The first time I saw Monte Hull was on TV.
I was in the dorm room of his then-girlfriend. She was in all my journalism classes Freshman year. She was smart, funny, had her shit together, and basically was the person everyone in that little cluster of nerds wanted to be around or be like. She was a nerd too. But she didn't act like a nerd, she didn't carry herself like a nerd, and she certainly didn't look like a nerd.
But there was a big mystery surrounding the queen of the semi-colons, WHY was she still dating some kid in high school from her nothing town? And what was so special about this guy?
I walked into the room for study group. She was sitting on her bed, her roommate—also a journalism nerd, but more of a nerd like me—was on the opposite bed. A handful of women were crouched around a dorm TV balanced on top of a dorm fridge just under a dorm microwave. This was the Oregon State High School Basketball Championships, and I was shushed right away.
I pulled up a chair and leaned in, wanting to see what the fuss was all about. Dorm room clusters like this were usually only reserved for The Real World or Melrose Place. I squinted, rubbed my eyes, and watched this kid from Hood River with floppy hair and a nightmarish left vivisect the lane, parting a sea of much bigger, more developed athletes from nearby Portland—easing all the way, elevating as he went.
At the last second, he switched to his right underneath the hoop for a reverse lay-in. The shaky camera zoomed in on his face, and he smiled, crooked and cherubic, and stuck his tongue out.
The girls all screamed.
"That’s her boyfriend?" I turned to the roommate.
"That's Monte," she said, not bothering to look up from her book.
And suddenly, everything made sense.
Monte arrived on campus the following fall, and I came to know him for a quarter-century. In that time, we lived under the same roof, went on group trips, sent Facebook messages on each other's birthdays, and checked in every once in a while just to say what's up.
We were in each other's orbit constantly but never very close, and that was probably my own design. It's tough to know how to act around someone you've always held on a pedestal.
Just before I quit Facebook back in 2015, I'd written a piece on a sports blog about a basketball player. He messaged me that he thought it was pretty accurate, what I'd written. Monte had played against him in summer league, and the guy had gone on to play college and a couple of years in the pros, then struggled with addiction after that. "He's a good guy," Monte wrote me. "A really solid dude. It's hard though sometimes, people think you're one thing, and you're really not that at all."
And I guess that, to me, was Monte. We have a hard time letting people grow into the folks they are to become, even (especially) the ones closest to us. We assign them roles, roles to play, and roles in our lives, and we want them to stick to the script. You're the funny one. You're the partier. You're the serious student. You're the cheapskate. You're the liar, the thief, the sellout, the golden boy, the exaggerator, the slacker, the player, the surprise success story, the one who never got their shit together—you're someone whose car wouldn't ever start.
And that seems to be it. And you can go on to do great things, or you can go on to do nothing, and life can wear you down, a lot, and things might not go your way, but when you get back with the group, these people—the ones who are supposed to know you best—they expect something from you. They want you to play the hits. But what if, in the end, it's just all a little exhausting. What if it’s not accurate. What if you simply want to just be?
The story I've been told is Monte was at his girlfriend's place making pasta for dinner and a beet salad for his mom on Mother's Day. It was a Saturday night, and they had plans to go bowling. Monte took a noodle and put it in his mouth to test whether it was ready. It shimmied down the wrong pipe. He couldn't get it to go up the right way. Instead, it slid all the way to his lung. He stopped breathing altogether.
The paramedics came and tried to get him going, but nothing took till he was in the hospital. They put him on a vent, but by then, he'd gone into cardiac arrest, and his body had effectively shut down. He was on life support. Seven days after the incident—after family and friends had gathered, and others had called in—he was taken off of it. He passed away Saturday morning.
Texts went around, and then phone calls. We asked about a gofundme and whether there would be a funeral. We wanted to know how the person on the other end of the line is doing, how this last year's been for them even though we already know the answer.
We told one or two Monte stories and said to each other how awful, how shocking this is. But really, it's a projection of all our greatest fears. If one of our best can be taken out so easily, at such a strange time of life: too old to be a tragedy, too young to have really done anything—then what's in store for the rest of us?
This coming Saturday, a group will gather in Portland and make their toasts and (once again) tell stories and act sad and be sad. The man of the hour won't be there to defend himself or be feted. He won't be there to fall into old habits or rise above and show change. And isn't that the shit of it?
Monte, to me, will always be the rangy kid who's gliding around the basketball court at age seventeen, a presence so big it was always a little awkward to be around him. I adored him; this much is true. I wanted better for him. We all did.
3301 Kollas Rd Hood River, OR 97031
Hood River today isn't the Hood River of my youth. It's no longer just the windsurfing capital of the world (note: to check to see whether windsurfers exist in the wild), and it's no longer considered far and gone out from Portland. If anything, it's a tony exurb that puts one right at nature's front door, with Mt. Hood just minutes away and water views at the ready. And if you want to go rustle up some brunch in Laurelhurst on a nothing Sunday morning, you can be in the city and parked in just under an hour.
If you want to raise your kid in a place where he or she or they can be outside until sunset, under the gaze of a dormant volcano that still has year-round snow—in a place where it's easy to find empty spaces to get lost and dream of whatever it is tomorrow will bring—and the assholes haven't yet found it: Hood River is pretty likely your safest bet.
Either way, stop by the high school sometime and look up their hall of fame. Monte's name will be there. He and many other kids whose likenesses can be recalled by the few who were there back when it was podunk.
Take a walk down to the banks of the Columbia River Gorge and sit there and sip your favorite beverage or read a passage in a shitty book you brought.
Look up and listen to the late-afternoon winds pick up and whip right through, spiriting away the beachy residue of the other lookers-on.
There, you'll hear the names of the town's favorites called out, or maybe it's all in your head. Hood River is haunted like that, but oh, isn't it nice to live in a place where memories fill up the expanse and churn the waters?
This place sits on 48 acres, a couple of miles outside of town, between the gorge and Mt. Hood. The expanse is yours to ponder on the daily. The spaces in this 1980-built custom home could use a little tweaking or a little leaving alone, whatever you have time for.
Guarantee nobody's going to bother you here. It's a place made for crosswords and Scrabble contests and early rising. Animals will rush through the property unbothered. They'll tip over your trash and make babies underneath the deck.
And maybe, if you're lucky, a friend will stop by, someone to mix a drink or two for. Walk around barefoot, put on a record, and dance till you're all sweaty and collapse right next to them, breathing heavy, hands touching.