Starting late in 2012, American society ceased to move. Communities turned inward, made do with less, stopped interacting. But some of the college-age kids, those who had been associating most freely with each other, refused to quit.

Clara and Hank met half a year before that. As odd as their names was the site of their introduction: Ft. Lauderdale at spring break. It’s true that they were college students, but they weren’t party-type college students. She was a diligent architecture major at MIT, and he studied physics at UC Berkeley. It was a pure fluke that each of them made it to Florida that week, but once there it wasn’t that strange that they found one another.

Clara came from Los Angeles but she attended MIT because her parents were from the east coast and were secret snobs about college. She lived in the French house, and her housemates cajoled her into going with them to the spring break capital of the western world. But Clara was a diligent serious studious young lady, and she did not enjoy the heady hedonism of the Florida scene. She tended to sift back against the walls in any tavern or party.

Hank was born and raised in Walnut Creek, a suburb of San Francisco. He traveled less than twenty miles from home to move into his northside co-op at Cal. Compared to Clara he was a lackadaisical student, but he had a gifted brain and an outgoing disposition; he did well at school.

His full name was Henry, for no familiar reason. His parents were Creative Anachronists, ever into the Renaissance Faire, and they named their children Henry and Morgaine. The whole Arthurian atmosphere so permeated his childhood that Hank eagerly embraced science in school. He had an aptitude for it anyway, and he grew up a total rationalist. He was too sensible to waste spring break on frivolity when he could be contemplating quantum physics, but his best friend Jason was competing in a bicycle race there and then, and Hank didn’t have the heart to refuse Jason’s plea to make the trip with him.

Clara and Hank bumped into each other at the back of a party. He leaned against his left shoulder and looked toward the bar, half attentive to the flirtations going on there. She rested her right hip against the same wall and glanced the other way, toward the dancers. Without either intending it they bumped butts just as a song ended, and they heard each other’s awkward excuses. Eyes looked into eyes and they made a connection. Before an hour had passed they agreed to disdain the party, left it, and started making plans for a broader escape. The next morning they assembled sleeping bags and backpacks, borrowed one of her housemate’s cars, and drove off to experience the Everglades and each other.

(continued next Monday)