At eighteen I believed I was in total control of my life. So much so, I thought it changed forever when I decided not to eat at a Culver’s. Us five ravenous, recently-graduated highschoolers had just finished a four-day backpacking trip on Isle Royale, a remote island in Lake Superior. We spent the days hiking, taking in sweeping views of the lake, reveling in our newfound freedom, and dreaming of a juicy butter burger to cap off our time in the woods. Despite some vocal protests from Alec and the others, I held tight to our planned itinerary. Instead of booking it down to Culver’s, we’d make our way slowly down the shore and stop for one last night of camping at Temperance River.
The park is a natural marvel. Placards by the steep ravines call the river nature’s drill bit in a nod to the current’s narrow yet powerful track down the iron range. Its mouth flows straight into Lake Superior, wide open like a mouth mid-laugh. Some say it was named ironically— that there was no ‘bar’ to separate where the current feeds into the lake. The park was a staple of my childhood and I count many happy memories swimming where the sun-warmed river blended with Superior’s frigid waters. I wanted to share it all with them, especially Alec.
We planned the trip together, drawing on our previous experiences backpacking. We’d spent two weeks camping in the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area in Wyoming a few years back through a local YMCA camp. It was a brutal time on trail, with both of us collapsing each night by the time we reached our campsite. It didn’t help that our one tent was crowded between the six of us boys, and to prove my hardiness I regularly volunteered Alec to sleep in the open air under a tarp draped over a thin rope tied between two trees. We woke in the night to the slightest rustles, terrified we’d see some nondescript animal peering at us from the edges of the tarp. Alec never volunteered us, but he still slept beside me. As scary as it was, we also found ourselves stumbling out at two in the morning to pee only to linger for half-an-hour in awe at the blanket of stars. In the years after, sitting in our high school journalism class while planning our Isle Royale trip, he confessed to me while we perused ferry schedules.
“On our Big Horns trip, there were entire days where I was so miserable that all I thought about was falling down a gorge, breaking my legs, and being airlifted out.” I laughed as he continued to explain. “But now, when I look back, what I remember most is all of us scooping our hands into that snowbank we found and pouring kool-aid powder over the top.”
“I think it was the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted,” I replied while he nodded along.
At Temperance River, we set up the tent to air out and then headed for a swim. The water rose higher than in my memories. It was June, and the remnants of the spring snowmelt still rushed down the range. Other swimmers lounged on the shore while we jumped in, swimming to the river’s far side and hoisting ourselves up on the rocky banks. The rootbeer-coloured water rushed past, carrying the tannins from the tamarack trees that line the sides. The current’s lull beckoned us, so we decided to jump in where it was stronger. I jumped in first, beneath a small slope where water flowed from a pool above it. It was a strange feeling; the water pushed more down than out. After a few strong kicks I was caught in a fun slip-stream toward the lake. Laughing, I climbed up the bank and watched Emma jump in next.
She struggled to navigate the conflicting flows and let out a little yelp. Alec jumped in after her, but by the time his head came up from the water she’d already managed to find the current and moved downstream. I couldn’t tell if he was looking for her, or if he was caught himself. From twenty feet down, I yelled.
“Emma is safe, just follow the current!” There was panic in his eyes as he treaded water. Others started to yell; our friends and strangers trying to guide him. In the blink of an eye he slipped under. The flash of a foot popped through the river’s amber hue downstream from where he’d been. I stood on the side of the bank. Other swimmers reached into the river from its edges, diving back in to search for him. Onlookers from the bridge above covered their faces with their hands, others called 911. Turning, I ran towards the river’s mouth, stumbling across the beach where it flowed into Lake Superior. My eyes scanned the current’s dark pockets, looking for a flash of limb––something pale, another foot. But I never saw one.
***
The following August I started college at a small liberal arts school in Ticino— Switzerland’s only Italian-speaking canton. By the end of my first year there I’d had sex with three people, in three countries, and heard fuck me yelled in three languages. The first time was at a bathhouse by Milano Centrale. I took the hour train ride south from Lugano to meet up with a friend, but lingered afterwards. Chalking it up to boredom and horniness, I pressed the buzzer beside the entrance door. After stripping naked I slipped into the large jacuzzi, taking note of the few other patrons. They were all Italian men; their chatter, barely audible above the bubbles, filled my ears as I looked toward the ceiling. Soon, one of the men slid next to me, gliding his hand over the top of my thigh. I looked toward him and he bent his head to kiss me. I leaned into it. His stubble was the first remarkable thing I felt, etching across my cheeks and chin. Soon, he swallowed all I had to offer.
I felt dirty after the first few times. In Barcelona I stopped inside a 24-hour-kiosk and bought a new toothbrush to get a man’s taste out of my mouth. I paced the streets and found myself at a midnight showing of Lady Macbeth dubbed in Catalonian: guilt, culpability, death. I got the message even without reading the English subtitles.
The back of the theater was empty, and I sat half listening to the dubbed-over voice on Florence Pugh’s face. One of the film’s final lines struck me more like a desire than a truth— “I did — nothing.” Crawling into my hostel bed that night, I took comfort in believing that I couldn’t be gay if I felt so hollow afterwards.
My desire and grief overlapped like wonky laminate. I didn’t know how to fit them together properly. A large part of me resisted coming out because I thought there’d be assumptions about my relationship with Alec, and he wasn’t around to corroborate the truth. The truth that I loved him, and I’m sure he loved me, but in a way that was entirely unromantic. But if I was gay, what would people think of our friendship? What assumptions would they make? I didn’t want to know.
Going to college in Europe and jet setting on cheap Ryanair flights offered affordances for escapism. But the distance created fractures too. I was scared to become someone so different from the person Alec knew. I thought that accepting my sexuality would somehow mean that Alec never knew the real me, that we were strangers. I didn’t know what to do. My midnight rendezvouses with men filled me with a familiar blend of dread and meekness, a stifling shame. When my eyes closed afterwards, it wasn’t the men’s faces I saw, but the river scene playing on a loop.
The first time I went to a gay bar was in Lille. I’d gone there for a long weekend with my friends Demi and Clary. There wasn’t much to see tourist-wise, so we spent the days wandering streets and the nights drinking with locals. Lille was a large university town, so most people were around our age. I stayed out after my friends went back to the hostel. I’d become accustomed to these solo expeditions, lurking off when everyone else went to sleep. I usually just paced the streets, wandering from corner-to-corner, refreshing Grindr every few steps. But that night, something was different. I didn’t want to hook-up; I wanted to be somewhere queer.
The first backpacking trip I ever took was a multi-day hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back up to the rim. I was in the fifth grade, and my two siblings and our parents had never done any overnight hiking trips prior. Even with a seasoned guide and an extra day allotted to split the climb back up in half, it would be tough. I don’t remember much, except that this trip overlapped with my reading of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. I wore a red Reebok fleece, athletic shorts, and a pair of white gas-station sunglasses that quickly muddled with the canyon’s red dust. I didn’t particularly like or dislike the trip, but I remember being jealous of the people who got to ride mules along the same route.
That night in Lille, I stumbled upon a bar called “Le Privilege.” The name was etched in unassuming white letters on an upper window, green ivy covered the facade, three bull skulls sat perched along the top, and a tiny Pride sticker was stuck on their window. I ducked inside, unsure of what to expect.
My most vivid memory of the Grand Canyon trek was stopping on our second night at a campsite by Plateau Point. It was an easy spur trail to the edge of the rock, where nothing but a small iron guardrail separated you from the steep drop into the Colorado River. It terrified me, and I only glimpsed over the edge for a few seconds before retreating to the relative safety of the plateau.
The gay bar was as neon as I imagined, with bright signs and fluorescent drinks catching the colorful lights. French bars are daunting enough, but entering one packed with attractive men was terrifying. I made a beeline for the bar.
“One beer please,” I said.
“American?” He asked.
“Yep, just visiting for the weekend.” He popped the cap off the bottle as I spoke.
“We don’t get many tourists in Lille. Enjoy.” His voice was monotonous but sincere. I thanked him, and slowly made my way to a corner. Once there, I began to take in the scene.
Men were laughing, slapping each other on biceps and backs. Some were dancing, their lips puckering to take small sips from their straws. The walls were covered in colorful decor. I stood in the corner, slowly sipping my beer while examining all the artifacts. I thought I looked mysterious and believed that men would approach me and want to talk to me, that by somehow merely existing in a gay space that I would transform into an object of desire.
No one besides the bartender talked to me that night at Le Privilege. But then again, I didn’t talk to anyone either. Still, on my walk back to the hostel, I felt warm. It was the hot rush of intimacy, or at least the possibility of it. The queer without the sex; the gay without the shame.
After the trip to the Grand Canyon, my family would head out on a backpacking trip every two years or so. Time on trail felt different, it was a space where bodies and time decompressed. It was that freedom I wanted to share when I convinced Alec to sign up for the trip to Wyoming, and when we planned our trip together senior year. I felt it there too, in the bar. An overlap between unexpected spheres: Death and birth. Guilt and sacrifice. Growth and remembrance. My grief, sexuality and love of the outdoors were linked, explicitly. Sex wasn’t the issue, but that didn’t make it the solution. It was futile trying to untangle it all.
***
Near Lugano lies the small town of Montagnola and the Hermann Hesse museum. It was there, among the green rolling hills and distant lake views that the writer found himself in 1919. He later described his first year there as, “the fullest, most prolific, most industrious and most passionate time of my life.” A few years later, in 1922, he published his novel Siddhartha. I came across it during my time there. Although inspired by his interest in Buddhism and Indian culture, I was drawn most to the natural themes— especially those of the river.
After Alec’s drowning, one of the first things I did was submerge myself in water, refusing to fear it— and I never did. But there was still a sense of betrayal, an unwillingness to trust. Hesse writes that, “When you throw a stone into the water, it finds the quickest way to the bottom of the water.” I wondered who the stone was. Where the bottom was.
Hiking felt like sinking, but nightclubs were imbued with that uncanny mixture of warmth and sweat, light and dark, comfort and thrill; the tenets of hiking I loved. My brain shut off for a few hours while my body worked; it was exhausting and energizing in the best way. I came out in these spaces— basked in neon rather than sunshine— but something lingered.
Hating the river felt easy. It took no effort. But then again, it was exhausting. I’d closed the door on a piece of my life that brought me so much happiness. Its ripples didn’t end at the river’s edge, they seeped into other aspects of life–– like my issues with queerness and intimacy. The rooted belief that love and hate could flip easily, like a switch, in the wake of a tragedy didn’t seem correct. Hesse goes on to write that, “It seemed to him as if the river had something special to tell him, something which he did not know, something which still awaited him.”
It took years, but one summer decided to try, setting out to hike the 250-mile-long Superior Hiking Trail. It meanders along the North Shore of Minnesota from the Canadian border down to Duluth, crossing through state parks along the way—including Temperance River. The years prior, I began backpacking again, but returning to the shores of Lake Superior would be like picking a scab, rehashing a wound I knew hadn’t fully healed. But time’s lure sunk into my skin, its barbed hook reeling me back.
The Temperance River crossing was almost a week into my hike, and about halfway through the trail. My thoughts leading up to the river centered on Alec, but also on myself. To mourn Alec properly I needed to not only detach him from his death, but to separate the river from its sharp edge. When Siddartha sat beside the river to learn from it, it laughed at him, “Yes, that was how it was. Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same arrows were undergone.” It would be there, on the bridge above Temperance River, where I could finally rip the arrows out entirely.
July’s heat drew pools of sweat from me, and the humidity countered any hope of the sun drying my damp clothes. As I made my way down towards the river’s mouth, anxiety began to bubble. Would I be overcome with sadness? Would the traumatic loop of events replay when I closed my eyes? Hesse writes that, “Is it not true, my friend, that the river has many voices? Has it not the voice of a king, of a warrior, of a bull, of a nightbird, of a pregnant woman and a sighing man, and a thousand other voices?” I placed so much importance on this act of revisiting, this symbolic ripping out of the arrows, that it seemed impossible it was only moments away. I opened my ears, desperate to hear all the river had to say, to stand where beauty met catastrophe.
After setting my pack down beside me, it was difficult to listen—mostly because of the summer crowd. Rather than hearing the river, I heard actual children laughing and screaming, boots scuttling across loose gravel, and muffled conversations. As my eyes looked out to the lake through the river’s mouth, all I saw was the sun’s glare coating them both. Even under the scorching July sun, there were no swimmers in the water. An elderly woman and middle-aged man stood beside me on the bridge, speaking to one another.
“I remember swimming in this river as a kid,” she said.
“Really? It looks dangerous, like the current is moving pretty fast,” he replied.
“I was thinking the same thing. But I can’t remember if the river was actually different back then, or if it’s just my memories that paint a much mellower picture of it.” She paused before continuing. “But I know that people don’t swim here much anymore. There’ve been a few drownings recently.”
Her comment wasn’t really what took me by surprise; it was the nonchalance of her declaration, as if it were as matter-of-fact as the placards with geologic facts. Here, beneath your feet, is a river where people have drowned. Where young, promising lives met their end.
I stood no longer waiting for the warm rush of enlightenment to wash over me; in fact I realized it’d come drop by drop in the years since Alec’s death. My queerness taught me that there’s a thick line between acceptance and denial–– a gorge wide enough for a river to run through. A river I jumped into years ago that I could never control.
Its laughter didn’t fill my ears, but Alec’s did. I remember reading somewhere that a person’s laugh is one of the first things you forget about them. But I’ve never even come close to forgetting Alec’s. Standing there, on the bridge, he felt like anything but a stranger. All I wanted to do was laugh with him again. So I did.
