The Angel of Buried Keys
July 2020
So the late-mid-July sun is beginning the downward slope and my shirt’s off and I’m scrambling through the leaves looking for the shirt cause I wrapped it in a ball around my keys. When I’m running, it is a privilege to be without shirt and without junk in pockets swinging around in stride, so sometimes, every now and then, I place my keys and maybe my shirt in a hidden location somewhere along the trail which I drove to (I like driving to trails to run because being surrounded by trees and soil is much preferable to hard asphalt and car sounds). Oftentimes I mentally note some trail marker or feature to identify exactly where I placed the keys. This time, July 2020, however, I did not. So, I’m scrambling around like a squirrel looking for its misplaced acorns and it brings me back all Proust-like to another instance where I was doing more or less the exact same thing when I had one of those “esoteric”-type experiences of pure fate-like chance encounters that make life so interesting.
It’s the summer of 2016 and I’m working on the Gettysburg College Campus as a research assistant/office assistant. Side note: living on a small liberal arts college, especially if the M.O.N. Liberal Arts Colleges in the summer is a rare treat; the whole place seems less crowded, strange occurrences are likely, and it feels more like a resort than place of education (likely cause there are no classes occurring in which one could be educated). I liken it to escaping the bubble of what these types of colleges so often are. End note. As a pretty consistent runner, The Gettysburg Battlefields during this time was straight-up idyllic. After work, I would put on my shoes, get in my car, drive to the battlefield, and park somewhere along the trails or in one of the parking spots adjacent to a monument. While GC is close enough to the battlefields (usually about 1 – 1.5 miles to get to the good stuff), I would much rather have a 6-mile run of pure battlefield. And this is where my dilemma begins.
The day was one like the others – I did my bit and parked along a roadway on Confederate Avenue, dropped my keys off in some patch of fallen leaves (unlike my run in 2020, I left my shirt locked in my car), and went for my run. This was my go-to run of Gettysburg, often dubbed horse trails because of the frequent horse travelers. Basically, it’s about 3-miles out and then the same back (6 mile total), filled with luscious fields, ever expansive and colorful skies, and of course the unforgettable past (marked by plenty of monuments). Truly one of the greatest places I have ever run. And it was routine as well. Running this particular trail at this particular time was something I did about 2-3 times a week. So I was in unconscious mode. And maybe it was the drifting thoughts or the minutia of it, but after the 5.9 miles of sweat and random thoughts, when I got to the local of where believed I dropped my keys…I could not find them.
The Four Stages of Missing Something That is Direly Important (Reserved for Keys, Passports, Wallets, etc.):
1. Initial Shock – “fuck where can they be, it has to be some where…”
2. Frantic Searching – “Okay it has to be here somewhere, It’s not like it can be anywhere else” (this is usually accompanied with a thump-thump in the chest and an adrenaline rush)
3. Serenity – “It’s here. I just have to keep looking. Panic will do me no good right now.”
4. Panic – the unquotable dread of recognizing that there will likely be several inconveniences in your way in order to do anything
I’ve been to stage 4 and back several times at this point and about 40 minutes have passed and that great blue Gettysburg sky is getting a bit pink around the edges and I maybe tacked on another two or three miles looking in other leaf patches. The location where I left my keys (and am now beginning to doubt even where I left them along the battlefield) was a rather expansive bit of dead leaves left to the side of the trail, probably about 400- meters of trail and accompanying leaves about 7-8 feet back with several small trees here and there. It’s a lot of area for small keys, but not incomprehensibly so. And I’m recognizing several things all at once in a hurricane like circle in my noggin’ – “I do not have a spare key in this state”, “can I leave my car here overnight?”, “My room key is on there”, “how will I get into my room?”, “will I have to buy a new room key? Aren’t the like 80 bucks?”, “Will I get towed?” etc. etc. Suffice it to say I was in panic mode, sitting on the side of the road, taking a 5-minute key-search leaf-rummage break, more or less having given up.
Suddenly, a Sudan approaches and the driver sees me on the side of the road. She pulls behind my car, and steps out. A woman, glasses, short blond hair, early-mid 50s – Susanette. I’m sweaty, jittery, and shirtless, and honestly can’t remember the beginning of the conversation (“is something wrong?” maybe) but what ends up happening is me confessing that my keys are lost somewhere under an infinite pile of leaves.
“Okay, I will help,” she says in a resolute manner, having already accepted the position of a guardian angel.
The two of us return to the trail on from the side of the road, and begin rummaging, She uses a stick to parse through the dead plant matter and I’m on my hands and knees as most parts of my body have a thin layer of either sweat or dirt or both. And we begin a friendly information exchange. I tell her my name, why exactly I am in the situation I’m in, as well as why I’m in the small town of Gettysburg Pennsylvania. And Susanette tells me about her –she is on a road trip from California and she’s doing a whole US tour visiting places she has never been, ultimately ending in Atlanta to be with her sister.
Susanette then reveals to me that she has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and that the purpose of the trip to see new places and to help people (“like yourself” she indicates to me) along the way. So, I’m dirt-covered, hands in leaves, recognizing the triviality of my dilemma, and slowly realizing the degree of coincidences necessary to be in this situation right here, a part of Susanette’s seemingly karmic road trip. We begin engaging in a conversation that is more philosophical than not (and more her asking questions to me than to her): how I perceive responsibility, how I react to situational stress, what losing my key in the woods and my reaction to it symbolizes in the grand scheme of my life and mental status. We are still in our respective spaces in the trail, shuffling dead leaves around in search of my elusive keys (and mind you they were on a key chain so they actually did take up some space), and she asks me what she thinks the lesson of the instance is – and I said, upon a internal debate of trying not to sound too cliché, “to not worry about the things that I cannot change” – and almost directly as I said that poof on the end of Susannette’s rummage branch are my fateful keys.
Now…there is a skeptical side to me thinking “she had the keys this whole time and was just waiting for the right moment to reveal them to me,” but the sincerity of Susanette and the sheer scheming of that move made me think that untrue. It had just been immaculate near fate-like timing. She is standing there, my keys (shamefully a on Natural Light branded lanyard) dangling from the end of her stick. I express my profound thanks to her, and the luck of her stumbling upon the keys, and she just tells me that it was meant to happen and that’s why she happened to be here. No pretense or irony, pure acceptance of fate.
We head back to the cars and I finally unlock mine and put my long-lost shirt on. Susanette takes out a book, not sure which one specifically, but a book, and in it she looks up my birthday, and tells me to grab something to down write what she is about to tell me. For some reason the only thing I had in my car to resembled blank paper is my copy of Less Than Zero, so, in the back cover on the blank page, I write, as she reads from a book of birth-dates “You are…Responsible, Dependable, Reliable, Caring” and then follows up by saying “Feelings Buried Alive Never Die”. To this day, I still have those words written in the back of the book, and Susanette says that she hopes all goes well for me and I echo the sentiment. She drives offs and I start my car, recently found keys rotating the ignition, almost 3 hours after I had first durned it off, and drive along the rest of the battlefield, reflecting on the sheer twist of fate that just occurred. Later, when recounting the events, I said I felt like I encountered an angel, and that feeling still rings true.
Comments