Over Here, Over There

Last week I made my first trek of the winter into the Sierra Mountains, chugging my fat butt and belly through wet, heavy snow that put as much drag on my skis as my weight did downward pressure. I had both friction and gravity working against me and the sight was not pretty. Headed toward a favorite lake, I gave up within 100 yards of my goal, wheezed a bit, then turned around trudged back to the car. I felt old and surely looked it. With a fresh few inches of powder, I tried again this morning and found that the skis glided with little effort on my part. When I left the car the outside temperature was 18 degrees, but with no wind the weather and the snow alike were perfect. I made it to the lake and had half of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, enjoyed the snow and sunshine, then wended my way back to where I'd begun, finding many wonderful diversions into meadows of unbroken snow.

By early afternoon I was seated on the rear bumper of my car and enjoying the second half of my sandwich. A couple hours later I was at my sister's house for a small going away party for my nephew, who is in the Air Force and who will soon deploy to Iraq, where another nephew has been for a couple of months. Enjoying my first beer of 2009 I sat and watched my nephew and his siblings, my sons, and several friends of the family play volleyball, and I could not help but contrast their fun with the certain realities my nephew will face as he joins others in the lie that was a search for weapons of mass destruction but transformed into ridding the world of an evil dictator and transformed again into the establishment of a democratic government, and what may or may not be part of the Global War on Terror.

As I grow older I wonder more at the ease with which some people send other people into harm's way as part of some "noble" cause or because we certainly must fight "them" there so we do not have to fight them here. I watched my nephew dig and set and spike the volleyball, and I thought back to when he was small and pudgy, when he worried about nothing more important than what to put on his hamburger. Last week when I played volleyball with him I listened to him talk, and I could hear the Air Force speaking with him just as the Navy must have spoken through me decades ago when I was just as gullible and pliable.

I could think of nothing profound to tell him as I left for home, so I told him to take care of himself, and to stay in touch with his parents. At some level, I think, he is aware of certain dangers that await him, but he betrayed neither fear nor worry. The first half of the day was good, but so frivolous compared to the second half. My brother-in-law told me that he and his son are planning things for when my nephew returns as scheduled in October, but I think both of us were wishing that he wasn't going at all.