trippy

We were supposed to leave for Montana today. We're still in Saint Paul. Greg and Oscar are sleeping upstairs, and I'm down in the living room, doing what I do best....procrastinating. The car is not packed, although the front bumper has been mended with duct tape so as to improve mileage, so that's something, I guess. My suitcase is packed upstairs, which is also better than I usually do. There is still much to be done before we leave. It's 1:30 a.m. and we have to get up before 7, but I just can't sleep. I'm a terrible sleeper under the best of circumstances, but mix in a healthy dose of excitement about the trip, nervousness about all we still need to accomplish before we can go, the compelling final volume of Harry Potter, and especially a thought-provoking letter received from an old friend, and I'll be lucky to sleep before sunup.

I almost died the first time I went to Montana. It seems so long ago, now, that we packed up Greg's old blue Grand Am and confidently and foolishly drove it straight west. We left school on a rainy March day, armed with a road atlas and a lot of Gatorade and oatmeal cream pies. The snow must have recently melted; I remember picking up an old leaf off the ground and handing it to Greg right before we left. It's the kind of thing I still do to this day, and whether it was the color of the leaf or it's size that attracted me to it I no longer recall. But I remember very much walking through those trees that I would never see again, and handing him that leaf that he would carry in his wallet for years afterward.

God, we were young. The weather improved as we progressed west, and we spent the first night in a Motel 6 in Rapid City. It was 50-some degrees, the warmest weather we'd felt in months, and we were off on a real adventure, having lied to our parents not only about where we were going, but who we were with. That's how young we were....it actually seemed to matter that we were traveling by ourselves and it certainly seemed to matter that our parents not know it. We awoke early the next morning, eager to head back on the road. Greg got the first shower, and I turned on the TV and opened the curtains in our tiny room and gawked: there was at least eight inches of snow in the parking lot and more falling fast. Happily I gathered snowballs and began chucking them over the shower curtain on a very surprised Greg. A few hours later was when we almost killed ourselves in a car crash in the Montana mountains. We lost control and swerved toward a drop off that would surely have killed us, gained control for a split second and swerved the other way, mananging to come out of it with only minor damage to the car and a totally blown front tire. Some nice guy gave us a lift into Bozeman, and though we were in quite a predicament, all I could do was stare out the window at those mountains.

As we did all we could to try to keep moving west, that same weather system that caused all the trouble in the first place was moving east. About 24 hours after we enountered it (and luckily lived to tell the tale), it apparently collided with a different system, producing several tornadoes, one of which destroyed our town. Our little road trip ended up longer than we'd anticipated....we didn't have to return to school for weeks, seeing as how much of it had been reduced to rubble. And when we did return, the part I missed the most was those big, old trees.

It just seems funny tonight, how much I didn't know back then. How I ended up marrying that guy I ate oatmeal cream pies and mini Babybels with in an old blue Grand Am on interstate 90. How my brother would come to call Montana home. How I'd never even met some of the people who I now recognize to be most influential in my life: C----, CAM, B---, the X's....I'd never heard of Storyhill, never read Pam Houston or Jon Krakauer or Barbara Kingsolver. I'd never been sick. I had no idea of the things I would lose, or the things I would gain precisely because I had lost others. I have a photo from that long ago road trip, a silly photo taken in the car of the side of Greg's head. It will look different tomorrow, that same head will have a couple grays at the temple. I just feel old tonight for some reason.

I've always kept a journal. Not an eveyday kind of thing, just a record of things I did or more often felt. Some of the entries now seem so trivial. I like to re-read these from time-to-time and refer to the corresponding years as "The Drama Queen Years." But some are not trivial at all, and when I re-read these they still have the power to move me to tears or long to talk once again with people from my past. One such entry detailed a nice morning walk up a mountain with an old friend of mine. Years old now, I still love to read it because I think it is the most honest thing I ever wrote in my life. In those days I was lucky if I even recognized my feelings for what they were, much less admitted them, even to myself, but on this day I did, and somehow all the words came out right on the paper. I sent that entry to my friend about two years ago, just to prove what my feelings once were, and how I treasured that pre-dawn hike and the sunrise we watched and the wine we drank and the rocks we sat against. Back in the day when we lived in my tent together and traveled in his old Toyota we used to read each other's journals anyway. But edited versions. There were entries we denied each other, and this was one of them. But years later, it seemed beautiful, and he thought so, too, and because of it we began anew, this time truly as friends (and nothing more). And this week, he sent me his version of that day, written years and years ago, but just recently found and photocopied for me. It was so hopeful. Mine was beautiful in its sadness and uncertainty, as if I knew even back then what would eventually happen, but his was all youth and hope and dreams that would never come true. I remember sitting in the tent by night and talking vaguely of the future and how confident we were that we would somehow manage to make a difference in the world, that our lives would be full of adventure and love and mountaintop sunrises, and that the ordinary things that trap so many people would never get in our way. But they did. We grew up, and he's trapped in med school, the path he swore he would never take all those years ago and I'm here in Saint Paul with a house and a husband and a body that keeps trying to fail me.

I just feel old tonight. All that thinking of who I used to be, and wondering if I am who I said I'd never be. I wonder what I'll think ten years from now. If I'll remember sitting up until 3 am reading Harry Potter and writing about getting old before a Montana road trip. Who knows? Trippy.