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During last July’s 5.8 earthquake, 3-year-old Bronwyn told her 1-year-old sister, “We’re going for a wiggle.” READ MORE
Fatherhood
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In the fall of 1986, I was a new student at a small boarding school where everyone knew everyone and no one knew me. I was a junior, veteran of a big public school a couple hundred miles away, a quiet kid given to occasional bursts of performative exuberance followed by drawn out periods of silent self-reproach. I lived inside a story of my own making a sort of Horatio-Alger-meets-Freud number in which a gritty young striver with a hot temper pulls himself up by his emotional bootstraps. It was a man-vs.-self tale, intense and densely told; sometimes it seemed there was no room for more than one character. Toward the end of September my class went on a camping trip to the Kern River, up switchbacks, down rocky hillsides, across boulders on the water. It was balmy when we set off, cool by dusk, and freezing by nightfall. At 5 in the morning, I woke and stepped from my tent into 13 inches of snow. The camp was silent; I looked around at the tents of orange and blue and olive drab, snow-dusted, frozen at the zippers, and for a moment it struck me that everyone had simply left. Then, the rustling of a door flap, the crush of shoes on snow, the appearance of another early riser, underdressed in Levis and a jean jacket with a wooly collar. This was José, a soft-spoken campus leader and a baseball star. He was from East Los Angeles, the only child of a supremely devoted single mother, and he lived his life with a sort of military-monastic discipline. José was quiet in a different way than I was; he simply recognized that sometimes words were not required. Before that morning we’d hardly ever spoken. We trudged toward each other through the powder, looked north toward a frosted mountainside with a cave three-quarters of the way up, agreed to climb. Up there, we sat in the cave and made two small snowmen and watched our sleeping classmates rise. We waved. On the way down, which was tougher than the way up, we had to invent new mountaineering techniques. There was the crab-walk. There was the butt-slide. We reached the bottom. Over hot chocolate, around a campfire, we laughed with our classmates. Nineteen years later, we are still best friends. Our sons met for the first time this spring. My boy is 4 years old and his boy is 10 months. They live 250 miles from one another, but José and I hope they will never be strangers, and that they’ll know what it’s like, out there in the cold, to find a mountain, and a friend with whom to climb. Greg Blake Miller writes from Las Vegas. |
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