Shortly before Elizabeth and I got married, I met her family members who lived in Utah. Her oldest sister was pregnant with her fifth child at the time. That child will be in middle school in a couple of years.

That little girl's oldest brother, who was just entering the awkward, gangly early years of adolescence when I first met him, is almost done with his two-year religious mission in Russia. In Mormon culture, missions have become a sort of rite of passage out of childhood. In a recent correspondence with my oldest nephew-in-law, I told him it was hard for his family not to think of him as a child. But he resented this idea. He is almost twenty-one and has been mature for his age since he was young. In Russia, he has repaired many homes, guided adults much older than him toward more responsible paths, held positions of responsibility and stress in the church, and learned a new culture and language while living on his own. He is, in every sense of the world, an adult; he has earned the title and shall carry it well.

Yet, when I realized this, I felt sad. A week after he returns home, his brother, the next-oldest in his family, will leave on a mission. When he returns, the next brother will leave. And then all three of them will be grown up. And time will have passed forever.

It isn't uncommon to yearn for adulthood as a child and then, as an adult, to long nostalgically for the lost innocence and pleasant illusions of childhood, the gooey romance of adolescence. Even though I know that most people feel this way, I'm still having a hard time getting older. This struck me on a recent trip I took when Elizabeth, Sonora and I went to visit my parents in Seward, Alaska. My older brother also came on the trip. Mid-way through the trip, we stayed for two nights in a yurt on a tiny island at the mouth of Resurrection Bay. Our second day there, my brother and I took a sea kayak out on the ocean. We paddled a mile and a half to a cove where fresh water plummeted over a cliff and formed a small, boulder-strewn pond before running out to join the salt water. We watched in awe the process of salmon spawning, how they struggled en masse against the current, the rocks, and each other, each in various stages of death. Many were already white and dead.

We hadn't expected to see these thousands of salmon. We commented on this extreme process of procreation, of life and death, birth, death, life, and time. And then we climbed back into our tiny boat and headed out to see what we were most excited about from the beginning: a square concrete opening into the side of a mountain, just above the place where the water meets the rock on the other side of the bay.

Growing up, my siblings and I were fort builders. We built tree houses, dug dug-outs, partitioned old barns, stacked adobe brick into small, dangerously unstable structures, made passageways and rooms in willow thickets. Forts were worlds of our own making that existed on our terms. They were exciting. Even though we knew every inch of what the forts contained, there was a sense of exploration about being in them. Paddling on the open ocean that day, my brother and I were going to find a fort. We hadn't built it, but it was abandoned, so it would be ours while we were there. Seeing the fort meant paddling an extra three miles over choppy open waters, but we didn't mind.

We were tired when we got to the rocky outcropping from which the square hole stared out at us. We scrambled up the granite boulders and through shrubs and young trees, following a path other curious people had trodden. We stepped over the fallen, rotting door and entered the dark rectangle. We had hoped to find a secret entrance to a vast network of evacuation tunnels form far-flung military bases, or maybe even something more modest such as an underground barracks. But what we found was an empty concrete box, roughly the size of a large bedroom. An old wire hung from the ceiling. A small rectangular hole in the back wall near the ceiling provided fresh air (though with the door missing, this was unnecessary). We felt decidedly underwhelmed with our discovery.

We stayed inside a few moments making obligatory guesses about what the room could have been; we casually read a few of the names scratched on the walls. But neither of us left his name behind. No one would care that we were there, and we knew we'd never be back to see our names chalked there and talk about how time had changed us in the interim. We climbed down the same way we came up, climbed into our two-person kayak, and paddled back to the little island in the sea. A few days later, we flew our separate ways--he to Arizona and I to Washington state--to resume our adult lives.

I was sad for my nephew to become an adult because I knew that when he gets home, all the forts in the world will have changed, or maybe disappeared altogether, and that his brothers, in their rush to become adults, didn't know to enjoy what they had while they were still not quite grown-up. But I don't know, maybe it is better that they rush out of childhood. I suppose if we spent our young years obsessed with how great it is to be a kid, nostalgic for the present moment, childhood probably wouldn't be that unique.