Friendship
On the shores of La Jolla, California, 1998, I found myself amongst friends. Drinking cold beer and staring into the bonfire. Listening to the easy sea, the sun a good two hours in the past. Three more-than-classically-straggly surfer dudes materialized from the windowless piece-of-crap van parked next to J’s truck. Earlier, as we stoked our pallet fire, we had seen these gents piling surfboards away, laughing and scratching their salt-brine hair. They seemed odder than most found around beaches, which is saying a lot, but now, as their shadowy figures slid the van door closed, they seemed determined. They wobbled our way. “Excuse me, mates,” the bright-eyed leader spoke, “you mind if we cook our pota’oes in your fiyah?” At twenty-one years old, I had a pretty deep catalogue of late nights with Monty Python, and so, despite general youthful unworldliness, I recognized the Queen’s English. Their question, not a normal primer, and not what we expected them to open with, but as he extended a hand holding an aluminium wrapped monster of a Russet, it was a cheerful ‘of course’ on our part.
Over a handful of weeks, J offered showers and a more comfortable place to crash, and I supplied us all with beer from the downtown brewery I was working at. These three lads, a few years our senior, had been surfing around the world for the better part of a year. The money they had accrued harvesting fruit in Australia was gone. At the grocery store, they popped open Lunchable packs, hoovered down the contents, and not even remotely clandestinely shoved the empties onto shelves, smiling and blithe-stepping through this foreign land. Kev strolled the aisles sipping soda; Dan peeled an orange; James dug into a bag of crisps. It was all so casual, and not just their open-handed thievery. When they walked, they surfed; when they joked heavy with each other, they sailed in summer sun. And for me, an unworldly, working-class youth, this newfound friendship prickled unnamed notions about how the intertwinings, planned or unexpected, pass between us and our disparate worldscapes.
A year later, J and I buzzed away from Heathrow in a mid-seventies VW Bus with the ragtop rolled back. Kev assured us we would check out London, at some point, but for now we looped south and to the east on a thing called the M25. He was driving on the “wrong” side of the road, but the landscapes didn't feel wholly foreign. England (eng in old Norse means meadow; thus, being named by the Vikings, England was seen as a land of meadows) didn't jump out as immediate different; the extensions of pastureland felt akin to those of Ohio or some other rolling midwestern scenery. But, here their everyday black bird might be called a Jackdaw or a Rook; here, instead of hawks, they have buzzards.
Kev and Dan had opened an indoor skatepark in their hometown of Ramsgate on the southeastern shore. Ambling the small town with the narrow cobbled streets; eating sandwiches called “Ploughman’s” from roadside trucks; watching the low action of sea-goers passing in front of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. The exoticism began to rush in. We visited Stonehenge; saw Elliot Smith play at the Royal Albert Hall; risked injury taking in England vs Argentina in a stuffed-to-bursting, half-a-millenium-old pub. And just like that random day back on the La Jolla Shores, we drank beer, passed guitars and tended a sentinel sea from around a hearthy beach fire.
On one of our last days with the lads, we attended a massive skateboarding event, an X-Games precursor, somewhere in the middle of one of those Norseman engs. After weeks with these enigmatic, joyful strays and their families and their partners and their friends, that prickly notion inside of me had gone from a prickle to a resonation. I shook hands with a well-known skater, a close chum of Dan’s. The resonation received a name as I stole glances at the bold tattoo across his neck: FRIENDSHIP. This was still the era in which soccer moms were appalled by the tattooed, when the desperation to be noticed, to out-stand amongst the flow of mass humanity, hadn’t become strong enough to allow your average everyday person to join the ranks of the virtually unemployable. Back then, tattooing your body, let alone your neck, meant something.
Before that night on the La Jolla Shores, I had an idea of the importance of friendship, but it wasn’t really until that visit across the pond that I felt its capacity for separating gaps. As this Moderately Sized Year has unfolded, The Ferry and I continue to doff sweat-stained hats to how important others are when trying to explore a world with a tent, an old truck and a relative dollop of money. We have strolled and patrolled for alligators and a wild horse with a Floridian pal and her next generation; we have been fed and housed by old family friends and new family friends alike; we have patiently scoped the foamed offing for fly-by auklets and murres with a dearly near-brother who prefers trees to birds, but who also just loves the company of a pure sea and a true kinship.
As a young person, I had trouble making friends, at least profound ones. Elementary School was kids being kids, alphabets and numbers and maybe some science and art; Middle School was a total wash, as kids found their footing when it came to being cruel to anyone poorer or rounder or in any way more awkward than themselves; making it through that debacle, by High School I was somehow not a complete loser: I had my small group of foes. But, looking back with the clear eyes of distance, I was desperately in want of human contact, at any cost, and so never really got to be myself. The person I appeared back then was far from the person I have become, though an innate drive towards default kindness and curiosity has never swerved. When it comes down to it, the teen years may be important for learning how to suppress confusing carnal instinct or learning how to satisfactorily feed yourself on Del Taco for $1.98, but looking back, those years present mostly like a flailing, exhausted swimmer caught in a riptide.
Looking back from this more seasoned, more holistic space, my notions of friendship have shifted. No longer does that word conjure a base need for a warm body to allay loneliness. As we get older, I hope we are all lucky enough to come to define friendship as something more than acquaintances sharing a moment in circumstance. Friendship, as this Moderately Sized Year has only more intensely affirmed, is putting ego aside, and being there, truly and not just physically, being there.
Could The Ferry and I have done this year of exploration without friends? Of course. Would we have been able to reach our goal of seeing 500 bird species? Yes, absolutely. But, without that frisson of realization given me by the lads and by that sure-toned neck tattoo all those years back, I’m not sure if I would have opened myself up enough to the natural verses present in the poetics of companionship to pass this year with such joy. The Ferry and I have each other, luckily so, but it takes more than one pole to hold up a tent. Other support struts might be: gleaning lingonberries on a mountain hike with friends, laughing through long work days with friends, playing boardgames with friends, being given a warm bed and a place for a much needed shower by friends, sitting in warm-summer Montana air and waxing philosophically on the inners and outers of existence with friends, trading songs across campfire light, watching rugby and pondering the younger generation’s dedication to higher education with friends, searching scrubby spruce stands for Grouse and Chickadees with friends, and sitting in an easeful trailer with the rain plink-planking the roof and just being there with true, true friends.
This year has been challenging, but to all who have given us a moment of your heart, your generosity and your friendship will always be spoken of with all-jawed gratitude. And, for those of you currently living in the Seattle/Port Townsend/Western Washington area, the Moderately Sized Year is coming to a wetland near you…get ready to live…
Nothing better than a friend…thanks for reminding in such an eloquent way 🌞💫❤️
Wonderful sentiments in a crazy world and time. You give me hope there are amazing and kind people out there still to meet