At about 4 or 5 a.m. on Saturday, two animals were on the roof of the Bunkhouse playing, or fighting. It woke me up, and I slept the next hour or two restlessly, finally rising out of my bed just before dawn. I sat outside and watched the sun come up through the valley.
Vicki had asked us the night before what time we’d like breakfast. We told her we were planning on hiking to the top of Black Mesa the next day, and she urged us to get an early start, offering to feed us at 6:30 so we could be at the trailhead by 7. She laid a fantastic spread before us that morning: blueberry pancakes, scrambled eggs, sausage and bacon and fresh fruit and coffee. More than ever, I felt as if we were staying with family, as I remembered so many early-morning breakfasts like this when visiting my dad’s sister’s house in Arkansas. We were full and happy by the time we left for the trailhead.
Laurie had opted to stay behind and have a relaxed morning, and as soon as we started off on our hike, I envied her. We were so full of food that we could barely walk. We packed Brian’s backpack full of water and snacks and took off up the trail, which goes first around the mountain for almost 3 miles before finally starting off to the top. Still, we saw some incredible stuff on that flat hike; nature really took us by surprise.
Do you see him?
The walk was easy and gentle, and even as we started up the slope to the top, it never got too bad. Once you reach the top of the mesa it’s still another half mile’s walk or so to reach the actual highest point in Oklahoma, which, as it turns out, rests only 1,300 feet from the New Mexico state line, and is marked by a large stone obelisk.
We had a snack of beef jerky and granola bars at the marker before making our way to the edge of the mesa to catch a view of the valley below:
I sat on those rocks for a long, long time, just staring off into the distance. It was the kind of quiet you almost never find anymore, and I felt suddenly that suddenly the veil was down a little bit between me and God. For the second time in as many days, I felt I was in the presence of something huge and holy and silent, and that it was time to just sit, and watch, and listen. So that was what I did, for at least half an hour. Finally I felt like I wanted to record the impression, and so I pulled my journal out of Brian’s bag and went to write. I’d just written the date down on the page when I looked at my hand and noticed it was covered in blue ink; my pen had broken.
Brian offered to walk back to the marker, where there had been a guest book in a metal box, and get me the pen from there so I could finish my entry. After he left I sat and silently thanked God over and over and over that I have Brian. The sun was warm and there was a breeze; I almost cried out with gratitude. Brian returned with the pen and I wrote a quick one-page missive:
I’m sitting on a cliff at Black Mesa, overlooking the New Mexico state line, thinking about spiritual mountaintops … Because out here I am absolutely engulfed in the hugeness of God. These skies are so big, so filled and so full. I’m filled with that terrified, sad elation one gets in the presence of the Holy.
We can parse my spiritual revelations later if you like; at the top of that mountain, my feet dangling off that cliff, I think I felt more at peace than at almost any other time in my life.
It was getting hot, so after I was done we turned around and headed back down. As we walked I was watching Brian, and this feeling, like a word, like a megaphone into my soul, went through me – "This is good. What you have with him is good." I took his hand as we walked across the top of the mesa and felt aligned, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
The hike down was harder; it was noon by this time, and I stripped off my shirt so I could feel the occasional breeze all over myself. This was a mistake, as I now I have a painful sunburn, but completely worth it at the time.
We were exhausted by the time we made it back to the car, and we had all agreed that the best way to spend the afternoon would be to completely relax at the Bed and Breakfast, and so this is what we did. We drove back to our air-conditioned rooms, the temperature outside now reaching the mid-90’s, and made some wraps with lunch meat and tortillas we’d brought along in our coolers. Laurie, Brian and I watched an episode of Weeds on his computer. We all took short naps.
As dusk began to fall Brian and I took Sam for a walk in the pasture behind the ranch house. More on that on Friday.
We had all agreed that we’d go back out to the three-state marker that evening to watch the sunset, and we had looked online to see *exactly* what time that would be happening. We packed up the coolers with stuff for dinner, a few beers and Cokes. We each had a camp chair, and we set off. A thunderstorm was blowing up in the west, obscuring the sun, but it looked like it would miss us.
Our first stop on the way out to the marker was something we’d seen the night before but for which we hadn’t stopped, as it had been too dark. Just off the road, only a few hundred feet past the Black Mesa trail head, was a sign marked "Dinosaur Tracks."
In the floor of a dry creek bed there are several sets of dinosaur footprints that have been essentially cemented into the rock over the course of hundreds of millions of years.
I was obsessed with dinosaurs as a child, and I’m sure my parents are very thankful that I did not know, then, that these footprints were there, as I’d have been begging us for weekly trips to the Panhandle to see them. From the base of the creek bed, we looked back up toward the car and got a laugh, as it seemed that Calvin was starring in his own commercial:
I can’t begin to tell you how much I love that car.
From here it was another few miles out to the marker, where the sunset was now putting on the full show:
So, we set up our camp chairs, made ourselves each a sandwich, and watched:
The thunderstorm had begun to come apart by this time, but its outflow provided our location with a constant breeze, which more or less kept the bugs off of us. We took turns putting our butts in three states at once:
It was quiet as the sun set and the stars began to come out, and we sipped beers, talked, and quietly observed the dying of the light. The moon set shortly after the sun did:
The stars came out one by one, as did the Milky Way. As we had the night before, we saw satellites moving across the sky, and shooting stars, and quick flashes of lightning in the fading thunderstorm. I was so sad that our time at Black Mesa had almost come to an end, but at the same time, as I watched the night sky, I once again felt compelled to whisper, or to keep quiet altogether, and just to allow myself to be. I felt the way people often feel at the edge of the ocean: small, insignificant, and yet, connected to something larger, holier.
Brian and I lay on the hood of my car for a long time, both of us just silently staring upward, holding hands, and being quiet. It was a perfect moment.
This year I decided we’d explore Oklahoma. I told myself, in April, that over the summer we’d visit five Oklahoma places that none of us had ever been.
