Far from a madding crowd

It takes a while to shed the belief that you’re invisible. Or, at least, that you’re unnoticed.

As long as you’re one among many, lost in the crowd, going about your business, you can wear a little anonymity along with your jacket.

But there aren’t as many crowds to be lost in just right now — and that means things stand out.

When I walk, I often meet the same guy on Thorburn Road in St. John’s. Doesn’t matter what time of day it is (and I always know the exact time — more on that in a second), we just seem to run into one another. He always asks me the same question: “Got the time?” I always take out my phone, and tell him — he walks away, repeating the time over and over again as if trying to set it into his head.

That’s the whole of the physically distanced encounter. But Thursday, he turned around as he walked away and said, “You sure walk a lot.”

A few blocks later and I pass a Tim Hortons. Unless it’s raining, there’s a man who regularly sits on the curb in front of the building and waves, shouting out “Hi!” when I walk by.

I think he probably waves to everybody — I always wave back. Last week, he shouted out, “You walk a long way.”

I see them: they see me.

We’ve accidentally become a little confederacy, aware of each other.

Perhaps that’s because, when the pool’s nearly empty, it’s far easier to recognize the other swimmers.

That hasn’t changed anything about my walking. I still trundle about, oblivious to most things, my attention caught by a spray of broken windshield glass on the gravel shoulder, the fact that someone broke the tops off of two disabled parking meters and for some reason hauled the stolen meters halfway up Mount Scio Road before dumping them side by side in the ditch, or the sudden arrival of white cabbage moths.

But I’ve been thinking it should change the way others do things.

One thing that the empty roads have done far more effectively than any public service announcement is to highlight, once again, the number of careless, distracted and speeding drivers we have on the roads.

When there are only a couple of cars in play on a stretch of Elizabeth Avenue, it’s easy to spot the white Honda whose flat-bill-capped driver is texting on the steering wheel; with no other cars around, its blind little slow stagger towards a busy crosswalk on an otherwise open roadway is hard to ignore.

Or the driver of a grey Hyundai SUV at the Allendale Road lights, perched there on the edge on an intersection with more accidents than any other. When you’re the only car at the lights and you miss the entire cycle of the left-turn arrow, especially with your face canted down towards your hands, it’s pretty obvious that attentive driving is not your thing. Full-size crew cab pickup blowing down the parkway at 100 kilometres an hour or so? You may not know it, but you stick out like a sore thumb.

I imagine it’s pretty much the same for drunk drivers. It’s interesting that, even with the reduced number of cars on the road, the police are still catching plenty.

What’s the message? The same one that I take from my new walking acquaintances.

You’re more obvious than you used to be, and more obvious than you think.

You might want to bear that in mind.