And of the call

Our assignment over spring break was to 'see the call to adventure,' we were given specific instructions to let the adventure present itself to you--not for you to seek it. My oh my did the adventure find me, and Frye's thoughts in his final chapter "The Recovery of Myth" has a lot to do with the antics that were presented. The end of spring break, St. Patrick's Day weekend in Butte, America, was nothing short of storybook--I mean I did grow up there after all having lived a good 14 or so years there total--and not until this weekend did I get the chance to witness the bizarre and unique night life. When I was younger my parents always insisted that we--my brother and I--stay downtown on St. Patrick's Evening because Butte becomes much more wild than Butte usually is centering around this rather small holiday. Most people around here know all about it, but what most people don't know are the more personal stories that encountered me this past weekend.

It's been almost six years since summer 2006 when my family relocated up to Anchorage. Butte and the people I'd come to know so well had become a memory in the back of my mind--I'd become happy with my new life beyond that once hometown--but it's only natural that coming to school an hour from where you grew up will trigger some of that hidden nostalgia. Anyways, it wasn't until this year that I got the chance to experience a St. Patty's Day back there, and my was it adventurous. Not only that, my two-and-a-half day span spent there gave me a chance to recovery some sort of lost identity that had been long forgotten.

I stayed with some family friends who I'd never really known that well, but they were incredibly generous by giving me a place to sleep and eat (damn was their corned beef & cabbage meal tip top). Justin, who's from Butte but goes to school here, and I after supper went up to Maloney's bar to find our group of friends who'd traveled over from Bozeman. We found them conveniently at the back of the bar where we stayed for a good hour or so--time hereafter gets a little blurry although I clearly remember the enormous amounts of people emerging from uptown crevices I never knew existed after we exited the back of the bar and returned out to the completely littered streets. The sidewalk trash cans were overflowing with empties as queue lines of people for the bars. We're at the corner of Main and Broadway and we'd lost some of those in our group, but they couldn't have gone far so we decide to head to Metal's--an old bank turned sports bar. On the street I see Lance, which reminds me of Lancelot in the old Celtic tradition at the time, who was the quarterback back in elementary school. He doesn't know who I am. Same goes for Zach, who was telling an older drunk guy to move along and out of his face. The older guy raised his fists--he would be trying to fight a former hockey teammate of mine--but he wouldn't do anything. I can only think about Frye when he says that in romance "violence becomes melodrama." (183) After the older guys moves along I go up and say "Hi" to Zach, it takes a moment for him to recognize me. It's been a while. Thereafter we go into Metal's and one of the first people I come across is Sarah--this story all of a sudden becomes a romance, what a coincidence. We hadn't kept up for a while, but she was the first friend I had in Butte. She became more than just a friend as we grew older, but she never knew that about my feelings for her--that 'first crush' type of thing, and now here we are. I hadn't seen her for over five years, let alone had a decent conversation with her. It seemed she had moved on like me because she wasn't with any Butte people, only with her friends from school in Missoula. But here we--the Bozeman people and Missoula people--were together in the middle. The Middle you say, eh? Anyways, we decided to head to the lounge in the Hotel Finlen, one of the most historically rich hotels in Butte which I had never been in--funny that it was my first time because you can seen the sign all the way from the other side of town. This is when my initial groups began to disintegrate. We weren't all sleeping in the same place, and naturally the drinking wasn't helping. It didn't matter though because what could be better than this, catching up with one of my oldest friends in my original hometown in a bar I'd never even knew existed?

It turns out that however sentimental this all sounds it's not a romance. Although, if we speak of Frye then who knows really? Everything went full circle that night. Also, over the entire night I was trying to catch up with a current coworker from Bozeman. It didn't seem like it would happen. We went back to Maloney's for a little, that's where we lost Sarah. Then we went back down the hill a little to Metal's, the final place we'd go. We found a table this time around because the night was winding down, but then I hear a "Spence!" come from behind me right after I'd made some offhand comment. It was Rob, my coworker, "Haha! Where you been buddy?" "Man, everywhere." What a night, it was only Bozeman people left, at least close around and I'd done everything that I wanted, and much much more. We all had a drink, Rob was with his girlfriend and I with my college crowd, and we all had a brief talk before Metal's was shut down. Then we all went home.

That night was an adventure, and it just came to me although it took some recovering. It was a place I'd never known although I'd lived there for so long. It got me thinking "Quis hic locus?"--or, "what place is this?" (152)--that this is the place I'd been so familiar with, and simultaneously neglected knowing, all along.