Take Me with You

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

“I’ve been trying to think of words to tell you how all this makes me feel.” “The Tetons?” “Yeah, but not just them. All of this. All this . . . you know. These places. Nature. It makes me feel different. But I just can’t figure out what words to use.” “Most people say it makes them feel smaller. Like the world is so big, it makes them feel insignificant.” “No,” Seth said. But then he didn’t immediately elaborate. “Bigger,” he said after a time. “Really?” “Just on the inside, though,” Seth said. “Like in my chest. Like I breathe air into my chest, and there’s more space in my lungs than before. But not my lungs really. I just feel like there’s more room inside me than there used to be.”

Maybe the school was the problem, August thought. Maybe everybody wants a science lesson if they’re sitting in the middle of one of the greatest geothermal wonders of the world. Maybe we’ve removed all the relevance from the information we teach kids so they have no idea why they should care. Maybe it’s not the kids’ fault. Maybe we made the first mistake.

But I’ve seen a lot of people walk a lot of roads. Some not so happy. And it makes them what they are. So if you run around putting a pillow under people to cushion their fall . . . well, I’m just not sure it’s quite the favor we think it is.”

We take all these little calculated risks. All the time. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand nothing goes wrong. And the one time it does, we blame the person who took the risk, tell them they should have known better than to ever do such a thing.

“I have no idea why time does what it does. Or why people do what we do. It’s all a mystery to me.”

Still, every one of us has something that makes him sad, August thought. And no one can save us from all of it.

“You know,” Harvey said in that tone he usually adopted when about to say something that would make August want to slug him, “if you don’t know what somebody means by something, you can ask. It’s called communication.”

“So you can not mean to hurt anybody and still hurt people as much as he does?” “Oh, yeah.” “It’s sort of like he’s a good person and a bad person at the same time. Which I think is . . . not possible.” “Seth. It’s not only possible, it pretty much describes every human being on the planet. Everybody is a good person and a bad person at the same time. The only real variation is in the balance. How much good to how much bad. When a person has a bigger good side, we call him a good person. But it’s never absolute.”