Huts and Churches

I licked a church once.

It was the Christ Episcopal Church of North Conway, New Hampshire. This happened on an early evening one June day in 2003, and was undertaken in a completely sober and well-intentioned manner by three adults: me, my sister Hannah, and her friend Josh.

To go back to the total beginning of why this matters would be to unpack more of my childhood and relationship with my sister than I yet have words or the emotional stamina to explain. Suffice to say, Hannah and I loved each other as small children, and barely tolerated each other for pretty much all the years we lived at home and went to school. I don’t know and now won’t know what her trouble with me was. My trouble with her was that I always felt smaller, weaker, dumber, chubbier, weirder and lesser than her and this filled me with a particular combination of fury and doubt about my place in the world. 

Sometime when I was in middle school, I taught myself how to be funny, because it made Hannah laugh. When she laughed at my jokes, we were closer to being the easier going sister-friends we were as very small children. 

I still gave her a wide berth, because I couldn’t understand the fire that seemed to rage in her—she pushed herself to be faster and stronger in all her sports, muttering the names of her friends and teammates as she sweated out push-ups. I didn’t ski and I didn’t run on our high school teams, partly and mostly, because I didn’t want to risk the tenuous thread between us by becoming one of those names to beat in her world.

Life happened and things began to melt more between us. We both went to college, we started to spend time together outside of our family house, we started to turn into our quasi-adult selves. It wasn’t always perfect, but things were better.

According to a birthday card Hannah made me three years ago, the major turning point in our sistership came when I visited her at Mizpah in the fall of 2002. 

Something opened in Hannah, I think, in her time in the huts. It’s a common experience. My sister Emily says of her hut friends that “we knew each other as we were becoming ourselves,” and that’s a part of the glue between many of us, and why we can be the best of friends but not see each other for years at a stretch. 

Hannah’s season at Mizpah was also where she found Josh, who was the hutmaster. My mother said that she never saw Hannah make as good a friend as fast as she and Josh. It wasn’t the same as if Hannah just had a hut-crush on a cute mountain man, but more like finding a new friend who serves as a mirror to your best self.  Except, when the friend is that good, you don’t have to talk about your emotional connection and can just go on for days making soy sauce jokes and doing dumb skits and singing John Prine songs, because you can trust that the other person gets it, and the daily stuff is the important part. As I said to Hannah once about some of the loyalty I have to hut friends—“they get me, so they get me.”

When I visited Hannah in the hut in October, Josh was on days off and so I didn’t meet him then, but as Hannah and I hiked down into the Dry River in the rain and then up to the ridge and back down Pierce, I heard all sorts of stories about him and the rest of the hut croo and how fun it was to be in the mountains and how all these people were doing interesting things and going off on adventures and trying on different ways of being in the world. Someone was planning a thru hike, someone was applying to grad school, Josh was preparing to move to Hawaii, and so on.

The most important part, to me, was that Hannah was actively sharing her happiness and her happy place with me. Rather than grunting out the names of people she wanted to be faster and stronger than, or trying to keep her life private, she was telling me stories and jokes and inviting me into this world. 

It was a place I desperately wanted to be, both in Hannah’s world—anywhere that might be—and amid this community of mountain folks, figuring life out amid the hills. 

Hut folk can be tribal and snobby. We can, as a group, humble-pride ourselves on qualities of exclusion and being different and having a million jokes that no one else can understand. Part of that, for better or worse, I think is that we’re often a bunch of sort of strange birds who are so grateful to have found the group that works for us that it’s important to maintain our identity as separate from anyone else, because interlopers could spoil our sense of security. We might also just be elitist dicks who spend too much time being treated like mountain gods by the wealthy families from “20 minutes outside of Boston” who form the bulk of hut guests, and all that adoration goes to our heads. 

I am not proud of having been a part of the darker sides of the tribe, because it is so much better and deeper and stronger and wilder to share that space and time than to hoard this common ground away. We are better when we are open, and what we all have together should make us stronger enough to be kind, as we are at our best.

Rather than the bad attitude—which can even extend from seasoned Hutmasters pulling rank on terrified new croo—Hannah shared her hut life with me. I don’t know how much that generosity of spirit came from how Josh Guerra ran his hut, but in reading the tributes to his life, I can guess that he had a strong hand in that.

For that, because how and who he was helped to blast open the door between my sister and I, I have always loved him an extra note deeper than some of Hannah’s friends.   

That, and the church, of course. 

After visiting Hannah at Mizpah, I ended up working in the huts the following summer. I was doing something I’d always wanted to, and also had all of the intense joy of sharing this strange corner of the world with Hannah—that my new best thing and my old best person were united in my every day was magic.

As was my first set of Days Off. Hannah picked me up at Lonesome Lake, and we drove to North Conway, to have dinner with Josh, who was in Maine to visit the camp he had worked at. Hannah and I drove across 302, talking a whole new language of the huts and jokes and old stories. She made me run through where all the cutest hutboys were working, which set of Days Off they had, and reminded me to “forget not the caretakers and Construction Crew boys, some of them can be quite the lookers!” We stopped to swim at what I think must have been Kedron Falls, and we felt like nasty frozen little Golems creeping around the rocks, and giggled so hard we would have peed our pants if we hadn’t been skinny-dipping. 

We got to Flatbread and I finally met the famous Josh. He was exactly as promised, and knew about as much as me as I did about him. Apparently, parents can learn a lot about how their children feel about them by how they talk to their friends about them. The same is true for siblings, and I felt so loved by Hannah in that moment that more distance and more years of ice between us just stopped mattering.

When we finished eating, it was late, but not that late. We all had to drive—Josh back to the camp in Maine, Hannah and I to Hopkinton. We got ice cream and found Josh coffee. 

And still we weren’t saying good-bye. Not yet understanding about hut love, I kept trying to give them some space as if they were on a date-date, and they kept including me. We walked all the way south in North Conway to the bookstore, and then turned and walked all the way north to the church at the intersection and lights.

“Hey,” said Josh. “You girls ever licked a church?”

“No,” we said—and I thought that this comfortable, casual unexpected question was proof I’d met one of the coolest people on the planet.

“Well then, let’s!” 

So we found a subtle spot, screened by shrubbery, and gave it a try. 

It tasted like paint, and we continued on our way. Hannah and Josh said goodbye, he wished me all the luck and fun of my first hut season, and off we all went—Josh suggested we both come visit him in Hawaii, in November, when the weather is, he said “crisp.”

And that, fifteen years ago, is the only time I met this man. I have no claim on the deep and horrible grief that I know his People are meeting in these horrible early days since his death. But grief isn’t about ownership, any more than huts and mountains are. I am writing this because it is impossible to understand that these two brightest of lights went from the world within a month. Their deaths are not linked, other than through stupid random chance of each having luck and physics be against all their wisdom and experience for a crucial second. 

I reached out to Josh in the early days of life without Hannah. I wanted him to know, as if he didn’t, how much she loved him. Selfishly, I deeply wanted him with me as I grieve—the Hannah he knew and loved was so close to the version of her I hold in my bones and lungs and skin. And she loved him. When I worked at Mizpah another year, I saw in the Croo Log something Hannah wrote about perhaps we all have to stop our wandering at some point because it becomes too hard to keep meeting these friends, and then having to say good-bye. And so, she loyally kept her finds, rather than say goodbye.

When Josh would come to Colorado to visit his family, Hannah would drop everything to spend a few hours with him. When she and Will went to Hawaii, Josh hung out with them and tried to teach Hannah to surf—not her best sport. When Dad died and we were wondering what on earth to do with his beautiful dories and boats, Josh offered that maybe his old Maine summer camp could take one—and he was a friend that was dear enough to Hannah, and so to all of us, that a place that mattered to him would have been a proper home for a piece of Dad. 

The words we are all using about these two marvelous jokers—radiant souls, adventurous spirits, people with brilliant kindness in their bones—almost make it worse to me. It makes the hollowness I carry bigger, to have that absence doubled and to see the words of all the qualities I wish to put into the world coupled with loss within a month. I know how Josh’s passing would have hurt Hannah, because I think it’s the mirror of what he wrote to me when I got in touch after Hannah:  

“I can’t even begin to imagine how you are all coping with the loss of such a special lady. Her absence in my life will be a gaping hole. I loved her and her steadfast friendship so so much. I know we only met once, but I still clearly remember it and how we all got along so famously. Wish I could join you guys to celebrate and reminisce. Just know that my thoughts and my heart is with you guys. If you need anything or ever want to talk, I’m always here. I loved your sister so damn much. She was one of a kind. Much love to you.”

I want to say something here at the end about learning from my afternoon in the company of these friends, about trying to be better at opening doors and sharing the best of your life with everyone, but instead, I just break down and cry when I try to wrap things up too neatly, because there is no tidiness and no lesson to learn that we didn’t all already know. Neither of these people died doing what they loved best, because what they loved best was their people.

Instead of tidiness and platitudes, I offer my love to those who knew Josh far better than I. Hannah would offer you anything she could to help, and I can only do the same. 

And, if the licking of churches is required, I was trained by the best and will gladly be your girl.