Interlude

Early Monday morning, a feeling of unease extracted me from some indistinct dream and deposited me back into a fusty motel room in Utah. I opened my eyes a fraction to check the time and was greeted by the sun’s rays gilding the floral curtains hung over the window. Perhaps if I lay still beneath the starchy comforter, I thought, I could delay the inevitable rush to pack and get back on the road. Turning to face the darker side of the room, I attempted to lose my sentience in sleep once more, but I couldn’t ignore the latent anxiety now quivering in my chest. The reality was our travels had almost come to a close, and I would be on a plane to Virginia the very next day, but this wasn’t the only thought which had roused me.

A few months before, I had been offered a spot in a linguistics master’s program starting that fall, and I was truly elated. In college, I had grown to love dissecting the minutiae of my friends’ dialects, the telltale vowels and vocabulary which betrayed their hometowns and personalities. The prospect of taking classes on American English varieties and the grammatical patterns of obscure languages titillated me. But I knew that despite my academic fervor, I was preparing for a future as inscrutable to me as the dream which had just dissolved in my mind’s eye.

Since high school, I had been convinced that I was the only person my age without a thirty-year career plan. I had had interests in a mélange of areas like history, literature, and foreign languages, but once in college, deciding on a major felt like a game of Go Fish, and I never quite knew where I could find the vocational matches to my deepest passions and proclivities. Linguistics came into my life through coursework for a minor in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), and after my first taste, my appetite for language became insatiable. I audited classes on language and society, speech sounds, and grammar just for the fun of it, and by graduation, I had applied to and been accepted into a graduate linguistics program. In doing so, I had chosen to embrace my newly discovered zeal, but I still couldn’t conceptualize what my future in this relatively unknown discipline might look like. My life seemed like one of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, a random assortment of casual interests and hobbies splattered against a canvas, and as the start of my graduate studies grew closer, I still spent many a day peering down at the colors looping around its surface, hoping to discern an underlying pattern that would make sense of my life.

Out West, however, the only stress I experienced came from maintaining our itinerary. Heather and I had traversed more than a thousand miles of desert, mountains and rocky plateaus over the past week, and the toughest decisions we had to make were which trails to take and when to turn around. Other than that, nothing seemed to matter except the pursuit of beauty. This temporary departure from our normal lives had become a succession of precipitous peaks and memorable hikes, footsteps on soil, sand, and river stone and silent minutes spent on the edge of a chasm or cradled between canyon walls. Whereas my days in Virginia swirled with anxiety about the future and tethered me to the insufferable routines of work and school, out here, sublime vistas infused with peace and revelation appeared mysteriously and unexpectedly along the trail or by the roadside; Heather and I chased these sacred moments from one park to the next, and for a time, all else was forgotten.

****

Sometime later, I vaguely sensed Heather stirring in the bed beside me as I surfaced from a half-sleep. Extracting my body from its cozy cocoon, I hurried to the shower where I could luxuriate in a few more minutes of justifiable solitude. The ripple effect of our spontaneous jaunt to the South Rim had continued to wreak havoc on our schedule, so our plan was to backtrack to Mesa Verde for the afternoon before moving on to Arches National Park in eastern Utah. Sadly, Canyonlands NP, which would have been the last National Park on our circuit, had become a casualty of extending our stay in Arizona and would have to be shelved until a future trip. But in return, I reminded myself, we had had the rare pleasure of experiencing the Grand Canyon with thousands of other Fourth of July visitors, most of whom, it seemed, had been ahead of us in line for the bus along the canyon rim.

An hour later, we whizzed through an undulating landscape of scraggly shrubs on our way to the Colorado state line, and as I watched the ground blur into an abstract composition of organic color, it occurred to me that today was Monday. The day before, Heather and I had intended on visiting a church near Monument Valley, but in our rush to make up lost time, we had quietly let the opportunity slip by. I turned around in my seat on an impulse and rifled through our belongings in the back seat until my fingers graced a familiar leather-bound book. Our Nissan had hardly been constructed with the intent of ushering us into the presence of God, but it would have to do.

“Hey,” I said, glancing over at Heather, “what do you think about doing a devotional since we missed church yesterday?”

I opened my Bible and randomly flipped to a passage of Scripture. Landing somewhere in the New Testament, I read aloud while Heather navigated the fields and pastures of rural Utah, and once I reached what I felt was a satisfactory stopping point, I closed the book in my lap and allowed the drone of rubber on asphalt to fill the silence once more.

“I don’t really know how to talk about my faith,” I said suddenly, surprised at my own honesty. “My relationship with Jesus is so important to me. I want others to have the chance to know His love too, but it’s hard to go that deep with people. I mean, I don’t even really like talking with people to begin with!”

When I was a teenager, I had professed to be a Romantic, someone attuned to and forthcoming with his emotions, but in reality, I was an introvert with few friendships outside my family. Coupled with this, I was chronically ignorant of small talk, making it difficult and even exasperating to start a conversation with someone I didn’t know well, let alone talk about the fears, regrets, and dreams that were central to my being. Yet, Jesus had given me so much: self-worth, redemption from my failures, and peace in the uncertainty of life; I didn’t want anyone else to miss out on those same gifts.

After listening to my yearnings, Heather poured out her own heart in our fifty-five-mph sanctuary, and then we fervently prayed together, for our family and our friends, for our coworkers and our neighbors, and for ourselves. We prayed that we would be compassionate and share Jesus’ message of hope with the people around us wherever we might be, along dusty Western roads or closer home.

The distance between us and Mesa Verde had vanished, and our car strained its way up the plateau toward the Cliff Palace complex. We didn’t revisit our tête-à-tête after that, but I treasured the intimacy we had shared. Though we had experienced the thrills of summiting peaks suitable for angels and riding side by side on horseback through a natural wonderland, I didn’t feel closer to Heather at any other time on our two-thousand-mile circuit than I did that morning in our rental car. It is an easy thing to exchange jokes and stories over hamburgers at In ‘n Out, but when you are brave enough to bear your heart to someone, you invite that person into the most private rooms of your home. The risk can be great, but the bonds forged there are more resilient than the ancient cliff dwellings of the Southwest.