Calvin and Hobbes
Core Memories
(Author's Notes: Trigger warning for mature content and themes.)
"Come on, kiddo. Just a few more steps… there you go."
Calvin accepted the hand his dad extended toward him and used it to scramble up over what felt like—and might well have been—the thousandth granite block. That was all the landscape around here was. Granite, mostly bare, with the occasional smattering of trees, or pools of water that were crystal clear because nothing could live in them because it was too doggone cold.
And it was sunny, somehow. Cold, and sunny, and dry, and the air was too thin, and just brr.
He was about to start griping when he saw that his father was already on the move again. So he stood up straight and began to trudge forward yet again.
"I still don't get it, Dad," he panted. "Why do we even have to do this?"
"To build character," his father answered instantly.
"Twisted ankles and broken bones build character?"
"Well, no," Calvin's father said. "That's why you have to watch out."
He indicated toward a vicious chasm in the rock and Calvin jumped over it, just in time. He shook his head and walked a bit faster so that he was side by side with his father.
"But waking up at 4am builds character," Calvin said. "And so do six hour car rides in countries that don't even speak English. Where the heck even are we again?"
"Let's see if you can answer that one for yourself," Calvin's father said. "They speak Norwegian here, right? So we must be in…"
"Norwegia," Calvin said.
His father rolled his eyes but had to smile.
"You're right kid," he said.
"Really?"
"Well, more or less."
"Right, right," Calvin said, clearly skeptical. "Now remind me, why did I have to leave Hobbes behind again?"
"Did you really want to bring your tiger up here, kid?" Calvin's father said. He'd snapped—he realized that a moment too late—but recovered by flashing a grin and stammering. "I mean, this is no place for a tiger, is it? It's too cold, for one thing."
"Yeah, that's true."
"See? Your old man knows a thing or two," Calvin's father said, obviously relieved. "And I care about you too."
"Right," Calvin said in an indecipherable tone.
His father couldn't think of a response to that. So he reached into his backpack for a packet of jerky. Nibbled on one and handed the rest to his son.
"You have to admit, it's kind of neat up here," he said. "Kind of… special, in a way."
"More like eerie," Calvin said. "I'd liken it to a desolate moonscape. A godforsaken, barren, miserable amalgamation of rocks and nothingness. Just thinking about it gives me the creeps."
"Jeez Louise, kid, where did you even acquire such an expansive vocabulary?"
"Like father, like son," was Calvin's only response, and again his father couldn't help but smile.
A tough climb was ahead of them. A boulder, some thirty feet tall, with barely a handhold in sight, and forget about grabbing at one of the dry yellowed tufts of grass wedged in between the fractures in it. And there was no thinking around the problem, either. This one was a matter of matter over mind.
Calvin's father gripped his trekking poles. Then he jumped up—got a foothold in the rock—and with Herculean effort, managed to muscle his way forward, too far forward, lightly fell onto his belly and then hauled himself up.
Calvin, meanwhile, calmly walked around the boulder and met up with his father some twenty feet later.
"To tell you the truth, kid," his father said, "there's another reason that we left Hobbes behind. It's so that we could have some quality time together. Just you and me."
"Quality time, that's right," Calvin said. "Building character, scrambling our butts off, and being nearly blown off the edge of the world into—what did you call the lake again?" he gestured to the pale blue water, thousands of feet below.
"Ringedalsvatnet."
"Right, Ringy-thingy-water," Calvin said. "Talk about quality time."
"Yeah," Calvin's father said. "Exactly."
They walked side by side across the desolate cliffside. Only their wits and balanced prevented them from plunging off the edge of the trail to their certain deaths. Having left at 4am, they were alone up there—all by themselves—and there was a strange sort of unease to the air.
"I can see why people believed in trolls," Calvin's father said, teeth chattering. "If they did exist… this is right where I'd expect to find them."
"Me too," Calvin said. He walked a little closer to his father after that. To keep warm, he told himself, and to block out the wind and the sun.
They walked in silence for some time. When they cross a deep chasm in the rock, connected only by a suspicious-looking wood bridge, they spent some moments in the shadow of the rock, freezing cold. And then they emerged into fresh sunlight, and had to stop to simply blink for a moment.
"Dad?" Calvin said.
"Yeah?"
"This officially stinks."
Calvin's father laughed, and not just once or twice. "I said the same thing to my own father when I was here… it feels like a lifetime ago."
"Really?" Calvin said. "You and Grandpa were here—and you said 'stinks'?"
"More or less," Calvin's father said. "Except it was in Norwegian."
"You can speak Norwegian?"
"'Course I can, kid," Calvin's father said. "I was born and raised here, until I was… about as old as you are now. In fact, one of the very last things I did before coming to the good ol' US of A was… I hiked this exact hike, with my own father."
"Wo-o-ow," Calvin said. "But how do you even remember that? It must have happened eighty-five, eighty-eight… hundred, years ago."
Calvin's father stopped and looked down at his son. There was something timeless in his expression, something that had happened a thousand times before—and would happen a thousand times ago. It was more than happiness, it was a content sort of certainty of what would happen next.
"It's because it's a core memory," Calvin's father said. "It's a part of who I am. I could never forget it, no matter how many hundreds of years old I get to be. And that's why I brought you here, kiddo. To give you a memory… an experience that you'll always be able to look back on, no matter where life takes you. And maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to give it to your own kid someday."
An understanding came over Calvin, or it might have been a premonition. In a way, it mirrored the certainty that his father had, and in that sense it was a passing of a torch.
And indeed, in the years and decades that came, no matter where Calvin went or which direction life took him, he found that he always could recall, with perfect clarity, that desperate, desolate hike in that distant, foreign land, all those years ago.
"Dad was right," Calvin said. "It's been a long time since that day… not quite eight-five hundred years," he said to some laughter, "but really… a lifetime. And no matter where I've been… no matter what I've done… I can always remember that day, that hike in Norway; that desolate landscape that trolls might well call home. That's why when the time came to pass the torch again, I took my own children there. And they made their own core memories there. Didn't you, kids?"
Two lovely little fuzzy-haired children in the front row nodded, clinging to their mother, crying tears of memory and sadness. Calvin smiled—wiped a tear of his own—and placed a hand in the coffin, touching his father's smiling serene face one last time.
"Thanks for the core memories, Dad. That one… and the snow man… and so many, many others."
