- Lemonade
Maybe you’re ten years old and manning a lemonade stand with your best friend. You’re wearing a rectangle-shaped lavender sundress you love that will not fit by next summer, because you’re at that age when growth is suddenly relentless and in all the wrong directions. Did you lug your boom box—one of your prized grown-up possessions—to the corner to liven up the scene, turn the radio to Kiss 106.1 and hope they played your favorite Sugar Ray song, the one that sounds like summer in sepia, sickly sweet like lemonade left in the sun? Maybe you let the sounds of summer speak for themselves: the splashes and shouts down at the lake, the gut-lodging bass of passing car stereos, the sputter and buzz of weekend yard work. The background noise, the sleepy-warm sun, the smells—barbecue smoke and stagnant shallow water and overripe blackberries and cigarettes mixed with a sour earthy drift you can’t yet identify as marijuana—it all makes you thirsty. You could run back down the block to your house and fill a water bottle. But the rush of commerce, that dopamine zing of each coin’s plunk, keeps you tethered to your post. So instead, you sip from your own supply, restrained slurps from a tiny paper cup growing mushy in your hand. Back in the kitchen, you must have mixed the lemonade from cans of frozen concentrate, filled plastic pitchers with all the ice cubes available. All afternoon it sits there, the beige plastic sweating, testing your commitment to profit: each dixie cup you fill for yourself is two fewer quarters in your jar. You watch the sun sinking toward the top of Orcas Street, the hill up which you will trudge to catch the bus to middle school a year from now. Already you can see yourself as if from up there, lemonade stand and lavender dress and lake far away and glowing in the late-afternoon light.
2. Vodka
Maybe you are fifteen and awkwardly dolled up for a school dance in a dress you know is wrong, but maybe it won’t matter because a friend of a friend somehow procured a handle of watermelon Smirnoff around which a handful of you now huddle in Conor Anderson’s basement, your bodies circling the bottle with fascination and itching greed. No time to bother with soda or juice or even cups, you take turns swigging until Conor’s mom, your ride, calls down the long tunnel of the stairs. The taste isn’t what matters; it’s the feeling you are thirsty for, the warm flood that dissolves brittle boundaries in your brain, remakes your whole being, mind and body melding into one porous swimming thing. At the dance, R&B oozes under your skin, Usher’s crooning melodies, a concentrate of teen horniness melting and spreading in a dark room. In the bathroom you blink at the mirror and try to recognize your face. The theme of the dance is “Lovers and Friends.” You are thirsty to be someone, something, anything else.
3. Coca-Cola
You’re not a big soda drinker—your parents never buy it, and you never developed much of a taste for carbonated sweetness—but at your first restaurant job you discover the magic of a few cold gulps of Coke three-quarters of the way through a brunch shift. You’re sixteen, the youngest person on staff, and you know that, other than washing dishes, bussing tables is the least glamorous position in this not-glamorous neighborhood diner. But you love the rush of the rush, of moving fast across the floor, anticipating when water glasses and coffee cups will dip from half-full to half-empty so you can be there, ready, with your pitchers. You love the way the servers smile when you help them out. They’re grown women with lives you can’t imagine, and don’t much try to, but you drink in their approval anyway. You love the steady mindlessness of filling and emptying a black plastic bus tub over and over, wiping jam and butter from Formica tabletops, the way these necessary and repeated tasks make the hours slough away. And when there’s finally no one on the wait list and every empty table cleared and wiped for now and the servers start to cycle through their smoke breaks, you love the click and hiss of the soda machine as it fills your cup, foaming to the brim and then settling. The boost of calories and caffeine lifts you off the soles of your feet, tugs you forward into the early afternoon. You love the way it tastes when you’ve worked for it.
4. Cheap Beer
You head to fifty-cent beer night at the Vic, conveniently scheduled on Wednesdays, the day you and forty other conservations corps members get back to town from an eight-day hitch of clearing and digging trails in the woods. You haven’t had a drink or a smoke in a week—ever the rule-follower, you take the corps’ no-drugs-and-alcohol policy seriously—and even a small plastic cup of the Vic’s cheapest, pissiest beer hits you smack behind the eyes. You’re not ten years old anymore, and even though you’re living on $275 a week, fifty cents feels the same as free. This is beer you can waste on games, flip cup and chandeliers at the long rickety tables under the high pressed-tin ceiling of the bar. You’ve already showered at the public pool, smoked a joint by the river with the boys, feasted on cheese fries at the tavern across the street, and the next six summer days stretch beautifully empty ahead of you, to fill with as much anything or nothing as you need. You’re twenty-five now, have mostly let go of the instinct to become invisible to yourself before you can let anyone else see you. But there is nothing like the way a spare change jar’s worth of beer opens up new dimensions in the night.
5. Cold Espresso
Go to the bakery on your first morning off and order a large iced mocha with your big slice of buttery quiche. You are famished, filled with the kind of hunger that won’t abate for weeks after the season ends, as your metabolism slowly recalibrates from the months of long days of hiking and manual labor. You make $15 an hour now and sleep in your car, but instead of saving every cent for whatever the winter might bring, you relish the recklessness of material indulgences—a rebellion against the restraint, the measured rations, the time-honed routines your job requires of you. Later you’ll browse the sale rack at the outdoor store in town, buy a half-off Patagonia T-shirt, just to feel the soft newness against your skin. You’ll consider a stiff ball cap not yet sweat-crusted, a pair of sunglasses not yet scratched. You’ll forgo the library for the bookstore, buy a brand-new paperback and write your name on the inside cover, no going back. But for now, in the bakery, all you know is that first sweet slurp of espresso, sugar, and dairy on ice, hitting like an injection after a week of instant coffee and instant oatmeal gulped sitting up in your sleeping bag. After a rough start to the season, your first on a professional trail crew, you’ve watched closely and learned quickly and finally settled into some semblance of a rhythm, carved out a small place for yourself that feels earned. Alone on this August morning you feel, for the first time, like you belong. You swirl the ice in your mocha, letting it melt a little so it lasts longer. It doesn’t matter. Later that afternoon you’ll buy another one. You deserve it, every sip.
6. Fancy Beer
Let the guy who’s sidled up to you at Charlie B’s buy you a Blackfoot IPA. It’s the whiskey of beers, he says, and you have to agree as it slides down your throat, rich with malt, crispy with hops, blooming warmth in your chest. You feel like you’ve been thirsty your entire life for this exact beer, right here, right now. You’re on your six days off again, it’s mid-July, and you’re rounding the corner into the belly of the summer, the days of heat and sweat starting to pile up against a dam of your own doggedness that strains for release. Your body feels lean and buoyant, and you want someone to touch your scrubbed-clean skin. Your new drinking buddy is a firefighter, of course, employed like you are by the U.S. Forest Service. You talk shop and order another round, then another. You go to another bar. You lose track. Before long it’s 2 a.m. and you’re standing in an alley and he’s mumbling something about his roommate having his keys. When you wake up in the morning, he’s shrugging into his clothes, shaking the fuzz from his brain, saying he’s late to a memorial for a firefighter who died in the line of duty last week. Driving away from Missoula that afternoon you can see the plume from the Lolo Peak fire rising and spreading across the valley, where it will settle and stay for weeks. You fix your eyes on the clear part of the sky.
7. Wild Water
On the hottest, most shadeless days of summer, simply drinking water is not enough. You’ll need to absorb it through your pores, let it saturate your hair and trickle out of your ears. Soak a bandanna, your hat, even a shirt in the creek and then wear it, wonder at how fast it warms and dries as you work. Dip in Indian Creek on your lunch break, and again when you pass the same spot at the end of the day, desperate for more. Wade in the White River, milky with silt, feel for the bottom with your toes and watch the water cascade over a logjam. Crashing around off-trail, searching for a shortcut to the Boulder Pass switchbacks, find a perfect private pool amid the tumble-steps of Boulder Creek and don’t hesitate to peel off all your clothes and plunge in. After you cross the Entiat River on a fallen log, strip to your underwear and slosh forward at the horse ford and dunk. Let the water brace you for the long hike out. Only six miles separate this eddy from its glacial source, but still you’re shocked by how icy the water’s stayed after weeks and weeks and weeks of ninety-plus-degree days. You think about baptism occurring at the cellular level. French Creek, Icicle Creek, Ingalls Creek, Rock Creek; Lakes Margaret, Josephine, Augusta, Sally Ann. From unnamed tarns and side stream eddies to the coursing churn of the Chiwawa, the Wenatchee, the Columbia itself—you could map this corner of the Cascades with the blue lines of every waterway that’s slaked your thirst, every drop that’s cooled you from the inside out. Every sip that transforms you back into yourself.