Troubling Questions After Close Call on Freeway

His clothes were the color the invisible wear--not the hot pink or lime green or crisp white of games and fun and safety, but the color of dirt. A color barely visible at twilight, at 60 miles an hour.

Yet there he was, suddenly in front of my car on Interstate 5. He was running across the four lanes of freeway, pushing his shopping cart in front of him. My foot flew to the brake, my hand to the horn, my heart to my throat. He was fast, faster than his appearance suggested he could be. Thank God.

He made it safely to the median; I made it safely home. But his image haunts me.

What if I had hit him? What about all the other freeway encounters that don’t end the way ours did? The migrant workers, the mentally unstable and homeless who have been killed; the drivers--young, old, rich and poor--who weren’t able to stop in time?

Where was he going? When he got to the median his path was blocked by a concrete barrier too tall to cross with a shopping cart. He was not, like so many of the people who dash across the freeway, a migrant worker on his way to a place of promise, however small.

Where had he been? His face, his hands, his feet--he wore no shoes--and his possessions were all the same invisible color of his clothing. Had he always been a resident of the roadside, of places without running water and a roof?

Was the danger he faced on the freeway less than what he faced off it? Perhaps he was fleeing trouble, trouble of his own making or of someone else’s. Or maybe his crossing was done on an impulse, the way I might throw a bag of chips into my shopping cart--a cart not filled with the sum of my worldly possessions but with the week’s groceries.

Was he as scared as I? What if when I had honked my horn, I had startled him rather than alert other motorists, as I’d intended?

Is he as angry as I am? Angry that the number of homeless continues to climb? That even as the need for services and shelter increases--at a rate some indicators put at 10% a year in San Diego County--we have governments that talk not of addressing the roots of the problem but of cutting away what is now spent to help the desperate? Angry that it is so difficult to act in the face of a problem so large.

Does he wonder, as I do, about the future? Wonder about all those who are not now homeless but who live so close to it that some small change in their circumstances will place them on the street? Wonder if we will see again a time when the dimensions of homelessness are such that the doorways of businesses and the lobbies of banks and the sides of the freeways are not home to the hungry and destitute.