A Painted Little Sliver — Albuquerque, New Mexico © 2018 Craig Dahlberg
An army of California freeway motorcyclists, the “lane splitters,” legally ride the no-man’s-land between lanes. When motorists encounter a Harley on the lane-that-is-no-lane, they may suffer violently erupting blood pressure and heartbeats outpacing those of a guinea pig.
A Harley can pump out 120 decibels, enough untamed quaking to redirect the veins in an eyeball. And the heart-stopping noise and sheer shock of an unexpected motorcyclist blasting on slivers of highway, mere inches away, can generate PTSD symptoms.
Tiny slivers can draw disproportionate attention. Take my left big toe. The toenail’s edge, a tiny sliver, grows crooked and inward. Only a sculptor could appreciate the nail’s insidious geometric angle. This minuscule anatomical anomaly, doubtless the vestige of an ancestor’s aberrant DNA, creates piercing pain. The throbbing torment rivals the earsplitting Harley gobbling up its sliver of freeway.
Other kinds of slivers carve consequential geopolitical landscapes. The city of Kaliningrad lies 412 miles westward from the rest of Russia, a vestige of World War II politics. It is an isolated political sliver encircled by other countries. The Suez Canal is another geographical sliver. That tiny navigable sliver eliminates long voyages around the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The canal reduces the journey by 5,500 nautical miles, or 220 fewer days at sea. The Panama Canal, another watery sliver, saves 8,000 nautical miles for ships sailing between the east and west coasts of the United States.
Our appreciation of, or annoyance at, slivers can play into our personal aspirations. We are hard-boiled in a pot of anti-sliver diatribe. To carve out a well-lived life, we are coached to create outsized achievements. Slivers be damned! We can become whatever we may dream, pole-vaulting over monstrous obstacles in our way. We measure our worth by powering our ambitions up the steepest inclines.
There must be a better way forward, a counterpunch to the gold-medal worthy mandates of a bigger, better, faster world. Have we overlooked the unnoticed, shadowed backwaters concealing Little Slivers of a different scale?
The July 19, 2024 issue of The New York Times carries an article about a tribe, the Maduro people, living deep in the vast expanse of the Amazon rain forest. This year, their tribal meetings would be held in a village 13 miles distant, beyond thick forest, logs, and streams. Attending the meeting would be a near-impossibility for the tribe’s oldest member. She had lost track of her age, but it’s somewhere between 106 and 120. Despite having never worn shoes, and refusing to do so, she vowed to make the trek.
We are brought low or grow tall depending on our navigation of the challenges in our path. Only the old woman’s son could create the way forward for her. Hoisting his mother up and onto his back, he fashioned a strip of fabric across his forehead for his mother to hang on to. Barefoot and dangling on his back like a baby opossum, the aged mother held on for the entire 13-mile trek. All the while, her son’s machete slashed and stabbed at the dense undergrowth, carving a Little Sliver, a way forward, a path of hope in the wilderness.
Little Slivers come in many wrappings. They may be a highway for audacious Harley motorcyclists. But when laid out upon the globe, Little Slivers can reshape a map. They can also create outsized consternation and suffering—the stabbing pain of a toenail or the anguish of a broken dream.
And there are the undervalued Little Slivers, the hopes like those within an aged woman. They remain unnoticed and little regarded except by another watchful, caring person. By lifting those precious slivers onto our backs and carrying them within our hearts, we may offer a hopeful way forward. When their sacrifice truly becomes ours—a lasting burden embedded within our own hearts—we may attain a new and hopeful Little Sliver for our own future.