There is a collage on our bedroom wall. My wife made it for me. It’s pictures from a summer trip we took. Natalie looks about 14, so it was 8 or 10 years ago. We call it “the trip around Washington.” We went around the state counter-clockwise, camping. We sang and crawled around in caves and lava tubes. We had campfires. We climbed Pilot Rock and ran around Mt. St. Helens. We lay on the beach at night and looked for Perseid meteors. We zoomed up Hurricane Ridge at sunset. We took the ferry to Victoria and camped on Vancouver Island. Then we went North up the Island. There is a road-- I can’t call it a highway-- that crosses the island from the East side, where everything is, to the West side, where nothing is. We crossed. There is a strip of settlement stretching from about 10 miles south of where the road hits the West coast, to about 20 miles North. We camped and sat in the rain and took slimy showers in squalid shower rooms. We ate in restaurants to warm up and played in tide pools. We watched surfers in wet suits surf in the rain. We went to the end of a point where there was an old observatory or radar station or both or something. Something happened on the access road to this old installation.

 

The road was narrow and very straight. Trees met overhead, so we were driving down this tunnel of foliage on the cloudy overcast day. We had a Julie Miller CD on and “Blue Pony” played.

 

Now my blue pony’s gonna take me for a ride

Down to where we used to go

And I’ll see you smile, and touch your face

And my heart will overflow.

Now the years have washed our time away

Like footprints in the rain.

And the house is gone, like the days we shared

But our love will still remain.

 

I realized that this was it, this was the pinnacle. I had it all, right that moment. And just for that moment. It was all good before, and it’s been all good since, but nothing has ever been like that moment. You would expect the Big Moment to be a wedding or a graduation or something, but I knew that forever after, when I thought of my family and my kids and the life we shared, my heart would come back to THIS moment, in the leafy tunnel, with my beloved and our babies, and Julie Miller playing.

 

I was right.

 

We went back to the East coast of the island, then back to the mainland, and back to Washington, and back home, and our lives proceeded the way lives do. The kids got bigger and smarter and smarter and bigger. They are grown and gone now. Wouldn’t have it any other way, really. This is by far the best way to lose them.

 

In the seasons of life, raising our kids was the summer. And that moment, in the van in the rain in the trees, that was the solstice. Many of the hinges on which our lives turn are in our past before we see them. But this one, I recognized. And I knew even then that I’d never have a blue pony to take me for a ride back. The moment could only be savored, and then it would go and never return to me, nor I to it.

 

I was right.