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Ricky died not so long ago. His obituary was a surprise, even thirty years down the road. There had been no contact, although I saw him a couple times in his truck, an old L-model International he had converted to four-wheel drive. I was in college at the time, and Ricky was helping Dad with odd jobs and logging. We said hello, but he was whip-thin and furtive, and the conversation didn’t go anywhere. Later I read in the local weekly that there was trouble at the grocery store and when the cops found Ricky walking afterward he had a gun, but he gave up quiet and went to jail. And then he was dead—not young, but too soon, and alone in a small apartment. I never asked how. I made it graveside and stood in the cold wind while one of his friends put a boom box on the headstone and played a song I should have written down because now I can’t remember. His daughter was there, with the same dark eyes I remembered from Ricky the boy. Hers were reddened with mourning, but she was wearing an army dress uniform, and you could see her standing tall because she knew it would have made her daddy proud. Afterward we went to the McDonald’s right across the street from the cemetery and we all had some coffee like Ricky had in that same McDonald’s every day for the last several years. Maybe he’d seen it coming clear back when we were kids. He had some sadness on him. It came built in.

My friends Andy and Wendy helped me put together a video essay about Ricky and the culverts for Wisconsin Public Television. Then a magazine asked me to write about my favorite place in the world. The question is unanswerable (there is a mountain in Carbon County, Wyoming, that pulls at me like the moon; there is a pine tree near here that fits the curve of my back; once I stood in a ruined Welsh castle and felt a thousand years old), but I chose the culverts for that, too. Ricky’s daughter saw the television piece and wrote me a letter. When I started the magazine essay, I wanted to reread the letter, so I dug through the piles on my desk until I found it. When I pulled the folded paper sheets from the envelope, a pair of photographs fell out. They were of Ricky—when I opened the letter the first time they had stuck inside and I hadn’t seen them. In rough notes toward the essay I had mentioned Ricky’s dark eyes but wondered if I was recalling them accurately, as memories have a way of conforming to our stories the more we tell them. But there in those photos—one of Ricky as a young man and one of him older, from the years I didn’t know him—were the very eyes memory conjured. I must restrain my speculation; there was so much more to this man than my few stories predicated on our childhood days, the odd newspaper clipping, and a funeral. But looking at those eyes now, I think Ricky knew early on he wasn’t suited for this world. I think he carried that army shovel figuring if worse came to worst he could at the very least dig in. Thing is, we never did finish any of our hideouts. I think Ricky died still digging.

You learn not to pretty these things up. You learn to take them as they are. I go to the culverts one day and just sit quiet. Two steel tubes and a halfhearted creek: I guess I could do better for a favorite place. But grandeur is for postcard trips. For the long haul, I want the click and trickle of flat water moving, the shelter of the grass, a road close to home. The chance to slip from sight at the sound of motors. I throw a pebble for Ricky, but I’m not looking for angels in the tag alders. I just watch the creek flow from beneath me and out of sight around the bend. When I was a kid I yearned to follow that water—on a raft, in a canoe, maybe simply barefoot with a stick. Now I just dangle my boots and let the cold spring air make my nose run, and I watch Beaver Creek slide smooth and quiet until it reoccurs to me that the world is constantly trying to bring everything level.

I have gone in to Eau Claire to hang out with some of my firefighter pals (including my friend Mills) at Station #5 when I