Minnehaha

    The phone on the reception desk of the museum rings. It’s a call from outside, which is unusual. The number seems familiar but I can’t place it.

    “Nooooodllllle!” cries the voice on the line.

    I laugh, completely taken aback. “Noodle! What are you…why are you calling me here? Is everything okay?”

    “I’m here in Portland! Babe’s here too! We’re at the airport!”

    I hadn’t talked to Noodle in nearly a year. None of our friends from back east had seen or heard from her in months. I’d heard a rumor she’d moved to Arizona.

    “What are you doing here?” I ask, still stunned.

    “We’re going to be hiking along the coast for a week, but we want to see you first. Are we allowed to come to your work?”

    I give her directions and two hours later, her impish figure shuffles through the front door. I step out from behind the desk and she runs across the lobby and throws her arms around me. Her hair is a knotty tangle; her scrawny body is lost in loose hemp clothes. I lift her off the ground a few inches and squeeze her tight. 

    “I can’t believe you’re here,” I say, putting her down and standing back to take a good look at her. 

    She grins. “Well, believe it, Nood!”

    Another figure lopes into the museum lobby. 

    “Bradley,” I say, and take his hand. 

    “Hey buddy. Long time no see.” Bradley smiles, revealing a wall of enormous white teeth. His normally long hair has been shorn to a crew cut and his body looks buff and trim.

    I call the control room and get permission to take a short break. The three of us walk across the street to sit in the park. Sunlight flickers through the canopy of elms. Squirrels scamper down from the trunks and stare at us, hoping we have food.

    “So what are you guys doing here, exactly?” I ask.

    “We’re on vacation,” says Noodle. “Babe’s getting shipped out to Baghdad next week.”

    “We heard there was good hiking,” says Bradley, his voice slow and thick as ever.  When I was first introduced to him, years ago, I thought he might be developmentally challenged, but he’s just a burnt out. That same night I’d met him, he took Noodle out to get high in his van. He’s a nice enough guy, very kind-hearted, but I never really understood what Noodle saw in him.  

    She’d broken up with him over a year ago, or maybe even longer; the details of their relationship were always a little fuzzy to me. Shortly after the break up, Bradley had enlisted in the Army. It had shocked the hell out of me and Noodle and everyone else we knew. Bradley has always been a real hippie, and is the last person (besides Noodle and myself) I could picture joining the armed forces.

    I should take a minute to explain that Noodle’s name is actually Jasmine. After trying out a number of different nicknames for me -“Chowda! Nugget! Pork Chop!” -she landed on Noodle. 

    “But what do I call you, then?” I had asked. 

    “Noodle,” she said. 

    “But you just said I’m Noodle.” 

    “We’re both Noodle.”

     “We can’t both be Noodle.” 

    “Noodle Noodle Noodle.”

    And that settled it. Over the years we tried to stop but by now using our real names feels unnatural, and we always end up slipping right back into Nood or Noodle. 

    Noodle tells me they’re taking the bus out to Cannon Beach, where they plan to follow a trail through the woods and along the coastline for the next week. I work until five and their bus leaves at six, so we don’t have time to hang out before they go, but they promise to call me when they come back into town to catch their respective planes (she’s flying back to Arizona and Bradley’s returning to the army base in Colorado Springs). When my break time is up they hang around the desk for a while before heading out.

    A few days later Noodle calls me at work again, saying they’re coming back to town the next day. Surprised that they’re cutting their trip short, I ask if they’re okay, but she says everything is fine, that they’ve walked all the way down to Tillamook and are catching the bus from there. She wants to know if they can stay with me a night or two and I say of course.

“Hey Nood. Do you know how to get to any of the hot springs around here?” she asks. “Babe really wants to go.” I tell her I’ll find out. I’ve never been to any of them, they’re hard to get to without a car.  

They arrive back in town the next day and meet me at the museum after work. It’s my weekend so I have two days off to spend with them, plus I figure I can call in sick the third day, which is when their flights leave. They’ve rented a car and we plan out a trip to see two of the nicer hot springs, Bagby and Breitenbush, both about two hours away and tucked in Willamette National Forest. 

    We have supper at a health place downtown called Blossoming Lotus. Noodle’s currently on a raw food kick. When we first met, she was an indiscriminate omnivore, while I was vegetarian. We eventually swapped places, and over the years she’s grown increasingly judgmental and intolerant of others who don’t eat the way she things they should. Being obstinately omnivorous, I’ve gotten plenty of lectures from her on the subject. 

    Bradley tries his best to follow a vegan diet, though he says it’s been hard since he joined the military. He says the other soldiers beat him up when they found out he was a vegan.

    “What do you mean, they beat you up?” asks Noodle.

    “They beat me up,” is all he says.

    We order a bunch of things and share. The raw food is good, though very acidic; it’s made with a lot of vinegar. It’s all curly tangles of sprouts and seaweed and sprouted bread, nut cheese and some things I don’t recognize. I think back on all the times we ordered pizza, how crazy she went for it, and I feel a little sad.

    Noodle tells me about the place she’s been staying at in Arizona. It’s a naturopathic healing center called The Tree of Life, nestled in a canyon in the middle of the desert. She camped out for a while in Coronado National Forest when she’d first moved to the state. She says that at night she could see the distant explosions of bombs being tested way out in the wilderness, flashes of bright light illuminating the desert sky. She talks about thunder that rolls along the canyons and ravines, nights of nonstop lightning. Recently she’s moved into an old wooden trolley on the edge of the Tree of Life compound, where she helps out with the cooking in exchange for room and board. 

    We split a coconut-cacao smoothie that tastes good but feels gritty between my teeth. It definitely feels like the end of summer outside; the sun seems to set earlier than it should, and there’s a slight chill to the air as we walk back to the car.

    We plan on leaving pretty early in the morning, so we head right home to get a good night’s sleep. Noodle looks around at all the stuff in my apartment. “You dragged all this stuff here from Allentown?” she asks. I think of the U-Haul, packed tight with all my shit, and admit that yes, I did. At the time I remember thinking I had so little; it’s strange when you realize that everything you own in the world can be packed into the back of a fourteen foot long truck. But then I think of Noodle, leaving everything behind to camp out in the middle of the desert with nothing but a backpack full of her scant belongings.

    “I guess I get kind of attached to things,” I say sheepishly.

    She marvels that I’ve kept all the critters that had once decorated the apartment we’d shared together, six years and three thousand miles away from here: a brass owl, a rubbery seagull, a boxing kangaroo puppet. She picks up a small bronze casting she made during her brief stint in college and shows it to Bradley.

    “Wow, you made that?” He turns it over and over in his hand. It’s a lovely little piece; an indigenous-looking figure curled up on its back with its stumpy legs kicking up into the air.

    “And you still have Ivan. Hello there handsome. I haven’t seen you in a long time.” My cat, who she brought to me when he was a tiny ball of fluff, smashes his cheek against her hand. 

    She removes a little bag from her knapsack and pulls out sand dollars she collected during their hike along the coast. She spreads them out on my little coffee table. “They keep breaking,” she says. “I started out with twenty-five whole ones, and now I’m down to nine.” She asks if I have a box or something to keep the remaining ones intact. I say I’ll check before they leave. 

    I pull out the Murphy bed but they take one look at the thin, lumpy mattress and unroll their sleeping bags in the middle of the living room floor. 

    When I wake up, they’re gone.