Ode to the Beat-Up Thermos, Marriage, and the Cycle of Life

I can’t even think of the word thermos without thinking about this one couple who used to go out with us on our crew’s annual pack trip into the high country each August. Chuck and Dottie Banks were some of our annual regulars, and they were always toting the same banged-up green thermos each year.

Now this thermos had to be one of the most trail-worn thermoses I have even seen. It was one of those tall green Stanley models that looked like it had been handed down through the ages since the dawn of Manifest Destiny. You couldn’t help but think of all the lunch hours, picnics, and cross-country road trips that this thermos must have poured its way through to get that mean looking. It was scarred up, dented, and ugly, and it truly was a testimony to the quality of the Stanley company’s product line. And it was still keeping the Banks’ family coffee hot through all of the generational abuse it had been subjected to.

Chuck and Dottie would prepare their coffee together each morning before we saddled up and headed out for the day. They liked to have a little coffee break with their lunch, and experience had taught them that we never built a fire for just a quick lunch along the trail. Hence, the necessity for their beloved Stanley.

One of them would pull the coffee boiler from the fire while the other readied the Sacred Stanley to receive its daily sacrament of Joe. Usually, Chuck poured and Dottie steadied. Dottie would cluck about the importance of being careful, while Chuck filled the Stanley to the very brim.

The funny thing was that these two were so proud of that Stanley. Like it was a badge of honor that they were still toting the same crappy-looking thermos that Chuck’s dad had used when he was still alive and working for Boeing.

Maybe it was a lesson in equating age-worn with beautiful. Maybe the Stanley was a testimony to their marriage and a symbol of the trust that they shared. Or maybe it was a lesson in forgiveness the way that Dottie didn’t cuss Chuck out when he splashed her hands with hot coffee as she steadied the Stanley. Or maybe they were just super cheap people and weren’t about to replace something that functioned with anything shiny new.

I don’t know. It was way out of my ken. Other campers would comment on the Stanley’s condition, and Chuck would launch into the story about how his dad, Chuck I, carried it with him to work each day for 20 odd years — all while Dottie would talk over Chuck’s tale, adding minor and odd details as to how Chuck’s dad was forced to retire early or how many years ago it had been when the two of them had laid claim to the Stanley after Chuck I’s funeral.

The year came when Chuck and Dottie arrived in camp, still with their travel-worn Stanley. The first morning in camp, I couldn’t help but notice that the thermos was missing its cup. A small part of me wanted to laugh – thinking that there must have been some lulu of a story to explain the carelessness or forgetfulness that led to the decapitated Stanley. I assumed that we would hear, in full Technicolor, the chain of events that would explain why their Stanley was missing its salutatory cap.

I imagined that Chuck had left the cup on the hood of the car after a roadside coffee break, or Dottie had forgotten it on some boulder alongside a creek while picnicking. It wasn’t until the next morning, when I overheard Dottie fussing over Chuck and insisting that he let her pour the coffee, that I knew something wasn’t quite right. Chuck’s hands shook as he tried to steady the thermos for Dottie’s inexpert pouring from the heavy graniteware coffee pot.

I came to find out later that night over campfire coffee nudges that the Missing Stanley Cup incident was a result of Chuck having been hospitalized for several weeks in the months prior. Dottie dutifully brought him his daily coffee in the trusty Stanley during his stay, and it was believed that one of the nurses on shift had thrown the screw-cup out, mistaking it for garbage. The outcome of Chuck’s hospitalization was still uncertain, and they weren’t sure what would allow for Chuck in the coming year. Still, they were grateful that they were able to make one more trip together into the high country before things had the opportunity to go south.

Well, you could have knocked me over with a flicker feather the next year when Dottie showed up. Alone. What surprised me wasn’t that Dottie was toting that crazy Stanley . . . it was what the thermos contained. The Stanley was functioning as Chuck’s urn, and Dottie was wanting to bury Chuck up in the meadow at Emerald Camp.

We made camp late that afternoon at Emerald Camp and, after dinner, Dottie asked me if I would grab a camp shovel and walk with her. She stopped at a spot that Chuck used to called Turtle Pie Rock. I never knew why he called it that, but Dottie was clear that that was the spot for Chuck. What surprised me was that Dottie wasn’t planning to scatter Chuck’s ashes; the Stanley was going to be buried in the hole right along with Chuck.

I dug for a spell until Dottie told me to stop. She laid Chuck and the Stanley to rest, and I can’t tell you how enormous that moment felt. I have been to funerals before, and I have shed my share of tears. But this. Seeing someone being laid to rest in one of his favorite spots on the planet in a damned thermos gave me pause. It was a real-life visual as to how our physical selves all truly return to the ash from whence we came.

We paused before I was instructed to start filling the hole with the rocky soil. We looked at each other briefly, and I had tears streaming from my eyes. Dottie looked away and started to laugh. It was a sad laugh, one filled with stories, tears, fears, and thanks. Maybe a few regrets. Regrets that Chuck wasn’t there to appreciate the irony about being buried in their Stanley in the middle of the wilderness. A laugh that spoke of years that had been marked by the zeniths that spiked their days with their unexpected nature of the good, the bad, and the ugly. And the breathtakingly simple and beautiful plainness of laying him to rest exactly as he would have wanted it.

When we returned to the campfire, I laid a blanket around Dottie’s shoulders. I poured her a coffee nudge and sat with her for a while. No one else knew that she had just laid her best friend and husband to rest. It surely does occur to me that hidden sorrow must be one of the most difficult things that we carry along with us in life.

And it just goes to show. Maybe thermoses, like some marriages, are age-worn on the outside while they still keep the brew nice and hot on the inside. I really had to hand it to those two. And to Dottie in her commitment to lay Chuck to rest in such a beautiful way. Despite Dottie’s shaky year of loss and grief, she was still out doing what she and Chuck loved to do, and she arrived toting that same chipped and dinged-up Stanley one last time to prove that some things just don’t change. Won’t change.

Call this some kind of tribute to Chuck and Dottie . . . or to Stanley products . . . or to marriage . . . or to fulfilling final wishes . . . or to high standards to quality . . . or to . . . I’m not really sure. Sometimes things just are. The Cycle of Life is enormously dizzying and, if we are lucky, we have someone special in our life who we can hold on to, to ease the spin.