55 Years Like Yesterday

A few days ago, I got a letter in the mail. I’m not sure when the last time was that I got an actual letter, as in a correspondence from a friend, via the United States mail. It was not in a legal-sized envelope. It was in a personal stationary-sized envelope that had a regular stamp and was hand addressed. It actually felt like a flash from the past, which was exactly what it was. This letter had traveled a long way in one sense in that it was from 55 years ago. In physical terms, it had only traveled from Sacramento, California down through the state to where I live in the North County of San Diego, a little less than 500 miles. Inside the envelope was a handwritten two-page letter and three Polaroid pictures from 55 years ago.

I didn’t really recognize the pictures, which by today’s high-resolution iPhone camera standards were not very clear nor particularly well composed. They seem to be random shots taken during a high school motorcycle trip that a small group of us made from Rome up into Germany. As I recall, that was in the late summer of 1970 and it was before I went up to London and bought my Triumph 650. This I could determine from the photographs, which included shots of my old Gilera 125, which was our motorcycle of choice in those days. The thought of riding any 125 cc motorcycle from Rome to Germany and back still makes my backside tingle since riding comfort and long distance touring capability were not the long suits of the Gilera street bike.

What I do remember about that ride was that four of us, including Bobby Asselbergs, Tom Wohlmut, Mike Cobbold and I, had one of those “Stand By Me” moments of youth. We weren’t walking through the Pacific Northwest to find a dead body by the side of the railroad, but we were four friends from a distant and somewhat idyllic past who ventured forth into the unknown on a mission. Technically, the mission was to visit Mike Cobbold’s girlfriend who happened to be summering somewhere in Bavaria. That sounds a lot like a fine mission for Mike but what was in it for the other three of us? Clearly, it was an excuse for a road trip, a chance to bond with friends of common interest (mostly motorcycles at that point) and an opportunity to travel to lands unknown to us like Austria and Germany. Anyway you slice it, that’s a pretty big adventure for a group of 16-year-olds in 1970. Put into today’s context, that’s especially so since in the absence of credit cards, our financial resources consisted of whatever cash we had in our pockets (Lira, which would need exchanging at the borders) to cover gasoline, lodging, food, and miscellaneous. That alone feels adventurous by the standards of today’s digital economy.

I don’t remember everything about that trip, but I do remember a guest house stay in the Brenner Pass where we were served fresh from the cow milk at breakfast after a night in an Eiderdown bed. I remember that while we had five languages covered amongst us, we had failed to anticipate the need for German in the two countries were German was the only language spoken. I remember finding the German exit signs that said Ausfahrt very funny with our sophomoric sense of humor. I remember stopping for lunch one day in an Austrian Gasthof where asking for a menu led to us to being served plates with meat filled dumpling balls the size of snowballs. I can’t remember who took the first bite of that strange blue-plate special. And I remember sleeping in an open field in Germany and coming out of the tent in the morning with migrant field workers staring at us in amazement as we packed up and headed off for breakfast at a local pub where Bavarian beer was being served to local workmen at 7am. Those are all memories that can rival a walk along the railroad tracks and finding a dead body.

The two-page letter in the envelope was from our old buddy Mike Cobbold and was a sort of catch-up on the last 55 years. I haven’t seen Mike in those 55 years but we have been on one Reunion Zoom call together and I have heard mostly through Tom about what Mike has been doing in his life. Bobby and I ended up pursuing careers in finance in New York City. Tom became a video producer in the Bay Area. But Mike went a very different path. In high school, Mike seem like the quintessential preppy. Somehow that morphed in his adult life into his becoming a top-ranked Ranger with the National Forest Service. I think he even lived in Yosemite while running all the concession businesses. I still don’t know all the specifics of his career moves, but I know he spent a lot of time in Yosemite and an even longer period of time as the senior guy at Denali doing things like locking himself in for the duration of the winter season in the midst of that Alaskan retreat. His career is fascinatingly different from anything the three of the rest of us in that gang of four lived through and that makes it great fun to hear his stories.

That letter from Mike has started a dialogue between us that left off 54 years ago when I went off to college in upstate New York and he went off to college in California. We’ve both since had wives and kids just as Bobby and Tom have. And now here we are, finding time to finally reminisce rather than drive forward every minute of every day. It’s particularly interesting to me that there were more touch points in Mike’s and my lives than either of us realized. For example, when he mentioned that he and his family had spent time in Costa Rica I said I’d lived in a remote tropical valley in Costa Rica for two years as a child, something he hadn’t known about me. It turns out that he spent three days at a conference at the Institute in the “remote” tropical valley where my mother had worked for those two years and within a quarter mile of where I had lived for those two years and gone to first grade. Another example is that in three weeks Kim and I are heading off for a cruise that will take us from Santiago, Chile around Cape Horn to Buenos Aires. Mentioning that to Mike gave rise to him telling me that he had spent time seconded to the Chilean Forest Service in Patagonia very near one of the glaciers that we will be visiting in a few weeks. Furthermore, I learned that he knew Buenos Aires very well and was indeed born there, something I hadn’t known about him. Both he and I, it seems, spent a good portion of our lives in the southern reaches of South America. Who knew?

Unlike the boys from Stand By Me, none of us have wound up in military prison, stayed in our old home town or been shot to death in a convenience store. But I have ended up being a writer (of sorts) who spends his days trying not to hurt himself while gardening, working my expert witness gigs and traveling. Tom is off living in Brisbane, Australia living the sophisticated life he was always destined for, making award-winning films (Building an Ethical Culture) and going out for fine dining, Bobby is still building out massive real estate projects for his Greek principals while moving earth with his tractor to dam up his backyard creek and preserving antique European motorcycles to keep his youthful memories alive. And Mike, while retired from the Forest Service seems to be still dabbling in floriculture since he’s going off this week to Death Valley with his smoke-jumping buddies who hire out to put out California wildfires from the air. As Richard Dreyfus (who wears a white beard that looks just like mine) says at the end of Stand By Me, ““I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was [sixteen]. Jesus, does anyone?”