I believe it was the Fall of 1970. In any case, it was the early days of my lifelong friendship with Bruce. We had been spinning rock n roll records at the campus radio station in the basement of the student union at Williams College. The radio show was over, and even though is was past midnight, we still had plenty of late night energy and a sense of adventure. So Bruce proposed we take a ride out to Petersburg Pass on his motorcycle. 

Williams is in a small town in a very rural area of western Massachusetts. And only a few miles from the campus is the Taconic Range, a very old mountain range that runs along the border between New York and Massachusetts (and further north between New York and Vermont). So we roared off and soon found ourselves at Petersburg Pass, high on the Taconic ridge line. It was a bright moonlit night, with a profusion of stars. To the east lay the Berkshires with Mt. Greylock clearly in view. To the west, the upper reaches of the Hudson River valley lay before us, and just north of us were the Green Mountains of Vermont. We hung out there on that quiet roadway for a while, breathing in the night air and taking it all in. No other people or vehicles were anywhere to be seen. 

Our eyes were well adjusted to the moonlight when we hopped on the bike and headed back down the winding road into the valley. No need to spoil the beauty and quietude of the night: we coasted down the mountain with the engine and headlamp off. We started off slowly picking up speed as we descended, leaning to the left for a turn, then leaning to the right for the next one, the shadows of the trees flickering by. No sound but the wind, no light but the light of the moon and stars. A magnificent ride I can still feel in my bones as I write this today.

I have so many memories with Bruce in the decades that followed. Joanie and my visits to Seattle, joining Bruce and Jan on Galatea and then Legendary for boat trips up the wild British Columbia coastline, visits to Turtle Beach in Mexico, and a string of fun visits at our place in the Berkshires where Bruce and Jan would come and hang out for a few days here and there. Lots and lots of wonderful memories of time shared together.

But that ride down from Petersburg Pass sticks in my mind as a special kind of starting point. Like so many adventures that followed, Bruce was in the driver's seat, his characteristic love of life leading the way. Ours was (and somehow will always be} a true friendship of heart and soul. It's a friendship that grew and deepened immeasurably with the years. But it always managed to remain as natural, free and effortless as that ride down a mountain road on a moonlit night so many years ago.

Although Bruce was from the Washington State Chapter of ASID,  I had never met the infamous Bruce Bringham, FASID, only heard about him.  He had be the Washington State Chapter President but had moved to Mexico before I became involved with ASID.  At a certain point in my career, I was on the national board as a representative of the chapters, and this coincided with Bruce's national board membership and his preparation for becoming the National President.  This was at a time when ASID was rebranding itself and Bruce definitely was the expert on branding.  He was very instrumental in guiding ASID through the changes, if I recall, we were challenged with bringing the brand to the chapters and all 40,000 members.    Here I learned that 'your brand is what people say about you when you leave the room.'  (Bruce, you have a great brand!)

Bruce was very excited to be the President, I remember him compiling and presenting to the national board extensive financial information regarding ASID and being very impressed.  Not all designers have a grasp on financials the way Bruce did.  He was very popular with all members on all levels as well as the staff at headquarters.  He was also an effective leader and shared very inspirational stories of his life and career.  I remember at some of the national conferences the students would literally follow him around like a pied piper of design.  He was very kind and patiently talked to everyone that waited in line to talk to him. (yes there was a line) :)

When we were out of college and in our early 20's, Bruce decided to move with his girlfriend at the time back to Seattle from southern Vermont, where he had been doing carpentry and renovation. He decided to drive out west, and I was to take time off work to go with him. He had the plan of making his own camper van for the trip. He bought a surplus mail truck by silent auction from the Post Office — they sell their trucks after 3 years or 30,000 miles, whichever comes first. He got a 2-ton step van with only a driver's seat and a huge empty compartment in back for the packages. When the post office auctions their trucks they paint out the red stripe on the side, leaving only the blue on the bottom and the white on the top so the paint job isn't the official PO scheme. So of course the first thing he did was to paint the red stripe back in.

I helped him a bit with the conversion, but he did most of the work himself, and the design was all his. He cut holes in the side walls with a saber saw and pop-riveted in plexiglass windows to let in some light. He got some weathered barn wood from an old barn that was being torn down nearby and made storage cabinets and counters, popped in a dry sink, and got some old car seats from the junkyard and put in a single seat in the shotgun position and a double seat just behind. He moved in his Coleman stove for cooking, and made a sleeping platform out of plywood that hinged up to the wall during the day and lowered down supported by chains and hinged legs when needed at night. He rigged up a converter off the alternator to run his stereo amplifier and put his two large KLH speakers in the back.

I found him a place in Cambridge that made hemispherical plexiglass bubbles and he cut a circular hole in the back corner of the roof and pop-riveted the clear hemisphere in place, then made a scaffolding of 2x4's supporting a seat under the bubble. (I still remember sitting in the bubble seat with Bruce driving, going over Loveland Pass, 12,000 feet, with the stereo headphones on, listening to the Grateful Dead, smoking something illegal, with a panoramic view of the Rockies.)

The crowning touch was that he put in an old pot-bellied wood stove in the middle of the back, on a tray of gravel, with a stovepipe that made two 90 degree turns to exit on the other corner of the roof, with a little conical hat on the top. This came in handy when we were traveling, since it actually got quite cold at various points. Especially driving though Kansas, which we decided to get through as quickly as possible because it was so flat and boring and we wanted to get to the Colorado mountains, so we took turns and drove all night. It was about 45 degrees and the little heater in the truck barely kept the driver's feet from freezing, much less the passengers, so we decided to fire up the wood stove. The draft from tooling down the endless flat road (max speed 50mph from the old Dodge slant-6 engine) got the stove roaring audibly and the stove belly was glowing cherry red, and we went through most of the firewood we had left from our Vermont stockpile — but we were toasty warm! I don't know how many laws we were breaking but we didn't get stopped.

Since we were driving west, and the weather was mostly clear for the 2-week trip, we were driving towards a lot of sunsets. We got into "sunset criticism" — sort of like music criticism — commenting on things like "the elegant horizontal motifs," and "the recurrent themes of red and purple," and "the progression from flagrant orange to muted grays with the sudden reprise of the red sun in the finale."

In the desert in Nevada we came to a gas station at around 5pm, with a sign that said "No Services Next 110 Miles." We filled our tank (gas was an outrageously high 52¢ per gallon) and checked our water and oil and went on, but decided to stop after an hour, so we pulled off the road onto the desert scrub and fixed dinner. There was no traffic on the road at that hour, maybe a big semi every 20 minutes or so. After dinner and listening to some music, I decided to hike out into the desert up a low rise nearby. I trekked out a couple hundred yards and looked around. The sky was absolutely brilliant with stars, all the way down to the horizons, with the remains of the day dimly lighting some far mountains. The road was invisible in the darkness, and the van, small in the distance and dwarfed by the environment, was lit up inside, with light streaming out the windows. It was the only human artifact visible in this huge landscape, and it looked as if a lunar lander had just set down.

I'll never forget that trip with my brother.