The forest road had us in the grip of Ponderosa pines. We cranked up Van Halen’s “Jump” to inspire our approach. As we avoided washouts and fallen logs, an almost sexual longing was growing inside us to break from these trees and lay eyes on what we’d come to see. And all of a sudden, we did. The pines just stopped being there. David Lee’s voice was turned down…and then off. And the cab of the pickup might as well have held three seven year olds just walking through the gates at DisneyLand. But the mice and castles here were beyond anything Walt ever had in mind.
We parked the truck beside a line of other offroad vehicles. Their model names and accompanying decals spoke volumes – Four Runner, Cherokee, Wrangler, Black Diamond, La Sportiva, Camelback. We were here. The north rim of the Grand Canyon. A place that for months had only been a line on the map was now the ground beneath our truck. We got out and just stood there, silenced and humbled. I’ve only had a few moments like that in my life - the moment my wife-to-be stepped around the corner and I saw her in her wedding gown for the first time and the moments when I cut the umbilical cords on our three kids and released them into this world. These were liminal moments - from the Latin limin, meaning threshold; something was about to be crossed, don’t proceed too quickly, savor the time, kairos. And like those other moments, this one found me wetting myself - my cheeks, not my pants.
Months earlier the decision had been made – let’s do the Grand Canyon. We applied for the appropriate permits and began doing trail research, befriending the stair-master, and rechecking our life insurance. We had been friends for almost ten years and many of those had been filled with annual backpacking trips. We started off as novices, buying gear we didn’t need (zero degree bags in Arkansas) and living the polar opposite of the go-light principle (packs full of glass jars of Smuckers jelly). Snapshots from some of our first forays into the wild would reveal guys renting tents, not setting them up before the trip, and then learning to set them up during equivalents of the biblical flood; cotton clothes left like breadcrumbs along the trail because they were soaked and five times heavier than usual (forgive us, gods of leave no trace); and crossing mad hatter swollen rivers up to our chests while repeating the 23rd Psalm and whimpering, “Mama.” Golden days, man. Golden days.
On some subconscious level, I’m sure we were aware that our lives were about to change in some dramatic ways and we needed the EPIC trip; the one you tell you kids about at the dinner table and weep over in the wee small hours of the morning. We wanted to be alone, so we chose the north rim as our entrance point. We had no desire to hike the Bright Angel trail alongside folks in flip-flops with plaid shorts. We wanted solitude, risk, challenge; somewhere and something to taunt us with, “So you boys think you can stay on for eight seconds?”
I had been reading Edward Abbey for years and my copy of Desert Solitaire was ragged and torn. I could imagine the Grand Canyon being just the thing ole' Cactus Ed would’ve encouraged me to do, after he’d ExLaxed my beans, pushed me off a cliff or put a rattler in my sleeping bag or something. I can almost hear him preaching the gospel of…
“Cutting the bloody cord…the delirious exhilaration of independence, a rebirth backward in time and into primeval liberty, into freedom in the most simple, literal, primitive meaning of the word, the only meaning that really counts.”
That’s what we needed and wanted; at least it’s what I wanted. Cut the bloody cord.
At the time, I was the senior pastor of a Southern Baptist church. Senior at the age of thirty-three; yeah, I’m afraid I was made a king too soon. You can do it, and some guys do, but the problem is not many people trust you when you’re that age. I betcha’ Jesus had that same frustration. We had television broadcasts, screens, lights, cameras, the show and the crowd. We were the place to be in town. We had stopped wearing suits and ties and brought in drums and Braveheart clips. But Jesus was right; you can gain the whole show, yet lose your soul, not to mention your mind. I had been there almost three years and realized that someone on the chessboard couldn’t move – the king. Checkmate.
In that particular church culture, folks loved for you to talk about being “born again.” In fact, most of ‘em wanted me to talk about it even more than I did. But any talk of being reborn bloodily backwards into liberty and who-hee! there was sure to be a hush in the sanctuary as hose-n-hair ladies blushed and their husbands called an emergency committee meeting immediately after the service. The church fathers would firmly prescribe a pastoral Sabbath: “Look, Pastor, you need to de-stress, take some time off and then come back refreshed. And orthodox. Please.” Now don’t hear bashing in those words; the person who didn’t fit in the picture anymore was me, not them. I hadn’t screamed Abbey’s words aloud from the pulpit, but I’d sure felt them for months in my blood constricting wing tips. And so I figured I'd beat them to the punch; I decided to encourage myself to take a pastoral Sabbath...and I accepted my invitation. Stress, says Sam Keen, is a good indicator you’re living someone else’s life. Dear God, did I need to de-stress. A week in the Grand Canyon? Count me in! When I left I planned on "coming" back, but I knew, even then, I'd never be able to "go" back to the castle. Cut the bloody cord, indeed!
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