Sharon still lived in the house in York when we started tubing a section of the Big Gunpowder Falls, the ice-cold, fast moving river below Prettyboy Dam.
There were several parties in the summers of 2003 and 2004, always with two cars. But one July day Gary and I drove up alone, parked at the old railroad station in Monkton, then walked the length of the river up to the low, slightly creepy concrete bridge of Blue Mountain Road where we always put in, screaming as we first sat back into the giant whale-colored tubes.
After the hour's ride, shivering in the hot car, our hands pruned and white, we got to the intersection with Route 45—the Old York Trail—and I suddenly told Gary "Keep going on this."
What has kept us together for 24 years is his responsiveness to my passionate or manic concepts—in the graceless, bureaucratic parlance of modern therapy, an enabler—and we found ourselves silently heading north, following the serpentine rise of the two-lane road up from the river valley. The opposite direction from home.
At the top of the hill, I looked back over the fields to find the high bridges, like two towering aqueducts, that carry the four lanes of 83 across the river.
I last saw them when I was seven, and the distant view (there were far fewer trees then) provided me with my first full-on Sehnsucht. My grandmother, my great-aunt, and I were driving down from Shrewsbury to White Hall to visit my Aunt Lillian. I had never met her, and after that day I never saw her again.
Thirty-seven years later, I am trying to remember the roads and turns as I saw them from the massive back seat windows of my grandmother's 1951 Buick.
"Turn right."
