It was over a year before Eric saw Donna again, and by then she’d married Trent Jameson. It turned out later that they’d been going out casually for a couple years, with no commitments made either way, but when she got back from her summer in the Inside Passage she decided to get serious about him. Eric always figured that it must have been the decision he’d forced her to make that summer, that had finally taught her that he wasn’t likely to settle down soon if ever – at least not with her, and probably not with anyone.

It had been his last chance with her, and there had been times he regretted pushing her on it. It might have been possible to work out some kind of accommodation that would have satisfied both of them, but over the succeeding years he’d come to realize it was pretty unlikely, and would have fallen apart after a while, no doubt to the great unhappiness of everyone involved.

At least this time, Donna’s marriage to Trent stuck, unlike her marriage to Frank. Eric never got to know Trent very well, but he seemed to be a kind, easy-going guy, and certainly not the kind to take off on a trip to the Inside Passage, Barrenlands Canada, or the Himalayas at the drop of a hat. As far as Eric could tell, the marriage had been close and placid, producing two kids, and ultimately five grandkids, now all grown up or close to it. It lasted over forty years, so he doubted Donna had much to be displeased about. It seemed to Eric that Trent was the kind of guy she’d really been looking for all along.

Luke’s new boat, the Firebee, had been completed while Eric and Donna had been in the Inside Passage that summer. It was a nice thirty-six foot fiberglass sloop with plenty of room for both of them. Luke had already made a tentative deal to sell the Hawksbill, so Eric soon moved his stuff off the old boat and they moved the other gear they wanted to the new boat as well. In a complicated three-cornered deal, Eric sold the Hawksbill back to Luke, who sold it to a new buyer at a good profit, most of which went into the Firebee.

In all the time that Eric hung around with Luke – and in the end it was over thirty years, off and on – Eric never did quite understand where Luke got his money. It was clearly family money of some sort, but beyond that he knew few of the details, other than the fact that Luke usually didn’t have too much loose change around him, and he was frugal most of the time, although not when necessities were involved. But somehow, when he needed money, he had it to spend. Eric was happy to know that, because most of the time it meant Luke was the one spending the big money, when Eric didn’t always have even small money available for necessities. During that time Eric was content to be Luke’s crew, on the boat or whatever else they were doing, and on that basis things worked out pretty well.

Luke and Eric spent almost a year on the Firebee. Only a few weeks after Eric’s return from the Inside Passage with Donna they were on the ocean heading for Hawaii. They made it there in good order, although with a little anxiety since Luke wasn’t confident in using a sextant to navigate and Eric didn’t know how to at all, at least not when they started. However, he studied Luke’s textbooks on the way, and by the time they got to Hawaii they were moderately comfortable with their navigation.

A little to the surprise of both, it was just the two of them on the first leg of the trip. Eric’s fallback plan to take Donna had fallen through, of course, and the girl that Luke had been working on to go with them also backed out. But from Hawaii onward they both had female companionship, and not always the same girls on the subsequent legs of the voyage.

Unfortunately, the voyage came to a tragic end in Fiji. Luke and Eric were ashore, getting set to climb an interesting mountain on a day hike, when a squall blew in. Although they had the Firebee stoutly anchored, a nearby bigger boat wasn’t; it pulled out its anchor, drifted down on the Firebee, tripped its anchor, and the two boats tangled, blew ashore, and wrecked. When Eric and Luke got back to the anchorage, there was little left of their gear besides shards of fiberglass and a few mostly useless items.

The wrecking of the Firebee meant that there wasn’t much the two of them could do but fly back to the States and try to pick up the other parts of their lives. Luke was making sounds about getting another boat with the Firebee’s insurance money, but in recent weeks the two had also been kicking around a return to the Himalayas for more serious climbing than they’d done on their trip years before. In the end, about all Eric could do was to tell Luke to pull what strings he could, and that he’d be there if he could manage it. That was about all he could promise at that time; then it was time to head back to Michigan and hope he had a winter job when he got there.

With a little help from Luke, Eric had enough money to take a bus back across the continent, and then the South Shore Line into South Bend, where Jeff met him. However, Jeff had some unwelcome news: “Unless somebody quits on me, I’m set for drivers for the winter.”

“Well, hell,” Eric said. “I guess that means I’ll just have to stay with you for a few days, tell you a few stories, then get hitchhiking back toward the coast. Maybe Luke can find something for me to do this winter.”

“Not so fast,” Jeff told him. “I had a call the other day from the guy who runs the propane gas place. He needs a driver, and I told him you’d be back in a few days and would be a good one for him. He wants to talk to you as soon as he can.”

“Well, that beats nothing,” Eric replied. “I’d rather be working for you, though.”

“In a way, you would be,” Jeff replied. “I don’t know much about the propane gas business, except that it’s pretty much the same as the heating oil business, but a little different. I’m seeing people replace fuel oil with propane more and more, and I keep thinking I ought to get into that end of the business. From my viewpoint heating oil is going to go up in price quicker than propane, mostly since propane isn’t imported and a lot of heating oil is. If I send you over there, there’s a good chance I can learn enough about it through you to be able to make up my mind what to do.”

“So you want me to be a mole to figure out the business for you?”

“Pretty much. The guy handed me this opportunity on a silver platter and I’d be a damn fool to not take him up on it.”

“We had a good time that summer,” Donna said as they rode toward the motel in the minivan. “I know I wished for a long time that it had ended a little differently. I really would have liked to have gone with you and Luke, but damn it, I wasn’t going to throw away getting tenure for a fling on a boat somewhere. In the end I guess it was the right choice, but there were times I had trouble believing it.”

“I often thought I should never have put it to you quite that sharply,” he replied apologetically. “But damn it, there really wasn’t any middle ground. It had to be one way or the other, since there was no in between.”

“I spent close to ten years trying to come up with a way to work it out with you,” she sighed. “I should have realized right from the beginning it was never going to happen, starting that time you took off for the summer between our junior and senior years at Meriwether.”

“Somewhere in there, probably that summer in the Inside Passage, was as close as I ever came to really settling down,” he admitted. “But I guess it was never meant to be, with you or with anyone.”

“That’s all a long way behind us now. Not only have we grown up, we’ve grown old along the way. I had a good life with Trent, Eric. Better than I expected. But still, I sometimes wonder what my life would have been if we’d been able to work things out back then.”

“I’ve thought about it too,” he admitted. “Things would have been different for me, that’s for sure. But I’ve often thought it wouldn’t have worked out in the long run.”

“You’re probably right, but it still seems like an opportunity I missed somehow. But then, I guess we both have missed a lot of opportunities, haven’t we?”

“Yeah,” he replied, realizing that somehow Donna was thinking something that she wasn’t saying, but he couldn’t figure out what that something might be. “But I guess there’s no going back and doing it over. I guess we’re both getting to an age where it doesn’t really matter anymore.”

“You’re probably right,” she said. “I guess it’s just wishful thinking.”

By now they were getting close to the motel. Eric stopped the minivan right in front of her door and said, “I’ll wait here until you get inside, just to make sure the key works all right.”

“Thank you, Eric,” she said. “It worked earlier, so I’m not worried. I guess I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Yeah, it’s going to be a big day. I guess I’d better get back and work on the eulogy some more.”

“Don’t kill yourself on it,” she advised. “You’ve always been a good storyteller, and you tell them off the top of your head. Like I said, I think you’d be best to just wing it.”

“You might be right, Donna. But I’ve always liked to be prepared for things when I can be.”

Eric really wanted to think about what to put in the eulogy on his drive back to the house, but somehow he couldn’t manage it. He kept thinking about Donna, like he’d thought about her a lot over the years. He still liked her; he had always liked her – it was just that they never could quite cross the valleys that separated them. Oh, well, it’s all water down the river, he thought. It’s over, and it had been over when Donna walked off the Hawksbill forty-five years before. That was then, and then was indeed a long time ago.

He tried to get his mind off that and onto the eulogy, which was the thing that was really pressing him at the moment. In a little more than half a day he’d have to be delivering it, and he still had no idea of what he was going to say. But his mind kept drifting back to Donna, and to what had ended when the summer of the Hawksbill had ended. In a way, it had been another significant turning point in his life; he and Donna had been sniffing around each other for ten years at that point. He could look back now and see that she’d been the only person he’d ever really given consideration to making a life with. There had been other women in and out of his life, lots of them, but they were ephemeral at the time and he’d known it.

That break-up also marked the spot where his life had changed in other ways. Up till that point he’d been a kid looking for a good time and often finding it, but with the idea in his head that he’d have to settle down and join the real world sooner or later. When she walked away it had sealed his life as being an adventurer, a man mostly fated to never having a home and a family. That was how it had worked out, too, and he’d spent over thirty years doing it, which seemed incredible now that he looked back at it.

In that thirty years he’d made a dozen more long canoe trips in the wilds of Canada with Gary. He’d been to the Himalayas twice more with Luke, which included their attempt on Nuptse, which although unsuccessful had gotten him to the mountain climbing high point of his life. The third trip had followed several years later, the year Eric had turned forty; they’d had several more first ascents of minor peaks in the region. Another time the two of them had gone to the Karakorams in Pakistan for climbing there.

It had taken several years before Luke managed to organize things for another attempt at a round-the-world cruise, and it was the early eighties before that came along. That took three and a half years, and Eric had to break off from the trip for two months to fly home from Australia to go with Dr. Heerman on a glaciological trip. Luke had hardly noticed his absence; he spent most of that two months in some heavy drama with a red-headed Sheila who eventually sailed to South Africa with them.

There had been other adventures over that thirty years, but somehow they’d never quite seemed as exciting, quite as vital as they had been when he and Luke and Chip were all young and seemed to have the world in their hands. Perhaps the reason was that he had somehow realized he really couldn’t have it all; a wife and family just wouldn’t fit into the degree of travel and adventure he’d experienced, at least not on his income from driving a fuel truck. He would have been fated to be like Gary, lucky to get out for an adventure once every few years and with his wife resenting even that much when he could have been home mowing the lawn, carrying in groceries, or other domestic chores.

That was what had happened with Chip; he and his girlfriend had gotten married while Eric and Luke were out in the Pacific that first time. She did let him out of the house for the second Himalayan trip, but that was the last time he got to do a major trip with them; when the plans for the third trip came around she apparently put her foot down on the idea, and that was that. For years after that Eric had seen Chip every few years and had been sad to see that his life had turned normal. But the visits had become more and more spaced out; in Chip’s last ten years they’d done no more than exchange Christmas cards.

After their big round-the-world trip on the Coppermist, Luke’s new boat, Luke had settled down a little. The climbing trips tailed down to the point where he wasn’t doing them very often and they were nowhere near as extreme as they had once been. He continued sailing; Eric had been up the Inside Passage with him a couple times after that, and on one trip they’d even seen the Hawksbill, still sailing after all those years. After that Luke more or less just lived aboard the Coppermist in the Seattle area. A number of times he was able to put Eric together with people who needed an experienced hand for an ocean crossing, but mostly he stayed put himself. One day, a dozen years ago he was found dead of a heart attack in the salon of the boat. Since it was in the winter and Eric was available, he flew out to Seattle for the funeral, but after talking with relatives he’d never met before there were still a good many things he’d never known about his long-time friend.

By then Eric’s adventuring had died down a lot. He’d quit doing high-risk big wall climbing a long time before, and as time passed the more difficult alpine climbs seemed to get too hard to want to tackle. His last climbing had been a backpack stroll in the Colorado Rockies almost three years before, just taking it easy; he’d had to go by himself since he couldn’t find anyone to go with him. Then Jeff had his stroke, and there just hadn’t been the opportunity to make an expedition farther than the grocery store or a doctor’s office since. Except maybe for flukes like the one Gary was proposing, his adventuring days were pretty well over with, and he’d come to admit it. Even his delivery truck driving had tailed off to just filling in if someone was sick, and he figured that was just as well.

The couple of winters Eric had spent delivering propane turned out to be a good deal for Jeff. In a way it was perhaps the biggest favor that Eric could do for him in return for all the favors Jeff and Eunice had done for him, because Eric had been able to be the go-between to arrange for Jeff to buy out the company. It was not cheap and a real reach for Jeff, but when the oil crisis came along a couple years later and heating oil fuel prices skyrocketed, a lot of people started switching to propane for home heating. Heating oil deliveries started to dwindle each year, and now were but a fraction of the total business done by Harrington Gas and Oil, which, though it retained the name, was no longer Jeff and Eunice’s; they’d sold out a few years before.

The more Eric looked back at it, it seemed to him that a great deal more than he’d realized at the time had changed when Donna came back to Michigan without him after that long summer. It wasn’t just on this ruminating drive back from dropping her off at the motel that he’d been thinking it, either. It had been a true watershed; at that point he really could have broken off his adventuring and have had a normal life. He would have already had his fun and paid his dues, but he’d let her walk away to marry Trent not long afterward, and that was that. He didn’t have any regrets seeing her go at the time, but there had been plenty of them in the years that followed.

He still had no idea of what he would have done if he hadn’t let her walk off by herself. He couldn’t see himself as still working for Jeff – with Donna unable to move from the Lansing area, it would have been too far to commute to Wychbold or Amherst. He probably would have had some sort of regular nine-to-five job with two weeks’ vacation each year, and that would have been the end of his going out and see the world. Going back to Michigan with Donna would have been the effective end of those days, anyway.

A lot of might-have-beens that never were, he thought as he wheeled the minivan through the night. A lot of things would have been different, unrecognizably so. It might have been better if things had gone the other way, but they hadn’t, and most of it was wishful thinking anyway. When he got right down to it, he’d been satisfied with the way things had turned out for him.

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