Tobin had been doing this thing lately where he talked about Bend the way people talk about their hometown after living there for forty years. He'd moved here in February. He found a podcast.
I want to be clear that I liked him. I want that on the record before I describe what happened.
Reggae Rise Up was at the Deschutes County Fairgrounds, which is a normal place with a normal address. I had the address. I had a navigation app open. The morning had been genuinely beautiful — that high-desert June thing where it's still cool enough to need a jacket but you can already feel the afternoon gathering itself up behind the mountains, all that heat waiting to arrive — and I was in a good mood. I was wearing good shoes. I was, in retrospect, not wearing the right shoes.
"Wilson Avenue's closed," Tobin said, with the gravity of a man who monitors infrastructure. "BNSF work. It's been a whole thing." He gestured vaguely at the city like he was briefing me. "But I know a way."
The way was through a gap in a chain-link fence near what Tobin described as a "rail-adjacent pedestrian cut-through" that he had, and I'm quoting directly here, "basically confirmed exists." I asked him what basically confirmed meant. He said he'd seen it on a satellite image. I asked when. He said recently. I asked how recently. He looked at me and said "look, satellite imagery has a lag."
We went through the gap.
The cut-through existed in the same way that a suggestion exists. It was a strip of gravel that turned into a strip of scrubby high-desert nothing that turned into a situation involving a drainage culvert and a fence that very clearly said BNSF on it in large letters. Tobin stood with his hands on his hips for a long moment. A train did not come. The train did not need to come. The fence had already made its point.
"Okay," he said. "This might be a slightly different section than I was looking at."
We stood there. My phone said we were eleven minutes from the fairgrounds if we retraced our steps and took the detour like normal people. Somewhere in the direction of the fairgrounds, a bass line thudded faintly through the afternoon. The World Cup was apparently on somewhere nearby — I could hear it from what I think was someone's truck — which felt like the universe offering a parallel version of events where people just went to the thing they were trying to get to.
"I feel like we're close," Tobin said.
"We went through a fence," I said.
"We went through a gap in a fence," he said. "That's different."
I will give him this: he did not try to find another gap. He stood there for a moment, looked at his shoes, looked at the BNSF fence, looked at me with the expression of a man running a very brief internal audit, and then said, "Okay, I made this worse."
Which is, honestly, the correct thing to say. I've gone on dates with guys who would have found a way to make that culvert my fault. Tobin just picked up a piece of gravel, turned it over in his hand like it had personally disappointed him, and put it back down.
We walked back out the way we came. Took the detour. Made it to Reggae Rise Up twenty-three minutes later than planned, which still meant we caught most of the headliner because Tobin had, in his chaos, budgeted extra time "in case the shortcut had a learning curve."
He said that. Learning curve. For a shortcut.
The show was good. The afternoon turned hot and bright the way Bend afternoons do in June, that high dry heat that feels almost aggressive after the morning cool, and we found a spot near the back with a decent sightline and Tobin bought us both water because he felt it was the least he could do.
At some point he admitted he'd also tried to use the cut-through the week before, alone, to see if it worked, and had turned back for the same reason.
"So you knew," I said.
"I had a hypothesis," he said.
He's the worst. I'm seeing him again next weekend. He says he knows a farmers market that doesn't have a line, and look, I'm not going to pretend I'm not curious how that goes.