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What I Did on My Vacation
Scronch, scronch, the soles of my feet rub against my
boots slowly slapping the crushed sand and rock of the
narrow desert wash.
"Once you resign yourself to walking, you can look
around and enjoy yourself."
"Are we having fun yet?"
"Are we there yet?"
I am afraid I am going to get blisters. I grabbed my
father's boots by mistake; they almost but not quite fit
me perfectly. My tee shirt is completely soaked from sweat
and yet it is not very hot; whenever we stop I freeze from the
light breeze as I lean against a rock in the shadow of the
sloping walls of the dry wash. (There's some secret trick to this;
if I concentrate hard enough, it will all become effortless.)
"So what's your favorite color, Susan?"
"Blue. At one time it was the"
"color of the sky at sunrise, you know, when you look
at the sky in the direction away from the sun" "it's been
getting lighter recently"
I slip on my Shintaido shirt with the bright red circular
design, and over it my faded blue denim shirt. This is my
favorite shirt to wear when I am hiking in the cool; for
some reason it is pleasant to be cold in that shirt. Morning
air, especially, feels very nice, refreshing, in this shirt.
"It is amazingly cold." Everyone is lying about in
their sleeping bags. We just finished dinner; sandwiches and
the quesadillas Michael insisted on making for everyone (Ben
says "Michael just wants to show off his stove.") Night
has fallen though it is only seven o'clock; it is wintertime
in the desert. We are about to go to sleep.
"It's below freezing."
"No, I lived in Michigan and I know it couldn't be that
cold yet."
"Well, at least it's below forty."
The stars are rotating ever so slowly over our heads.
"What are we going to do if we don't find water tomorrow?"
"Are you being fatalistic again, Carolyn?" Susan's
voice flies up from somewhere past the foot of my
sleeping bag.
"I've got two liters." "We'll make it. We'll just
have to go back if we don't find any water."
"What if there's a huge puddle of oil under the car?"
prompts Jun, and we pelt him with tomatoes.
"Slow down, slow down!"
Michael is driving the car at two miles per hour over a
sandy rocky desert road on the way to the start of the trail.
We hit a dip in the road, and as the car eases over the edge,
we hear a scraping sound at the back.
"We can get out if you want, Michael, no problem." Ben
has a smile in his half-serious voice as he says this.
"Don't worry about it, Ben." Another bump, and a scraping
sound this time.
"We're about halfway there." We're eating lunch at the
top of what would've been a waterfall if there were any water.
The canyon continues on here much as it did before the falls,
flat and wide and bouldered. The stone here is smooth and warm,
and it is a nice sunny place to sit around together.
"Michael, I have a question for you. Why do you go hiking?"
"To get away from people." He waves his hand at the
other five of us, smiling.
Ben looks up. "Well, I do it for the outdoor experience."
Ben chooses this moment to hold Susan closely and they both
smile into each other. He is a large Mongolian warrior with
kind intelligence.
"He has the potential for anger, though." Pause. "He had a
choice between the dark side of the Force and the light side,
and he took the light."
"We're all glad he did, Ben."
Ben's father started backing the car out of the driveway.
A string of colored Christmas lights passed by on the right.
It's a very long driveway; Ben's house is hidden down at one
end of it: you can't see it from the road, really.
"So where are you guys going?"
"There are these Indian ruins out in the desert, papa.
Forty rock houses up in this canyon."
"How many of you?"
"Seven."
"Oh, the Seven Samurai, eh?"
"Where is Matias?"
Everyone is moving, dancing, the lights, red, yellow, and
blue, are flashing, in the dark there is laughter and music.
Ben sits across the corner from me; I am not dancing. I feel
a great difficulty in moving, a residue of the social paralysis
I sometimes felt back at school.
"I don't think he's going to make it." Too bad; I was hoping
we could live up to Ben's dad's epithet.
Susan asked Ben to dance with her but he doesn't like the
music they're playing. She's out there anyway; in fact most of
the people dancing right now are girls. She's dancing with a girl-
friend of hers; it crosses my mind that she might feel a
little uncomfortable dancing while Ben and I are just sitting
there watching her; I shrug it off, though, and just watch her.
"So what do you think about love?"
Carolyn and Michael are arguing up ahead of us.
"I like to shoot down the idea of love. When you fall in
love you realize how trivial everything is."
We catch up with them. "No, you become more interested in
everything!" objects Susan, who happens to be in it, everyone
agrees.
"Michael just needs to find someone that's like him."
"Do they have to be similar, Carolyn?"
You know, Mits, very few people fall in love with the people
they think they do, especially if they think the person they are
in love with is in some way "related" or "in sync with" themselves.
"Of course! Otherwise they'd have nothing to talk about."
I laugh. "Love is a good conversation, then."
"We thought Michael was deranged."
Ben raised his hand as though he were holding something.
"He held this bone out and said, "'Telephone, Ben!'" This struck
us as very funny and we laughed spiritedly.
"We kept on trying to ask him if he found a good place to
get water, and he just kept on waving this bone around!" I
took another bite of Susan's mom's curried chicken. I was sitting
on the floor, using my chair as a table for my apple cider and
plate of rice, chicken, and salad. Susan sat at the coffee
table on the other side of my chair.
"What I said was, 'Here's a bone, Ben!' I thought he might
like it." To the rest of us: "And he left it up there, too!"
I finish off my water and put the empty bottle back in my pack.
We hear a yell in the distance. "Hey, that was Michael."
"Did you find any water!!" I yell. Another unintelligible
cry. I look up the canyon but can't see anything. Ben starts
to put his pack on. "Let's go."
"One yell if you find water!" Susan calls after us.
"Two yells!" I call back.
"Two yells, o.k.!"
Ben turns around. "Stay there, though, even if we find
water."
Susan doesn't say anything.
"Stay there, OK?"
"O.K." she says finally.
"Love is a good conversation, then."
"That's right, Mits! I bet you've been in love."
"Actually, I was being sarcastic." I glance at Susan.
"I disagree with you, Carolyn. Though I don't know anything."
Susan smiles slightly at this.
I began to crawl under the coffee table, over to where Carolyn
and Susan were sitting on the couch. Susan said "Look what's
coming up from under the table!" I popped my head out next to
Carolyn's knees. Susan was lying behind her, and I was looking
right into her face. This was an uncomfortable position, so I
turned over on my back and put my head on the floor. There was a
narrow wooden bar running the length of the table which I had
to lie on; I felt as though I were back in the desert
"It's really strange to sleep with your head lower than your
back," says Ben to Susan.
Again we are looking up into the bright night sky,
Orion rising, the hazy arc of the Milky Way, faint stars
just barely perceptible, in the thousands; one is frustrated
to pick out one of them, though you know the sky would be different
without them.
"And my feet are lower than both!"
"Hey, I just saw a shooting star! That's the first
one I ever saw in my life."
I am wearing the gloves I just found hidden in some
corner of my backpack. My head is near Susan's, though I lie
north-south and she, Ben, and Jun are east-west.
Michael is also facing north-south. "Mits, imagine the
plane of the sun's orbit as the plane of the ecliptic, right?
Now look at the Milky Way. See how our solar system is tilted?
Doesn't that give you a feeling of depth?"
I look up and imagine the disk of the solar system hanging
in deep space, askew to the massive disk of the galaxy, and deeply
inhale. "Jesus, Michael, you're right!" we swing along a moment
together through interstellar space, silent, vast.
Susan laughs softly at our excitement. I stick my hand out
into the night and notice how big my gloved hands are against the
sky. It reminds me of when my brother and I used to play with
the lamp in our old room; we'd put our hands up to the light
and make huge shadows of our hands, magnified on the walls, and
pretend a huge hand was coming down to grab us or something.
I slowly bring my hand down toward Susan's face:
"Aaah!" Susan lowers her light hand down toward my face,
she moves it up and down. I laugh and as she keeps her hand
there I reach up with my free hand
"Michael! Michael!" "Do you think he got into any trouble, over
the ridge or something?"
"I don't see why he'd go there. Hey Mits, come look at this!"
I follow his voice down the slope. Smoosh! My foot hits some
mud. Surprised, I look down, and there's water, a tiny trickle of,
water!
and we clasp hands, I hold her hand for a moment . . . then let go,
and she leaves her hand hanging there, limp, for a time, and finally
pulls it back up.
The (my) point is, one must see others as one sees them and
not how they see themselves. That is why most of this time you
don't know what the hell I'm talking about because I go around
seeing you my way without telling you what it is I see in you.
"We found water up there! There was a little pipe running into
this barrel, and a small area you could camp in." Michael and
Ben were just entering camp after an exploratory hike up the canyon.
The rest of us were sitting, talking, enjoying the water we'd
found lower down.
"Did you find any ruins?" Carolyn asks.
"Yeah, about twenty or thirty rock houses. They don't
look they way you'd expect," Ben says.
"What do you mean?"
"They're just these walls, pretty short-----"
"Most of them are set into the wall of the canyon," interrupts
Michael.
"Well, I don't want to lug our packs up there. Still, I'd
like to take a look. Anyone up for a hike?"
"How far is it?"
"It's about as far from the corner there as we are from
the corner." The canyon goes in some three hundred meters then
takes a left turn.
"You mean it's just up there and then again?" Susan says,
pointing.
"That's right." "Well, I just don't want to take our packs
there."
"That's OK," laughs Ben, "cause there aren't any ruins up
there."
People are getting up to leave. Ben's little sister Anna is running
about, offering people cookies. She holds the dish up to me. "That's
o.k., Anna, no thanks."
Ben and Susan are hugging each other up on a rock and
I am standing there and Susan glances at me while they hug
I shake Michael's hand and bid him goodbye, call out a
goodbye to Carolyn and Jun is already out the door. I walk to
the entryway with the crowd. Anna runs up to me and I take
her hand firmly and swing it up and down, pat her on the back;
Susan is standing there my hands are full Susan stands there
with a resigned hand waves then disappears out the door I forget
about Anna and head for the door looking out and wave "Goodbye!"
she is running down the stepping stones into the night.
. . .
I am sitting alone in the darkened room on my sleeping bag.
Suddenly I realize that what I have been doing, my friendly
simple relations with my friends is not the natural, direct
route I was thinking it was, but really in my giving
Love for Susan
I had to find my path.
A brilliant sunrise greets my departure from Ben's house; without
hesitation nor drama I wrote a short note to Susan, an ordinary
note, and to the strains of Jose Avenal on the tape deck flew down
the freeway towards home.
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