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To say that I was excited to see #6 after our four full days apart would be misleading. Because they hadn’t been four days. Sure: if you look at the calendar, at the moon, at the turning of the tides, at the flow of menses, most people would argue that four nights apart had passed — but that was not how I looked at it all. To me, it was if I had lived, died, been reincarnated, and forced to live again as a newt only to be stepped on by a younger version of myself and then reincarnated once more. It was forever and a day and then a day after forever and a day. But the day had come; she would be arriving that very night. I was foolishly enthralled with the entire concept. When I had spoke to her last, her plan was to leave work near Seattle by one o’clock and arrive at Crater Lake by eight or nine that evening. I was ecstatic.

Ben and I made it to the Mazama Village Campground a little after ten o’clock in the morning and it was a good thing, too, for by noon-time all the campsites had been taken. And we were happy about this. It was good to have some validation that all our pedaling and all our miles had been put to some use. Had we arrived at the campground after forty-eight hours and over two hundred miles of riding and found it practically empty, I am sure a bounty would have been put on my head. More so, even, than if we had arrived to find it full.

The campsite we chose for the Fourth of July weekend sat towards the back of the campground and had its own private path down to its own private canyon. It also, we came to learn very quickly, had its own private sub-tropic climate overpopulated with starving mutant Klingon-esque mosquitoes. When we first pulled in that morning, though, the campsite was warm and welcoming. We dismounted, breathed a sigh of relief, and examined our surroundings. Mostly we were fenced in by individuals in cars or RVs and Weekend Warriors — the Mazama Village wasn’t the sort of camping area you could easily hike to and, I believe, of the over two hundred sites, we were the only bikers.

After our basic bodily needs were taken care of and we had showered and changed clothes at the bathing facilities, we returned to find our campsite changing from warm haven of goodness to sweltering hovel of hell and we escaped to a nearby park to read, relax, muse, ponder, and — most importantly — to wait for #6. It was the only time on the trip that I monitored the clock as carefully as I monitored my calorie intake. My desire to see her was only rivaled by my desire to see what sort of food she had packed.

I once drove six hours (twelve, round trip) to visit #6. This was long before there was much of a real chance for her becoming #6 (before I had found most of my #’s, in fact) and it is an entirely different story altogether and I don’t care to go into the details for they are sordid, as was I, and I would rather not think on them. The point is only that I drove six hours to see her and then, after a time, drove six hours to return home, with a quiver in my eye and a lump in my throat. Six hours for #6.

To visit me in Crater Lake (though she told her closest friends that she was coming to see both me and Ben — so that it did not arouse too many suspicions), she would have to drive seven hours. To me, it was not a foolishly long distance. I had driven six and if I had had a caravan following me during this trip, I would have shot up the coast nightly to see her. Plus, she had been known to drive three hours to see a movie in a particular theatre that suited her and we were on the West Coast where distances are measured in days, not hours. I downplayed the whole ordeal.

Ben, however, raised his eyebrows at this when it first became obvious that she would come see us, and later made a comment to the effect of:

“Well, she doesn’t not like you, at least. That’s something. I wouldn’t drive seven hours to visit anyone — especially you.”

I told my mother over the phone that I was awaiting her arrival (a point I had failed to mention in earlier conversations because, well, to be honest: I just didn’t want to have to go into it and, subconsciously, I was afraid my father would find out) and my mother, being the wise woman that she is, said something very coy and conniving like:

“She must be a really good friend to come all the way there to see you.”

Of course, the way she said “friend” and the way she ended the sentence with a little rise in her voice required that I expound further upon the current nature of #6 and my relationship — which, as I began to attempt to describe it, I realized wasn’t very well defined . I liked her. She appeared to like me. She was #6; she was driving down; I was happy; etcetera.

For a mother, though, this is never enough — though this time it had to be. The poor connection on the payphone and the notion that others may be waiting to use it worked to my advantage. I did not want to discuss it. I knew that everyone from my parent’s dog, to the gentleman on my father’s construction site, to people I had never even met (or wanted to meet), would be hearing all about it post-haste, and if there was anything I like less than telling people where I am headed on a trip, it is telling them anything meaningful about my life.

I hung up the phone, hung up my biking shoes, hung up the notion that there was anything good to eat in the camp store, and began to wait for my fair lady, happy as I could have ever been without her.

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