Before I even set out from my chemotherapy and radiation treatment in Puyallup on Monday to the office in Sumner, I’d calculated the trip taking about 35 minutes.
I can live with that, I told myself.
Foolish, foolish boy.
See, between the various obstacles of just getting from Point A to Point B like traffic, numbering fools walking in the middle of the road, lunatic drivers and the ever-popular “What the hell is that thing crossing the road ahead?!” — the trip took much longer, and the mind began to wander.
All I know is that somewhere along the construction-closed roads and sloth-paced highways, probably at the moment I began to utter blood-curdling blasphemies, I got to thinking about a book, “The Odyssey,” and its titular hero, Odysseus.
As the Greek poet Homer tells us, the crafty Odysseus, beset by setbacks, wandered over the “wine-colored sea” for years before he reached his home in Ithaca. So, with my mind churning in traffic that wasn’t doing even a nano-churn, I began to imagine my tortured path would map very well onto Odysseus’s voyage, rendered in such modern terms as I could find.
Was I off base? Let’s see:
Odysseus’s homeward journey took 10 years, mine two hours. His in boats, mine in an air-conditioned vehicle.
I had to deal with traffic, construction zones, you name it. He had to best monsters, among them the Cyclops, that giant, one-eyed, bone-crunching beast. I got the willies at the mere sight on a man on the side of a road, wearing an eye patch. He made it past Scylla, the monstress of the cliffs, the enchantress Circe (“who straightaway turned men into groveling swine,” according to John Milton in his Comus), or the Sirens who drove men to madness with their singing. Not even the island of the Lotus Eaters with its sweet music, and its lethargy-inducing lotus plants and poppies, which tempted the sailors with its tempting, “home-shmome, stay here with us boys” ambiance.
OK, they don’t compare.
Well, perhaps in one way they do. As the poet James Russell Lowell wrote in “The Vision of Sir Launfal:”
“Daily, with souls who cringe and plot, we Sinais climb and know it not.”
That is, on some days, just getting to where we are going and getting back again in one piece, having contended with all we had to get done in the day, seems like a hero’s act, requiring the quick-thinking, on-your-feet adaptability of an Odysseus.
Because the real monsters are still out there. Like the woman who’s just stumbled out of a bar at 2 a.m., plastered, and hops in her car. Or the guy coming up on your bumper at 80 mph above the posted speed limit. Then there’s the woman who, unbeknownst to anyone, left her home an hour ago having already decided to kill herself, which she’ll do by lurching into wrong-way traffic and smashing into whatever innocence that chance throws her way.
Then there are the drive-by shooters, and the guys who fire into crowds and set off bombs.
We must contend with these awful people. As the great mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote of today’s heroes in the forward to his book, “The Hero’s Journey:” “The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”
That means you and me, everyone.
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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.
