbian Way, headed down the side of Beacon Hill into the Rainier Valley. The streetlamps are out along this stretch of road, and the feeble headlight on my bike is running out of juice; the pavement is slick with mud and rotting leaves. I’m going much faster than I should in these conditions, but I don’t care, because Donald Trump was elected President on Tuesday.

There’s a narrow woodsy road on the right up ahead, at the darkest part of the curve. There’s almost never anyone there, but once in a while I’ll come upon a car inching forward past the stop sign into the bike lane, trying to see around the corner. Most nights this is the spot where caution interrupts the exhilarating freedom of soaring down this long, glorious hill. Tonight I don’t even touch the brakes as I fly past the intersection. Bring it on. Take me out. I’m done.

Once I’m past the woodsy road, my tension eases. I swoop back into streetlamp territory, with plenty of time to slow down before I merge with traffic at the bottom of the hill. I’m surprised to see a pair of headlights in the left turn lane facing me – nobody ever turns onto that dead-end side street. They’re not signaling – are  they really turning? At the last second I decide to plow ahead. I have the right of way, goddammit. Besides it’s too late to stop or slow down even if I wanted to.

The car turns, right in front of me. I brake hard and swerve left, narrowly avoiding the front bumper, veering directly into oncoming traffic. I turn sharply back, skid, and go down hard. I scramble to my feet, drag my bike out of the road, and stand there on the sidewalk, heaving with adrenaline-fueled rage, roaring raw profanities at the sky.

I have no idea if I’m hurt or not, and I don’t really care. The floodgates have blown open. Everything comes pouring out: all the buried layers of excitement and doubt and defensiveness and outrage that built up over that dreadful primary season and the surreal campaign that followed. The hungry anticipation of a milestone victory – a woman president, something I’d never imagined would take this long, back when I was a feisty eleven-year-old running around in an ERA t-shirt, snapping back at any boy who said I couldn’t do anything he could. The dawning humiliating horror on election night, the downing of drink after drink, the keening and rocking and sobbing on the couch, with my teenager awkwardly patting my back, trying to mask his alarm. The conviction that this was Game Over for the climate: whatever slim chance this boy and his sister might have had to grow old on a habitable planet had just vanished. The shame, in the following days, at having been shocked by this outcome: how naïve of me to imagine that my country was anything but a poisonous sack of rotting racist pussy-grabbing garbage! The news that 54% of white women voted for Trump; the confounding implication that I was somehow responsible for them, for the entire disaster. The reeling realization that everything I thought I knew about changing the world was wrong, that all those years of meetings and trainings and protests and phone calls had been not just useless but laughable, that a smart, experienced, flawed, competent white woman has no place to stand, no role to play. The whole roiling mess comes flooding up from the depths of my broken heart, pours out of my ragged throat.

Someone touches my arm, and I whirl around. Is this young white guy the asshole who nearly killed me? No, he’s just stopped to see if I’m okay. I immediately collapse against his shoulder, sobbing – and then recoil, appalled at having slipped so quickly into this pathetic damsel-in-distress act, when I’m actually a furious, full-grown woman, four inches taller than him, nearly old enough to be his mother. He asks what happened, and I sputter out an explanation, gesturing wildly toward the hill, the road, my bike, laying there on its side with the tail light still pulsing red. The car that nearly hit me, he points out, has pulled over halfway up the sidestreet, not ten yards away. I surge forward to confront the driver: finally, a target for all this fury.

The door of the car opens, and out climbs a tiny, terrified, Somali woman with a white headscarf draped over her head. She approaches with wide eyes, reaching out to me with shaking hands, saying words I don’t know, but whose meaning is clear: Oh God, I’m so sorry, are you okay? I’m so sorry, oh God, please tell me you’re okay.

"You almost killed me!" I yell. But as soon as it’s out of my mouth I know it’s not true. It’s dark and rainy. My headlight’s not that bright. I should have slowed down way before I came shooting out of the shadows directly into her path. I’m clearly not seriously hurt, or I wouldn’t be charging at her, shouting in her face, taking out my helpless wrath on someone far more vulnerable than me. My rage withers instantly into chilling, choking shame.

"I’m okay," I tell her. "I’m fine,” I say (also untrue). “I’m sorry I yelled at you. It’s just been a really shitty week."

"For all of us," says the young white guy, catching my eye, cocking his head towards her. I feel the sting of his reminder: Oh please, lady. You think this is gonna be hard on you?

The three of us stand there in silence as the rain picks up. I try to imagine this woman’s life, what she’s lived through already, the fears she’s facing now. I look at the guy again: he has an air of Bernie Bro about him, for sure – were he and I glaring at each other across a district caucus six months ago? None of that matters now, of course. An enormous chasm has swallowed our country; it yawns before us still, its depths unplumbed; we are a tiny, fragile clutch of strangers clinging to its slippery edge. I want to believe there’s some redemptive beauty here, a path forward to be found in our common humanity. Instead I feel like a character in a parody of “Crash.”

"I’m sorry," I choke out one more time. I turn to the woman, enfold her in a hug that I hope is reassuring (though it occurs to me later – with another flush of shame – that I might have imposed this intimacy on her to ease my own mind). I hug the guy too. He has righted my bike, and we spin the wheels experimentally. It’s a little wobbly, but it’ll get me home.

As I ride up Rainier Avenue, I feel blood seeping through my sleeve where my arm scraped the pavement. A bruise on my knee is starting to swell. The tsunami has passed, but the flood of rage, fear, grief, and shame still flows through me, as it has for months. As it will for years.

There’s a glimmer of something else, though. I go back to the part where I lay sprawled in the middle of the road, all tangled up in the bike frame, scrambling to get out of the lane before someone came roaring around the corner. It dawns on me that I seem to have decided that I want to be alive after all. That maybe I’m willing to keep breathing, keep fighting, keep pedaling through this shitty, shattered world.