Glen would like me to tell you that we are averaging about 24.6 miles to the gallon, we’ve gone
10,500 miles, and have at least another 500 to go. We’ve been to 14 National Parks, 20 states, and 23 different KOAs. You can talk to Glen when you see him if you want the facts and details of our trip - I’ll continue to fill you in on the important stuff. Glen says I can tell you that on this trip he, too, has had many feelings… He’s experienced driving fatigue, hunger, and he’s currently feeling uncomfortable in the triple digit temperatures. He is beginning to feel excited about getting home – he says that if you can’t be in the West, you might as well be in the East… there’s no sense being in the Midwest! (Sorry, Midwest - I'm sure it's not true.)
After our breathtaking drive through the Cascades (and exciting! We were hit head-on by a tire as it exploded from the car that was passing us in the opposite direction! No one was hurt, and Glen and I were able to skip our afternoon cup of caffeine), Glen enjoyed learning how many cubic yards of concrete are in the Grand Coulee Dam… I don’t remember, so that’s one of those details you’ll have to get from him. I find dams uninteresting, except for the torrent of irreverent puns they seem to unleash in our family! If you can guess it, we probably said it…
There was no holding US back!
The first half of last week we spent with my cousins in Spokane. My cousin Sarah and her husband Bob invited us to stay with them in their home on Liberty Lake. Sean and Alyssa were delighted to play with their children, Anika – who is four, and Bekk – who is two. We didn’t see much of Sean and Alyssa while we were there - they had cousins to play with, a boxer (Willie), and the lake! Sean and Alyssa are like two river otters – they go from pool to pool to lake and river and ocean… if there are kids and dogs to play with, life can’t get much better than that!
My cousin Bill lives in Spokane also, with his wife, Annie. One trait my cousins all have in common is outstanding taste in their spouses. Bob, Annie, Amanda – they feel just as much like family as my cousins do! We spent a good chunk of our next day in Spokane at Bill and Annie’s house, where they not only have a dog, but two African Tortoises and a Bull snake! (Alas, Bill’s rattlesnake died before we came.) Plus, Bill is wonderfully mechanical, so we enjoyed seeing his shop and all his nifty inventions – Sean could have moved in and been right at home! Annie and I spent some time talking about writing and books, and I mentioned in passing a book I wanted to read some day by one of my favorite authors… The day we left Spokane I found the book tucked into my visor in the van! Annie is that kind of person… I decided that I’d like to take all my cousins and their families home with us and have them live next door! Only thing is, we have to go through Canada on the way home, and I don’t know if we could get the African Tortoises through customs.
My Uncle Steve is my dad’s younger brother. He and Aunt Peggy are Sarah, Bill and Jim’s parents. Steve and Peggy recently moved to Spokane to live across the street from Sarah and Bob, and I was looking forward to seeing them as well. Uncle Steve is also my God Father (Episcopalian, not Italian), and he and Peggy have always held a special place in my heart. Steve and Peggy were to return from LA where they had attended the wedding of a close family friend a few weeks before our arrival. While they were in LA, Steve’s cancer (last year Steve was diagnosed with lung cancer) spread to his brain, and he had to be hospitalized. We felt so blessed that he was able to return while we were still in Spokane, and the second night we had the privilege of having dinner with Sarah and Bob and the kids, Bill and Annie, and Uncle Steve and Aunt Peggy. But Steve was not doing well. We all thought that he was just having difficulty speaking and focusing because of the pain medications he was on, and we left him with Aunt Peggy while the rest of us went out to do some tubing and wake surfing on the lake.
It turned out that Steve’s brain was swelling due to the cancer, and he had to be hospitalized the next day.
I began this trip asking Ecclesiastes questions, questions I wrestled with even before my Aunt and two uncles were besieged by cancer. My faith has trembled on the precipice of these thoughts for the past year:
“Man’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: as one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.” Ecclesiastes 3:19-20
“The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them.” Ecclesiastes 9:11-12
During the last year I began experiencing panic attacks and generalized anxiety disorder that have brought me up short and left me breathless. I started this trip in a fog of fear and all my writing has been a ploy to take my mind off myself.
But the vacation came like birdsong – causing me to lift my eyes from the precipice and be released from the vertigo of fear of death. It has become a metaphor of life. (I’m so far-sighted that the only way I can see truth is through the magnifying lens of metaphor and icon!) Our family has traveled from place to place – more than 20 KOAs and counting! We have traveled from one glorious National Park to the next… we have visited with friends and beloved family.
But we move into a place one day and out the next – leaving behind nothing of ourselves except where we have interacted with others in the context of relationship. Taking with us nothing but memories. (Well – and some rocks and driftwood and sage!)
It’s with whom we travel that puts our lives in context. Not where we go or what we get… Ecclesiastes said it best, “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up! Also, if two lie down together, they can keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” Ecclesiastes 4:9-12
Jesus graciously invited us to travel with Him on this journey. I watched Uncle Steve and saw that he has had to shed much of what was “his,” yet I see God caring for him through the loving words and touches and ministrations of his family. I see a generous mercy and redemption of suffering on the horizon. When I looked into the precipice and saw dry bones and death, God caused me to look again and come to an Ezekiel understanding: “This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: ‘I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.’” Ezekiel 37:5-6 Our job as friends and family sharing the journey together is perhaps to do no more than lift each other up so that we can feel the breath of God.
We took the four kids to Coeur D’Alene, Idaho the day Steve was admitted to the hospital, leaving Sarah and Bob so they could be with Steve and Peggy. Seeing the blue lake with all the action of boats and water planes and sea gulls through the eyes of two-year-old Bekk was a peaceful gift in a time of anxiety for Steve! Anika made wondrous creations of seaweed and driftwood with Sean and Alyssa, and kept us in stitches with her impersonations of a famous female pop star! When we took the children out to eat after a full day at the beach, they ALL behaved with impeccable manners! I think they each understood that something difficult was happening in the family, and they were helping the grownups in their own intuitive way.
Leaving the next day was extremely difficult. We stopped by Holy Family Hospital to say goodbye to Steve. Peggy, Sarah, and Bob were there, and Jim, who had just flown in that morning. I am grateful for the gift of this family, and even the pain involved with leaving and the grief over Steve’s health; it means we’re all together on the Journey! We’ll hold each other up as we go.
That day we took a little several-hundred-miles side-trip up to Glacier National Park in Montana. We arrived at midnight under an almost full moon. With the clear, vast western sky we could see practically every star in the galaxy! The mountains around us reminded me of the cozy silhouettes of friends stargazing together on the grass.
The next day beauty after beauty unfolded as we traveled through the park. We took a lovely, winding hiking path through a valley dusted with gentians the color of midnight under a full moon, and a whole array of other wildflowers in pink and yellow and white. Up so high, the cedars were twisted into those exotic shapes that seem to flow with the lines of the rock. There were grizzly bear warnings everywhere, but we never got to see one. Frankly, I was disappointed! (They get you all
excited with the warnings, but never follow through with actual animals! The same thing happened to us with rattlesnake warnings at Chimney Rock in Nebraska… No snakes to be seen anywhere!) We did see two Mountain Goat mamas and their babies hanging out on the side of the mountain, and I was so excited about photographing them that I forgot my fear of heights long enough to stand on the edge of the cliff and take a picture. With the telephoto I had to remind myself where I was, because I didn’t have much room to back up, and they were very close to me!
Someday we hope to go back to Glacier! We fell in love with it! But we had no idea what we were to experience a few hundred miles later in Yellowstone!
“When we see the changes of the day and night, the sun, the moon, the stars in the sky, anyone must realize that it is the work of someone more powerful than man.” Chased by Bears – Santee Sioux
“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Romans 1:20
My reaction to Yellowstone took me by surprise. None of my favorite authors are from there. Thomas Moran, the famous artist, did much of his work there – glorious Chinese water color-looking paintings of places in the park. But that wasn’t it. Perhaps, again, it was the sense of God being so gracious, taking me to a place I’d always hoped to go, WITH my family.
Being in Yellowstone was like being in C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra series. Otherworldly. Mammoth Hot Springs and the Norris Geyser Basin left you feeling like there wasn’t much earth-skin between you and the molten mantle underneath. Fumaroles roared like jet-engines as water reached the hot rock masses beneath us, turned to steam, and drove gases with it from the earth through a vent. Burnt out lodge pole pines ringed the steaming vents and spewing, sparkling geysers, standing ghostly in the white steam that billowed from the landscape. Mats of heat-loving micro-organisms (Thermopiles) swept green, yellow, and orange swaths over vast white deposits of sinter.
We left that bleak, white, thermal world and passed through lovely forests, along green streams (with an occasional thermal vent and the accompanying steam), through gorges and up mountainsides… back to earth. A great gift was the sight of a lone Trumpeter Swan dining in a bend of the Yellowstone River! We spent the night in a huge valley – surrounded by mountains on every side. It was like sleeping in one of those ashtrays that you made for your parents (even though they didn’t smoke) when you were in third grade – on a giant scale!
More wonders when we woke up next morning… Exploring Fountain Paint Pot area with its myriad of geysers and bubbling mud pits was like finding one treasure after another after another! And Midway Geyser Basin – with Excelsior Geyser Crater and Grand Prismatic Spring (the steam over this huge spring is all the colors of the rainbow!) – was a mystical delight! Our Grand-Finale was Old-Faithful.
We had to wait for Old-Faithful. She had just finished a display as we arrived, so we had to wait about 80 whole minutes for her next eruption. It was worth it! We made friends in the waiting crowd and passed the time pleasantly. All of us became quiet and reverent when she began to blow! The crowd hushed and the anticipation crackled, and, suddenly – up burst the most gloriously clean, transparent fountain of water I’ve ever seen! It rose like seraphim higher and higher into the sunshine above us. I held my breath. When it was finished, people did the most endearing human thing… they clapped wildly! I don’t think there was an adult in the crowd at that moment! I could have hugged everyone!
That was it… a powerful Grand-Finale. It was time to head home.
Our visits to the National Parks have been like sampling Baskin Robbins ice cream with those little pink doll-spoons they give you. How does one taste Yosemite, Arches, Bryce, Yellowstone or Glacier in a day or even two? But we know which ones we want big scoops of, the ones we’ll revisit when/if we ever have the opportunity!
That night we spent outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on the banks of the Snake River. I was stung by a yellow jacket while I was looking for snakes. (I never did see any snakes – today I may have seen a big dead one on the side of the road – but we couldn’t stop.) We saw the Grand Tetons from there, and drove through that beautiful park, past those stunning mountains, and on through the rest of Wyoming. What a beautiful state! (Although, in Casper we spent the night in a KOA in the midst of gas stations and railroad tracks! It was 102 degrees, and there was no air-conditioning!)
We picked up the Oregon Trail again, visiting a spot along the Platte River (we stayed by the Platte all day) where you could see ruts from the original trail, and Register Cliffs, where the pioneers would leave their names for posterity. Sean wanted to see Fort Laramie, so we went there and learned some interesting history – but, again, I was amazed at the injustice done to the Indian Tribes by our government! We made treaties, but as soon as someone discovered gold within the treaty boundaries, all bets were off! I’m determined to learn more about this part of our history when I get home…
When we entered Nebraska we visited Chimney Rock and the pioneer museum – which is where they had all the rattlesnake warnings – but no rattlesnakes. You could definitely understand how Chimney Rock became such an impressive landmark! It stands tall and dominates the landscape for miles.
Iowa, with its beautiful rolling green hills, made us realize we had left the West behind us and now were truly homeward bound. We passed through Indiana, Illinois and Michigan at lightning speed as we rushed home for a week long IV Staff Conference in Albany, NY beginning this Sunday. Tomorrow, Lord willing, we will enter Ontario, Canada for a brief visit on our way to Niagara Falls. We’ll spend some time being tourists in our own State and then make the drive to Glen’s mother’s in Clifton Park. Finally, a week from tomorrow, we will begin the final leg of our 7-week, cross-country journey, when we leave Camp Pinnacle and drive through one of the most beautiful landscapes in the country…the Adirondacks!
With love,
Beverly, Glen, Sean and Alyssa
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