Between the moon and the sun

The first sliver of the moon, for a moment a deep and vibrant red, appeared over the ridge of Thumb Butte.
The fireworks show was over and done, the horseshoes had been pitched and the beers were finished. The conversation had already bridged today, yesterday and tomorrow, seamlessly.
The baby was fed and asleep as we stood on the gravel in front of the deck, a slight wind coming up from the valley, through the Ponderosa pines, the near-to-far sounds of kids on dirt bikes still ringing out.
From everybody’s best recollection, Zach and I had been friends since our growing child minds could comprehend the idea of a friend. It’d been more than 20 years since our pre-school adventures, taken in pickups down dusty roads for the little-kid version of hanging out.
In those same woods we later spent afternoons jumping into swimming holes, helped haul firewood and rocks for our fathers, covered untold miles on mountain bikes, sipped lemonade on Grandma Lou’s porch, built dozens of forts. In those same woods even later we learned to drive, turned bumpy roads into freedom, camped and raised hell drinking beer.
In those same woods he bought a house, where we stood, old friends reconnecting after too many years.
I’d been there a month earlier, for his wedding. Driving in to Highland Pines, one curve in particular opens to the west, where I saw a brilliant sunset, a skyful of colors resting above the hills over Skull Valley.
Zach is a firefighter now, almost two years on with Central Yavapai. With his wife Cynthia and a 7-month-old daughter, his life these days couldn’t be further from my drunken bachelorhood and general jackassery. It’s not a complete switch, but in the days when our friendship had all but vanished I was a newspaper geek on my way to becoming a high school valedictorian, while he spent his waking hours drunk, stoned or on acid.
The night before his wedding we sat on the deck, drinking beer the way our fathers did. We weren’t hell-bent on getting wasted (like my average trip to the bar), we just sipped as we were thirsty, lips slowly loosening as we dug into the stories of those years when we’d barely say hello, yet still proclaimed an endless friendship when we did.
There was the first-hand account I’d never heard of the senior-year Spring Break crash in Mexico that nearly killed two of the best guys around. That rollover was the single shocking, definining tragedy for that high school class. Thankfully it wasn’t fatal. I’d heard vague rumors among what I’d guessed was the occasional solid fact, but for years the whole story was a shrouded, nearly mythological tale of wild teens who nearly went over the line, playing chicken with death itself.
Zach told the whole thing, from the beer-run arrest in Tucson to the lucky seat swap he did not 15 minutes before the car rolled over, to the shattered moments looking at friends, bleeding among twisted shards of metal.
Damn, I told him. That week I started walking again, done with rehab on a reconstructed knee.
Zach painted and worked construction for years, essentially bumming around more than anything until a 22-year-old mind emerged from years of pot haze and he decided to be a firefighter. Years of training, testing, schooling, applying, plenty of hard work, stress and a bit of luck later, he was wearing a CYFD T-shirt, off-duty but undeniably a firefighter - and a father and hours from a husband.
My own path to 25 had plenty of wrinkles, moments of careful thought and near revelation, moments of happy abandon and moments dark turns. I’d embraced a new landscape - a wide, harsh and magnificient desert that felt as home to me as those woods did. I’d travelled, made wonderful friends, could recount stunning achievements at the best, too many wasted hours in the middle and crushing, splintering defeats on the low end.
Sure we couldn’t tell it all, and we didn’t need to. On the eve of his wedding, Zach and I shared great dreams of coming days, triumphs we would watch unfold and demons we were set to defeat.
Each friendship has a rhythm. The dynamic between any two people resonates at its own frequency, changing even, as time goes by. You can fall in and out of touch with somebody repeatedly over a lifetime, yet still merge abruptly in an hour or two of laughter, old stories and catching up.
That night too we saw the full moon rise, in the same wondrous manner, on the same wondrous stage. With each almost imperceptibe step up the ladder of the sky, the moon slid accordingly down the color spectrum, shining through pure orange and golden yellow before it perched straight above us, an orb of brilliant white that lit the whole forest, the same woods where we grew up, that defined our past, cradled the moment and help hope for the future.
But my mind stops on that red. It was a transient color, destroyed and corrupted in an instant, yet stunningly powerful. The red was eternal and mysterious; a rock ‘n’ roll riddle that managed to both burn out and fade away.
I’ve since been trying to name the color with the moment. I thought first of momentary red, then of perfect red. Home red, life red, or friendship red. Or rather than blood red, blood-brother red, in honor of two 8-year-olds whose pin-pricked fingers sealed a lifetime of friendship when they pledged the same.
I bet that when you look at it right, the color of a moonrise is the same as the color of a sunset, or sunrise, or moonset. There are always perfect colors at the changing of days, and they’re always the same. It’s the eyes that are always different, though, still reflecting the light of midday or the dark of night.