Mi Novia

I think the stains on Ben’s face made us leave the mountain early. Ben was my best friend and only friend in my neighborhood. Ben was a friend. He and his family were nice Mormons who lived behind us.

Ben and I told our moms that we were going to climb the mountain – it was really just a hill that led to Highway 89 in Ogden, Utah. The Rocky Mountains dwarfed the hill we planned to climb. We told our moms we planned to climb the “mountain” and have lunch and come home. But secretly, we packed our tent, our sleeping bags, and enough peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, dinner, and the next day’s breakfast. There may be a mother out there reading this thinking: “You mean you were just going to disappear for a night and not tell your mothers? You little shits.” The answer to your question is “Yes!” I was eight. It seemed like a just fine idea to me.

Ben and I headed up the steep blacktop hill that led to the “mountain.” We stood there momentarily before walking into the wild. The PB&J’s were weighing heavily on my back. But they would be worth it. I squinted my eyes and looked at Ben. He looked at me with a stain on his lip and smiled. I don’t remember if the stain was milk stain or a Kool-Aid stain, but it drove my tiny tolerance for stains on kid’s faces crazy.

We hiked slowly up the dirt-bike path and along the edge of the hillside until the trail ended. The sounds above our heads on Highway 89 vroomed in the background. We called them jungle animals and did our best to avoid them. This way it seemed more like an adventure than an ill-planned and non-permisable campout above our houses. We trekked through the brush, the thick, dry trees of the Utahan hillside and found a bare spot to lay down our tents. We both sweated heavily in the 90-degree June weather. The stain on Ben’s lip started to run down his cheek, and he did not wipe it off. I watched it drip to his chin and gaffed at his sad attempts with his tongue to lap it up. That was all the effort he gave, oblivious to the pain he inflicted on me.

We set up our tent and rolled our sleeping bags out inside of it. We were proud of our plan. We decided on lunch: PB&J. When I pulled my sandwich out of my bag, it was warm and squishy. The jam got sticky on my hands when I ate it. Ben crammed his sandwich down his throat and had layered a jam stain on the previous milk or Kool-Aid stain. I knew it was only about one in the afternoon, and we planned to stay the whole night, to share another two meals of PB&J, and sleep over in the woods beneath the wild animals that night.

“Let’s go. That was fun,” I said to Ben. I packed up my bag.
“But we just got here,” he said with a jam and milk stained mouth.
“It was fun, let’s go,” I said and he agreed.

My traveling partner did not suit the length of travel. He began to get on my nerves immediately, so I cut the trip short.

Since that day, my tolerance for traveling companions has grown. A little. Multiple times, while out of the country, I have shared a room with someone I couldn’t stand or a flat with seven people I couldn’t stand.
But this trip, I am so excited to share a room with my best friend and wife. She’ll be sick of me long before I’ll get sick of her. But we’ll have wine to cure her of that ill. It just stains teeth.