Deep Springs (Scene 5)

As the fall semester drew to a close, winter break beckoned. Ethan knew his spiritual journey was far from complete, that the lessons he had learned and the love he had found were so different from the normie world he’d experience back home in New York over Christmas.

Home? To Ethan, that word didn’t mean what it used to. Here in the Springs, in his valley, he had found a new home, a new family, and a new soul. His twenty years in The Big Apple was a distant dream of an existence he could only now remember in shards, but never fully embrace again.

Ava had taken an earlier flight, and their goodbye had been tearful.

On the good news front, he had asked Dr. Norton about getting a single in The Tramp’s Shack for spring semester. The dean had promised nothing, but Ethan was hopeful.

Now, he stood on the steel tubes of the cattle grid under the timber-hewn ranch arch that marked the entrance to the campus, the inverted “T” of the Double L logo hanging from its wooden crossbeam, waiting for his ride to the airport. Ethan removed his fleece jacket and piled it on his canvas travel bag. Living in the High Desert was all about layering. On a day like today in late-December, the highs crashed to ten degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of the night, and then shot up to seventy at midday. As he waited, the temperature climbed.

He mentally prepared himself to face Manhattan once again. Mom’s last letter asked him to pray for Alex. His brother had been acting weird before Ethan left back in August. “Too many bad drugs,” he had shared with Ava one evening. “Alex’s probably turned his brain to Swiss cheese. I’m not sure you get to come back from that.” But August was a lifetime ago on another planet called New York City.

He never did pray for Alex, at least not the way his mother had meant. No rosaries. No novenas. He simply couldn’t do that kind of praying any more. That kiddie Catholicism of his youth was dead. He had discovered something greater. He had glimpsed what it meant to be one with the universe, and wasn’t that essentially what all religions sought? Unity with the eternal? Whatever churches could offer, his God was bigger than that.

But there was no sense in making Mom worried that he had become some sort of mad hippie. No, Ethan would method act his way through the winter break, at first studying the dozens of gestures that constituted living in the Holloway home until they became reflexes again. All the while waiting, waiting until at last, he could return to Ava here in their valley.

A cloud of red dust swirled up in the crevice where the mountains joined the horizon. His ride would be here any minute. He took a deep breath to steady himself, folding the fleece jacket over his forearm and hoisting the canvas bag on his shoulder. With a mixture of excitement and trepidation, Ethan prepared to step across the cattle grate and back into the world.