Sometimes We Never Know
Savoring my morning coffee, scrolling through email, I suddenly became aware of a red rope slowly snaking downward outside my thirteenth floor window. What the …!? No way of telling where it came from or where it was going. Before long it was joined by a blue rope, the two of them swaying in the breeze, a sinuous tango, occasionally touching, then parting.
Mystified, I went about my morning ablutions. When I emerged from my bathroom, I discovered a man in a boatswain’s chair outside my window, expertly clearing away soap with his squeegee. I’ve long admired the efficiency of professional window washers. With just a few graceful swoops, they make the world brighter and more clear than it was. Still, I prefer to watch them work when they have both feet planted on the ground, or on a low ladder. Because of my own exaggerated fear of heights, I don’t like to see anyone in precariously high locations.
The window washer, noticing me, smiled and waved. I placed my hands over my heart to signal both apprehension and appreciation. He put his hands together and gave a bow. Then, as he began to lower himself to the twelfth floor, he pantomimed falling, first with a startled expression that gave way to a big grin. Obviously an act he’s perfected over the years.
I can’t shake from my mind how relaxed, at ease he was, trusting his life to just two ropes. No doubt he regularly scrutinizes them with an eagle eye. Still, it’s a leap of faith, not only in his equipment, but faith in whoever ran the machine that braided those ropes in the first place. He’s vitally connected with someone he’ll likely never meet.
Window cleaning isn’t on the list of the hundred most dangerous occupations, compiled by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. OSHA reports eighty-eight window cleaning accidents over a fifteen-year period, sixty-two of them fatal. That’s out of millions and millions of windows washed. Squeegee Squad, a commercial window cleaning firm, claims that “statistically speaking, it’s safer to be a high rise window cleaner than it is to drive a cab.”
Or, safer than driving on rural two-lane highways, which is where I’ve driven most of my life. A federal safety initiative reports that more than twelve thousand deaths occur each year on rural roadways because drivers cross the center line or run off the road. That’s about a third of all annual highway fatalities, even though the interstates and city roads handle way more vehicles.
I used to think about that in my frequent travels along SR97, the north-south highway that bisects Washington state. I’d watch vehicles hurtling toward me at sixty mph (usually more) and think, I’ll never meet that driver, but my life depends entirely on their sobriety and attention. I’d silently message them: be aware, be safe. Then there were the occasional heart-in-throat moments when drivers passed recklessly, forcing others to brake and pull onto the shoulder. My messages were less silent and not kind.
“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in his remarkable Letter from Birmingham Jail. “What affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
We think we’re such independent individuals. But whether we’re washing windows on the thirteenth floor or driving along a two-lane highway or just reading words on a screen, we’re all as closely connected as one heart beat, one breath.