Twenty-five years ago on this date, a younger version of me was sweating a first day at work, figuring out bus schedules because the clutch was shot, and somehow also lamenting the sorry state of dial-up internet in 2001. Not on the right track, I wrote. Time will tell.
Time did tell. It told a lot, actually. There was Marcy, my dog, who absolutely annihilated a bird family on a Blue Mountain hike and earned herself a permanent ban from anywhere with wildlife. There was a Missoula coffee shop that waged a quiet war against laptop users, and I documented the whole espresso scam in exhausting, glorious detail. Meanwhile the mountains kept calling. Pintler trails and snow too deep to finish. A race that probably should have been cancelled but wasn't.
A few years in, tattered shoes and ragged pants became an unexpected source of leverage, and asking for more felt both terrifying and necessary. There were fat bike epics, three-fold goals up to Fairy Lake, and fitness described as a precarious Jenga tower always one block from collapse.
The Beartooths showed up, and so did the striking silence of Valley of Fire. And then came a funeral that became something else entirely, where mom engineered the reunion none of us would have planned on our own.
Most recently, stingrays and uncertainty and the quiet act of paying attention at a Seattle aquarium. Still building the tower, still pulling blocks, still somehow standing.
June 16th has been a lot of things. Never boring.