The hot air balloons – two dots that were bobbing up and down behind a hill to the north – have disappeared behind the trees. A parachute-shaped kite dives toward the ground at least three times before recovering. At the lowest point of each dive, I’m surprised that it doesn’t swipe against the ground and collapse. When the kite plunges toward the earth a fourth time, I’m surprised that it does touch the ground and collapse. Some of the people that we saw in the park are in the parking lot now, loading their things and their dogs into cars.
A bus pulls up at the stop across the street and the driver shuts off the engine. He has no passengers. Dusk fades to nighttime over the fifteen minutes the driver spends with his newspaper. We watch from the bus stop across the street. A few minutes into his reading, he climbs out of the driver’s seat and paces to the back of the bus, where he settles in with his legs stretched out on the seat in front of him. He ends up back in the front of the bus, and waits for the clock to click over to a given time. He starts up the engine and maneuvers into the old navy base checkpoint. He gets the bus turned around and pulls up to the curb in front of us.