Bonded

We never found the wallet.
The wallet my older brother lost somewhere along a meandering dirt trail on which he rode with his friend Mike. The same meandering dirt trail that he retraced a day later. This time he went with his younger brother. It was an adventure I was happy to take on. It wasn't a forced march but a chance to go out into the wilderness and see the woods from a different perspective.
And it was a chance to hang with my older brother.
Perhaps it should be noted that my big brother was not yet sixteen at the time, so the contents of the missing wallet did not include a driver's license, credit cards, or a large sum of cash. It was more the principle of the thing. In our family, things did not stay lost. A very responsible lot, we tended to have a place for everything and everything had its place. Somewhere between our cabin and the tip of Gross Reservoir was not the place for my brother's wallet.
We set out early, after breakfast. We had packed a lunch and some snacks in each of our Army Surplus backpacks. Our canteens were full and chilled after spending the night in the refrigerator. We hadn't gotten very far before I began to complain and ask for a break. I had yet to comprehend just how long this eight mile round trip might take. My brother waited and reminded me that we had a long way to go, and we needed to save some water for later.
We pushed on. As we walked, I tried to contain my focus to the road in front of us, in case the wallet should appear abruptly and we could head home. But as the feet turned into yards into miles and the sun climbed higher in the sky, my road focus became one of mild desperation.
We stopped for lunch after we had broken off from the road and started down the fire trail that had been such a zippy excursion on a little Honda motorbike. We didn't talk a lot, mostly because the day was long and the lack of wallet was wearing on us both.
But mostly my brother. Because he was and continues to be the model of responsibility. Which may be an unfair label to drop on him, since I don't think he asked for it. The oldest and the trailblazer, it was his journey to break the waves for those behind him. Like me. And as the day wore on and I began to notice each footstep rather than all the places a wallet might have fallen near them, our hike turned into more of a test. I was not going to let my brother down, even if I had forgotten what color the wallet was or if there had ever been a wallet.
There is a picture of the two of us, sweating and drained by the day on the road, coming up the driveway of the cabin. Our youngest brother, full of anticipation and excitement at our return, rushed out to greet us. He is the one who is smiling in the photo. My older brother and I appear ready to collapse. Canteens empty and legs wobbly, we went inside to report our lack of success.
At the time, it felt like defeat. Age has given me the perspective of how much more we got back than a wallet. If you don't know what I'm talking about, take a hike.