Disappearing Act

My principal is retiring at the end of this year. She hired me four years ago and working under her has been very rewarding both professionally and personally. We have a lot in common even though she's close to forty years older than I am. I remember being in the hospital back in January when Jordan was born and texting my principal. I mean, how cool is it that a sixty-something year old texts. That's just how she is. There have been many afternoons over the past four years where I've sat in her office and talked about music, our fascination with cults, or just listened to her stories about her life. She tells great stories. Two days ago, we talked in her office after school for one of the last times, I'm sure. Our topics ranged from computers to Charles Manson and finally to losing touch with people from our past.

What was most interesting about the last part of our conversation was how different our perspectives were on people who we haven't seen in awhile. Even though there's a considerable age gap between us and she's from another generation, it's never felt that way until that afternoon. She was talking about how many people she has lost contact with from her past. We both agreed that it was like people just vanish from the face of the earth when you lose contact, but the difference in my generation and her generation is the means of communication. With the evolution of the Internet and my space and blogs and basically any search engine, you can find people that have "vanished" and pull them back to the present if you want to (and if they want to). Who hasn't ever been bored and decided to plug random names from the past into Google or my space and see what pops up? She told me she wouldn't really know where to begin with something like that.

The more I've thought about it, though, the more I question whether or not this access to finding people is a good thing. Sometimes when people "vanish" or just fade away over time it's best to leave them there. I'm beginning to think that certain people only fit in certain contexts of my life and to try and bring them back or reconnect with them would leave me disappointed. I think there's a circle of friends and family that stay with you throughout your life. And every time you see them, you pick back up from where you were the last time you were together. Then there are others who fall along the way or disappear and it's best to let them go. I've tried to hold on to more than a few people for nothing more than nostalgic purposes and, more often than not, we seem to lose touch anyway.

I guess that's why our brains are designed to remember emotional experiences. The people that are worth remembering will always be somewhere in my mind. And over time parts of those memories will pull a disappearing act, but the ones that are most important will stay where they are. The people who have vanished are somewhere else now and I'm sure (if I was important enough) I've got a place somewhere in there memories as well.

Spring River

I had one of those dreams last week. You know, one of those where you wake up and think, "Where the hell did that come from?" It was one of those that felt like you were living it until the very moment you start to come back to consciousness and then you realize it's not real. And you have that disappointing feeling that you're losing something that you never really had in the first place. I've always had those dreams. When I was younger I would dream that way about the ocean. I loved the ocean and wanted so badly to be there. I would almost will myself to dream about it. Usually what would happen though, is that in my dream I would be riding in a car and I would see palm trees and I would know that the ocean was close by, but I never could quite get to it before I woke up. After awhile, I wasn't even tricked into thinking I was actually there...I had the dream sequence memorized. After only a few minutes I would realize I was dreaming and the disappointment would come back again. As I've grown older, these dreams don't happen as much and they never include the ocean. I guess, maybe, my subconscious has settled and I have everything I want or need. In the last few years, though, these types of dreams pop out of nowhere from time to time. The difference in the newer version of these dreams is that I am going back in time to a place I used to go when I was younger. My friend, Ben, and his family would take me camping in Arkansas at least twice a year from the time I was in the third grade until I was a junior in high school.

This river was beautiful. There were some rapids and some calm parts. The water was green and moved along at the foot of the Ozarks and there were hills all around. The water was also very cold...about 65 degrees actually. There were little islands that caused the river to fork at places and eventually it would find its way back together. There were rope swings and inner tubes all along the river. We would walk the railroad tracks with our tubes on our backs about two miles up river and put in and float all the way down to our campsite. We did this every summer. It never got old. I think the river always had some mystical quality about it. At night Ben's dad would tell us ghost stories while we laid in the camper. He would tell us of the "Spring River Hacker" and make it sound so believable that we thought we heard footsteps outside. Our third summer there we noticed one of the rope swings had been cut down and we found that a young man had slipped and busted his head on the tree and died. We would talk about how many bodies were at the bottom of that river and that only added to our fascination. There was a tunnel under the tracks with the date "1902" carved at the top. We would make up stories about people who had worked the railroads. At night we would hunt for crawdads and cook them over the fire while we listened to Hank Williams, JR. and George Jones or some AM country music station we picked up in Missouri. Ben and I made our last trip when we were Juniors in high school.

Almost two years ago, I convinced one of my friends to go there with me camping. It was late March and a cold snap moved through just was we were there. We only stayed two days and it was at a different camp site, but it still had the same pull over me. We planned another trip for later that summer with our wives and another couple. We went in late June, on a week-end and stayed at the same camp site that I used to stay at when I was younger. Everything was different. The river was overcrowded with drunks in canoes, the water seemed lower than used to be, and snakes were everywhere. I went out into the water at dusk, like Ben and I used to do, but this time no one wanted to go with me. I waded out by myself and ended up swimming out to where the first rope swing used to be...the one where the guy died. There was another one in its place and there were some teen age boys taking turns swinging off of it. I climbed onto the bank and then climbed the tree as the rope swung back to me. I grabbed it and took a couple of seconds to think about it, then I jumped. Not as far down as I remember. I landed in the current and let it me take down river a little ways before I made my way back up stream to sit on the falls and watch the moss wash down the river just like it used to at the end of every day all those years ago.

I haven't been back since then. I'm not sure if I ever will go back. I'm getting tired of outgrowing things now. I want some things to still have more meaning than they probably should. I don't want Spring River to lose any more mysticism than it already has. I'll just visit it in my dreams and live with the disappointment of waking up.