This Is The Place

From the beginning, I'd heard about this special place of childhood where he'd caught his first fish, built his first campfire, slept under the stars. It was where he was anchored to the earth, where he'd gotten an inkling that he wouldn't be able to wear suits.

It was also where he'd learned what it meant to be a man in his gruff father's image: Don't bawl when you fall down, keep your mouth shut if you don't know what you're talking about, and don't let the dark spook you. 

Several summers, his family had loaded up the old car, left the desert floor long before first light and headed up into the mountains on a switchback road where the radiator always boiled over. More than a dozen hours later, as twilight outlined Ponderosa pines and a gurgling, gin-clear stream beckoned them, my husband's family settled into their campsite in the wilderness.

My husband remembers those trips as the happiest of his first few years. When he was 8, the family moved to another state and he stopped going to the high-mountain camp. Fifty years later, in a fast car with a good air conditioner, he was back searching for it. 

"It was in a valley," he said, trying to see through dust thrown up by a passing pickup on a narrow gravel road. "I know it's here someplace, we're very close, let's just go a little farther, OK? I'm sure I can find it."

The unaccustomed anxiety in his voice gave me pause, for I am married to a very calm man. But not today; he was on a mission planned many months ago and 5,000 miles away. He was bent on having me hear what he'd heard, smell what he'd smelled, see what had so imprinted itself on his young mind that it had carried him through all the years, good and bad.

Going against the lines on the map, he turned right instead of left. Instinct guided him. We started down a steep grade. Through summer willows, he spotted a river. We didn't speak. I crossed my fingers. 

At the bottom of the hill there was a meadow of aspen and pine, the sound of free-flowing water, a fork in the road, a sign: Diamond Campground.

"This is the place." He'd saved those words for a long time. 

It was no more beautiful than a hundred other mountain streams we'd seen in our 27 years together. But he was different: animated, energized, striding from one boulder to the next, scrambling down the river bank to stand next to the water, putting his hand in it. That pool was where his cousin, Donna Jean, had helped him dig the worm, then put it on the hook, showed him how to dab the line in the water. Right here, on this bank, he'd pulled out his first trout, a 5-incher, held it, then gently removed it from the barb and put it back into the stream.

Over there, that's where they'd all slept, where his grandfather had cooked biscuits in a cast-iron Dutch oven, and his mother and aunts had gossiped and played cards. 

Right here. This place.

He'd brought a video camera and I filmed him, pointing and remembering, talking straight into the lens. It had taken 50 years to get back here; he knew he didn't have another 50.

We left after a half-hour. At the top of the hill I had a flash of insight: "Is this where you want your ashes scattered?" 
There was no urgent reason to think such a thing, let alone voice it.

"Yes," he said. "This is the place."
Through tears, I pressed him: "Are you sure?"
"Yes."
Mission accomplished. 

© 2001 The Women Syndicate

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