The April Fools: A hero's journey

I am one of the lucky survivors of the expression "boys will be boys." One of the most poignant sayings ever coined, this little gem includes, but is not limited to, a wide range of hormonally induced, reckless, self-imposed ordeals masquerading as rites of passage. Most if not all of these ordeals can be dangerous. Indeed, that is the whole point. In mid-April of 1981, my best friend and I concocted one of our most extreme ordeals during an unseasonably hot and humid four-day stretch of weather.

* * * *

On this singular, soon-to-be sweltering early spring Friday, I saw Randy waiting for me in the school lobby at morning break and I headed that way. He was a strange and quiet kid who wore funny little rectangular glasses that made him look like he had the tiniest eyes ever. Before I knew him, his nose had been broken at some point, and it came straight down for half its length before skidding off to the right. He was in our usual spot, at one of the tall, arch-topped windows that taunted us--regardless of the weather--with panoramic views of freedom yet hours away. He was leaning against the sill in his customary fashion: arms crossed like a tough guy, and his feet set shoulder-width apart with the heels facing each other. The toes of his sneakers pointed away from each other at almost 180 degrees, like a cartoon character.

In the complex caste system of high school, he ranked as an upper-echelon misfit. This made him perfectly suited to be my friend because we shared the same ranking. I might even have been a rung lower because as well as being shy, skinny, and extremely pimply, I was in the Gifted and Humanities program, which allegedly made me smart. This earned me the twin titles of Geek (it meant something slightly different back then) and Nerd. I tried disproving these every chance I got, but no demonstration of how remarkably stupid I could be seemed to help.

I joined him at the sill, mimicking his pose. Well, except for the feet. I didn't envy how he could stand having his feet like that, or why he would even want to try. It missed "cool" by a mile.

Being fifteen, teenage boys, and misfits, we were especially watchful for ways in which to prove ourselves. We were desperate to trade up from misfit status because that was an important place not to be if you wanted girls to notice you. We had convinced ourselves that we could be noticed and tried everything we could think of to make that happen. Still, very few people, none of them girls, paid any attention to us at all.

He nodded a greeting at me, his 80's feathery "big hair" bobbing in accompaniment. I nodded right back, as did my own hair. We did not speak. We both knew that brevity was good for getting girls to notice that you were the strong and silent type. We made every effort we could to appear silent. We were still working on looking the "strong" part.

He turned his head toward me slightly--only until the lower half of his nose was actually pointing at me--not wanting to give the impression he was carrying on an actual conversation. He spoke in a low, almost inaudible tone. "Let's do the permission thing and go to Gibralter. We'll go swimming. My Dad says the ice is out."

I thought about this for a minute. Swimming sounded great; it felt like it would top out in the nineties that day. For mid-April in Maine, that's crazy hot. A jaunt out to Sebec Lake sounded perfect. Gibralter's Rock! I'd almost had a nosebleed from sheer joy the first time I laid eyes on its fifteen-foot cliff dropping straight into twenty-five feet of water. There was also the bonus of a picnic table and a fire pit on site. The location was remote enough that we were guaranteed to have it to ourselves, especially in April. The only real problem I had was the hand-lettered sign at the trailhead proclaiming the place to be "Gibralter's Rock." I detested misspellings.

Yes, this was a stupendous idea. Randy was now looking at me sidelong, expectant. Oh, right. He wanted an answer.

"Excellent," I replied, giving him a likewise side-eye. "But why do we need to do the permission thing? It doesn't take that long to get there."

"The bikes aren't running. I tore 'em down for maintenance." He spoke with a fighter pilot's aplomb, given how far it was to the proposed destination.

Just how far it was, neither of us was entirely sure. It was "quite a ways," and we had never tried to get there on foot. He had a dilapidated old pair of street bikes that we used as trail bikes. We went everywhere on those finicky and temperamental old beasts, but they usually broke down at least once during any travels. These constant, minor emergency repairs made it hard to judge distances based on the time it took us to get anywhere.

We tried to guess how far it was. After some whispery debate, we settled on eight miles or so, give or take (When we measured it later, the distance proved to be just over eleven miles). We'd definitely have to do the permission thing because we'd be staying the night. Excellent, an adventure, then! Bragging rights!

"Excellent!" I burst out. A little too loudly, but I was thrilled. This would be fun. It might even be epic. And maybe, just maybe--it would be our ticket! "I can get permission, no prob, but unless you want to walk to my house, you'll have to loan me a pair of shorts, or something."

Walking to my house would have added four miles roundtrip to our epic adventure.

"No prob! We don't have time to go to your house, we'll barely get to Gibralter's before dark as it is." His reply, though enthusiastic in tone, was delivered deadpan. Then he shut up. A giggling gaggle of cheerleaders walked past, in earshot, on their way to the jock section of the lobby. Randy hitched, adjusting his stance for maximum cool, just in case one glanced over. None did, and I wanted to blame him for their snub. You just can't achieve maximum cool with your feet poked out like Wile E. Coyote's, no matter how toughly you cross your arms. To be fair, we'd been saying things like "no prob" and "excellent" quite a lot, and maybe they had somehow overheard us, despite our efforts.

The seeds for growing eventual plans now planted, we leaned against the sill for the rest of the break, silently staring straight ahead, concentrating on cool. The bell rang and we went back to our classes.

I spent the rest of the day fantasizing about the glory we would reap when we returned triumphantly to tell our tale to the few people who would be seen talking to us. I imagined their "oohs" and "ahs" as we recounted our daring, however-many-miles-it-was hike to do an early spring dive from Gibralter's Rock.

As soon as school let out, we sprinted the hot and humid half-mile to Randy's house. We tried to make plans as we went, but we soon found we needed all of our breath just to breathe as we ran. As soon as we got there I called my parents to breathlessly ask if I could stay for the night. At the same time, Randy was asking his mom if he could stay at my house. This was the "permission thing," and we had already used the ploy several times to get up to mostly harmless teenaged mischief. Our parents never checked with each other.

Up in Randy's room to gather supplies, pressed for time, we thought to keep things simple and easy to carry. Swimming trunks and a Frisbee should be adequate. Those items were collected, and we turned to leave.

Randy paused to roll up his sleeping bag and stuff it into its carrying tote. What the hell was this? I was appalled. Didn't we just talk about this? Who takes a sleeping bag on an adventure? Well! Certainly not me! It felt like an overindulgent extravagance to me, but then, I didn't have one. Nor any way to get one.

I could not stay silent on this. "Dude, what are you doing? You're gonna lug that all the way out there?"

"Yup."

"I thought we were in this together. No fair you should get a sleeping bag! Cheater. Why are you wimping out all of a sudden?"

"Dunno. Just got this feeling." He shrugged.

"Wait--what feeling? Like you're gonna need it? It's a friggin' million degrees out there! Do you have another one?"

"Yeah." He grinned. "I also feel like you're being a dickweed."

"Don't be an asshole. I meant sleeping bag." I made as if to punch him and he warded me off with the bulky package.

"Nope." He shrugged again and looked away. I thought he might be feeling the tiniest bit embarrassed, but no. He was consulting the alarm clock on his nightstand.

"Time's wasting. We gotta go."

Fine, then. Whatever, I thought. I still carried the light sweatshirt I had brought with me that morning but hadn't needed. It was just what you did in April. The upside to this was that my tale would have an extra element of derring-do to it. Mine would be rife with more danger, more gumption, so I'd reap more glory in the end. That wasn't such a bad thing, was it? Besides, we would have a fire. Even heroes built fires. Especially when camping in areas like Gibralter, where there wasn't a light source for miles at that time of year.

Alas, what neither of us would have was food. Not only was food heavy, and a pain to carry, but Randy's mother was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes and reading her magazines. We couldn't nab anything to eat without awkward and revealing explanations. Okay! That was okay, too, fine, no biggie--no prob. Real men didn't need food, anyway. I had never heard of a single Greek or Roman demi-god stuffing their face while lounging about the campfire in a comfy sleeping bag.

My stomach growled angrily at being told it would get no food that night. It didn't care at all how heroic my fifteen-year-old brain thought all this sounded. I had skipped breakfast that day, as I usually did. I had also spent noon break as I always did: in the library gobbling down Greek and Roman mythology instead of in the cafeteria eating lunch. I was in love with the superhuman deeds of the ancient heroes, and I read of them every chance I could get. I wanted to be Perseus so badly I could feel a new pimple break out every time I thought about it. My stomach again rumbled out a passable imitation of a crocodile's mating call, but I ignored it as stoically as I thought Perseus would. I would be tougher than the toughest go we could make of this.

The lack of a sleeping bag and now food meant that Perseus would have to ride shotgun in my head for this adventure. He settled himself in and gave me a thumbs up. Ready to go!

Minutes later we set off with shorts, Frisbee, and Randy's widdle sweeping bag in hand.

* * * *

The first two hours of the journey were stiflingly hot but uneventful. We paced ourselves because of the ridiculous heat. It was just too damn hot to do anything quickly. The heavy air was almost unnaturally still. Sounds wouldn't carry; every noise seemed muffled under a heavy blanket.

Off to the west, the sky had taken on a yellowish tinge. Randy stopped walking for a moment. He had finally seen that thin yellow tint. He looked at it, then at me. I looked at him, then at the sky, then back at him. Then we both stood looking at the sky for several minutes.

"Are those clouds coming in?" Drat. I hadn't wanted to be the first one to speak.

"Hell if I know. It's too hazy to tell . . .but . . . naahh, I think it's just haze. There isn't any wind." He spoke slowly, as if discarding unpleasant facts as quickly as he thought of them. After he finished talking he watched me carefully, waiting.

This situation called for some creative thinking. My equation ran something like this: It was even hotter now than it had been earlier. Therefore, more heat equals more heat haze. More haze equals can't possibly be clouds, because clouds could ruin everything. The day only seemed dimmer because the sun was westering. I ignored that the yellow dimness was rolling in from the west, where the sky should be brightest. Who needs inconvenient truths? After all, the sun was yellow, wasn't it? Most of the facts added up! Everything was fine.

"Let's keep going," I said. Randy hesitated before nodding. After all, he only had a sleeping bag, not a Perseus. On we went. We paid no more attention to the possible buildup of the maybe clouds that couldn't trouble us as long as we ignored them. In unspoken accord, we went a little faster anyway.

Another hour later, we were tired, sweaty, and oh, so thirsty. We had not brought any water with us, as there was plenty where we were going. This painful new level only added one more layer of heroism to our quest. As we plodded on, we hoarsely boasted to each other of our total non-thirstiness. Our tongues swelled with manliness.

In the meantime, the air and sky had gone from hazy white to a deep and sickly yellow, with grayish tinges. It looked like the sky of an unfriendly alien planet. The color reminded me of the thick smoke you can get by burning ping-pong balls with smoldering cattail punks--yeah, don't ask how I know that.

"Do you hear any thunder?" I asked. I myself hadn't, but Randy's hearing was better than mine. He hadn't heard any either, and the hush was absolute. I was now feeling a touch antsy about that sky in spite of my previous calculations and I was searching for just the right amount of denial to maintain a jaunty hero's heart.

"Nope,'" drawled Randy, succinct as ever.

"How much more time walking, do you think?"

"Dunno. Maybe an hour? Can you carry this thing for a while?" He hefted the sleeping bag slightly in my direction.

"Oh, sure thing. No prob." I reached over and plucked the Frisbee out from under his other arm, where he had tucked it. "Glad to help."

"Dickweed."

"Wuss."

He turned serious, then. "No really. What do you think of that sky? Maybe should we book it back to the house? We can sleep in the barn."

I had been pondering the same question. Even Perseus was pensively chewing a fingernail at this point, wondering if "heroic" was the right word to describe what we were doing. No, we couldn't go back. The thought of retreat after all those miles was too galling.

Randy answered his own question. "Nah. Guess we can't go back. If we get caught, there goes the permission thing."

"Yeah. I guess so." I felt a cooling puff of air on my cheeks and the little touch from Heaven lifted my hair a little. Wait--a . . . breeze? Yep, sure enough, a light breeze was kicking up. "Uh, we better get going."

Forty-five minutes later, the overgrown dirt road we were on came to an end, narrowing to a root-choked footpath. Passing the crude, orange-lettered sign advertising that this was the trail to Gibralter's Rock, we followed the path as it wound over and among moss-covered boulders and ledges through a brushy forest of alder, maple, and beech. A half-mile later, we stepped out into a cathedral of ancient pines and hemlock. We had finally made it.

* * * *

We had gotten there just in time. According to Randy's watch' it was very near sunset, though there was no sun to be seen. The sky had gone a solid, leaden gray shading off to black over in the west. The wind had picked up considerably. It was blowing in toward us from over the lake, and now it had a chill edge to it. Okay. They were definitely clouds, then.

Randy stashed his sleeping bag underneath the rickety old picnic table. I set the Frisbee on a boulder and put a round rock twice the size of my fist in the middle of it to hold it down in the freshening wind. It looked at me like a big red fisheye.

We had two things to do. Gather firewood and go swimming. We had begun this whole thing with the thought of swimming, so we were going to do that first. We changed into our swimming trunks and stood on the precipice of Gibralter's rock. The temperature had fallen markedly; it seemed like April was coming back home. The now gusty wind was slapping the heat and sweat of our long walk from us in hard little chops. The water fifteen feet below looked as black and cold as Medusa's stony gaze. It was time to jump right on in.

Randy took two steps back, gathered himself, and then with a banzai shriek launched himself through April's fickle and moody air. His scream cut off in mid- "AAAIII" when he struck the water, and he seemed to be under there a long time to my anxiously waiting mind. When he finally reappeared, he swam back to shore slowly--almost leisurely.

"How's the water?" I hollered. He didn't immediately answer. I was largely one hundred percent certain I knew the answer to this question, mostly. Sebec Lake is eleven miles long, and deep. It was only mid-April, and the ice had been out less than two weeks. The water couldn't possibly be warm . . . still, the weather was awfully hot. I hadn't got my answer yet, so I yelled again. I was tensed, knees bent, bouncing back and forth on the balls of my feet, Perseus ready for battle, prepared to propel myself to glory the moment I heard the right word.

A faint "f-f-fuh-hine" drifted up to my waiting ears.

That was the right word--well, the pieces of it anyway, and as soon as I heard them, I was gone. I followed his trajectory out over the water. I noted his perplexed, alabaster face staring up at me in amazement as I passed over it, and too late I realized how odd his voice had sounded. Then I splashed down.

When I hit the water, many things happened in a micro-second progression. As soon as the soles of my feet touched the surface of the water my entire body tried to turn in the air and run back to shore. When my 'nads dunked they squeaked and vanished like two startled prairie dogs, and with such force, I thought they'd blow out of the top of my head. When my head went under, every neuron in my thick skull strobed out the word "cold" in a blinding blast of silent white light.

Perseus vanished in a twinkling.

My brain may have fainted for a few seconds because when I came to, I was looking up at the surface of the water. It seemed much farther away than it should be, and that freaked me out. Thrashing, I managed to flail my way back up to breathable air, but I couldn't seem to take a breath. My diaphragm was a uselessly flapping flag that wouldn't obey my command. My heart was tripping and pounding so hard I thought it would explode. All the blood in my extremities fled to hide in my internal organs, leaving my arms and legs as pale and weak as half-melted marshmallows, yet stiff as drying cement. They stuttered and jerked when I tried to use them to swim, dammit, swim back to shore as fast as I could. The best I could manage was a slow swim that might look almost leisurely to a particularly dull-witted onlooker. Nevertheless, after a small eternity, I made it back to dry land.

I flopped out of the water and crouched, freezing, just above the waterline. I tried to yell something up to Randy concerning his parentage for tricking me into jumping into liquid nitrogen. "Y-y-hoo--hoo b-buh-huh-has-tuh-uh-uh-uh--"

I gave up. No point in biting off my own tongue over the word "bastard." None of the rhythms my body usually danced to so effortlessly were playing at the right tempos.

I waited, shivering, for my limbs to stop their uncoordinated and spastic twitching so I could climb the cliff. The spasms subsided, but the shivering did not. That was getting worse. I began jiving my jittery carcass up the cliff anyway. Hopefully, I wouldn't jounce myself off the face back into that glacial abyss of icicle drips. Once was enough.

Halfway up the cliff, all the blood that had gone to bathe my innards in hot juice rushed back home to my limbs. Fierce jabbing and stabbing pains erupted everywhere. I was cold and hot at the same time, as if I had been plucked from a freezer and tossed into a briskly boiling vat full of porcupine quills. I wheezy-screamed, but I was hanging on to the cliff and couldn't do anything else to comfort this new pain.

I managed to squirm my way to the "kiddie ledge," which was three-quarters of the way up. I stopped there and tried to rub everywhere at once as the pains continued to swarm like invisible hornets. The torment didn't last long--about six thousand years--before eventually subsiding into waves of pinpricks. When I felt I could move again, I finished the last few feet of my climb.

At last, I was once again standing at the top of the cliff, feeling much older than I had the last time I had been there. The first thing I saw was that damn Frisbee. Its happy round redness was matador bright in the gray-black of the remaining daylight. As I and that stupid piece of plastic stared at each other, I finally came to understand the true meaning of irony, which until that moment had only been a word I knew. I snorted a chuckle of bitter amusement, and my blue lips may have smiled ruefully--I don't know. I couldn't really feel them. If I'd had any fine motor control whatsoever I'd have picked up that moronically cheerful-looking Frisbee and flung it as far out into the lake as possible. That was beyond me at the moment, so I left it there to watch us--a wide open, mocking eye gleefully awaiting further developments. They were not long in coming.

* * * *

The wind, which was blowing hard now, felt quite warm. It felt . . . nice. Judging by the size of the huge goosebumps rising all over me, it probably wasn't as warm as it felt. It was past time to get dressed. This proved to be more difficult than usual because I couldn't steady my quaking limbs long enough the shove them through the moving targets of the appropriate openings. With a determined effort powered by desperation, I finally succeeded in getting my clothes back on. I'm sure Perseus would have been proud, had he been around.

Randy, also dressed, opined that maybe now would be a good time for firewood. His voice was slow and forced, and he seemed to have trouble saying more than a couple of words at a time. I thought I might sound the same, and I was by God about to find out. Firewood could wait until I'd had my say, however difficult it would be to say it. How dare he let me leap into that frosty hell, knowing I didn't have so much as a sleeping bag? Perseus had not yet returned to remind me of the heroic nature of this mission, of brave hearts steadfastly true to glorious honor--blah, blah, blah. I opened my mouth to give Randy a tongue lashing he didn't deserve, but I never got the chance.

The oddest thing about what happened next was that up until the moment it happened, we had heard no distant warning rumbles, though we had been listening hard. One massive, cracking explosion from directly overhead was the only warning we got, followed a moment later by a torrential downpour. It was as if all the Gods of Olympus had opened their togas to shower their golden appreciation of our heroics down upon our hapless heads. Except, this deluge was almost as cold as the lake. Another deafening blast of thunder sounded. The storm was on us.

Misery upon misery. We were drenched to the bone before that second boom died away. A fire was out of the question now. When the rain hit, it had blown out the last remnant of daylight like a candle. It was pitch black, lit only by momentarily brilliant flashes. Zeus was hurling his lightning bolts everywhere in a tantrum of deafening roars. The wind was a steady shrieking howl lashing at the trees, which creaked and groaned loudly in protest. Large waves began breaking themselves on the shore below, and the booming sound of surf rolled up the cliff face to add to the general cacophony.

Perseus was still nowhere to be seen. We were on our own. I stood there dumbly in the frigid downpour, trying to fathom how far and how quickly things had gone downhill from what had already appeared to be the bottom of the slope.

I was aware suddenly that Randy was screaming something at me, but I couldn't make out the words through the din. I felt his hands on my arm, and he walked them up to my shoulder to pull me closer.

"COVER!" He screamed this directly into my ear from about two inches away. "We've got to find cover!"

The only cover within reach was the picnic table. Using the flashes of lightning to guide us, we made our halting, stumbling way over to it, waving our hands in front of our faces so we wouldn't crack our noses on anything, and tripping on seemingly every root in the forest along the way. I found the table by barking my shins on it. We crawled underneath it to wait out the rain.

The sleeping bag was still relatively dry under there. Randy unzipped it all way, and we draped it over our heads like the world's most absorbent tarp. After that there was nothing to do but sit and wait, scrunched up, legs drawn up tightly to our chests and arms wrapped around them to keep them there. Cold, wet lines soon formed on the sleeping bag; the rain ran freely through the half-inch cracks between the table's weathered planking. The icy water slowly spread out and the lines joined together. Soon the entire bag was soaked through, but it was still way better than nothing.

We sat there while it rained buckets for the next eight hours.

We were afraid to sleep. We knew a little about hypothermia, and though we found it was easier to talk after a while, we still didn't dare doze off. We feared that April might come all the way back during the night and that if the temperature dropped any more, we might not wake up.

So we talked. All through that cramped, miserable eight hours, we talked. About everything, and nothing. About all the things that mattered to fifteen-year-old boys. About lots of things that didn't matter to fifteen-year-old boys at all, but were merely words that filled in the cold, dripping emptiness of waiting. One of the things we discussed (over and over) was what we would do if the temperature did begin to fall again. We agreed that if that happened, we would try to get out. We'd feel our way out on hands and knees if we had to. It was much too risky to try in the pitch-black, without uttermost necessity, but if the time did come when we needed to choose, death would not find us hiding under a picnic table. That would be just too embarrassing.

Fortunately, the temperature stayed stable and the wind and rain even took a break around three-thirty in the morning. We crawled out of our hiding place to unfold ourselves. After the icy dunking and eight hours of tightly clenched steeping in an April downpour, we were locked up as tightly as rusty bicycle chains. Moving and stretching was a crampy agony of joint creaking horror, but after some minutes we were able to hobble about, sort of.

As we stalked stiff-legged in a circle around the picnic table, we talked again about walking out. We wanted to totter away, to get the hell away from that hellish place as fast as our aching legs could carry us. Randy suggested using the tiny light from his wristwatch to light our way. I said that maybe we could use it to find some birch bark to burn. I immediately proved it was still too dangerous to leave by wandering away from the table just a little, hoping to find said birchbark, and promptly walking off a four-foot ledge I couldn't see. My teeth clacked together hard when my feet thumped down and I scraped both palms deeply on the rough granite trying to stop my fall. That ended any further talk of attempting to walk out in the dark. The entire area was a massive dump of granite glacial deposit with a forest on top. It could be treacherous walking even in daylight.

The downpour soon returned, this time without the wind, and its indifferent cold needling drove us back under the picnic table for the rest of the night.

* * * *

Dawn came at last, bringing another lull in the rain with it. We emerged from underneath the table like wrinkled amphibians crawling from the primordial ooze, blinking their slow and stupid way into the first day of a new future.

We had no energy for talking, and nothing left to say anyway. We silently wrung out and packed up the sleeping bag, which now weighed about as much as a baby hippo. We were turning to leave when a flash of red caught my eye. It was the Frisbee, still watching us from its perch. I tapped Randy on the shoulder, pointed at it, and shrugged wordlessly: do you want that? Randy stared at it, then walked over and picked it up. He bounced it up and down a couple of times, thoughtfully. In a sudden motion, he heaved it out into the lake as far as he could. I laughed, a kind of watery whimper--but it was a laugh. He came back and hefted the sleeping hippo with a groan.

We started down the trail toward home, two pruny, ravenous zombies lurching away from the grave.

By seven thirty, we were spent. We had stopped looking towards home, and food, and warmth, and were now hoping only for a reasonably dry place to lie down and rest for a moment--just for a moment. The weight of the wet sleeping bag had crushed us, even though we passed it back and forth frequently. It had started to rain again, light, steady rain that barely registered on our dulled senses; we knew it was raining only because we could see the raindrops ringing on the puddles. We were starving, soaked, stiff, sore, grainy, and raw. Good times, yep, good times.

Randy's "feeling" about needing the sleeping bag had been prophetic and had likely saved our lives. I was grateful and all, but I tried several times to convince him to leave it behind, we could always come back and get it later. He refused each time, saying his parents would kill him if he lost it, or there was no telling when we would be able to come back for it, or it was his favorite thing in all the world and he couldn't be parted from it, and a bunch of other equally silly things. During my next turn to carry it, I was dragging the burden behind me on the muddy road. My head was down, staring at my trudging feet, still trying to think of some way to sway him when he punched my arm. I looked up and followed his shakily pointing finger to see a car parked in the dooryard of one of the few summer camps that were the only buildings on this stretch of road.

We looked at each other and didn't even bother to confer before doing something we never would have normally done. We went up to the door and knocked. Louder. Again, banging this time. We banged away on the door until a voice thick with sleepy irritation asked just "who the hell was making all that God-awful racket!"

We both started talking at once but Randy elbowed me into silence. "Please sir, we're two boys from town and we're stranded out here. We're really sorry to wake you, but we really, really need a ride to town. Please help us." His voice was shaky and sounded exhausted. It would have been a fine performance except he wasn't acting. Nor had I ever before heard him refer to any adult male as sir. Not once.

There was a long silence. I was terrified the guy was going to tell us to go the hell away, we'd woken him up. There was the clunk of a deadbolt being disengaged, and the door cracked open, revealing the puffy-eyed face of an elderly gentleman. He looked us up and down in silence for a bit. I watched his eyes change from steely to concerned in the span of seconds. "Wait right there a minute." The door creaked closed.

We stood, swaying, in the man's driveway until he came out five minutes later. He smiled at us and unlocked the trunk, gesturing at us to put the muddy, bedraggled sleeping bag in there. Moments later, we were on our way home.

I don't remember much about the ride back to town. I remember how satisfying it was to watch the scenery flowing by so quickly. I remember there was conversation, but time and the warm sleepiness blowing from the car's heater have stolen the words from me, along with the man's name. What I will never forget is the kindness he showed two idiot boys who had adventured their way beyond the limits of their endurance. Perhaps he remembered what it was like to be fifteen. I know I do.

I have tried to pass that kindness on over the years.

In the end, we agreed that we would not tell anyone at all about what had happened. There was really nothing there to brag about.

So, whatever happened to Perseus? He never came back and I was forced to finish my adventure without him. I did that on my own. I still imagine him from time to time, but in a much different way than my fifteen-year-old self. Now I close my eyes and imagine a deep-water cove full of April water as black and cold as Medusa's stony gaze. Twenty-five feet down, a stone statue of Perseus stands posed in a high-stepping sprint toward a shore he will never gain. His mouth is open and his eyes are Frisbee round in shocked surprise. Jutting from his helmet in an unlikely crest are the heads and upraised forelegs of two startled-looking prairie dogs, captured in mid-flight.

Irony lives on inside me, in the place that Perseus used to dwell.