by Bob Smith
Every morning I’d join Michael for an arroyo hike since starting your day’s journey by refusing a beautiful walk indicates you’re an idiot; or you’re a man who believes that starting your day by having fun isn’t the correct way to live. Some people think pleasure in our lives shouldn’t last longer than an orgasm. They’re convinced God created sex to show us that happiness is the length of a moan.
Hiking away from your life gives you a vantage point from which to see your life. You’re more observant out in nature. My Nature Boys and I talk about everything: mushrooms, wildflowers, turtles, deer, birds. But we also discuss boyfriend problems, family complications, job challenges, and, of course, health issues.
Unfortunately, nature is easier to identify than nurture. There are no field guides that teach you how to identify the poison ivy people in your life or how to avoid having any contact with them. The best we can do is hope that most of our friends, lovers, and family will be beehives. We’ll tolerate their stings because we want the honey.
While California is home to unique wonders like sequoias and redwoods, there are also a slew of lesser-known marvels. The California Floristic Province is an official biodiversity hot spot, home to over thirty-five hundred species of plants, 61 percent of which are endemic species. I think my favorite shrub—a phrase I never dreamed I’d be using—is the matilija poppy. It’s a drab khaki-brown bush that can grow eight feet high and has the largest flowers of any California native plant. The blossoms look exactly like fried eggs. It’s beautifully hilarious—perhaps the best botanical joke Mother Nature ever cracked.
John and I first saw them hiking in the seven-thousand-acre Malibu Creek State Park, one of my favorite places in California. On our hike, John was on the lookout for dudleyas, a group of California native succulents. John explained they can live up to a hundred years and many are rare or endangered species. When we spotted them growing on cliff faces, John added that rainwater needs to fall off the plants or their leaves will rot. They’re strange plants with waxy-looking, small pale-green leaves often shaped in a rosette pattern. They look Martian.
John really made me appreciate California native plants. His yard in LA is a cornucopia of native flora, and it’s been included on many garden tours. John buys his plants at the nursery run by the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants, which he dubbed “Theater of Pain,” a moniker I embraced.
We bought plants—and even trees—for each of our gardens in LA, and our support for conservation increased when we noticed the nursery’s staff was frequently made up of beautiful men. John has always liked hairy-chested guys. (His handsome husband, Curt Bouton, has prairie pecs.) I was reading tags on plants when John gave me a subtle nudge, pointing out a handsome blond. The woolly-mammoth hunk reminded us that while we were fauna interested in native flora, a rose tattoo on a hairy, powerful arm will always be our favorite wildflower.
It must seem ridiculous that three Nature Boys live in Manhattan. But I like unusual animals and plants, and New York City is the terrain of unusual people. Meeting one redneck in Mississippi satisfies your curiosity since they’re as common as house sparrows.
Eddie is a New Yorker and, like my Michael, has helped me with my endless ALS challenges. I’m at the point where everything is hard to do—everything! Picking up a cup. Using a spoon. Putting on deodorant. Most of the time, I’m genuinely happy but can’t explain why, which is probably what a woodchuck would tell you. Eddie has suffered from depression all his life, but our senses of humor fight against feeling down. Many of the people I love suffer from depression: my Michael, my sister, my mom, and my good friend Judy Gold. I understand that it’s an illness like my ALS. It’s something you have to deal with every day, and there’s no cure—yet. (Although nature is the best medicine for despair.)
Eddie travels to Boston with me to see my new doctor, helps me put on my coat when he sees me struggling, yanks up my pants when my butt crack starts peeking over the fence, and assists me in countless other helpful ways. His husband, Court Stroud, is equally as thoughtful and always makes me laugh when he comments, “Oh, Bob! We know you have a hot ass!” while he hikes up my shorts.
One time, on a beautiful summer day, Eddie and I went to write in Washington Square Park. It’s filled with massive old trees and is a chlorophyll inhaler for wheezing urbanites. We picked a quiet bench, but our attention was immediately focused on a group of fundamentalist Christians using a loudspeaker system to turn freedom of speech into a dictatorship of lecturing.
We started out identifying with Jesus’s statement from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But after an hour of ceaseless preaching, I said to Eddie, “You come to a public park to relax, not to have your ears crucified by Bible-thumpers.” Finally I reached the point of Jesus’s other statement from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” I fully grasped that one of the most important aspects of freedom of speech is the right to tell someone to “shut the fuck up!”
Unfortunately, my disease was at the stage where I was still under the delusion that I could talk and be comprehensible. I told Eddie, who still understood me in bits, that we needed to tell them off. He agreed. We stood up and walked over to the young group of “Christians” who seemed not to understand that sometimes saving your soul means having an afternoon free of thoughts about your afterlife.
Eddie told me later it made him sad that the leader of the group couldn’t understand when I told him we were already in hell because we couldn’t enjoy the park with their constant screeching. I also added that their message was anti-Christian because no one would want to spend eternity with a bunch of inconsiderate assholes. I pulled out my iPad and typed out my thoughts, which Eddie conveyed to their four-eyed red-haired leader. He replied that freedom of speech gave him the right to preach. I told him, “Freedom of speech gives us the right to point out that betraying the kindness of Jesus for your narrow-minded needs was exactly what Judas did. You should set out a hat to collect thirty pieces of silver.” We left the park, but I felt elated.
Looking back, I truly believe my rage was intensified because I was with someone who’s not selfish: Eddie.
My favorite memory of Michael Hart is when after my sister, Carol, committed suicide, he insisted on flying from Santa Fe to spend the weekend with me in Los Angeles. I tried talking him out of buying an expensive last-minute plane ticket, but Michael knew me better than I did. I was a wreck—this was the worst thing to happen to me—and I didn’t understand my own devastation.
A few months later, I got a phone call from my telephone company that they were going to turn off my phone unless I paid my overdue bill. That had never happened to me before. I had a television-writing job and was making good money. That was when I realized: I’ve been depressed. I’m not prone to melancholy and hadn’t understood that seeing the second Lord of the Rings film, The Two Towers, ten times (free admission during awards season with my Writers Guild card) wasn’t a fan’s enthusiasm but a desperate attempt not to dwell on Carol’s death.
Long before I got sick, John Arnold invited me each summer to his mom’s cabin on Newfound Lake in New Hampshire. The cabin is surrounded by old-growth forest where we pick chanterelle mushrooms. John took a small cabin built in 1925 and expanded it without making it into a suburban ranch house. It’s still an uninsulated cabin that has to be closed down for the winter. The raw pine of the original cabin blends with the new pine. There’s an old boathouse with an outdoor shower that has two beds, and sleeping there is like camping out in a cabin. One year, I brought our first dog, Bozzie, and remember him curling up in a ball on my bed on an especially cold summer night.
Newfound Lake has made me think about how we live. Henry Thoreau summed it up in Walden: “Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplify, simplify, simplify!” John’s mom, Priscilla Gemmill, has established a cabin way of life that we all follow: eat well, relax, enjoy the lake, and work hard. It’s possible
to do all four at the lake. I drink a cup of good coffee while writing and watch as a mama redbreasted merganser swims by, followed by six chicks. We don’t think of Priscilla as John’s mom—but as our friend. We especially like to make her laugh. One of the things we admire about Priscilla is that she’s straightforward. She’ll tell you her opinion of books, movies, and people with a New England candor that’s equivalent to Paul Revere shouting, “The British are coming!”
Enjoying myself at Newfound Lake usually is as simple as having a glass of wine on the porch or hearing the loons calling at night or having my favorite meal: Priscilla’s blueberry pancakes. The berries are picked from bushes in the yard, and it’s an easy chore for us. One time, I saw a chipmunk berry picking at the top of a tall bush. He acrobatically reached out for the fruit and could easily have fallen on the rocks below the bush. I wondered if any of us would have the guts to climb to the top of a sixty-foot tree for our breakfast.
Priscilla has a proven recipe, and she will only cook her pancakes in an old electric skillet. It gives the pancakes a crispy brown finish without turning the flapjacks into crackers. The maple syrup she serves is from a local farm, where there’s a cash box on the porch. If no one’s home, you’re trusted to take a jug and leave the right amount of money.
Sitting on the lake-view porch one morning at dawn, Eddie and I saw a family of pileated woodpeckers, which are mainly black with a red crest and a white line down the sides of the throat. They’re the largest surviving species of American woodpeckers—adults measure sixteen to nineteen inches in length—and these three giants were breakfasting twenty feet away from us as their beaks splintered several trees. I’d only seen this particular bird three times before—you never forget seeing them—and then just for a passing missile moment. Pileated woodpeckers are like eagles and whales. If you ever feel blasé about seeing any of those three species, immediately look up to observe the kettle of vultures circling in the sky above you.
I’ve only seen lady’s slipper orchids at Newfound Lake and in Provincetown. The orchids are an elvish marvel from middle-earth. They’re true wildflowers that can’t be cultivated. The wrinkled pink blossoms look like human hearts being offered for transplants. It’s a flower wearing love on its stalk. I mentioned this to John, Eddie, and my Michael during an annual visit.
“The orchids are increasing here too,” I said.
Eddie said, “They only grow in the two places you visit the most, Bob. You’re an orchid fairy.”
“No,” my Michael said. “He loves Tolkien. He’s an orchid elf.”
John added, “I’d rather be an elf than a fairy. The elves fight evil.”
“You know me,” I said. “I’ve always been eager to throw men who value gold rings over goldfinches into a volcano.”
A few summers ago, I had dinner with Eddie and John at Newfound Lake. During the meal, I had a lot of trouble holding my spoon. This panicked me. Was it further evidence of my deterioration? I wanted to be able to feed myself. Eddie wrapped duct tape around the handle of the spoon while I stood in the kitchen. I expressed my distress that I was losing the use of my hands. I started crying—and I never cry about my ALS. John gave me a big hug when he noticed how upset I was.
Luckily, it turned out that writing on my iPad without a table had strained my wrist. However, after my recent pneumonia, I can no longer eat. My throat muscles don’t work properly and when I swallow, food goes to my lungs, which causes pneumonia. I went this summer and couldn’t eat and still loved it. It’s the scenery and hanging out with John, Eddie, and Michael.
But the episode with the spoon made me aware of what I’d always known: my Nature Boys are my hiking companions throughout my life. And so are Curt, Court, and my Nature Gal, Priscilla. They wouldn’t leave me in the woods with a rattlesnake bite or clinging desperately to a mountainside. And they won’t leave me battling my ALS alone.
John is a guy who went to India to work for Habitat for Humanity building houses. He called me from Italy when he learned my sister had killed herself, and he and Curt immediately came over to my house when they returned from their trip. On my most recent trip to Newfound Lake, John and I went down to Amherst, New Hampshire, to meet with conservation groups about fifteen acres of land owned by John that he wants to preserve. The land had been owned by John’s grandparents. All good things, but you know what I thought was the most charitable thing John did during our outing? We stopped for lunch at a great burrito place Priscilla had recommended. A very muscular guy in a white T-shirt sat down next to us. It was impossible for a gay man not to notice him. John gave me the biggest laugh of the week when he suggested going up to the guy and asking, “My friend has ALS. Can he touch your muscles?”
My illness has made me understand that our sixth sense is our sense of humor. Like blindness, there are many people born without this vital faculty; right-wing “entertainers” make us suffer from their handicap. Perhaps we should train laughing hyenas to guide the unfunny to what’s genuinely amusing. Do animals laugh? Studies of great apes, dogs, and even rats show these species emit vocalizations and other physiological signs that are equivalent to laughing. Rats like to be tickled, and a tail-wagging dog is proof that joy isn’t limited to humans.
What brings me joy are my friends. Michael Hart surprised me with a visit to Manhattan recently. When I walked into the restaurant and saw him, it made me tear up from happiness. I hadn’t seen Michael in over a year. If the same scenario happened with any of my Nature Boys, my reaction would have been the same. Your friends give you the freedom to be happy, impertinent, bored, or miserable. (Your partner needs to be your friend too. That’s obvious, but some people don’t understand that every successful relationship shares more than genitals.) Even with my ALS, my best friends make me feel like the luckiest guy in the world. (I know Lou Gehrig claimed the same thing. It might be a symptom of the disease.)
My Michael and I recently went on a trip to Buenos Aires, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica, and the Falkland Islands. My favorite part of the trip was visiting the Falklands. The population consists of twenty-nine hundred Dickens characters. The Falklanders are preeningly British with a fervor that makes you suspect the penguins have Maggie Smith accents and the seagulls sound like cockneys.
This was a trip where I had to communicate by iPad. We were on a cruise ship with a small subgroup of gay and lesbian passengers. Michael was traveling with a conversationally disabled boyfriend, but after spending time with the other passengers, I thought, “When I could talk, at least I wasn’t dull.”
I made up for having to laboriously write out funny remarks by picking several wildlife tours offered by the cruise ship. The gay travel group suggested three tours, but for me, there wasn’t enough outdoors. One was a tour of Stanley, the capital of the Falklands. Stanley is tiny. No New Yorker needs a guide for a city smaller than the Greenwich Village. Instead, I picked a tour of Bluff Cove, which has a thriving colony of gentoo penguins and a new colony of king penguins. Bluff Cove was about an hour drive from Stanley on a sheep and cattle ranch.
The Falkland Islands have no native trees, and the oddball grassy, mountainous landscape is the perfect setting for a community of gregarious recluses. Its desolate bleakness seemed to emphasize that even the rocks in the Falklands must be suicidal. There are no roads to Bluff Cove; we had to travel over bumpy terrain by four-wheel-drive Land Rover. The bumpiness of the ride made the scenery look like it had Parkinson’s disease. (Sorry about the disease metaphor. But when you have ALS . . .)
We were dropped off at an inlet where the tide was out, and several hundred penguins were either standing or lying on their bellies. It was overcast, but a patch of sunlight illuminated the sand on the far shore of the inlet. The grass was gray with molted penguin feathers, and the bare stretches of brown earth were streaked with white stripes of penguin poop. Michael and I laughed when we witnessed a white-bellied penguin shoot a foot-long stream of guano from the prone position.
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��Jesus,” I typed. “I hope I’m never so lazy that I think it’s okay to shit while napping.”
We hung out with the penguins. They didn’t seem bothered by us, and their bathroom habits didn’t gross us out. My new definition of cuteness is a bird who can squirt shit and still be adorable. We watched penguins entering and exiting the surf, running, and waddling along the beach. And then I noticed Michael was crying.
He explained that he was happy.
So was I.
Homer and Yukon Island
Will we see any bears?” I asked. It was 7 p.m., not a normal time to start a hike in the Lower 48. We were in a city park, speculating whether we were going to bump into a grizzly. It was Anchorage’s largest park—Far North Bicentennial Park—almost four thousand acres, five times the size of Central Park in Manhattan. Far North was also an urban extension of five-hundred-thousand-acre Chugach State Park. The parking lot had advisory signs about bears.
“We might,” said Jonathan. “Someone was mauled here recently.”
“We’d make a nice three-course dinner for a grizzly,” I joked.
“You’re hiking with two born-in-Alaska guys, you cheechako,” said Brad.
Cheechako was Alaskan slang for a newbie to our forty-ninth state. I understood that, since I was reading every book with Alaska in the title.
“Is that supposed to make me feel protected?” I asked. “Brad, you told me, ‘People die up here all the time.’”