The man who lives on the bridge

By Lyman McLallen

Since the middle of last October, he’s been living on the sidewalk of one of the bridges over the creek that runs through the neighborhood in Seoul where I live, that’s when I think I first noticed him.

He keeps his belongings directly under the elevated expressway that follows along the creek ― and thus goes right over the bridge ― so he can stay clear of the rain and snow, at least most of it. He doesn’t take up enough space to get in the way of people who walk by or ride their bicycles on the sidewalk on his side of the bridge. He lives out in the open where thousands of people pass by him every day, making him hard to miss.

Surely, I’m not the only one who notices him or is even curious about him. I like seeing him and I take my daily walks over the bridge mostly because he is there. I try not to intrude on him, at least not so he will notice. I think it might disturb him if he knew I was watching him, but for all I know, he might not even care.

Though his clothes are not new they are not shabby and neither is he. He is clean-shaven, looks physically fit, and I can’t imagine him being a beggar, or a drunk. And he’s not lazy, for I’ve seen him sweep the sidewalk on his side of the bridge and I can’t help but admire how clean and neat he keeps the space he occupies. He goes out to gather bottles and cardboard and other things he can recycle, and in maintaining himself this way, he relies on hardly any of the natural resources of the planet.

He’s salvaged his few possessions from what others have discarded. He has a bicycle that is at least thirty years old that he keeps in good repair. He has fastened a couple of baskets to the bicycle and has attached to the back fender a small two-wheeler he uses to carry the cardboard, metal cans, plastic bottles, and other items he finds that he can recycle or fix up and use. He has a fold-up mattress for his bed that he put on top of the old beat-up steel cart he has, the kind that rides on two bicycle tires that you see older men and older women pull along the streets hauling stuff, paying no mind to the cars, buses, and trucks speeding past them.

At night when he is asleep, I have walked by his space on the bridge and noticed that he bundles himself up in a couple of quilts and also wears a pair of gloves and a thick wool cap that covers his ears to keep out the bitter cold. During the day, I’ve seen his bed made up so straight and tight, you’d think he lived in an army barracks. He has three pairs of shoes that he keeps neatly arrayed under the cart when he’s not wearing them, and like all of his stuff, the shoes look worn but still have a lot of use left in them.

He has arranged his small space on the bridge as if it’s an apartment. Next to the cart where he sleeps at night, he has a tiny kitchen and dining area walled off with cardboard where he keeps his few plates, chopsticks, spoons, a couple of pots and plastic containers all on a little table. He has an empty large metal can, the kind you find in restaurant kitchens filled with sauce or cooking oil, which he uses to hold the fire he cooks with. For his chair he has a small plastic bucket he has turned upside down. He even has an old chalkboard with chalk and an eraser and he has written something on the chalkboard but since I can’t read Korean, I can’t tell what it says.

Since a police substation is at one end of the bridge, it would be no effort for the cops to arrest him, but so far they haven’t. Of course, since he keeps his place neat and sweeps the bridge clean daily and doesn’t bother anybody, this helps. Still, if this were America, the cops would have busted him for vagrancy long before now.

When I think about him, I wonder where he came from and how he has lived his life and why did he come to live on the bridge during the cold winter this year. Just like all of us, he was once a helpless baby and somebody must have taken care of him when he was a child.

The writer is a professor in the English College of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. He can be reached at mclallen.hufs@gmail.com.