Seeing Farther

I stared straight ahead as hard as I could. 

I focused my gaze to the point that I expected my third eye to burn a hole through the poster on the wall like a magnifying glass pointed at an ant under the summer sun. In front of me was a poster with a hidden image set into a seemingly bland pattern of repeating tesseracts. I stared harder, and my eyes watered. The waitress had told me that the hidden image was an eagle. I crossed my eyes then uncrossed them.

   I looked  blankly down at the toilet to my right to rest my eyes. The poster was hanging in the bathroom of a tiny breakfast restaurant called  "Captain Jack's Stronghold" in the tiny Northern California town of Stronghold. Both the restaurant and the town were named after an Indian known as Captain Jack, who in the late 1800s killed a US general and took refuge in a nearby labyrinth of lava rock formations. They say he was outnumbered 10 to one as he held the federal troops at bay.

   The old man I shared a breakfast table with had shared this story with me. I was pleased to find the restaurant wasn't named after the Disney movie franchise, as I had expected when I walked in. The rest of old Jack's story is printed on the menu, if you ever find yourself on Highway 139 and want to fill in the details. 

   I pushed open the bathroom door to make sure no one was waiting patiently on the other side, then went back to work on the poster. I walked towards it and away from it, squinted my eyes, crossed them, and moved them in every possible combination of directions I could think of until they started watering and begging for mercy. I went back to my coffee and the old man. This was my second attempt at the poster, and he waited expectingly to hear my report. I moved my head slowly from left to right with a solemn look on my face. 

  He pretended to commiserate, but a grin was shining its way out of the corner of that old farmer's mouth. The sweet waitress tried to ease my pain by assuring me that others had faced my predicament; many of her return customers were travelers hellbent on seeing the eagle appear magically from the pattern. 

   By now a family of six or so had joined the project, and the oldest son had pulled out his phone to look up tips for seeing the hidden gems in these posters. He was about my age, and the entire family was dressed in University of Oregon Ducks fan gear. The son downloaded an application with other hidden images and brought it over to me, hoping to let me leave with a consolation prize. I stared at the pattern on the screen: nothing. All patterns, no eagles. 

   A similar poster was hung outside of my seventh grade science classroom. I was often sent to the hall during seventh grade science for talking in class, so I was well acquainted with that poster. While my classmates learned about potential and kinetic energy, I was in the hallway working on that poster: crossing my eyes, walking back and forth, and staring with all my might. I never saw what was on that hallway poster. 

  This always bothered me. It bothered me much more than it seemed to bother others, and it bothered me even more now as I stood next to the toilet at Captain Jack's. To me, this meant that there existed a level of reality that my mind failed to comprehend, but that others could plainly see. It wasn't about the eagle; it was, and still is, about having some sliver of the universe closed off to me. 

   I've heard people say that if aliens did try to communicate with us, we might not even detect their transmissions because our five senses don't line up with their senses and methods of communication. I'm not sure if I believe that or not, but I do know that if an alien were trying to show me a picture of an eagle, all I would see was an unappealing pattern: and the kicker is, that's even after I've been told there's an eagle to look for. What more could be written in a field of grass blowing in the wind, or a cloud, that I wouldn't even be looking for?  What more lies beyond my eyes?