Austin, TX

It is cold enough to see my breath, and I am wrapped in a bulky, unflattering man's jacket. With his left hand hold my right and his right around my waist, I can breathe in his scent of clean hair and hot tea. It is 2 o'clock in the morning and we are dancing the Texas two-step on a bridge, with the city lights of Austin shining behind us and shimmering in the dark water, and Orion standing watch with the same faithfulness he had when he greeted me each morning in the Sierra Nevadas.

After nearly a week of wedding preparations and car-lessness, my friend Cynthia and I were left with just under 24 hours to see Texas. So, we used them all. Fate provided us with guides in the form of a 30-year old guitar player with shoulder-length hair, and his brother, a surfer visiting from San Diego. They had matching, intense blue eyes and sandy blonde hair, and the same sort of relaxed restlessness that Cynthia and I were feeling. We met them at the wedding reception, where a conversation about arson and lizards had developed, and things fell into place from there.

We spent the day doing the normal Austin-tourist circuit: the Zohar botanical gardens, lunch at Stubb's BBQ, going up to a viewpoint of the city and the river that borders it, getting coffee at a local shop. Mostly, we spent the day going to various places to sit and talk. There is something about just talking to someone you don't know at all, and may never see again, that gives conversation a kind of rare aliveness and freedom. Or maybe it is just the Austin sun, that makes you want to stretch out your words to make the afternoon last as long as it can.

Anyway, we all scattered for dinner, and Cynthia and I went to watch the bride and groom open presents, but we made plans to meet up for the evening and check out the scene at the Broken Spoke, where they give Texas two-step lessons every night.

There, we fall quickly into two pairs: myself and the guitarist, Cynthia and the surfer. He is a good dancer, with a musician's sense of rhythm, and I fall back on my memory of swing-dancing. It is pure and simple fun. More fun than I've had in a while. We drink a few Lone Stars and talk about nothing, and dance. After a couple of hours, we head to Hole in the Wall. The live music is loud, but good, and between sets we head outside to smoke vanilla cigars and trade wood-chopping stories and questions about the opposite gender.

I don't know if it was ever an explicit plan to stay out all night. It just sort of happened that way. After the second band played we ended up at an all-night cafe for a bite to eat and drank a good deal of coffee and tea, and at that point it just seemed to be a consensus.

So that's how I ended up on the bridge. I should be clear. My companion for the evening struck me as probably out of my league, and I saw him mostly as an interesting person to talk to, but it is hard to dance close to someone under silent stars without... My heart beat a little fast in spite of myself. But I made a decision not to try that path. It didn't seem like it should be part of that night. We were all there for some other reason.

At this point, we are somewhat determined to make it to sunrise, so we head to a coffee-shop for hot cocoa and spend several hours in conversation, the kind of conversation that only happens at 4 in the morning. We talk about philosophies of life, what friendship really is and what it feels like for people to enter and exit your life, whether God and religion have anything to do with each other. Before the first light arrives, we head back into the car and drive outside of the city, to a lake near the reservoir. We sit with the heater on and listen to Tom Waite, and see a small herd of deer run past in the semi-dark. Cynthia grabs her camera and heads out into the cool morning air, and a few minutes later I follow her. We make our way over pock-marked rocks and odd plants to the edge of the water, with steam rising from its surface and the occasional sound of a fish jumping. The light comes long before the sun does, and she seems to be taking her sweet time just below the horizon. We wait for her mostly in silence. The guitarist gives his pronouncement: "You girls are crazy." "How so?" I counter. "Crazy like foxes."

We return to the rented house Cynthia and I have stayed in for the past week, a little after 8 o'clock. She and I have been left with the final clean-up chores, since the rest of her family had early-morning flights. We strip sheets and empty trash cans while our two companions doze on couches. Our ride to the airport is coming at 10, so Cynthia and I make tea and sit next to our slumbering friends and wait. She reads a novel. I fall asleep. At 10 sharp our ride arrives and we all say goodbye with hugs and last words, and I'm left with a business card in my hand and a request to email once in a while.

It is strange how people enter your life, and some part of me seems to need these strange occurrences, strange experiences that don't fit into any plan and may never lead to anything else. I may email my new friend, but maybe I won't. Maybe I will and we'll write a couple of times and it will peter out. The important thing seems to be that that night really happened, that we all stayed awake to watch the world and it looked different from that perspective.

It looks different still.