Mountainside Pondering and Playing With Bugs

Sunday night, I wanted to get out and enjoy the beautiful night air. As it turns out, so did Javier, so after he put his little one to sleep, we drove up to the "Y" on the side of the mountain and hiked up. It was a first for both of us. It was totally dark by the time we got up there, so we were walking by night vision.

It was a little awkward pulling up onto the overlook and starting the hike up the mountainside, being two guys and all. I said, "Um...it kind of seems like we should have at least one female or a group of people...or something." But we just shrugged, dealt with looking like a "couple", as we'd done plenty of times before (remember the time in Salt Lake when he was buying a mixer for his wife at the antique store, and the staff kept telling us what a great deal "we" were getting?), and we hiked on.

The winding trail was actually a little longer than I'd imagined, but not bad. And I hadn't given it much thought, but of course the Y was extremely thin and elongated when you're up there, to make it look proportional from below. We made bets as to how many people we'd run into along the way. Javier won: 2.

From the Y, we found Javier's house among Prozac Valley's peacefully twinkling panorama of lights and called his dad to flash a flashlight at us to confirm the location. We flashed back. We talked about the ponderous things twenty-somethings are supposed to talk about while looking down on distantly diminutive civilization from the lofty perspective of a mountainside. And we talked about lighter things that have no place in deep mountainside conversation. We were amused by a car in a church parking lot far below us driving around in circles and figure eight patterns. We heard spinning tires. We wondered what kind of bright, green light someone was playing with on top of a building 'cause it was friggin sweet (that's how we say things in Utah). We flashed flashlights back and forth between someone else in a tower at BYU.


We made up stories about who was flashing back at us. I decided it was two pasty-complected, video game addicted and porn addicted freshmen with poor hygiene habits doing the same thing they do every night: communicating with any signs of life they don't have to actually interact with. He decided it was a bunch of scantily clad, hot girls jumping up and down, having a pillow fight and giggling, and they were apparently distracted from their activities by the flashing light on the hill and flirtatiously signaled back. Hey, it could happen.

In short, we were total nerds and hung out on the Y for a while, tossing rocks down and listening to them tumble an impressively long time before finally reaching the bottom of the Y. Cupping our ears to gather the sounds of the valley, not unlike listening to a seashell. On the way back down, we played with millipedes and crickets and spiders. We wished our entomologist buddy were with us, but alas, she's in Cali. No dice. Yeah, we're nerds--you'd never guess we're approaching thirty. But hey, sometimes I forget how relaxing it is just to be with old friends you can have fun doing almost anything with, and how refreshing simple pleasures like playing with bugs can be.