Every Right On Red Frays The Social Contract A Little Further

A couple of blocks from my office is a steep hill. Sometimes at lunch I go out into the sun and walk up the hill. The hill is very California: asphalt so newly laid that it looks AI generated; a handful of wheeling turkey vultures; golden dried grass edging up to fortress-like new construction. I usually march up the sidewalk but there’s also a path that winds through blackberry vines and over the creek, past where people without other places to stay have been sleeping. It’s a Diebenkorn painting; it’s the place he runs to at the opening of The Beginning Place. Walking up the hill restores me to myself when I am tired or cranky or worried about something I have done or failed to do at work. The only problem is that I have to face down death. At the end of the first block is a stoplight. If you turn right at that stoplight you find yourself in a shopping center with a Lucky and a Home Depot. This shopping center is used a lot while the sidewalk that goes up the hill is used significantly less. Drivers are always turning right to go to the shopping center, or turning right as they come out of the shopping center, and often they make those turns without regard to whether or not there is a pedestrian about to step into the roadway. This is galling, especially because it’s one of those California intersections where in order to cross legally I, the pedestrian in question, have to hit a button before the light turns green in the direction I want to go or else I am stuck there first watching the traffic stream in my direction, then the traffic making the protected left, then the traffic going in the opposite direction, then the traffic making the protected left in the other direction. This probably takes a minute and a half—it feels like a lifetime.

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