John Muir
On Sunday, August 4, we left Durham, NC with the goal of getting to the Pacific Northwest as fast as we could. Lindsay will be taking a flight out of Portland on August 20 so she can get back to SoCal for the annual Capistrano Valley HS girls cross country training camp in Mammoth. On Sunday night at 9:30pm we arrived in Columbus, Ohio at the home of Joe McQueen and Kellyn Muller-McQueen.
Joe was the worship leader for Fellowship of Christian Athletes 10 years ago when Tom was the campus faculty advisor. Joe has put down the guitar and taken up some serious literary critical work, finishing up a PhD in English at Ohio State University after teaching English for two years in Japan.
Joe and Kellyn have been on a very similar spiritual-theological-political journey. In all his free time, Joe has immersed himself in reading and writing and dialogue. They have participated with Columbus Mennonite Church the past two years and are seriously discerning a move to Seattle to join Joe's brother Josh and his wife Neely (more on these two in a future post!) in an intentional community experiment. Sure enough, the Brothers McQueen visited the Rutba House in Durham for a week this year to learn from Jonathan & Leah Wilson-Hartgrove and the rest of the community about what it takes to commit to this more radical form of communal discipleship.
We stayed up until 2:30am, eating homemade smore bars and drinking beers from North Carolina, Kansas City and Michigan, talking and resonating about travels, readings, church and where the the Divine Hand will prod us next. We awoke at 7:30 and hit the road for the 2nd longest day of driving on our pilgrimage. Destination: Minneapolis.
We met our old friend (whom we met 6 weeks prior) C. John Hildebrand at Luce's Pizza in Minneapolis as the sun set over the Mississippi River. John was getting ready for a road trip of his own: he and folks from Reba Place in Chicago were meeting in just a couple of days for a trek down to the Wild Goose Festival outside of Asheville, North Carolina. WG has become a summer mecca of sorts for progressive Christians who enjoy camping out in the Southern humidity. We met a handful of others (like Sara Stratton in Toronto, the Esaus from Germany, and Tevyn East in Philadelphia) along our journey who were planning on Wild Goosing in August. Pictured below are C. John, right, Joyce and Nelson Johnson of the Greensboro Beloved Community Center, center, and Tevyn East with the Carnival de Resistance, left (featured in our previous Philadelphia post), at the Wild Goose Festival in 2011.
From Minneapolis, we traveled across South Dakota (the land of eccentric art and billboards) to Rapid City where we met Carl Meyer and Karissa Ortman. Carl first discovered the beauty of South Dakota during a Christian Peacemaker Team mission to Pierre (the capital) while in college at Goshen. Carl and Karissa joined up with Mennonite Central Committee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in Porcupine for four years (when they were newly married!). Carl served us home brew that tasted like Chimay while Karissa served us zucchini and squash from the backyard garden dipped in homemade hummus and a lovely homemade green tomato salsa.
On Wednesday morning, we met Rev. Robert G. Two Bulls at Red Shirt Table. This was the first time either of us had stepped foot on a reservation. This is beautiful Lakota land, just a few dozen miles from the awful Wounded Knee massacre of the late 19th century. The Pine Ridge reservation has the lowest life expectancy of males (48) in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. The unemployment rate is 80%. This is a place of historic atrocity. Of genocide.
With the gorgeous backdrop of the Badlands and the eerie silence of the Land all around us, we sat and listened to Robert tell his Story at Christ Church Episcopal, the host site of more than a thousand Taize worshippers from all over the world this past Spring. Robert joined the Navy as a teenager, traveling to the North Pacific, China Sea & the Japan Sea on a Destroyer named USS Radford. After his proud service to country, Robert convinced the beautiful Dolores to marry him and they moved to Rapid City, just a 45 minute drive from Red Shirt Table. Robert worked long hours for decades at an auto body shop to support his wife and five children (we got to meet Twila: see below). He eventually heard God's Call to a commitment to study and service in the Episcopal priesthood.
Robert shared generously with us of his life and wisdom from decades of serving at Christ Church Episcopal. Perhaps most striking in our Time with him was the strong truth-seeking spirit woven throughout his story, reflected in a constant willingness to learn and reform whenever he came across new understandings of the Way. He sang a couple of hymns in the Lakota language for us and took us for a short tour of the church grounds. The view was breathtaking.
We planted ourselves in Montana territory for two nights, splitting the time between two university towns: Bozeman & Missoula.
On our last big travel day of the trip, we visited Tim & Stephanie Lyons (as well as their twin boys Sam and Sean and Tim's parents George and Jean) in Spokane. Tim and Tom first met each other on the 4th Grade Mission Viejo Youth Basketball All-Star Team and they roomed together at the University of Kansas. We had not been to Spokane since their wedding back in 2007. We spent good time with the Lyons catching up on life and getting to meet their two precious little boys, as they fed us generously before getting back on the road for our last 4 hour stretch to Sammamish.
I AM TIRED JUST READING THAT! WOW!
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