It was one of those experiences that occurs in a flash of time, all warmth and good feelings that settle down into a nest of memories with a warm glow like a winter fire. I was driving from Vermont to East Worcester, New York following a business trip. I had decided to take a few extra days to visit my paternal grandparents in East Worcester, and as I passed Lake Placid on Highway 87, the straight, lonely road that runs north and south along the west side of Lake Champlain, I hatched a plan.

Not far away in southwest Connecticut lived Bob Cullen, a high-school best friend that I hadn't seen in 19 years. Approaching a roadside rest stop, I pulled over at the last minute and, fumbling with my address book, found Bob's number and called. As the phone rang and my anticipation grew, I thought of how we had only recently gotten back in touch, a serendipitous sequence of events that had us missing each other at every turn. I was still living in California then, and my wife and I had gone to Monterey for the week, the same week that Bob had come to the San Francisco Bay Area for a business conference.

He had a few facts to work with. He knew that I was living in the area the last time we had talked, that I had graduated from Berkeley and that my parents lived nearby. Unfortunately, I had moved to a neighboring town, had an unlisted number and my parents were living in Yugoslavia. After dealing with operators who refused to divulge my number and a sympathetic (but helpless) tenant in my parents' house, Bob finally turned to the University of California. The Berkeley Alumni Association confirmed that I was living in the area but refused to divulge my number or address.

Sensing his frustration, they reluctantly agreed to address and mail an envelope to me with a letter from Bob in it. Unfortunately, the letter arrived the day we returned from Monterey and two days after Bob returned to Connecticut, but we were able to establish phone contact and had been calling each other every couple of months since.

Two more times the phone rang. Finally, just as I was about to hang up, he was there. Of course he'd meet me at the farm. Not for something like this. Hanging up the phone, I felt like a child on Christmas Eve. The rest of the drive would take forever. One more call, I thought: Better let the grandparents know that there'll be one more for dinner. As always, they were as gracious as they could be; they remembered Bob from their visits to Spain while we were living there. Love to have him.

Back on the road, I was suddenly awash in emotions and memories. The old adage about never being able to renew friendships ("you can never go back...") lurked evilly in the back of my mind, making me wonder if I had done the right thing. Should I have just left it alone, allowing the memories of the past form the stuff of friendship? I couldn't; besides, Bob would be feeling the same sorts of emotions as he drove up, and if we were going to face each other we needed to be similarly equipped. No, I had made the right decision.

Bob and I had met 21 years before in Spain. Our fathers worked for multinational corporations in Madrid, and the two of us had arrived at the American School of Madrid in the tiny suburb of Aravaca, west of Madrid proper, to begin our sophomore year of high school. Shortly after school started we met and realized that we shared similar interests: scuba diving; girls; camping; girls; music; and girls. with those fundamental similarities, in a few weeks we became fast friends.

The sun was beginning to drop low in the sky as I continued south, passing Severance and Brant Lake and Northumberland. Watching the sky turn from blue to pink to indigo, I smiled at the thoughts of past days. Some came back in a flash of recognition, brilliant and unfaded by time; others returned slowly, a piece at a time, a patchwork quilt of barely-connected memories.

That year, Bob and I planned our lives together. We would both marry the perfect girl (at least that part came true) and become marine biologists. We would build a huge house and laboratory complex on the beach in Florida, from which we would sell our services -- "Sorry Mr. Cousteau, we'd love to help you that week, but we're booked on the Tierra del Fuego Expedition. Perhaps another time."

Anyone passing me on the freeway at that moment would probably have backed cautiously away, as I was laughing loudly at the thoughts that followed. Shortly after we designed the house, we went scuba diving in a lake near Madrid with our swimming coach. We wanted to dive on the town that supposedly lay at the bottom of the lake, the victim of a newly-built dam that flooded the valley and everything in it.

The dam should have been a clue to us, but we didn't pick up on it -- until, that is, we saw the militia on the beach, waving at us with their rifles. Not being entirely stupid, we decided that a return to the beach was the prudent thing to do. It was. Water supply, they said. Jail, they said. Posted, No Swimming, they said. Nothing about diving, we countered. They paused. Enter peasant fisherman. Dumb Americans, he said. Dumb Americans, we agreed. Let us go. They did.

I passed a sign on the highway that said, "Wilderness Camping," with an arrow pointing up into the New York mountains. Immediately, memories of a camping trip with Bob and my brother Roger flooded in. The three of us had travelled into the Guadarrama Mountains north of Madrid for the weekend. From the train station we hiked up into the Cotos Valley, a remote, high-mountain area well above timberline. Roger was only 13, but he kept up with us. It was mid-July, and we were ready for a great weekend.

That first night, the bulls came.

Spain is famous for its fighting bulls. One of the techniques ranchers use to make them fierce is to limit their exposure to people. That way, when they see a human, they charge them as something new and different. To keep the bulls isolated, they raise them in remote, out-of-the-way places. Like Cotos.

Roger was the first to see them. We were camped on the floor of a valley, a sort of meadow ringed by low mountains. As darkness fell, Roger spotted movement across the valley, and it wasn't long before we figured out what it was. Luckily, we had eaten by that time, so we turned in early, hoping the bulls would go away. It seems that that meadow was the happening place to be if you were a bull, because they didn't leave; we miserably stuck our heads out every so often to check, and they were always there, pretty much ignoring us and the tent. We stayed inside.

Late that night the bulls left, because the blizzard came.

Heavy snow doesn't often hit the Guadarrama Mountains in July, but this was an exception. It started with rain that rapidly turned to slushy ice as the temperature plummeted into the twenties. Pitching the tent on a high piece of ground wasn't in our minds when we arrived, so naturally we chose a hole. The tent filled with freezing water, but huddled together we were able to generate a modicum of warmth, since at least we had the tent over us to keep the snow off. That lasted until the combined weight of the snow and ice ripped the main seam out of the tent, leaving us completely unprotected.

We didn't have many options. Above us, high on a ledge, there was a shelter, put there for the rangers and shepherds who frequented the area. We didn't want to risk falling off the cliff to get there, though. The trail down was equally dangerous, so we decided to sit it out, hoping that morning would come soon.

It didn't. It took a month to get there, and then it was foggy and windy. We had long since lost feeling in our hands and feet, and we were tired, hungry and scared to death. Wrapping everything in what was left of the tent, we dragged it down the mountain to a local bar, where we huddled in front of a fire until my father came to pick us up.

That was probably the closest I ever came to dying. Bob came a lot closer, though; in fact, he did die, two years later, in 1973. He didn't know it at the time, but he did.

I had gone to visit him in Mamaroneck, New York, the town where he and his folks had settled following their transfer back to the States. It was the summer following our freshman year of college, and I had travelled east from California to see a girlfriend in New Jersey and visit Bob on the way there. We had a great time, vowing to stay in touch. We didn't, of course; Bob moved that summer and I didn't know it, and I was devastated a year later when I received the phone call from a mutual high school friend, informing me that Bob had been killed in a motorcycle accident. I had ridden on that motorcycle.

I mourned Bob for a long time, and felt like a part of me had died with him. I missed him, and I missed the plans we had made that would now never happen.

It wasn't all that bad though, because four years later Bob called me.

I was home having dinner one night, autumn I think it was, when the phone rang. I answered, and a strangely familiar voice addressed me in the nickname I had earned in Spain -- and that only one person ever used. "Flaco!" the voice said. "Is that you?"

It couldn't be, I thought. I was dizzy and confused. "where the hell are you calling from?!?" I yelled. "Home, of course," he replied. "But you're dead!" I insisted, by now making no sense whatsoever. We finally made it through all that (he didn't hang up on me, a miracle in itself), and I broke it to him gently that he was in fact dead and after all that he had put me through, the least he could do was lie down and act dead. We never did figure out where the rumor started, but we were both relieved that it was only a rumor. Especially Bob.

Old Mill School, Next Left. The sign made me think of the American School of Madrid, ASM. Sometimes, I wonder how Bob and I ever made it through that year. It certainly wasn't the most -- academic -- of school years. We worked hard, but not at the things we should have. Algebra killed us both (although it's still recovering from us), and we never should have been allowed to take any of the other classes together, either.

We were pretty clever, though, and we did some neat things. Like the time we built the wall of toilet paper in the bathroom and buried the first freshman that ran into it. See, now that was the school's fault. If they hadn't left the toilet paper boxes in there in the first place, we wouldn't have built the wall. Or the time we decided to take the doors off all the lockers and hide them in the bathroom. That was the last day of school, and I think they were so glad to be rid of us they didn't say anything. Although they could have.

It didn't stop there (Do our Moms know all this?). Bob and I discovered photography and the darkroom at the same time, and used to spend hours up there, developing hopelessly pathetic prints from the four or five negatives that were lying around. We found that to be much more fun than Algebra, so I used to write Bob a library excuse from a pad of purloined passes and excuse him from class during my free periods. On occasion, he would reciprocate. It's a wonder we ever graduated from high school.

Music was the other thing we shared. We wanted to be the next Iron Butterfly (or at least Zager and Evans), and we used to have interminable jam sessions during which we played musical strokes of genius, comprised of the same three chords, over and over and over again. We were hot. My Dad, himself a piano whiz who once played with the Big Bands, would smile and lend encouragement. Then he would drift into the other room and kick the dog.

I was minutes now from East Worcester, passing though nameless little towns that looked like they had dropped in from another century. They were towns of mixed heritage, with flavors of Dutch and Amish and Russian rolled into an odd-looking hybrid architecture. These were the forgotten towns of upstate New York, located in that wilderness between The City and the big population centers to the north, Rochester and Syracuse. There was a richness to the area, an almost spiritual wealth that transcended the shabbiness of the older, poorer towns. And the people: these were simple folks, farmers mostly, and they had that odd charm that one finds in the country, a mix of innocence and trust that is all but dead in the city. These were people who didn't own house keys, because they didn't need them.

Finally, East Worcester. One main street, maybe six blocks long, kids on bicycles, a garage sale, the country store. Up the vaguely familiar road to the farm, where the Shepards waited with smiles and hugs and a dinner that left me stunned in the easy chair afterwards. We talked until ten, catching up on family news and the latest happenings in East Worcester. They went on to bed, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the excitement of waiting for Bob.

He wasn't long coming. At about one in the morning, headlights splashed the seldom-travelled country road that my grandparents lived on, and soon a truck heaved into view, complete with camper shell and a police-type light bar on top. He had arrived. Apprehensively, with a full dose of bluster to hide my nerves, I went outside and waited for him to park.

Remember the scene in Close Encounters when the people are standing in front of the mother ship, waiting for the door to open? That was me. When it finally did, I was relieved to see -- Bob get out. He was heavier, having inherited my own growing middle; He had the same beard I had; and he was still Bob. We apprised each other for a few seconds and then, with ear-wide smiles, embraced like the lost brothers we had been for so long. It was homecoming all over again.

That night, we talked quietly in the living room until the early morning hours, surrounded by the sounds of the old house and the familiar tones of each others' voices. I waited, dreading the arrival of that awful, inevitable moment when old friends long separated run out of new things to say to each other and that uncomfortable silence falls, like a winter snow blanket. But it never came. I'm sure Bob was waiting for the same thing to happen, but as we talked on and on we began to remind each other of things forgotten and in a few short hours we were friends again, comfortable in each others' presence. When we finally went to bed, we did so relishing the arrival of the next day.

Farms are funny places. They have their own time zone, evidenced by the sounds of cattle crossing the road with an obviously wide awake farmer at 3:30 the next morning. Actually, what woke me was the sound of Mr. Porschka's voice as he talked with his cows. I don't mean talked to his cows -- I mean talked with them. Accompanying the dull, muted clank of the cows' bells was the voice of my Grandfather's neighbor as he carried on a rambling conversation with one or more of the black and white Holsteins making their way to the knee-deep grass of the pasture across the street. I guess he was hearing responses, because he would occasionally pause, listening to nothing that I could hear (There was no one else there, I looked) and then return to talking. Turning from the window, I shook my head and went down for a shower.

By six AM, I was showered and dressed, drinking coffee with my grandfather and discussing the chores of the day ahead -- planting trees, watering bushes, other odds and ends around the place. I enjoyed time spent with him because it allowed insights into my family as well as myself. Later, after Bob left, I spent several hours with him, listening to his life story and learning things I had never known about his son, my father.

At seven, my Grandmother and Bob came down the stairs, and after introductions and reacquaintances, we all sat down to breakfast. Bob and I ate quickly, wanting to spend more time talking and catching up on things left over from the night before. After washing the dishes we decided to go outside and sit on the lawn. Before we did, though, Bob went to his truck and, opening the back, retrieved three large boxes. With a mysterious grin he motioned me to follow him to the lawn chairs.

Anyone who ever attended high school learned the fine art of note writing. Not the academic, memory-jogging type that teachers like to see flowing from students' pencils, but the clandestine type that are secreted inside borrowed pens and passed from hand-to-hand until they reach their final destinations. These are the notes that make for high school scandal, the Valachi Papers of adolescence. "I think she'll go with you, but remember that Tom wants to ask her, too...Do you think he'll ever talk to me again? If he doesn't I'll just die...". Some of them were eyes-only communiques between friends, not to be shared, regardless of the cost; others were desperate steps to reveal a fact to someone else that the writer was either too scared or too shy to convey personally.

Whatever the case, as I opened that first box, I discovered a treasure trove comprised of every note I had ever written to Bob, Bob had written to me, or that either one of us had ever written to or received from anybody else. The man was the ultimate packrat, and I instantly loved him for it. Here were the library passes I had written to get Bob out of History. Here, an invitation to all comers for a jam session to be held at my house. Over here, notes that represented every possible interpersonal combination of professed love: Note from Bob to Steve about Girl. Note from Steve to Bob about Girl. Note from Girl to Steve about Bob's note from Bob to Steve about Girl. Note from Girl to Bob about Peter telling Girl that Steve maybe liked her, and was Bob really the source of that crucial piece of information. And on and on.

There were letters from friends I had forgotten and letters from friends that, try though I did, I couldn't remember. Bob even had the original shopping list that we put together for our ill-fated camping trip to Cotos. Judging from what we took, if the snow didn't kill us, malnutrition would have.

This was a period of rediscovery for us, a time that saw us reconnecting with the concentric rings of friendship that blessed us during that year in Spain. We remembered people long-forgotten, things we had done, places we had gone. Bob reminded me of the swim meet that we competed in against a hot Spanish team. I was swimming anchor on a 1600-meter medley relay, and when I leaped from the block I unknowingly left my swimsuit dangling from the backstroke handle. I won the race; the coach met me with a towel, warming me with the thought that I should be heartened: I could have been swimming backstroke.

We talked well into the afternoon, sometimes sitting, sometimes walking around the farm, enjoying the sights and smells of the country. We watched a tiny car putt-putt up the hill and remembered Bismarck, the wrecked Italian Goggomobile that we had rescued from a field near the high school and turned into a go-cart of sorts. We talked of the things I had remembered on the drive up, and laughed at the silliness we had shared. When dinnertime came we went to a dark little steakhouse a few towns over. After eating, we talked for a while, and then it was time for Bob to head for home.

As I watched him wave goodbye at the freeway ramp, I felt a great sense of warmth and relief flood through me. After nearly 20 years of sporadic (at best) contact, Bob and I had proven that certain flavors of friendship are capable of transcending time and remaining intact. We had reloaded lost memories in each other, restoring some of the bittersweet feelings that are so much a part of that period of adolescence.

The next day, I drove back to Burlington.

That trip was a year ago. I spoke with Bob last night, and we shared stories of our kids' first days of school. We call every week or so, just to stay in touch, and we plan to visit again soon. We took up the mantle of responsibility for our 20th High School Reunion in 1992, an adventure best left for another story. Next spring, Bob and I are going to get our families together, either in Vermont or Connecticut, and do something.