Briefly, it was the end of the world. There were four of us on the hill that night, overlooking the lights of our town, and watching something bloom orange and mysterious on the horizon. It had a round top, this thing rising in the distance, and was the color of a very ripe pumpkin; its sides were pinched, quaking, and it looked swollen, like a bubble about to pop.
Frozen in that moment, looking out on this strange and unexpected thing, were myself, and my friends Alec, Steph, and Matt. We sat in silence, just the sound of the wind, and the frogs in the wet hollows beneath the bushes, and maybe a coyote barking somewhere in the darkness. We had all met in high school, and spent hours together in class and on the weekends, on our bikes or taking Steph’s car to the beach. They knew me so well that they’d comment on some small habit of mine that was so distinctly me, but which was a surprise to myself. The step I took to keep a distance from others. How I’d rub any part of my body that had been touched by another person, as if I’d been bruised. I did not easily let others close, then, or now. Matt, Alec, and Steph were my best friends. I’ve lost contact with all of them.
The hill on which we sat was tall, and near the house in which I lived. In my memory it was always covered in dry white grass. Even at night the grass was white, almost glowing. All the hills were like this, big shaggy dogs lying on their sides, the rise of their hips against the sky, the long slopes of their splayed limbs. These hills were often on fire. Once a turkey vulture landed wrong on a powerline and caught fire; it burned down half the oaks on a hill down the street. And there was the time my father and I packed up all our family albums and the desktop computer as the wicked horns of flames rose above the hills to the west. We stood on the doorstep wondering when we should load our pet turtle into the car.
The hills closest to our house had never caught fire, but there was a fire road that ran straight up the steepest one, to a water tank somewhere over the crest. This was the trail I always climbed to get a view of our town at night. And this was the hill that my friends and I had climbed the night we thought the world was ending.
I had told Steph and Matt and Alec to not turn around until we reached the top. The view was special to me, and I didn’t want it spoiled as we climbed. There were parts of the trail that were less stable than others; rocks skittered down the hill and other things rustled in the tall grass to either side. Matt was ahead, he was a surfer and had a surfer’s easy strength. Alec and I, both skinny, almost skeletal, walked side by side as we would for the many years of our friendship, talking. And Steph was somewhere behind. Like me, she was defiantly single. We took many classes together, and wrote each other long notes in our yearbooks.
At the top of the hill was a cow gate. We leaned against it, and the wind smelled somewhat of cows and somewhat of the distant Pacific Ocean. Finally we turned around.
We saw more hills, below us, and the quiet lights of our small town. Beyond was the highway, and the white lights of cars. We could see the shopping center on the far side of town, the bright streetlights in the parking lot, the red light of Target and the blue light of CostCo. Then, further, the starry lights of other towns, the blackness of the inner bay, the strings of lights showing the Richmond Bridge and the Bay Bridge. Across the water were lights from towns in the East Bay Area. The sky was very black, and the clouds lit a colorless gray from below.
And then we saw that great orange swelling on the horizon.
Of course, it was only the moon. But it rose more quickly than we expected, and it was such a bright orange in color, and its sides were warped by the horizon, so that just for a moment we all believed that we were witnessing a mushroom cloud, a nuclear explosion. And just as quickly the illusion broke; we all laughed, and realized we’d been sharing that same terrible thought. That was friendship at the time, our minds so aligned, and all of us quick to move on from trauma to laughter. Alec, and Steph, and Matt and I, laughing away the end of the world.
Friendship doesn’t end in a moment. There’s no flash of light, no heat turning the hills to dust, boiling the water of the bay. But I’m no longer friends with any of them. I lost contact with Matt during college, and Steph after. Alec and I stayed friends the longest, until I moved in with Erika, who is now my wife. Alec’s loss is the one that still hurts, the memories not yet scarred over.
I’ve come to think that nostalgia is a kind of apocalypse. I take my son and my wife to the same hillside. Everywhere I must push through the ash of memory to make room for this new world of mine. But I cannot sit and look out at the bay without thinking of that moonrise and all the things that have ended since.
One night I stood here and watched six white owls fly from the crown of an oak tree. They made no sounds and each flew off in a different direction, searching the hills for that which would allow them to survive this night and into the next.