When I was kid my buddy Kyler and I would go off romping in the woods around Hansen Elementary School with straight sticks for swords and curved sticks for bows, hooking rubber band chains around each end of the stick, and we would pretend we were warriors and survivors straight out of Tolkien, renegades traversing the land. Hordes of bad guys would come charging at us and we’d fend them off with arrows and sword blows and then we’d wander through the trees looking for a post-battle meal of some poor slain animal.

I always had it in my mind that it was an impossibility, pure fantasy that I loved to imagine and play out in my mind, but probably would never attempt, probably didn’t even want to. Survival like that always sounded romantic and rugged, but lonely, which is what I feared the most, being stranded somewhere alone without the warmth and camaraderie of another human. 

“I wouldn’t care,” Kyler said. He had no qualms, no reservation in imagining a life without friends or family. I always got the sense that he didn’t much care about his home life, a thought that made my stomach sink. I would have felt terrible if I left my family, terrible for how sad they would be discovering my empty bed, for how lonely I would be wandering through the world alone. 

But Kyler was always defiant, hot-headed, had the me-against-the-world syndrome something fierce. He was growing up without much of a dad – his dad was always away on a fishing boat in Alaska or somewhere, and when he wasn’t, he was drinking – and he hated most of the jarheads and knuckleheads and softies that his mother dated. 

“He was never around when I was a kid!” he blurted out drunkenly one summer night, his words loud and rolling. “And now he is around and he’s still not here!”

We were up in the hills of Capitol Forest, roasting weenies and burgers over a fire-pit filled with beer cans and empty liquor bottles. We all laughed at him, and somebody yelled out “daddy issues!” and we all laughed some more. 

Later that night we threw logs and decomposing stumps on the roof of his Subaru and drove through the trees whooping and hollering into the night. We rolled over bumps and into divots and through deep, muck. He popped the car over an especially rowdy bump in the road and the biggest log on the roof bounced high and slammed down onto the wagon’s trunk lid. The window shattered and glass cascaded down into the trunk and everyone shouted “shit!” and “goddamn!”, and in the morning while everyone rubbed their heads and remembered, Kyler laughed manically and sipped a morning beer and raised his arms to the valley rolling towards the west. 

He’s got a kid now, if you can believe it. A little boy that I haven’t met yet. Little trouble maker probably. No doubt Kyler will be a better dad than his was. Another young man learning how not to be.