Julie and I attended a 50th high-school reunion last week, in the city park in Hagerman, Idaho. Wood River High School’s Class of 1971 had invited the three classes ahead of them and the three classes behind them to join their get-together.

Hagerman isn’t the town where we all went to high school. WRHS is 70 miles north, in Hailey, a now-gentrified suburb of Sun Valley. Most of its graduates live closer to Hagerman these days. Few people who grew up in the Wood River Valley during the ’60s can afford to live there now.

I wanted to go because I had missed my own 50th reunion—it had been held in July of 2018, and July, for us, means summer visitors. Since that time, the obituary columns have included the names of schoolmates I would have tried to see, had I known they were about to die.

Pulled-pork sandwiches and lemonade were on the reunion menu. Some people brought bottles of wine or hard liquor. We had a long drive back to Sawtooth Valley, so we stuck with lemonade.

Not many people showed up. A friend from the Class of 1968 was there, and we talked about health issues and the politics of Covid vaccination. I told him I’d checked out a recent obituary column in one of the Idaho papers, and out of a list of 34 dead people, 17 of them were younger than me.

“I don’t know if it’s Covid that’s getting the young ones or something else,” I said.

“Could have been old age,” said my old friend.

 

I went through my senior yearbook on the drive to Hagerman. Stories surfaced: of buying beer for a date, of riding the bus out into the Idaho desert on a field trip to the National Reactor Testing Station, of getting kicked out of junior English class, of dances that might have been more fun if I’d danced with anyone. I looked forward to telling these stories. With luck, I’d tell them to someone who would know what I was talking about.

I’ve begun to think that you have an unofficial history, which is what you remember, and an official one, which is what other people remember. Ideally, they should agree. They never do.

It sounds odd, but I walked into the park looking for people to confirm stories. The trouble is, at this late date, a lot of witnesses have been tampered with.

 

The people who ran Idaho’s experimental reactors had put them far out in the sagebrush between Idaho Falls and Arco. (Arco is the third city in the world to be lit by atomic power. The Arco Chamber of Commerce has put up signs saying they’re the first, but they’re forgetting Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) As part of a civilian outreach program promoting the peaceful use of atomic energy, my chemistry class had been invited to tour the reactor buildings.

On the three-hour bus ride from Hailey, I sat next to a girl I liked. We walked through the reactors next to each other, checking each other’s film badges to see if either of us had gotten a lethal dose of radiation.

Toward the end of the tour, we came to a room that contained a giant 25-foot-deep swimming pool. At its bottom, chunks of metal glowed a hellish purple-blue. It was hard to look at them. Some of the energies they were radiating came in wavelengths human eyes weren’t designed to see.

Our guide explained that these were the still-hot cores of reactors. If the water was ever drained, they’d all melt together and reach critical mass and the resulting fire, explosion, and fallout would kill a high percentage of Idahoans. The cores were scary, even underwater, and I decided that high-school students shouldn’t be herded through these buildings, no matter how safe the Peaceful Atom was supposed to be.

I wanted to hold hands with the girl beside me, but you can’t just grab somebody’s hand because you’re feeling scared, especially when you’re a fifteen-year-old boy.

  

I got kicked out of English class the spring of my junior year because we were reading Thoreau. The sun was shining through unshaded windows, turning the classroom into an oven. We had been told to read silently, and I decided to follow the instructions for claiming my own experience as laid down in Walden. I left the classroom and went outside and read under a tree until the bell rang, and then I went to my next class. The next day I was told not to return to English class for the rest of the semester. I took a correspondence course for my English credit.

The teacher had graduated from a Jesuit university and was devoted to the idea of discipline.

But it was deeper than that. I can see now that I had committed heresy. I had exposed a serious flaw in the doctrine: students are assigned literature to study, but God help them if they read it in the spirit it was written. Read Thoreau as a plea to believe your own eyes and ears and there’s not much need for teachers—although I admit there would be a need for EMTs to get out and rescue a bunch of starving hermits in the woods.

 

By senior year, I had found a girl to hold hands with. We were out on a date in my daddy’s car. We hadn’t driven very far.

Next to us on the seat was a six-pack of Olympia beer, which I had purchased, for an exorbitant price, from a guy who had been caught buying teenagers alcohol and had been given a choice, by a local justice of the peace, of going to jail or joining the Army. He had chosen the Army but was still a reliable source of supply in the month before boot camp.

Instead of going to a movie like we’d told our parents, my date and I had gone to Fairway Road in Sun Valley, where giant houses were being built according to a new concept: ski resorts could be the centerpieces of luxury real-estate markets. I parked the car in a lot full of construction equipment and lumber and concrete pavers, bounded by trenches dug for foundations and sewer pipes.

With a bottle opener acquired specifically for that evening, I opened two bottles of Oly. I didn’t like Oly. The Olympia slogan was “It’s the Water,” which was pretty much what Olympia tasted like.

My date drank her beer. I opened another for her. I was only half-done with my first one when she finished the second. She kicked off her shoes and stretched out on the seat, used my thigh as a pillow, and looked up at me.

“Okay,” she said. “You’ve got me where you want me.” For quite a while I didn’t say anything.

“This isn’t a good place to park,” I finally said.

I was suddenly sure that the cops were going to show up with their sirens screaming, with flashlights and big cop grins, and I was going to be given a choice between jail and the Army. Whatever it was I wanted to do, I wanted to do it a lot further out of town than where we were.

“Maybe we should drive up to Galena Summit,” I said. Instead, I put the car in reverse and backed the rear wheels into a four-foot trench.

Much later in the evening, when I had filled the trench with pavers and used the bumper jack to lift the rear of the car high enough to get a couple of two-by-sixes under the rear wheels, I eased the car out on solid ground. I drove onto Fairway Drive and then on to Sun Valley Road and into Ketchum, where I delivered my date back to her house. I kissed her good night on her doorstep. It may have been my first kiss. It was our last date.

 

The girl I had walked through the reactors with wasn’t at the reunion. The girl who told me I had her where I wanted her died of breast cancer twenty years ago. The juvenile delinquent who bought me beer died in Vietnam, and after he did our local justice of the peace stopped giving the young people who came before him a choice between the Army and anything.

My high-school English teacher is, incredibly, still alive. He lives an hour downriver in Challis, Idaho. He wasn’t at the reunion, but I could visit him and tell him I turned out to be a decent student after all.

But I don’t know if he would remember me at all, much less remember the day he tossed me from his class.

Anyway, Jesuits are scary. Old, demented Jesuits, history tells us, are even scarier. You don’t consider them for a minute when you’re looking for someone to confirm your story, because their default negotiating position is that you’re making shit up.

  

On the drive home, I wondered if any of the other Wood River graduates had found anyone who remembered their stories. I wondered if they realized, as I finally had, that most stories are internal. I wondered how many of them looked back at key moments and wished they had behaved differently, but then realized everything had to go that way or they wouldn’t be who they were.

I looked at Julie and said, “You realize the odds were against us sitting here, in this car, headed home together?” She nodded. “One tiny thing different in either of our lives, and we’d be different people in a different world.”

“I would have been lonely without you,” I said.

“You wouldn’t have known I existed,” she said.

“That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have been lonely.”

In the moment, driving up over Galena Summit, neither one of us was lonely.

But loneliness was in the air. I was thinking of a girl from the Class of 1971 that I had hoped would go to the reunion, but she hadn’t. The last I had heard, she was living in Utah, had many children and grandchildren, and no doubt had more to do than drive to Idaho to compare notes with a bunch of old people.

 

I was thinking of her because when I had come home from college in the spring of her senior year, she had asked me to a dance at the LDS Church. Afterward, I walked her home in the moonlight. I don’t remember what we talked about, but it was a conversation that was easy, comfortable, and suddenly deeper and more affectionate than any conversation I’d ever had. I also remember thinking she was beautiful, and terrifically womanly for someone who was only seventeen.

I was a Forest Service Wilderness Ranger that summer, working out of Stanley. When I was out of the mountains for my days off, I called her several times from pay phones in town, but she was working a couple of summer jobs and wasn’t home. I left messages with her family. She never called back. After a while I found a girlfriend, and then another.

Years later, I found out she had called my parents’ home, returning my calls, but my mother didn’t relay the messages. She was afraid I was going to fall in love with a Mormon girl and get trapped into marriage.

When my mother was dying of dementia, she confirmed this story, or at least the parts about what she was afraid of. By then, her bigotry was unselfconscious and unashamed, and there wasn’t anything to say to it. Once, pre-dementia, when I had told her that Julie and I weren’t planning to have children, she had gotten furious with me and called me terribly selfish. She had wanted grandchildren, and I was refusing to give them to her. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she had long ago wrecked her best chance.

We were nearly home when I told this story to Julie. She said things had turned out the way they should have.

“You wouldn’t have made a very good Mormon,” she said.

“I could have made a very good Mormon,” I said. “I also could have been an astronaut, or a doctor, or a race-car driver. Fly-fishing guide. Ski instructor. Life was full of choices back then.”

“There’s only one choice in the end,” said Julie. “And you made the right one.” Then she said, “The reunion’s over. Give all those other old guys a rest.”