The Walking Guy

I saw him today, walking the beach, up near the high tide line, while I was jogging closer to the water's edge. 

I call him the Walking Guy because that's how I always find him; walking.  He walks everywhere.  I see him near or on the beach usually, but I often see him inland too, on the back roads I employ to avoid the traffic on Route 1. Though I've seen him for years, decades now, I do not know his name or anything about him, where he's from or where he lives.  I always see him walking; head down, as if studying each step before him, or perhaps looking for something on the ground, or maybe simply engaged in deep thought.  He rarely seems to look up.  And though I've passed him many times, running, walking, riding my bike, or even driving by, he never looks up to make eye contact.   

His hair is shaggy and unkempt and his natural color is brown with lighter highlights that used to bleach out under the summer sun.  His hair is mostly gray now though.  He used to shave his face but left it grizzled, as if he only scraped a dull razor over it once a week or so.  Nowadays he often lets his beard grow out and it becomes quite long and gray like his hair, only even scruffier; picture Santa Claus on crack.  And I swear the wire frame glasses he wears are the same pair I saw him wearing way back in 1973 when I first came to awareness of him.  In the summer he usually wears either faded blue jeans, or an old pair of bleached out blue surf baggies that I think might be older than his glasses.  On his torso it's either a sweatshirt, t-shirt, or bare skin, in that order as the weather warms.  All his clothes are tattered and stained except for the surf trunks which I'm sure will survive Armegeddon. In the winter he concedes somewhat to the weather and has an old down coat, a watch cap, and a pair of gloves.  On his feet it's sneakers. Almost always sneakers.

I used to think he was an old, burned out surfer.  He certainly seemed to carry that air about him.  And he seemed connected to the beach.  In the old days, I would sometimes see him sitting on a rock, overlooking the surf...watching.  Maybe he is simply a casualty of the drugs of the late '60's/early '70's.  I also sometimes wonder if maybe he's some eccentric genius who when not wandering about town, deep in thought, is back in some hut in the woods, formulating mathmatical theories that the rest of us could never understand.

I sometimes ask others who live in town, if they know anything about him. His name at least. They usually look at me puzzled, not understanding who I'm talking about, which leaves me wondering if I'm the only one who sees him.  As if he's no more real than an imaginary friend from childhood.  Or more like a wandering specter of my consciousness, whose import or message I've yet to figure out.  I actually used to think of him as, in a way, almost myself; that he was my destiny, my ghost of Christmas yet to come.  In the throes of my doomed marriage and former life, I envisioned that I too would one day become a lonesome, restless wandering soul. A hermit loner, walking through a life that was surely yet to come, alone, head down, and invisible to the the world around me.  Since that has not come to pass though, as I have survived the fog of my earlier life, and come out into the light of my new one, smiling, happy, and at peace with who I am...I wonder, why does the Walking Guy still haunt me?

Anyway, I saw him on the beach today...head down, squinty-eyed, his teeth showing in a mild grimace, because he was scrunching his face, as we glass wearers sometimes do, trying to keep our glasses from sliding down our noses.  He always has that same look, that mild grimace, as he contemplates whatever only he and God know.  I passed him, going the same way he was travelling, as I jogged, leaving him behind for awhile as I outpaced him to the far end of the beach.  When I turned around to come back, I looked for him...but he had disappeared...