The .Plan

No rest for the weary. Every night this week I have set my alarm for 8:00, but every morning I have somehow woken myself up at 7:00 or earlier. I woke up this morning at 6:00. After thinking it over for a few minutes, I decided to book it to Seattle, rather than hang out for an extra day or two in Yellowstone / Grand Teton / Craters of the Moon as previously planned (see yesterday’s entry for details). With that, I hit the road.

In the 45 minutes it takes me to drive to Big Sky, Montana, the temperature has dropped 20 degrees and the wind is furious. US191 north between Yellowstone and Bozeman is beautiful. Much prettier than US14/16/20 (the byway that Teddy Roosevelt called “the most scenic 52 miles in America”). During high school, I secretly harbored a fascination with wanting to visit Bozeman, as it was the place where Robert M. Pirsig (of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance fame) taught rhetoric and composition in his previous life as “Phaedrus”. My ZAMM obsession was short-lived, but I still wanted to see Bozeman. So I did, today. Bozeman is underwhelming, and I don’t bother taking out my camera.

Cool. From my balcony, I just watched a seaplane land on Lake Union. Very cool.

After Bozeman, I am on the interstate. No point in taking back roads anymore — I’ve got a mission (get to Seattle), and I want to complete it as quickly as possible. There are no more pretty trees and mountains — just flatness. The rain starts to fall at 9:15. As I head west to Butte, the clouds have swallowed the sky, but it clears up by noon. I look around Butte for familiar landmarks and see none. I’ve been here once before — 8 years ago, when a business school professor I did research for asked me to fly out to interview some execs at some random technology incubator.

The interstate crosses the Continental Divide just west of Butte — today is my fourth crossing (in addition to crossing it in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico) — and here the interstate becomes interesting as it winds its way through the mountains. At 10:00 I stop for a power nap. I’m really starting to peter out, even though it is a beautiful drive — all the way to the Idaho border, the interstate is 100% sweeping curves that can be taken smoothly at 60-70 mph.

I cross the Idaho panhandle into eastern Washington, and pretty soon there is a steady stream of eastbound cars, presumbly departing Seattle for the holiday weekend. On two more occasions I have to stop for power naps and am pretty much living on fumes at this point.

The closer I get to Seattle, the more and more doubts start creeping into my mind. And I start second-guessing everything. There are just too many uncertainties and too many variables — and no short-term foreseeable guaranteed upside. Fueling this internal monologue is a conversation I had with Harold just before leaving Cleveland about the pesky question that has been plaguing me the entire trip, that is, how one can know God’s will. And it can creep into all areas of life: Should I do psych or medicine? Who do I rank first? Should I rank Harvard #7 or #8? When do I pick up the phone and call her? Should I use a moving service? Do I want a Dairy Queen blizzard or ice cream sandwich? The questions are endless, and the answers, of course, are not forthcoming. All this time, I am well aware that preoccupations with knowing God’s will seem to be a phenomenon largely confined to well-educated, upwardly-mobile, North American Christians. After all, it is we who suffer from the embarassment of riches that bids us make decisions about which law school to matriculate to, which travel fellowship to take, and so forth.

I remember when, near the end of college or perhaps the summer after graduation, James visited Pastor Hugenberger’s office hours to talk about this very thing — an act which forever enshrined him in my “He Has Balls” pantheon of heroes. Hugenberger referred him to the lengthy discussion in Proverbs 16. Most Biblical wisdom imparted to me simply goes in one ear and out the other, so of course I don’t remember a thing of what James told me. But every time I start to puzzle about this question, at least I do remember to start with Proverbs 16.

During the summer after my junior year of college, I came upon Stanley Hauerwas’ book God, Medicine, and Suffering quite by accident, but I didn’t really engage the rest of his work until several years later, during medical school when I rediscovered the book. One of the central ideas Hauerwas has developed over the past 30 years is that, prior to the Enlightenment, there were no Christian attempts to distinguish between theology and ethics, and that only after the Enlightenment does one start to see Christians ask the questions “what do you believe?” and “what do you do?” separately and without reference to the other, as if the two questions could be asked independently.

From there, it is only a hop, skip, and a jump away from one of Hauerwas’ signature claims, which he makes in a short essay entitled “A Story-Formed Community: Reflections on Watership Down” (found in his 1983 book, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic): “the first social ethical task of the church is to be the church — the servant community.” Put another way, Hauerwas argues that Christians should be more concerned with questions about what kind of people they are to be rather than questions about effectiveness.

People who are preoccupied with wanting to know God’s will tend to approach it almost as one might aim for a bull’s-eye: God’s will is at the center of the target, and if you miss it, then you are completely hosed. That strikes me as a rather impotent and ungracious version of what one might expect of a divine, omnipotent, and perfectly loving being. After puzzling through this question all these years, I’m right back where I started, at Proverbs 16. But something occurs to me today. Verse 3 seems broadly consistent with Hauerwas’ claim. Perhaps I ought to be more concerned about the cultivation of virtue (”commit your works to the LORD…”), thereby becoming the type of person who would know what a joy and privilege it is to be in His will (”…and your plans will be established”). And in the meantime, I will prayerfully and with some trepidation continue to make my decisions — to put the pen to paper, to pick up the phone, and generally to do what needs to be done.

(There is much more that needs to be developed here, but this was supposed to be a blog entry, not an essay!)

Since leaving Ohio, I have not seen a single speed trap — that is, until I get to Washington. From Spokane to Maple Valley, I observe no fewer than 6 drivers pulled over by state troopers, presumably for speeding. While I’m puzzling over Proverbs 16 and cruising along to Kathleen Edwards’ alt-country — which is just made for driving — I start to daydream again. The speed limit is 70, and although I’ve been careful all week to go no higher than 5 mph above the speed limit, somehow I’m at 81 mph when I see the sirens flashing in my rearview. Cheeky. It was an unmarked car just cruising along with the traffic — since it wasn’t a speed trap, a radar detector would have been of no use anyway. Now I know why Seattleites are so careful about following the speed limit.

NOOOOOOOOOO. I’ve been so careful for almost 3 years to get those speeding tickets (from my last road trip) dropped from my driving record. I explain to the state trooper that I’m moving to Seattle to start a new job at the county hospital — that seems to work in Cleveland — and what do you know, he lets me off with a warning. Thus chastened, I drive the remaining two hours to Seattle at a careful 72 mph. So, very thankfully my car insurance payments, instead of becoming astronomically high, remain just very freaking high (at least until September, when those tickets roll off of my record).

817 miles covered today, some 12+ hours, no breakfast, no lunch break. I’m about to die of weariness, but I really, really want to take a bath tonight (but not before I bleach the bathtub and scrub it clean). I pick up my keys and head for the apartment. There I am greeted by a horrifying sight:

Looks like the boxes I shipped on Monday arrived ahead of me. I move all of the boxes into my apartment. Driven by nothing more than strength of will, I head for Target in search of cleaning supplies. It’s only 5 miles away but seems like another 20. The bathtub is now clean. I draw a bath and drop in two bath bombs from Lush. I’m off to enjoy my bath. Hello, Seattle.

Tomorrow the unpacking begins.

Five songs from today’s “Seattle, Ho!” playlist:

• Gwenyth Paltrow & Huey Lewis - Cruisin’
• Patty Griffin - Forgiveness
• Frank Sinatra - Fly Me To the Moon
• Goldenhorse - Maybe Tomorrow
• Dixie Chicks - Cowboy Take Me Away

More photos from my barren apartment on my flickr feed — click here

This morning, I walked around the tourist trap of Deadwood and snapped a few photographs. Wanted to go check out the gravesites of Wild Bill and Calamity Jane, but I was hoping to make it all the way to Yellowstone by sunset.

Heading south from Deadwood, I take the Spearfish Canyon Byway in search of the ‘Dances With Wolves’ filming site. The byway is beautiful — it’d be great for motorcycling, with plenty of sweeping curves and no switchbacks. When I get to the filming site, I am very, very underwhelmed.

Soon I am on the Interstate headed to Yellowstone. The earth turns orange near the Wyoming-South Dakota border and is beautifully set against the green of the lingering grassland. Gas is satisfyingly cheap in Wyoming. Why? As I head further west, the Bighorn Mountains come into view distantly to the west — challenging, “see if you can cross”. Have to stop at noon for a 5 minute power nap. I get off on US14. Fortunately, the melting snows have just opened up US14-alternate, and so I take the Bighorn Byway west. The road twists and winds its way to the top of the Bighorn Mountains much like the Moki Dugway in Utah. On the way up, I catch a glimpse of some mountain deer playing tag right next to the road.

At the top of the Bighorn Mountains, the sky opens up to a burst of blue pocked with scattered stay-puff marshmallow clouds. If you get out of the car and listen closely, you can hear trickling, running, gushing water. The snow has not yet melted away completely. I’m looking for the Medicine Wheel of the Crow, and when I finally find the turnoff, I find that the National Park Service has closed off the road due to snow. Boo.

At the end of the Bighorn, the byway heads back down the mountain. A sign warns truckers appropriately:

Fourteen miles of 10% grade. Just to see if I can, I switch my car into neutral and coast. The car reaches speeds of 60 mph easily, and I have to ride the brake all the way down. There are 3 turnoffs for truckers to cool their brakes. At one point the road stops twisting and heads straight down, and just to see how fast the 10% grade will get me, I let up on the brake. I hit 95 mph before deciding that brakes are a good thing.

I cruise into Cody and skip the Buffalo Bill Museum. But it’s 3:00 and I haven’t had anything to eat all day, so I stop by Dairy Queen for a blizzard. Soon I am on my way east along the Buffalo Bill Cody Scenic Byway — a stretch of land that Teddy Roosevelt once referred to as “the most scenic 52 miles in all of America”. It is pretty, but I think Roosevelt was exaggerating slightly:

The byway ends at the eastern gate to Yellowstone.

All of these trips over the past few years, and I’ve never once stopped to think about what it means to travel alone. But just 30 minutes into Yellowstone, and I find the beauty overwhelming. Places like these were never meant to enjoyed in isolation — they were meant to be appreciated in fellowship with other human beings. At this point, an extreme heaviness (I don’t want to call it a loneliness, but perhaps these are just semantic games) weighs upon me, and I don’t want to see the rest of the park. I just want to close my eyes and save the experience to share with others later. Almost as if I don’t want to “use it up”. I take a few more photographs — the bison are cute, especially when they frolick about in the dust — but my heart simply isn’t in it anymore.

By 8:00, I reach West Yellowstone and sit down to think about this over a steak dinner. Tomorrow I had planned on seeing more of Yellowstone and then heading south through Grand Teton, but now I’m thinking I’ll just drive the 800 miles straight to Seattle. I’ll be back another day. What should I do? Will it be another 5 or 10 years before I can make it back here?

Five songs from today’s “Seattle, Ho!” playlist:

• Kathleen Edwards - What Are You Waiting For?
• Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris - Beyond My Wildest Dreams
• BB Mak - Back Here
• Johnny Rown - Porque Te Amaba Tanto
• Caedmon’s Call - Before There Was Time

More photos from day 4 on my Flickr feed — click here