New Work In Progress

This is exposition-heavy for now... but it is going, quite literally, down a canyon and nearly off a cliff.


The Summer I graduated high school, my brother and I took our parent’s Toyota minivan on a camping trip through British Columbia. Newly eighteen, Stanford-bound, convinced for what seemed like sound enough reasons of my own invincible merit, I had spent my high school years working hard and staying out of trouble. Only as graduation came on did I finally loosen up a little, drinking at parties and kissing an occasional girl, taking chances here and there.

My brother Jeremy was already the reckless rebel, his entire identity predicated on not being me: he insisted on attending a different high school, didn’t care about his grades or what our parent’s thought, had already dropped out of competitive sports, took up surfing, BMX racing and smoking weed. His friends were the bad boys of the school, hoodied and perpetually slouched to walls, cutting class to smoke cigarettes behind the gym, most headed nowhere good. But we were tight and had no secrets and never fought, had been that way since I was ten and he was eight and the two of us, talking between bunks in the dark, had decided that it made no sense to fight each other when we could buck our strict parents by presenting a united front. We could meet eyes as our parents laid down some mandate or rule or schedule and know not just what the other was thinking, but how we could collude to make things tilt our way. When we were young, that was as simple as a shared protest or agreement, numbers at the ballot. Later, I would note that a family trip we didn’t want to go on would interfere with my wrestling schedule or study session, when really I didn’t care, but knew Jeremy had a party he wanted to be at; for his part, knowing me, he’d take the rap those rare times I fucked up, like when our parents noticed that the liquor cabinet had been raided-- I’d taken the Cutty Sark for graduation night, but when they assumed it was him, he didn’t set them straight even as they yelled and carried on. The favored older son, my accommodation to the hand I’d been dealt was to perform perfection and so avoid censure, while Jeremy, stuck with inevitable comparison, refused judgment entirely.

Yet the truth was that we were pretty much the same, nice quiet kids, half-Japanese and so never belonging in white suburban Oregon, short and bookish and overbright, sensitive and a little awkward. If Jeremy admired my dedication and achievement, I admired his willingness to defy the expectations of the known world. As August’s heat came on and plans were set for me to leave for college, it was clear that our partnership was coming to an end. This trip was to be our last hurrah. I convinced my parents to let us take the car on the basis of my long record of responsibility—I would watch after the kid and stay safe, I promised. I thought I was breaking us both free into the heady independence that I thought of as adulthood.
We strapped my brother’s mountain bike to the back of the van, took removed the rear seats for room, filled a cooler with sausage, hot-dogs, eggs and marshmallows, borrowed the down sleeping bags and campstove, stowed in kindling and wood for campfires, took a couple old newspapers for tinder, made sure we had the rainsleeve. We took the inflatable two-man kayak, a pump, lifejackets, and two paddles, imagining wild rivers up there and still giddy with our skill: we’d run the wild and scenic portion of the Rogue that July in the two-man without flipping once. I hid a fifth of Absolut in the bottom of my clothes bag. We could do anything at all in the deep Canadian woods, British Columbia beckoning like a tundra Mardi Gras, sure to allow us to become more than boys.

We left early on a Monday morning through a cold dawn, taking turns driving, rock overloud from the tinny speakers, I-5 a long fast flat run through Portland and past Seattle, the land the long flat fields and a tunnel forest, familiar, an automatic green blur. We gassed up just before we hit the border in Washington, pass the Canadian guards with a grin and a wave, only to have the guard wave us back to tell us we had no gas cap, that we’d left it back in the States. The US Border guards detained us for a full hour questioning us and looking for contraband, unsympathetic to our explanation we’d been in Canada for five minutes, leaving me sweating about the Absolut. They were looking for drugs, fortunately, and didn’t find the vodka. By the time we’d retrieved the cap and come back across the border again, our enthusiasm was undulled, but our confidence had been a bit shaken. The highrises of Vancouver ahead, however, sparkling in the high sun of afternoon braced us and renewed us. We were at any moment going to find our future, or at least, see something we had never seen before. We made for the cheapest hostel of Watertown.