Bridget was “mein Freundin Frau von Frankfurt.” And who or what was I? I remembered. I was a stooge who lent her, in those days, an air of heterosexual respectability—with nothing “sexual” about it.

At eighty years old I had made the climb and walked directly to her porch. The fifty-year-old details of our moments on the cliff and pitching her tent were intact. When we inserted the poles, the tent became a room, and I remembered a group of college boys yelling, “Get a room!” to a couple intertwined in a long kiss under a tree on campus. Anyone else at Black Rock might see us as lovers with tent, but no one was here. And I already knew that even though I was in love with Freddie, she was unspokenly not with me. That I remembered clearly. And yet I was still anticipating crawling into our “room.”

It was dark when in the tent she produced a camp candle, Brie, crackers and wine. Romantic? No, just practical, and I remember nothing of the evening. Did I suggest we zip our sleeping bags together or just think it? Was “Ah, pooh” her answer? Does a memory of something count if that something never happened?

In the morning at first light I sat up from my sleeping bag, unzipped the tent flap and looked out to see a skiff of snow covering the rock surface. Cold air blew in. Freddie had not yet stirred.

Dry, powder snow floated across in air, barely visible in the predawn light. A faint westerly wind from the cliff edge was sweeping little, longitudinal wave crests of fallen powder across the flat rock, as if drifting across a prairie in miniature. A magical, mathematical beauty. Freddie had placed us here.

There, dear Freddie, is all that is left of us at Black Rock—even if we were not an “us” then or now. You never awoke to see the waves, but you gave them to me to keep, and I will climb here again and walk straight to the place where we were.

~

Alice and I met at Freddie’s congested, noisy going-away party. All pretense that I was Freddie’s lover had crashed when she announced she was moving to Germany, and Alice, an old Catholic high school friend of Freddie’s, sat and talked with me all evening.

She was interested in my recent purchase of a sixteen-foot, two-seater canoe. She had always wanted to learn how to paddle, and with Freddie leaving, I was looking to find a woman interested in going out on the water. Alice accepted my invitation.

I took her to a shallow, quiet stretch of the Potomac River at Snyders Landing for her basics. She took right to it, a natural. We paddled upstream to the Horsebacks—vertical beds of limestone sticking up in rows across the river—and we practiced maneuvering through them upstream and down. We worked on turns and ferries. She demonstrated an innate understanding of how the force of a current acted on a hull at different angles of incidence. I did not have to explain or anticipate what she needed to do for a particular move because she got it. I was smitten by what was happening to me as we paddled in unison without thought or talk—I was falling in love with her.

Between canoe trips we discovered another unison. We were both “moody,” with unpredictable ups and downs. She suspected she might be manic-depressive but was afraid to seek a diagnosis. I had suspected the same of myself. We soon found we were often in phase with one another on the emotional roller coaster. This simpatico seemed to help us both. “It’s like us paddling on the river,” she said.

We planned a trip to Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota one night when we were manic together. I knew from experience that manic plans vanished into thin air and never appeared again. But Alice had disciplined herself to try to control the forces of mania and depression. For depression she could often fight her way through by embarking on some project, the meaning and purpose of which she would refuse to question. “The important thing is to stay busy,” she said. For a manic-made plan, she would simply resolve, “We planned it, now we gotta do it.”

Boundary Waters looked scary. Thousands of lakes that stretched between Minnesota and Ontario had been used by the voyageurs in the fur trade. The connecting lakes lay in an isolated wilderness among glacier-scoured granite outcrops of the Canadian Shield, the oldest surface rock of North America at about three billion years.

We learned we had to reserve before paddling in to camp. We found a lake that was accessible only via a half-mile portage, which we planned to train for. Such a trek should give us the solitude in nature that we were seeking, and hopefully we would not get lost.

As our departure date neared, we jointly experienced ups and downs, anticipations and dreads, just as with anything else. But we stayed focused on preparations and on repeating to ourselves that the journey was worth making.

“I see you have reserved a permit for Hegman Lake, and it appears you will have it all to yourself,” the ranger told us when we arrived.

Now the memory of forty years ago begins to play tricks. I remember carrying the canoe in with Alice, watching her walk in front of me. I remember putting in and seeing a vast empty lake before us, its shores lined with pine trees and points of granite-gneiss outcrops. The paddling, the hard work against the wind across the big water was memorable enough. During the day, we saw a pictograph of a moose on a rock. It must have been older than Canada or the U.S.—people who lived here centuries ago, whose lives disappeared just as ours would. The moose? It was their memory, as unfaded today as it was in their time.

By mid-afternoon, exhausted, we found a smooth outcrop of granite-gneiss on which we could land and take out. We knew we had to get the tent set up immediately. When we finished, Alice sat on the rock with her head in her hands. I knew that fatigue would often drop her into depression. I prepared sandwiches and got some food into her.

I can remember nothing of our evening after that, except that I realized she had been just as coordinated and synchronized in paddling as during our first day on the river. And I still loved her. The rest of the evening is just gone, like a blackout drunk, but we had no booze.

We awoke together to the sun on the side of the tent. It was cold, and we did not want to go out. We unzipped our bags and cuddled together in them. We did not make love because I knew that sometimes that could bring on depression for her. I had hoped that the exhilaration of being out in wilderness would lift her spirits to a manageably safe level, but I was not sure which way she was headed.

“Soon the sun will warm everything,” she said. “Let us be cold-blooded reptiles and lie in the sun until we are warmed into movement. You said this granite had solidified in the earth from molten magma three billion years ago and was exposed at the surface when glaciers scoured away the overlying rock. It then would have been exposed to the sun. Let us go back to that time and put ourselves on the rock in the sun.”

We lay side by side for a time we could not determine. We said nothing and only occasionally looked at one another. The sun was good. I could not count time passing, and I was not aware that I was thinking anything. Except: was she in a depression pit? A funk of silence? No. I was not in those, and neither was she. I could read that much. We were reptilian, and the only time was that it was not yet time to move.

When it was time she moved, and I followed. I felt an unaccustomed calm, and I thought she did, too. We hugged for a while. The paddling and portage and drive back out—my memory is blank until several miles down the road when we stopped at an outfitter store in Ely and were looking at postcards, aerial shots of the lakes where we had been.

“You know what,” she said. “When we were reptiles on the rock, I never for a moment had a fleeting ghost of a thought or feeling about depression. It was just not there, and not even conspicuous by its absence.”

“You’re right. It was something different. We were free.”

I have no memory of our drive home from Minnesota. Now when I think about that trip, it seems to have occurred in some previous geological period, one from which we have only scant evidence. Except for the reptile sun. It remains a time which has never moved.

I think we made a couple of river trips in the months after Minnesota, but I cannot remember anything specific. Then Alice disappeared. With her car, her belongings and her no goodbye.

To this day I cannot tell you a thing about the lives of Freddie or of Alice. As far as I was concerned, they had died. Or it had become time to move for each one.

What have not moved from my old life are the powder snow drifting across quartzite rock and the reptilian sun of granite time.