inspo/meet-cute

Martha and I had met in college. I was studying civil engineering at a small school in northern Utah. I’d gone there for the skiing. I was going to learn how to build roads into the forest. I was eighteen years old; what did I know better?

Martha was eighteen. She explained to me that what I was doing was bad, that road building in the West destroyed the last pieces of wilderness, fragmented the last sanctuaries where the wild things —the bears and the wolverines, caribou and great gray owls—holed up and hid out from man’s hungry, clumsy, stupid ways.

She told me that we had too many roads already; that the mountains and all wilderness were disappearing beneath concrete, and that what I needed to be learning to do instead was to tear up old roads and plant trees in their place.

It took me about two weeks to change my major. And I have to say it probably wasn’t her passionate defense of centuries-old forests falling to bulldozers, or soil sloughing into pristine brooks. It was her ass that converted me.

But it’s not like I followed her like a puppy; I steered clear of her wildlife science classes, her ecofeminist curriculum. I changed to literature. When she went out on her wolf howlings (thirty fucking below, in January), I usually stayed in town, at the library. I would read a life, while she lived one.

This isn’t to say we weren’t in love. We were; as much as any two young people are capable of, which is to say, a lot. Our differences — the way she was so outgoing, the way her energy poured out of her, like water over a spillway, and the way I held mine all in —these differences formed a lock on us, the way deer and wolves fit together in the woods: one’s movements always affecting the other’s.

I moved my leg slightly, the slimmest fraction of an inch, and Carol and I were touching. She sat absolutely still as Austin continued to speak. I moved again and we were touching now thigh to knee. The occasion was one of infinite subtlety. She may not have noticed the scant pressure of my leg; she may have noticed but thought nothing of it; or she may have known all along what I was doing. I edged my arm toward hers. Austin kept talking. Now our forearms were touching, the faintest inshore breeze of our bare flesh barely in contact, flesh resting on points of almost invisible silver hair. Still she was motionless, no sign either way. I waited several minutes. Then I moved my right hand across my lap and let it rest above my right knee. Carol was looking straight ahead. I was extremely nervous. The next few seconds would tell whether or not she knew and how she saw fit to respond to the knowledge. I did not want to be disappointed. It was important that she give me the right sign. I let my hand slide very slowly into the crease formed by our two legs. I let it rest there. We were both looking straight ahead. Then I felt a slight pressure from her thigh, a slight and pleasant heat on the tips of my fingers, the slightest suggestion of shifting weight, a muscle tensing, her body not moving and yet expressing movement, finding a new balance, shifting inside itself, shifting toward me. I returned the pressure and then moved several inches away. Austin kept talking and I began to relax. Carol and I looked straight ahead. It was my first ego-moment since New York.

Amanda grew up smack in the heart of the heartland. You met her in a bar and couldn’t believe your luck. You never would have worked up the hair to hit on her, but she came right up and started talking to you. As you talked you thought: She looks like a goddamned model and she doesn’t even know it. You thought of this ingenuousness as being typical of the heartland. You pictured her backlit by a sunset, knee-deep in amber waves of grain. Her lanky, awkward grace put you in mind of a newborn foal. Her hair was the color of wheat, or so you imagined; after two months in Kansas you had yet to see any wheat. You spent most of your time at zoning-board meetings duly reporting on variances for shopping malls and perc tests for new housing developments. At night, because your apartment was too quiet, you went to bars with a book.