I waded around Newt Lake all morning, knee-deep, pointing my camera down through its ripples, framing rocks that caught my eye. After each wind and click, I’d sift through the sand for them, stuffing all kinds of rocks in my shorts’ pockets to save. Rocks smooth like eggs, some flat like sand dollars, some chipped and bumped and slimy. So many rocks, by the end I had to hold my waistband up from sliding down and into the water.
I’m sitting next to them now, all clumped in a pile, still too wet and dull to show any hidden scratches or freckles. I picked them up for no particular reason—maybe just as a funny way to clear my head. You see, just hours ago, I was asked to leave the only home I’ve ever really known to move across the country for good. I’ve never journaled, but a decent amount happened recently, and I just can’t stand the thought of forgetting all the shit that led up to that moment. Right now it feels like I’ll never forget, but fuzz always bleeds back, and when the fuzz starts you’re done for. Besides, it’s a way to pass the time until these rocks dry up.
I’m in a good spot to write, too. I’m sitting on a flat, mossy boulder the size of a queen-size bed, with white pine branches above me, blocking the sun with its layers of needles, shielding the moss like a canopy. My Minolta is resting in my lap, full of undeveloped photos. Further up the beach, a circle of old-timers are glued to their camp chairs, drinking beer and eating junk. It’s not too loud around here either; besides the occasional birdsong, all I can hear are the whirring engines of motor boats out on the water, puttering in arbitrary circles. It’s good. Anyway, I guess the best way to start this is to go back to yesterday morning when my friend Max and I left our hometown and started our drive up to his camp.
As I steered my old truck over train tracks, Max Archer looked out of the passenger window into a green rush of Maine. It’s a blurred landscape, one we both knew well, one I was planning to leave behind. Besides riding shotgun, Max is my best friend in the whole world. He’s a tall kid, built like a goofy German shepherd, and he’s got a laugh that could echo from Lewiston to Merrymeeting Bay. You see, Max is the kind of person who has handfuls of people saying he's their best friend. And that’s all right—I’m not one to be jealous like that. What I will say, though, is that if you put a gun to Max’s head and told him to name his best man, I’d bet the house that I’d get the nod. Anyway, when we’d crossed those train tracks, we were only five minutes into our journey. We were driving up to his house on the eastern shore of Newt Lake, one of the biggest lakes in Maine, where we planned to spend the night and fish for trout and smallies in the morning.
There’s no air conditioning in my truck, so we’d rolled down our windows to let the wind rush in. I figured it was turning into the hottest day of the year; when we left home, it was already eighty-five degrees. Beyond the open window, there were trees and signs and telephone poles, all of which Max and I have passed an incalculable amount of times, but he wasn’t looking at any of them anymore. He was looking at the road ahead with a lost stare, eyes zoned out. For someone as wild as he is, these moments are rare.
“What're you thinking about?” I asked him over the hum of the engine. I remember he let out a shudder as if I’d shaken him from a deep afternoon nap.
“Nothing, Deaner,” he replied, releasing a breath, then turning to me with a wide smile. He opened my glove box and started to root through the heap of random papers and broken things I’d packed in there over the years. Not surprisingly, he dug out a photo I once took of a sunset over the Old Saw Lakes. It’s a blurred photo, overexposed, unfocused, washed, and generally bad. I hate it, but Max loves it. I was with him when I’d taken it, during my last week in Maine before I left for college in Pennsylvania. And even though the photo is poor, I took it on a great night. Way earlier that day we’d woken up in a Hannaford’s parking lot in Millinocket and hiked Katahdin with our buddy Wes Nadeau. The hike was hard and long, and our feet swelled up like warm yeast, but for some funny reason we all caught a second wind on our drive back home and none of us wanted the day to end. Wes had us touch down in Bangor for some beer and a dozen hot dogs. We grilled them later up on top of Norton’s Hill over a smoky fire that we’d made from a bundle of waterlogged branches and newspaper. It was a shit fire—we only got the dogs lukewarm before we gave up on cooking them—but we couldn’t care less. Anyway, I was having a good time and wasn’t paying attention to taking the perfect photo, so I ended up taking that one. Now Max was dusting it off, ironing out the bent corners, folding down the truck's visor, and sticking the picture in the beauty mirror.
On one side of the train tracks is Manning, a small inland town on the western edge of the Old Saw Lakes, where Max and I grew up. Before college, we both lived near a roundabout that connects four skinny streets—Plum, Peach, Apricot, and Cherry—like the hub of a tire. The streets are identical in shape, size, and probably number of homes, though I’ve never given them a proper count. Both of us grew up on Apricot, our houses just five doors apart.
Max’s house is the smallest on our street, despite having the neighborhood’s largest backyard and front porch. Over the years, I spent thousands of summer hours out on the Archers’ screened-in porch, sitting in an Adirondack, drinking Max’s mother’s sun tea, spiking it with rum once he and I had reached high school. That porch was the hangout for everyone we knew. Deep into middle school summers, an hour after the dinner bells had reverberated through the stone-fruit streets, my neighbors’ lanterns would flicker on, and the summer moths would begin to swarm. Screen doors squeaked up and down the sidewalks, and it felt like the whole neighborhood had come alive to bike over to the Archer porch for movie night. Most of those nights are fuzzy to me now, but I do remember some things, like how kids would bring sleeping pads so they could lie down, while others would sit on their hoodies so their butts wouldn’t fall asleep. And once the crowd would settle in, Max’s mother—a woman as sweet as her tea—would hold the front door open, waving a wooden spoon to say hello to the children whose parents she knew. Then Max would wheel out a cart carrying jugs of tea and his old twenty-inch box television.
There’d always be a big commotion when the cart appeared; Max wasn’t just the most popular kid in our neighborhood, but maybe the whole state. In middle school he’d hang out with high schoolers; in high school he was invited to college parties out of town. It’s rare to meet someone with that level of charisma—Max is, as my buddy Grant Panneci would say, “one in a generation, like a great boxer.”
After everyone else had left, Max and I would linger on the porch for as long as we could, talking about girls and baseball, rambling about circle changeups and cup sizes until we’d drop. Eventually, his mother would come out and tell us that it was time. There’s only so much arguing you can do when a parent says: “It’s time,” but Max would try. He’d stand there with his mouth open, his eyebrows up, his hands hanging by his side, looking like a dumbass. Then I’d leave.
By the time we’d reached high school age, the dinner bells died down and the neighborhood crew had drifted apart like most all do. There were no more movie nights, but Max and I would still stay out on the porch for hours after dark, basking in the confluence of our innocence and independence, taking turns to reach behind a big pot of lilies to grab our bottle of rum. Between sips, we’d switch on the flash on my shitty little point-and-shoot Olympus and take photos of the street cats that crept near his steps, of daddy long-legs crawling into corners. Now that I’m thinking about it, I can't guess where that camera is now. We’d talk about what the world would be like when we got older, how we would own both of our houses on Apricot Street, how our kids would watch the same VHS movies that we had. At the time, the plan felt real. As we grew older, I couldn’t wait to leave, and he still wanted to stay. Max noticed that change in me, but he never got mad at me for it. It wasn’t anything personal, and he knew that. Most friends wouldn’t know that, but he did.
Our different paths made sense. Max’s parents are high school sweethearts who grew up together in Auburn, not even an hour’s drive from Manning. By contrast, my parents grew up on separate coasts and met in graduate school. Max’s father owns a carpentry company, and his mother works as a receptionist in Augusta. My father is a nose doctor down in Portland, and my mother has been in between jobs since before I can remember. I have no siblings. Max has three older sisters who all still live in Maine; in fact, I don’t think any of them has ever left Maine, even for a vacation.
In our freshman year of high school, Max started working for his dad on weekends, building decks and sheds, soon to inherit his father’s business. It was around that same time that I decided I was to become a photographer. On my fifteenth birthday, my father gave me an old forgotten film camera of his, which also happened to be my first ever—the shitty little point-and-shoot Olympus. I remember he felt sorry he couldn’t find me a new bike; God, how absurd that sounds eight years later. That gift absorbed me.
By the time I was sixteen, film photography was almost all I cared about, and as expected I started to struggle in school. Around that time I began to secretly build a dark room out of my bedroom closet. I needed equipment, but I was broke and far too afraid to ask my parents for money out of fear they’d shut the project down. Anyway, a week into construction I got caught stealing beakers and bins from the AP chemistry lab. It was such a big deal that I had to sit down with my parents in the vice principal’s office. After some scolding, the meeting ended with a compromise. If I applied myself in classes, I’d be given access to an old janitor's closet. No more C’s. After that day, I started getting to school an hour early to renovate that closet into a dark room. I had my very own key and everything.
With a bit of badgering, the science department gave me bins, beakers, gloves, tongs, a safelight, and a bag of developer powder they’d found hidden away. I started helping Max’s dad with building decks on weekends until I collected enough money to buy the rest. It took me almost a year, but I did it. Soon enough, I started making some under-the-table money developing rolls for other kids. I didn’t do it for the cash, but more for the thrill of developing. By the time I turned eighteen, I got into a top media department in the nation. The next fall I moved to Philadelphia to enroll.
Anyway, Max and I had split on different paths; it’s amazing how the person you’re closest to in the entire world can see it so differently than you do. One day around last Thanksgiving, when Max and I were out on a walk in Norton’s Orchard, we’d paused at sunset on the top of Norton’s Hill, the highest point in the orchard and in our little town. Up there, the rows of apple trees seem to slide down the slope. The rest of the hill is dense woods, covered with white pines that never stop swaying, almost like they’re breathing. We’d sat on a bench, installed in memory of some name I’ve forgotten, and watched the boats docked on the lakes below. In the distance, a scatter of silver lights sparkled up from the big-box stores in Augusta. We’ve sat there hundreds of times, but that night the twinkle from those lights looked so sad and empty to me—possibly a symptom of being surrounded by brighter ones these past few years.
That night, I asked about the baseball team at UMaine, and in return, he asked me about my photos, though I know he did just to be nice. My high school hobby had become something more in college. As a journalism major, I almost exclusively took photos of politicians, using digital cameras that cost thirty times what my shitty little Olympus had. I wasn’t that interested in politics, but the travel program was killer. If you concentrated in photojournalism and pitched a strong enough plan to the department, you’d receive a plane ticket, a stipend, and a platinum-sealed letter of affiliation that would get you almost any press pass you wanted. For my senior thesis, I traveled to Montreal, Chicago, New York City, and Washington D.C. Most of the time I’d been down in the press pit, my polished 150mm lens sticking up like a telescope, focusing on blue and red ties, snapping thousands of photos, rapid-fire. Burst. Check. Adjust aperture. Burst. Check. Too high. Burst. Check. Good. Burst. Lighting change. Adjust ISO. Burst. Check. Good. Burst. Refine. Refine. Refine. And so on.
We talked for a good bit about those things until the pink sky bruised with blacks and blues, but I still couldn’t shake the dull glow of those lights. I’d opened my mouth to say that to Max, but he spoke his mind before I could.
“This view up here is so full,” he said with a smile. “I love it.”
On the other side of the tracks is Monte Leone, which looks identical to Manning. As I drove, I could see the humidity of late morning hanging on the horizon, distorting strawberry fields, reducing distant herds of cattle to the size of bugs buzzing over a pond. Above, great lazy clouds followed us northward, and the roadsides were dotted with old farmhouses, their screen doors shut tight. Next to me, Max broke into one of our four bags of marshmallows. I was concentrating on the road. There’s a good number of squiggles and hairpin turns in Monte Leone, but I knew where I was going—I’d been up to Max’s house on Newt Lake since I was eleven.
The house isn’t big—maybe half of the size of Max’s house on Apricot Street—but the view is unreal. His deck looks down on the widest stretch of Newt’s basin, where a scattering of house-sized islands poke out of the water. Late at night, after the stars would pop, we’d always leave the house, make our way down a snake trail, and out onto the dock, our pockets stuffed with skipping stones. Over the years, we must’ve left 5,000 rocks on the bottom of that lake.
Anyway, sometime after leaving Monte Leone I steered off a winding farm road and onto a highway on ramp. The thermometer had hit the mid-nineties. As the highway leveled out, the ground around the truck seemed to stretch into infinity, and the sky was wallpapered with cotton-ball clouds.
For the next thirty miles, the wind took the place of our conversation. Within that whistle and roar, the world kept expanding, the piles of great lazy clouds rising higher and higher, getting smaller and smaller. The further north we drove, the thinner the traffic became. Eventually, Max and I started to try to get cars in the other lane to roll down their windows so we could talk to them. In the left lane, I would speed up and slow down as Max waved to the drivers. We must’ve tried this on fifty cars and didn’t get a single one to pay attention to us. Finally, he resorted to hurling marshmallows at their windows.
Max has a hard time sitting still, and he really only slows down when he’s fascinated by something. I remember a spring day when we were in high school—one of those rare balmy April afternoons. Last period had just ended, and we had an hour before Max needed to get to a game, so we hopped on our bikes and rode around the perimeter of the lakes as fast as we could. When we got near Rome, we turned onto Dow Road and stopped at a gas station to pick up Cokes and hot fries. We stayed on Dow until we hitched a right onto a dirt path and coasted down it until we hit a narrow trail overhung with pine branches that brushed us as we rode. The trail spat us out onto a small crescent beach with a couple of fallen white pines splayed on the sand. We pedaled straight onto the beach, tipped over our bikes, and ran into the lake without saying a word to one another.
After that first splash, Max paused, stood still, calf-deep in lake water. After a moment, he reached down into the shallows, felt around, and slowly pulled up the limp white carcass of a crayfish. I remember high-stepping back to the beach so he wouldn’t toss it at me, but when I looked back he still had it in his hand. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was locked in on that crayfish. From what I could see, the poor thing was missing half of its legs and its whole back shell. It was grim, but for some reason, Max couldn’t look away. He held the translucent body gently as if it were a bird with a broken wing. Later, as we were sweeping the bottom of our hot fries bag for crumbs, he told me he’d never seen the inside of a crayfish before. He thought, if he looked long enough, he’d never forget what was underneath that shell.
As soon as we left the highway and negotiated our way past the truck stop and Walmart, we were on backroads again, most of them scarred by logging trucks and snowplows. We were headed northwest, pointed towards Canada, still decently away from Jennings. To give Max something to do, I reached into my door well and pulled out my beater film camera—a Minolta—and a booklet of CDs. As soon as I handed them over, he stuck in an old and scratched-up mixtape and started snapping photos of me.
Some time later I drove through a town called Moss and past the brick buildings on Main Street. There was a sandwich shop, a paper shop, a hardware store, and an antique store. Each telephone pole carried an American flag for the upcoming Independence Day parade. Leaving downtown behind, we crossed a tiny bridge over a skinny lake, where rope swings dangled from the tree-lined banks. On the other side of the bridge Max needed to pee, so I stopped at a store stationed at the split of two roads. Hungry enough to eat again, I grabbed my camera back and followed him in for a snack.
The store was an old yellow house with maybe twenty windows, a white wicker porch, and a door that shrieked like a cat fight when Max swung it open. Pausing, I turned around to pick up a sense of setting that I could carry with me inside. Back toward the bridge, a half dozen teenage boys were leaning over the railing to size up a jump. Some began rolling off their socks, while others retreated. I felt a lot, right then as if their shadows were stretching out and onto the white of my t-shirt as if I were a mirror of them, and their movements were etching tiny cuts into my chest. I raised my Minolta to my eye, adjusted my shutter speed, wound the lever, and clicked.
Inside, the store was a maze of shoulder-high shelves mostly stocked with jerky and junk food. Barrels of yarn and beads collected dust under the sunbeams glinting up from the river. At the back, a line of lit-up fridges stocked energy drinks, beer, and chocolate milk. An ancient wooden table functioned as a checkout counter, displaying ten kinds of gum, a basket of wrapped baked goods, and one of those high registers that looks like a rolltop desk. Behind the counter was a boy who looked no older than nine. He was perched on a stack of Yellow Pages and counting cash from the register. I swear. Halfway through a wad of fives, he felt me staring and stopped.
“Yes, sir?” he asked awkwardly, his hands still counting bills. Now that we’d made eye contact, I could see he was older than I’d thought, just small for his age. He had scarlet hair and buck teeth.
“Do you run this place?” I asked. He stopped his count again as if I was actually wondering if he ran this place.
“Well, my mom does mostly. But when she’s gone, I do.” The way he emphasized that ‘I’ made me smile.
I picked up a blueberry muffin and handed him a five. As I pocketed the change, Max swung open the restroom door in the back, wiping his hands on the front of his shorts, and walked over to the barrels of yarn and beads. Over by the barrels, Max picked up a lavender skein. The wool was thick and soft and flecked with tiny blue dots. I left the register and walked over to him.
“This is the best color I’ve ever seen,” he said, staring down at the yarn and twisting it between his hands. “I’m gonna make something out of this. I’m gonna make a hat.”
I laughed, and he laughed a little, too, but his eyes stayed glued to that clump of yarn.
“Made in Miss-Oh-La,” he said, reading the label “Where is that?”
“Mizz-Oo-La,” I corrected. “It’s a cute city in Montana.”
“Mizz-Oooo-La,” he repeated, nodding and smiling. “That's nice.”
I nodded back, and he put the yarn in a brown paper bag to bring to the checkout.
There are rivers everywhere in Maine. Around Jennings, though, you start to lose count of them. It’s as if Newt Lake is the state’s heart, and the rivers and streams that extend from its vast banks are veins, pumping like blood through a huge wooded body. Honestly, there were probably springs and ripples trickling beneath our wheels as we shot up Route 15, far beneath the rumpled pavement, beneath the old gravel, beneath the soil and the worms and the bones and beneath the Earth that had been rotting there forever. Little trickles, moving, without anyone knowing they exist.
Near Jennings, we crossed one of these innumerable rivers, and in the middle of the bridge I had to slam my brakes so hard that my tires squealed and I smelled the bitter burn of rubber. A gangly boy with a shaved head had run straight across the road in front of my truck. He waved a hand to say ‘sorry!’, and then hurled himself up and over the bridge railing. We couldn’t see him break the surface but could hear howls of applause shoot up from the river bank.
“All right!” shouted Max, bouncing up and down, slapping his hands on my dash as if it were a conga drum. “We gotta try that. Pull over, Deaner!”
I burnt some more rubber peeling my truck out and over to the five or six cars parked on the shoulder. According to a small rusted sign, this was the Bunker River, and even though I’d passed it many times, I’d never really noticed it before. Max and I started laughing like madmen, overcome by the wildness of it all. We threw our shirts and shoes into the bed, next to our rods and backpacks, and walked back to the railing. The drop was considerable, maybe thirty feet. Down below, a pack of tattooed twenty-somethings swam and hollered like it was the last sunny day of summer.
We stood there for a bit, silently assessing our options. I was sure as shit going to back out, but someone below shouted, “Jump!” Max lifted one foot onto the railing, then pulled himself up so that he could balance with his arms open wide to blue sky and sunshine. Then he leapt. He hit the water smoothly, surfaced, then floated for what felt like a long time, his arms making tiny circles. Before I could talk myself out of it, I climbed up on the railing. My body swished through hot air, and I saw Max quickly swim out of the way so I wouldn’t kill him. And then I hit the water with such force that I lost my breath and the insides of my ears tightened. When I finally broke free, I gasped in big breaths of soupy air before swinging toward Max, who was treading water alongside the others.
Everyone in the group looked to be about our age. I was introduced to all of them, though I really only remembered the names of a couple of the pretty girls and Bode, the boy we’d watched jump, who’d already hit it off with Max. Bode was twenty-three, a recent graduate from UMaine Farmington, and, no kidding, had grown up in Missoula, Montana. I swear. When Max found out, he lost his mind. “Mizzz-Oooo-Laaaa, Deaner! What are the chances of this shit? Jesus!” He went on to tell Bode about the skein he’d bought, and Bode asked him if it was from some little mom-and-pop company he knew of, and Max told him he thought so but needed to check the label to be sure. That’s all I heard before I started chatting it up with one of the pretty girls, whose name is Drew. She’d also just graduated from Farmington and was staying there to work at the hospital. She had a giant smile that showed thirty teeth and a sun hat that was the same deep brown as her eyes. In just fifteen minutes I got to know her better than I’d known any girl in my life.
Before long everyone started to get cold, so we splashed over to a big slanted rock on the sunny side of the river. It was just high enough out of the water so we could dangle our ankles in the river. The bridge had a constant rush of cars zooming on it, and way behind us there was a trestle that had the occasional train squeaking down south. It was nice, sitting there. At one point Max yelled out that this was his heaven, and I almost could’ve nodded.
As we dried, I told our new friends about Manning, about Philadelphia, about driving up to Newt, about how Max and I had thrown marshmallows at cars on the highway. And then, as the setting sun began to turn the water gold, a glint up on the bridge caught my eye, something shiny coiling up into the sky like a pop-fly. It was a can of beer, and at its peak it turned over and spun towards the river, picking up speed like an asteroid. It hit the water hard and fast, staying beneath the surface so long I thought it might have lodged in the mud. Eventually, though, it popped up like a buoy, and everyone on the rock erupted in laughter and cheers. Another can shot up from the bridge, and then another, and Max and Bode and Drew and ten others dove back into the Bunker to bring them in.
I jumped in too, swimming as hard as I could. Beers kept dropping like bombs, and, man, it was terrifying. Against the sky, the cans looked like broken blue satellites spiraling out of control, heading straight for our faces. Nobody ever got hit, though; the cans always struck empty water, smacking the surface with a massive plop and sinking like stones. Waiting for them to reemerge, we stayed quiet as if we were on the eighteenth hole of the Masters, waiting to see if a shot would be sunk. But when they sprang up to the surface, we’d lose our shit. This went on and on. Cans would tumble up, catching darts of sunlight against aluminum, before they’d hang, motionless, basking in the blaring whistles of southbound trains. Each time, they’d plunge into the water and we’d wait there believing that they may never come up again. Honestly, I think it was the wait that made them taste so good.
Eventually, the case from heaven was empty, and as we drank, two men leaned over the railing, both shaggy and deep into their thirties, smiling and pumping their fists. I never learned who they were, but we cheered and waved back. As they drove away, we heard the bang of a few early evening fireworks going somewhere nearby, close enough for us to see puffs of smoke drift away among the pine trees.
Max and I ditched our plan to go to his lake house and instead followed our new friends to their campsite on the western shore of Newt. We hadn’t packed tents, so we drove up to where everyone else was pitching theirs and planned to sleep in the bed of my truck. The site was a wide piece of grass, rimmed with second-growth pine trees that jutted like an elbow into the water. Between two of the trees there hung a taught black clothing line, displaying a rainbow of bottoms and tops still wet from the Bunker. We didn’t have a beach or anything like that, but there were a few boulders flat enough to sit on. Next to a rock-ringed fire pit, a few people set up a Coleman stove and started boiling water for macaroni. As the lake began to darken, our fire brightened, and we pulled sweatshirts from our backpacks. We sat in a circle around the Coleman—some in camp chairs, others criss-crossed on sleeping pads. I hadn’t brought camping supplies, so I had to spoon my helping of macaroni into a travel cup I’d brought for coffee in the canoe. Then I sat down next to Drew.
After dinner, Max passed out the remainder of our marshmallows, constantly pausing to spark up conversation and toke borrowed cigarettes. As the smells of burnt sugar and tobacco rose into the night, I could hear Grant Panneci’s voice in my head: “Like a great boxer.” When Bode’s girlfriend Winnie got up from her chair to go pee, Max ditched the piece of cardboard he’d been sitting on and sat his ass down in her empty seat like a sultan. When she came back, he stayed put. Max shouldn’t have won that battle, but Winnie didn’t fuss; she climbed onto Bode’s lap and let Max stay.
The stars came out, and Bode started talking about Montana rivers, and Winnie chimed in, remembering a day when they’d caught too many fish to carry home. Max kept interrupting with handfuls of questions: “What’s Missoula look like? What’s it smell like? Why’s it smell like that?” Patiently, Bode answered them all. He told Max that Montana skies stay lighter for longer than they do in Maine, that the clouds turn the same shade of purple as Max’s skein of yarn; how you can taste the smell of smoke. He talked about honest-to-god-cowboys, and the way sound bounces off Missoula’s low brick buildings in the early morning. He spoke about that place with the kind of pride I’ve been searching for my whole life. And then, he said that he and Winnie would be leaving early in the morning to drive back there.
At that, Max started bouncing and his questions got more urgent: “How much gas will it take? How many buffalo you think you’ll see? Are buffalo bison? Are bison buffalo?” Drew leaned over and whispered to me that it would be easier if he just went so he wouldn’t have to keep pestering them. She was joking, but the more we talked, the less wild the idea seemed. I’d been wanting to drop by Missoula on my way to a bigger city, and what was stopping me? I don’t have a job; my truck is in good shape. Max had his fishing rods in the back of my truck, and we had some basic clothes and our toothbrushes. If we drove out now, we’d be with people who could show us what’s what.
Eventually, those thoughts spilled out to the group, and Max was on the hot seat. He can be wild and all, but Max’s never been make-a-drunk-decision-to-move-across-the-country wild, you know? He’s a Mainer, and he talks about Maine the way people like Bode talk about Montana. Anyway, Bode and Winnie hammered him until he squeaked out a ‘maybe’. I knew it was no use.
When the glitter above us brightened and everyone was still awake, I grabbed my Minolta from the truck so I wouldn’t forget the scene. Besides, everyone was keen to have their photo taken. I used my headlamp as a makeshift flash, a nearby stump to hold my camera steady, and my finger to click away at random moments. It felt like seconds before I couldn’t wind my camera anymore. And once I took out the canister, I held it as tight as I could. I kept it clenched in my palm as if to protect it. In my delirium, I thought the dim light from the fire was going to burn through plastic and warp whatever I’d taken. In reality, the light of three bald suns couldn’t beam through that canister. I’ve known that for years, but last night I chose to ignore it. Last night I needed my hand to keep those photos safe.
The circle shrank and the fire died, and eventually, the only ones left were Drew, Max, and myself. Max was drunk. He kept poking the embers with a long dead birch branch and telling us how excited he was for the sun to wake him in the bed of my truck. Drew and I talked with him until neither of us could get through a sentence without yawning. When we headed for her tent, Max stayed in front of the dying fire. Drew turned to him. “You won’t wake up in the truck if you stay here ‘till the morning,” she said.
Max smiled at the ground and nodded. “Right, right.”
The last I saw, Max was still in Winnie’s chair, moving around little flecks of light, humming to himself.
I woke up in Drew’s tent to the sound of a zipper. The sleeping bag beside me was empty. The sky was still mostly dark, and I wanted to fall asleep again. I had dried drool all over my cheek, and an eyelid sealed shut with sleep. I felt awful. When I staggered outside, I saw that she was on one of the boulders by the lake. It was cold out, and dew was still sparkling on the ground. The horizon beyond Drew was showing a soft pink line, and I had the urge to take a picture of it. So instead of climbing down to join her, I walked like a dead man over to my passenger door for another roll of film.
After I grabbed my new roll, I staggered up on the seat and flipped down the visor to see just how bad I looked. When I did, out fell the print Max had tucked there yesterday, spinning down like a leaf onto my lap. It landed perfectly straight, right-side-up. Maybe it was the moment, or the way it rested, all perfect like that, that’d made me open my eyes a touch more. Without thinking, I breathed a laugh. You know those inkblot tests? The ones where a blot looks like a dog, but then all of a sudden it transforms into an upside-down old man? Since that day with Max and Wes, the photo had always bored me. At that moment, though, it became the most beautiful picture I’d ever taken—leagues beyond any I’d captured in college.
The blurs, the haze, the overexposed Augusta sky—that photo transported me back to a place I’d been on a good night with my best friends, when I was too carefree to check the light meter, too busy throwing rocks with my left hand to balance the camera in my right. It was also something more than a memory. Beyond those blurred trees were rivers I’d never seen, trains hooting alongside them . . . places far beyond the bent glossy corners in my hand; places right underneath my nose. It was the most beautiful picture I’d ever taken, and it took me four years to realize it—what kind of sick joke is that? The sun was starting to cut through trees across the lake, and little golden lines were streaking my dash. Before I left the truck, I reached into my pocket, took out the film canister from last night, and dropped it in the glove box.
Down at the boulder, Drew apologized for waking me, but I told her I was glad to be up. She sighed and I loaded up my new canister in a flash. The sun was streaking through the Hundred Mile pines, and Newt Lake looked brand-new under the orange glow. I lifted my Minolta to my eye and clicked, stamping those sunbeams and shadows onto my new roll. I couldn’t stop smiling.
“Deaner!” Max was standing by Drew’s tent, his hand on the zipper. “Deaner! Get up!”
Drew laughed into her hands, and I sprang up and hurried back to the campsite. Max didn’t hear me coming, and when I tapped him on the back, he jumped, then turned to me, smiling and jittering like a madman who hadn’t slept a wink.
“I’ve given it some thought,” he said. “I’m in.”
I took a second to process his words. “You’re in?”
He smiled and nodded. “For the trip. I’m in. You ready?”
I was too confused for words—confused at his decision, even more confused about mine. You know how badly I wanted to say yes? To hug Max and run over to wake up Bode and Winnie? To throw our bags into my truck and drive off? Man, I wanted that as bad as I’ve ever wanted anything. But I couldn’t say yes. And, instead, I told him that I’d changed my mind—my words repeating themselves over and over again. I couldn’t figure out how to say anything more, anything that would explain what I was feeling.
On and on I went, until Max stopped me. He put his hand on my chest and asked, “Drew?”
I wish I hadn’t, but I laughed at him and laughed for a long time too. When I finally calmed down, I shook my head. It was the truth; in the end, I didn’t even get a number or P.O. box to reach her.
Tears welled into Max’s eyes, and he shook his head slowly. My eyes filled too. I’d never seen Max cry before. But now he was, softly, looking like the little boy whose mother just told him it’s time to come in from the porch. Until that moment, I’d never thought twice about Max Archer’s future, and I’m not sure he had either. He was to live in Manning, with his family, and work with his father until he’d take over the business. He’d find a home, a pretty wife, and die peacefully in the town he grew up in. When he cried, I knew he was gone.
The woods around us this morning were quiet. Not a whiff of wind. All the second-growth pines had stopped swaying, all holding their breath, all waiting for one of us to speak. Max dropped his head and I saw a couple of tears fall onto his shoelaces. He lifted his eyes and looked at me, from the dried drool on my cheek to my tumbled mess of hair, like he was memorizing my face. And then he wrinkled his nose and smiled a big, goofy smile. I laughed at him again, but this time he joined me. We stood there, bouncing laughs off of one another like only best friends can do, volleying them back and forth, our voices rising until both of us fell to the ground in hysterics. We roared like dumbasses, waking up the whole camp, laughing until every tent was emptied. No one around us knew what we were on about, and maybe that’s why we found it so funny. Besides us and the pines, no one else really knew.