I walked into the old northern bar, it had been my home for the last 6 years. The wood in the walls is now 100 years old. The warmth of this place and its people carried me through a war, through my return home, through a breakup, and into a new life that too would also fail. I took these walls and their uniqueness for granted towards the end. It was just that comfortable.
Rumors of dissatisfaction had helped with that, but I still loved all of my friends here. The bartender was more than I ever imagined he would be. He was a true friend throughout it all and never failed to take his stand when he needed to. His raw courage would seem obsolete anywhere else in the world, but here, it was very respected. The only time he does not take a stand is when it challenges the girl. Miss Northwest Passage. He held her in the highest esteem, even to his own injury.
The girl really was something after all. Her life being only one-third of his lacked the decades of frontierism, but this did not matter because when the do-or-die moments arrived, even if the bartender did not know what to do, the girl was born knowing and when she spoke, she was an amazon, whom no one dared challenge. She knew what she wanted. She arrived with the astronaut but made her mind up on the bartender and there was no one anywhere on earth that was going to change the way that she felt.
The astronaut was shattered and therefore true to nature vowed to kill the bartender despite their lifelong friendship. The bartender made the first move, he had stared down death many times. They were friends again although at times, the lines blurred. But all the astronaut wanted was someone special in his life, and he fought over and over to have that and principles kept tearing her out of his arms. Would he ever win what he wanted so badly?
Everyone’s friend, the voice on the radio, provided convenient rationalization to all of us if somehow we ended up not being enough. Then like in a dream, the surroundings changed and the reasoning behind our inadequacy took on a more deeper and intrinsic meaning. That manifests itself in twilight abstract under the aurora borealis. The best part was, we just went with it. He was never down on his friends, well rarely, and he could bring optimism to a nearby mushroom cloud sighting.
The first man I ever met in town was an inconveniently loyal friend and he grew before my eyes. I know as the years go by I will always think of him and find more depth and more treasure. He skeptically answered a call to become a shaman, and yet somehow his heart was always found in celluloid.
The wise storekeeper although a senior woman of little means, in my opinion, was really the person who had the most control over her own life and more influence than the affluent members of town. She has a very special place in my heart and she always will. I miss her.
Dearest Marilyn. In all of the time that I knew her, those words would only fill just a few pages, but she said more than many of the most outspoken people who ever lived. She is a testament to the fact that less is more. When a storm rages out of control, a quiet word from this beautiful soul sets everything right. I loved everything about her, even when her silence edified my own imperfections. She was not perfect, but she was as close to it as she could be.
I thought of the doctor and the man who was really behind him. In the years that passed after finding his jeweled city of the north, did he have regrets? It was an important time in his life, but in taking his stand for his career, did he truncate the most amazing experience of his life? I dare say that he did have regrets, maybe not that first day as he stood on the Staten Island Ferry, but in the decades that passed, he slowly began to look in the mirror and ask, “What have you done?” I know he tried to get back, but the world flipped upside down and like a space capsule lost and floating off into oblivion, it can never be.
The last day came, and we crested the top of the hill. 6 years of solitude, and friendship closing. I got on the bus and looked out the window as we slowly drove out of the dusty little town. It had been the mecca of the north and the mind. Along the way, I learned of their visions for the future, their hopes and dreams. I saw them grow, cry, compromise, win, and lose.
Most of the friends in town had to take on more than they were designed to. In some ways that created a facsimile effect on their personage, especially on the last day. Some do their last day with stellar surprise, don’t you Mr. Louden, or should I say Hartley? Others have everything change suddenly like those wayward friends outside of Uijeongbu, Korea, like our friends in Everwood, Colorado.
Here in Cicely, the change was a slow underburn that those who were only paying attention to the surface did not see. They all rolled so well with the changes. Because we loved them all so much, it was nice to see the shift and the exploration of the people. Sometimes it got weird and became a stretch that we as guests once allowed a limitless measure on, the contraction of that license became evident in the last days, especially on the last day.
As for our dearest Mary Margaret, the once decisive pilot became watered down when her tether broke allowing her to float nebulously into space without the explosive but solid connection with the doctor. She just smiled and rolled with it, like suddenly on medication with side effects that subdued one’s personality, often like John Lennon during the Get Back sessions.
Holling, that great hunter turned bartender, grew so much, meeting and defeating so many demons, but on the last day was reduced to nothing. This was a reminder that we not only lost Joel but the great minds behind the magic as well.
A thank you is in order, for allowing the astronaut to finally find love. He had to find it within what he perceived as loss. Even if his learning was accidental, on the last day he was given what he had been searching for.
Chris, that great spinner of wisdom who did not understand the words he alone spoke, but learned from them anyway was given a gift that was not his, someone who looked like someone we knew but was nothing like her. Sadly on his last day except for his last words, he was the sum total of those dark bits we had been told he had grown past.
Phil and his wife it is no fault of their own that they owned the gloom that they were forced to try to pretend it did not exist. You were invited in as a victim of circumstances.
As the bus drives out of site and the good people of Cicely go to sleep, they all stand in their respective places where we love and remember them. The last three decades should have allowed the chance to get back together. But after 1995, something happened to the world. As the information age raced on we lost something that we could never get back. We started to see all of the ugliness that was always here in the world, there was just no conduit to make it visible.
In the years that passed things got even worse, buildings fell in fiery rage in the jeweled city, and there were even more wars. People just tried to get through the days they were in. We only lived in defense, nothing more, nothing less.
Tranquility Base was more than the end of Cicely for me, it was the end of the innocence. It was the last days of the world as it once was. We had to grow into the knowledge that we had even though it broke us. As the sun set, and the last view of Cicely disappeared in the back window I drifted off to sleep as the bus disappeared into the midst of oblivion.