Five years ago I was walking with friends on the Chemin de St Jacques in Southern France when I found out that David had died… right around the moment we began the walk.
began lighting candles in his memory, and thinking of our lives, and thinking about creating this site. The first church I found was this little one in the middle of an intersection, outside the small village of Nasbros. 
The day of his memorial service, there was only one village anywhere near where I would be when the time came… I hoofed it hard all day to reach Montgros… sounded like a place that might have a nice cathedral.
It turns out to be the only village we encountered without a church!
I left the village and sat on a large rock, thought of all the adventures and misadventures we’d had, thought of our less-connected adult lives, thought of Judy, Dave, Joan, Christine and their families, of the losses of almost all our various parents in recent years…
Five years later, I was back on the same path, with the same friends, and I stopped to meditate for a while on the same spot. Here’s a cross near the rock.
I still think of Dave when I’m hiking or in wild places like we traveled with Al, Karen, Eva, Pat, Kert, and Vince.
A random conversation reminded me of a pasttime Dave and I shared… in the Hinman family rec-room were three items of importance: a ping-pong table, a stereo system, and a refrigerator.
Throughout our teen years, when weather was poor, or we didn’t feel like going outside, we would migrate down to the fluorescently lit rec-room, pick out an LP, and bat a ping-pong ball back and forth for a while. Neither of us were very good. The fact that there was a steel I-beam running across the room over the net, at about 7.5 feet, didn’t help, except it occasionally added hilarity.
We listened to Styx, Kansas, Boston, Billy Squier, Van Halen… and played ping pong, and drank ginger ale or coke or pepsi.. and talked about stuff. Talked about friends and music, school and girls, about dreams and inventions… and some of memories we already shared.
I can smell the room, the paddles, steel/rust on my fingers after hanging from the I-beam… the sound of the freezer in the pantry room attached, the colors of the walls, floor, carpet. The pencil rubbings on the walls from a family trip to England. A prized model of a Standard Oil gas pump that sat on the bar. And, at some point later, after Dave and I had gone off to college, a bitterly disputed poster my mom had originally hung on my bedroom door, a modern stylized graphic of a man holding his light-bulb-threaded head in one arm, the caption “If it wasn’t screwed on…”
I guess it went there with my mom, when she married Dave’s dad? Or maybe she’d gotten one for his family when she got that one for me? She and I had the worst fight I can remember when she put it on my door… It took me years to realize that I felt it meant she didn’t respect me, or thought poorly of me in some way, and I didn’t have the words or awareness to understand that and verbalize it to her.
Boys. Feelings. Sometimes we’re not so good at recognizing them. How much simpler and better life would be if men were more self-aware, and could more often say “Ouch, that hurts, it makes me feel like you don’t like me as I am.”
Anyway. I don’t think such a topic ever came up in such a form, playing ping-pong in the rec-room. Teenage boys are buffeted about by their feelings with about as much control as a ping-pong ball. We get caught in the net or go flying off the table a lot.
David’s mother Suzanne was the one who started our families on the road toward each other… literally. In the Summer after my 4th grade year I was walking down Woodland Trail when a beautiful woman in a convertible slowed along side me. She said “I have a son who I believe is about your age, and we’ve just moved into town. Would you like to meet him?” I replied “Yes”, and she said that she wouldn’t drive me, but rather that they lived at the T intersection of Woodland and Ski Hill Road, and I could walk down and she’d meet me there.
David and his twin older sisters Christine and Joan had moved to the dunes from Southern California. Exotic, to me, although they were actually moving back to the area, having lived in Valparaiso for some time before California. They moved to follow Dave’s father Jack’s work.
In the decade to follow Dave and I became best friends, and spent thousands of hours together. We played ping-pong in their rec-room while we listened to music (tastes changing over the years, from my first purchased LP “Chicago” through Styx, Kansas, Billy Squier, Van Halen, the Doors, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Black Sabbath, the Police, Boston, Queen, Foghat, Jethro Tull, the Doobie Brothers, Average White Band, Supertramp, and others. A dollop of Steve Dahl and Larry Lujack on the radio. That Seventies Show, basically. 🙂
We explored the dunes, and spent a lot of time on the beach and in the water. The Hinmans came to have a Sunfish sailboat, and a small outboard waterskiing boat… Jack taught us to sail and to ski, and drove the boat on weekends… we’d put in at Lefty’s Marina in Burns Ditch, slowly make our way out into Lake Michigan with all the other boaters, find a spot on the beach to stake a claim, and then zoom back and forth parallel to the shoreline skiing. Joan and Christine, I imagine, spent more time on the boat than we did, but with their friends.
In 7th grade David began playing trombone, while I started on tuba. In 8th grade I started playing trombone as well, and by high school, we were both in band and jazz band together, and I at least became a band geek… an uber-band-geek really. When Dave got his license, he started driving to and from school, which helped a lot from our junior year on, when I had my own tuba and case which I schlepped to and from school daily (in Dave’s car, or getting a ride in early with the cross-country team or others).
Around that time we also started playing soccer and football, Dave as a fullback, I as goalie, Dave as defensive tackle and I as offensive center… both sports only lasted a couple of years for us, because trips in the Summer and marching band in the fall took their place. More on that in the next post…
In the mid-1970s, my uncle Al started taking Dave, me, and my mom (Al’s sister) on long Summer wilderness trips. Our first was the least physical, a jeep trip in Canyonlands National Park in Utah (as well as the drive out and back).
The Jeep was a Willys, it was Bob Jones’ and had been in a wreck that left the drivers side repaired with a plywood wall. The brakes needed maintenance, Al actually got the parts and replaced the brake shoes en route (somewhere near Silver City, if I remember… or Durango… wherever the second photo with Dave and Karen was taken.
I remember petroglyphs, rock climbing, throwing dirt clods to attract bats, sleeping on the ground (with kangaroo rats jumping on us) or picnic tables (fewer scorpions or snakes).
Al took us for provisions one day, and we ended up swimming in a reservoir with some young women who showed us how to find it.
Dave accompanied me for one of my more stupid adventures — there are mushroom shaped rock formations like these (in fact maybe I’m remembering these exact ones)… I was exploring around, and lept from one to the next to the third… and then realized that each jump out had had also been down… and the third was the farthest and lowest and the edge slopes downward… and now I’m 60 feet off the ground on the third mushroom and really not sure I can make the leap back up to the second or first one! And, it’s late afternoon… will get dark in an hour or two, and we’ve walked an hour from camp.
I sent Dave back to find Al, and get enough rope to let me lower myself down from the mushroom I’m stuck on… but the longer he’s gone, the more I start thinking I should really get out of this trouble myself… so I take a run around the perimeter of my mushroom, and leap back upward to the second one, phew!… then again to the first one, and finally back to the butte or bluff they’re carved from… and I hustle back to camp in time to prevent a search party/rescue mission.
Close to the end of our trip we were exploring the area closer to the campground, driving up a dry wadi, when we spotted a hint of a human-made wall up high in a rock face… we stopped the jeep and Al taught Dave and I how to wedge ourselves in a “chimney” formation and work our way up without ropes or hand/foot holds… and when we got just under the lip of the rock wall, sure enough there was a cliff dwelling… it was dry stacked stone almost hidden from sight from below, and there was a fire pit in the middle of it… Al took some of the old coals from the fire, and we noted this on the map, and when we talked to the rangers, it turned out this was a new discovery! Al had the charcoal carbon dated by a lab, and it turned out to be hundreds of years old!
(In searching I found this nice FlickR photo set which shows a lot of what we saw in Canyonlands).
Our second big summer trip was 1974. Al took Pat, Dave, and me canoeing in Quetico, the provincial park just over the border of Minnesota, accessed by going to Ely, paddling through a few lakes to a border wilderness border crossing, and then into the Canadian side where no motors are allowed.
At a rest stop in Michigan, we posed for pictures in the leather visors I had made for each of us… the “Jones Canoeing Company”.
The first afternoon, after crossing into Ontario at Prairie Portage (longingly wishing we could use the train track portaging system there), we stopped for late lunch at the isthmus between, I believe, Burke Lake and Sunday Lake… that was a pretty darn good paddle for a first day anyway… after Pat started cooking up lunch we decided to just stay there, and we got tents pitched.
Around that time, a couple came down the little rivulet and stopped to visit. They had a huge black dog, maybe a Newfoundland? They told us that there were bears in the area, and that they had gotten used to being able to steal from people at the site, and that we should probably not stay there, but rather camp on an island… and at the least, bear-bag and hang our food high.
They went on their way, and Dave and I started playing around the area… we tested what we’d learned about “lining a canoe” up the creek — using ropes at bow and stern, keeping the stern a little closer to shore so the bow is being pulled away from the shore by the current, and using the stern line as the motivating force to make the canoe move upstream… quite pleasant compared to portaging, at least in a gentle current. Then Dave paddled solo around the bottom end of Sunday Lake while I climbed the rock face to the bluff above our camp.
Just as I got to the top, a huge black furry face poked out of the bushes a few feet from me. I thought “those people left their dog behind!!”… and then it came farther out. No… not a dog… a big black bear. About then I hear clanking from camp, look down the hill and see my mom beating on a pot trying to scare two bear cubs out of our packs, where they were unconcernedly rooting around, tearing, finding our food. I’m between the mother bear and her cubs!!
I back away slowly and I sing-song “Dave? Oh David… could you please paddle over near the rock face here? Uh… quickly? ’cause there’s a really big bear right here!!” I start to climb backwards down the rock face, watching momma bear, who is watching my momma bear trying to scare her cubs away… and Dave gets there, and I climb in, and we paddle to the shore trail and run back to camp and help Pat and Al shoo the cubs away.
Dang, they’ve gotten our bacon, our eggs, and our Carnation hot chocolate!! Treats for the first couple of days!
Well, our visitors were right, this is not a good campsite. We pack everything into the canoes up at the edge of Sunday lake, and we paddle until we find an island to camp on for our first night.
I’ll tell more of this trip another day, but two things about the trip and bears:
On our last day, we got up very early, and paddled back through Basswood lake (I think!) at dawn… people were camped all along the shore there… and we counted 13 bears happily raiding all their food… I think I even remember one bear having found food in a waterproof drybag weighted down underwater about 10 feet from shore! It seemed like at least some of the paddlers were awake in their tents… just hoping the bears would go away soon.
And, for years I thought I’d been relatively safe from that momma bear once I started climbing that steep rock face to Dave in the canoe… and then I watched a National Geographic video of bears on the rainforesty Western shoreline of Vancouver Island running sideways along moss covered steep rock faces at full speed, like it was nothing to them… momma could have had me any time she wanted.
Calm days…
Right after she took this photo of her brother, Pat slipped and fell into the water with her pack (and her cigarette). Fortunately not with the camera, which Al had by then and documented her downfall.
Al is proud of his fish and his coffee.
Some of the campsites in Quetico are nicely developed. This is one that had a table and a “toilet seat” (in the woods), on the shore of Lake Louisa.
Wilderness canoeing became a staple travel mode. With Al leading most of the trips, David and I would spend about 75 days over the next four Summers, padding close to a thousand miles together in the 17′ Grumman aluminum canoe I still have and use.
So, back to our days a soccer players for a moment, and then onward to the next wilderness trip, because they’re related, and in fact this next story probably had long term health consequences for Dave.
David was a pretty good fullback, and I think he liked soccer pretty well, but he didn’t like our coach very well. It was, at least most of the time I knew him, kind of hard to get Dave riled up (or to hurt him), but Mr. Beatty used to yell “My grandmother could run faster than you!” or “You kick like my mother!”… Dave didn’t care for that! It kinda got under his skin. I think that’s why he got distracted… anyway, one day we were playing at the field in the dunes, and the ball got kicked way out of bounds, and David ran after it… right into the back right quadrant of a car driving by the field. He banged his knee hard against that car and it knocked him down, and out of the game for the day… and he hobbled a bit for a few more days. But the real damage didn’t become apparent until our backpacking trip across the Uintah mountain range in 1976.
That Summer, my uncle Al planned a trip that took my mom (Pat), sisters Karen and Eva, David, me, and our best friend Kert Fox to the Wasatch and Uintah mountains, East of Salt Lake City Utah — the only East-West section of the Rocky Mountain range. The plan was to hike the whole range, 110 miles, from West to East, while Pat, Karen and Eva drove and camped their way in the same general direction. On the 3rd day of the hike we would intersect a highway where we could meet up with them reprovision with food, adjust our gear if we needed more or less stuff, and just have some non-wilderness company.
Well… the hike was a lot of exertion, and as you can see, our packs were not small… first couple of days went well, but by day three, Dave’s knee was bothering him a lot, and by the time we met up with Eva, Pat, and Karen and started hiking into day four all together for at least the morning, Dave was really concerned he would not be able to make it the whole way — we were heading up to the highest point in Utah in the next few days, Kings Peak, at over 13,000 feet…
Day 3, hiking the Uintahs
Well, we ended up strong arming (legging?) Eva into taking David’s place for the rest of the hike — the way she tells it, she was none too happy about it, not having the right gear, not being prepared, and carrying a lot more weight than she was comfortable carrying. Plus, wilderness travel with two teenage boys and her 46 year old uncle… wasn’t her favorite of plans!
I don’t know what the next 7 or 8 days were like for Dave, Pat and Karen (perhaps Karen will chime in here someday)… but I loved the hike. It was rough, and I was slow up those steep rocky mountainsides… but the beauty we experienced was formative for me. Kert, a strong cross-country runner was so fast, we’d almost lose sight of him as he bounded up the mountains ahead of us. Al called him “the stork”, with long thin strong legs, flying away.
The next year, Kert’s family moved to Colts Neck New Jersey. I never saw him again. Sadly, on a trip home at Christmastime from Duke University, his sophomore year, the car he was traveling in flipped on a cloverleaf, and Kert died of his injuries a couple of days later. He was the first close friend of mine to die. I plan to create a memorial her for Kert as well, he deserves to be remembered! Though the internet didn’t yet exist when we lost him, I think he would have been a mover and shaker in this digital world.
I have fond memories of camping like this with my dad in the summer! We too, had a trusty Grumman! He never took my mom, sister and I this far, but we did ride some nice rapids in Minnesota and Wisconsin over the years! I remember Dave, how wonderful that you have made such a beautiful page in his honor! Blessings to You!