The Real (Overgeneralized) Colorado

When I look through the living room windows of my parents’ home, I can see the first ridges of the foothills leading into the Rocky Mountains only a few miles away. On this winter morning, with the birds singing in the prairie grasses beyond our fence, Table Mountain is brown and dead with a crown of white snow along the cliffs at the plateau’s head. At sunset, I know, this same rock face will turn a deep purple-blue, the color that has been famously recorded in the song “America the Beautiful” as “purple mountains majesty.”

Despite the romance of this scene, I can’t help but laugh to myself thinking about how tourists have come to think of my Colorado home thanks to advertising brochures. I often see posters and pamphlets encouraging travelers to visit “The Mile High City” of Denver whenever I fly out of one of Chicago’s airports on my way home from college on breaks. More often than not, they depict either a skier on the slopes or the city itself which, compared to Chicago, looks tiny even in pictures. On rare occasion, I’ve seen a brochure with a front cover of two hikers on a beginners’ level trail somewhere in Rocky Mountain National Forest. Every pamphlet is filled with advertisements for fancy restaurants selling buffalo meat, bars where you can sniff oxygen while you drink, furriers promising protection from the mountain chill, and luxury car dealerships that will loan you a Porsche to handle curves on the mountain passes.

Any Colorado native knows that if a local were to design those brochures, none of these things would be included. Jeeps or Subarus, not Porsches, are the vehicles of choice and have their own designations of owner status in lift heights and bike racks. If you’re going to go to a real Colorado bar, they will be playing honky-tonk, not jazz. Mexican, not buffalo burgers, would be the featured food of choice. No self-respecting, nature-loving native would ever wear a fur coat. And the front cover would be anything more rugged and dangerous than the national park, where you have to pay twenty dollars just to get a day pass and then walk in single file with all the other tourists along the “hiking trails” that should be labeled “nature walking paths for senior citizens.”

Now, before I continue allowing the reader to think that these opinions are coming from some rugged, military-trained, scruffy-bearded mountain man who eats nothing but raw meat and granola, let me put a disclaimer on the person behind my over-generalized statements. I am a twenty-one year old female college student, meaning that I’ve spent nine months each year for the last three years at sea level in a suburb outside Chicago. In other words, I look like any other city girl; my mountain-hardened lungs and muscles have gone flabby and my skin is the same pale shade as those blind fish that live in caves and never see the sun.

Though I’ve always lived in Colorado, my parents didn’t raise me in some one-horse mining town where the main source of income is moonshine and the mayor still pans for gold.[1] My childhood home was in Thornton, a northern suburb of Denver on the deserty eastern plains, where I could see the colors of the sunrise on the summit of Long’s Peak while looking out the window of the bus on my way to school. When I was about to start high school my family moved to Arvada, a southwestern suburb that sits right at the feet of the mountains and lets its residents look out over the city from their higher elevation. For those out-of-staters who need skiing references: Thornton is three hours from the main slopes, while Arvada is only one and a half.[2]

So I am not a scruffy-bearded mountain man, but I do love Colorado. My family has always undertaken mild adventures in hiking, biking, camping, fishing, and backpacking, and though only a few of these expeditions have been very extreme, and only then by accident, I still feel that it’s about time that someone tried to capture the true heart of Colorado’s culture, which at its heart is an outdoor, not fur-coat-wearing, culture.[3] In other words, I feel called to dismantle the myths of the travel brochures so that anyone who reads this can appreciate my state for its true beauty when they visit.

Of course, if I were to do this in detail, I would need to write an entire book. There would need to be a chapter on four-wheeling, on camping, on the food and the cars and the bars and the notable absence of local fur coat wearers. Maybe someday I will write such a book, though I doubt that the people in charge of making those brochures would be very happy. Lucky for me, I found a beautiful microcosm of said “Colorado culture,” particularly its interesting characters, when I went with my family to the Colorado RV and Outdoor Show at the Denver Coliseum over spring break this year. It will provide a sufficiently brief and hilarious insight into what Colorado is really like outside of the travel brochures.

To begin, the reader must understand that this RV show did not take place in the country or even in a small mountain town where community members live in their RVs. Instead, Colorado residents from all over the state came to the capital of Denver to the largest events center of the city, The Coliseum, to shop for fifth-wheels and pop-ups and hitch-pulls and C-classes and motor homes.[4] This Coliseum complex, so magnificently named, also hosts the National Western Stock Show in January, the biggest event to come to Denver every year.[5] All you need to know about the setting of the Coliseum complex is that it stretches over a number of city blocks and includes several huge indoor arenas with dirt flooring and very uncomfortable stadium seating. For the RV show, the dirt was packed smooth and covered over with outdoor carpet, though this didn’t hide the smell of horse pee that has soaked into the dirt through successive stock shows and rodeos. In contrast to this sour odor, the concrete floor underneath the seats, though clean, smells sweetly of spilled beer.

The most notable cultural rendering that the RV show provides is the fact that the RV show itself even exists. Not only does it exist, but it is extremely popular. Despite the fact that each adult had to pay ten dollars for entry, the entire multi-arena complex was packed with people coming in and out of home-sized trailers. These trailers also cost as much as some homes, ranging between ten and fifty thousand dollars per recreational item, plus tax. Point to be observed: people in Colorado are willing to pay the big bucks to shop for and own a new item in which they can pretend they are at home even when they are not.[6]

In an unfortunately accurate generalization, the RV show also provided some cultural interest in that it doubled as a Colorado fashion show, especially in menswear. Baseball caps, particularly those that are camo patterned, have been in vogue for as long as I can remember. A close second in popularity is the graphic print tee featuring the name and a cartoon picture of a particular vacation spot. For example, I observed one entire family sporting faded tees from Daytona Beach, which I think is in Florida, though the cartoon palm trees in the pictures were very unspecific.

One fashion statement that trumps all the others is the beer belly. I didn’t mention this first because I’m not necessarily sure that this is just a Colorado-specific phenomenon, but the protruding, low-slouching gut does seem to be considered attractive among natives. It certainly seems that no one is embarrassed by the belly, which is highlighted as the center of attention when owners tuck faded tees into jeans with a belt, as is the norm. The younger men who sported such pouches often had a skinny, microwave-tanned woman on their arm who held their man’s backup clear plastic cup of beer for whenever he finished the one that was already in his hand.[7]

This reminds me to mention also the women’s fashion exhibited at the show. Besides the radioactive tans, breast implants are in vogue, perkily and proudly displayed with the help of tight tank tops and no bras. Both men and women love Wranglers that cut off circulation to the crotch, worn with cowboy or hiking boots. Women take as much pride in the shininess of their footwear as the men do in the muddiness of theirs.

Now, if you’ve heard the statement that Colorado is the healthiest state in the nation, you’re probably questioning my generalizations. As well you should be. I said that the RV show was a microcosm of Colorado culture, but I meant this in terms of both representation and contrast, though the direction of both is the same. Allow me to explain. The RV show, in its existence and its attendees, says something very important about the state: every Colorado native, even beer belly men who look like they don’t leave their couches, tries to have some sort of connection with the beautiful nature they see every morning as they drive to work. Some, like those attending the RV show, like to keep nature at a distance while still being in it, and so they buy trailers and campers with showers and ovens and televisions and microwaves and refrigerators where they can keep their Coors. Others also want to enjoy nature, but do so in a way that has become more associated with Colorado than the method represented by the beer-bellies.

I will call this group the granolas, as my family has so kindly nicknamed them. Though both the beer-bellies and this new group desire to enjoy the beautiful outdoors of their state, each takes extremes in different directions. For the beer-bellies, the outdoors is all about kicking back and relaxing, which means making a five-course breakfast in the morning, fishing or four-wheeling in the afternoon, and then coming back to another hot meal and watching the game on television while reclining in a king size bed, just like or better than the one at home. The granolas, on the other hand, opt for two-man tents, cold freeze-dried meals marked “organic,” and entire days spent just finding things necessary for survival, like clean water and firewood and maybe even a humanely killed squirrel cooked over a safe fire. Beer-bellies stay in RV parks and drive to their places of further camping entertainment, usually staying only for the weekend. Granolas walk into their campsite with everything on their backs and stay for a week in one spot or at different spots along one barely-visible trail, never showering for the entire time, which doesn’t matter much because their goal is to see no one but the person they hiked in with for the duration.

So while the RV show represents one extreme of Colorado outdoor culture, I must admit that they do not represent it in its entirety. Colorado is a very fit state and deserves its healthy reputation, though the granolas see their fitness more as a requirement necessary for the survival of the fittest than a way to lower their cholesterol. While some other states might have people who join a gym to feel healthy, this portion of Coloradoans sign up to run marathons because they want to make sure they can make it through their next backpacking trip.[8]

The majority of Coloradoans are those of us who fall somewhere in the middle of these two groups. We have a pop-up camper, which keeps us off the ground and gives us a stove and a sink, but is still open to the pine-scented breezes and animal sounds of a night in the mountains. We go backpacking, but never for more than a few days at a time, and we allow ourselves a sponge bath on the third day before we re-enter civilization. This is me and my family. My dad tucks his t-shirts into his jeans, but he doesn’t drink beer. My best friend is a granola, and though I agree to hike with her, I usually choose the trail and pack some of my own food, which always includes non-organic Cheetos and crackers with peanut butter to supplement her organic sugar-snap peas and carrots.

So we can go to the RV show and shop for a C-class for my parents to drive to visit me and my brother in our respective states of residence. We can also hike into the wilderness for a few days and pretend that we’re fearless pioneer explorers who just happen to have brought along a jar of Jiff. This is Colorado: quirky on both hick and extremist ends of the outdoorsy spectrum, we love our state and all its beauties, and immerse ourselves in it in whatever way we think best, eating squirrel or drinking Coors. Either way, fur coats are never included.

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[1] Though these towns do still exist in the mountains, making money on methamphetamines, the modern moonshine.

[2] Speaking of skiing, I suppose I must answer the question that everyone asks when they hear I am from Colorado: yes, I do ski. No, I do not have a season pass. I am lucky if I get to go even once a year. Full-day tickets are at least sixty dollars for everyone, including locals. Those “locals” you see working the lifts? They work all summer at local bagel and coffee shops in order to pay for a season pass at their own place of winter employment. Most of them are from European countries. They live in broken-down cabins and trailer homes in the back woods where you can’t see them when you’re on vacation in the ritzy resorts. They’re what we call “ski bums.”

[3] This assessment was asserted, without prompting, by two Colorado natives who asked me what I was writing about (this essay) while waiting for a plane back to Chicago.

[4] For those unfamiliar with RVs, a fifth-wheel trailer hooks into the bed of a truck instead of to the hitch. It gets its name from the fact that it has an extra set of wheels like a semi trailer. A pop-up is a hitch trailer that one can crank up into what looks like a tent on wheels. Hitch-pulls are almost as big as fifth-wheels, but they hook to the hitch. A C-class is a small motor home with a truck front. Everyone knows what a motor home looks like.

[5] Writing about the cultural and just plain interesting details of the stock show would require an entire book, which I’m sure has already been written, much less a separate chapter in the book I have already pretentiously claimed I might write.

[6] And the bigger trailers and fifth-wheels really are a home away from home. In one that we explored, a spiral staircase led up to the master bedroom. This bedroom was separated from a second bedroom by a full living room, complete with fake fireplace, flat screen TV, and full-sized couch and kitchen table. The square footage was twice as much as an average studio apartment in Chicago. All of the people we saw actually buying an RV at the show were negotiating financing. We saw no one who actually had the money to pay for their new toy.

[7] This beer is almost always Coors, which is made with “Rocky Mountain spring water” and is brewed in the town of Golden, only a few miles from my house. I can catch whiffs of the rotting bread smell from my backyard on hot summer evenings. As a side note within the side note: my favorite experience of the show was watching a young father with a baby in a carrier on his chest balance a full cup of beer in each hand as he navigated the crowd.

[8] This is rather ironic, since the number one cause of death in Colorado wildernesses is lightning strike, which has nothing to do with fitness, just knowledge. This means that if fitness is required for survival, the hiker is pushing themselves too hard. Though fitness is necessary to hike long distances in the high altitude, you have a good chance of surviving even if you are morbidly obese if you simply know the rules of the wilderness: don’t hike on the bare tops of high mountains late on summer afternoons. Oh, and don’t feed the bears, if you ever see one, not because they’ll attack you, but because then you won’t have any food to eat. Contrary to popular tourist assumptions, starvation after you get lost and the bears steal your food is much more likely to kill you than the bear itself.

Stained Glass

The large bay windows in the small living room of my childhood home were the pride of my parents. They had replaced the fogged, multi-paned old windows a few years after we moved in, installing large sheets of sparkling glass that framed perfectly the purple and dusky tones of the Rocky Mountains at sunset. They kept the rosy stained glass above the windows, saying it gave the old house its character. Every brilliant evening, I would trace the patterns the mottled pink glass shone onto the dark wood flooring instead of admiring Long’s Peak, a fourteen thousand-foot peak whose name I had not yet learned, as its dark point pierced the sun and cast a shadow over the plain.

I thought that the Holy Spirit lived in stained glass windows. Why else would so many churches need to have them? I decided the window makers must know how to capture him in the colors, sealing him down with lead and pinning him up against the wall. He was always there in the church then, but you could only see him when the sun came out and he shone himself into the pews. Whenever I pictured the dove descending on Jesus after he was baptized, I thought of the pink shapes travelling across my living room floor as the light sank behind the mountains.

At age seven I desired more than anything else to “let Jesus into my heart,” as my Sunday school teacher had asked us all so many times to do. If I let him in, he would get me into heaven where it was always light and the streets were yellow though there were no buildings, just green fields and talking lions and lambs. If I asked him, he would come live inside the beating thing inside my chest that I could feel in my wrist and neck, and then when I died, I would be able to fly with wings like the angel on top of the Christmas tree.

I knew God would be waiting for me in the windows. My parents had collapsed into their Sunday afternoon nap when I stood in the widest puddle of pink light and stared directly into the disk of the sun as it hung suspended, rippled and distorted in the glass.

But the light stayed on my skin. I could see it on the palms of my hands, and I could see my shadow behind me where I blocked out the glory, where it couldn’t penetrate. Perhaps I was too solid, too “bone-headed,” as my grandmother said, for God to get through. Maybe he had hardened me, like He had hardened Pharaoh, the man with the tall gold hat on the felt board who wanted the Israelites to keep making bricks.

I had enough sense to know that I could not actually cut open my chest to let him in. But I had to show him I was serious, that I wasn’t stubborn beyond his help, that I wasn’t hardened. He needed to know I wanted him.

I curled both my hands over my chest and then flung my arms away from myself, flinging away my stubbornness, my solidness, which had to be the thing the people at church called sin. If I couldn’t actually open my chest, I could show God that I wanted to by pretending, because pretending could be as serious as reality. Church had also taught me that God saw my thoughts. So I flung my arms wide and pictured in my head the folding back of skin, the cracking of ribs, and the splitting of the red mass depicted on science posters in my mother’s classroom. Each time I opened myself to him, I waited for the dove of pink and white light to fly down from the window and settle on my bleeding heart.

“Julie, what are you doing?” Mom had seen my third attempt at heaven from the top of the stairs.

“Nothing.” I ran into the kitchen tried to act like a normal child, like one that had not been impenetrable to God.

On Potheads and Perfection

I wore my bikini, only the second one I had ever owned, proudly. At least internally. I wrapped my towel around myself whenever I climbed back onto the sailboat after snorkeling, claiming I was cold when I was wet and keeping myself from getting sunburned when I was dry. Baby fat still clung to my new hips, and my skin was pale, splotched with irregular red patches I had missed with the 50 SPF.

My second bikini, my family’s second tropical vacation. We had travelled away from Western America for the first time only the summer before, flying all the way to Maui, Hawaii to enjoy some rest and relaxation. My dad had only consented to such a typical and unadventurous trip because my mother had chewed him out during our last vacation to Yellowstone National Park as they paddled a canoe back to camp during a hailstorm. “Next year, I want a tropical vacation!” she had screamed over the thunder. And so we went.

Relaxation the way normal people did it seemed, unexpectedly, to stick, though Hawaii was still too mild for my father. A place with a McDonald’s just wouldn’t do. Dad found what he called a happy medium for our next trip: warm and beautiful with palm trees included, but still (mostly) untouched by those disgusting “other tourists.” Though the sand was white and the water blue, some chance of exotic danger still remained, a rare combination of attractions that existed, he said, in a magical place called Belize.

Soon after we arrived, this magic took on a form, in my mind at least. His name was Mateas. His dark, bronzed skin shone smooth with sweat from the tropical sun, and his eyes were as green as the water over a shallow bed of sea grass. His arms were covered with the scars of life on the ocean: rope burns, eel bites, anemone stings. The salt dried as crystals in his short curls.

He was our snorkel tour guide. But not just any tour guide. The most wonderful, most beautiful tour guide ever.

He taught my brother and me how to swim against the current coming through breaks in the coral when we were snorkeling on the reef. He pointed out the eel’s hole, the nurse shark beneath the rock, the coral we shouldn’t touch. He showed us how to catch a lobster with our bare hands, though we never actually tried. Instead, we became his fellow hunters, finding the crustaceans and pointing with mute fingers as he dove down to hook a hand underneath the biggest part of their shells and drag them to the surface, where they ended up in our lunch.

Mateas lived on the same beautiful island where we were staying in our resort: Ambergris Caye. If Belize was magical, then Ambergris Caye was paradise. The only town, San Pedro, flashed lively and bright along its two main streets, where the owners of clothing stores and the only internet café yelled greetings to people in the street from their doorways. Fluorescent, flower-printed fabric hung outside every shop, lifting and sighing in the cool breeze. Everyone drove golf carts, the only vehicles cheap and small enough for the narrow cobblestone roadways, and no one honked. Family-owned restaurants lined the beach, where live bands played reggae as bartenders made smoothies of fresh papaya and mango. Paint of every bright color, students in school uniforms walking home on the beach, the smell of grilled fish mingling with the salty sea breezes. Beautiful and perfect. Like Mateas.

In my fifteen-year-old imaginings, I willed myself to believe that Mateas thought I was beautiful, too. After all, he had paid more attention to my younger brother and me than to any of the other people on the tour. Given, all the others were either honeymooners or gray-haired retirees, the women of both groups barely sticking a toe in the water before they decided they would just stay on the boat and drink margaritas. But still, Mateas let us swim with him. That had to mean something.

I told myself he had fallen in love with my adventurous spirit, my wavy blond hair, my gradually tanning skin. I imagined obstacles to our love that would only make our story even more romantic. He might have to choose between me and life on the sailboat, having been threatened with losing his job if he dared to love a tourist client. There would also be a question of ages: he had to be at least twenty, ancient in comparison to me. And so he would keep his love quiet, agonizing in silence as he showed me how to catch lobster, including me in his world the best he could.

While in reality he could only follow the tour and show me the popular tourist snorkeling spots on the reef that bordered the island, in my dreams he could make me a part of his fascinating home. We could go to the only church together on Sundays, the church with the windows that opened on the sea, substituting for air conditioning. We could build ourselves a house of cinder blocks on stilts to weather hurricanes and termites, painting it green to compete with our neighbor’s bright, fluorescent pink. He could take me on dates to the places with the best grilled lobster and coconut rice and beans. We could drink cerveza and salsa dance all night with his sun-browned, dreadlocked, ivory-smiled friends.

I already felt at home when the madres on their golf carts waiting for their children waved to my family in our cart as we passed the school. The man with the fruit stand gave my brother and me free limes and laughed as we sucked the halves and showed him puckered faces. I could live in the flowing, brightly-colored cotton clothes sold by the vendors on the main street, I could eat fresh fish and shrimp and lobster with beans and rice forever. I could swim in the water everyday, calm and blue, protected from the waves of the Gulf of Mexico by the bordering reef. I would let the cool breezes blowing through the palm leaves dry my salty hair as I listened to the steel drums being played on the beachfront.

In the end, my week with Mateas could be captured in one interaction: him pointing to a creature under a piece of coral and me trying to yell “cool!” through my snorkel, which ended up sounding like a drowning man’s gurgle.

My family decided to return the next summer. I looked forward to seeing Mateas again, seeing the island again. It felt like returning home, and I bragged all about my knowledge of San Pedro and the people I knew to the elderly couple sitting next to me on the flight from Houston.

We got our names on the list for three different sailboat snorkeling tours over the week, remembering that this particular activity had been, unanimously, our favorite. On our last tour, Captain Alito had told us the story of how he had built his entire sailboat tour company from one beaten up boat, bought for cheap after a hurricane. He also told us all about his daughter, his wife, his wife’s restaurant (which he high recommended we eat at), and the island he loved. We felt as if we knew him, as if we had become a part of his family, as if he had liked us more than any other tourists he had ever met. I thought it likely that Alito, and therefore Mateas, would be exactly the same as when we left them, happily living and working in their island paradise.

As my family boarded the boat, we smiled at Alito, thinking he would recognize us. Instead, as we set sail, he gave us the same conversation starters about his daughter, his wife, his wife’s restaurant (which he suggested we eat at before the end of our vacation), and so on and so forth. We quickly realized that he didn’t remember us at all, that we were just tourists, then and now.

And Mateas was nowhere in sight. I asked Alito if Mateas still worked for him.

“Mateas? Mateas who?” he said with a squint.

I told him I only knew Mateas’ first name, not mentioning that we had never actually had a real conversation. Or that I knew all of the stories behind his scars, stories I had made up, of course. Alito squinted some more and frowned.

“Oh yeah, Mateas. We had to fire him.”

I asked why, and Alito was reticent to explain, but I used my innocent face and eventually got him to tell me that Mateas had a problem with marijuana. Drug use on the island was not looked upon kindly, since the residents wanted to keep their home clean from the corrupting influences of other Central American countries. In particular, someone in the tourism industry couldn’t afford to show the visiting, paying customers a side of the region that might shock them out of their perceptions of perfection. And so Alito fired him.

Mateas a pothead? Not my beautiful Mateas.

More cracks began to appear in my images of paradise. A recent tropical storm had flooded the barely-more-than-a-sandbar island, strewing trash from the local dump along the length of the beach and the sides of the roads. We took a trip over the bridge to the north end of the island, where we saw the shacks of the people who worked in the resorts. We also realized that the grocery store we had once labeled “quaint” was only visited by tourists. The local grocery stores had no dairy products and their Coke in the glass bottles cost a fraction of what we were been paying. The same was true of our favorite restaurant; I realized we had only ever eaten next to other tourists. Maybe locals didn’t eat fish all the time, after all.

New signs went up across the road from our resort, advertising a soon-to-be-built gated community of vacation mansions. Where before there had stood a thick patch of tropical jungle, a concrete wall had been erected, surrounding a bare sandy patch ready for sale at over two million dollars a lot. The beach to the south of us had acquired the same partitions. Kids no longer played with coconuts and stray dogs in the open sand lots on their way home from school.

The island was changing. At first I was angry. Those “other tourists” had come along, discovered our wonderful hideaway, decided to make it their own and destroy the beautiful culture by tossing around their cash. But then I thought about how many people my family had told about Belize, how much we had been paying for our food and drinks, how we had shopped in the stores selling souvenirs, how we stayed in a British-owned resort. We might have had more respect for culture, more desire for true wildness than other tourists. But we were still tourists, just the first wave of many more, less considerate vacationers to come.

And the island had always had its flaws. Mateas had been a pothead when I met him. I just hadn’t had the eyes to see it.

My family now owns a time-share in a resort on Ambergris Caye. We visited for the third time this last summer. Now in college, ready to graduate, I brought my fiancé along to show him the island. I dreaded what further changes might have occurred in the wide gap of time between visits. I dreaded telling him about the beauty, the culture, that had been, but that he would never see. I dreaded being conscious of my place as just another tourist.

To my surprise, I found that the people were friendly. And the food, the food was delicious. And the main streets were excitingly narrow and busy and colorful. The man at the fruit stand gave me a free lime and we laughed as I puckered while sucking the juice.

One night we took a walk on the beach and watched the moon rise over the ocean, its yellow face fragmenting into golden sparks on the water. “It’s absolutely beautiful here,” my fiancé said in awe.

And so it was. Even though I was a tourist. Even though I would never live there. Even though it would have problems to face in the incoming onslaught of tourism. Still beautiful in imperfection. Like Mateas.

Friendship: An Impossible Anatomy

“I left all my underwear in Wheaton,” she admitted sheepishly.

I didn’t know if it was appropriate to laugh, but I did anyway. I hoped she wouldn’t interpret it as the triumphant laugh of a victor when their enemy falls prey to the whims of fate. I knew there was such a hint of gloating involved, but I thought that my laughing would offend her no matter the reason, so why worry about my motives? Such an imperious person could never laugh at herself.

But Sarah did laugh. At least, she laughed a little. “Yeah, I left it all in the top drawer of the bureau when we left the States. So…do you know anywhere where I could buy some?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I’ve never been to London either. I don’t suppose they have Targets here.”

“Um…well…in that case, do you have any I could borrow?”

I couldn’t help but laugh again, this time from embarrassment. “I don’t think you would want to wear mine. I have, we’ll just say, colorful taste.”

All in a moment, we couldn’t stop laughing. Tears leaked from the corners of our eyes and we held our sides as we giggled uncontrollably. Us, subconsciously sworn enemies, giggling like best friends at a slumber party, talking about underwear. I think the laughter came just as much from our surprise about the other as it did from the situation. The fact that we hated each other seemed suddenly hilarious.

“Well,” she said in gasps, recovering her breath, “I suppose I could always go commando.”

“Oh no way,” I said seriously, “Walking around London? You would suffer some serious chaffing.” And we were friends.

Though the beginning of our friendship is very distinct in my mind, the beginning of our rivalry is not. Freshman English majors at the same college, we came to hate each other as much out of instinct as anything else; competition between writers, especially young insecure ones, is so thick as to be tangible in settings where they are forced to compare themselves to others through grades. Sarah, a poet with lots of opinions, struck me as exactly the type of writer I both never wanted and had always wanted to be: self-assured, confident, talkative, serious. She reminded me of a spoiled princess in a book I had read once: fierce and terrifyingly beautiful, who men would go to war and die for, but never love. She terrified me.

My only distinct memory of those days is an instance in which we were put together for an in-class discussion group. I don’t remember the class. I do remember that our eyes met when the professor called our names, and I could tell she knew as well as I how the discussion was going to progress. The rest of the group ended up sitting helplessly by as we argued about something, I don’t remember what. We were probably on the same side, but honor and first impressions mandated that we disagree.

So when we first discovered that we were to spend two months in England together on a summer study abroad trip, I can speak for myself in saying that avoidance was the tactic of choice. I managed to get by with only the barest of contact until we arrived in London, when my roommate happened to be friends with Sarah’s roommate, and I came to her hotel room, and ended up discussing my choice in underwear.

After that first breaking of the ice, we talked about past relationships in Regent’s Park, shopped for souvenirs and discussed life over cream tea in Oxford, talked more about boys in our dorm rooms at St. Anne’s College, and hiked the downs of Ambleside in the Lake District. We were chased by sheep, rowed a boat across Lake Windemere, got caught in the rain, got lost, got sick, got homesick. Or, rather, I got homesick. I borrowed her blue sweatshirt so many times that it became a part of my wardrobe. In the Port meadows at Oxford, we watched the most brilliant sunset I had ever seen and a photographer took a picture of us, standing silhouetted by the colors, side by side, as if we had been friends forever.

I wanted to believe that we would be friends forever, or at least for a while after the trip, but didn’t dare to hope for fear of pushing too hard and scaring away her independent personality. All the same, another school year arrived, and we talked and laughed and shared adventures just as much as we had in England. The continued growth of our friendship has been almost as surprising as it’s beginning.

I’ve often tried to figure out why this friendship has been so much closer and more stable than any other female friendship in my life so far. The odds have been stacked against it: beginning as enemies, being forced together on a trip, and expecting the relationship to wear away once the situation of the trip no longer holds us together. No observations of our turbulent situation could have predicted the firmness our friendship now demonstrates.

I had every reason to doubt my own contributions to the friendship, as well. Having only one younger brother and an often-distant relationship with my mother, I’ve always felt inadequate as a female friend. I don’t know how to respond when another woman tells me good news, or how to comfort her when she cries about the bad. With the interference of my overactive conscience, I often don’t know how much gossip is wrong and how much is just normal girl conversation. Sometimes I forget that other women don’t usually use the word “dude” when they’re excited or enjoy stories about outdoor adventures. I don’t know how to fight like a girl, with all the crying and negotiating and hurt feelings and telling other friends who tell other friends. In short, I know myself to be pretty inept at being a girlfriend.

With Sarah, none of these things have ever seemed to matter. Not that our relationship is like the relationship I have with my male friends or my brother; I don’t usually talk about outdoor exploits with her or make stupid jokes that everyone laughs at because they are stupid and for no other reason, though we do say “dude” occasionally. But I am myself with her, something I’ve only experienced previously with other friendships in a handful of brief and scattered moments.

Coming to this conclusion, I suppose I answer my own question as to what has made the friendship last and grow deeper. The relationship has been sustained by this trueness to self, our feeling that we are ourselves when we are with each other. The question, then, becomes this: what is it about this friendship makes me feel as if I can be myself at all times without shame? What makes the difference between this and so many other temporary and tenuous friendships in which I have only played a role, been a piece of myself instead of the whole?

To be honest, I don’t really know. I wish I did, because if it were quantifiable, I might be able to capture it into a system or set of rules and apply it to all my friendships current and future. I would be the Solomon of friendships, collecting and collecting until I was known for my friendships and built up for myself storehouses full of stable relationships.

In this thought, however, I think I have my answer to this second question, as well. It is precisely the unquantifiable and rare nature of a deep friendship that makes it so precious. In other friendships, I can point to the things that hold me to someone: hobbies, interests, beliefs, backgrounds, simple proximity. Sarah and I can point to some of these things as well. We share our writing, we hold to the same faith, we want similar things from our lives. But we both know that there’s something more foundational to our friendship than activities or simply stated self-assessments.

After all, who can quantify themselves?

Our friendship is beautiful precisely because we do not feel as if we must know ourselves or the other person completely, put into a tiny box of understanding, in order to feel connected. I am myself, and she is herself, and we are friends because our two individual persons enjoy the company and conversation of the other. The key to our relationship, I think, is in not trying to define either the other person or the exact nature of our relationship. If we tried to figure out why everything works or exactly why we enjoy the other person, we would end up focusing on those small details in neglect of the only real thing that holds us together: who we are as people.

One must admit, however, that any good friendship needs to have some level of understanding beyond just the personhood of the other. Otherwise, we could be close friends with every other human being on the planet, even if at a distance. Yes, it is true that only when we see each other as whole, unquantifiable people, can we have true friendships. However, we can only really see and appreciate another as a whole person when we are blessed enough to find one of those few people in world who we feel can really understand us and we them. Herein lies the paradox: the best friendship is one in which there exists an appropriate balance between knowing and mystery, between understanding and admitting that one can never fully understand the other person. If these two things can be kept in balance, then the friendship grows.

I’m always looking forward to learning more about Sarah, the person. I know now that she is a princess men could love, and do love. She is still occasionally imperious to me, but I respect her strength and look to her as an anchor when I feel like someone should put me away in a padded room. She is strong where I am not, I am strong where she is not. She is always a mystery to me, but I can usually read the thoughts behind her eyes. I can always understand her, and I know I will never understand her completely.

This balance doesn’t necessarily determine that the friendship will last forever. It does guarantee that the friendship will leave a lasting mark in the form of significant growing experiences shared, connections between two souls established. Even if my friendship with Sarah grows apart in the future, I know that I will always consider her to be my friend and remember her as a person with who I truly shared my life.

We ate scones in my apartment the other night and she told me she had thought of me.

“I was at Target,” she said, “and I saw some underwear I knew you would like.”

And so we are friends.

Let's (Not) Go to Coffee

“Let’s get coffee sometime,” a new acquaintance says.

I smile and nod politely in agreement, as is required by the customs of such coffee invitations. But internally, I am in strife, on the edge even of rage. Why coffee? Why has the buying and consuming of an expensive, over-caffeinated, often over-sugared drink become irreversibly wedded to the one-on-one conversation?

Some might say that this question comes from my blackened heart as a coffee-hater. I ask for the pardon of coffee addicts everywhere, but I simply cannot understand the appeal to such a beverage. It is naturally bitter. It makes one thirstier after than before one has begun to drink it. It has an aftertaste that could be labeled “essence of old shoe” and contributes to bad breath and brown teeth. Perhaps if it was clear or a delightful color of the natural rainbow I might be able to acquire a tongue for the taste, but, realistically, it displays the same unappetizing color as used motor oil.

The very idea that some have labeled themselves coffee “addicts” also keeps me from throwing myself wholeheartedly into the current drinking trend. If those who love coffee the most have been given the name “addicts,” one can infer that they no longer drink it because they enjoy it, but because they have been entangled in the brew’s dark clutches. How, then, am I to trust such an addict when they tell me that coffee “tastes good”? I put no more faith in their assertions than I would in the statements of a meth addict who says he only continues drug use because the meth makes him, and anyone else who tries it, “feel good.”

Because of these natural, and in my opinion, reasonable objections to coffee, I feel justified enough in saying that I will not drink such a beverage and will not accept the claims of “addicts” that it is an impossible task to live without it. It is illogical enough to enjoy coffee, but will not bother coffee drinkers if they will not bother me. After all, if I ask them not to impose their addictions on me, I will not impose my scruples on them.

Alas, if only coffee had remained an individual rather than societal problem. The rise of coffee as the number one social drink has officially excised me from social networks and centers of intellectual communication. Now, if I want to get to know someone, it seems that I must capitulate to the system and “ask them to coffee.” If I were to ask simply if they would like to “sit down and talk for a while so we can get to know each other,” I would instantly be rejected, not to mention labeled as a strange human being and relegated to the outskirts of normal society.

Coffee as a social drink is an even more enigmatic phenomenon than coffee as a popular beverage of choice. It requires the shelling out of at least four dollars that buy nothing more nourishing than sugar, fat, and empty calories, not to mention the jitters. Wouldn’t one rather pay for a delicious and satisfying meal with the money spent on just two or three cups of coffee?

Besides, isn’t the point of the “coffee date” to encourage conversation? Conversation is free if one doesn’t feel the need to buy coffee in order to facilitate, instead simply sitting with the other person somewhere (not a coffeehouse) and chatting. And who desires for their breath to stink and their teeth to be yellow while they get to know someone new or to grow a previously established relationship? I know that I certainly want to smell and look my best. I also know that caffeine exacerbates my already-weak concentration skills. How can a good conversation occur when listening skills are dropped to record lows by the anxiety-causing effects of caffeine?

This is my plea, though my voice be drowned out by the roar of all those pounds of coffee being ground by baristas everywhere. Until conversation without a beverage comes back into social popularity, I suppose I will have to capitulate, shell out my four dollars, and chug down my bitter sugar-saturated oil-colored social medicine in order to have any friends.