CHAPTER ONE: TEJAS TRAIL
I started hiking Thursday morning in the rain. The parking lot at the Pine Springs Visitor Center at Guadalupe Mountains National Park was empty, which seemed natural because who would go to the mountains on such a dismal rainy day? It was March, Spring Break, and my wife Cyndi was enjoying her days away from school by visiting our daughter in Dallas. The timing was perfect to do something I’d wanted to do for so long. However, I never expected the weather to be so cold and wet in the desert mountains of West Texas.
For years I dreamed of going backpacking, going up into the mountains all by myself with everything I might need hanging on my back, always planning but never actually doing anything about it. I would be more accurate to say backpacking had been howling in the back of my brain for 40 years. I had wanted to be a backpacker since I was a youngster, but ‘never’ seemed to always get in the way – never able to work out the details, never seemed to have the right gear, never had enough free time. I hoped this first trip up Tejas Trail marked the next phase of my life; one that I hoped would be a long phase.
About two-thirds of the way up to the crest of the mountain, where the steeply climbing trail finally flattened out a bit, the rain turned to snow flurries. The snow melted as soon as it landed and wasn’t accumulating on the ground, but I knew snow in the air down here meant it was snowing harder up on top of the mountain where I was headed. It was beautiful, but it was also a little frightening. I was backpacking with a cobbled-together kit, and I knew I didn’t have anything sufficient for camping on top of snow. It made me nervous to think about sleeping all night in a cold tent pitched on a snow field, but I kept going up despite my concerns. The only thing worse than camping on snow was turning around and going back home.
I’d already done too much turning around in my life. While it’s true that I’d completed seven marathons by then, I was haunted by the two other marathons that I’d attempted but couldn’t finish because I couldn’t handle the discomfort. And there were many more attempts that I backed away from before race day because the long training runs were too painful or inconvenient. I also knew that running marathons was just a metaphor for other things in my life that I’d backed away from when they got hard. I was tired of backing away from hard things.
Texture of the earth
When I was a young boy, I used to go with my parents to a church camp in northern New Mexico, near Pecos, called the Glorieta Baptist Conference Center. I remember I spent a lot of time hiking alone in the woods. In the afternoon when everyone else in the family was taking naps, I would walk into the woods by myself to explore and pretend to be an Indian who set animal traps and hunted for new trails. I did it every day, and it never got old.
Back home in Kermit, Texas, I used to go out into the mesquite pasture near my house to go rabbit hunting with the family’s single-shot 22 rifle. Hunting rabbits was really an excuse to go hiking in the pasture. I didn’t care that much about shooting rabbits, but hiking sounded weird to most of my friends. Hunting didn’t sound weird at all, so I went hunting.
We used to do a lot of car camping as a family in the Davis Mountains of Texas, and I remember how much fun I always had. But I didn’t want to do that at this time in my life. Car camping wasn’t the adventure I was after. It seemed a lot of trouble to drive to a campground and haul out all my stuff and set up camp and sit around among the trees. I enjoyed spending time away from home reading and writing, but I didn’t need to go to the trouble of camping to do that. I knew I would enjoy backpacking more because I could keep my feet moving. I didn’t actually want to look at nature; I wanted to interact with nature. I wanted to move. I wanted to cover ground, feel the texture of the earth under my feet, and feel the changing terrain.
As I got older, married and had a family, it seemed like my weekends were always taken up by school or church responsibilities, so I never had an opportunity to go to the mountains. Or maybe it was because I didn’t have any cool backpacking equipment, or maybe the whole adventure appeared childish and goofy, and I was embarrassed to make a big deal of it. It seemed too indulgent and selfish to buy the gear and spend the time, just for me alone, not for the family. I didn’t understand the value backpacking would have on my heart.
I did make a couple of Boy Scout backpacking trips with my son Byron, an Eagle Scout, and they were fun. But Byron grew up and finished Scouts and moved to Dallas to attend college, and the opportunity to go back to the mountains with him ended for a while.
So I just gave up on my dream of backpacking through those years. However, once both kids went off to college and my weekends were freer, and I had a bit more money to buy gear, well, my urge to go into the mountains came howling back. It haunted me for a couple of years before I finally did something about it.
I actually started planning my first trip into the Guadalupe Mountains while driving down Interstate 20 from Dallas to Midland. Cyndi and I had been in Dallas helping our son Byron move into his new apartment. We were also bringing his washer and dryer back to Midland since he didn’t have room for them in his new place. It was a long hard day, and we were exhausted even before we started the five-hour drive home. We ate dinner with Byron, said our goodbyes, and finally started driving back in the late afternoon. It was a Saturday, and we had to get back home that night so I could teach my adult Bible study class Sunday morning, and so Cyndi could work in the church media group for the morning services.
While driving west on Interstate 20, we listened to an audio book by John Eldredge.[i] In reality, I did most of the listening since I was the one driving. Cyndi fell asleep soon after we started rolling. I stayed alert driving by listening and thinking about Eldredge’s comments until we were roughly ten miles west of Weatherford. In the middle of my contemplation, I barely avoided an accident on the Interstate. I saw it happen in my side mirror. The traffic at the time was full, but not crowded, all driving 70 miles per hour. There were vehicles in all three lanes for as far as I could see, forward or behind, but we weren’t bumper-to-bumper. This amount of interstate traffic was typical so near Fort Worth. I was driving in the center lane and made a routine glance in the left side mirror just in time to see a black pickup moving up beside me in the left lane. Suddenly, the pickup skidded sideways with the passenger side moving forward, then flipped into the air and started rolling down the highway, side-over-side. I saw all of this in a momentary glance in my mirror. It is a cliché to say this entire scene seemed to happen in slow motion, but that’s exactly how I remember it. I instinctively hit the accelerator to move out of the way of the rolling truck and any flying debris. It all happened so fast, in a blink. And in another blink, just like that, we were hundreds of yards past the accident moving at 100 feet-per-second. We were miles from the next exit, and all the cars and trucks around me just kept driving. There was nothing else to do. It happened too fast, and we were too long gone to stop and help.
My own heart was racing in my chest from what I’d just seen. It all happened so fast I didn’t even wake Cyndi. In fact, the whole episode was so scary I didn’t tell her about it until weeks later. But the adrenaline rush from the moment, from an accident that could have taken us out with it, put me on edge.
And then, because the audio book was still playing, I heard Eldredge ask, “When was the last time you did something specifically to feed your heart?” Whoa. That question bored straight into me. I pushed the pause button on the CD player and drove on in silence for awhile to think about what he’d asked in context with the accident I’d just witnessed. I thought about that question for the next hour as I drove in silence. I couldn’t shake it off. I decided I had to start making plans right then to do something for my heart.
I pressed the play button on the CD player and heard John describe a solo backpacking trip he made into the desert mountains near Moab, Utah. He went to get alone, to get quiet, to listen to God, and to feed his heart. I decided I should do the same thing as soon as possible. I didn’t want to spend any more time not paying attention to my heart. Who knew when my truck might be flipping over on the Interstate.
I ran a mental inventory of all the places I could go to be by myself without having to travel too far or spend too much money. I thought about going to Junction to a friend’s ranch where I could run along the South Llano River and up on the bluff, but it didn’t seem wild enough. And the more Eldredge talked about the desert, I thought about hiking into the Guadalupe Mountains.
Spring Break was only a few weeks away, and I knew Cyndi, an elementary school teacher, would take advantage of the week away from school by driving to Dallas to help our daughter Katie plan her wedding, buy clothes, and all those things women like to do together. I hadn’t planned to join them; it didn’t sound like much fun to me; so it was a good time to go to the mountains. I was a little nervous about going by myself because I didn’t want Cyndi to think I was trying to get away from her, but I saw Spring Break as a guilt-free chance. All the way home to Midland, while Cyndi slept, while John Eldredge talked on my CD player, I planned my trip. The next Monday morning after we got back, I phoned Joe Chapman, the Boy Scout leader at my church, and asked to borrow a backpack.
I’d spent too many years not worrying about the condition of my heart. So maybe I spent a lot of time taking care of my physical heart, but not my spiritual heart. If Satan could harden my heart, he could cripple my ministries and destroy my relationships and sour my close communion with God. Satan attacked my heart regularly through over-booked calendars, important roles and assignments, people who irritated me and stirred up my anger and resentment. I knew I could not hope to keep my heart open to God in the long run unless I took diligent action. In my case, that meant quiet and solitude along with movement. I knew I had to do something intentional, right now, to feed my heart.
Hard on the outside
Annie Dillard wrote, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without.”[ii] I don’t know if she ever visited the Guadalupe Mountains, but her description fit them well. Everything you see about the Guadalupes, at least from the outside, is hard, steep, prickly, and pointed. The Beautiful places are up high and inside. They are hard to get to and almost impossible to see from the highway down below.
The Guadalupe Mountains are located in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The range includes the highest summit in Texas, Guadalupe Peak, 8,749 ft. and the "signature peak" of West Texas, El Capitan. The mountains were occupied in ancient times by Pueblo and Mogollon peoples, and later in the 19th century by Apaches. Once the Mescalero Apache got horses (from the Spaniards, who arrived in the 1500s), they dominated the Southwest and made the Guadalupes their fortress.
In 1840 Captain Randolph Marcy discovered springs at the foot of the mountains. Later, John Butterfield built one of his stage coach changing stations near Pine Springs. On September 25, 1858, the first westbound stage met the first eastbound stage on the desert beneath the high cliffs of El Capitan. This route lasted for about a year until pressure from the environment and the Apaches moved it further south.
Lieutenant H. B. Cushing and his mounted cavalry unit surprised an Apache camp up high in an area known nowadays as The Bowl during Christmas 1869. They destroyed over ten tons of mescal root, leaving the Apaches without food for the winter. There were other battles between cavalry and Apaches through the years, but by 1880 it was all over. The Apache lost.
Wallace Pratt, a successful geologist and oil finder, came to the area in 1921 and bought land in McKittrick Canyon. Pratt later donated 6,000 acres to the National Park Service, prompting Congress to create the park.
Rancher J. C. Hunter built a large ranch in the Guadalupes area, laying a water line from a high country spring down Bear Canyon to provide water for a sheep operation. The holding tanks for his water and many of his transport pipes are still in place in The Bowl and in Bear Canyon.
On October 15, 1966, Congress established the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. The park was officially dedicated in 1972, and Congress set aside 46,850 acres, about 60% of the park, as wilderness area.
This is an isolated range surrounded in all directions by desert. Few people visit here because there are no scenic drives up into the high country and few destinations that don’t require climbing 3,000’ elevation. The Guadalupes are as lonely a national park as you'll find outside Alaska, especially in the winter months when mild temperatures make it one of the best backpacking destinations in the country. It's a wilderness park with few amenities. Backpacking your way up into the higher elevations of the Guadalupes is hard work, all the more so because you have to carry all the water you'll need. All of these factors worked perfectly into my scenario. The mountains were quiet, mostly deserted, and there were plenty of trails to keep me moving.
Raining
It was raining that morning in Midland before I left home for the three-hour drive to the mountains. The rain had fallen all night, but I didn’t think it would last long into the day. I had to keep convincing myself of that as I loaded my gear. I certainly didn’t expect rain in the desert mountains. I had reasoned in my own mind that this trip was too important to me for the rain to continue all day. Besides, I didn’t have any more weekends available for months afterward, so I had to go. Surely God would stop the rain. Just in case, I packed a few extra plastic trash bags with my gear so I could cover my stuff to keep it dry.
I left my house about 6:00 AM while it was still dark. I took Interstate 20 west to Pecos, Texas, where I made my first stop for gas. My first big obstacle of the trip, if you don’t count the continuing rain, happened then. After gassing up at the Flying J Truck Stop, I couldn’t get my Jeep to start. I cranked it over and over until I was afraid I’d run down the battery, and then sat in the driver’s seat and prayed, “OK, Lord, what is this all about? You sent me on this trip to work over my heart. Now I’m sitting at a truck stop, the rain is still falling, and my Jeep won’t start. What am I supposed to do now? Is this a test to see how badly I want to get alone with you, or is it a message from you telling me to turn around and go back home, that hiking in the rain is stupid? Which is it?” I was discouraged, and suddenly, I felt very alone.
I went inside the truck stop and phoned a local repair shop that I found by looking in the Yellow Pages. They said they would come to the truck stop and tow my jeep to their shop and see what was wrong. I resented spending money for something as trivial as a tow truck, but I had no other choice. Whether I went on to the mountains or turned back home to Midland, I could do neither until I got the Jeep running again.
The tow truck guys towed the Jeep to their shop about two miles west of the truck stop. They said they couldn’t get to it right away because they had to finish a couple of other jobs before they had room in the garage to look at the Jeep. Fortunately, I never traveled anywhere without a bag full of books, so waiting wasn’t such a burden, except that I was burning daylight and had a long hike ahead of me before setting up camp for the night.
I always enjoyed reading, and I usually didn’t mind waiting for someone else if I had a book. But honestly, it felt a bit strange to sit and read a book while manly men worked on my stuff. I felt like I should be helping them, getting my hands dirty too.
There was another occasion back in 1995 when my Ford Ranger’s transmission fell apart, ironically just a few miles east of Pecos. I hitched a ride into town with a husband-wife team driving an 18-wheeler listening to Steely Dan; they dropped me off at an old-style gas station where I phoned for help. As I sat in a metal and plastic chair reading my book, waiting for a ride to the planning retreat that was my original destination, there were two high school-dropout guys working hard in the hot sweaty tire shop. One of them asked, “What are you reading?” I was embarrassed to tell them, “A book about the history of philosophy.” A great book by the way, but it didn’t seem adequate in the moment. It was too nerdy for a gas station book.
On that trip I had to leave my pickup beside the Interstate and come back for it later, with a trailer, so I could haul it back to Midland. This time, I knew the problem wasn’t as serious as a wrecked transmission, so I wanted to fix the problem there in Pecos and continue on my journey to the mountains.
At the mechanics yard there was a young boy – maybe high school age, but he actually looked younger - who was apparently the son of the owner. He was busy stripping body parts off of a Ford Pinto. I said to a man next to me, “That young man is working so hard on that car, but when he finishes all he’ll have to show for his effort is a Pinto.”
“A racing Pinto,” replied the man. “He wants to race that car.”
I wondered who would want to race a Pinto, but then I looked around the repair shop’s yard and noticed two other Pintos in the yard, painted for racing. Apparently racing Ford Pintos was a family tradition.
Well, the problem with my Jeep turned out to be a fuel pump going bad. The mechanics said it was typical for vehicles like Jeeps that had the electric fuel pump inside the gas tank; they often overheated whenever the driver let the tank get almost empty before filling, something I did often because I resented the intrusion of having to squeeze a trip to the gas station into my carefully crafted daily schedule. The fuel pump didn’t need replacing yet but simply some adjusting, or cleaning, or resetting, or knocking around, whatever. I was on my way to the Guadalupes in an hour or so.
The rain was still falling when I left Pecos, but not hard enough to make me turn around and drive home. With just a slight drizzle covering my windshield, I convinced myself it didn’t have lasting quality. I was hoping the sky would clear as I drove further north and west toward the mountains.
The drizzle never stopped. I pulled over at the TxDot roadside rest stop at the base of the Guadalupes to find the men’s room and stretch my legs, and the lazy rainfall I had been driving through all morning turned to very tiny hail. I couldn’t believe it … hail, of all things. There’s never hail this early in the spring, and seldom so early in the morning. How long would this freak of nature last? Was I supposed to go backpacking in hail? Maybe it wasn’t hail at all, but large sleet. Whatever it was, it wasn’t encouraging.
The drive from the roadside stop to the trailhead parking lot took me only fifteen minutes. The hail/sleet had returned to drizzling rain, which continued all through my parking lot routine of loading my pack and arranging my gear. I dug around in my pickup for some plastic trash bags that I was sure I’d packed so I could waterproof my stuff, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. I casually walked around the parking lot looking into the trash cans until I found one that had not been used. I figured the bag had to be clean because there wasn’t any trash inside, so I swiped the plastic trash can liner and wrapped it around my sleeping bag. I hoped that if everything else got soaked, I could at least sleep in a dry bag.
But even in hail and sleet and constant rain, and even knowing I didn’t have a good way to keep my gear dry, and even wondering what the weather would be like up on top of the trail, 3,000’ higher in elevation, I didn’t want to quit. I never considered loading up and driving home. I was determined to make this trip happen no matter what. Somehow, being brave in spite of the weather was important.
I guess it was like staying committed to a marathon. So far in my life I’d completed seven marathons; I hadn’t run any of them very fast, I’d always been a slow runner, but I finished on my own two feet. That is, all except for two marathons that I didn’t complete – one of which was due to being undertrained and the other because my feet fell apart. Or, and this reason has haunted me for years, maybe I didn’t finish either of those two because I wasn’t brave enough to gut it out.
The marathon finish I was most proud of was the Paper Chase Marathon in Amarillo, Texas, in May of 1998. I trained for months, yet as the race grew nearer I knew I wasn’t prepared enough to actually run it. But I ran it anyway, because I was determined not to back away. A successful moment of courage, and I decided to run no matter what.
The decision was complicated by the fact that I had a party to attend in Midland on the Friday night before the race on Saturday morning, and I couldn’t leave home until after 10:00 PM. It was a small dinner party to honor my close friend, Glen and his fiancée, Collette who were marrying soon, and I didn’t want to miss the chance to wish them well. I also didn’t want to play the martyr, so I didn’t tell anyone my plans to drive to Amarillo afterward. I didn’t want to put a damper on the party.
So I drove for six hours through the night to Amarillo, listening to audio books to stay awake. I drove my Explorer all the way to the hospital parking lot and parked near where I assumed the registration tables would be located, sleeping in my car through what was left of the night. Since it would’ve taken another hour to find a hotel and check in, and I would’ve lost an hour in the morning checking out, I traded the comfort of a hotel bed for a lengthier sleep in the back of my Explorer.
The next morning I ran what turned out to be my slowest marathon ever. It was the first one I ever ran completely by myself - no friends to cheer for me and no family running with me … well, that’s not exactly correct. I ran my very first marathon in 1983 all by myself, but that was before I knew the value of running with a group of friends. Here in Amarillo, no one else in the race knew me, and no one cared if I finished. Had I turned around and driven home, or had I walked off the course, no one would have noticed.
Running the marathon made for a long hard morning, and I struggled even more than usual to finish the last ten miles. Both of my hips were aching, my feet hurt … even my shoulders hurt from swinging my arms. It occurred to me that I could have simply taken a short cut back to my car and gone home and told everyone I had finished, and no one would have known any different. Several times I thought about doing exactly that, but instead I just kept going. The race was a death march, until I finished, and then everything about the event was wonderful. I remember standing alone in the finish chute feeling like I had passed the test of manhood, even if no one understood the nature of my struggle.
Even Cyndi thought I was crazy and immature to drive all night to run a marathon that I was only marginally trained for, and she tried to talk me out of going. She even used her “I feel sorry for you” eyes when I was leaving the house. And later, she never really understood why this particular finish was so important to me. I was OK with all of that, though. It wasn’t her fault she didn’t understand; she was a girl; what did she know about tests of manhood. She loved me and wanted the best for me; it was too much to expect her to understand the value of not quitting and the Rocky-like determination to not go down again. Women don’t understand why men often have to take a beating rather than fall down again. Most women don’t realize how men have to prove we have what it takes to be a real man, and most of the time that proof comes only through suffering. It isn’t their fault. There are plenty of things we men don’t understand about women.
Here’s the thing. If a man backs down from a battle, and if he backs down from the next one, and the next one … someday, one day, it will be his last, and he will never stand up again. We can take only so much defeat, only so much surrender, before we stop trying. Too many quits, and it becomes too painful to try anymore, and most men will simply sit down and stay down. Unfortunately, we can’t predict when the critical make-or-break battle is coming up. Since we can’t know the timing of that crucial battle, we have to fight them all.
Making this hike up Tejas Trail was one of those struggles for me. I was aware of that even as I stuffed my sleeping bag into the plastic trash bag and wondered if I would spend a cold and wet night up on the mountain. I had put off backpacking for too many years because I didn’t have the right gear or the right weekend or the cool place to go, and I was determined to make it this time even with imperfect gear and bad weather.
You can learn me
Backpacking was no different than so many other adventures I had pulled away from because I was uncomfortable or scared. Some battles aren’t obvious. One of my biggest battles, if least likely, was dancing with Cyndi. She is a phenomenal dancer – she has danced since elementary school and she looks forward to any opportunity to dance. Me? When dancing, I can truthfully say I’m not at my best. I told Cyndi that dancing is way scarier than running a marathon, or skiing too fast on an icy slope, or backpacking in the rain, or even public speaking. I can’t convince her how awkward I feel when dancing, and in spite of her reassurance, I fret about what people think when they watch. I also can’t help but wonder what Cyndi thinks – such as – maybe she should have done more research into my skill-set before agreeing to marry me. But my hope is that if observers think anything at all, and Cyndi assures me they don’t, they’re thinking, “Look how much he loves her, to do something he’s so bad at, just to please her – isn’t she a lucky girl?” And even, “Look how much she loves him to be patient and loyal to such a clumsy oaf – what a lucky guy he is.” Those are the thoughts that give me courage.
It’s just that when it comes to battles and adventures, I’m not a risk taker – I’m a calculator. I think about what I’m going to do before I do it, often for a very long time. I study and research and analyze. I live a controlled life, and I just don’t do something if I doubt I can be at least above average. Failing doesn’t scare me so much as looking foolish – which, I guess, is failure.
So if dancing with Cyndi is scary and uncomfortable, then the question has to be asked: Why bother? Why would I do something that terrifying? I know a lot of men who simply say, “I don’t dance,” and they get by with it. Why not me? The answer is simple: nothing else delights Cyndi like dancing. When she’s dancing she glows; her eyes radiate with intense energy that is matched only by her smile. How can I not be part of that? The fact that I’m uncomfortable, awkward, or scared is a poor reason to miss this joy of Cyndi’s life. So I mount up the courage, try to ignore the spectators, hold on to Cyndi, and dance away. I have determined to join her on the dance floor at every opportunity because I don’t know when it might be our last chance. There are some things about Cyndi I can never know unless I dance with her, and I want to know all of her.
In the movie, The Constant Gardener, Tessa asked Justin Quayle to take her with him to his next diplomatic posting in Nairobi as his wife, in spite of the fact they were practically strangers. He said, “We hardly know one another,” and Tessa replied, “You can learn me.”[iii] And in fact, the plot of the movie was exactly that: Justin trying to learn Tessa. Only Quayle waited too late, and all of his learning happened after Tessa was dead. He missed knowing her when she was alive.
And now, after 30 years of marriage, after 33 years of being in love, I realize I still hardly know Cyndi. But I’m learning her; and she continues to learn me.
Marry me, learn me, follow me … they are all the same request. Getting married is a commitment to learn each other, to learn each other’s stories, to learn each other’s families. Unfortunately, some people approach marriage more interested in changing the other person rather than learning them. It’s a selfish approach. It doesn’t sound like love to me. Cyndi has never insisted that I have to learn to be a good dancer in order to have her love. She hasn’t tried to change me. But she has patiently given me time to learn.
The first time I ever saw Cyndi was at summer band practice before my senior year of high school. She was two years behind me in school, which at the time seemed like a huge difference. I was talking to my new girlfriend, Carol, the first morning of the first rehearsal, when Libby and Cyndi ran across the room and Carol said, “Meet my sophomore friends.” At the time I thought they were just giggly little girls who might be fun to talk to but would probably be irritating in the long run.
Later that year I saw Cyndi at an evening Bible study at the high school. I was with Carol, and Cyndi had just come from dance class. I can still picture her sitting one row to my left and one row in front of me so that I got a good look at her in red fishnet hose and a short dance skirt. Cyndi now claims she never owned red fishnet hose, and I guess I have to believe her version of the story, but my mental image of those fishnet hose is vivid and consistent, an indicator that I was focusing on her beautiful legs already.
The next time I saw Cyndi to pay attention to her was one year later during my first year at New Mexico Junior College when Doug White and I were shopping at The Flip Side (LPs – 8 tracks – cassettes – quads) one Saturday night. It was 1975; we were looking for the new tape by Joe Walsh. Cyndi was in the store with her boyfriend, Kenny. She was wearing tan bellbottom hip huggers and a white sweater with black horizontal stripes. The four of us talked about music for awhile, and for the first time since knowing her, I thought of her as someone I should think about dating. I thought she was cute and full of energy, clever and smart, and she looked absolutely contagious in that sweater. As we discussed the merits of Joe Walsh and the Doobie Brothers, I asked myself, “Do I want to see this girl again?” I knew the answer instantly: yes.
But Cyndi was dating someone else, so I left her alone. I thought about her from time to time, but I didn’t know how to pursue her. I doubted that she remembered me at all.
I realized Cyndi was taking notice of me was when we went to the One O’clock Jazz Band concert in Denton, Texas, during the Thanksgiving Holiday season. It was 1976 and you could characterize this outing as our first date except that it was more like a chance encounter. Up until that weekend, Cyndi and I had observed each other only from a distance. We had never spent any individual time together. This was the beginning of us.
In the summer of 1976, I was a student at the University of Oklahoma, studying Petroleum Engineering. Cyndi was attending New Mexico Junior College in Hobbs, New Mexico, where we both lived. I had come home to visit my parents for a few days and planned to join the NMJC group in their trip to Denton for the concert. I drove my own car, a pale blue Ford Maverick, following the school vans, and stayed with them at the same hotel. I was a good friend of the band director, and he let me stay with some of the guys in the hotel, saving me the expense of my own room. My plan was to drive back to Oklahoma the next morning after the concert while the Hobbs folks drove back to Hobbs.
I remember a couple of guys, John and Bill, rode with me in my car so I wouldn’t have to drive by myself and they wouldn’t have to ride in the crowded school van. We all stopped for gas somewhere near Abilene, and while the three of us guys were sitting in my car, with all the doors open, waiting for the vans to finish gassing up, Cyndi ran over and dived into the car with us. She was just giggling and having fun and flirting with her two friends, but she was also sitting in my lap and laying across the font seat on top of us. She was wearing a light-blue T-Shirt that said, “I’d rather be in Hawaii,” and very attractive jeans. I was amazed that she felt comfortable enough around me to jump in my car like that … in my lap like that. She didn’t really talk to me then, but talked to Bill and John. However, she didn’t jump through their door, she jumped through mine. I noticed all of that.
Later that night, after the concert, we all went to eat pizza. I had noticed that Cyndi was paying lots of attention to me, more than my share when divided among all the guys in the group, and I was hoping I could sit beside her in the restaurant. Turns out, sitting next to her was a much easier maneuver that I thought. She must have been doing some maneuvering of her own.
We sat next to each other at the large table, and our eyes locked. She looked down shyly and leaned forward in her chair. The whole evening, through all the multiple conversations, she never turned away from me. We didn’t keep staring at each other all night; we talked to everyone at the table, but it was obvious to both of us that were interested in each other. I decided that night I would call on her the first chance I got, when I came home next month for Christmas break.
I don’t know exactly when I first fell in love with Cyndi, but I know I’ve been hot for her ever since that jazz band concert in Denton, Texas. Actually I’ve been hot for her since seeing her in that 8-track store. We were married in July 1979, and since then, I’ve never seen Cyndi without feeling a small but discernable buzz mixed with a feeling of gratitude that she was with me when she could have been with anyone, and pride that I was the one who she picked, and arrogance that she was fortunate to be with me.
I’ve been learning her ever since then. That’s the nature of all relationships – continually learning each other. It’s what brought me to the mountains; I was hoping to learn more about God, and more about my own heart.
Finishing the climb
The Tejas trail is a long four-mile climb, a constant grade with very few switchbacks. It just keeps climbing and climbing and climbing. Much of the trail has been blasted into the solid limestone mountain, and the surface is rough and covered with more rocks. Hiking up that first time in the drizzling rain, as I crisscrossed back and forth up the switchbacks, more than once I came around a promontory and the fog was so thick I couldn’t see down the mountain behind me or down the slope beside me. All I could see clearly was one turn above me and one turn below me. The sensation was eerie. I couldn’t tell how high I’d climbed or how much further I had to go. I felt like I was climbing in a dream world - a mountain treadmill.
I finally sat down on a big flat rock, took off my backpack, and pulled out my rain jacket and hat. It hadn’t been cold enough down at the bottom of the mountain to need the jacket, but I knew if my shirt got soaked from the damp air, I would be miserable when I got to the top. I decided to suit-up before going any further.
As I hiked, I kept stepping in water running down the trail. Not a good sign. Water seldom runs anywhere in the Guadalupes, so seeing water on the trail meant the rain was coming down even harder up higher, and I was just seeing part of the runoff. Not only that, the higher I climbed, the more the temperature dropped, and the wet ground alongside the trail soon became dusted in snow. Eventually, snow began to cover the trail, and the low spots in the trail were often filled with cold slushy water.
What a relief to finally cross that point at the top of the trail where the slope changed – it happened between one step with my left foot and the next with my right, the left foot still pointing upward and the right foot facing straight ahead. The change wasn’t insignificant; I could feel the relief in my back and shoulders, I could feel the tension and fatigue in my entire body bleed away with that one step. I was on top. All the way up I had been hiking through harsh desert mountain landscape, mostly rocky, scraggly, and harsh, and gray-brown. But now, over the crest, at the ridgeline, I saw the pine woods, the grassy meadow, the open vista, and the sight was a breathtaking gift. All those pine trees looked peaceful and at home up here, yet they were not anything you’d expect to see while driving on the highway down below.
The only bad part about crossing the crest was the snow. I was nervous about pitching my tent on top of snow. I kept checking my watch to calculate when I would have enough daylight to turn around and hike back down to my car before dark.
At first I tried to follow the Bush Mountain Trail to Pine Top Campground, but I couldn’t identify the actual trail in the snow. I kept walking off on tangents. After several attempts I realized I wouldn’t find the campground on this trip, so I gave up that effort and turned back to the crossroads to another trail. I hiked 1-1/2 miles to the Tejas Campground, my second choice. I was so worried about missing that campground as well that I kept checking my topo map at every turn in the trail. Every time I passed by a smooth flat spot alongside the trail, I wondered if I had passed the campground and maybe should camp there instead. The Park rules say hikers can only set up camp in the prepared campgrounds, but the snow was making me nervous. It was a great relief when I finally saw the sign for the Tejas Campground. My worries had been unfounded; this campground was easy to find.
But now, because I had wasted so much time looking for Pine Top, it was 5:00 PM and getting very dark. I was just able to set up my tent and move all my gear inside before complete darkness set in. Since this was my first backpacking trip and I hadn’t spent any money on new gear, I didn’t have any way to heat water for coffee or cook food. Park rules prohibited building an open fire, so I simply crawled inside my tent, drank some water, and tried to settle in for the night.
Because I planned this trip as a spiritual retreat, I hadn’t brought any food. I’d decided to add fasting to my solitude for the 24-30 hours I was out. Leaving the food behind decreased the weight of my pack and the complexity of the trip, and I knew I had plenty of stored fat in my body to last the weekend. But more importantly, fasting was a good way to focus my mind on the task at hand, namely, listening to the voice of God. However, that first evening, as I shivered in my sleeping bag, the thought occurred to me that a nice cup of hot coffee might’ve been just as spiritual as fasting. Surely I could still hear from God with a warm stomach?
Sleeping
It was really cold. I didn’t have a thermometer with me so I didn’t know the actual temperature, but the air was cold enough to cause me worry. I wondered how I’d ever get to sleep while shivering so badly. The evening was still early, and I wondered if I could possibly stay in my sleeping bag for fourteen hours until sunrise? I’ve never stayed in a bed of any sort that long, not even a comfortable bed. I was so cold that my prayer became, “Lord, keep me warm through this long night since Cyndi needs me so much.” I wasn’t afraid of actually freezing to death because I was still in Texas and not high up in the Rockies, but I was cold enough to be frightened by the chill that had managed to find its way to the very core of my bones.
The reason I got so cold that night was because I got wet during the hike up the trail. I waited too long to put on my rain gear. While hiking I didn’t realize how wet I had become because my body was generating heat and keeping me warm. Once I stopped moving and set up my tent, I lost body temperature quickly, which is when the chill came. By the time I figured out what was happening I quickly changed into warm dry clothes, but I was already in a deep chill and could never warm up. If I’d worn better foul weather gear while hiking, or if I had shed my wet clothes sooner, I probably wouldn’t have gotten so cold, and I would’ve enjoyed the evening more. As it was, I ended up sleeping in blue jeans, 2 pairs of socks, a T-shirt, a long-sleeved hiking shirt, my blue fleece pullover, gloves, and ear muffs. I wore pretty much all my dry clothes into bed.
My feet were so cold I could hardly breathe. I think part of the problem was that my Thermarest mattress was only ¾-length, so my feet didn’t have any separation from the ground and they were on the tent floor. That hadn’t been a problem during previous warm-weather campouts, but it was a problem now. I finally figured how to put my empty pack under my feet to get them off the floor and that helped a little. Later, I actually stuffed my feet - sleeping bag and all - inside my empty pack, using it like a short bivy sack. That was a huge insight; after I did that my feet were toasty warm all night.
Another reason I got so cold was that I’d packed the wrong sleeping bag. The one I’d grabbed from our family sleeping bag stash had a bad zipper and it wouldn’t stay zipped. I didn’t know it was broken until then. Every time I rolled over, which was often since I had so much trouble falling asleep, my sleeping bag popped open, and all my warm air was displaced by cold mountain air. Besides that, the sleeping bag wasn’t designed for weather this cold. It dated back to our YMCA Indian Guide days, so it was at least 15 years old. I managed to stay warm by tucking the loose edges of the bag under me and keeping a grip on them with my hands. I had to re-tuck the loose edges every time I rolled over, which was often because I was so uncomfortable and so cold. At least the bag was long enough for me to stretch out completely and pull it up over my head.
I was simply too cold to sleep, or so it seemed. The night seemed to go on forever, and I felt like I was awake the entire time, only to understand later that I took little naps on and off all night. I tried reading several times. I pulled my book into the top of my bag and propped my flashlight on one of my boots so it shined on the book. I had difficulty finding a comfortable position for reading, but at least struggling to read took my mind off the cold. I even tried writing in my journal until I was so cold I couldn’t hold my pen any longer. Writing in my journal isn’t easy while zipped up in a sleeping bag even in friendly weather, much less on a night like the one this had turned out to be. I finally decided to tough it out and huddle down in my sleeping bag until I got warm or until the sun came up – whichever happened first.
I guess I eventually fell asleep since I dreamed I heard the sound of a Forest Service Truck pull up outside my tent and the Ranger inviting me to a warm breakfast. The rest of the hikers were already sitting at long picnic tables in a huge tent, eating egg and bacon burritos and drinking hot coffee. What a great dream. But alas, there were no Rangers, no hot breakfast, and no trucks. In the Guadalupe Mountains there were no roads, and no way for anyone to drive a truck. Just a dream. I was up here all alone.
I don’t sleep by myself very often
Cyndi and I have slept together on a king-sized bed since the very beginning when we first got married. We bought it on advice from Cyndi’s mom, which was the best advice we acted on as newlyweds. I still wonder why Deanna told us to get the king-sized bed since she never owned one herself, and I don’t think anyone else in her family or close circle of friends owned one.
That bed was our first expensive investment, and our decision wasn’t an obvious one at the time. We started out our young marriage living in a trailer in the Careyville Mobile Home Village in Brownfield, Texas, and that king-sized bed took up 90% of the floor space in our bedroom. We had to walk like Egyptians around the room just to get to our closet. I still don’t remember how we got the mattress and box springs down the hall, around the corner, and into the room.
We seldom got to sleep on a king-sized bed when we traveled, and so we seldom slept very well. (I should mention that we slept on king-sized beds during our trip to China, but that doesn’t count. The Chinese beds were as hard as plywood; we had to be careful not to plop down or we’d hurt ourselves.) As much as Cyndi and I liked each other, sleeping on a smaller bed felt like an all-night wrestling match, like we’d traveled cross country with too many people crammed into a small car, always in each other’s space, continually banging into each other.
But in our own big bed at home, we still liked to be close. It was a strange paradox: in a small bed we struggled for freedom, but in a large bed we slept as close together as possible. We usually started out the night as close to each other as we could, arms and legs tangled, contacting as much skin as possible, drifting away into blissful close-contact sleep, two humans melting into one. We never stayed that way for long, however; sometime during the night in our sleep we’d both move to the edges. I usually woke up to wonder why I was all alone with my arms and legs splayed in four directions. Then I’d crawl my way through the covers back toward the middle to find Cyndi once again. This happened over and over, night after night. I think it happened to Cyndi as well, but since I was asleep when she did her crawling, and she was asleep when I did mine, who knew what actually happened.
One December morning I pulled my way toward Cyndi and dug into her as close as morning breath would allow. I thought about how our back and forth movement through the night, toward each other and away from each other, was how Cyndi and I lived our lives together. We started out close, fell asleep, found a comfortable spot, drifted apart, woke up, and made a conscious effort to come back together. We did that over and over, every day. The decision to come back close was seldom a simultaneous decision, but it was made by whichever of us first noticed the separation.
We like being very close to each other almost all the time, but we also like our individual space and freedom almost all the time. We are constantly moving toward each other and away to freedom.
The second best advice we received when first married was from our friend, Tommie, in Hobbs, who told us to always find time for ourselves. She said it was important for us to have individual identities. We didn’t understand her advice at first since being individuals was what we were hoping to escape by getting married … we’d had enough individualism and we wanted to be a couple. But Tommy was right. Her advice was great. Through the years we’d learned to fit our lives together like a king-sized bed, close for snuggling yet room to be free.
We couldn’t live every day all tangled together; but neither could we love each other every day without touching. One was suffocating, the other lonely and depressing. It takes an attitude of total acceptance to leave emotional room to both snuggle and be free. It takes constant attention, making adjustments day after day, moment after moment.
I once heard this definition of marriage: “Marriage is spending your life in a bedroom that is too hot with someone who spends their life in a bedroom that is too cold.” One evening at Rosa’s while we were eating tacos, I was giving Cyndi a hard time for always being cold when I thought it wasn’t cold at all. She said, “I wouldn’t be cold all the time if I put on 40 pounds.”
I said, “Good point.” I kept a full supply of fleece pullovers, sweatshirts, and sweatpants behind the back seat of my pickup ever since, just for her. After that, if we were in a restaurant and she got cold, which happened often, even in the middle of the hot Texas summer, I knew I’d rather go out to the parking lot and retrieve one of my fleece pullovers than consider the extra 40-pounds option.
Daylight
After my long cold night in a bad sleeping bag, daylight finally found me at the Tejas Campground. I could hear birds singing, and I knew the area was in store for a beautiful day. The campground was in a valley surrounded by tall pine trees, which made daylight reluctant to enter the area, but even then I could tell the clouds were all gone and the breeze was very light. I decided to wait awhile for the sun to come up and warm the air before loading up my gear.
The area around my tent had stayed wet all night long. The snow had stopped once the sun went down, but the rain had continued to lightly sweep the ground. My tent was soaked because the overhanging trees above me served as a drain for the steady drizzle. The inside walls were wet, too, probably from condensation.
When I first conceived of this trip, I expected to spend significant chunks of time writing in my journal, reading, and sitting on a rock or a log and, as Cyndi once said, “Contemplating and stuff.” But yesterday had been too cold and wet to stop moving, and I was too worried about hiking in the dark to spend any time sitting. I tried writing during the nighttime while shivering in my sleeping bag, but the experience was far from pleasant.
When I looked out my tent windows that morning, the scene was just beautiful. The pine trees were dark green because of all the moisture and the mountain air looked clean and crisp. There was still a lot of snow scattered on the ground and in the trees, and my first thought was that Cyndi would love this, and we would have to come up here together soon. This piece of the trail was so different from the first portion of the trail, the desert part, the side of the mountain that everyone saw. It was so different from the Guadalupe Peak trail. Looking out my window I couldn’t believe I was only four or five miles from my pickup in the parking lot (if measured in a straight line). From my viewpoint, I felt as if I should be hundreds of miles away. None of the motor coach crowd down at the visitor’s center could imagine how beautiful the area was up here, completely out of sight.
I decided I had stalled long enough, so I broke camp, loaded my tent and gear into my backpack, and retraced my steps from last night to the trail junction. The Juniper Trail was fun. Although often muddy and steeper than I’d guessed from looking at the map, most of the trail was located in heavy forest, covered with pine needles and oak leaves. What an amazing day – even more so when compared to the drizzle and snow from yesterday. The sky was brilliant blue without a single cloud. I sat down on a big fallen log for awhile in the sun with a light breeze at my back, and decided the current temperature was no colder than the 50’s. The Juniper Trail made all my fretting over snow and my cold night worth it - my reward for sticking it out the day before.
All morning I debated whether to take a short side trail up to Hunter Peak, which was the 6th highest elevation point in Texas (at 8,258’). I thought it would be a shame to be so close and not go up. Who knew if I would ever come back up here? I thought after topping out on Hunter Peak I would then double back on the Bowl Trail for a half mile and then take the Bear Canyon Trail down the mountain to the parking lot. It was supposed to be one of the steepest trails in the park, dropping 2,000’ in 1.8 miles, the kind of trail best for going down, not going up.
However, in my joy of the morning, I apparently walked right past the Hunter Peak cutoff and the Bear Canyon Trail, and didn’t realize it until I found myself at the crossroads where Tejas Trail came over the ridge. By then my legs were too shot to turn around and go up again, so I took it as divine intervention on behalf of my quads, and decided to head down to my car.
My original plan would’ve added an hour to my hike, but when I finally walked into the parking lot, I knew I didn’t have another hour in me, so my oversight turned out to be the right move. “In nature,” wrote Huston Smith, “the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.”[iv] Good point.
This first time trip had turned out to be a great one for me. I learned my big shortcomings as a backpacker, in skills, in fitness, and in equipment. I learned that I had a lot to learn about packing my gear. I thought I was working hard and my pack was big and heavy until I met several hikers coming up the Tejas Trail on Saturday. They were carrying huge packs, and looked much more comfortable than I felt.
Afraid to look silly
I was never a hunter or fisherman or athlete. My adolescent rabbit hunting trips hardly qualified; I’d been bird hunting and deer hunting exactly one time each my entire life. I used to fish with my grandparents, but it was mostly stock tank fishing and boat dock fishing. While fun, it was low on the skill and coolness scale. To tell the truth, I had always felt inadequate around guys who talked about hunting and fishing. I never felt like I was as manly as they were, so I avoided those situations.
And another thing: I was always one of those guys who wouldn’t ask anyone for advice. I would rather research the topic myself, and then if I made a mistake, I had only myself to blame (that’s OK, I can handle that) and no one else to be accountable to (as in, the person that gave me advice). Asking for help was always a big problem for me.
So one of the biggest risks I took when I committed to this first backpacking trip was knowing I’d have to borrow a pack and borrow some other gear, and ask for advice from experienced backpackers. I’d have to admit to being a novice, at my advanced stage of life. I would have to admit weaknesses to my more manly friends who owned everything that I needed. I was too embarrassed to spend money on gear that I alone would use. Already, the idea of going to the mountains without Cyndi when instead I could be going somewhere with her and doing something she liked to do seemed too selfish.
I often fell into the dilemma of wanting to do something but not having the correct gear to do it right and not wanting to look like a beginner. One of my greatest fears as a man was to look silly. I have always been afraid to look like I don’t know what I am doing. I was scared to be caught posing, or pretending, so I avoided new situations or experiences because I was afraid to look like a beginner. I was afraid to look silly.
However, for some reason, I managed to get past all of those fears this time. Maybe my need to get alone in the mountains didn’t seem as self-indulgent as it had before. This time there seemed to be a purpose in it, even if I couldn’t’ quite articulate the purpose in words. Maybe the thought that getting alone on the trail would feed my heart and allow me to listen to God helped me overcome my selfish feelings. So once I set my mind on this trip, I was determined to go no matter what happened or how silly I felt.
After the trip I made an inventory: I had good hiking boots, marginal clothing, a marginal rain jacket but no foul-weather pants (meaning I packed an entire change of clothes knowing I would get wet in the rain – and it meant a lot of unnecessary weight in my pack), a borrowed external-frame backpack, a lot of water but no satisfactory way to carry it, a poor excuse for a sleeping bag, a decent but heavy tent and ground pad, a great hat, my journal, a good trail map, marginal knees, strong legs, and a long-distance heart. I began the weekend feeling unprepared as I hiked away from my car in the rain, and I had no idea whether I would end up enjoying the night, but I moved forward anyway, and that turned out to be an important part of the adventure
I was intentional about not waiting until I had perfect conditions and the best gear. That was a big breakthrough for me because I had to override all my natural tendencies. It took an act of my will. I decided to go anyway, prepared or not, and make this my prototype backpacking trip. I decided my goal would be to learn what I needed to change for next time.
After I got home it seemed funny that I went to all that trouble to spend only one night in the mountains. Well, baby steps come first. I was already making plans for a longer trip. John Eldredge wrote: “Above all else, you must care for your heart.” He asked, “What do you do to care for your heart? What does your heart need?” I had found it.
[i] John Eldredge, “Waking the Dead” audio book (Oasis Audio, Carol Stream, IL, 2003).
[ii] Annie Dillard, “Three by Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY, 1990), 92.
[iii] Movie: “The Constant Gardener” (Universal Studios, Universal City, CA, 2005)
[iv] Huston Smith
