Usually there is a guitar resting on a guitar stand adjacent the fireplace at the nature center where I volunteer. Last week the stand was there, but the guitar was gone. When Cindy, the head naturalist, walked past the front desk, I asked her where it was.
“Someone snapped off one of the tuning pegs,” she said. “and we have to decide if it’s worth fixing. No one ever plays it. Why? Do you play?”
“I used to play camp songs when I worked at a residential environmental ed program in California,” I replied. “Even then I did not play much, because half of the naturalists on staff were better musicians than I was. Two of them even play professionally now. Anita is with a folk band in the San Juan Islands, and Larry is part of an environmental song group in northern California.”
“The Banana Slug String Band?” Cindy asked.
“Yeah! How do you know about them?”
“I use their songs sometimes,” she said. “Bats eat bugs, they don’t eat people. Bats eat bugs, they don’t fly in your hair.”
I was surprised that Cindy knew of Larry’s band and its songs. She has worked as a naturalist on the East Coast and in the Midwest, and I thought that the Banana Slug String Band never got out of northern California. Obviously I was wrong.
When I got home that evening I went through my old emails to see if I still had an email address for Larry. I found one, but it was over a decade old. Still I tried it.
The address was active, and Larry wrote back the next day with a brief two-sentence update. He lives in Santa Cruz, which is less than an hour from our old camp in La Honda. The Slug Band continues to perform, and he is also part of a folk rock band called Painted Mandolin.
The short correspondence with Larry got me to reminiscing about my years at SMOE (San Mateo Outdoor Education). Even though he and I worked side by side for two years in the early 1980s, my fondest memory about our time together has nothing to do with camp. It is about a cross-country trip we took after SMOE shut down for the summer.* Larry was originally from Michigan and I was from Wisconsin, so he and I drove east together to see our parents.
What I remember most about the trip is that neither of us had money for gas. Our plan was to stop in Reno along the way and play blackjack until we’d won enough money to continue on. When we arrived at the casino, he and I sat at different tables in hopes that one of them was hot. I’d barely exchanged my money for chips when Larry ran up to me and exclaimed, “Stop playing! Stop playing! I have the money. Let’s go.”
I know this story to be true, but it is still a hard one for me to believe. I do not doubt that Larry and I had no money. Our naturalist jobs, after all, paid $125 a week, so we were often broke. The incomprehensible part is that Larry and I both thought that gambling our way across the country was a good idea. If we had a backup plan, I do not remember what it was.
I don’t have much desire to return to the carefree recklessness of my youth, but I’d like to think that I’ve retained some sense of adventure and a confidence that things usually work out. Looking back on my SMOE days also reminded me that Larry always sang Dylan’s Forever Young to the kids on their last night in camp. The kids may have been too young to fully grasp its meaning, but I wasn’t. The last line of the first verse is, “May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung; and may you stay forever young.”
* SMOE is a school program run by San Mateo County School District in northern California. Sixth graders stayed with us for week of nature study. SMOE’s season goes from September to May.
Recent Comments