Listening to Joe

By Jill Kuraitis, 8-19-08

A young man dear to my heart and young enough to be my son arrived on a hot afternoon in the way young people tend to arrive – in a dusty heap of a car filled with gear and boxes and a bicycle strapped to the roof.

He was stopping for a night at my house during his one-way road trip. It wasn’t the geographical middle of his journey, but it turned out to be the halfway point anyway.

As if emerging from a cloud of carefree energy, Joe grinned himself out of the car and wanted an immediate hug, there in the driveway. He was barefoot and filthy, his dark curls escaping from the blue bandanna around his head, worn to keep the sweat from his eyes as he drove the 350 miles from his Oregon town to Boise without air conditioning, which he thinks is an evil plot.

I threw him in the shower and waited in the kitchen with cold beer and food.

My friend Joe is a rogue camper, hiker, fisher, writer and reporter who sucks in words and sentences like oxygen, then spits them back out with a questioning fervor.  Tell him a story and he’ll listen more intently than anyone you’ve known, fascinated with you as much as the story; ask him for one and you’ll get a preposterous tale of misadventure, narrated with wonderment, as if he is also hearing it for the first time.

He joyfully tells the-one-that-got-away fish stories he swears are true, describes harrowing close calls with outdoor-equipment failure or walking too close to the edge of something – so very Joe - and talks of keeping his car running with pine cones and sap. There are specific elk or deer he’s seen that have touched him; he knows the Rocky Mountains like Google Earth. 

You must, he insists, listen to his saved voicemails from girls who have dumped him.  Then he entertains you with the sad tale of each romance, usually with the theme that he screwed everything up.  It was all his fault, and she was a goddess until he pushed her over the edge with the disorder that is Joe.

Joe has mental lists of crazy stories he wants to write, and gets you interested, too.  One could be a plan to follow shoe-making gypsies around Romania, one a series on the subculture of weasel-trappers, and one a profile of Hmong mushroom-hunters in Saskatoon. Joe will ask you with his eyes to approve or disapprove of them, and if you have suggestions, he can pick your brain for an hour.

But Joe is a terrible scoundrel.  He smokes too much pot, drinks more than is good for him, lusts after too many girls, and wakes up on too many strange floors.  He’s always got neglected books, emails and calls to return.  He has travel plans in limbo with five different people, some of whom he will let down in a heap of tearful remorse. There are things he’s going to take care of any minute now, like the rip in his tent or a rotten fish net, as soon as he finds something clean to put on.

Conversely, he has the party manners of a raised-right boy, escorting me solicitously as we took the dog to the river; helping me over a fallen log. He remembers all his pleases and thank-yous. 

Somehow, despite his rascalhood, Joe is one of those endearing souls who is instantly forgiven.  His heart is out for viewing and his guileless wide eyes that have seen so much havoc are irresistible. And Joe makes you laugh and cry and FEEL more intensely. You don’t want him to leave, but you want him to leave, because he wears you out in ten minutes flat.

Joe is a walking Greek drama.

Congratulations are due Joe’s mother, of whom I thought often during his visit.  He must have been hell to raise.  Thank goodness I didn’t have to raise him, but he was craving help with his decision to leave a crazy wonderful part-time job he loved, in the West he loves, to a real grown-up job in the Midwest, writing about the outdoors.  There would be a salary and benefits and other things alien to Joe’s world view. And as of his arrival in Boise, he was hundreds of miles from his old Oregon home, but hadn’t really left yet.

I woke the morning he was due to leave, his 26th birthday, to find Joe in a panic. He danced nervously around the kitchen over coffee and birthday pancakes with blue sprinkles, and poured out his crisis of confidence about leaving the Rocky Mountains. Where would he hike and fish? Would his car hold up until he got there? What was he doing leaving his friends in Oregon, where life was carefree and sweet? There was a girl – of course – who might be willing to pick up where they left off, and his crazy little house, and people to meet up with every night.  In the Midwest job, he said, he would have to get there on time and wear real clothes and write a bunch of boring stories.

What on earth had he done?

I curled up on the couch in my bathrobe, sipping coffee and letting him rant.  A few motherly “hmmns” and “you’ve got a point there” seemed to work for awhile.

Suddenly - “I think I’m going to go back home,” he said.

“Are you,” I remarked, getting up to refill my coffee.

“Do you think I should?” he asked, staring at my back so hard I could feel it.

Knowing this was the right moment, I turned to him. “Do you know, darling, what this is really about?”

Another stare.

“You’ve stopped here, too far to turn around, but still with a long way to go. Keep driving and you’re farther from your old life, which is sad, and closer to the new one, which is scary. And you are grieving.”

“It’s the bridge to Grown-upsville, and you’re not sure you’re ready to cross.”

He stared again.

Quietly, “Do I have to be?”

Oh, the classic and terrible quandary. 

“No,” I assured him, “no, if you’re not ready, you get to decide what to do.”

“Do I,” he said dejectedly.  “That’s no help at all.”

He decided to make a standard list of pros and cons. Though I contributed a few small considerations, it was mostly him, and he did a fine job of finding the priorities.

Still unsure, but calmer now, he went off to take a shower.

Then I heard him scratching around making leaving noises.  He returned to the kitchen with wet hair, dressed and holding his backpack.

“I’m going,” he announced.

“Are you,” I remarked.

“Yes, I’m going all the way.  I said I would.  I’ll try it for two years, and if I hate it, I’m back.”

“Good thinking,” I said.

He gave me an enormous hug, the kind a kid gives a mother as he leaves for college. Then he was off, bike rack rattling, fly rod peeking out a car window.  I watched him turn the corner.

As Joe crossed his bridge to parts unknown, I returned to the kitchen.  There were the sandwiches and fruit I’d packed for him, forgotten. 

I smiled.  Joe had left things behind.