I’m sitting in a bakery in downtown Missoula at the dawn of a new summer. Outside, the sun is bright on Mount Sentinel, where an hour ago my wife and I hiked up to touch the white “M” that floats above town. This afternoon we’ll drive west--somewhere, anywhere--and find a place to camp for the night. If we make modest progress, we’ll be back home tomorrow in time to go to a backyard party. Soon, it will be July.
This last week, the first week of vacation, began auspiciously. I fished in cold mountain streams, tried to sleep through thunderstorms, went for a run on the Palouse, watched mountain goats traverse a faraway cliff. The highlight was the grizzly bear, two hundred yards across a lake, that we stared at for almost an hour as it ambled down the shore, coming in and out of the water, fat and jolly and inhaling the rich bloom of summer.
In many ways, this first week followed the template that I’ve constructed for a decade now. If the school year stretches us to an unhappy tension of helicopter parents and honors sophomores whining about grades, then that first part of summer releases, and flings us across the American West. I get in a car and drive through bright, open places. I watch Major League Baseball. I drink beer, I climb mountains. I go without showers. I get wild-eyed, scouring hillsides for feral animals, fingering the bear-spray at my side. And I slough off my career’s obligations like snakeskin.
But this year feels different. There are clouds at the other end of the prairie. Joan Didion wrote about it in her fine essay about leaving New York, “Goodbye to All That.” Eventually, we need to stand tall and jut our chins into the cold wind. I’ve followed the hedonism of summer vacation for so long . . .
More specifically, Jennifer Senior wrote about it in All Joy and No Fun.
The sky darkens and I remember, I remember that the rain will come and sustain us. The soil’s dry. We can’t drift around forever. Those snapshots that I’ve gathered over ten years--the baseball, the campsites, the granite peaks--I give thanks for those memories, ephemeral as they are.
If this next year stops the life as I’ve constructed it, if indeed it blows it down, then something will take its place. And it might even be better. I’ve been told it’s better. Still, I’m anxious. Nothing can prepare you for Hurricane Ramona.
She’s a ways off, though. I’m clinging to normalcy. Next week, after only two days home, I’m out again, this time to Minneapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City . . . Up in those bleachers, beer in hand, I’ll watch the teams take the field and be thankful to not be at work and exhale deeply and ready myself for the realization that this will all be finished and that all of our ceremonies of transition are inadequate for the coming storm.
