My final weekend could not have been better. It was some sort of cosmic miracle in fact. It is a story I would like to tell.
Shortly after arriving here in June, I was contacted by a childhood friend named Katherine. We had gone to elementary school in The Colony, Texas together and we were very close. I passed her house on my morning walk to school, and it was the first I saw leaving class every day. Then in middle school her family moved away.
How insurmountable even a small distance is in childhood... it was only the next town over, but after a half dozen or so field-trip type visits to the new house we soon lost touch. We went to different schools, traveled to different places, suffered different tragedies and chased our exclusive dreams in different directions. So I thought. Anyway I had no idea how to feel when she found me online and said she was also in Wyoming, living in Cheyenne seven hours away.
I was excited, but also hesitant to reveal how far I've strayed from the young man she knew. Same thought for her: could she possibly still have the passion for X-Men comics which brought us together so long ago? She would then be very dismayed to learn I had canceled my subscription, "put away childish things" and so forth.
Our meeting kept getting pushed further and further down the calendar line, all the way to my last weekend here. It almost seemed like it wouldn't happen, but then I found myself giving directions. I shrugged off apprehensions as I described my neighborhood and I waved casually from my walkway as I saw a familiar face looking for me from the parking lot; not riding some child's bicycle, but skillfully navigating an SUV.
Immediately I was overcome with excitement and emotion. How do you tell someone what you have been up to for a period exceeding ten years? My best friends of longest standing, ten year friendships that produced brothers who are always with me in photographs and at family gatherings–she had no idea about any of them! I had no recollections of her parents, nor had she any of mine. It would take an hour to explain my summer work here at the Tetons... to explain all the other times of my life over one weekend would be a crude dismissal of entire places and peoples.
Not possible. It had to be enough that we intertwined our lives once again in this abstract way... we couldn't stay indoors comparing notes and justifying all these decisions that got us here. We spent the weekend, which she noted was my last weekend, doing things that would be new for me as well as her since she only passed through Jackson once with family. She had seen the adventures I already had on facebook, and I call it the grace of a mythological ghost to say I shouldn't re-do anything just for her sake. All new things!
Our weekend was a comedy in the Shakespearean tradition. Everything was an enjoyable disaster. During our first hike right after reintroduction, Katherine moved to take a photo at the top of the mountain and accidentally nudged her black camera bag off the cliffside. "Was there anything in that?" I asked.
"My nicer camera," she said laughing.
We listened to it roll. She laughed again and began to ask why she would do such a thing, as we stood there tragically but comedically still listening to the distant tumbling sound of something long gone out of sight. Our first assignment would not be easy.
We had to scale down rocks and make this unexpected social trail in order to locate a small black bag before complete darkness, which was due in one hour. My dog sniffed, her dog sniffed, and two frantic people searched the side of a large mountain in a zigzag fashion. I scaled a steep bed of fallen trees and miraculously, spotted and recovered the camera bag with much joyousness and surprise from Katherine. I think by that point, she had given up hope and marked it as an impossible task since nightfall had almost completely settled in, but again, by the grace of that same mythological ghost, the impossible was somehow possible.
We then found ourselves a bit lost in the woods at night, and my flashlight was discovered to be dead, probably because I had previously been playing with it in a well-lit room. Eventually, we found our way off the mountain and back home, amused and relieved by the evening's series of unfortunate and fortunate events.
The next day we rented tubes and went floating through town. The first half was peaceful, but soon my lanky form was meeting with rocks in a way reminiscent of being assaulted with aluminum baseball bats. Both of us received an identical slash in our tubes and had to climb out in a section of river which gushed violently through a public park. I injured my toe attempting to walk through the current, and Katherine's top came off in front of many happy families as she vigorously tried to wrangle her tube and attached car keys from being carried away by the rapids. Then we had to drag our deflated tubes to my car, lugging them as if they were sad, injured donuts. All the while, like the night before, there was only laughter and we seemed oblivious to any hardship.
We rode my bicycles without incident, but then decided to roll the dice once more and take a road trip to Victor, Idaho. We are both fans of live music, and I assured her we would find something there on a Saturday night.
We arrived to find the town dark and quiet. A lonely barmaid scrubbing a table at the Knotty Pine told us there was nothing, nothing. There seemed to be some junction with the Twilight Zone near Jackson. So we played Pac-man and walked several miles in the total darkness of a small Idaho town. We investigated a strange barn which turned out to be an ice rink, the oval shaped enclosure overrun with tiny sage brushes.
Those are really the extent of our calamities: Sunday was spent perfectly in the Grand Teton Park, and I got to take her many places I had never been myself so it was providence that none of them were disappointing or dangerous. We even encountered and provided a ride to a cute hitchhiking girl, the kind you only find in the movies, with long hair blowing in the wind, a trendy backpack, and a thick foreign accent.
We spent the whole day in the park, and on the drive home we talked about the complex series of coincidences that had brought us back together again at this bizarre latitude and longitude... from riding bicycles in The Colony, Texas to strolling through Victor, Idaho after midnight on a cold August night: as adults, bedecked in jewelry and endowed with so many years of our lives already written. It seemed like a miraculous coincidence that we were still the same age. Our conversations only emphasized that some quality of mind, call it philosophy maybe, had infected us both as youngsters and caused us to act in parallel ways without knowledge of what the other was doing.
You know, in a psychology textbook I once read about identical twins who were separated at birth and then reunited after thirty odd years. The photo showed two slightly similar men, but it was the words that jarred me: they had children of the same age, very similar wives, and both had small dogs they had named "Toy." It really makes you wonder, doesn't it?
That's about how I felt talking to Katherine. She told me she is an intern with the Teton Science School in Cheyenne, and I–all of us from the Academy, to wit–have some unofficial capacity with that organization as well, remote as it is from Texas. We shared so many qualities evident in our stories–ways we lived, places we traveled, people we knew and ways we felt... was our bond so strong in elementary school that it could have been the initial, womb-like core from which these events in our lives are so symmetrically cast in opposite directions? I just don't know, but we seem to be rushing headlong along some great arc too far to see.
She is gone again, but I am assured after this weekend that we will meet again, even if we do not speak in the meantime.
It was the perfect summation of a long and strange journey, a short moment which informed large parts of my past and certainly my future too. I hope everyone here can experience something that causes such a jolt inside the brain. It will help me reflect on all the friends I have made here, how they are gone or "not really gone" if you choose to argue the optimistic side... here's to hoping there is some place buried in our future where we can share the psychedelic joy of this kind that is only such because it is known so few times in one's life.
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