Reflections on the Man Lying in the Street

I was driving on my way to kayaking when I saw what sort-of looked like a man lying in the left turn lane of the highway. Whatever it was had the right mass of a person but not the right proportions so I couldn’t quite figure it out as I drew nearer and nearer. I pulled off the road and walked out into the road. Even then I was not quite sure if the pile of clothes contained a person but when I touched it, he was a person, curled up with a hood pulled over his head that was pillowed on a small bag, as if sleeping in the middle of the road.

There was no sign of injury. I tried to get him to stand up and come out of the road but he would just grunt and roll back into a fetal position. He was probably in his mid-twenties. No smell of alcohol. As I tried to convince him to get up, another car stopped and called 911. Another car stopped and two ladies came over, one saying she was a doctor and asking if he needed help. In a couple of minutes, the police arrived. One of them asked questions that the man would not answer. The policemen had the authority to help the man up and out of the road. On the side of the road, the other, non-doctor woman tried signing to the man and he signed back. So he was deaf. That changed the way the policeman related to him. An ambulance arrived and I drove on.

Three reflections from that experience have stayed with me. When I first interacted with him, I saw in his eyes a broken spirit. Every year two or three children transfer to Chrysalis because they were being bullied at their former schools. When I meet them for the first time, they have a similar dull, pained look in their eyes. One of the joys of Chrysalis is watching the light come back into those eyes over the first couple of weeks of school as they realize that the other kids will be nice to them and that they are safe. But if there was not a Chrysalis and you had to endure an entire schooling of such bullying—and if you were deaf—and if you were from a background where you ended up on your own, homeless, deaf, broken, would you reach a point where you would just lie down in the street, curl up and cover your head until a car ran over you and ended the suffering?

The second reflection is about him lying there. I was at a distance when I first noticed something lying in the road. I did not see him walk out or lie down. He was already lying there. He might have been lying there for many minutes in an area of steady traffic. He was in one lane of a double left turn lane to turn up to a Walmart superstore and attendant mall. So people wanting to turn left could have gone around him in the other turn lane. But that would still require them to drive around a man lying in the street. How many minutes had he lain there? How many cars had driven by a man lying in the street without stopping?

The third reflection is a sense of wonder about what happened when I did stop for him. Within a minute of that, people were stopping, including a doctor and a woman who could sign with him. How strange is that, that the help he needed aligned in a few minutes? All I could do was stop for him but the act of stopping, I think, led others to stop who could help him. The world can act heartless or kind but in some mysterious way, we help decide in which direction it shall flow.