Boys Again

Boys, Again From Chicken Soup for the Soul: Older and Wiser
BY: Timothy Leland Email Share Comments (0) We first met when we were six years old. Jim and I became best friends, spending our summers together in a town on the south shore of Boston, where Jim lived year round and my family rented a house during July and August. In those early years, we went barefoot almost the entire summer, the soles of our feet becoming tough as leather, our arms and legs dark as chocolate from the sun, our hair bleached yellowwhite.

Jim and I learned to sail at the local yacht club before we were ten, competing against each other in the walnut-sized sailboats known as rookies, treasuring the blue pennants for first place, red for second. The year we turned eleven, our parents sent us both off to the same boys camp in New Hampshire, where we grew to love the overnight canoe trips, the campfire cookouts, the smell of pitch pine. When we were fifteen, we were accepted at the camp as counselors-in-training, an important advance in grade and rank, the first of lifes promotions. But lifes work still seemed far away, and after a year of counseling, we committed our vacations to travel and adventure. We spent a summer in Nova Scotia and Quebec, taking odd jobs and camping along the way in an old canvas sheepherders tent. In the summer of 1956, Jim and I drove across the country and worked in a lumber camp in the state of Washington. We worked another summer in a boys club in the slums of London, a far cry from the camp in New Hampshire. The year after graduating from college, our last summer together, we drove to Central America, where we rode a narrow-gauged train through the jungles of Guatemala, stopping at villages with Mayan Indians selling their wares beside the track. After that, we went our separate ways. Jim took a job as a teacher at a school in South Berwick, Maine. I became a journalist and lived in Boston. We both got married the same year and both had two children, a boy and a girl. The children grew up and two of them got married, starting families of their own.

We sent each other Christmas cards but found it difficult to stay in touch, our lives diverging. Our careers took us in different directions, gave us different experiences, involved us in entirely different communities of friends. The years went by. The ambitions of youth were tested, cast offsome in success, some in failure. We aged. Jims hair turned snow-white; I went bald. I developed back problems, Jim had a bout with skin cancer. We both turned sixty. And then, miles apart, we both woke up one morning and knew it was time to retire. Separately, we came to the same conclusion in the same month. Both of us realized it was time to walk away from the jobs that had kept each of us engaged and excited for thirty-five years. It was time to begin a new chapter of life. I had heard about a research project in the badlands of Argentinaa team of paleontologists searching for the planets oldest dinosaur fossils. And they were taking volunteers. This Earthwatch project was more primitive than most. Volunteers brought their own tents and sleeping bags, lived in a barren area of the desert known as the Valley of the Moon. There was no electricity. No plumbing. No latrines. Just dinosaur fossils and occasional pit vipers. On a whim, I called my friend of fifty-five years. We talked about our upcoming retirement, and I told him about the paleontology expedition. Then, on the spur of the moment, I asked him whether he would consider going on such a trip. The answer was instantaneous and emphatic: Yes! A few months later, just retired, Jim and I were pitching a tent along a dry riverbed at the foot of the Andes, pounding our stakes into the sandy soil with a large rock, the same way we had done as teenagers, traveling around the Gasp Peninsula in Quebec. Every day for the next two weeks, we hiked across the hardpack desert, searching for the fossilized remains of animals that had died there 240 million years earlier, dark purple bones in the white sand. We carried canteens of water and hunks of cheese in our knapsacks, just like the days we had hiked around the Grand Canyon. And in truth, the rugged landscape was very similar in both placestimeless and forbidding and very beautiful. Late at night, lying in our sleeping bags, Jim and I looked up at the cold black sky, rimmed with stars, and talked about the time we had camped out in the Dakota badlands, far from any townships. We recalled how we woke up after midnight to hear a distant metallic sound, a faint clicking in the heavens, eerie and totally out of place in such a remote space. It wasnt until late the following day that we discovered the distant train track and figured out what that mysterious echo in the dark had been. And as we had back then, Jim and I started to laugh. We couldnt stop. Our laughter rang across

the desolate land and the years between us fell away, circles reconnected. We were boys again.

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