would melt away in the afternoon sun. They did not.
Where clear-eyed dreamers toiled
We wait. Remembering.
It is possible to drive from Portland, Oregon to Denver, Colorado in two really, really long days; but most people who have their masochistic tendencies under control will usually drive the 1,600 miles in three long days to accomplish the journey and still arrive at least semi-conscious. It is also a trip that you want to take during daylight, since most of the time you are passing through some of the most scenic country on the earth. Even after having taken this trip dozens of times in my life, I am still in awe of the Columbia Gorge, the Snake River canyons and the Wasatch Mountains. So when my friend Alan called me from Portland and told me that he had found a job in Denver and could I help him drive out, I thought I might enjoy the trip.
I had lived near Portland for almost ten years, but in 2008 I threw my entire life into chaos by enrolling at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, and my wife Vivian and I packed up or threw away everything we had and moved to Colorado in a twenty-four foot U-Haul. We had previously lived from 1995 to 1999 in Colorado Springs, but had relocated to Oregon to care for Vivian’s aging parents. So in moving back to Colorado not only did we change states, again, but I was walking away from a well-compensated career as a computer programmer to become a low-paid pastor in the United Methodist Church. Alan had remained in Oregon and continued his work in high-tech with a job at one of Oregon’s famous Silicon Forest companies. Like most of my friends and colleagues, he could not understand why I would make such a radical move, as well as shoot myself in the foot financially, and assumed I would eventually drop out of seminary and come to my senses, return to programming, and retire in the ease and comfort he thought I had earned after 25 years in the computer industry. By June of 2013 I was still shooting myself in the foot and stubbornly remaining in Colorado, and I had arrived at a considerable turning point in my pastoral career: ordination was only a week away.
I assumed Alan got the job in Denver simply for normal financial reasons, but had cooked up the idea of this road trip as a last ditch opportunity to talk me out of my foolishness. One of the reasons I decided to help him drive from Portland to Denver was I thought I ought to let him try. I knew from long experience that I often didn’t recognize my own foolishness, and if I couldn’t withstand a grilling from the ever-forthright Alan I had no business changing careers.
So one evening in early June I found myself aboard Alaska Airline’s 6:35 flight to Portland. After a few hours, the ancient 737 swooped down the Columbia River gorge, flew west past the Portland airport, made a big, loping circle over Washington County, then lined up on the runway lights west to east and landed smoothly on the damp tarmac of runway 10R. I disembarked through a Jetway into Portland’s modern, spacious airport, retrieved my luggage and took the shuttle bus to the rental car lot. Alan was the ultimate city dweller and didn’t own a car, but had arranged for us to drive the rental all the way to Denver. It was a mid-sized Ford and fairly comfortable, with more than enough room for two guys travelling light. I pulled out of the lot and wound my way out to the freeway. I had taken this route many times when we lived in Portland, which was fortunate considering all the turnoffs and unmarked freeway interchanges that you needed to take in order to get into downtown Portland. It was dark and rainy—not surprisingly—and I couldn’t imagine how someone unfamiliar with the peculiarities of Portland driving could have ever found their way into the city. If they were smart I suppose they took a cab or the light rail, but Alan had gone to some trouble to arrange a long distance rental: our home for the next three days.
As I wound over the river and skirted the city in order to go through the tunnel and over to the west side, I wondered again why Alan had gone to so much trouble. His new company had hired movers to get all of his stuff to Denver, and he could simply have flown there himself, taken a cab and moved right in to his new apartment. We had for a time been fairly close, but had experienced the normal drifting apart over the last 5 years since Vivian and I had moved back to Colorado. Was he really so disturbed by the thought of me changing careers and life-direction that he wanted to do some weird kind of intervention, trapped together for three days in a rental car? Did he think I would be desperately unhappy as a pastor, yet somehow fulfilled if I returned to computer programming? Like me, Alan had come into computer programming in the “cowboy” days, when the industry was inventing itself and it was exciting and challenging to go to work every day. But those days had ended when the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, and computer programming became less of a vocation and more of a job. I knew Alan felt the same way about this, but he had decided that relative financial security was more important at our age than fulfillment, while I had decided to limp along financially in search of deeper meaning in day to day life. I also knew that Alan had given up on organized religion a long time ago, regarding it as too shallow and unrewarding and irrelevant to modern times. My problem was that I wasn’t certain he was wrong. I needed to be certain.
So there I was on the brink of ordination, 1,600 miles from home and likely to be grilled for three days on the purpose of my life. Would my defenses and arguments stand up? And I was anxious and uncertain about ordination itself. Would this be a defining moment in my life, on the same list with my wedding and the birth of my children, or would it simply be the last of a long series of hoops I needed to jump through in order to be accepted into the clergy club? It might have been easier if I had just ignored all of this and let the whole thing play out unchallenged, but I knew that if I was truly seeking something ephemeral I could not back away from my own doubts and fears.
I turned south off of highway 26 on to 217, then got off the freeway and wound my way through the maze of streets that constituted the Raleigh Hills neighborhood of Portland, finally arriving at Alan’s apartment building. In Portland, cars are considered to be a little bit like a malodorous smell, so it took me almost twenty minutes to find a parking place three blocks away. I grabbed my overnight bag and hoofed it up the street in the rain, finally arriving cold and wet like a stray dog at the door of Alan’s apartment. I rang the bell while wondering why there wasn’t a larger stoop and overhang in a city where it rained all the time, but Alan came promptly to my rescue and ushered me into the apartment.
His apartment was impeccably neat, a talent I had never been able to acquire, though it did have the advantage of being almost entirely devoid of furniture. There was a cot and a chair in the living room, and I could see a few cups in the dish drainer in the kitchen, but the rest was apparently in a moving van on its way to Denver. Alan stood there in the middle of the floor beaming.
“You have a distinctive knock, my friend, but you smell like a rotten fish!”
“And it’s good to see you, too! I don’t suppose you have a towel?”
Alan went to the kitchen and found a 4”x4” face cloth, which he held out for my inspection.
“Great . . . ”
It was good to see my old friend again. We were about the same age and approximately the same height and build, but he seemed much healthier than I—I really needed to work out more—and his red hair and neatly trimmed beard gave him a distinctive look. He had also acquired the knack of looking really natty in just about anything he was wearing, which on that night was a simple blue polo shirt and Dockers. My button-down and jeans had started out wrinkled in Denver, were not improved by the flight nor the rain, and actually did smell a little like a rotten fish.
He sat on the floor while I occupied the sole chair, and we talked for some time, catching up on life events and common acquaintances. The coffee maker and teapot were on the truck, so we just sipped water from paper cups. But after a while it was clear that both of us were wearying of the superficial conversation, and I finally broke the ice.
“Alan, it’s great to see you again, but . . . well, why am I here?”
“To drive with me to Denver, you knucklehead.”
“Yeah, I got that. But why didn’t you just fly out? Would have been a lot quicker and easier.”
His face became serious. “Look, I just wanted to have some time with you, OK? Probably