Joshua Mohr - All This Life

So far, today’s material has been a bunch of stinkers. The highlight has been an old lady fighting with a fast food wrapper, frustrated with how it constricts her breakfast sandwich. Jake’s even stooped to trailing some seagulls bouncing along the bridge’s railing, and he hates those nature shots, thinks they’re for old people, the Discovery Channel backwash his mom’s always watching, when she’s in town.

Jake likes capturing real human life, snatching seconds away from those who don’t suspect an audience. The other day, for example, he captured a guy’s catastrophic ponytail waving in a breeze, looking like a windsock; Jake immediately set it to music, Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” then uploaded it to YouTube.

309 views so far.

Not bad.

But today’s turning around for Jake.

Because right as he’s bemoaning all his benign options — the fast food wrapper, the boring gulls pooping and perching on the rail — that’s when he sees the band.

They’re just coming onto the bridge’s walkway on the San Francisco side, by the tollbooths; they’re moving toward Jake. Playing their instruments, forming a roaming pack. Jake counts twelve of them, three trumpet players, two saxophonists, two clarinets, two trombones, a snare drum, a bass drum, and a tuba player.

They’re all done up in wild outfits, clothed in mismatched prints and patterns and clashing colors.

Are they clowns? he wonders. No, their faces aren’t painted. They just have no fashion sense.

He hits record, holding his phone up toward them, zooming in. The brass band is too far away for Jake to make out their music, but they are all playing. Sort of dancing, shuffling along, moving their instruments back and forth in time with the song. They seem to be all ages, all ethnicities. White, black, and brown. He spots one bald man and two women with gray hair, the rest looking in their thirties or forties. Wait. He spies one girl who doesn’t look that much older than Jake. She’s tall and skinny, wearing purple striped pants with a paisley shirt, a butterfly collar. She’s playing the clarinet.

The most predominant noise comes from two men banging on the drums, one beating out a quick pattern on a snare, the other producing a slow rumble on a bass drum connected to his chest. It’s the size of a tractor tire, and his mallets hit either side of this musical wheel, deep thunderous booms that remind Jake of dinosaurs walking in the movies.

There are also certain loud notes exploding from the horns — the trumpets — little staccato bursts, punctuating something, but he can’t tell what they’re playing, what all the instruments’ contributions add up to yet, too far away to hear a melody.

Soon, though.

In anticipation, he says, “Turn down the radio, Dad,” kneeing the back of the driver’s seat.

The father, engrossed in a discussion of the 49ers pass defense, just grunts.

“There’s a band out there,” says Jake.

“Not now.”

“I need to hear them.”

“Later.”

At that, the boy loses interest in luring his father into this strange display on the bridge. Jake is a banner ad that the father won’t click. He’s a pop-up. He’s something equally as annoying: He’s a son in the backseat of his father’s car, talking.

Jake rolls down the back window, stretching his arm out, hoping he’ll be able to hear the brass band’s music and not the steady chug of traffic. But he can’t hear them yet, still about forty feet away. He frames the band as they bop and weave with their instruments, the sun glaring off of the horns, refracting little rainbows.

The band stays huddled together, forming an oval, like a lung turned on its side. They take synchronized steps, marching like soldiers, dressed like hipster gypsies. Jake can’t believe his luck finding this, filming this. An emoji of his face would convey an overjoyed anxiety, with the head gritting his teeth with a furrowed brow and flames burning in each eye socket.

Jake’s father lurches the car in small chunks every thirty seconds or so, the bridge even more gridlocked than normal. A couple hours ago, somebody ran out of gas, and the morning commute never recovered; he learned this from a traffic update during a commercial break from his sports talk. The empty car sat there for half an hour until Caltrans removed it, traffic trying to spread around the stalled vehicle like water around a rock. But it really screwed things up. His dad actually admires the stuck car, this idea of stopping, of quitting.

Jake fidgets in his seat.

His arm reaches as far as it can out the window, limb extending his iPhone, trying to get as close as he can.

The outline, the shadow, wisps of the brass band’s music finally reach him. It’s a fast song, something peppy and vivacious. The kind you might hear a marching band play. All major chords with a dance beat.

But it’s the way they move that fascinates Jake. Their oval, their lung. As they get closer, he notices that they move like a breathing entity, a subtlety he couldn’t make out before. They position themselves right next to one another in the oval and then they move away a few steps, the lung expanding, swelling. Then they come together into a mass again and this continues, in and out, this breathing. The brass band does this and still keeps making forward progress.

“What the hell?” his dad says, finally taking notice.

“What song is that they’re playing?”

His dad turns down the sports talk. “Roll up your window.”

Jake pulls his arm in, cranks the window up halfway. Knows better than to tussle with his father so early in the morning. But he keeps filming.

The brass band plays its song and moves in its inhaling and exhaling choreography, and one of the trumpet players, a man, breaks free from the formation, moving over to the bridge’s orange railing.

Throwing his trumpet over the side.

Climbing the rail.

Folding his hands in prayer.

Leaping toward the ocean.

Jake watches and records, records and watches, and it’s not really happening, there’s no way this is really happening, so he keeps filming. The brass band stops its forward progress. Jake has to crane his head backward to watch it through the car’s back window because his father’s ride inches toward the toll plaza.

The brass band staying huddled, keeping its music going.

Then another runs from the pack. The paisley shirt, the butterfly collar, throwing her clarinet and heaving her body over the side.

Then another trumpet player jumps.

Then one of the saxophonists.

Then a trombonist.

“They’re jumping, Dad,” says Jake.

The father adjusts the rearview and side mirrors to get a look at the scene. He takes in the huddle. Sees one of them break away, lob a trombone over the railing, following it quickly.

The father stops the car, opens his door in the middle of traffic. He is the first person to do this, standing and gawking. He is the empty car; he is out of gas. He holds everyone up as he hunts his head for an interpretation, a way to understand what he’s witnessing. He twists all these things he’s seeing up into various balloon animals, attempting to form a shape that makes sense.

Two people behind him honk. He doesn’t acknowledge their protests, only stares at the remaining members of the brass band. A few other honks come and he points toward the musicians, a gesture meaning Are you seeing what I’m seeing and why is this happening and what does it mean?

Other people exit their cars, too, facing the brass band, standing like zombies in the road. The people who had been on the walkway, joggers and bicyclists and tour bus explorers, all stop and give the band a wide berth.

Shouldn’t there be a good Samaritan among them?