On the Occasion of My Twentieth High School Reunion

So Spake Mo…

Twenty years.

Twenty years since we shared the journey of childhood together, since the stories of our lives were so bound up in one another that we gave shape to each other, to the people we would become. Amidst canyon and sagebrush, in the cradle of a one-stoplight town, we began.

Twenty years.

Twenty years since we set off to become that something more, to create the new people we held in the dreams of our hearts. And in those twenty years, we created ourselves anew so many times: cashier, engineer, homemaker, soldier, admin, entrepreneur, artist, manager, teacher. Along this road, in the throes of the journey, we were aided by the wisdom and the folly of hundreds as we retooled our dreams to match reality…or reality to match our dreams.

Twenty years.

Twenty years into the journey we return. We come in the guise of middle age, wearing the dust of so long a road, so many selves created and discarded. We come wrapped in the critique and the support of the hundreds we’ve met along the way. But for all their love and advice, they could never truly know all of who we are. They were not there when we began:

Amidst canyon and sagebrush, in the cradle of a one-stoplight town.

Among those who helped shape our original story.

Among friends.

Welcome home.

So Spake Me…

There it is. My own personal creation story, my myth. And it is so very startling how archetypal the actors, events, the places of our legends become in just twenty short years. My memories have become aged snapshots, grainy and uncertain in their detail. Only the most vivid of the defining moments remain and as I gaze back at them in my mind, I can’t help but wonder how much of the truth remains after so many retellings.

I wrote Mo’s speech as the welcome piece for the reunion book, looking forward to the reunion, looking at those snapshot memories anew. With the fears of youth set to the side, curiosity rose up in its place. Slowly, steadily my classmates transformed into one hundred and thirty-four books I had never finished and “What happened next?” became the nagging question tugging at my mind every time I stumbled across a Facebook post, an old photo tucked in an worn children’s game, or a dusty yearbook I’d glanced past for years without seeing.

And when the nights came?

The stories were more fascinating than I could have possibly expected. Probably because they mattered to me. These people, I knew how hard they had to work, how far they had to climb to get where they were now. And the peaks they had conquered! Business owners, Air Force pilots, PhDs, researchers, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, flying high in the big city, settling cozy in the small towns, even planting roots in our own hometown to keep her thriving.

So many stories. Each story so new and yet so familiar. So many glimpses at the archetype I had become in my classmates’ own legends—the girl I had once been seen from new eyes. Each glimpse so surprising and so sweet.

And when the nights were over?

I left with a bit of sorrow at the stories left unheard, at the renewed connections I knew would fade once more. I left missing my people.

But I also left happy. I am so proud of the people I come from, how they have grown no matter what path they chose.

 

When these images, too, become faded with age, the details blurred and uncertain, I hope I can still draw from my myth, from my memory, this timeless truth: I come from good people. Good people who are still out there in the world spinning their fascinating stories and sometime soon perhaps I will get to hear more.

And that brings me the profoundest comfort.

Welcome home.
 

No Idea

So Spake Mo…

They had no idea what they were getting into.

Would an astronaut’s eyes work up in space or would the lack of gravity cause them to change shape, so that they could not see?

Would gravity affect his ability to breathe, even to swallow the food he needed to survive?

Could they keep a rocket together long enough to find out? They were replacing a warhead with a human payload on a freaking missile!

What would the surface of the moon be like?

One of the places the astronauts trained was the Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. They learned to be the eyes and hands of the geologists back home, identifying volcanic rock and formations. But would the surface they reached be anything like that volcanic landscape?

In vastness and desolation, perhaps.

In volcanic formation, no.

Were the eyes a concern? No.

Breathing, eating? Not really.

Did they figure those human missiles out? Yes.

By the seats of their pants, by adapting the technology they were familiar with, by a vigorous outpouring of ingenuity and the determination not to be outdone.

They had no idea what they were getting into.

And yet they managed what man has dreamed since we first looked to the stars and thought to walk amongst those shining gods.

They had no idea what they were getting into, but they did it.

So Spake Me…

One of the reasons I’ve always found the story of humankind’s ascension into space so inspiring is the sheer impossibility of it. We should never have been able to make it happen. Where were the high speed computers, the advanced aeronautics, the streamlined and elegant technologies we so take for granted today?

But like so many other things in life, it is that overwhelming monument that cannot be conquered which finally inspires people to reach beyond themselves, to push each other past what they’ve always believed to be the limits of their bodies and minds. The highest mountain, the longest marathon, the greatest voyage.

So many of us stop with the I Don’t Knows. We look at that list of questions not as a checklist of activities to be undertaken on the path to Getting There, but as roadblocks, That Which Cannot Be Done. Problems which prevent us from even beginning.

When we begin, we never know what we are really getting into. Never. EVER. The simple trip from the family breakfast table to the front door: missing shoes, missing homework, dawdling kids, an emergency call from work.

Isn’t it a little strange that we expect any other undertaking in life to be any different?

They had no idea what they were getting into.

And neither will we, but it’ll be one hell of a ride.

**Astronaut photos courtesy of National Parks Service.

The Daredevil and the Fisherman

So Spake Mo… Once there was a man who—despite being on record as having broken nearly every bone in his entire body over the course of his illustrious career—managed to secure all the necessary permits from the city of Twin Falls, Idaho to stage a media extravaganza!

Before a crowd of spectators and media, Evel Knievel strapped into his X-1 Skycycle, preparing to make a leap of approximately 1,500 feet…over a 486 foot deep section of the Snake River Canyon.

He made it.

Sort of.

The rocket car’s parachute deployed prematurely, dragging Knievel back over the river, then further still to land on the launch-side riverbank. A few more feet to the north and he wouldn’t have walked away with minor injuries; he would have drowned. His parachute wasn’t the only thing to malfunction. His harness failed to release, trapping him in the Skycycle until help arrived.

Strip away the newsmen and the elaborate machinery.

Bring on the lower-budget daredevils: the fishermen. Approximately a quarter of a mile from the site of Knievel’s jump stands an abandoned platform overlooking those dizzying heights. Feel like dangling a line in the waters of the great Snake River? Grab your gear and your pole and join in your mind’s eye the fishermen of yesteryear as they shimmied down a ladder that hung from this platform in their quest to catch The Big One.

Funny, but the city of Twin Falls, Idaho decided to shut that one down…

So Spake Me…

For those of you unfamiliar with the man, Evel (formerly Evil) Knievel was the stuntman rockstar of his day. His Snake River Canyon jump has been called Woodstock with out the mud and rain.

Yes, hard to picture that in Twin Falls, Idaho.

My folks actually saw the jump. They were stopped on the Perrine Bridge that spans the canyon on their way to pick up some peaches. They watched him nearly land; they watched the wind sweep him back into the canyon.

And then there’s me.

Who snaps a picture of the fisherman’s platform as fast as she can and scurries away from the railing before the vertigo can pitch her head over heels into a picturesque death on the rocks…way…down…there.

PS—Did you know the Shoshone Falls (right next to these two historic sites) is taller than Niagra? Oh yeah, it’s WAY down there.

PPS—I, obviously, didn’t take the Knievel picture, having been less than a year old at the time, but I couldn’t find the name of the photographer who did. So, my apologies. On that note, the photo of the Perrine Bridge, a favorite haunt of base jumpers, was taken by my father.

Twin Falls Trolley

So Spake Mo…

Below roared the thunderous waters of the Shoshone Falls like a scale model of the great Niagra filling the space between sheer canyon walls with billows of fine mist.


Such a contrast between the violent beauty of the water, the implied threat of the deeply cut bedrock and that ethereally soft spray… and then came the rainbow that ricocheted from it. A beautiful moment.

As we backed away from the viewing platform, we came to another contrast: the naked heat and drought of the Idaho desert mere feet from so much water. Three generations of us climbed the path up the canyon wall taking refuge from the sun in the occasional shallow cave scraped out by those waters so very long ago.

Absorbed with the vivid colors of the desert, my father and I eventually fell behind the rest of the group near an unnatural arrangement of rocks along the path. That, said my father, was one of two staircases that once led down to a tidy little park with a series of small pools overlooking the falls. He said that in the distant past, the city of Twin Falls had had a trolley running from the county courthouse to this remote spot. Parties with picnic baskets in hand descended these stairs to take their easement while enjoying the natural majesty of the falls.

The park and the stone steps have since returned to nature. But every once in a while as the city of Twin Falls grows and evolves, reminders of the old trolley are found—bits of track unearthed as new roads replace the old, little memories of life as it was.

So Spake Me…

Alright, I know I promised this space would be dedicated to more information regarding the legends from Spectre, but sometimes you just hit tasty gems in places you’ve been a thousand times and you’ve just got to share them.

The Shoshone Falls were on full blast when the family and I journeyed back to Idaho last week and my husband, who had recently been to Niagra, couldn’t believe I’d never taken him to see this before! How do you tell a guy who is looking at this triumph of nature and engineering that the Shoshone Trickle is more what I was accustomed to finding down here.

Of course that is not the only tasty tidbit my parents had to relay, so stay tuned for more…

On the space elevator side, just a quick note: National Geographic recently conned me out $5.71 with promises of an article on space elevators. Nrgh. A picture and puny little paragraph. Repeat after me: Impulse buying is bad. Impulse buying is bad!