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.
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.