Window Closes…Another Opens
New York Times
The Summer That Ended All Summers
By JOSH WEIL
Published: August 21, 2010
Leverett, Mass.
No one — not the doctor in Cairo with his egret-feather hair and bad-news eyes; not the spinal surgeon, with his broad Egyptian shoulders and eagerness for the knife — knew how it happened. It might have started during Ramadan, out by the pyramids, on a spine-rattling, bareback gallop. It might have happened 13,000 feet up in the Alpine swamps between Uganda and Congo, as I leapt from tussock to tussock with 50 pounds of gear on my back.
But whatever caused the disc to burst and splatter against my spinal nerve, it brought the endless summer of heat and adventure that I had found while living in Northern Africa for a year suddenly, surely, to an end.
Ever since I was a kid, I’d lived for summer — and, until a few years ago, sharing it with my older brother was what brought summer to life. We used to crouch on the bank of the Deerfield River where it wound south of Vermont, taking turns blowing up our Kmart raft, bulge-cheeked and frog-eyed, our mouths on the inflation valves, dizzy and sputtering with laughter. We’d buckle on bike helmets, paddle into the rapids and spill.
If you’ve ever been hurled head-first into white water, you know the feeling: your world upturned, your hold on it spun loose, the current pitching you forward so fast you struggle to grasp what has happened to time. When you come up to breathe, the air is pure exhilaration.
As we got older, we hunted harder and farther for that feeling. The summer I turned 16 we found it in England, on the shoulder of the M-1 freeway — where we stood all grins and thumbs — when an honest-to-God Madonna impersonator pulled over, picked us up, slid her convertible’s top down and headed for Scotland, singing into the wind.
That night, we climbed a graveyard fence, spread out our sleeping bags and watched the rising moon’s pale light paint the valley below. A week after that, we woke to the hot breath of horses, their muzzles lipping our hair. We’d bedded down in a dark field only to find in the morning that it was a paddock. But there they were, and there we were, and so we rode them — bareback, beside the highway, whooping till we fell off.
We slept under ponchos, on the cliffs of Dover, inside a tool shed in France, beneath olive trees in Spain. We ate from fruit trees and out of fields, followed the scent of fresh-baked bread, washed our faces in fountains. In Paris, we got kicked out of a restroom for scrubbing in the sinks. We shrugged — so long City of Light! — and lit out wet-headed.
After that, every summer found us somewhere together: in Tanzania, stalking along the banks of the Ruaha River, listening to the huffing of buffaloes or splashing naked into a snow-melt lake in Montana, just the two of us 10,000 feet up in a world of wilderness.
Until one day, eight years ago, we climbed down from the Bitterroot Mountains and out of all that forever. That year, before we could eat our end-of-the-hike steak dinner — before we could do anything — we had to find a pay phone. Driving in search of one, I watched my brother’s eyes fill with the same urgency he’d felt when night was falling and we needed a place to bed down. And, when he finally got his fiancée on the line, I saw the same relief. In a year he was married. In another he was a father.
From then on, I broke free of regular life on my own. Which is how I found myself beneath a bridge in rural Slovakia, scrubbing with a soapy bandanna while gypsy horse carts clattered above my head. I stood listening. The voices sounded strange — not because they were speaking a language I didn’t understand, but because it had been days since I’d heard a human voice that close.
That summer, I walked across great swaths of Eastern Europe — Bohemia, Moravia, the Tatra Mountains and the high pastures of the Carpathians. At dusk, I would slip into a secluded field or a dark stand of trees to pitch my tent. By dawn, I would be gone.
Have you ever passed through a place with the knowledge that only the fields and forests will ever know you were there? Have you ever emerged from morning fog onto the cobblestone street of an ancient town and felt the stares of gypsy children waking in the square? Have you ever wondered how a ghost feels, wandering, invisible, through the world? I’ll tell you: free. Incomparably, immeasurably, free.
Three years after that summer in Slovakia, 30 years old and back in the States, I lay on the floor in my brother’s house, where I was convalescing. Shoulders on a yoga mat, hips raised, I slowly extended first one leg, then the other. Above me, my brother’s 3 1/2-year-old daughter stood watching.
“Who are you trying to kick?” she said.
“I’m not,” I said.
She bobbed and weaved in slow-motion around my slow feet.
“I’m trying to get strong,” I told her.
“I’m strong,” she said.
And she lay down beside me, lifted her legs, began mimicking my moves. She made her face into an exaggerated grimace, gritting her teeth.
“See,” she said, “I’m stronger than you.”
It was early June, the beginning of my summer of surgeons, my mother driving me from doctor to doctor. I had just been told I would never hike again.
We went to the YMCA every week — me trying to regain my strength with lung-aching laps, my brother and niece splashing around in the kiddie pool. My brother kept bemoaning the big shoulders he’d lost along with the adventures that had built them. But, forced for the first summer of my life to stay home (or as close to a home as I ever had), forced to stay still, I could hear the thrill in his daughter’s shrieks, the joy in his low chuckle; I could see pleasure bloom on his face as he watched his wife gather black-eyed Susans from the flower beds. And I understood for the first time how my May-to-September hunt for freedom had cut me off from all the other things that summer could be.
Look: There’s my niece between the rows of cherry tomatoes, her hair like a dandelion puff, a pint basket in her hands. Beside her, my brother fills it. Later, at the kitchen sink, my sister-in-law will wash the fruit. My brother will pass behind her. Reaching back, she will slip one between his lips. I know she will because all that summer, that was how it was. And I, looking in, watched.
By the end of August, I had healed enough to walk the family dog down by the river. I remember one time in particular: returning up the road toward the scent of grilling that came from my brother’s house. When I got there, nobody was outside.
I stood with the dog for a while, looking at the place where a Slip ’N Slide had been. My brother had let the plastic slide sit too long and now that he had taken it up, it had left its mark: a pale path of depleted grass running through the lawn all the way to the edge of the woods. Through the kitchen windows I could hear them — my brother, his daughter, his wife. Down there at the end of the trail, the trees were dark, tempting, unexplored.
I know a bit of how he feels.
Tags: 1, Reflections
Zoe
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