Letter No. 9: The Way Back

Photo credit: Keith "Giligan" Geier

Before we have words for it, we learn the comfort of returning.

A small child wanders a few steps from a parent but looks back for a familiar face. A traveler crosses miles knowing there is a place waiting at the end of the journey. We leave, explore, and discover, but there is something reassuring about knowing there is a way back.

Perhaps that is why the places and people we return to matter so much. They remind us that we are known.

The first night of our reunion with friends from college, we sat around a fire at a cabin on the south shore of Flathead Lake.

The conversation moved easily, the way it does when people have shared enough history that every story seems to have another story attached to it. Firelight danced across familiar, weathered faces and reflected in widened eyes. Around us, the evening settled in—the crackle of the fire, the darkness beyond the circle of light, and the occasional movement of bats crossing overhead.

I noticed the bats while listening to the conversations. There seemed to be dozens of them. They appeared and disappeared against the night sky, moving quickly through the fading light before appearing again. At the time, they were simply part of the beauty of the evening.

The next morning, Rod, my high school friend and college roommate, joined me for the drive to Missoula. I needed to complete an appointment required for my Florida securities license, and the only location in Montana offering the required electronic fingerprinting was in downtown Missoula.

The miles passed easily, filled with laughter and stories that did not need much explanation. Some friendships allow you to pick up a conversation exactly where it was left, even after years have passed.

When we arrived at the building on Higgins Avenue, the doors were still locked. Another person stood outside waiting. She was there for an appointment as well and wondered why the doors to the entire building were locked.

I told her they were probably controlled by a timer and that the magnets would likely release automatically at 8:00. Precisely at 8:00, there was a faint click. I reached for the handle and pulled the door open. She thanked me as we stepped inside.

During our short conversation, I learned that she had recently moved to Missoula. She was having her fingerprints taken for a travel program that would make airport security easier because she expected to return home to Ireland often.

When Rod and I returned to the cabin, I learned what had happened while we were gone.

One of my friends had opened the umbrella on the back deck. A dozen bats fell from the folds and landed on the deck surface below. They were so still that everyone thought they were dead.

Using a broom and dustpan, my friends scooped up the bats and carried them to the edge of the elevated deck. They dropped them over the rail, their small bodies fluttering downward as gravity pulled them into the bushes below.

The next morning, curiosity got the better of me. I opened the umbrella, and the bats were back. They had returned to the same folds. The broom and dustpan came out again, and once more they were dropped over the rail into the bushes below.

What kept bringing them back? What did they know about that umbrella that we did not?

Was it warmth? Protection? Familiarity? Some instinct written so deeply within them that they simply knew the way back?

While everyone else slept on the third morning, I watched the silhouetted bats return after a night of hunting. The first light of day stretched across the lake as they found their way back to the same place they had chosen before. This time, we left the umbrella undisturbed.

I kept thinking about that.

During the reunion, I was surrounded by people who understood something about returning. We first met more than forty years ago as college students. Since then, our lives have moved in different directions. Careers changed. Families grew. Miles separated us.

Yet every few years, we find another place and gather again. The location changes. The welcome does not.

There is no hesitation when we return. No need to explain where we have been or prove that we still belong. We simply arrive, and somehow the years between gatherings become smaller than the relationships that carried us there.

The bats return to the umbrella. A woman in Missoula keeps the way back to Ireland open. Old friends return to one another.

Maybe that is the comfort of the way back: knowing we will still be known and welcomed when we arrive.

Until next Sunday…

George

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