It’s…amusing – I’ll say “amusing” – the lengths that some people will go to to avoid eye contact when walking. A sudden urge to check something on the phone, a steadfast sideways glance at something captivating on the horizon. Steadfast study of the sidewalk immediately ahead. I swear, only one of the at least 20 people I passed walking up to the conference venue from beachside La Jolla even seemed to acknowledge my existence. And she, this exception, seemed to do so only as a sort of threat assessment, eyes meeting mine, then darting around the environment for possible escape routes in case I should try to engage in more than the casual “G’morning,” I lobbed as we negotiated a narrow bit of the sidewalk in opposite directions.

Sure, in the crush of a Manhattan boulevard. But here? In lazy, laid back and sumptuously laid-out La Jolla? I was amused, but also disappointed.

I think it is always somewhat thus for me when I find myself in idyllic paradises. Maybe it’s the money here, but I think it’s more the easy lifestyle brought on by that money, and by the almost inherent ease of the climate and landscape upon which it is laid.

It is gorgeous here. And in fairness, running along the beach the next morning, I did get my share of head nods and howdies. But those feel more like the oddballs – the pre-dawn surfers, fishermen, other runners (yes – I’ve very tentatively tried starting running again) who are pushing themselves. So many of the people I faced one place or another, whether ensconced in Bentleys and Land Rovers, or promenading a pair of coiffed poodles, helmeted in headphones and mirrored sunglasses, just seem to be armored against their surroundings, and the others who inhabit it.

I’m going to blame the climate. When you crack the door open against a sheet of ice and sally out wrapped in your three-plus layers of sub-Arctic winter, negotiating the treachery of the frozen, snow-covered ground like Neil Armstrong venturing out of the lunar lander for the first time, you can’t not greet a fellow venturer like a kindred spirit. Maybe it’s that harsh climates wake us up. Maybe it’s that they jolt us into remembering that the world, however beautiful it is, is vast and uncaring, and that if we’re going to survive very long, we’ve got to learn how to depend on each other.

We’re having our little PNW taste of that back home. Not the sheets of ice and arctic winds, mind you, but the rain, the chill gray of approaching winter, the weak, vanishing light that tries – mostly in vain – to peek out from behind the ever-massing rain clouds like that short kid who Miss Masley always put in the back row of class photos when you were in grade school.

Nonetheless, it reminds us that we puny humans are ephemera in whatever grand scheme the universe has in play. And that at the end of these short, dark days, what we have is each other. And the only people we can celebrate this brief spark of existence with is, likewise, each other.

Conference is over, and it’s time to head north, back home where I belong. I’m going to tarry a bit, though. Rather than attempting to hop on a non-stop that may or may not be canceled, I’m going to spend a few days wending my way up the coast in a rental car. Visiting my mother and brother, along with some dear old friends from all along the timeline of my rather eventful life. End up some time next week in the Bay Area to see the kids then, assuming our national air traffic system hasn’t collapsed, fly north from there. I’m sure the farm can last a little longer without me.