Matt

I welcome the rain. The humidity and heat have been steadily edging into my brain, with only one brief reprise for a few hours one night this entire week. I welcome the rain, though of course it’s not just rain, we got an e-mail with a tornado warning, and the light just flickered and the thunder was a crack right by my ear.

The semester is off to a good start, but I will write about that later.

The Sunday before I left home, I went to climb Mt. Washington with Папа, Yosef, and his best friend. The peak is at 6,288 ft (1,917 m) and the highest wind recorded there was 231 mph (372 km/h), which was the world record until a few years ago. For me these numbers only make sense when Папа told me that the air is thinner at the top, though unlike many of the mountains he's climbed, I can actually manage this one. The day we went wasn’t too hot or too cold, and there was hardly any wind. Папа  says he has never seen such perfect conditions there, ever. Granted, he has a tendency to climb it when there’s snow. The mountain does tend to attract clouds though, that’s true. 

I hadn’t climbed the mountain since I was nine, and then we had arrived at the top soaking wet from the rain and took the last train down. Last time I remember Папа bought me hot cocoa at the top, which burnt my tongue as I too-eagerly tried to drink it. It was strange arriving at the top this time, because many of the people up there had driven, and we still had ways to go before the end of our journey.This time I bought a banana and stole sips of cocoa from my brother.

On the way down, when there was only about twenty minutes left to go (we had started around eleven in the morning, and it was near eight, the sun was setting) we bumped into two other hikers, an old man and a young man. My dad started talking to the older guy, probably in his 60’s, and we soon left them behind, catching up to the two 13-year-olds that had decided to run off ahead. 

The guy I ended up talking to was twenty-something, from Oxford, MA. Shorter than me, with braces and a beard and he introduced himself as Matt at the end of our conversation. He has a job painting lines on the road. His father and grandfather had done the same, and he likes it, says it pays well. In the winter, he gets laid off and gets unemployment until the weather clears up and he can paint lines again. He was planning on staying in his jeep for night and hiking another peak in the morning. He turned out not to be the adopted Russian son of the 60-year-old man, and in fact had just met the man half an hour ago. The old man had looked slightly confused so he was walking down with him and was going to give him a ride to his car, since it wasn’t on the main lot. We were talking about New England* and skiing came up and he said something about being a loser for not knowing how to ski, which was absurd, and he was looking forward to moving to Maine (his job moves him around, you can’t paint road lines in the same place all the time) because of the solitude and mountains, and how photography allows you to remove yourself from a social scene without actually leaving it. We talked about psychology and orphans and the fact that he likes to go to the Middle East café in Cambridge for music concerts, though he generally shies away from the city (and, it seems, people in general.) 

Eventually my dad came down carrying the old man, whose legs had given way from exhaustion.

Matt went to get his jeep and drove the old man to his car. And that was that, and it left me thinking, yet again, about how narrow a world I live in, and how few people I meet.

*fun fact: when I was little I thought New England was just another name for the USA. The fact that my dad’s map of New England was different from what other maps of the USA did cause a moment of pause for me, even then.