Memories

Noah

I first met him as Mr. Pippin, my 5th grade English teacher (other grades, the class was referred to as “Language Arts”, abbreviated to LA, but Mr. Pippin informed us on the first day that, “we don’t need no Los Angeles Class”). We composed entirely with pen and paper–no eraser, and certainly no delete key–and were told to submit our first drafts full of cross-outs and rewrites and arrows traversing the page as we moved sentences from one paragraph to another. He made sure the we knew that not only is there no shame in an edit or a rephrase, there is celebration. The process of creation is one of constant changes and, “wait, wait, I thought of a better way to say that!” This is a lesson that has become part of not just the way I write but so many other areas of my life

I knew him next as Ranger Dave, when he piled us kids into a small white van (and later a tiny yellow bus) and took us hiking as part of our school’s summer program. After spending a year with him as our teacher, nothing sounded cooler than signing up to spend a week hiking with him, so of course we signed up the summer after our 5th grade year. Then again after 6th, and 7th, and 8th, and by the time we got to high school (each of us dispersed to a different school across the city) he told us, “I mean, you all don’t need to sign up for any program or whatever. We can just go hiking together.” Each summer we reunited, and the mountains of Washington State echoes with cries of, “valderi . . . valdera . . .”

I’ll always remember the day we planned on ascending the backside of Bandera Mountain. As we were refilling at a highwayside station, Ranger Dave casually looking over the map, his head suddenly popped up and he pointed at the horizon proclaiming, “**that peak’s not named.** We’re going that way!!!” We made it to the top and found a summit box naming the mountain Pete’s Putrid Peak, aka P3 (sadly thwarting our desire to name it Getaway Mountain, it’s a long story, I’ll explain later), with notable summit journal entries such as, “Today, we climbed the mountain naked / Tomorrow, who knows.” To be clear and explicit: That day of scrambling up dried riverbeds and carefully traversing screes was not only one of the best hikes I’ve ever been on, it is one of the best and most cherished memories of my childhood. Thank you, Ranger Dave

Finally, I knew him as most of the other people here knew him, as simply Dave.