Up early in cold darkness, Arch and I sat silent, sometimes for hours, watching the air become illuminated as the sun crept over the hidden horizon and filtered down through the canopy of trees or burned off the mist over the pond. In those quiet moments, I thought of the poster on the door of my English teacher Mrs. Shackelford’s classroom, printed under an old painting depicting two men atop a rocky overlook in the wilderness, a stream beneath them, green mountains in the distance. nothing can befall me in life which nature cannot repair, the poster read, quoting Emerson. The painting, I later learned, was named Kindred Spirits.

In the deep silence of those still mornings, the world’s vastness became present and visible. I understood what people meant when they talked about having a “religious experience.” In my imagination, it was Arch, not God, to whom these things belonged, who showed them to me, who made me feel both sublime peace and joy.

On my first visit to the camp, Arch led me out past the pond, which stood in a small clearing at the center of a copse of poplar trees.

“I’ll be buried here too one day,” he said.

It was a beautiful spot, wide enough so that the sun shone down through the gap between the branches of the trees above us. The headstone was a simple marble slab engraved with Arch’s father’s name and the years he’d been born and died above a Celtic cross. A border of flagstones marked off the grave itself. In front stood a bench Arch had built with Jim years before in what now seems a rather heavy-handed bonding ritual but which I thought of then as deep.

“I wish I’d known him,” I said. “He must have been a great man.”

“Not really.”

A darkness came over Arch. I can now see that darkness for what it was, though at the time, I thought only of myself: how the confidences Arch shared with me drew me closer to him, deepened our connection, proved that I meant as much to him as he did to me—that we were, in fact, kindred spirits, like the men in the painting from English class.