The past returns in ways you cannot predict.
Matthew* was the son of a prominent doctor who was the star at the local Catholic hospital. They lived in a smart house in the only chic part of the county, a township of industrialists and lawyers and other doctors. His father was aloof, his mother brittle. The home was filled with crucifixes and portraits of Mary bounded by angels and Christ, his hands, palms open, outstretched in that peculiar downward motion brought to stillness. Watching Matthew with his parents was like looking at people in different dimensions of time slide past each other without acknowledging someone else was present.
We were friends of a sort until he left for prep school at the end of 8th grade. He was very bright and self-assured, and as is often the case, bored by the repetitive nature of class and thus a minor kind of rebel to the nuns and the routine of a Catholic grade school.
Our friendship consisted of wandering on foot through every undeveloped part of that township, especially along a stream that cut along quiet roads. The last time we were out, a hot hot late Summer day, high school almost upon us, we walked for hours looking for the stream’s headwaters, a word I did not know then. I knew we were looking for its beginning, for a spring or some place where water burst from the ground and began to flow.
A pretty close approximation to the kind of quarry we explored.
We ended up in a dry quarry long since abandoned, where we explored a landscape littered with old machinery until it grew late, long after I was supposed to be home, and so to make a quick return to his house and my bike, he said we should climb the quarry wall before us and cut cross country.
I remember thinking, “I don’t think so,” but I was only 13 and he was such a confident boy, and I was not. We climbed up rotten rock on parallel tracks, loose pieces clattering away from our hands. It was about a 30 foot pitch but it seemed so much more. I reached a point where I could neither go forward nor retreat, maybe 20 feet up. Matthew made it to the top and looked down and called for me to “Come on,” and when I told him I was stuck, he laughed in that off-hand, insouciant way of his and said he would meet me at his house, and he left. I called his name again and again.
I do not know how many minutes passed while I hung on to a place I could not leave. It could not have been very long, maybe a minute, two or three at the most.
There was a young tree behind me, the leaves not quite brushing my back. If I could half-way turn and for a moment hang on with one hand, I thought I could leap to its slender trunk and climb down to safety. I did not know what else to do. I did not think about this. It was as if my mind said maybe, then yes and a moment later I jumped.
I must have come off that cliff like Spiderman because I almost over-jumped the trunk. My momentum was so great that when I crashed into it, leaves and limbs, face whapped, glasses tumbling, temporarily blinded, my trunk met its trunk and I held on to anything that would give me purchase. It bent and came back, and I half fell, half-monkey scrambled to the ground, onto my feet and felt … a surge of relief and elation, all fear erased.
I found my glasses and walked the long way back to his house, got on my bike and went home. He did not come out. They were eating dinner. I heard them through the open windows. I never spoke to him again.
He found his way to California where he became a designer/builder of high performance bicycles and in the late 80’s died of AIDS. He put an entire continent between himself and that cold home.
I became a high school teacher and for a period of 6 years found ways to go climbing in the West.
*I changed his name
