We Got the Week
My dad has one story about being young. Every dad does. I turned twenty and realized I didn't have mine yet.
So of course I planned it all. Months of it. 3,500 miles from Green Bay, Wisconsin to the coast of Maine and back, seven days, mapped to the hour. Three best friends and a camera.
The taillight died four hours in. We fixed it in a Walmart parking lot at midnight, and that was the moment the plan fell apart, and the trip actually started. At Niagara we stood on the Hurricane Deck in ponchos and got soaked all the way through.
In Hoboken we got pizza and sat watching a pickup soccer game on a Thursday night, and a woman performing on the waterfront started playing Landslide while the skyline went gold behind her. I was twenty years old, on the best night of a trip I'd spent months planning, listening to a stranger sing about everything changing.
New York was 30,000 steps in one day and a subway we almost rode to Delaware.
What was left was Maine. A tent that turned out not to be in the trunk, 2,000 miles from home. A trail with iron rungs bolted into the cliff, climbed by three people who had never really hiked. And a last night around a fire, with two questions I'd been carrying all week, waiting for the right night to ask them.
None of it went the way I planned it.
Behind the camera for most of it, and narrating the rest. From the film: "I film everything. Always have. I think I'm scared of forgetting stuff."
Third road trip the two of us have done together, and the first with Trevor. The life's too short guy. Says yes before he knows what the question is.
The one we had never managed to get out on a trip before this. A firefighter. So every time something went wrong out there, all three of us just looked at him.
