Best Friends and Road Trips

David and I met in the first class on the first day of high school. It was gym, home room, and when they assigned lockers our names were next to each other alphabetically so we looked at each other and said, You wanna? Within a few weeks, we were inseparable.

It’s impossible to exaggerate how entwined our lives were. We strode into each other’s houses without knocking. David helped me rent my first skis, then buy used rentals at season’s end. He drew two arcs on paper and explained that Jean-Claude Killy made turns using only his edges; I was impressed, even if I didn’t understand why that was cool. Knowing I was passionate about water and swimming, he encouraged me to become a lifeguard. That led to meeting a gal at a pool who connected me to a job opening at USA Today, which led (circuitously) to an introduction at Powder magazine, which led to a move to Southern California, where I met my wife and was blessed with the children and life I have today. When I moved up at USA Today, I hounded David to apply for my old job until he did, which led to his career in journalism, culminating with him running the New York bureau for USA Today, as well as meeting his wife and having a son, Wesley, whom he adored.

I have lost friends to mountains and other hazards, and my dad passed away two decades ago, but David’s death to heart issues in April 2020 was gutting. We texted regularly, and just seven days before he died he sent a picture of himself and Wes. Living on opposite coasts, we talked only a few times a year, but when I could no longer call him I recognized that he was in my thoughts almost every day, and always had been.

Naturally, I was going to his memorial in Connecticut in June 2021 and there was no question I was going to drive from Southern Cal. Our road trips had been as much a part of my earlier life as breathing. We went to Maine in summer and the Outer Banks in fall. In winter, when we had money, we drove to Pennsylvania for Friday night skiing, invariably wearing our Vuarnet cat eyes on the return. Once we had jobs, we went to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware every weekend, usually in my Jeep CJ5 with the top down, carrying tattered yard-sale wetsuits and the sixty-dollar used shortboard we shared. Our last act of the weekend was to try to catch waves, which we did poorly. Often we got out of the Atlantic, pulled our wetsuits down to the waists, and drove halfway back to Virginia that way; people laughed at the kooks, but we were so stoked on the lives we were building, on the sensations we found in the ocean and on snow, that we stayed connected to those passions any way we could. 

It was not all good times. David and I were estranged for nearly a decade. Ours was a gradual rupture, and the details are unimportant, just each of us hunkered behind our resentments. He was gone from my life—a huge loss, as if part of me was missing, but it seemed a closed chapter, nothing to be done about it. Then one day, unannounced, there came a knock on my door, in California. David was on my porch, vulnerability on his face. The second I saw him, I knew he was there to forgive me and for me to forgive him. I stepped forward, gave him the biggest hug I could, and after saying what we needed to say, we spoke no more of it forever.

Our last big adventure together was in Mexico. The first morning, on the Sea of Cortez, I woke before the sun and saw David was already up, in silhouette, facing the purpling sky. I thought about how far we’d come, from our messy, turbocharged youth to the chasm of our estrangement to where we were now. I rubbed my eyes, tossed off my bag, and padded down the sand. Neither one of us said anything. We just stood there, side by side, watching the sun rise, at peace.