Old Farts Reunion: Phart Three

I headed off with a somewhat smaller group for a hike to a waterfall. Anyone says "hike" and I'm usually in. For a while it didn't look like this hike was going to involve any actual forward movement. You get an astrophysicist and a geologist with a GPS device and they'll hunch over in the middle of an obvious trail for hours staring at their whizbangery. I'm technologically backward, but evidently there exists a little square box that can tell you where you are with CIA proficiency. "There should be a large, striated metamorphic boulder eight feet to our right," they'll say, hunched, "and right now we should be directly under a suspended spider visible from space." They look up.

Already this is a lot different from the old Hostel Club. We didn't really care all that much if we got lost, because we were young and unfamiliar with mortality. There was never a guarantee Lynn's VW bus wouldn't strand us on the side of the road, we had no cell phones or cash machines, and if we did undertake too many expeditions in a row without getting lost, we'd try spelunking. We'd drop ourselves into a narrow hole in the ground on a rope and scrabble about in the mud and the dark like salamanders until even J. Edgar Hoover gave up looking for us. We always assumed at least one of us knew the way back to the rope, and as long as there was still a prospect of descending on the nearest Howard Johnson's on the way home like the Attack of the Mud People, we were happy.

Bill, or Clumsy Carp?

But there's no getting away from the modern ways, which are undeniably cool. Still, it wasn't technology that saved the day for me. It was Karen. And she isn't even an original Hostel Clubber. She married in.

We left Bill at a water hole with his fly rod and took our noisy selves further up the stream in search of the mythical waterfall, which was exactly where, in the opinion of John's GPS, it was supposed to be. Three of us, not including your correspondent, plunged into the pool below the falls, while your correspondent examined the falls with just a little disappointment. This was puny by Oregon standards. There were rocks and water and a smattering of gravity, but not a lot of fuss to it. But Karen is a marine biologist, which means she is an avid appreciator of life in all its speckled, gelatinous, stridulating, or wriggly majesty, and she and I were soon flipping rocks in the stream and scoring frogs and crawdads and a toad and little tiny insect larvae and she whipped out her magnifying glass and revealed yet smaller (but still enthusiastic) forms of life. She found me a freshwater sponge. I didn't even know there was such a thing as a freshwater sponge! You can tell them from the marine sponges by the scrubby pad on one side. And then. And then!

Fishies! But not normal fishies. Fishies with zest and ambition and piscatory derring-do! Fish smaller than my little finger were galloping straight up the wet rocks and bounding into the cascades, everywhere we looked. They bunched up in pools the size of a bicycle helmet to get a good running jump and they flipped themselves into the miniature torrent and zipped and squiddled their way upward, ever upward. Diminutive bears waited at the top of the falls with their mouths open. Itty bitty videographers from National Geographic stood off to one side. Somewhere a band of tiny trumpeters was playing the theme from Rocky. Karen and I crunched down as small as we could and cheered. Go, tiny fish, go! Go, tiny fish, go!

We have two biology degrees between us, hers a working model and mine vestigial, and we have no idea what the hell they were doing. They couldn't have been old enough to spawn. Maybe they were little kid fishes playing "bet you can't" and "watch this." It was an honor to observe them, and hard to leave them. But we'd promised Bill we'd meet him back at his fishing hole, and there we found him, troutless and a bit worse for wear. He'd slipped on the rocks and fallen in, twice, to the detriment of several body parts he wasn't done with yet. John and Karen and Morris had plunged in on purpose. I was the only one high and dry.

Mostly high.

Here's a video of our heroic fishies. Look closely! A couple of them make mighty leaps at the very end. 

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

The People-Bop

It was dark, and I was sound asleep, and fourteen--that figures in later--and it sounded like someone was throwing gravel at my bedroom window. Because someone was throwing gravel at my bedroom window.

Someone from the Hostel Club. I'd heard about the Hostel Club soon after I enrolled at Yorktown High, in tenth grade. When they had their first meeting of the year, I summoned the gumption to check it out. This was a club devoted to hiking, and bicycling, and canoeing, and camping, and staying in youth hostels. And jollity. I had found the social scene intimidating since sixth grade, but so did these people. They all seemed to be taking AP math and physics courses and being nerds and they were smart as hell and even funnier than hell and completely incapable of fitting in with the In Crowd. I fell in love with all of them at once. Every outing was like a mass date with all the fun left in and all the anxiety stripped out. We were a posse. But I wasn't sure where I stood, being new. And young. Most of the members were seniors, and I was not only a sophomore, but the youngest in my class by as much as two years.

But when I peered out my bedroom window and saw my new friends about to let fly with a handful of gravel, I realized: Yes! Lord love a salamander in springtime, I'm In With The Out Crowd!

"We're going to Carderock," Lynn stage-whispered. "Got any eggs?"

Problem. It wasn't as though I could just leave the house, with eggs, like a big girl. I had to wake up either my mother or my father--I reviewed my recent experiences with both and refined my tactics--and ask if I could pile into Lynn's VW bus two hours before dawn and head off to the park with a bunch of kids and some eggs. I didn't like my chances. My parents were stoutly aware that I was younger than everyone else in the whole world and they had all sorts of rules that didn't apply to anyone else I knew. For instance, I  had the curfew of a novice nun in Las Vegas. None of this seemed fair to me because I was, at the time, as old as I'd ever been, and besides, they were largely if not totally responsible for my age.

I must have chosen the sleepiest and least wary parent to poke because, after a brief explanation that included neutral or cheerful words such as "breakfast" and "dawn" and "real careful driver," I got the go-ahead. And then asked if I could take some eggs, also not a sure thing in a family on a tight budget. I could.

It was my first People-Bop. I'd heard rumors. A kernel of two or three Hostel Clubbers would hatch the plan to kidnap their friends in the middle of the night and go play by dawn's early light. The kernel would always include Lynn because she had the VW bus. She was a real careful driver, but it's not like every now and then we wouldn't try driving with one person blindly operating the gas and brake with his hands, one person leaning over from the back seat to steer, and Lynn barking out instructions from the driver's seat between snorts of laughter. A successful People-Bop required some familiarity with people's bedroom locations, and just after I'd joined the bus, we screwed up at Bob's house when we graveled his father's bedroom by mistake. From inside the halo of our own high spirits, Bob's father seemed to lack a sense of humor. But we still scraped Bob out of it, and just about when the sun was peeking over the horizon, we were at Carderock Recreational Area, cooking up eggs and bacon over camp stoves and having a high time.

An hour later ropes had been anchored on the nearby cliffs and several, if not all, of my friends were rappelling down the sheer face in exuberant leaps, like spring frogs heading for the wetland. So I gave it a go. I thought: the worst part is just letting yourself go over the edge, and then this miracle of rappelling will simply happen. It didn't.  I was unwilling to allow myself to be perpendicular to the cliff and I teetered back and forth on insecure pins, making bargains with God I would abandon within days, and hit the ground and the end of my rock-climbing career at precisely the same moment.

But that's the kind of thing the Hostel Club did. I've had great friends through the years, but none that came in a complete set like that. Maybe it was our youth. Or maybe we really were that special. Could be I'll find out.

Because the great, grand People-Bop of all time is coming up soon. Four or five of us located each other when Facebook came on the scene. Some of us had still maintained ties with outliers. And when we decided to try for a reunion of the Hostel Club, 45 years later, in the Adirondacks in July, somehow we managed to scour the planet and achieve a critical mass. People are flying in. Driving in. Bob, whose father has either moved on or passed on, is going to bike in from New Hampshire. We're tickled we actually located him. Not one of us, though, all in our sixties, is surprised he's coming by bicycle.

We'll see. We won't have youth on our side. We'll have everything else.