Foggy morning walks through Soaring Eagle state park. By December the color has drained down to a dull copper with some last yellow in the leaves. The rest of the landscape is green, cloaked in gray. The deep greens of the Pacific Northwest, forest green. And the electric green of the mosses everywhere with more yellow. The moss snakes along the fallen timber, up the sides, a turtleneck sweater made out of moss. Come winter it is quiet with only a few small peeps, the rest just the hush of distant traffic or a dog’s bark. This is the beginning of the down season, a time for rest.

I hold my walking stick like a joust and touch the trees I pass like a fist bump. It’s time to go back to when I first started college on the east coast many years ago. First there is the matter of Ray.

Aimee (she really spelled her name like that) broke Ray’s heart and then Stefan’s. Stefan was friends with both of them when Aimee and Ray were dating, high school sweethearts who couldn’t last more than a semester at college.

Aimee was all smiles and glowing, a real beauty. Barbie doll blue eyes. But Aimee ditched Ray for his friend Stefan, part French and more cosmopolitan than Ray with his bomber jacket, Marlboro reds and motorcycle. I was there when he learned of this and Ray, who was all smiles and glowing himself, kind of broke that day. Both his girlfriend and guy friend had betrayed him, a double blow.

Ray got caught not long afterwards growing a pot plant in his college dorm, perched right there on the window sill in full view of campus security. He got kicked off campus.

Thereafter Aimee broke Stefan’s heart for a third male, who trumped both Stefan and Ray: Phillip Pierre. No one had the gall to call Phillip Phil except Pat Driscoll, a hulk of a man twice the weight and width of Phillip. Both Pat and Phillip were actors I worked with in the college theater; certainly not students, town locals and older.

Phillip wore his curly hair in a man bun before anyone, in 1989. He was pure cool. A painted leather jacket with Rastafarian colors, round spectacles, always a knowing look about him. Like he was in full control.

When Stefan, quite assertive himself with his bomber jacket and motorbike, got the news about Phillip he broke down in a similar fashion as Ray; he cried. I laughed inside at all this. These guys were getting blown out of the air like clay pigeons.

Pat Driscoll, the hulk of a man who Phillip recruited as the lead villain in a play about a talk radio show host who gets harassed and ultimately killed by a psychotic listener was a method actor, meaning he’d meld into the part by accessing and using some comparable experience of his own for the performance. You didn’t want to go near Pat when he was getting into character in our small theater. He looked frightening enough as is but considerably more so in this mode. With a barrel chest, shoulder length hair, and slit eyes like a snake he’d shout PHIL when it was time to go or he needed something. Pat rolled his joints so tightly they were hard to draw from, and his slit eyes would turn menacing, like the way house cats reveal an inner lid when they’re sedated. Some of us speculated about his past life off stage. Had he actually killed someone?

When Ray and I transferred to the main campus Ray fell in with a group of hippies who lived on the west end of campus in a patch of older homes with nice porches and good Asian rugs inside, exotic houseplants, candles, Kitaro albums. They were hippies on the outside but appeared to be well fed and capable of affording the higher rents on the more desirable end of town. Few appeared to work full time.

Ray got himself a good job at the local record store and wasn’t taking classes but then something happened, something drug related, and he got sent to prison. It was hard for us friends of Ray to accept this. He was such a good guy, it was deeply unfair. When he got out a few months later he seemed changed by it. He also said I was the only one who wrote to him and this meant a lot to Ray.

There was a girl named Michelle Guidry I developed a crush on and knew what time of day I could expect to see her on campus as classes changed. She was an actor and looked like another woman I’d acted with previously, in the Phillip/Pat days. Every day as classes changed I’d hoped to catch her eye, as if I could gauge her opinion of me in how she looked back. I don’t think she ever noticed me, not even once.

But oddly, out of thirty thousand some students, she started dating Ray. She was head over heels for him. Ray and his big blue eyes, his long chestnut brown hair, his striped Guatemalan pants and hummus. Ray, a vegetarian since his early teens, who’d been to prison.

But over this span of a few years and knowing Ray, I observed a change in him. Like his heart had crusted over: he was hardened by it all. Sometimes he said callous things, and with Michelle it was clear, he could give a shit. I let Ray know I wanted her, badly. Maybe he could think about moving on if he wasn’t interested?

Ray looked at me and considered this, you could see the wheels turning in his head, and he liked the idea. On one hand he could do a favor for his buddy Bill and on the other, he could cast aside this woman he didn’t care for. Maybe it was a way of getting back at Aimee even, or the world. So he agreed.

But when the report came back from Michelle, how she felt about me, she wasn’t interested. Bill wasn’t down to earth, or earthy enough. This really stung. She didn’t know me at all! Wouldn’t give me the chance even. It felt like a judgment, that I lacked depth or wasn’t real enough.

And the cruel irony of it all: I’d been accused of not being earthy, and here on my morning walks through the woods many years later, I was fist bumping trees. It all traced back to Aimee in the end. I wondered, what had come of her and Phillip. And who could be more down to earth than me? Not even Ray.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, humor, Memoir, pacific northwest