In the darkness, the periphery of the porch light silhouetting our features, Elder Nelson said, “This has really been an experience. I’ve never met anyone else with the first name of Elder before.”
It seemed to me that the crickets fell silent and the universe quivered, slightly. I staggered as nonchalantly as I could to the car, rolled up the windows, and fell into spasms of laughter on the vinyl seat. I don’t know what Dad said to get himself out of that one.
I was still laughing when he got into the car several minutes later, a quiet and humble man if I’ve ever seen one.
We awoke Wednesday morning at sunrise, the birds being our alarm clock. After breakfast and cleaning up, Dad opened up the laundry drum.
“All right, everyone drop your dirty clothes in here,” he said.
Mom made a last attempt. “You aren’t really serious, are you? We only have a few days until we get to Wilma’s. We can wait until then.”
“I didn’t strap that luggage rack on the car and figure out a way to secure this drum for nothing. We’re going to use it.”
We all deposited our clothes from the day before. Dad handed me a box of detergent. “Fill the drum to the line with water and add a scoop of this,” he instructed. “I’ll put on the lid to make sure it’s sealed.”
I did the laundry while everyone else broke camp. Then we wrestled our way into Abilene, repaired the hose, and struck out across West Texas. I will not weary you with an account of each time the carburetor flooded out. Suffice it to say that we found ourselves sitting on the side of the road twenty-two times due to the needle valve, in all manner of terrain, from desert to mountains. By the time we reached California we had completed a graduate-level course in the trying of our faith, producing patience, and counting it all joy. However, not everyone graduated with honors.
I interspersed my reading with staring out the window, obsessed with visions of the land of Ultimate Cool. In Fred I was strange in a stranger land. I fit in about as well as a fish in a rodeo. But I figured it was just the Ugly Duckling Syndrome. I told myself that all I needed was the proper environment for my awkward layer of gawky adolescence to molt, revealing a brilliant new coat of sophistication and charm. I pondered without enlightenment on my primary dilemma: how to determine the locus of fate and, more importantly, how to get there.
I alone was aware that this vacation was in reality a pilgrimage to the Mystical Mecca of Hipness. I had not breathed a word of my aspirations to anyone. Heidi would consider it childish, Hannah would mock it, and Mom and Dad couldn’t possibly understand it. I was forced to scheme silently and unaccompanied. The itinerary of the average family vacation is not conducive to providing opportunities for meeting and converging with the counterculture. I needed a ruse that would provide transportation to some cultural marketplace while at the same time gaining independence. I couldn’t make contact with the counterculture in the company of my hopelessly uncool family.
In spite of the difficulties, we covered 350 miles by nightfall and pulled into a campsite near Tijeras Canyon, New Mexico. Everyone piled out of the car. I headed to unhitch the Beast and set it up, but Dad collared me. “Come here.”
I dutifully followed, having been saddled with the very job I was trying to avoid. He unstrapped the laundry drum and handed it down. “Rinse this out very thoroughly. When you’re through, hang the clothes on the rope that I’ll stretch on the back side of the camper.”
The drum was too heavy to carry, so I rolled it to the faucet, wondering if this was some kind of sadistic payback for laughing too heartily as I recounted the Elder Nelson story to Mom and the girls. I poured out the soapy water and ran fresh water. After three rinse cycles my musings turned from self-pity and resentment to amazement mixed with exasperation. I had never realized how much work a washing machine does. The camp was set up, and supper was cooked before I was through. I vowed, and not for the first time, that I would not be a preacher. Or if I did become a preacher, I’d be a TV evangelist and make enough money to have my laundry done while I was on vacation.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Thursday morning we drove into Albuquerque to fill up with gas. Hannah went to the bathroom. We were sitting in the car waiting when she finally returned. She bounced in and asked Dad, “Is that supposed to be doing that up there?”
“Is what supposed to be doing what up where?”
“Is there supposed to be something dripping under the front of the car?”
Dad turned off the ignition and climbed out of the car. As I followed, I heard Heidi groaning, “Now what?”
Sure enough, something was dripping from the engine: gasoline. Dad diagnosed the problem as a leaking fuel pump, which prompted a discussion on an administrative level. It ranged from counting it all joy to counting it all lost. Eventually it settled on the immediate problem, and Dad ransacked his memory. I had no doubt that he would dredge from the bottomless well of his memory some antediluvian acquaintance who was now living in Albuquerque.
“Hey, didn’t old So-and-So move to Albuquerque after he left Buna?” Dad asked.
“No, he went to Lynchburg,” Mom replied.
“No, he didn’t. He graduated a year early by going summers and got that little church in Red Lick. From there he went to Buna, was moderator of the Association one year, I remember. I think they moved to Albuquerque in ’70 to work in that mission.”
“No, that was Whats-His-Name. So-and-So went to Lynchburg.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Who did he marry, Such-and-Such?”
“No, it was Whats-Her-Face, the one who sang soprano in the choir.”
And on it went until they had nailed down who had moved to Albuquerque, his complete job history, a partial family tree, and his voting record at the annual convention.
We called Whosit. Before long we were at his house. It was morning, so there was no need for me to hold the light. I got to swim with Heidi and Hannah while Dad and Whosit replaced the fuel pump. By the afternoon we were on the road again.
For about twenty minutes. Then the carburetor threw a fit, jealous over the attention lavished on the fuel pump. Like indulgent parents with a strong-willed child, we obligingly catered to its whims, tapping it lovingly with a crescent wrench and pleading impotently like a follower of Dr. Benjamin Spock. Due to the delay caused by the fuel pump combined with regular ministrations of the carburetor ritual, we only covered 150 miles on Thursday and camped outside Gallup, New Mexico.
As I irritably rinsed out the clothes in the laundry drum, I reflected on Fate. Fate. Destiny. I spat with disgust into the swirling suds flowing into the dusk. I had expected Fate to orchestrate my assimilation into the counterculture in a romantic tryst. Instead, the fickle muse had stuck me on the edge of New Mexico, doing a chore with which I was as painfully familiar as the carburetor tap, and which I hated more, if possible. I was in the frame of mind to write a sequel to Ecclesiastes.
We got up plenty early Friday morning and crossed into Arizona. We had no mishaps other than the now familiar carburetor and a flat on the Beast. Our first tourist stop was the Petrified Forest in the Painted Desert. Coming from East Texas, I thought of a forest as a cool, shady place. I knew the trees had been petrified, but I was disappointed to discover that they were all lying around on the ground. There was no shade for miles.
We also took a detour to see the Meteor Crater. This was more impressive. Trying to imagine the impact that would blast a hole in the ground a mile wide occupied my mind for hours. Heck, I thought, I could fit the entire town of Fred, Texas, inside this crater. Let’s see, if this platform is the south city limit sign, Fred Grocery would be about there, and there would be the church. The parsonage would be right by that boulder, and the post office would be there by that little shack. Over there would be the other city limit sign, with a tenth of a mile to spare before I hit the other side of the crater. My primary disappointment was that I was not allowed to hike to the bottom.
&n
bsp; Because of the sightseeing, we had another 150-mile day. However, we had more to show for it than a new fuel pump and a dented carburetor. Friday night we camped near Flagstaff, where once again I did the laundry. I began to hate the sight of the drum. I decided that I would volunteer to spend my own souvenir money if necessary to avoid two hours of rinsing.
Saturday morning we broke camp and detoured up to the Grand Canyon. Nothing I had seen, not even the Meteor Crater, prepared me for the Grand Canyon.
I had seen pictures and movies of the Grand Canyon, had read about it, but the sheer enormity is impossible to capture in any medium I have ever seen. Nothing but actually standing on the edge can deliver the impact of a hole more than ten miles across, almost three hundred miles long, and more than a mile deep. It was a moving, almost spiritual, experience that left me speechless for quite awhile. Before we left I bought a book from the gift shop. I watched the roadside to catch glimpses of the canyon, but I began reading the book as soon as the canyon was definitely out of sight.
In one section, the book discussed the geological history of the canyon, describing the various layers that are clearly visible in the canyon walls. Practically every geological age is visible—all the way back to the Precambrian Era, two billion years ago according to modern geology.
“Wow!” I said, getting everyone’s attention. “Listen to this. According to one of the theories on how the Grand Canyon was formed, it took only two to three million years to cut.” I laughed and tossed back my hair. “Only three million years! I think I’ve been grounded longer than that before.” I thought my little joke was clever, but nobody laughed. Hannah just rolled her eyes and returned to her Nancy Drew book. Heidi forced a strained smile and looked out the windows.
“Based on dates from the Bible,” Dad said, “Bishop James Ussher calculated that the earth is only six thousand years old. If the Bible is true, then the Grand Canyon couldn’t have taken three million years to form.” Of course, I knew the “if” was rhetorical. In our family there was no question about whether the Bible was true. I might as well ask if gravity really worked. “When you look at the Grand Canyon, what does it remind you of?”
It didn’t remind me of anything I’d ever seen before. It was too massive to be familiar. I tried reducing the scale in my mind. “Well, it sort of looks like the gullies washed out of a river bank after a storm,” I guessed.
“Exactly. But it would take one heck of a storm, probably one heck of a flood, to wash out something like the Grand Canyon, don’t you think?”
I picked up on his inference immediately. I wasn’t a PK for nothing. “Like a storm that lasted forty days and forty nights? With a flood that lasted over a year?” (That’s Noah and the ark stuff, for you who haven’t guessed it yet.)
“Exactly! A flood of those proportions could have devastating effects on the landscape.”
I considered the idea. “But, why would these scientists think the earth was . . . ,” I consulted the book, “. . . more than two billion years old? I mean, they’re not stupid. You have to be pretty smart to be a scientist.”
Dad caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “It’s possible to be too smart for your own good.”
“How could you be too smart for your own good?” I thought intelligence was an asset. I rated it pretty high, at any rate, because it was one of the few assets I possessed. I didn’t see how I could ever be too smart.
“When you are so smart you think you don’t need God.” His eyes flashed back and forth from the road to the mirror. “‘What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’”
“Yeah. I guess you could be too smart for your own good.” I drifted back to the book, my mind grappling with the ideas Dad had brought up.
Of course the Bible was true. It was the Word of God. If there was a God. I looked out the window at the landscape flitting by at seventy miles an hour. It seemed stunted and barren. Brittle spikes of grass and yucca under the shadow of angular outcrops of granite. Scrubby, deformed pinion and juniper, blasted by the elements, broke the monotony of the mesa. The world felt empty, devoid of beauty, perhaps even devoid of meaning, no more than the bizarre and grotesque dream of Twain’s Mysterious Stranger. While standing on the edge of the majesty of the canyon, overwhelmed by its magnitude, the grandeur of God seemed obvious. But now we were surrounded by miles of wasteland not even worth fencing in. It had futility written all over it. I had to struggle to conjure up the conviction of divine purpose and meaning.
I had lain on my back on a midnight hill in the wilderness of Fred, deeply aware that the heavens declare the handiwork of God. The magnificence and complexity of nature suggested an even more magnificent and complex mind behind it all. But I had also seen that nature was cold and relentless. The nourishing rain may fall on the just and the unjust alike, but devastating floods also destroyed the just and the unjust alike. The mind behind nature sometimes seemed as unconscious and aloof as a machine blindly churning out results, matter indifferently following the principles of particle physics. How could I get a sense of majesty and futility from the same source?
I eventually abandoned that riddle and returned to my book about the Grand Canyon. A chart in the back showed the different levels at which fossils could be found, some separated by hundreds of feet. It didn’t have to take millions of years to accomplish that. If they were all drowned in a giant flood, they still might settle at different layers. Then I saw that fossilized footprints had been found on four layers, each separated by five hundred feet of rock.
My pulse quickened. If it was all laid down during the Flood, how did tracks have time to form and harden before five hundred feet of debris was piled on that layer? Four times? I looked up, irrationally fearful that Dad knew what I was thinking. He drove on, oblivious to the revolution brewing behind him. I considered challenging his Flood theory, but decided against it. For all I knew, I might be too smart for my own good!
As if to juxtapose the absurd with the sublime, we made a stop at the set where the TV series F-Troop was filmed. It had the characteristic tourist-trap ambience, replete with a gift shop full of dreck. Inevitably, Dad took pictures: the kids looking down from the tower that collapsed in every episode; the kids surrounding a cannon with a surface temperature of 150 degrees; the kids staring at a mangy buffalo. You know the pictures. You probably have a few yourself. Vacation shots.
I still can’t erase the image from my mind of a picture Dad took in the Painted Desert. There, preserved for eternity, I stand next to the Beast wearing lime-green, knee-length cutoffs and a homemade “Charlie Brown” shirt, red with the black zigzag stripe. The image is replete with nerdism—the dirty blond hair hanging in my eyes, the deathly pale skin. And a thoroughly revolting grin that says, “Mystical land of Ultimate Cool, here I come.” I think of it now and shudder. I hope it has been burned.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX The last of the major tourist traps behind us, we pressed toward Prescott, Arizona, and the mountains. We reached the foothills in the afternoon and began the ascent. Afternoon crept along, and soon the sun disappeared over the peak. As we topped the mountain, we saw the sun again, still a good distance from the horizon.
Then began the descent. Approaching the mountains from the east had been easy enough, but the west slope of the mountains looked like something from a Snuffy Smith cartoon. Being a flatlander, I got chills riding along with an immense density of rock on one side and an eternity of air on the other.
With the weight of the Beast breathing down the neck of the Galaxy, the usual measures of gearing down for the descent were inadequate to keep the car at a reasonable speed. Dad was forced to use the brakes with increasing frequency. Before long we began to detect an acrid odor.
“Yuck,” Heidi complained. “What’s that smell?” She tried to lean across me and roll up my window, but I whacked her hand with my book. “Ow!” She jerked her hand back and silently dug an elbow eighteen inches into my ribs.
“Tha
t smell is the brakes,” Dad replied tersely, concentrating on getting us down the mountain.
“Why do they stink like that?”
“They are getting too hot from trying to slow down all this weight.”
“Great,” I answered. “Let’s throw Heidi out. That’ll lighten things up.”
Hannah laughed and Heidi made a jab with her elbow again, but I had anticipated the move and she hit a copy of Asimov’s I, Robot instead. “Ow!”
“Could ya’ll keep it down back there?” Dad was uncharacteristically abrupt. “You aren’t making this any easier.”
“Making what any easier?”
“If the brakes get too hot, they’ll quit working.”
“Oh.” The implications were so obvious that not even Heidi needed to inquire or comment any further.
Dad used the brakes as sparingly as possible, rolling down the mountainside at a rate too fast for my comfort. I envisioned a fiery, plummeting death as the smell grew stronger and our speed increased. No one talked as we all gripped armrests. Heidi, who was in the middle and had no armrests to grip, mangled Hannah’s and my legs as surrogates, leaving what I assumed would be permanent furrows. We were both too petrified to protest.
Dad grimly gripped the wheel, squinting into the setting sun. His week-old beard bristled on a chin set with determination, making him look like a cornered desperado steeling himself for the final showdown. After several lifetimes, we arrived at the base of the mountains physically, if not emotionally, intact. I watched the sun set across the flattest land I had seen since West Texas. We stopped at a gas station and choked down some tuna fish sandwiches.
The temperatures had been fairly cool in the mountains, but on the plain it was in the nineties. The sand radiated the heat it had been absorbing all day, and the air seemed to trap it and hold it close to the ground like a blanket wrapped around a delirious patient. No breezes relieved the stifling intensity of the heat.
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