Becky has been in Los Angeles for the last week, helping her mom clean house before a remodel. She’s been dredging up old memories and odd objects, letters she wrote her brother from college, games they played as children, the old leather suitcase with which her father first arrived from China.
I have been dredging up a few odd objects myself.
Becky and I spent our first Thanksgiving together on the road, driving a small rental car up and over the Sierra Nevada into Mono County. It was also our first visit to the desert. We passed aspens and Jeffrey pines, tufa towers and lava flows, and it was long enough ago — 16 years — that I no longer remember what we talked about on the way over Sonora Pass, or if we talked at all. I do remember the rental car’s brakes smoking as we descended the pass’s east slope — stupid automatic transmission.
It was cold as we appproached the Walker River along 395.
Thanksgiving night found us in a closed campground on Grant Lake. I fiddled with my new backpacking stove, got the freeze-dried turkey tetrazzini cooked precisely according to the directions on the package, and it took neither of us more than a quick taste to judge it inedible. Ah, well. The morning promised sunlight and omelets down the road. We crawled hungry into my little pup tent and warmed each other, then slept.
The next day we coaxed the rental car down a rutted, washed-out dirt road in the Greenwater Valley, just outside Death Valley National Monument. We found a wide, unvegetated spot amid the creosote and pitched the tent again. There had been a stop in a grocery store in Lone Pine, and that night we didn’t go to bed hungry. I awoke at two to brilliant stars. I did not know Becky then as well as I do now: we had only been sleeping together for a few months, and not every night at that. I nudged her. “You should see the stars.”
“Don’t wake me up.”
“No, seriously. Look at the stars. There are so many of them.”
“I mean it. Don’t wake me up.”
“Just a quick look.”
Becky, once woken, cannot fall back asleep. For the next four hours she told me so. About once every five minutes. And then came the sun, and a trip up to Dante’s View to see Death Valley splayed out before us and a mile below. Then came breakfast, and Badwater, and Baker. We ate homemade turkey soup for dinner in Mojave in a restaurant called Reno’s, long since closed and lamented and remembered fondly along with Villa Hermosa in Berkeley and Pring’s in San Leandro. But I digress.
For years, despite a dozen sumptuous dinners since, I’ve privately thought of Thanksgiving 1989 as the best I ever had. Sleeping hungry with Becky is better than sleeping sated without her. Last night I was in a mood to reminisce, and Becky called. “I’ve been thinking about our first Thanksgiving,” I said.
“Oh, my god,” she replied. “That was horrible. I told myself over and over again that night ‘bring cheese and crackers the next time you camp with Chris.’ After that, there was nowhere for our Thanksgivings together to go but up.”
She thought for a moment.
“But climbing in the tent with you was nice, as I remember.”
I’m adopting a compromise view. 1989 was the best Thanksgiving ever, and they’ve been getting better ever since.
