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.Anything was possible.The sky was the limit.WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE to be alive?Living, you stand under a waterfall.You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall.The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms.The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed.Can you breathe here? Here where the force is greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face? Yes, you can breathe even here.You could learn to live like this.And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where maples grow straight and their leaves lean down.For a joke you try to raise your arms.What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!It is time pounding at you, time.Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.Who turned on the lights? You did, by waking up: you flipped the light switch, started up the wind machine, kicked on the flywheel that spins the years.Can you catch hold of a treetop, or will you fly off the diving planet as she rolls? Can you ride out the big blow on a coconut palm’s trunk until you fall asleep again, and the winds let up? You fall asleep again, and you slide in a dream to the palm tree’s base; the winds die off, the lights dim, the years slip away as you idle there till you die in your sleep, till death sets you cruising down the Tamiami Trail.Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you, rear, kick, and try to throw you; you hang on to the ring.It is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping.Or, conversely, you step aside from the dreaming fast loud routine and feel time as a stillness about you, and hear the silent air asking in so thin a voice, Have you noticed yet that you will die? Do you remember, remember, remember? Then you feel your life as a weekend, a weekend you cannot extend, a weekend in the country.O Augenblick verweile.My friend Judy Schoyer was a thin, messy, shy girl whose thick blond curls lapped over her glasses.Her cheeks, chin, nose, and blue eyes were round; the lenses and frames of her glasses were round, and so were her heavy curls.Her long spine was supple; her legs were long and thin so her knee socks fell down.She did not care if her knee socks fell down.When I first knew her, as my classmate at the Ellis School, she sometimes forgot to comb her hair.She was so shy she tended not to move her head, but only let her eyes rove about.If my mother addressed her, or a teacher, she held her long-legged posture lightly, alert, like a fawn ready to bolt but hoping its camouflage will work a little longer.Judy’s family were members of the oldest, most liberal, and best-educated ranks of Pittsburgh society.They were Unitarians.I visited her Unitarian Sunday school once.There we folded paper to make little geese; it shocked me to the core.One of her linear ancestors, Edward Holyoke, had been president of Harvard University in the eighteenth century, which fact paled locally before the greater one, that her great-grandfather’s brother had been one of the founding members of Pittsburgh’s Duquesne Club.She was related also to Pittsburgh’s own Stephen Foster.Judy and her family passed some long weekends at a family farmhouse in the country on a little river, the nearest town to which was Paw Paw, West Virginia.When they were going to the farm, they said they were going to Paw Paw.The trip was a four-hour drive from Pittsburgh.Often they invited me along.There in Paw Paw for the weekend I imagined myself in the distant future remembering myself now, twelve years old with Judy.We stood on the high swinging plank bridge over the river, in early spring, watching the first hatch of small flies hover below us.The river was a tributary of the distant Potomac—a tributary so stony, level, and shallow that Judy’s grandmother regularly drove her old Model A Ford right through it, while we hung out over the running boards to try and get wet.From above the river, from the hanging center of the swinging bridge, we could see the forested hill where the big house stood.There at the big house we would have dinner, and later look at the Gibson girls in the wide, smelly old books in the cavernous living room, only recently and erratically electrified.And from the high swinging bridge we could see in the other direction the log cabin, many fields away from the big house, where we children stayed alone: Judy and I, and sometimes our friend Margaret, who had a dramatic, somewhat morbid flair and who wrote poetry, and Judy’s good-natured younger brother.We cooked pancakes in the cabin’s fireplace; we drew water in a bucket from the well outside the door.By Friday night when we’d carried our duffel and groceries from the black Model A at the foot of the hill, or over the undulating bridge if the river was high, when we children had banged open the heavy log-cabin door, smelled the old logs and wood dust, found matches and lighted the kerosene lanterns, and in the dark outside had drawn ourselves a bucket of sweet water (feeling the rope go slack and hearing the bucket hit, then feeling the rope pull as the bucket tipped and filled), and hunted up wood for a fire, smelled the loamy nighttime forest again, and heard the whippoorwill—by that time on Friday night I was already grieving and mourning, only just unpacking my nightgown, because here it was practically Sunday afternoon and time to go.“What you kids need,” Mrs.Schoyer used to say, “is more exercise.”How exhilarating, how frightening, to ride the tippy Model A over the shallow river to the farm at Paw Paw, to greet again in a new season the swaying bridge, the bare hills, the woods behind the log cabin, the hayloft in the barn—and know I had just so many hours.From the minute I set foot on that land across the river, I started ticking like a timer, fizzing like a fuse.On Friday night in the log cabin at Paw Paw I watched the wild firelight on Judy’s face as she laughed at something her cheerful brother said, laughed shyly even here.When she laughed, her cheeks rose and formed spheres.I loved her spherical cheeks and knocked myself out to make her laugh.I could hardly see her laughing eyes behind her glasses under hanging clumps of dark-blond curls.She was nimble, swaybacked, long-limbed, and languid as a heron, and as abrupt.In Pittsburgh she couldn’t catch a ball—nearsighted; she perished of bashfulness at school sports.Here she could climb a tree after a kitten as smoothly as a squirrel could, and run down her nasty kicking pony with authority, and actually hit it, and scoop up running hens with both swift arms.She spoke softly and not often.Judy treated me with amused tolerance.At school I was, if not a central personage, at least a conspicuous one; and I had boyfriends all along and got invited to the boys’ school dances.Nevertheless, Judy put up with me, not I with Judy.She possessed a few qualities that, although they counted for nothing at school, counted, I had to admit, with me.Her goodness was both intrinsic and a held principle.This thin, almost speechless child had moral courage.She intended her own life—starting when she was about ten—to be not only harmless but good.I considered Judy’s goodness, like Judy’s farm, a nice place to visit.She put up with my fast-talking avoidance of anything that smacked of manual labor
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