Sunday's Practice Writing

This was supposed to be about altitude illness, but it just took off on me. Yesterday I found a little pad with my friend's handwriting on it that said, "Jerry has an aneurysm in his aorta." So I guess this was his way of saying, "hello."

Comfort

The campground was okay, a little too regulated for me, but then again we couldn’t have brought the trailer if it was real wilderness. “Life’s a trade-off,” as Jerry was fond of saying. And in this case I had to agree. Climbing out of the tent every morning had gotten progressively harder for me over the years. Straightening my aching back was accompanied by ever increasing volumes of grunts and groans. That’s when Jerry announced we were buying a travel trailer.

“What,” I said, “and give up the glory of nature?”

“Now honey, we’re not giving it up,” he replied. “We’re just gonna make it a little more comfortable.”

“Comfortable for who?” I muttered.

“Why me, of course,” he said and grinned. I have never been able to refuse that grin. So I agreed to adjust, and boy was I surprised at how quickly I settled into 'more comfortable'. No more setting up tarps and tents and toilet. No more pumping up the old Coleman stove--I never could get that damn thing to work right.

In our new comfortable mode, Jerry would drop me off at the ranger station to pay the fee, and by the time I’d walked over to our site he’d have the little white trailer backed in and hooked up. All I had to do was open the door—and there it was, Home Sweet Home. He’d set up the camp chairs and the table while I opened a bottle of wine and we’d have our cocktail hour out in the open air.

And that’s how it was for the next five years until the day I hiked to our site and Jerry was still sitting in the truck, his eyes wide open, dead of an aneurysm. I reached in through the window and took the keys out of his hand, strangely pleased that he’d managed to turn off the truck before dying. Then I trudged back to the ranger station and asked them to call 911.
I didn’t cry while I set up the camp chairs, when I opened the wine, or when the paramedic knelt in front of me and shined his little penlight in my eyes. “You’re in shock,” he gently told me.

He’s the one who filled out the papers—he got most of the information from Jerry’s wallet, which fell out of his pants pocket before they took his body away.
After I signed everything, I sat in my camp chair and drank the rest of the bottle of wine. When I lay down in our bunk in the trailer, missing the weight of his arm across my chest, I balanced his wallet there but it was too light. I cried that night and all the other nights I spent in that campground waiting for paperwork to travel through bureaucratic channels and Jerry to be cremated. They gave him back to me in a plastic box, but that was okay, Jerry was never big on frills.

I put him in the passenger seat and buckled the box in. Then I drove the truck, the trailer, Jerry and I to our next campground. Split Mountain National Park.
These days I back the trailer in, hook it up, set up the chairs and table, open the wine. At every camp I take out Jerry’s box, take out a tiny pinch of his ashes and sprinkle them somewhere near the camp. Under a tree, on a rock, in a river. I always say, “We’re traveling in comfort now, Jerry.”

And I’m sure he agrees.