Glacier National Park

    The most memorable trip of my early youth was a road trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. We wound our way through eastern Washington listening to Michael Jackson's Bad album.  First we visited the humongous Grand Coulee Dam, cutting the soundtrack in half.  It was an impressive thing to see, but I just wanted to get back on the road.  I remember the music being the perfect soundtrack to driving through those rolling, yellow hills in the hot summer air.  The refrain from Leave Me Alone to end the album still brings those images to my mind.  It's the first time that music ever provided a soundtrack to my life.  I grew to love it more that day.

    In Montana the worst thing happened- we hit a deer.  The vacation was almost ruined by that.  The car was all bloody as my stepfather video taped the dead deer.  He drove the bloody Camry all the way to Kalispel, trying to persuade us to go back home the whole time.  I don't know what changed his mind, but in Kalispel we got the car washed and he decided we should move on to the park.  Maybe it was finding out nothing was wrong with the car that made him feel better.

     Glacier National Park was the most beautiful place I'd seen up to that point.  When you are a child, places like that are so surreal and dreamlike that the experience inevitably becomes greater than it would when you're an adult.  We drove on this cliff up to Logan Pass, where you can see miles and miles of mountains and ice fields.  You could drive under waterfalls and through rocky tunnels.  On the pass there were fields of wildflowers that extended past the tree-lines.  To cap it off, we walked up a trail on top of the ice field, which extended over the entire pass.  It was one of my first official hikes.

    We stayed at Flathead Lake instead of camping, which is what my stepfather had wanted to do.  I guess instead of letting him ruin another camping trip, mom decided it would be best if we stayed at a lodge.  It seems whenever we went camping, he'd throw a fit at some little thing and make us feel awful.  The fight after the deer must have reminded her of that.  Anyway, Flathead Lake is where they had a romantic renaissance of sorts.  It was amazing; it was like nothing had ever happened between them.  I finally learned how to swim there; at some point my curiosity overcame my fear and it just came to me naturally, like riding a bike.  

    On the way home we took a scenic drive through Missoula, Idaho, and down through an amazing view of Lewiston-Clarkston and the Snake River.  After eastern Washington, Logan Pass, and driving down to that river, I grew a special fondness for road trips, even though we'd hit a deer that nearly ruined one.

The Chiming Seashore

The wind lapped our faces as we stumbled down an uprising to the sand below.  We dug our bare feet into the sediment, racing to defeat one another at an invisible finish line marked on the shore, where crashing water splashed us with the carefree exuberance of an ancient friend, one that had been waiting us longer than anything else in the world.  It was the ocean; an eternal womb of procreation, a chasm that spawned the surge of evolution, sprouting all of life’s divergent branches, accumulating each phylum’s peculiarities, observing our journeys through the annals of history, watching as we die and awaiting our return through each successive reincarnation, from the first formations of paramecium to the more advanced mammals now roaming the land above it.  The ocean resembles opportunity, escape, and transformative power.  As a network of water reaching across the planet, it cleanses the Earth of its impurities, connecting us all in a web of communion.  Through maritime travel, we extend the present from the past every time a new sea is reached, and it greets us with swarming hugs from the waves that crash upon its beaches, kindling in us the love we felt after it birthed us, and the admiration of its perennial patience.  

Even though I’d always been afraid of that abyss of mysteries, this was a time when the joy of my family vacated from me any threat or doubt, instead drenching my heart in its contagious remedy, causing joyful springs of lovely abandon to reverberate through the cliffs of the seascape.  It allowed me to temporarily forget the pangs of pre-adolescent confusion, tossing me back into the blithe moments of childhood like a penny belonging to a peddler, once hefted, flipped, and considered upon- comfortable in his palm- before being catapulted into the fountain before him.  My brother and I challenged the waves with our mother watching, going out a little farther each time we withstood one that had successfully knocked us down, daring each of them to carry us out into the ocean.  The overwhelming force of the water would swallow us and, luckily, spit us back out onto the shore instead of drowning us a foolish death.  With the taste of salt stinging our mouths, the sound of gulls cawing from above, the delight of our mother clapping and singing along to the rhythm of the tide- laughing at us every time we fell, laughing lavishly, laughing to the rhythm- the smell of seaweed that seemed to personalize the ocean with a familiar odor, the rising evaporation on the horizon shrouding us in harmony, and the sensation of everything in the universe witnessing our excursion, came together in unison to inject me with the thrall of enchantment.  As one particular wave came in, I gesticulated in delight- part ravishment, part apprehension- to the rising foam of a liquid beauty that had escaped from the clutches of a ocean, the biggest one we’d seen all afternoon.  And in that moment of fractured reality, I became disengaged, drawn to the sideways parabola of the wave, which, to my obliterated senses, began transforming into strands of human hair that curled upwards into an aqueous face animated with joy.  The sanctity of the moment was radiant in its eyes: two sparkling irises in front of a crystalline pattern of light that was showered by the sun’s penetration on the ocean surface beyond.  As the wave fell upon me, a mermaid of love outstretched her arms from above the crest, causing my own arms to reach high into the air in imitation for the embrace of the breaker, which had miraculously incarnated into a liquefied version of my mother. 

The wave knocked me backwards and the fruits of sanity returned to my head.  I came to my senses, got up from the sand, and saw that my brother had been pushed even farther back than I had.  But he wasn’t hurt; he had that wide-eyed rapture in his eyes, that invigorated joy I can remember so well.  He was exceptionally happy, and so was I; so were we together- all three of us- content for the first time in months, charmed by the solitude of my mother’s favorite place, the chiming seashore. 

Divine Stairway

When I was a child, I spent every Sunday evening eating ambrosial dinners on an old cedar deck in the company of my family.  Upon entering my grandma's house I’d be met by an unexpected staleness- an ambience secreted by curios of pre-60s memorabilia that she'd been too sentimental to discard- which, with all the love brewing around it, always became transformed by the catalyst of a more felicitous atmosphere.  Immediately I would hear singing up the stairs, so I'd steal away to them and slowly make my way up.  The way would be dim, and as I climbed, I would see a painting of Jesus hanging next to the brightness of an adjoining room.  The portrait would complement the singer’s voice perfectly, and at once I'd feel most comfortable, as the combination of painting and song created a pathway for me up the stairs, to light.  When I'd reach the top, while standing under his gaze- above which his heart burned externally- the brightness from the hallway would illuminate me, and an angelic voice would penetrate through the walls, clear and homely, not unlike the delicate notes of a harp cradled by a cherub high up on some rolling clouds.  When my singing aunt would see me, a joyous eruption would spring from her navel, excreting itself through the curvature of her roseate lips, making her smile as if I were greatest thing in the world. 

The intricacies of such moments are never forgotten.  It was the anticipation of her affection that gave the painting more substance than it would have otherwise, and the consequence of reaching it that likewise gave my aunt’s embrace more of it as well, so that the two were combined into the same equation despite having separate functions.  That stairway will always materialize in my mind as a beacon of love, a passage to the promised land, or, more allegorically, a stairway to heaven, with the Messiah and his embrace waiting for me at the gates.  Memories are lifeforms in themselves, in that they live and die on the metabolism of experience, always seeking preservation through an expression, whether it be through art, literature, or dreams, some of whose realities become so distorted that myths are born, and reputations are ruined.  We must listen to our memories and share with the world what we can, for without memories there would be no life or love or learning, and the stairway would crumble and fall.