Time with Dad

Morning bike rides with dad up the desert trails, tan-grey sand, yellow flowers frosting the scrubbrush and the silver sage lit by the sun. My first day here, jumping to 4,500 ft elevation from my comfortable sea-level, he took me on an 800 foot bicycle climb to the Mormon Temple. Its a sacred place for him and he wants it to be sacred for me, too - wants desperately for the "spirit" to speak to me. I've felt the singing of the spirit before, but not here. I see the boxy building with its brutal spire and golden angel as a sign of strangely personal and invasive oppression. Its claws and hooks burrow deep through years of logic and rational thought, seeking out the tender, irrational indoctrination of childhood. It has its nettling hooks deep into my father. The god is not, as its bishops and elders preach, a god of love. This deity demands guilt, teaches us to be ashamed of some vague and terrible inner failing over which we can only grovel and apologize and never be fully absolved. When we disagree with the dogma, we must pray to have our sinful rational thought purged and replaced with faith.Not the god I like or worship. I have to be careful not to inadvertently direct my prayers to him.

I've spent the past few days in the high mountains of Wyoming - another jump in elevation: this time to 9,000 feet. The last time I was here was the year I finished grad school when mom and I drove up to Yellowstone. It looks much the same as it did then; strange contrast when my internal landscape has changed so completely. The trees have mostly lost their leaves, but the snow hasn't fallen. Its cold and bracing. At night the temperature dropped ten degrees below freezing.

Dad drove up to winterize the cabin. I went with him. So of course we hiked the trails around Cottonwood lake, and then drove past Smoot, Afton, Thayne, the Snake River, Hoback Junction and Jackson Hole, to arrive at the Teton National Park. Beautiful. We set up camp near Signal mountain.
 We hiked through the remaining daylight around Jenny lake, then back to the tent as the temperature dropped. The stars came out in their billions.

With dad, camping is always a tricky proposition: he rarely comes prepared, and he doesn't find rules to be worth following. I've inherited key portions of this character but in me it manifests as a healthy skepticism for authority and rule-questioning. But I recognize the value of many rules. Here is one:
There are bear boxes: large steel containers cemented to the ground at each campsite to store food. There are black bears here, and Grizzlies. A sign on the table reads, "Bears are attracted to odors and packages. Keep all food and toiletries in the bear box when not in use."
Of course I remember every news story of a bear attack between Utah, Idaho and Wyoming: bears attacking hikers to get at toothpaste tubes - or the two teenage boys killed in Spanish Fork because one of them was stupid enough to bring candy in the tent.
We eat foil packs and, breath frosting in the dark night, prepare to put our things away and go to bed.
"Lets get this loaded in the bear box," I say.
"Bear boxes are gross," says dad.
"Yes," I say. "But they keep the bears out."
"We'll put the food in the car," says dad. "That will be my bear box."
More fighting. There are good reasons not to use the car. We don't want to train the bears that human vehicles are receptacles for snacks. But dad won't budge. He's not going to use the bear box.
I'm careful to keep odors out of the tent. Toothpaste goes into the Tupperware container I brought for the purpose. And face lotion. Even that has a fragrance that might attract bears. All of these I store in our "bear box".
Its a cold night. Well below freezing. The ground is hard and unforgiving. Nothing we brought seems quite adequate to keep us warm. The best we hope for is to keep the important bits toasty and let our legs and rear ends become quietly frigid. I use the chemical hand warmers I brought along. Stick them onto wool socks to keep my toes warm. Give some to Dad, as well. He's skeptical at first, but later calls them a "lifesaver".
In the morning, light coming into the tent, I wake and sit, look around me. There, at my feet, at the end of dad's sleeping bag, is a plastic bag: full of candy bars and loose chocolate pieces: Whoppers and Junior Mints and Toblerone. Dad brought the chocolate bag into the tent for safe keeping. There's really nothing I can say to this.

Back in Star Valley, we clean the cabin, winterize it, and go out back to shoot dad's 22 and Colt, using targets and cans, and the hillside to absorb our stray bullets. This has been a ritual since childhood and probably the reason I wasn't a bad shot when Rogier taught me how to aim a 9MM handgun. Breathe in, out, squeeze the trigger between heartbeats. My aim is still pretty good. Competitive with dad.

Back in Draper Utah this morning. Ready to spend time away from dad. Love the guy. But done for now. I need time alone. He's an extrovert, doesn't understand the need for solitude. So I'm careful with his feelings. Or at least I think I am. I need to get okay in my head again.

The strength of love

The next step takes me...into nothing. I'm not afraid. I should be fearful, but it feels too familiar to me. Like this is the start of the next verse to a song I learned long ago. I've forgotten the words but the refrain cycles back again and I pick up where I left off. There's something here about death and rebirth. There is something here about the constancy of pain and the triumph of love. I place one foot ahead of the other and follow the next bright patch.

It was a shining day; shift from the cold and rainy weather wherein I made my slippery and onerous move. It felt like a gift and I embraced it to me. I feel looked after; cared for. Somewhere, in the folded dimensions of space and time where angels linger and flash into existence, someone's looking after me. I've felt it for months now. I talk to god and somehow the nature and form of this being is less relevant than the I AM spoken to Moses. We set the metrics for identity but god is unconstrained by our three-dimensional space and one-directional time. He may linger with us in our plodding path but out of compassion, not necessity. I ask I AM to look after Sjors, but god says he's got it, and I believe god.
"Please," I begin. "I want...more than anything...please..." Not able to finish, the longing in my heart: the memory of bright beautiful eyes and trembling hands, the quick mind and the love. The person I keep in tact and whole in my heart.
"I know," god says."I know."
God loves him too.

I met J for coffee this morning. He didn't make the original appointment, so I called him, drove to his neighborhood. I wanted to see him before I left. It felt important. He hadn't shaved or showered. He pulled out business cards of astronauts and company presidents and plopped them on the table casually as he sorted through his wallet. He wanted me to see. But I don't care anymore. At one time I may have had ambition for its own sake, but I doubt it. Everything I've wanted and fought for, I've lost. I listened to him talk. He talked about being good at anger and letting it go. This is what I've had to do, as well.

Eve and I went to lunch. I picked her up at the office that used to be mine. I have no connection to the place anymore, only gratitude that they've accepted Eve so readily. We ate and chatted, and I drove her back.

I went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum then. So many years here and I haven't gone in although I've bicycled past hundreds of times. I felt I could bear it today. And I needed to see. I needed to know. I understand more now than I did before. It hurts more now than it did before, knowing we are like that. The destruction of ideas, the bullying and threats, and the thousands of people who followed orders to torture and kill: physicians who murdered 70,000 disabled and mentally ill people in the first years of the war, the expulsion of "unwanted" people, the ghettos, the ship of refugees turned away from America's shores only to die in camps, the industrialized wholesale killing of people; the individual cruelties and complicity of average people; Allies unwilling or un-ready to go to Poland's aid, unwilling to bomb the gas chambers in Auschwitz. When I was younger I saw the videos and pictures and they seemed unreal to me. Today, I saw my friends and family and myself. Starving, tortured, murdered. Its far too real now. I've seen complicity and cowardice from people in my life. How many steps are we removed from such a thing happening today?

I walked to the Botanical gardens then, felt the vegetable, leafy coolness of the place. Rubbed the leaves of the mint and lemon verbena plants and breathed in their fragrances. I sat on a bench and listened to the sounds of water and rustling leaves. Outside, I meditated in the setting sun.

Eve, Shelly, Joy and I met for dinner tonight. I looked at them each in turn and they looked back with such love and sorrow. They love me and I love them. I've had pain in my life but feel the soothing knowledge that I'm loved and so fortunate in my friendships. The love of friends has saved me when I was at my saddest. The love of friends and family and my love of them has carried me through difficult times. That love carries me now. Strangely, my love for Sjors also carries me.

There was a poem by William Wordsworth that struck me decades ago: called Michael. It was about a shepherd who lost his son. Wordsworth wrote: "There is a comfort in the strength of love; 'Twill make a thing endurable which else would overset the brain, or break the heart."