Astrophysics and Sentimentality for People in a Hurry
Last week, I got a text from a central-north Tennessee area code. This is a region of that more … umbilical part of our country which I do not associate with, nor frequent. I had thought, at first glance, it might be a solicitation from a debt collector or a crooked charity appeal—some worldly things of that sort.
Upon reading the message, though, it was nothing of the kind.
It was a very non-worldly and very-serendipitous request from a well-acquainted college friend hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. He and I had gone to a small college, where former classmates came to know each other’s various whereabouts and goings on post-graduation. Knowing mine were in Mammoth Lakes, Goodbred—that’s his name—asked for use of my shower, to rest his head in the manger that is my half-comfortable rented address, and to borrow a rubber band to keep the lid of his camp cooking pot attached to its vessel.
PCT hikers, they may be weary. Oh, they do get weary.
Given that the recurring motifs of my year have been unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar landscapes, I jumped at the chance to remedy the former. And, given that the theme of my year, personally, has been flailing in the field of self-provision, I was excited at the idea of providing that which I could for another person. Rubber bands and hot water—these were small luxuries, to be exchanged (offered Goodbred) for some company and a home-cooked meal. It was to be the most action my kitchen would have seen in the past 10 months.
Matt Goodbred, to put a name to the face unseen, started at the Mexican border in April, and is on track to complete his hike in 3 months and change. For myself and my classmates, it came as no surprise that Matt was doing this. Not only was he a well known outdoorsman while we were at school, but he had spent the time following both our graduation and his summer research stint in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire meandering in Telluride, Colorado. Tinkering, skiing, bumming. Tinkering about with skis and the bums that traverse them.
And were you to poll the class of ‘23, the consensus would be that Goodbred was just, well, impressive. Widely acknowledged as such. He’ll be continuing his work at Princeton next fall to study plasma astrophysics, and has already been the co-author of peer-reviewed work in his field (published in Physics of Plasmas and Physical Review Letters).
And oh yeah. He’s a bonafide, nice guy.
So, anyway, when central Tennessee arrived at my California home after the paper went out last Thursday, I showed him some East Coast hospitality.
I cleaned the sheets on the twin mattress downstairs, gave him the nice towel with neither bleach stain nor torn hem, and splurged for Stella Artois over Keystone Light to stock the fridge (whether those Stellas were lifted from The Sheet office is profoundly unimportant). And when he put his pack down on my floor, we sat in these great, big, plush red chairs landlord Lunch has got in the living room and we got to talking. Didn’t stop talking, really. We talked about our scattered friends—all doing impressive things, making impressive sums of money, or both. We talked about the ones we worried about, and the fewer for which we didn’t. Goodbred talked about his favorite things along the route—Idyllwild, Rae Lakes via Kearsarge Pass, and the hitches he’d scored in between them. I talked about my paper route, Sierra Nevada yellow legged frogs and the man that kept them, and my day with Troy Patton in Lone Pine. We compared, between Mammoth and Telluride, distances from airports, hospitals, and Trader Joe’s. The last time each of us had seen our best friend. The days we’d logged on our respective mountains, and the issues that dogged the communities at their feet.
We took inventory, both of us, of all things had, and all things missed in a year. Neither category was a hill of beans.
And when first we realized that I didn’t have a single damn can of beans, olive oil, rice, salt, or well, jack shit to fuse together the board he’d promised in exchange for room, the beer held us over just fine.
And so we kept on talking.
But as we got really hungry, and as I had increasingly little to offer (besides pantry staples) in terms of stories and beer, I remembered that Lunch—who had left earlier that day for his 35th reunion at his, mine, and Goodbred’s alma mater—had suggested I make a stop at the Tioga Gas Mart’s music event. When he’d first suggested it, though, after having gone stag to chili competitions, Monster truck showcases, film screenings, housing conversations, and more Town Council Meetings than I’d care to admit, I felt myself at a breaking point for that which I could endure sans booze or a or a familiar face to toast with. But with Goodbred in toe, and the pressure to show the kid a good time the one night he was in town, we decided to face the music.
(And, if nothing else, I’d heard that the fish tacos at Whoa Nellie Deli are your best shot at sea fare this side of the Sierra.)
And so we lumbered to Lee Vining—Goodbred marveling at the mountains outside his passenger window—and then drove a little further because there were cars and camper vans parked many lengths down on the shoulder of the road, past the gas mart.
Up the hill were the people that had filled all those cars—and man, they were something beautiful. Had the man any sense for the ironic resurgence of work coveralls worn by real estate agents, or the innovation of ring tab Coca Colas, Norman Rockwell might have painted something like it—children blowing bubble, and the smell of dish soap and corn syrup on hot pavement when one of them spilled the very elixir that so enchanted his wand; black tar-footed men in the grass and women, inside the deli, under the flourescent-light of antler-fitted chandeliers.
What surprised me was that I recognized many of these people on the hill. Theirs were faces I’d collected since moving to California—ones I’d interviewed, ones I’d photographed, ones I’d made coffees with and for. And there were faces that Matt recognized from his own adventures about that long, strange road between here and Mexico. There was a girl who called herself Freebird with stencil tattoos on her shoulders, and a boy that had said he’d come from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, though in talking to him I became unsure. The details of the rest elude me, but the mystic quality of their trail names seemed to beg as much, besides.
Goodbred and I spent the evening with these people, dancing to the band Tracorum who, I will say, are quite good. They had a great fiddler and kept the rhythm tight—neither of which are an easy thing to do.
And when it got dark, the people abandoned their seats in the grass, and the deli cleared out. The bubble-blowing children were driven home. And those that remained swayed before the stage, and threw polyvinyl beach balls into the air, and the band played that similar refrain:
Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart,
Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart,
And the people swayed some more. Because of course it does. And of course they do.
The band played its encore. Then it played another. And then we went home.
On the way back to town, because there was time for it and because we had already talked at length about Mammoth and Telluride and Goodbred’s hike along the trail, we talked about those things that would come after them. All those things we had planned.
I did not have much to report.
And so Goodbred talked about the plasma flow of the universe, and that stuff called dark matter (the proverbial “they” don’t know what it is, but they know that it is). He said he was excited to go back east—to go back home—and on that, we agreed. He explained why May’s solar flares happened the way they did, and about the very impressive and very sudden explosions of magnetic energy that can happen when under the duress of extreme environments.
We laughed. It was on the nose.
I asked him if it ever got overwhelming—high-order thinking like that, all the time, about capital O capital T, Out There.
He said that it didn’t. That there is comfort to be had in math working the same in Lee Vining as it does where the dark matter hides. That, for him, making sense out of life is also how life derives its meaning.
I asked him if it ever got lonely—studying something that we, on Planet Earth, have no intuition about. If it was frustrating, explaining to all the rest of us who cannot understand what, to him, is so apparent.
And he told me that was the point of it all. That to explain is to understand. And that the capacity for those things leaves a lot less space for loneliness.
We turned into town, where they had not yet repainted the reflective lines on Meridian Boulevard. In the car, it had become very dark and very quiet. And neither of us were alone.
