I was alone in the car when I noticed, which is the wrong way to notice anything.
Something was off about the hillside above the Crystal Springs rest stop. I couldn’t have told you what. It took a mile, maybe more, for the shape of the absence to harden into a fact. The statue was gone.
Twenty-six feet of concrete sprayed over a steel frame. A robed JunÃpero Serra, kneeling, one arm thrust west toward the missions, set above Interstate 280 in the bicentennial year and left there to watch the Peninsula go by. A thing so large and so constant that the eye had stopped registering it, the way you stop hearing a refrigerator. And then, sometime in the last few months, nothing. A patch of bare earth. No one beside me to ask whether they’d seen it go.
This is what the road does. At highway speed the world beside the freeway is a blur you agree not to examine. The statue stood behind a locked gate, and the people who passed it by the hundred thousand did what the road trains everyone to do. They looked ahead.
It took a walk to catch up with it.
I walk most mornings, always the same loop around a duck pond, and from the path the freeway is a low roar somewhere off to one side, a sound like weather that never arrives. Rebecca Solnit called the mental state that walking produces “the mind at three miles per hour,” and Annie Murphy Paul, in The Extended Mind, borrowed the phrase to argue we should fold movement into everything we do. The research is real and stranger than the popular version. In 2014, two Stanford researchers, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz, found that people came up with markedly more creative ideas walking than sitting. A treadmill facing a blank wall worked nearly as well as a stroll across campus. It was the moving, not the scenery. Walking did nothing for problems with a single right answer. It only helps the kind of thinking that needs room.
Steve Jobs seems to have known this without the paper. When he wanted a real conversation, he was famous for proposing a walk instead of a seat in an office. A conference table is where people defend positions. A sidewalk is where positions loosen, because both people are looking at the same horizon and neither is looking at the other. The best ideas often arrive sideways.
Austin Kleon, in Keep Going, passes along what Ingmar Bergman told his daughter: the demons hate fresh air. Kleon stretches the line to cover the outer demons too, the ones that profit when we stay glued to a screen. I’m not sure the science can prove it. I’m sure Bergman was onto something. Some questions only come loose at the speed of a body.
The pond teaches a lesson about absence. For part of the year it has no ducks, only a flat sheet of water with nothing written on it. Then, in other months, it fills up and gets loud, a crowd of bodies and a racket of wings. Nobody posts a notice when they leave. Nobody needs to. It’s an absence I’ve learned to read, a gap with a season attached, and I know the water will be busy again. The statue’s absence had no season. Nobody had told me it was leaving, and nothing suggested it would ever be back.
Mine arrived between one footfall and the next. Why did the statue disappear?
I wrote it into the outline of my book, in a running list I call the side shows, the small tents pitched along the midway of the main story. Then I went and dug.
Here is what I found. Caltrans took the statue down in August, saying it no longer met the standards of its Transportation Art Program and had become a frequent target of graffiti and vandalism. Afterward the state said it had been destroyed. It has not said where the pieces went. The archdiocese complained that the thing seemed to vanish in the dark of the night. Gregg Castro of the Association of Ohlone Tribes, who had argued for years that it should come down, got his wish without ceremony. A saint to some, a monument to conquest to others, the statue left the way it had lived beside the road: unremarked, at speed.
And here is the part I can’t stop turning over. In 1967 the Legislature named this freeway the JunÃpero Serra Freeway, with no recorded opposition. The statue is gone. The name is still on every sign.
I’ve started to suspect the whole book is a list of things the road asked us to stop seeing, and that the walk is the only instrument sensitive enough to find them. This morning the path was quiet, and the roar was there behind it, patient as ever. I found myself thinking about the ducks, which leave and return on a schedule I’ve learned to read, and about everything else that leaves without one, and what I might see if I just slowed down enough to ask.