Almost exactly five months ago
today, on May 5, 2008 (today being the milestone date of November 4th),
I went on a hike with Sycamore and Molly, and a large group of
co-workers and friends of co-workers from her workplace, the Natural Resources
Defense Council, a.k.a. NRDC, a.k.a. Nerdic.
Some of these people included Erin and Nathaniel whom I considered two
amongst my very few friends in Los Angeles, Bart, an outdoor enthusiast and
trailblazer, Jessica, a co-worker at NRDC who was very cute and who I would
meet out one night a couple months later and not recognize, and Margaret,
another co-worker at NRDC who I briefly had a crush on after first meeting her
in late 2007 until I realized I was most assuredly not her type.
I drove
with Sycamore and Molly and Margaret in Molly’s parents Toyota Prius, which
they would borrow on again and off again and which was a great treat to them,
getting significantly better mileage than their usual vehicle, an occasionally
unreliable Subaru Outback. We drove
through the San Gabriel Valley, where Margaret had grown up. We drove for about an hour and a half. We got lost along the way a little bit. Eventually we met up with everyone at an
outdoor supplies store. There was
another group of people that none of us had met before, and after we left from
this initial meet-up spot, to continue on to the hiking launch point, we saw
them stopped on the side of the road.
They had pulled over and everyone in our car was very confused by their
apparent inability to follow instructions.
We laughed, thinking they had no idea what they were doing. We could hardly consider that they had their
own reasons. Eventually they met up at
the launch point not much later than anyone else.
We
began the hike. I did not realize it was
going to be about ten miles and it was going to take us about eight hours. We had somewhere between fifteen and twenty
people in tow. Most of them
environmentalists, many of them vegan or vegetarian, and the majority of them
seemingly happy, healthy individuals. I
reached for a cigarette and everyone started berating me.
“You’re
going to start a fire!” they said.
When I
finished it, I was careful to put it out safely and calmly, making sure that no
embers caused larger flames. I buried it
in a sandy part. Behind me, Molly
unburied it and started carrying it, to throw it away at the end of the
hike. I told her she was ridiculous and
I put it inside a plastic bag inside a backpack pocket. I argued with her and her co-workers about
how forcing everybody to follow such a strict code was impossible, there were
still people in nowhere towns in middle America that would never recycle no
matter how much you convinced them it was essential to our survival, and how
people would still always litter, etc. I
called them Nazis. I was probably a bit
out of line, and now I consider myself something of an “environmentally
conscious” person—after I did some work for NRDC myself—and I deeply regret how
poorly I failed to adjust.
I talked with Sycamore for a while
and probably complained about feeling like none of these people would accept
me, that I was one of the few odd persons out.
I don’t know what I must have talked about. At some points during a hike, you may find
yourself running at the mouth for a while.
You are just walking, climbing, heading down a pre-determined path, in
search of natural beauty, or a scenic overlook.
You push forward and you talk about random things, but I must have had a
rather negative bent because the two people I considered my closest friends on
this hike had seemed to grow tired of me.
“You
know, it’s really easy to shit on everything,” Sycamore had said to me.
I
didn’t know exactly what he meant by that, but it sounded like he was just
exasperated with my negativity. Later we
had lunch, and Sycamore climbed a tree in the area, and I told him it would be
awful if he fell because we still had several hours of hiking left and it would
not be easy to carry on in an injured state.
After lunch, I think I had another cigarette, far away from everyone and
no one seemed to notice or care. Then we
continued hiking some more, and as I recall this period was relatively free of
peril. Then we came to an impasse. We could either continue the hike, up to the
top of Strawberry Peak, or we could turn back and wait at the car for everyone
else to leave. I would have just as well
gone home at that point, but Sycamore and Molly wanted to go to the top and I
figured, it was wait and do nothing at the car, or it was go on, get some more
exercise (even though we had probably done well enough for ourselves already), and
see some height-enhanced beauty.
Well,
my complaints took on an even more absurd form at this point, as Molly began to
grow tired and they began to fall back from the pack. I caught up to Margaret and Bart and told
them that I think I had offended Sycamore and Molly, that I had crossed the
line somewhere. I told them they were
going too slow anyways, and the only reason I was going up was because they
wanted to, at which point they probably wished they had never invited me to
come along. Well, Bart, Margaret and I
made it to the peak, and we waited for Sycamore and Molly to join us. After about ten more minutes they did, and I
was so happy to finally start our final descent. I lit another cigarette in celebration and
this exasperated everyone. At one point
Molly started saying something about how I didn’t care about anything.
“I
care, I care!” I said.
“No,
you don’t!” she insisted, finally sounding as if she had reached the end of her
rope. It took us awhile but we finally
met up with everyone else about forty-five minutes later, and I was able to
throw out my three cigarettes in a garbage can.
Erin and Nathaniel had wanted us to follow them in our car and meet us
at a place for root beer or something and we did, and we found the place was
closed. We rode with Margaret for a
while and she talked about wanting to read William Faulkner. One thing she and Molly had talked about that
day was how they were the only two members of the LOVE club: Left-handed, Only
child, Vegan, Environmentalist. I don’t
know why this pissed me off so much—maybe because I was left-handed but none of
the other three and I felt left out.
We got back to the supply store and
Margaret switched cars to go back to Santa Monica and it was just me and
Sycamore and Molly to go back to Silverlake, for me, and Hollywood, for
them. We didn’t say anything for the
rest of the ride. Finally, after we made
the final turn for the street, I had to make my apology.
“I just wanted to say, if I upset
you with anything I said today, I hope you can forgive me.”
They didn’t say anything and I got
out of their car and they drove home. I
didn’t hear back from them until May 23rd, when they were the only
people to show up to my housewarming party.
That night I was excited because I
was going to drink a bottle of wine and read the Dennis Cooper novel Try—the same manner in which I had read
it some four and a half years earlier, in Paris. The experience was not disappointing. A couple weeks later I would send out the
invites to my housewarming party. I sent
an e-mail to Nathaniel asking him if Sycamore and Molly had ex-communicated
me. He said he didn’t know anything
about it—maybe they just needed some temporary space. He said that Bart had said we probably
shouldn’t have climbed to the peak for the sake of all of our sanities. I had been very bitter for a few days, that
they had told me I should move to California only for them to turn their backs
on me, and I had started work on a novel with the theme being all of my closest
friends eventually betraying me. I was
very happy when they proved me wrong and things went back to normal. Still, I feel now that I had been a child who
had been given a “time out.”
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