Avery swung Rachel around one time too many, getting slightly off beat with the rest of the dancers. They laughed sheepishly through the fiddle notes and stomps as they ducked under each other back into position to grab the hands of the other two dancers.
"Circle four, once around. Come back with a left hand star!" The caller, a slight old man with suspenders, paced across the makeshift bandstand.
With Rachel on his right hand and Anya on his left, he caught the eyes of Martin, across from him. They kept eye contact with big smiles as they spun around, the ladies flinging their skirts with each step.
"Promenade across the set! Ladies chain, into lines!"
He twisted Rachel with a half-spin into position in front of him and they stomped on past Anya and Martin. All four dancers waved their shoulders to the beat. The fiddle stopped and the banjo player carried the next few measures with an amazing series of rhythmic notes. The guitar kept an off beat, boom-Chuck!, boom-Chuck! boom-Chuck! boom-Chuck! As the ladies shifted across the set, the music sped up. Rachel's hair was slick with sweat and Avery felt his heart speed up as the round began again; in their long lines, the dancers tromped towards their partners, tromped back again, swung their partners, and Avery nodded farewell to Anya, found the hand of another man, a stranger, who twirled with him and sent him back into Rachel's arms again.
On up the line they worked, reaching the band and the caller, and bouncing back. The gym's polished wooden floor vibrated with a hundred synchronized feet slamming down upon it; the vast ceiling bounced notes and hollers over every dancer's head and, if someone were to look up, they'd see the basketball nets shake with the excitement.
The dance ended with a long, strong swing, Rachel and Avery spinning each other and winding up in a low dip as the fiddle hit the last, sustained note, a high A. Her back was damp and his hands were sweaty and they nearly toppled, but he managed to get her upright again with a stumble.
There was nothing to say, so the two of them smiled and sighed and shared a second of euphoria; Avery took a deep, deep breath. "Hoo! Thank you!"
"And you," she replied. He rubbed his hands over his face and turned to track down the drinking fountain. The caller instructed the room to find a new partner for a waltz, but Avery decided to sit this one out and recover for a few minutes. He wanted to ask Anya for the next dance after that, but saw her across the gym as she nodded to another fellow, a friend of his.
Martin met him in the line for water. "She's a great dancer," said Martin, referring to Anya. "Where did you find her? I haven't seen her before."
"I found her in the woods, actually," said Avery. "Last week. I was hiking up on the Peninsula with Scott, coming back from Blue Glacier. We got off the trail a little ways, kind of taking a shortcut, and just suddenly found her in the middle of nowhere. She was totally lost. First thing in the morning; hadn't even had coffee yet."
"Is she from here?" Martin looked back across the room at her, where she was waltzing gracefully.
"No. She's from North Carolina. Just up checking out the rainforest while visiting her brother in Seattle."
"Carolina! No wonder she's such a good dancer. Lots of contras down there!"
Avery reached the water fountain and sucked in the cool stream. His heart was still beating from the last dance. He splashed a bit of water on his face and dried it with his already-wet shirt. "I feel gross," he said. "I'm going outside for some air."
He left Martin at the fountain and went through the big metal double doors that led to one of the many campus lawns. It was late in the year, and the temperature was dropping quickly. As a student, he had spent far too much time on that campus, but he'd never seen a campus so worth spending time on. Between classes he remembered darting down the trails that surrounded the college, taking ten-minute jogs through the trees. He had collected lichen and learned about forest ecology in those woods, been taught to stare at a tree for hours to learn about the countless interactions that happened upon it. He never had appreciated beetles until he spent his four years there.
He still lived near Olympia, and only came back the campus periodically for contra dances, public seminars, and to utilize the free printers in the library. He had only been out of college a few years and still looked like he belonged there. He kept a short beard, wore flannel shirts, and could speak at length about mycology, beer brewing, and farming. Just like three quarters of the twenty-somethings that he knew. But he was getting tired of living the seasonal life helping out on his friend's farm, Nightshadow Nursery. Winters were hard, and he did his best to pick up low-wage, low-commitment work in the service industry. At twenty-seven, he was thinking harder about what he really wanted life to look like.
The look of life, though, was vague and foggy to him. He had ideas. And some skills. But that was pretty much it. In his mind, he needed to find a partner first, imagining that, whoever she was, she would give him direction and they would support each other.
After seven years in Washington, with only brief spurts of travel in the slow seasons, he was ready to explore a new world. He dreamed once of farming on the moon, but he suspected that it would be too expensive to ship as much compost on a rocket ship as would be needed to get started there, so he set his dreams on more obtainable locations.
Sometimes, while waiting for inspiration to hit, he would realize that months of relative stagnancy had passed in his life. Inspiration had a way of sneaking up when he wasn't paying attention and he had vowed to himself that the next time it entered his life, he would follow it. Just last week, he had been telling a friend of his that he was hoping to find that direction out in the forest, maybe buried beneath the ferns or etched into the bark lines of some great Cedar.
And just last week he discovered Anya. Well, he thought as he heard the waltz wind up inside. Maybe Carolina needs farmers this time of year. He re-entered the gym to find a partner.
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