In the Colorado backpack, I hiked with two dear college friends. In the California backpack, I'll be hiking with my youngest sister. As I reflect on the trip to America's Rockies, I am struck that, in an eventuality of which I had no inkling beforehand, we ended up following a trail on which my wife and I had hiked forty years before. It was mind boggling, really, to revisit a trail so full of memories, a trail that represented our first foray into the wilderness together, all those decades in the past.But the mountains had not changed. The peaks were as jagged as ever, the meadows still overflowed with wildflowers, and the lake, our destination, as lovely and serene as it was forty years before. It was a picture of timelessness, really, a picture of the incredible ability of a landscape, when untouched by human hands, to sustain itself, presenting wonder for every successive generation of backpacker to tread its depths. It reminded me of a time, as I backpacked through Alaska's Brooks Range in 1972, I emerged from a thicket of willow bushes to see a grizzly sow and her cubs some fifty yards away. Happily, the sow didn't seem to detect my presence. As I delicately spurred away, however, I thought of how wonderful it was that this family of grizzlies is able to continue its ways, unbothered by human intrusion: all sense of time and chronology vanishes.
One of my Colorado companions believed in God; one did not. The one who did not often struggled to balance his sense that something spiritual ran through this world with the notion that, on the other hand, this could not possibly be.
Who is right? Without claiming ultimate insight, I suggest that if time can stand still, it needs somewhere, something bigger than what it is, in which to do so.
Thanks for reading. I'll catch up when I return next week.
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