Paradise Lost

The Editor and Queen wander across America seeking Eden

All those years, since I moved from the big city, everything had gone my way. My business had done well. My wife and I were closer than ever. My health had never been better. My grandchildren had moved back from the frozen tundra, and into my arms. My whole extended family had grown closer, and I had made many friends. I had worked hard, but the fruit of my harvest was many times greater than my labor could explain.

Several times a week, I would walk out on that same porch, and find myself amazed at the circumstances around me. That's when I realized I lived in Paradise. We eighty-one (or so) blessed souls call it Round Top, and pretend that it is just another small Texas community. But, in those days, I knew it wasn't just an ordinary little town. It was too quaint, too pretty, too interesting. No, I reasoned. This town must be Paradise.

This brought up the question of why I had been allowed to enter. Given my simple mind and slovenly habits, there was no way I could have deserved such an existence on my own. My heavenly life certainly wasn't the result of any excess amount of virtue. I was just as pig-headed and selfish as the next guy. No, it must be the result of some higher power. Therefore, I reasoned, obviously Paradise.

So, it had been for eight incredible years, the best years of my life. Then, it came to an end. It wasn't a sudden fall from glory. I didn't go plummeting into the abyss like Lucifer. No, it was like a slow erosion, first one piece, and then another, until one day, not long before my forty-ninth birthday, I realized that I was no longer happy. I was no longer satisfied with my life. Paradise was lost.

I remained obsessed with my lost state of grace for a full nine months before my wife reached her limits. The Queen is a patient and practical woman. She had dealt with my changeable disposition for almost thirty years, only occasionally finding it necessary to utilize a cattle prod, but now the steam was beginning to escape through her ears.

One night, six weeks before my fiftieth birthday, while engaged in a lengthy whine, I finally stepped over the line. I groaned that I needed to get away by myself, spend some time alone, try to get some perspective.

Her eyes sparked. "Maybe that's a good idea." she quickly agreed.

"Sure," I said, "...a vision quest like the native Americans. I could just take off and try to find myself."

I winced. Her eyes said "How soon can you leave?"

I realized I was in more trouble than I thought. Paradise might have been lost, but I wasn't in Hell...at least, not yet. One more look at her smoldering pupils gave me a hint of the flames of Hades. I didn't want to go there, either.

I packed up my pickup and took off for the high hills.

The practice I decided to engage while on my quest called for no planning, no timetable and no itinerary. My idea was to drop by and see my Mother and Grandmother for a short while, and then follow my nose until my vision arrived. You will note the capitalization of the words Mother, and Grand-mother. Just like my wife, the Queen, and my Daughter, the guardian of the holy grandchildren, these women demand a certain degree of respect. Or, perhaps I should say subservience. The men in my family have long been subjugated. I come from a matriarchal line descended from settlers who came to Texas in the 1830's. My two boys and I are Sons of the Republic of Texas. My Mother and Daughter are Daughters of the Republic. I do not know if, back in those days, every man kin to me had his life run by women, but in my present day family, it's been that way as long as I've been alive. These women are two of the reasons why.

My Mother has recently converted to Catholicism. I was raised Episcopalian, and a certain amount of adjusting is required when your mother shifts not just denominations, but schisms. As I left, she handed me some plastic rosary beads, and gave a brief demonstration of the prayer that accompanies them. I hugged both of my grand dames, and parted. As I drove off into the unknown, the rosary beads hung from my rear view mirror, reminiscent of a plastic Jesus.

Across the great state of Texas I wandered. Through the ragged hills near Lampasas, out to the edge of the big sky country near Brownwood, then over the great West Texas desert into El Paso. I drove past Las Cruces and across the New Mexico grasslands into Silver City, and then north into the Pinos Altos mountains. From there, I turned west and entered Arizona. North again through the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert. West to Flagstaff and north to the Grand Canyon.

There, I had a religious experience. So did hundreds of other people from all over the planet. You can buy tickets to a religious experience at the Grand Canyon. North again through the Navaho reservation until I came to a town called Medicine Hat. Medicine Hat is a tiny hamlet in the middle of the Utah desert. It's even smaller than Round Top, There I stayed on the San Juan River in a motel called the San Juan Inn.

Everyone who is employed at the San Juan Inn is a Navaho. The Navaho people I met seemed so calm and relaxed, the eyes of their old people full of wisdom.

The reservation seemed like the perfect place to have my vision. My spirit dream was not to come, however. I think it had something to do with the accommodations. I made the assumption that, since Medicine Hat is on the Navaho Reservation, and since the people who work at the motel are Navaho, that the business would be owned by a Navaho. But, as the owner explained to me, the Navaho are a communal people and not given to the individual ownership of the land. She says the Navaho men see each other as equals, and are not suited for Western style management as they don't like to boss each other around.

I learned all about Navaho culture from the attractive, blond-haired ex-VISTA volunteer who now owns the San Juan Inn. She had come to Southern Utah many years before to help the Navaho overcome their thousand-year-old customs and embrace the American economic system.

Upon discovering that the tribe had no interest in being enlightened, she gave up her philanthropic endeavors and bought the motel cheap. Now the Navaho work for her. This, of course, is how the enterprising American economic system works, and why there are McDonald's restaurants all over the globe. This also explains why Americans have such a marvelous reputation for their cultural sensitivity.

My hostess, the VISTA volunteer, had new braces, and they were giving her a fit. As she picked her breakfast out a mouth that was reminiscent of a bear trap, she allowed that there was still hope of civilizing of the tribe. She said that commercial television had made in-roads with the Navaho where she had failed. More of the men now spoke English. Many had their own pick-up trucks.

I was glad to hear that Navaho dollars were going to support the disadvantaged auto manufacturers in Detroit, but I shuddered at the thought of these distinguished Navaho men appearing on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

The next morning I slunk off into the desert, terrified I might be confronted by a laptop-toting Navaho trying to sell me insurance in a Yankee's baseball cap.

As I left town, I saw a sign saying simply “Valley of the Gods.”

Seeing as I was on a vision quest, it seemed obvious that I should follow the signs. They led me off the two lane blacktop onto a small park road that wound through the desert desolation for miles. Occasionally, a sign would appear warning that the road would soon be gravel and subject to "15 mile per hour switchbacks." I came around a curve, and suddenly the road turned into gravel as promised. It began to climb the raw face of a mesa at what seemed like a 45 degree angle.

Higher and higher I ascended that guardrail-lacking mule trail, the desert valley spreading out before me as I hyperventilated. Up and up I rose, my Chevy screaming in protest. At one point I stopped, blocked my tires, and peered over the side of the road into the valley below. No where were any signs of civilization. No buildings, no freeways, no billboards, no other vision-questing travelers. Only endless, barren desert as far as the eye could see. I was alone, high above the Valley of the Gods.

I just knew my vision would be coming along at any moment. I got back in my pickup, scaled the last two switchbacks on the road, and came to a wide place just short of the summit that offered a view so awe inspiring, I could not help but stop. As I sat there gawking, my engine still running, I heard some children laughing. I looked to see an old car parked just up the road. It was the first vehicle I had seen in over an hour. A young Navaho woman got out of the dilapidated vehicle and started walking towards me. She held handmade necklaces out before her like an offering.

"Nice shop you've got here," I said and gestured out across the amazing vista.

To make a long story short. My quest ended. I had my vision. That tale will have to wait for another day. The important issue here is that, when I returned to Round Top, I was filled with a great passion for the spiritual quest. I just knew that if the Queen and I went looking for the Paradise we had lost, and our hearts were pure, we would find it.

Every September for the last five years, the Queen and I have gone on a wilderness canoeing trip in Quetico Provincial Park in Canada. It is a much cherished ritual at this point. We look forward to it all year long. I turned fifty in this first year of the millennium, and was especially excited about the year 2000 trip. I expecting to gleam insights that would lead me through the next fifty years of fame an fortune, and into my 100th birthday in 2050.

You see, due to my expected longevity, I am pacing my fame. I'm sure I'll be rich and famous in the future, but I am enjoying my anonymity and poverty right now.

I was born in 1950, and expect to live to be 100. I plan to live fifty years on either side of the millennium. So, there's no sense in getting in a rush. There's time for Regis later. Besides, fame seems like a lot of trouble for me and my friends, what with all the tabloids and paparazzi. I mean, look at Round Top. My little town is famous, but does that really make it a better place to live? I'm not sure. So, I am taking my time.

In any case, I approached my wife with a daring proposal. We would leave for the Quetico wilderness in the normal manner, but this year, we would not come back! I suggested we could stay gone for a spiritually significant forty days and forty nights.

"What about our businesses?" she asked.

"Our employees are sick of us anyway. It'll probably run better if we're gone. Besides, I don't care if we do come back broke,” I ranted. “I want to go anyway."

The obvious logic of my in-depth financial analysis paid off. The Queen agreed to my plan.

The only problem was, we couldn’t decide where to go after we completed our canoeing trip.

The Queen and I are tent snobs.We have always said we would never consider owning a normal RV. Only wimps and senior citizens drive RV’s. Besides, how could we be RV people when we liked being out-of-doors? We have long found it a puzzle that in the RV section of every campground we visit, the people stay inside. They drive those huge, house-sized contraptions out into the wilderness, and then stay inside watching TV. In our experience, that's what RV people do, and we didn't want to do that.

Just to be fair, however, we went and looked at the full gamut of recreational vehicles before we left on our trip. We discovered, to our self-righteous delight, all the same quality standards for which the mobile home industry is known. The flimsy construction was particularly disturbing, considering that even the little pop-up trailers were $8,000 and above. We were not impressed with the investment.

We wanted something that made long distance traveling easier, and gave us shelter when we needed it, but was designed for people who liked to spend time outside.

We thought no such thing existed. Then, one day, the Queen discovered an ad in one of her camping magazines. It was an odd little thing, so small it could be pulled by a sub-compact car. It was essentially a queen size bed on wheels with a big rear trunk that opened up to a compact camping kitchen. The pictures on their website at Cozycruiser.com showed it to be manufactured to considerably higher standards than those rickety RV’s.

It was called a Cozy Cruiser and the basic model cost less than $6,000. If we picked it up in Florence, Oregon...we would get $500 off the sales price!

How could we pass it up? We could drive across the U.S. to the West Coast, wandering through some of the most scenic country in the world. We could search for Paradise, and save $500 big ones!

I had a spectacular send-off in the form of a fiftieth birthday party. My family and friends were very kind to me. My vocalist daughter sang a medley of all the hits from my songwriter days. (Well, they might have been hits if any of them had ever been recorded.) The Queen and her sisters composed and performed a musical sonnet in my honor. Imagine being mercilessly roasted by Queen Latifah and the Lennon Sisters, and you'll get a hint of the experience.

Then, on the sixth of September, two days after my birthday, we loaded my wife's Suburban to the hilt,and cast off. Northward we hurtled, up Interstate 35 to its source in Duluth, Minnesota. There, we parted with superhighways, continued North to Ely, and found our outfitter on Moose Lake. We caught a tow boat up to the ranger station at Prairie Portage where we passed though customs into Canada. We carried our canoe and packs over that short portage, and as we dipped our paddles into the pristine waters of Basswood Lake, our quest for Paradise truly began.

We saw a bear on this trip. That was heavenly. We had just pushed the canoe into the water at the end of a short portage, when I was alerted by the Queen's whispered squeals "Look! Look!"

I did, and there, calmly ambling over the rocks along the shore not fifty yards away from our bobbing craft, was a black bear. The animal looked towards us, decided we were irrelevant, and continued walking. We sat in the canoe with our mouths open, until it suited his ursine majesty's purposes to disappear into the forest. We had been camping for two days at the other end of that short portage. That bear had no doubt been our neighbor. The night before, at that same campsite, a moose swam out onto a small island in front of us. That lake was particularly close to Paradise.

Two days later, at the bottom of Lake Agnes, (the bottom geographically, not the actual bottom) we set up camp. We were just in time to escape the only inclement weather of our trip. The wind blew and the rain fell. Cocky in our foresight, we sat snug and dry in our tent.

Solitaire and gin rummy get old fast when you are tent bound. So, while we waited, we invented a special descriptive language based on colors. We theorized that each of the colors of the spectrum represented certain personal characteristics. For instance, white implies purity, spaciousness and silence. Black is solid, concealing and immobile. Blue is elevated, expansive and calming. Green represents growth, inventiveness and vitality. Red is emotion, with the darker reds representing anger. Red combined with black makes hatred; and the lighter reds, various shades of excitement. Yellow is enlightenment and illumination. Brown is earthiness, practicality and humility. It's amazing how far you can progress down the road towards psychosis when you are stuck in a dripping tent for two days. We analyzed the color signature of everyone we knew and commented on the spectra of various public figures. By the second day, we were coming up with suggestions about how the entire lot might be able to improve their personalities, politics and religion by adding a bit of a color here and there.

Try it out, dear reader. It's a fun exercise to play with when you're feeling blue. If you're too afraid to try it, then you're just too grey to have any fun. Hey, you don't have to get all red on me. I'm just trying to add a little yellow and green to your reading pleasure.

Needless to say, the teenage desk clerk was less than happy to see me at the Paddle Inn. She checked us into the tiny motel, while maintaining a safe olfactory distance. It took three showers to return my encrusted body to a condition suitable for exposure to the public.

The next day, we wedged our paddling gear into our already packed vehicle, strapped the canoe on the roof racks, and headed West seeking Paradise. Across the rolling hills of the north woods of Minnesota we roamed, past Fargo and onto the high plains of North Dakota.

The ancient Greeks believed that in early times, before man ruled the earth, the world was populated by giants. Now, this period in Greek mythology roughly corresponds to the period of time Judeo-Christians associate with Eden. Therefore, I began to feel that I was getting closer to Paradise, when in these first two days, I began to observe a variety of giants.

First we discovered a giant Paul Bunyan in Minnesota. Next, in North Dakota, we ran into Salem Sue, the world's largest Holstein cow. Sue is thirty-eight feet high, fifty feet long and weighs 12,000 pounds. Looking at her udder, which has the capacity of a medium-sized hot tub, I could scarcely imagine the dairy product bonanza she must produce each day.

Sue looked a little lonely, however, so I was relieved to run into ol’ Paul Bunyan again in Northern California. While walking from Minnesota, the big guy must met up with his buddy, Babe, the Blue Ox.

Like Sue, Babe seemed a little on edge. I imagined it must be difficult for such a substantial bovine gentleman to find a paramour of equal dimensions, so I mentioned the existence of Salem Sue, suggesting they might have a few things in common.

I am almost certain he winked, which I took as a sign that he would be calling on the lady at his first opportunity.

I rather enjoyed being the matchmaker. Relationships can be difficult at times, but I have a feeling those two are made for one another.

We also discovered a giant caveman and a giant buffalo on our trip. Not far past our sighting of the giant bison, in North Dakota, we ran into a few of the normal variety, which were still sufficiently large to demand respect. I got out of the car, seeking some close-up photos, but the Queen ordered me back into the vehicle.

Perhaps the buffalo were dangerous, as she alleged. I am not sure. However, there was no question in my mind about the peril involved in ignoring the Queen.

I got back in the car.

We stayed in a small bed and breakfast outside Billings, Montana. It was owned by a religious couple who had moved from Baytown, Texas to that high country. I fully understand why anyone would want to move anywhere from Baytown, but like Baytown, Billings is also dominated by the smell of petrochemicals and the spires of refineries. It was my suspicion that these displaced Texans had relocated to escape the end of the world at Y2K. I wondered at that time how they must have felt when the collapse of western civilization did not come.

Later, upon watching the national elections, and the electoral zoo that followed, I reflected that perhaps they had the right idea. Perhaps the fall of civilization had occurred, and I had been too busy to notice.

The next day we headed across the grass-covered hills of North Central Montana. Here I discovered a tractor lover’s Paradise. They grow hay on a slant in that country. Their huge tractors have tracks like a military tank, and they sometimes mow at what looked like a 45 degree angle. The hills are covered with golden grasslands, and the contoured patterns mowed into the sides of those domed fields were like large scale modern art. I know quite a few men in Texas who live to sit on a tractor. As we wove ‘round those massive hills, all hillocks of ancient lava without a single tree, I thought of my farm equipment-obsessed neighbors and how much they would have appreciated the fine points of such mowing. That country, my friends, is for making hay.

At some point, those uniquely contoured fields opened up to display a skyline of craggy peaks to the West. We were passing through the Blackfeet Reservation and nearing the Rocky Mountains and glacier country!

When British trapper, David Thompson, first recorded his impressions of the area that is now Glacier National Park, he wrote “Their immense masses of snow appeared above the clouds, and formed an impassable barrier even to the eagles.” At that time, the “Backbone of the World” was controlled by the Blackfeet people of the Northern plains, who aggressively protected their territory from both Europeans and other native tribes.

The Blackfeet believe that spiritual beings or values live in every feature of the land. As one Blackfeet elder put it, “...everything under the sky has a voice to speak with, and knowledge to tell.”

Because the mountains were thought to be home to spirits, members of the tribe often journeyed there on vision quests. It only seemed appropriate that we follow their example.

However, before launching ourselves up the face of a mountain, we felt it appropriate to sample a little historic luxury.

Starting in 1914, a huge rustic lodge, modeled after the Adirondacks playgrounds of the rich in upstate New York, was built in East Glacier. The Blackfeet called it “The Big Tree Lodge” because it was constructed of huge fir trees brought from Oregon. The central lobby is a huge palisade of log columns, soaring high up to a skylighted ceiling. We ogled our way to the front desk and booked our room. The place was oddly deserted. We were soon to discover that we had arrived the day before the Glacier Lodge would close for the Winter. As the night progressed, the vacant halls, the 1920’s ragtime music that echoed down the corridors and the creaking of the radiators which still heated the place, began to make us feel like we had fallen through a hole in time, and landed in the era of flappers and bathtub gin. As the scant guests settled in for the evening, I must admit, the hotel became a little eerie. As I walked down the deserted halls, I kept expecting a demonic, grinning Jack Nicholson to stick his head out of a doorway, and start chasing me with an axe.

The next day, we saddled up and headed towards Going-To-The-Sun Road. This historic two lane goat trail kept the Queen’s knuckles white for most of its 52 miles of precipitous drops. The views are incredible, the craggy, glacier cut cliffs unlike any I had seen before.

There aren’t many large glaciers left in Glacier National Park. No one in that area questions the reality of global warming. Only small, high remnants are left of huge bodies of ice that covered those mountain valleys and alpine meadows at the turn of the century. That night we spent the evening on Lake McDonald, a ten mile long, 472 foot deep lake carved eons ago by an immense glacier. The Kootenai people, native Americans who lived on its shore, called it “Sacred Dancing Lake.” You can easily imagine why. The water is perfectly clear, and the small river that is its source, flows studded with idyllic cascades and iridescent aquamarine pools.

We thought for a while that we had found Paradise, but after some reflection, we decided the rooms were overpriced and traveled on.

Northwestern Montana is heavily forested and wonderfully scenic. At one point we entered a particularly beautiful valley and discovered the tiny town of Paradise, Montana. For a moment we were excited, imagining we were hearing the faint refrains of heavenly trumpets...but a quick perusal of the area uncovered a number of mobile homes. We decided, despite the abundance of country-western lyrics to the contrary, that angels would not be caught dead in a double-wide, and kept moving. We scaled the mountains, and forded the lakes of the Big Sky country and into Idaho. We consulted the Queen’s footlocker of tourism information and discovered a number of National Forest camping areas near the resort community of Coeur d’ Alene. However, when we drove into the small city and stopped at the National Park headquarters, we were to discover that all of the National Park campgrounds and most of the state campgrounds were closed for the winter. This was puzzling as the temperature at night had never been below 45 degrees and there was no problem with snow. We complained vociferously and finally, the long-suffering rangers, eyes rolling, pointed us towards a small state campground on the Southern end of Lake Coeur d’ Alene that remained open to campers.

It took almost an hour to get there, but when we arrived, we were happy to find a beautiful little park on the side of the lake that we had all to ourselves. Huge fir trees stretched into the sky over our heads. Deer entered the campground as we pitched our tent, and in a shallow estuary not 50 yards from our site, thousands of ducks, more than I had ever seen in one place, created an incredible symphony of quacking...all night long.

We didn’t mind the racket created by Donald and his cohorts. The sunset was beautiful, the sky was clear, and we were all alone. I hid in the reeds, trying to play wildlife photographer, and was finally able to get a few shots of a cloud of the quackers skimming the surface of the water.

We were camped on an edge of the lake where we could see the “shadowy Saint Jo,” billed as one of the highest navigable rivers in the world, but no barges or longboats filled with trappers disturbed our quiet evening.

Sometimes, Paradise appears without notice. It is especially enlightening to discover that often, Nirvana finds you...not the other way around.

The next day we left our little Eden and sped South across the opening plains into Southern Washington. Here again we discovered the remarkable contoured grasslands that had enchanted us in Central Montana. We passed near Moscow, Idaho, heading towards the Snake River Canyon. We imagining a wild and scenic river. But, we were to discover that much of the Snake, like many Western rivers, had been tamed. Lewis and Clark floated down that awesome canyon, but they would not recognize the river they explored so long ago if they paddled it today. One concrete dam after another has blocked the Snake’s flow until it resembles a shipping canal more than a free flowing river.

All across the Western United States, great rivers have been dammed in order to make them navigable, and to provide irrigation to arid lands that would otherwise be useless for agriculture. These days, these rivers are battlegrounds between conservationists, who seek to save dwindling salmon and return these rivers to their natural state, and agricultural and other economic interests, who need the water to continue to operate.

The same issues surround the logging industry in Washington, Oregon and Northern California. Jobs for working people, versus saving the last vestiges of our wilderness resources.

It’s a nasty fight, one with big stakes on both sides. From what we saw, neither side is winning. As we wound our way down the long incline from the high grasslands into the cavernous Snake River canyon, we pondered these issues.

Just before we reached the great reservoir that now fills the old river valley, we found a small park. We hiked that morning up a high bluff called Wawawai, so named because of the many times long ago that native peoples met in that high place. In the local native tongue, “Wa” means talk. “Wa wa wai” means “talk, talk, talk,” and also, “council grounds.” Overlooking the vast canyon below, they talked calmly, smoked a “peace pipe” and sought gentle resolution to their differences.

As we sat cross-legged in that high place, I could see them in my mind’s eye; business people and environmentalists, Democrats and Republicans, Israelis and Palestinians...sitting together, their strident voices muted by the wonder of the scene below.

Maybe having all the world’s entrenched opponents smoke a peace pipe on Council Bluff wouldn’t solve the planet’s problems.

But, it couldn’t hurt.

I always wanted to go to Walla Walla, Washington. Don’t ask me why. It’s just one of those towns with a wild name, like Uncertain, Texas or Home on the Range, North Dakota...or for that matter, Round Top. But, it was getting late when we passed passed through through, so all I could do do was holler holler at Walla Walla and go on my way way.

We were still on the lookout for Paradise, but things had taken a turn towards the infernal. As we motored west towards the Columbia River Gorge, the terrain became more and more arid until, as we passed over the state line into Oregon, we were driving through a desert.

I never realized they had deserts in Oregon, but they do. They also have one big dog of a river. I’ve seen the Mississippi, and I know it’s supposed to be bigger than the Columbia, but you would have a hard time proving it by me.

We drove down that big, fat river for hours, the silver disk of the sun easing into the shimmering Columbia like a fiery silver dollar swimming in a flood of mercury, the whole massive waterway a rippling mirror. As we neared the back side of the Cascades, we could see the point of Mt. Hood in the distance, floating over the river like a distant volcanic island.

We turned left at Hood River as darkness fell. We found a little park, set up our tent with a flashlight, crawled in, and went to sleep.

The next morning, we awoke to the sound of cascading water. Our tent was set not twenty feet from a beautiful mountain stream. We were camped at the foot of towering Mt. Hood. We had barely noticed the setting in our exhaustion the night before. Revitalized, we ate a quick breakfast over our campfire and set out once again to find Paradise.

No place I have ever explored is closer to heaven than the Oregon Cascades. Pristine lakes stud the valleys like gems. Waterfalls, cascading rivers and streams are everywhere. In places where the old-growth forests are intact, huge fir trees climb into the sky. The undergrowth is abundant, and almost tropical in nature, ferns, lichens and moss sprouting from every corner. Fog and low clouds float through the valleys, adding mystery to the almost magical landscape.

Fall colors were rampant along the roadway, and in clearings in the forest. We wound through those mountain roads for a day, enchanted by what we saw. We found an out-of-the-way lake which had a campground that was still open, and spent the evening cowering under the biggest fir trees we had seen. I was very impressed as they were the largest living things I had ever seen.

The next day drizzled on and off. We wandered through those beautiful mountains, stopping to walk beside idyllic waterfalls, peering into transparent lakes, hiking through towering old-growth forests until...we found Paradise!

There it was. Clearly marked by a Forest Service sign on the side of the road. We couldn’t believe our luck. We turned off the blacktop and entered Eden, the Elysian Fields, Shangri-la, Valhalla, and Nirvana, all rolled into one!

Paradise was found.

I don’t really understand it but as soon as we drove into that campground, I suddenly lost all knowledge of good and evil. It was as though I had become totally innocent. I’m pretty sure for just a few minutes there, I was completely without sin.

Or at least, that’s the way it felt. I guess it could have been altitude sickness or something, but I sure felt sanctified. Either I was in a state of grace, or I was having a flashback from the lacquer fumes I inhaled in my early days as a painting contractor.

Either way, I was feeling good!

The Queen and I drove through Paradise campground and up to a picnic table on the side of the McKenzie River. For a little while, I wandered through that blissed-out forest. I lost all shame and would have taken off all my clothes if it hadn’t been 45 degrees and misting. Maybe my body wasn’t naked, but my heart was.

I strolled back to the picnic table, where the woman who had been created from my rib was spreading a feast before me.

I sat down.

“Here,” she said. “Have a piece of fruit.”

I smiled and took a big bite.

I thought I heard a faint thundering over the roar of the rapids. Suddenly I realized what had happened.

“Oh noooo!” I howled. “Woman! Why did you give me that fruit?”

“It’s got lots of vitamin C,” she replied.

The gentle mist became a driving rain. We covered our heads with our rain gear and ran for the car, slipping and sliding in the fresh mud. Our magical Paradise had suddenly become a storming swamp. I covered my face in shame. “Driven from Paradise ...again!” I thought. “How am I gonna explain this to my mother?”

From there on, everything went down hill. We drove a few miles, pulled into another campground and immediately had a flat tire. We tried to set up camp but the rain turned into a torrent, soaking every item of camping gear we owned. By the time I had the tire changed, we were two bedraggled, dripping, sodden sinners, cast out of Zion, and were starting to smell like old fish. We had been given another chance at Paradise, and we had blown it!

We slunk down the mountain, pools of water gathering on the floorboard, and took our flat tire and our burdens of sin into a gas station in Detroit Lakes, Oregon. While we waited in our sodden underwear, we noticed a tiny motel across the road. It was a modest little hostel, but at that moment, it looked like the Taj Mahal. We gathered up our drenched gear and drove in the rain to the little mobile home marked as the office.

The Queen is very picky about accommodations. More than once we have bounced from motel to motel because she caught a whiff of smoke in one, and considered the housekeeping substandard in another. She got out, entered the building and disappeared. I became even more sullen, doubting that this tiny establishment had a chance of escaping her critical fury. I could envision myself in some waterlogged campground, suffering from hypothermia. Less than thirty seconds later, she appeared once again, her face a contorted mask. She was rolling her eyes in shock. The proprietor of the motel soon followed her out, and I observed the reason for her consternation.

The gentleman who emerged from the trailer sported a mane of black and grey hair that framed his face like a cumulo-nimbus cloud. He looked more like an aged heavy metal guitarist than a small town hotelier.

The Queen stuck her head in the car as she walked by. “He has a picture of the Dalai Lama over his check-out counter” she explained.

As it turned out, the motel was imacculately clean, and survived the Queen’s rigorous inspection. It was a pleasant harbor in the storm. We had a good night’s sleep, and then continued on our way to Florence, Oregon, where we were to pick up our new Cozy Cruiser.

Our first view of the Pacific Ocean was from atop a hill just outside Florence. It was not the first time I had seen the water of the Pacific. I had flown to San Francisco as a young adult and seen Pacific waters in San Francisco Bay.

But that was different. The water in the bay, being contained, was much less threatening. This ocean was very large and obviously held much more water than needed to drown me and everyone in my family.

It also looked remarkably unstable. I gazed uncomfortably at the cliffs behind me, wondering if I would be able to reach high ground in case some of it spilled.

I am not sure why people live beside oceans. It seems to me somewhat akin to living near an active volcano, or at the base of an avalanche-prone snow-covered peak. I stood there shivering, only partly from the cold, until I remembered an important fact.

“Oh yeah, these people are crazy.”

I have been told that people on the West Coast, particularly those who live in California, are crazy since I was a small boy. I knew other cultural facts about them also. West Coast people eat grapes all the time and drink wine like it’s water. They scarcely get out of bed during earthquakes. Most of them have been surgically altered to make them more attractive. They interview prospective employees on casting couches. They are so unhappy with the idea of old age, that they invented New Age philosophy. Ronald Reagan and Mickey Mouse take turns being governor of California.

So, you see, I was not without some knowledge of the West Coast cultural and political landscape to prepare me for the visit.

However, I was not prepared for the Pacific Ocean. We picked up the Cozy Cruiser and I spent two terrifying days driving up and down the coast, walking on the beach, inspecting tidal pools, eating fresh fish, and hobnobbing with seals and sea lions.

The Queen does not share my reasonable fear of ridiculously large bodies of water. She was raised near the Atlantic Ocean in New Jersey. I try to make allowances for her lineage. Seeing as she is only half Texan, I know it is unreasonable to expect her to have normal sensibilities. However, after two days on the brink of the Pacific, I had reached my limits. I told her we would either have to return to the mountains, or I would immediately begin construction on a large wooden ark. We headed back up into the Cascades.

They say Man cannot return to Paradise. Adam and Eve committed the original sin, and now we must all pay. We have fallen from grace and that is that. I am living proof that this is a false doctrine. We drove back up the McKenzie River Valley to Paradise campground, the Eden we had been driven from by the wrath of rain, and set up camp.

The weather was perfect. We sinned no more and spent two wonderful days in a state of grace.

God laughs at our idea that we are the dominant life form on the planet. I not only know this because of the close, personal relationship I forged with the Maker in Paradise, but because I heard her laughing in a forest of giant redwoods.

This was not a unique experience. Anyone can hear this eternal ridicule. All you have to do is hike into a grove of old-growth redwoods, and if you can still find the arrogance necessary, shout out “I am the king of the world.”

The laughter will be deafening.

Some human beings think that if you can kill something, you are superior to it. There is some historical evidence for this, but not much. The dominant life forms on this planet are actually microscopic. Single-celled animals, viruses, plankton, and the like, have been on the planet many millions of years. They still dominate the globe today. Human beings are just theme parks for bacteria. Even roaches were on earth long before mankind, and will be here long after we are gone.

Of the larger life forms on the planet, no other living thing dominates the space around it like a grove of giant redwoods.

Some living redwoods were seedlings when Christ was born. They are the tallest living entities on earth, some reaching 360 feet high. That’s almost 2 1/2 times the height of the Statue of Liberty.

Redwood groves contain the highest accumulation of biomass on the planet, ten times more than the densest tropical rain forest.

I thought I had seen big trees in Oregon, but I was unprepared for my first hike through the redwoods. From afar, a grove looks like any other stand of big conifers. You can’t get a sense of how incredible they are until you are standing on the ground beneath them.

The Queen and I camped in Jedediah Smith State Park in Northern California. In season, the rangers build a foot bridge across the river that runs through the park so visitors can hike in the grove on the other side. Huge redwoods were all around our campsite, bigger than the enormous firs in Oregon. But, the rangers said the really BIG trees were on the other side of the river.They had taken the bridge down the day before we arrived, but that did not challenge dauntless explorers like us. We dragged our canoe off the roof rack, launched our boat, and soon made landfall on the other side.

For six hours, we hiked through that incredible forest. It was one of the high points of my entire life.

A redwood forest is silent. Sound is muted by the dense organic matter that covers the floor of the grove. Giant redwoods often sprout new trees along their bases. For hundreds of years, these “babies” rely on the roots and leaves of the mother tree for sustenance. As these “rings” continue to mature, they grow together at the base of the main tree, forming a massive trunk, much larger than even those of the Giant Sequoias. I estimated that some of these rings were over forty feet in diameter. Eventually the central tree dies, but the ring of younger trees live on, all sharing the same genetic material as the mother. Because of this means of reproduction, some scientists believe that some giant redwoods may contain genetic identities that are millions of years old. As we walked through that primeval forest, it certainly felt like we were in the presence of beings far beyond our limited understanding.

Several times, as we drove through California, we stopped and walked through coastal redwood groves. In the Sierras, we visited the Giant Sequoias, a related species. Never did the awe I felt wane in the slightest. Standing in the presence of such trees was a profound experience.

Which is why I found it incomprehensible that they are still cutting them down.

When white settlers first came to California, there were over 2,000,000 acres of old-growth redwood forest along the coastline. Today, there are less than 90,000 acres of these incredible trees remaining, or about 4% of the original stands.

As we drove past sawmill after sawmill, and saw the mono-culture tree “farms” that have replaced the old-forests, we were shocked and offended. California portrays itself as the most environmentally progressive state in the union, but I saw little that spoke of good stewardship.

After our profoundly spiritual experiences in the redwoods, the stacks of trees we saw laying on their sides beside sawmills reminded us of pictures we had seen of stacked bodies in Nazi concentration camps. We Americans have nothing to be proud of here. Future generations will most likely judge us harshly for the holocaust we have perpetrated.

The Queen and I hung our heads for days afterwards. Things did not get better. We drove down the overdeveloped California coastline, spent two days in San Francisco, but even the rainbow I caught with my camera over the Golden Gate bridge held little promise of redemption in the face of the out-of-control urban sprawl. We traveled to world-famous Yosemite National Park, and found the incredible valley to which people are drawn from all over the world. It was swarming with tourists and looked like someone had taken a baseball bat and beat it half to death. It was so upsetting, we refused to stay the night.

We had better luck viewing the the Giant Sequoias, but it snowed just before we arrived, so the trampling of human beings was most likely concealed. We moped our way across the California basin, passing through the desert that now grows grapes and citrus crops at the expense of most of the free-flowing rivers in the West, and then hit the outskirts of Los Angeles.

I try to be a positive person. I am sure there are parts of Los Angeles that are beautiful. Surely all those people would not have settled there if it were not so. However, the Queen and I spent almost four hours driving down Interstate 10 through that God-forsaken parking lot, and I never saw a place where I would build anything prettier than a used-car dealership.

By the time we escaped that ruin of concrete and asphalt, we were so eager to get home, we drove like fiends all the way back to our beloved Texas.

Across that great desert that begins on the outskirts of LA, and doesn’t end until you hit the hill country, we high-tailed it like the tribes of Israel fleeing Egypt.

We passed through Austin, and as we drove by Smithville, and then into La Grange, I felt my insides settle into some semblance of order for the first time in days.

Here is what I learned on our six week journey to some of the most beautiful country in America.

Those of us who are blessed to live in this part of Texas are some of the luckiest people in the world. We live in one of the most authentic, least defiled places in America. There is still a rural culture here, though it is on its last legs, one that has a natural respect for the land. The rolling hills and live oaks that we love may not be as spectacular as the mountains of Glacier Park or as scenic as the Oregon coastline, but we never saw any place we would rather live.

The bottom line is that where human beings go, they leave wreckage behind. We aren’t better people than those folks in California. Many of them love the land, too. There are just fewer of us...for now. In our part of Texas, facing as we do a great influx of settlement from urban areas, we need to look at what has happened to California and learn a lesson.

I always been told you can’t stop change, and I suppose that is true. But, can’t we at least slow it down? Can’t we take a look around at our still unspoiled countryside and try to find some way to work together to preserve the land, the culture and the lifestyle that drew us here in the first place?

Some of our families have been here since the 1800’s. Some of us only a few years. But we all have a stake in the future of the land on which we build our homes.

Money doesn’t buy happiness. Growth is not always good. The grass is not always greener. Sitting on my porch back in Round Top, I remembered a lesson I had learned before.

Living where I do, I have to look no further than home to find Paradise.

Round Top Register - Texas Fun Travel Guide