Reunion with an English Winter

Since the middle of January when I left for the five-day Nebaj—Todos Santos hike, I haven’t spent more than two nights in a row at the same place. When I returned to Quetzaltrekkers, I packed up my things and took a six hour bus to Guatemala City, where I flew to Atlanta to see my oldest brother (who used to guide with QT as well), then shot down to Mobile, Alabama to see the rest of my family, up to Birmingham to visit friends, and back to Atlanta to fly to England where I did another three-prong trip of friendly reunions. The tumultuous streets of Guatemala gave way to the slow country roads of Alabama, then the quaint, winding lanes of southern England. It all felt like a show playing on television as I looked through the windows of buses, planes, cars, and trains. And the perennially sunny Guatemalan dry season teeming with wild flowers turned to the gray and brown of  the U.S. and U.K.’s decidedly deciduous forests.  Even when the sun shone brightly, the temperature hovered near freezing. I yearned for the simplicity of Guatemala’s weather—sun up, hot; sun down, cold. Full-time Trail-guiding had brought its own less predictable highs and lows, though. And despite the frost and the short days, I was exuberant to be in England again on the way to see three of my closest friends.

Tim

I landed at London-Gatwick airport for the first time in nearly six years and hopped on a train to my friend Tim’s house near Pulborough. His village is known for its thatch-roofed farmhouses and narrow country lanes where you’re as likely to pass a rider on horseback as a car or a bike. The whole place could have been a film set for The Wind in the Willows. He picked me up from the train station. I was easy to spot, sporting a technicolor sweater that looked like something edible a contestant on Great British Bake Off would make for a fashion show.

I first met Tim in New Orleans eight years ago. We both were staying at one of my favorite hostels in the world, India House. When I worked my first dull office job after college at the port in Mobile, I would book weekends there every couple of months to scratch the itch to travel. It was always buzzing with bevies of fascinating internationals and the atmosphere of a neverending, laidback house party. Many friends I keep in touch with to this day and have met up with in other countries I initially became acquainted with in this way. He was nineteen at the time and road-tripping with a late-thirties Midwesterner in a Winnebago. The Midwesterner seemed a little unhinged—he would make whooping sounds like Yosemite Sam at random, his eyes darting wildly as he rambled through long-winded yarns that he reacted to like he was hearing for the first time. From one of these apostrophes, I learned that before he decided to burn bridges with family and friends and take his Winnebago on an aimless road trip, his brother-in-law had accidentally hit him in the head with a 20-pound weight. I used inductive reasoning to connect this story to the significant dent in his head and deduced he probably had an untreated brain injury. I suggested to Tim he part ways with him sooner than later, which he later told me turned out to be good advice.

Tim and I didn’t see each other for a couple of years, but we caught up in 2018 in the U.K. as I was passing through and he ended up accompanying me on a harebrained trip in the south of France that began on a friend of a friend’s cousin’s grandpa’s yacht, took us through the Pyrenees (in a stick-shift Fiat 500 I taught myself to drive in a grocery store parking lot), and ended in Barcelona, where I split off and flew to Greece to teach English at a refugee center for the Red Cross. A year later, a few months after I finished cancer treatment, we met up again and backpacked through Southeast Asia. Post-covid, he was living in Canada and came down to the South to travel through Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas with me. I say all this to say we have a history and it was nice to see him and his parents again.

We walked to a little pub down the road with a creaky wooden door that was probably a hundred years old and motel-style carpeting, catching up on each other’s lives over a cider. He was working on a degree in set design at the local university with plans of eventually moving to Canada; I was doing whatever it is that I’m doing. Faffing mostly. We continued on a self-guided pub crawl that took us through muddy farm fields—a lot of llama pastures, weirdly. Apparently there’s a zoning loophole that allows people to build houses in non-residential areas if they have a llama farm. The mud sucked at our boots as we trudged home, the path darkening with the setting sun. It was not even 4 pm.

The next day we rose late but decided to hike the South Downs to catch the sunset. The sky was mostly clear, a rarity in English winter. We could see all the way to Brighton, its brick buildings glowing warmly on the horizon. The wind battered us on the sea side of the ridge, carrying the smell of salt. Tim tried to fly a little drone, but the gale sapped its battery in minutes; it crashed into a hill trying to land itself. As soon as the sun dropped into the clouds, we hied back to the car, the farmhouse, and a traditional Sunday roast dinner: yorkshire puddings with gravy, roasted potatoes with thyme, steamed broccoli with butter, beef sirloin cooked medium-rare with horseradish and mustard, and a boysenberry tart topped with vanilla ice cream for dessert—all courtesy of Tim’s lovely mother. After dinner, Tim and I discussed possibly meeting up in New Zealand. He has Kiwi citizenship and family there, so it wouldn’t be too difficult. It sounded more likely he would go to Halifax to pursue a woodworking apprenticeship, but my past experience with him tells me there’s no predicting where we will see each other again. Only that we will.

Josh

The next morning, I caught a train to Bristol by the skin of my teeth. I was off to see my friend Josh—one of the few people I have a longer history with than Tim. Josh and I first met during my second summer tutoring English at a university in Okinawa. My first summer, there had been no native English speakers my age, so when I returned and people told me I had to meet him, I thought it would be like when people try to set up their gay friend with their only other gay friend. But from the moment we met, we got on like a house on fire. I ended up spending almost every day of the three weeks I was in Okinawa hanging out with him and sleeping on his dorm room floor. After I left for mainland Japan to backpack through Buddhist temples, we didn’t see or talk to each other much for years. But during the same period I was frequenting India House, he and I reconnected over weekly video calls—he venting about his masters course and I about my white collar job, usually over a glass of wine. We also pored endlessly over geopolitics, sociology, psychology, etymology, literature, and anything else that interested us. To wit, we never exhausted discussion, only our time and our cups.

I visited him for a week in the summer of 2016 and we traveled through Bristol, London, and Brighton. He was the one who exhorted me to go to Australia on a working holiday visa, having recently returned from one himself. I took the advice and have never regretted it. After I returned to the U.S. from Australia, he met up with me for a road trip from Georgia to New York and back that was cut short when I totaled my car. We ended up taking a bus to New Orleans and then flying back to Australia for several months, living in a warehouse community sustained by dumpster diving called Crunchytown. (I have reams to write about this place.) We split up from there and I taught English in Southeast Asia to save up money for a summer road trip through Europe with him and other members of Crunchytown. The last time I saw him was shortly after that trip at his Nan’s 75th birthday party in 2018. So it had been five years since our last in-person encounter.

Josh and I had kept in touch constantly since 2018 up to the present moment when I spied him through the glass of the bus that dropped me off near his apartment in the Clifton neighborhood of Bristol, but there is always something quite jarring about seeing a friend in person after years apart, even if in regular contact. Slack-jawed, I bumped into the girl in front of me queuing to exit the bus. He laughed silently through the window. Any suspicions we had matured since our last encounter were immediately dispelled; we were the same goofballs. We ambled up the high street to his flat in the Crescent overlooking the city. It was a posh neighborhood in Bristol, but some of the apartments still bore scars from the Blitz. He regaled me of his new civil service job that he’d spent over a year jumping through hoops to get. He’d flailed through the pandemic just like I had, working odd jobs and trying to retain his sanity. But in the early months, he had made the stellar decision to quit drinking, having had problems with it in the past. Now four years sober, he was moving up in the world. It was good to see. He showed me around the apartment that he shared with its owner, Mark, a fascinating man who had spent most of his life living in Trinidad and Tobago and had become a reluctant repatriate to the U.K. when covid locked the border during a family visit.

   The apartment was small by American standards but luxurious by British, with a balcony, large living room, and three bedrooms. On the walls and mantles resided sketches of exotic locales and historical artifacts; the shelves were teeming with arcane texts. Mark was an erudite, and it showed. I doubt there was a book in the flat he couldn’t name the author of and recite a quote from. He and I talked about the disputed border between Guatemala and Belize and the new tensions between Venezuela and Guyana, given the latter’s newly discovered oil reserves. Josh and I then went for dinner to an authentic Chinese restaurant. Since my first encounter with real Chinese cuisine, my taste and appreciation have improved, but there are still aspects I have failed to acclimate to. The hot pot Josh and I ordered had the wonderful, slow-building heat of szechuan spices and the deep red hue of chili sauce, though it swam beneath a centimeter of oil. What else swam the depths: shrimp with heads, shells, and legs still attached and slices of ridged pork intestine, stomach, and other mysterious organs. It was a menagerie of discomfiting textures. We mostly finished the meal, but it was a battle.

Back at the apartment, we stayed up late staring out at Bristol’s night-time skyline, reminiscing about the wild adventures we had gotten up to over the course of our friendship—to date spanning a decade, four continents, and a dozen countries. The next day we walked toward the botanical gardens, crossing over the Clifton Suspension Bridge. It was a hulking, ambitious piece of architecture that juxtaposed oddly with the meandering little creek that usually ran below it. The gorge was deep at least, and the water level rose precipitously as evidenced by the high, muddy banks. Affixed to the towers on either side were plaques with the phone number of the Good Samaritans, a suicide prevention organization. Josh told me there was a longstanding epidemic of people jumping from the bridge. They usually would shoot straight through the shallow water into the muck below, suffocating. I thought of the Bog People dredged up from mires in northern Europe, preserved by peat for millenia, relics of lost generations. I used to wonder endlessly at their stories, how they died, and why. I had thought time the main barrier to discovering the answer. As I considered the poor souls below, though, some perhaps less than a year gone, I realized they and their depths were just as unfathomable. Another lost generation.

The botanical gardens were not particularly lively—or even alive, it being winter. A reflecting pond in the main courtyard looked like a portal to the land of the dead. The manor in the center was a wizard’s manse, complete with massive climbing plants scaling its walls; I was sure they would swallow it whole come Spring. We walked through a greenhouse with a panoply of cacti and succulents that seemed frighteningly far from home in their misty gray surroundings. We finished our day with dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant sharing one of my favorite dishes I discovered when I was living in Hanoi: bun cha. It’s grilled pork sausage in a sweet and sour broth with basil and mint and rice noodles on the side to be mixed in. Endemic to Hanoi, served daily from 10-11 am at little pop-ups that would disappear as abruptly as they had appeared, bun cha became the reason I got out of bed. On the other side of the world, it was what put me to sleep. The next morning, Josh and Mark were packing for a two-week trip to Barbados when I said my goodbyes. I took a bus to the Temple Meads train station, bound for Oxford.

Silvia

From three platforms away, through the turnstiles and mosaic of milling people, I spotted Silvia as soon as my train pulled into Gloucester Green. Her thick, curly hair and dancer’s poise were unmistakable; I could pick her out from an airplane. The sun-starved British winter had sapped her Italian complexion since I’d last seen her in Guatemala, but not her fiery temperament. Bundled up in a parka, she beamed at me and gave me a warm hug. It was the first sunshine I felt that day.

A testament either to the profundity of our friendship or to my own obtuseness, even in a place as beautiful as Oxford, the main attraction for me was our conversation. It was not our first time walking through these streets together. We first met in Vienna in 2018 at a Couchsurfing gathering along the Danube. There were probably thirty people there, including a few of my other friends, but as she and I started talking, the group steadily winnowed away to just the two of us. She had come to Vienna after an academic conference to see the oeuvre of an expressionist painter whose name escapes me. We talked about the increasing polarity of politics and the impact it was having on our countries and families, her mathematics masters at Oxford and the thesis she was finishing on the Riemann Zeta Function, the volunteering I was planning to do with the Red Cross in Greece, and a range of other topics for hours until midnight when she had to leave. Meeting up at a park the next afternoon, we carried on in much the same way.

I saw her again passing through Oxford a week later on my way to Josh’s Nan’s 75th birthday. It was summer. Tourists’ feet beat flat the cobblestone streets; their camera flashes bleached white the limestone buildings. It was a short rendezvous: a few drinks at pubs as we wandered, a night-time tour of her college, Lincoln. I learned it was founded in 1427, which to me sounded pretty old. She showed me a statue of a strange little imp, for some reason in a jail cell. When we parted, I thought it was the last time we would see each other.

A few months later, she reached out and we caught up—me on how she was adjusting to Barcelona and her doctorate program, she on how I had just learned I had cancer. So began a colloquy that continued through my treatment by chemo drugs and hers by her advisors. To this day, I don’t know which of us had the worse end of the stick. We started watching movies and talking about them together. She introduced me to Alejandro Jodorowsky and I showed her Jean-Luc Godard. When I finished my tenure in the chemo suite we planned to meet up in Malaysia, but my doctor told me my white blood cell count was too low. So instead we dropped contact for four years, only reconnecting when she told me she was going to Guatemala and was keen to meet up and hike.

   While tourists in summertime Oxford flocked the streets like seagulls on chips, in winter the population was culled. I noticed students for the first time, obvious by their boredom with their surroundings. She showed me All Souls College where only a few students are accepted a year. I tried to picture these geniuses standing outside its gates on their first day of school; all I conjured were the golden ticketholders waiting outside the Wonka factory. Peckish and in the mood for fish and chips, we went to a storied pub I don’t remember the name of. I inadvertently riled a bartender asking for cutlery. Lip curling as if pushed back by an invisible bridle, he said, “Sir, if you would address this matter to one of my colleagues on the floor, I’m sure they could assist you.” I’ve spent enough time in England to know it was the closest a Brit comes to a backhand; I wondered if a handprint was visible on my reddened cheeks as I returned to our table.

Back at her apartment, I met her British roommate who, after a polite exchange of small talk, exclaimed my American accent was too strong and walked out, never to come back. The atmosphere was cozier with just the two of us, though. She pulled out a dusty guitar given to her by a friend and we strummed it a bit. She had adjusted back to life in Oxford from Barcelona but still puzzled over what to do with her life, aspirations running the gamut from eclipsing Ada Lovelace to opening a cafe for cats. I found it comforting that even a person with boundless opportunity who had achieved so much was still mystified by life. The next morning, we ate croissants and fruit and she walked me to the bus. I invited her to New Zealand and she invited me to her 30th birthday. Looking out at the English countryside for the last time on the way to Heathrow, I wondered at the odds either would come to pass. I’d been surprised before.