Invisible camp fires

Of all the sights in Nantucket, the most astonishing may be skyward. One week ago, I sat with friends around a washed up log on Nobadeer and traded stories at midnight. Henry started that he once ate a heart. His statement ushered in the predictable, but necessary, questions, “What did you say?” “Really?” “So how did this happen?”

Long story short, he took a gap year to “quite basically travel around the world.” With his savings spent on air fare, his parents picked up the rest of the tab. It was the most difficult thing he has ever eaten, he said, because it was tough, muscle, and, rather unforgettably, an antelope’s once beating heart.

We sat against the log, knocking the sand from the bottoms of our Bud Light cans so the grains wouldn’t go down our fronts as we made our way through the supply. Looking only upward, left and right, up and down seem to melt in the face of infinity. In that darkness, I couldn’t be sure if I was focusing on the faraway star nestled in a Milky Way invisible to Fall River and Amherst, MA . It was hard to envision my next week, let alone something light years away.

Henry was working on a South African land reservation as a farm hand. There, he shot his first antelope for the lions kept there. His coworkers, citing ritual, said eating the heart was a coming of age experience: kind of like bungee jumping from the Rye field so many my age flirt around.
Back on the beach, we had no fire. It felt like there should have been one, but I nodded as if he could see me, agreeing that manhood is a tough concept to swallow.