Fifty Years Zoom By

Just got off a fifty-year reunion of the old Hostel Club on Zoom. It's important to maintain old friendships. Old friends can keep you honest in a way your newer friends, who have only known you since you refined your shtick and curated your image, can't.

For instance, I've been known to comment that I've never been driven. I wear my lack of ambition as an obscure badge of pride, even though at its heart it derives from a condition of feeling easily satisfied with things, also known as laziness. 

Anyway, I say that I've never been driven, but I still have friends left from high school who know better, because they drove me. Lots. All the time. It was embarrassing. But that's what happens when you fall in with a really cool group of funny, smart people who get together in each other's rec rooms and have a great time, but you, yourself, are still two years shy of getting a driver's license and your parents, who are unspeakably old, think you should be home by ten pm.

It all seemed deeply unfair, even though I was fourteen years old, and I was playing with nineteen-year-olds, and I was known to wear skirts that didn't even cover my personal fourteen-year-old situation.

Which means all my friends were having a really good time right around ten pm, and I had to wander around the party trying to work up the gumption to ask someone who's having the aforementioned really good time if they could stop everything and give me a ride home.

Oh, the humanity.

I know my parents couldn't believe the fun we were having was clean and innocent. But it was. You know, mostly. Whatever happened in Stuart's pitch-black bomb shelter stayed in Stuart's bomb shelter. I don't even know what I wasn't doing in there, or who I wasn't doing it with.

I was just beginning to get my social feet under me in tenth grade, just starting to come out the recovery side of adolescence, and this new group of friends in the Youth Hostel Club was the place to do it--we called it "being in with the Out Crowd," and were, for the most part, not naughty, individually shy, and collectively a dang hoot. Still, I was very young, and one doesn't always know if one is going to be accepted.

That all changed the night the People-Bop hit my house. The People-Bop: it was never announced in advance, but an hour before dawn, someone would decide to start collecting people in Lynn Malone's VW bus and head off to a park for breakfast and fun, in this case rappelling down a sheer cliff at Carderock Recreational Area. I woke in the dark to the sound of gravel hitting my second-floor window and my heart about busted in half to look out and see my friends grinning on the lawn, motioning me down, and telling me to bring eggs.

Oh god. They had no way of knowing if this was something I could do, and neither did I. First I had to tiptoe into my parents' room and wake one of them up and ask if it was okay to go flying out the door with my friends at oh dark thirty. Not at all a sure thing. Not at all sure anyone else had to ask permission, or what I'd do if I had to lean out the window and say my mommy wouldn't let me go. But she did. Then I took a deep breath and asked if I could take some eggs. Our family wasn't known for extravagance.

But I could.

Thank you, Mommy, for that rare lapse of judgment, and thank you, good friends of the Hostel Club, for picking me up on my first People-Bop, for giving me that sweet whiff of future independence, for letting me know I belonged with the best people ever. Thanks also for dangling me on a rope over that damn cliff, and I'm sorry if I urinated on anyone. Thanks.

Old Farts Reunion: Phinal Phart

So the question is: can you visit your own youth?

Sure, as long as you can still see it from here. First you need to reassemble the old neighborhood. It's near the smell center of your brain. Fetch up the mimosa blossoms and the honeysuckle, the sweet humid fragrance of Gifford's Ice Cream Shoppe, and the taste of rain on a window screen. From there it's a short hop to the brick Colonials, the split-level "mid-centuries" that used to be called "new," and a particular rec room and bomb shelter with secrets in them.

Now you're ready to invite your old friends. You get a core group to loop together the threads of their various connections, add Google and the airline industry, and then your youth--or something like it--will show up one day on a lake in the Adirondacks. Friends Lake, in fact.

It's not going to be exactly the same. When we were all eighteen or so, there was that fizzy element of infatuation, barely submerged. Not many of us in this socially awkward group knew just what to do with it, but any observer could map it out. All you needed to do was was watch

us unroll our packs in whatever cabin we hiked to and negotiate the space, everyone willing to settle for mere proximity and possibility, the sleeping bags arranging themselves on the floor like iron filings obeying an invisible magnet. That part is pretty much gone now, at least I think it is, our attractions having been diluted into a comfortably low-key group crush.

That first day at Friends Lake was a scene thrumming with joy. Sometimes I stood to the side just to watch as new arrivals showed up and smiles bloomed around the room and laughter rolled in eddies. It was later in the evening that we began to catch up and reconnect in more intimate groups that shimmered and sparked on the deck, a bright constellation of friends.

Unless you've grown distracted or inattentive, you're still in touch with all the ages you've ever been. But it's a special gift to spend time with the people who loved us when we were young and full of the future, who can still make out the eighteen-year-olds at our centers. We have custody of each other's past. We can set our memories loose to roll around together until they shine again. Until each of us is a polished stone in someone else's pocket.

Then the week is part of your past too, and the whole thing slides away, and you can watch it go, one hand on your pocketful of stones and one hand on a slim new tether to the last memory.

Nothing changes.

Which, in my case, was that dreamy Bob Gearheart kissed me goodbye.

[On the cheek, Dave.]

[Not that cheek, Dave.]

Old Farts Reunion, Phart Two

We're well provisioned, I'll say that. Penny is in charge, and we're glad of it. It was Penny who budgeted and shopped for our epic seven-day bicycle tour of Amish country, back in 1968, coming in at twenty bucks a head. She has a steely determination and fiscal ferocity matched only by her coupon collection, and if we eat any more food, the grocery chains are going to be sending us money to stay away. We're in good hands.

As for activities, it's not like we all have to do the same thing. We have options. There's talk of an excursion to the Adirondack Museum. There are bicycles and canoes. There is a lake to hang out in. And there's rafting. Rafting: why not? What could be better for a girl like me, who is terrified of water, than to rocket down a river without a seat belt, or a personal relationship with the Almighty, in the company of friends who promise to pluck me out of the drink as long as I don't bounce out of reach? Sign me up.

Photo by Bill Priedhorsky

Problem. The first thing on the waiver was something about death and dismemberment. The last thing on the waiver was something about one's heirs and assigns. I'd blacked out on the stuff in between. Janice and I traded wretched looks. She looked every so slightly worse, actually, because she had managed to locate the only two working black flies in the area with her face. We embraced, exchanged last words, and trudged into the cattle car. School bus, I mean.

Photo by Bill Priedhorsky

At the put-in, our guide, Madd Dog, eased us into a shallow eddy to practice rowing and piling into the belly of the raft for emergencies and following orders and not stabbing each other in the head with our paddles, until we were a smooth, well-oiled machine. And then we shot into the mainstream and pinballed down the Hudson River like a spastic, panicked centipede, oars clacking violently, our little arthropod legs going north and south at once.

Smooth.

Madd Dog looked over his team with the bleak serenity of one accustomed to disappointment. He had the steering wheel but no brakes and apparently no drive train, but he knew his river. Our crew had a good forty years on every other crew on the river, which meant we didn't have as long to live, but might have better lawyers. He piloted us around all of the more obvious Gyres of Doom and managed to keep our lungs undampened.

Photo by Bill Priedhorsky

Seventeen miles later, we sailed into port on silky waters, oars a model of synchronicity. The Trilobite had landed. We were ready to go home and regale our museum-going counterparts with smug composure, and as long as nobody checked for hematomas, we could pull it off. What happens on the Hudson River stays on the Hudson River. If my fingernail and the skin from my knee should happen to wash up on shore, though, I'd like them back.

Old Farts Reunion: Phart One

Attention! The fifth annual meeting of the Yorktown Youth Hostel Club is now in order, 45 years after the fourth. It's an experiment. Take a couple dozen nerds who went on what was essentially an extended mass date in high school, scatter them across the map, wait a very long time, and then throw them into the same pot again and see what cooks. We all showed up with plenty of seasoning and some of our bits were crispy, but boy howdy if we don't still make a tasty stew.

Photo by Bill Priedhorsky

It was an outdoor club. No surprise our current lodging is festooned with vintage bicycles and canoes. We're on a lake in the Adirondacks, laughing so hard we've humbled the loons. We're all in our sixties, so we know that life spools out like a bolt of fabric, unrolling faster and faster as the bolt gets smaller. But it turns out you can pause for a moment and fold that fabric. You can line up 2015 with 1968, say, and that pleat will hold, at least for a little while. Then all you need to do is hold both ends and shake it to unload all the intervening years, the careers, the triumphs, the losses. For hours we stood and nattered like magpies on espresso, and continued over dinner on the deck, but the next day it was time to get moving. The Hostel Club is not a group of fanny-sitters. We decided to climb Crane Mountain.

Photo by Bill Priedhorsky

We should have been ready for anything. We had an emergency room physician, and if he couldn't handle anything that came up, we had a backup hospice nurse and, um, a coroner. We had an electrician and a poet and a real estate agent and a geologist and a psychologist and an occupational therapist and a marine biologist and a physicist and a mathematician, and figured we could cover any contingency shy of voting Republican (or, as it happens, working the microwave). So off we went.

Crane Mountain is a 3200-foot pile of boulders that the state of New York gets a civic kick out of calling a "foot trail." There was the occasional trail marker, but we could navigate just as well by keeping an eye out for the fingernails of earlier hikers embedded in the rock. We had three stents and six heart bypasses among us, unevenly distributed, plus an assortment of herniated disks and grumpy joints, some hiking poles of which much was demanded, and an unreasonably sunny attitude. We were going to bag that

summit and collect all that scenery if it killed us, which was no longer just an expression. Maybe our short-term memory isn't as good as it was, but we're pretty sure the head counts at the beginning and end of the hike matched up.

Is he dead?

In the 'Sixties, we had fun and movement and laughter and all of it thrummed with an undercurrent of youthful hormones that most of us weren't sure how to get into gear, and now we were having all of it without the hormones, I think. We're not that much different. The former smart-asses are now merely smart. Teenage psychic pain has been replaced with the mature version: pain pain. But we're cool with that. There might be pizza and ice cream tonight, and we have a whole week, and there's probably more stuff to shake out of the fabric.

Photo by Tom Boothe