Willamette, Revisited
There’s this river near the house I grew up in called the Willamette. In high school, this was my “third location”. I had my house. I had my school. And everything that didn’t happen at either of those, happened at the Willamette.
I rowed on this river every day, twice a day, for 7 years. Outside of practice, I walked on its beaches. I ran its paths. I swam it’s breadth. In middle school, I did a study about the insects in it’s riparian zone. In high school, I hosted bonfires on its shores. First as a COVID necessity (with 3 masked friends sitting around a fire in the middle of April), but then, as a traditional gathering place, where I’d throw crazy parties with upwards of 20 people. This was my social life.
I only went home for a few short weeks this summer, so, in order to reconnect, I invited everyone I could think of to a bonfire. A “one year reunion”, as sad and washed up as that sounds.
Things went fine at first. We made a ridiculous attempt to place a person onto a buoy in the middle of the river, and then started our fire to warm up. As the sun went down, we enjoyed our roaring driftwood-fueled fire, our toes in the sand.
Intruders
After the sun went down, and the wayward families went home for dinner, things started to ramp up. With the beach to ourselves, we could do whatever we wanted, and not have to worry about disturbing the peace. But something wasn’t quite right: the number of adults in our part of the beach was dropping off as expected, but the number of teenagers remained constant. It might have even been rising.
This could only mean one thing: there was a dock party tonight. These decentralized parties involved hundreds of high schoolers, loud speakers, and sufficient weed and alcohol to make half of them forget the whole thing. As the groups began to coalesce, and their rival music started, we began to feel uneasy. But we decided to stand our ground. I’ve been here long before any of them, I thought.
I began introducing myself to everyone who walked by, and hyped up my friends in front of the youth. As more and more arrived, and my little Wunderboom 2 portable speaker began to be dominated by huge boomboxes, we became a tiny island of light surrounded by a sea of people.
This period of time is a blur in my memory. Repetitive conversations, hands dapped up, old faces remembered.
Then, somewhere in the commotion, a fight erupts. Two kids, barely out of middle school, wrestling on the ground. One is short and chubby, the other tall and skinny. He has braces. A croud forms around them, cheering them on. Me and my friend Oscar watch from the side. Phones record, people yell, and finally it disperses. I walk closer to the teenagers on the ground, curious how the fight ended.
They stood up and to my surprise, the look on the fighters faces wasn’t one of anger, or sadness, or victory. They both showed kinda sheepish smiles, as though they knew each other and were both on an inside joke. Then, they blended back into the crowd and another duo took it’s turn.
Maybe it was this revelation about the nature of fighting, maybe it was the testosterone in the air, or maybe just some part of me wanting to prove I was still young. Whatever it was, before I know it, I’d grabbed Oscar from behind, and dragged him to the ground.
A crowd reforms. Coated in dust and sand, I strain to get my arm around his neck from behind, forcing a chokehold. He fights back, and twists hard to the side. Now I’m in front of him, trying to turn him back around. He raises an arm against me, and we lock into position. We heave in exhaustion, staring wide-eyed, unable to move, and after ten, frozen, seconds I relax my grip, and the yells of the crowd fade away.
We fall back, arms still tangled, stare at the sky, and quietly laugh.
Maybe Fight Club had something figured out.
The mood changes
We stand up, and his smile goes away. He can’t find his phone–it must have fallen out during our wrestling match.
We search, and as we scan the sand, the vibe shifts from boyish exuberance to teenage degeneracy.
I watch fifteen year old girls walk up to random boys, desperate for someone to make out with them. I stumble past a kid lying on a bush at the edges of the party, staring into nothing, unresponsive to his surroundings. Overwhelming clouds of weed smoke make it hard to even breathe, much less find a phone. There are now multiple fights at once, and what once sounded like yells of excitement now sound like jeers and whistles.
Off to my right, there’s a disturbance in the crowd as people’s bodies move away from a patch of sand. I walk over, hoping it’s my friend’s phone. But it isn’t. Instead, there’s a kid who looks around 16, waving something around. He points it at me, and asks if I’ve seen a holster. I shake my head, confused. And then finally I realize what he’s holding.
a black pistol.
damn.
Reflections
I turned away, Oscar found his phone, and our group left pretty soon after. Everyone was fine, but I still have a sour taste in my mouth.
I keep thinking about what could have possibly led that guy to bring a gun to the river. The petty politics of high school life, excessive substance use, scared kids, people in way over their heads. It all feels so distant to me. I wondered how these people will look at these times five years from now. Will they look at themselves the same way I look at them now, as scared, scary, messed up kids?
Or, will they look at themselves the way I look at that version of myself. Burgeoning, meeting new people and being exposed to new ideas. Do the smoky crowds, random fights, and pointed guns fade with time?
The river, and the bonfires that came with it, were a formative time for me. I went from being someone who never really got invited to parties to being the guy who throws the parties. They’re when I discovered the power of organizing things, and the freedom that provides. A huge amount of who I am today came from events surrounding that river. I’ve decided to leave the Willamette to the high schoolers from now on. That’s their battlefield to fight on.