After the Age of Books came the Great Escape. It paradised two years and sunrise storm began with me telling my father, 'Why don't you just send me away to boarding school!' No sooner said than done, in the outpaced trail of a ciggarette butt tossed out a highway window, there I was.
There I was. In a school of scarcely three hundred. Surrounded by a deep forest. Grounded just a mile from a pacific stormy beach. It was two years of discovering how to make friends who shared interests. It was; it was understanding learning as the mind-expanding elation that only greatening awareness can betide. And happily, nickoftimely, it was finding out I was so much more than the sadness and frustration I had been forced to define myself with.
I made such friends there as I shall never forget. Shades of myself and my selfcomtemplations have grown from them, from who they were and what they expressed of themselves and their beliefs. Pride of the Self, no matter what you've been through. That was Pat. Adventure and exuberence in everything you do with a constant respect for animals. That was Jim. Thinking beyond your bounds every day. That was Ken.
And it was running with Ken one day along the endless sandy tracks in the surrounding forest that we stopped at the top of a hill to catch our breath. This hill was just tall enough to give us a view in all directions of yet more forest, green, constant, and without variation. "What if everything you can see from here was all there is?" Ken said. And you know...In the most earnest of moments that we all come to in our lives. He was and is exactly right.
