New land, lost friends
Oxford, Seattle and back
Kasey Turman
Caitlin Curran
I’ve always thought I’d discover something about myself on some grand coast-to-coast road trip. Maybe I thought the shadows between the cliffs of the Washington mountains held all the answers to my lifelong questions. Maybe I read “On the Road,” by Jack Kerouac one too many times. Maybe I just had too many questions I didn’t want to answer myself.
Whatever it was, the mountains that called my name for years would finally hear my response as I gazed at them through a car window on my way from Seattle back to Oxford.
Through a stroke, or many strokes of luck, one of my best friends since middle school, Grady, moved to Vancouver Island for the summer to play box lacrosse; which is some maniacs' idea of basketball, lacrosse and arena football combined. Grady is a freak athlete who should be talked about in circles outside wherever he is. One of the things he’s despicably good at is box lacrosse, which is exactly why he had the privilege of moving as far west as possible to play a game I didn’t even know existed five years ago.
He was set to drive home in the middle of August, starting the Monday after my internship ended.
Grady is one of those people who exudes confidence in a way that makes you want to believe him. Over the years, I’ve learned not to believe his every word because even his bullshit comes out clean. Nevertheless, during the three years I’ve been away from him, I forgot about his ways and believed it when he said he had everything planned.
“Yeah, get the flight that gets in at noon. I’ll be down there by then,” he said before I booked anything.
“Here’s where we’ll go,” showing me a Google map with four stops between Seattle and Oxford.
Up until the week before, I thought everything was a-OK. But one phone call reminded me of who he is.
“Yeah man, I’m out surfing on the island right now,” he said in a slight Canadian twang. “So, I forgot to book the ferry trip back to Vancouver. But I think I can wake up in time to get a spot on the first one back and still make it to Seattle by the time you land.”
I knew. I just knew I wouldn’t see Grady at noon in Seattle. Hell, I didn’t know where in Seattle he would meet me.
To be fair, the trip was planned in about two weeks because of changing dates and availability, mostly because one of our great friends, Jonathan, said he might be able to make the trip with us if the dates changed. Sadly, they didn’t. This would’ve been a great time to have Jonathan’s level-headed reasoning because he’s constantly surrounded by Grady’s ability to talk a wall into moving.
The two of them get mentioned in the same sentence more often than not. They’ve been going to the same college in Detroit while playing lacrosse together for the past three years, so they’re usually associated with each other.
They always seemed so close in high school. They both have a brain for math and science that makes you question why you’re even given the same problems as them. It didn’t help that there were things only the two of them knew, which made their conversations impossible to follow at times.
“Oh yeah, that pocket is just too shallow. It’ll never hold,” Jonathan would say about some lacrosse stick I couldn’t even describe if it was in my hands.
Without Jonathan, I was hoping Grady had it all figured out, but regardless, I knew nothing would get in the way of spending five days seeing a world I’d only imagined.
I bought the ticket Grady suggested, packed a bag, discovered the bag was too big for Delta’s sacred standards, packed another bag and tried to sleep.
My flight was scheduled to leave Cincinnati at 6 a.m. But because I’ve only flown three times, I asked my best friend and roommate Ben when I should get to the airport because he’s been on more flights than I’ve been on road trips.
The only flight I could base it on was one I took from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Anchorage, Alaska, after my senior year of high school. All my best friends were on it for our senior trip, something I didn’t know could impact a life like that one did.
Five high schoolers and one dad were supposed to go to Alaska for a seven-day hike and other adventures before we’d all slip into the real world, or whatever college is supposed to be.
We never made it through the seven days.
After a day of travel, another of driving from Anchorage to Wrangell St. Elias National Park and one of hiking, my four friends and I became forever intertwined. Ben had organized a trip with his brother Andrew and his dad David and decided to bring Grady Jonathan and I along for the trip to commemorate our senior year.
It was going incredibly well. The days in Alaska were some of the most beautiful and thought-altering of my so-far short life, but not all thoughts should be changed.
After the first day of hiking, we woke up next to a glacier to start another day of trekking into the wilderness, which we would cap off with a short climb up a mountain. We bushwhacked for what felt like forever. The branches would whip off Jonathan’s hands straight to my face, but once we made it out of the brush, it was all worth it.
We found a glassy lake so clear it looked like you could scoop up the purest sip with your hand. Our trail weaved in and out of the contour of the lake and led us to our campsite for the night.
With our packs off and the sun still high in the sky, we backtracked to the mountain base and started to climb.
Rocks slipped from under our feet so often that it felt like every step forward was a step back, but surely enough, we got up to where the trees stopped and snow patches emerged. David slowly fell behind but would make up for it by working harder when we took breaks.
As David passed me, I asked Ben if his dad needed help, but he reassured me there was no way he’d stop now, so we kept climbing. Just after the next ridge, the five of us grew up.
All I heard was rocks flinging down the mountain as Ben yelled for someone to help.
I couldn’t see over the ridge yet, but I heard Ben and Grady start to climb down as Jonathan and I sat and waited. Andrew made his way down to us before we sent him down with a first-aid kit. We couldn’t see David.
After an eternity of waiting, Ben called for us to climb down. Just as we got to the edge of the ridge, I saw David’s body on the edge of the loose rocks. As Jonathan and I sent rocks tumbling from climbing down, no one guarded David from the rocks. He didn’t move.
I knew what happened.
After tears, phone calls to Ben’s mom and the park rangers and a hike back to camp, our lives were changed. We got a helicopter ride back to where we started the hike and made sure to bring everything with us, but sometimes you leave something behind that you can’t see.
That day, we left our childhoods behind and got pushed straight into the world.
Andrew said something at the end of the trip I’ll never forget. He said, “We’re not just friends anymore. We’re all brothers.”
That’s all I could think of when preparing for another trip out west with my friend. It was the first flight since the long haul from Anchorage to Cincinnati and the first time I’d see those stunning mountains that can leave shadows on your life after climbing down with one less person.
Maybe I was thinking about it because of one night this summer when Johnathan and I stood in a kitchen, finally talking about everything we felt from that day, week and year.
We both felt the weight but didn’t talk to anyone in depth the way we wished we could. We stayed in that kitchen talking longer than I ever have with him.
That’s what I knew and hoped would happen between Seattle and Oxford.
The Trip
I got to Seattle at noon just like Grady told me to, but he was nowhere near. He didn’t get the ferry he thought he could, so he wouldn’t be in sight of the Space Needle for another hour or two.
This was great news for me. I was stuck in a city I’d never been to in a part of the country I’d dreamed of visiting.
Since it’s Seattle, I got on a train to the best coffee shop I could find. I don’t even drink coffee.
Once I got off the train, I lugged my full-to-the-brim backpack down a couple of blocks to grab a tea that might revive me from my long trip. I woke up at 4 a.m. in Ohio, changed flights in Atlanta with five minutes to spare, and slept just a little more than an hour somewhere between Georgia and Idaho to make it to Seattle just 13 hours after I woke up.
On every street, I could see the bay peeking out, almost calling me to explore and see what I knew would be there: the clashing of mountains and ocean. Naturally, I booked it from the coffee shop to the closest pier to make sure I spent every minute taking in something that could be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Grady called me by the time I made it to the second pier to say he would be another hour or so away and he could meet me wherever I was. I told him and he said we should grab a salmon sandwich from the Pike Place Market before hitting the road. I started my way over there, taking in as much of the view as possible.
When I finally saw Grady, I didn’t know what to say. Sometimes, when I see someone after a long while, I have everything to say. This time I had nothing. We hugged, talked about the market and ate before leaving Seattle.
I started off driving but not before moving the seat up what felt like multiple feet. Grady is a giant from my perspective. Well over 6 feet tall, he and I would do a dance of moving seats forward and backward for thousands of miles.
Just getting in the car reminded me of the trips he, Jonathan Ben and I would take to so many things in high school. We were the big four. We traveled in a pack and loved every carefree minute of it.
Now, Grady and I are getting in the car to head back to college, our jobs and everything that comes with being 21, which is more than I ever could have imagined.
As we drove east while the sun kept speeding west, we talked about everything from our summers to our future goals now that we’ve been knee-deep in life away from home. Slowly, the conversation morphed into what I thought it’d be: how we were actually feeling.
I don’t know how it started, but I remember telling him what my life was like growing up. I spilled everything from how my parents raised me to how I thought I killed one of the best role models I’ve ever had in David right before moving away from everything I loved.
I laid it all out and he dished it back.
I hadn’t talked to Grady for more than half an hour since last summer but now the words streamed out of my mouth into the void that was the space between the driver and passenger’s seats. It wasn’t anything like how we talked in high school, the beginning of college or even last year. Some wounds had stopped bleeding long ago and had become scars we could now point out with knowledge of how they fit on the map that is our bodies.
I would’ve loved to have talked about how we were going to bike Uptown to the next summer concert or how we would ask Jonathan and Ben if they wanted to meet up at Cook Field to play football, but we were past that. Four years past that.
Somewhere in the conversation between the tears and hard truths I realized I chose the right friends. Ben, Grady and Jonathan morphed from these friends who are the funniest people alive and the only people I’d be willing to share a bed with to two-way safes that I can store my deepest fears and emotions in.
Too long after the sun went down, Grady put the car in park outside a hotel in Kalispell, Montana that showed its age in decor and layers of paint. After our eight hours of travel, we could do nothing but drag our bags upstairs and collapse in a single questionably-colored bed where we would spend less than eight hours.
We had four more days of driving to go. Tomorrow, we would go to Glacier National Park, swim in glacier water and revel in a world of nature I never imagined possible to both create and preserve.
We made it through more than 500 miles of travel, hard conversations and some hard truths, but we had more than 2,200 miles to go. Maybe we wouldn’t shed any more tears but we’d be back in Oxford nonetheless.
