The Men Beside the Lake

By the last mile, I had begun negotiating with my knees, promising them a chair, perhaps an entirely different owner. Ahead of me walked two men, one I had known for years and one I was only beginning to know, although at that moment I was mostly studying their packs and wondering why mine contained, apparently, the cornerstone of a cathedral. Then the trees opened, and there was the lake, held in a bowl of Montana stone, so clear we could watch trout move through depths we would never reach.

We dropped our burdens with the dignity of furniture falling downstairs. Cold air found the sweat along our backs. Evening light rested on the granite, and nobody needed anything from us that we could answer with an email. I thought this was what I had come for: water, mountains, the medicinal silence that asks nothing and somehow gives you back your hearing.

I had also come for my old friend. Too much time had passed since we had really connected, the kind of time that accumulates without anyone choosing it. You mean to call. You hear something he would find funny. Seeing him on the trail delighted me more than I had expected. I had missed the particular pleasure of being myself in his company.

The other man I did not know at all. Initially, there was the courteous business of getting acquainted, discovering what each of us did and whom we belonged to. Then something opened. A question received an honest answer, which made another honest answer possible. Soon we were talking with a depth I would not have known how to request. I had expected to enjoy his company. I had not expected to trust him so quickly.

There remained important matters to settle. Weather. Fishing. Whether a certain backpack represented sound judgment or a cry for help. Breakfast bacon received the sustained theological attention usually reserved for the nature of grace. Someone’s knees had become audible. Laughter traveled across the water, and I loved hearing it arrive somewhere none of us could go.

There is something funny about men walking miles uphill, carrying their bedrooms, before admitting they have been having a difficult year. Apparently we require altitude and a stove small enough to lose in a sock before attempting three consecutive sentences about our hearts. But beneath the joke is a tenderness I do not want to mishandle. These men were not strangers to love. They had spent years practicing it, often tired, often without witnesses.

We had reached the age when the usual summaries leave out most of the story. Marriage, work, children growing into lives of their own, parents aging, bodies making unsolicited announcements: none of this fits comfortably inside “Doing well, just busy.” There are disappointments we have learned to carry politely, successes we scarcely pause to enjoy, questions about God that persist after the dishes are done.

I am good at those summaries. Ask me how I am, and I can provide a competent report. Family good. Work busy. Grateful, certainly grateful. I can speak about God before admitting I have been lonely. Being useful has sometimes been my way of staying safely beyond reach, and I have called that generosity because generosity sounds better than fear.

Beside the lake, there was time to get past the report. We could speak about the peculiar ache of children needing us differently, of being proud of their independence and still missing the small hand that once reached for ours. A man can spend decades helping his children stand on their own and then find himself looking down at his empty hands, wondering what fatherhood asks of him next.

We will carry eighty pounds together, repair a roof, bury a family member, stand beside a hospital bed. Yet “How are you, really?” can feel like stepping onto ice. Perhaps we fear imposing. Perhaps we know an honest answer will require one in return. With these men, an old friendship finding its way again and a new one taking shape, I felt how much courage there is in simply remaining available.

The mountains were beautiful, but they were not the great gift.

The men were.

I thought of Saint Aelred, who took friendship seriously enough to write about it as a way toward God, and Aquinas, who spoke of charity as friendship with God. Neither thought seemed remote out there. Friendship asked me to receive another person without turning him into an audience, a project, or proof that I was a good man. It asked me to listen, and to allow myself the uncomfortable kindness of being heard.

Faith belonged in our conversation, with room for conviction and questions, without requiring every thought to arrive neatly resolved. Truth mattered too much for politeness to replace it. So did the person speaking. A friend ought to be able to say, “I see that differently,” while making clear, by his continued presence, that disagreement has not ended the friendship.

Jesus walked roads with His friends, ate with them, corrected them, forgave them. “I have called you friends.” I have heard those words often enough to stop hearing their astonishing intimacy. The men who opened a roof to lower their friend toward Him understood something I forget: sometimes another person must help you get there. Handling everything privately is not necessarily spiritual maturity.

I would return to my wife with less need for her to guess what I had refused to name, to my children with more room for the lives they were making. These men had not relieved me of my responsibilities. Their company had helped me become more available to them.

Who actually knows you? Who knows what frightens you, what you regret, what you are quietly proud of? Who can challenge you without losing you, hear your doubts without panicking? And whose life do you know that way? I ask with affection, and with neglected names in my own phone. One of mine had been walking beside me. Another, until this trip, had been a stranger. Call the man you miss. Schedule breakfast. Ask the second question, and leave enough morning for the answer.

At dawn the lake was glass. There was coffee, cold air, the prospect of trout. Soon we would shoulder our packs and return to everything we loved and everything that wore us down. I watched the water and listened to these two men, grateful for the friend I had recovered and the friend I had found. The mountains were beautiful. So was the silence. But the holiest gift may have been this ordinary human company, given enough time to become extraordinary. Before we reached the trailhead, I was already thinking of someone else I needed to call.