Back Where It All Began

We were on the two-lane roadway, which I'm sure by now is at least a four-lane highway out near Auburn Hills, which was nothing but a backwater back then--long before The Pistons or The Palace or the inexorable human sprawl that seeped its way into the countryside like lime into the water table. Two high school kids just starting to really feel their oats, still a question mark on the page of history; nothing yet decided, staring out the window of a pickup listening to Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix or some guitar jam--always a guitar in those days--when suddenly “What’s that out the window?” The classic Roadkill question. “Oh man! A fox must have got hit.” “No--no! That wasn’t a fox, that was squirrel.” “Really, are you sure? That looked like a fox.” “Turn round, I’ll show you.”

So what the hell. If you were any older of course you’d have better things to do, but back in those Stanley Clarke school days it was like, “Alright lets turn around.” And you go back and you look and you’re like “Ah, man that’s a squirrel alright. Told you so.

“But maybe that’s a fox.”

“Oh no! come on man. Thats a squirrel and you know it.”

And of course you do know it but you’re not going to concede the point just yet because this conversation’s about it being a squirrel and its about everything but the squirrel. The argument just an excuse or a coat hook on which to hang a shared experience; a topic to return to during the lulls while you’re fishing or swimming; joking about eating squirrel for dinner or tossing frisbee fox; ‘cause there’s so much life infusing you in those strong early years that a roadkill is nothing but a trifle or a joke; nothing really tangible cause your seventeen or eighteen and you’re gonna live forever and a day and a roadkill was just an amusement in a world made for you and you alone.

So it wasn’t about whether you’d seen a fox or a squirrel but about the bond of camaraderie, the argument itself eventually morphing into a kind of ritual, repeating itself every fishing trip in the same way they sing the national anthem before a ball game--a way of saying This is our tribe and this is our common experience. This is who we are.

‘Cause when you’re eighteen and you’ve grown up near Detroit you can’t be soft. You’re not going to say, “I love these fishing trips." Or "You’re my best friend,"or anything that can be construed as gay or pusillanimous. So instead you make bets on who’ll catch the biggest fish or who can hold their hit of weed the longest; or argue about roadkills--talk about everything and anything but the importance of your friendship.

Because you don’t think you need to say it. You don’t realize at that young age that one day this two lane road is going to be a four-lane highway; or one day they’re actually going to break ground on that construction project called The Palace; or that one day the people that are close to you will grow old and change, or that you’ll change and perhaps without accomplishing a lot of those big things you were going to do. You haven’t yet gone through those experiences that develop the empathy and humanity to recognize that the insignificant squirrel that you’d seen flattened into a frisbee that first trip out to Metamora just lost the one and only life it was ever going to get and that in the overall big scheme of things maybe your life isn’t anymore important than his.

But you can’t see or feel any of that yet, cause your still back where it all began.