My first husband, father of our sons, loved to go camping. It took a separate closet in the basement to store all his gear. He spent winters drying beef jerky for snacks and fixing meals to be reconstituted later with water on his summer trips. He used the kitchen oven so often I was lucky to get a meatloaf in edgewise. He also mixed his own gorp, which is now called trail mix and sold in grocery stores. Solomon, a ninety pound black Lab who was his best friend, and our sons accompanied him. For years he kept journals chronicling his adventures.
Recently I posted Memoirs of Two Innocents Abroad, several installments about the first big trip we took together – to England and France. Originally I wrote long detailed letters to my sisters back home which they saved for me to keep as a remembrance of our travels. They are part of my “Family Treasures” to pass down through the generations and have survived my moves after our divorce for the past twenty-five years. This summer when they resurfaced, tucked away and forgotten in an old shoe box, I was distraught. My letters are written in long hand, which is not taught in my grandchildren’s schools. That was the impetus for translating them into a typed form on my blog so they could read my stories. Now I am planning to have copies bound into a simple notebook to give them to my sons and their families for Christmas.
On a regular basis my former husband now a friend, who lives near by, invites me out for coffee. I mentioned to him my idea for creating a travelogue. He jumped in with his idea of including his camping journals, which he had copied over the years on his old manual typewriter. I was delighted to merge our stories. To get things started he brought me a shopping bag full of journal pages to go through and maybe condense.
As I began to read I found myself in a minefield of exploding memories and new emotions. I never knew the man revealed in his writings, though I was familiar with many of his stories. I never saw the soul mate possibilities between two people who chose different trails and confronted different wilderness adventures. We are both adventurers who strike out on our own. We are survivors. We’re story tellers. I mourn that I never saw him truly. But, though I think he sees me now, or at least is willing to listen to me, he stops short of wanting to plumb the depths of me. I will not tell him of my revelation. I celebrate that we are friends.
Ranier Maria Rilke writes of a “love that consists of two solitudes which border, protect and salute each other” across a divide. For me this is reality.
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