I'm not sure if retching at yesterday's lunch is the logical culmination of my six day visit to my college friend Ian or something anomalous, like a lightning strike or shark attack. Maybe I was physically purging the malaise that had sapped my motivation and willpower all summer up to that point. What I do know is that my vacation achieved exactly what I'd hoped it would. I feel more competent and motivated. I feel like blogging.
This was to be the second year in a row I'd joined Ian in Eugene for the Oregon Country Fair, a massive festival featuring food, music, exhibits, plays, and bare-breasted hippies that runs over a weekend in early July. Last year we ended up stumbling through the dusty labyrinth of Pocahontas-costumed fairgoers for a full day looking for Ian's friends from the University of Oregon Department of Physics. This year would be different. This year, I got to Eugene by air.
The man-child sitting next to me on the hardy little prop plane that shuttled a trail mix of students and businessmen between Portland and Eugene wore his hat backwards, ears muffed by an oversized set of headphones jacked in to a hand-held video game console at which he squinted for the duration of the brief flight. When the startlingly attractive attendant asked him to turn his apparatus off during takeoff and landing, he closed the screen, only to brazenly open it again the instant she turned her back.
He removed his headphones only once after we touched down in Eugene. "Damn near thought we'd crash!" he said, turning to me. I looked into his face for the first time: He was at least 35 years old.
Transportation makes me nervous, and I suffer from the same anxieties on planes as I do on Greyhounds. I fret endlessly about delays, my baggage, and whether I'm headed in the right direction. This is why I always pack a book at random in my carry-on: The stress of starting something new is easier on the nerves than tying myself into knots over what has already been done. On the Portland-Eugene flight, I failed to notice my seat-mate's age, so deeply immersed was I in my choice for this trip, Mountains of Memory: A Fire Lookout's Life in the River of No Return Wilderness, by Don Scheese.
Scheese, a some-time fire lookout on Ruffneck Mountain in Idaho, put together a collection of anecdotal essays that alternates between capturing the quietude of life in the woods and butchering his achievement with that nasty habit endemic to feature story writing, putting words into people's mouths.
Without thinking, I'd elected to read about reclusive life in backwoods Idaho while on a trip to a place where men in Hawaiian shirts with ponytails passes for high fashion. My home state's least appreciable attributes, coldness and disapproval of civilization, would literally be part of my baggage.
My skepticism of Eugene-folk started at the luggage claim, where the leggy redhead who sat two rows up from me on the plane shared with who I assume was her youngish boyfriend a sprawling and almost cinematic embrace.
It reminded me of something a carpenter working with me in McCall, Idaho, once said about his neighbor who lived in a yurt: "When his girlfriend's in town and they're getting busy, at least he turns the NPR way up." At least the yurt-dwelling environmentalist in McCall had the courtesy to drown out the rutting sound with public radio. Standing there at the luggage claim conveyor belt, puritanically surveying the mess of copper hair and black skinny jeans, I prayed for a distraction, a bird to crash into a window or a bomb to explode––anything that would divert my attention.
It was at this moment that Ian strode into the terminal, his long arms swinging purposefully. Our greeting, though hardly effusive, was certainly warm. We only see each other once a year, and I'm always thrilled to see him. My bag was one of the first through the rubber flaps at the gate between the luggage loading and retrieval areas, and with it in hand, Ian and I beat a path to his Ford Taurus station wagon, leaving the discomforting couple behind us.
It was 4:00; we had an ultimate Frisbee engagement at 6:00. After arriving at Ian's narrow two-story flat, I changed into shorts and we drank glasses of Ian's latest concoction––ginger tea wheat beer––to celebrate my arrival.
...
We walked everywhere in Eugene, starting with our trip to the ultimate Frisbee game, which was some fifteen blocks from Ian's flat. The sunny, warm weather and cool breezes dulled my feeling of being someplace foreign, and made our long treks into downtown extremely pleasurable.
Along the way, we were passed by a pasty, black-haired nerd type on a bicycle who seemed to nod at Ian and I as we walked past some university buildings. I made a forgettable comment about nerds, only to remember a promise I made to myself on the plane: "Harrison, don't talk shit." Ian said nothing. Debuting at the large field attached to a baseball diamond where we would play, I found the curly-headed nerd talking to some girls on the sidelines. He proved to be a tenacious Frisbee player.
I wasn't sure whether it was old age or the quality of my footwear, but the two-hour match felt more like two hours of work than play. After an hour and forty minutes, my feet had developed large blisters; out of fear for the rest of my weekend, I grudgingly tapped out and retired to the sidelines. My evening, despite the hamburger dinner with Ian's friends and two girls we'd met at the match (Erin and Callie, who were a repeating feature of my trip), was over, and blank congeniality was the most I could muster in mixed company for the remainder of the evening.
That night, safely back at Ian's apartment, we watched episodes of 30 Rock and Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was good to see Ian again, and the physical exhaustion of travel balanced well with the exertion of Frisbee. After a couple of hours of letting our nerves and bodies settle, we called it a night.
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