"Floating Joy": Childhood Hijinks and Shared Bonds
I believe the most common question I’m asked about growing up in a small mountain town is “what is there to do?” Often it seems that we’re limited in what we can do. For instance, there’s no arcades, no skate parks, we have no readily available martial arts classes or much of any extra curricular activities that don’t involve getting outdoors. Sometimes we don’t want to climb mountains, sometimes we just want to be kids. Granted, I did come up in the midst of the tech revolution where video games and computers provided endless hours of entertainment, but where could we go when we wanted to really spend time with friends? Many folks found community in church, and many others would flock to the local pool during the four months it was open. Camaraderie was built into our sports teams and our school band alike, but was it enough?
Winter of 2013 is when I found my happy place. It was a “seniors only” bonfire and because the host was such a close friend of mine they let this green underclassman come too. The typical hijinks followed; boys were trying to impress girls, girls gossiped about boys, someone took their shirt off (it was me, I admit it), and we played really loud music. Once everyone began to leave our host instructed us to grab some flashlights and get ready for the real fun - and that was where it began.
We trudged down the mountainside in complete darkness with nothing but our leader’s memory of the forest to guide us. We walked through valleys, crossed a stream, passed a dead forest, and found ourselves in an open field beside a tucked-away mountain lake. I can’t say who this placed belonged to in the daytime, but once night fell it was ours for years to come. We untied the canoe from its post and dropped it in the water, using sticks as paddles and cramming ourselves unsteadily into the vessel. Our ability to paddle was limited by a number of reeds that stuck out from the lake, so we made it our goal to get as much speed as possible and slam into the bundles so that they would hold us tightly in place. There we would sit, both summer and winter alike, in the darkness of the valley where no traffic lights, no street lights, no houses could look down upon us and interrupt our night.
Something we found during one of our treks down the mountain. Most of that night was spent listening to something continually barrel and crash through the woods. We debated for hours on whether we should make a break for it or stay on the canoe until daylight.
Over the years we’d start bringing select others into our little piece of heaven and share with them the beauty of a sunset gleaming across the lake in perfect solitude. Other bonfires meant other groups the select few of us would choose to bring down. We’d act like fools and rip our clothes off as we dove into the lake, both a freeing experience and means by which we thought we could impress girls. We’d float some beer behind the canoe some cold, winter nights and refuse to leave the forest until it was all gone, all the while relying on cheap cigars and laughter to keep us warm. These nights live on as the fondest moments of my life, and even though we’ve all moved onto the next chapters in our lives, the memories we made after crawling through that dark, dark valley, crossing the frozen stream, and passing through that dead forest will always bond us.
Like I said, we don’t always want to climb mountains, but the beauty of living in a small mountain town is that if you want to enjoy your time, you often have to, and I’m grateful for every time we climbed our way back out of that little piece of eden.
Adventure On!
-JGM