Four weeks from tonight, I’ll attend my forty-year high-school reunion in Winter Park, Florida. We were invited to write about a memory. I chose not the end-of-school campout of about twenty-five guys. It only lasted a few hours because a Seminole County sheriff’s deputy busted us just as the drunken revelry was cranking up. A few classmates barely made it out of jail in time to attend graduation. Instead, I chose the lesser-known prequel to that story:
Far from anything, we lurched along two sandy ruts winding through pine and scrub oak north of Red Bug Road. I was driving my mother’s faded station wagon, nicknamed the Blue Boat. Perched cross-legged atop the roof, Danny and Charlie looked more like maharajas on safari than seniors about to graduate. Stripped to the waist and wearing their shirts swami-style around their heads, they scanned the woods.
I turned up the radio, drowning out the clatter of barbed wire that had wrapped around the drive shaft a few miles back. We’d come too far to turn around. Not that we knew where we were. That was part of the plan, getting lost to see what we could find. And we were doing more than searching for a camp site; we were clutching what little was left of our years together in a grip that couldn’t hold.
Read more »
