Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

It’s getting to be the time of year where every day is two seasons here in the desert (deep, pipe-bursting winter until 10:45 a.m., and then equatorial summer until sunset). Somewhere near the end of last Wednesday’s winter (call it 10 a.m.), I found myself thinking, “You want to be honest with God, for a start. And yourself.”

That’s pretty much 1 and 2, as I’ve been seeing things. You don’t want to parse words with the Creator, in particular -– you know, argue the definition of “is.” That’s not a winning strategy when interacting with the All-Seeing. Where the innately and profoundly fallible human memory, intentional or unintentional, plays into this dynamic, well, that’s when you need to convene your own Supreme Court of Divine Nuance.

I had a case before this court on that fateful recent Wednesday. It surrounded a hike. A hike in questionable weather. And the issue at hand was whether my going on it violated either the letter or the spirit of a promise I made to God in appreciation for saving me from Death By Lightning on an earlier outing in questionable weather. That one occurred in 2007 and was documented in Part Five of Farewell, My Subaru.

Though I often wake up sweating from memories of both the harrowing near-death-by-lightning that occurred that earlier afternoon, and the devastating hail storm that followed last year, I didn’t even think about it last Wednesday until I saw KB’s truck rumbling down the Funky Butte Ranch Black Diamond driveway, a “road” which itself has suffered from its inability to go inside when some of the world’s most intense electrical storms strike. The reason I didn’t think about it, I believe, is that last week’s hike involved another person, where my promise to the Creator involved decision-making that was wholly my own. My spirituality is largely a personal thing.

A vague hesitation about the day’s hiking plans did form initially when I first saw KB’s aged truck making a valiant effort to cross the Funky Butte Ranch Creek Bed (AKA rain-churned clay factory). On the one hand, I admire a fellow who shows up ten minutes early for a hike when a violent thunderstorm isn’t just imminent -– it’s here, which is what KB did last Wednesday. On the other hand, there was something disturbingly telling about our route and gear discussion as we packed up to go.

By the time he parked his mud-caked truck in front of the Funky Butte Ranch House, KB was by a good margin the least weather-concerned of the two of us, but he didn’t know that my concern extended beyond death by lightning and into the why of the death. “We’ll stay in canyons,” he said, zipping up his windbreaker. “We won’t attract lightning. Not unduly.” That’s how KB talks. He’s a dignified Midwestern ex-Hippie.

The storm was getting worse by the second, with billowing wind hinting at hail seeming to come from every direction at once, when the sky ripped open directly above the Funky Butte Ranch. When the reverberations of the soul-shockingly Apocalyptic thunderclap died down and I pulled my terrified dog out from between my feet while waiting for my hearing to return, I pointed to my hip pack.

“We won’t?” I asked, my voice emerging as though from a great distance. “Not even my cell phone that draws lightning like Fox News draws the profoundly-ignorant, which I’m bringing as a safety device, to call for help in the event we get charred by lightning because of the draw of the cell phone?”

“Plus the phone’ll probably be melted, too,” KB pointed out.

I pulled out and examined the phone. “Let’s see, do they ground these things?”

KB looked at his retractable walking pole. “Well, I’ll be grounded, and you’ll be the one dealing with ramifications of carrying the phone.”

True, but I wasn’t prepared to congratulate KB in advance on his survival. My mind was shuffling several tracks back to the classic “If you let me survive, God, I’ll never do this again” promise I made almost exactly two and a half years earlier, during Great Spring Lightning and Hail Storm of 2007. The fact is, I couldn’t remember if my promise was “I will never go out for an afternoon pre-Monsoon run again if an electrical storm is threatening,” or the more general “I will never again in my life knowingly head out in threatening weather.”

You see the distinction? Now, putting aside whether or not I was conveniently accusing my memory of being vague (since I wanted to go on today’s hike, and KB had come a long way to make it happen –- anyone who makes it down the Funky Butte Ranch driveway is somewhat brave, in any weather), I wondered, “Why would I have made such a narrow, specific promise? Wouldn’t the point have been to avoid lightning danger in general?” On the other hand, I go on a lot of multi-day trips in the wilderness. Inevitably, I’ll be caught in storms again, as I had been plenty of times before the Promise. Maybe I had profferred a tailor-made, case-specific promise.

I snapped out of my metaphysical reverie and looked over at KB. There he was -– soaked but happy on my porch. I hated to disappoint.

I just didn’t know. I honestly couldn’t remember -– the storm and promise had occurred more than 800 days earlier. I couldn’t recall where I had put my notebook down this morning.

Judging by his goofy smile and pack buckle-tightening, KB clearly had no inclination to call it off.

And so we set out, I feeling as though I were watching myself in a movie that might prove to be a horror flick or a comedy, both of us sinking with great boot-sucking sounds into the creek bed at my property line, which had turned recently to adobe. Which in turn meant that in a couple of hours it would be a creek again, just like in pre-Climate Change times (old-timers tell me my creek used to run nearly year-‘round). Wildflowers had, understandably, exploded everywhere since my last jaunt up this canyon, three days earlier. Despite my moral quandary and the possibly dubious state of my relationship with the Eternal, I noted that it’s extremely difficult to declare a favorite season in this desert/alpine transition ecosystem. Without fail each one is more stunning and varied, educational or renewing than the last.

The giant, canyon-bed flower field took on an incandescent glow in the Bergman-lit afternoon darkness, and I heard myself say to KB, “How about, at the first close lightning strike, we turn back?”

“Statistically, that’ll be soon.”

Another true if unhelpful statement from my hiking buddy. I couldn’t tell if that was a “yes” or a “no” though. We live in the area that receives the second highest number of annual lightning ground strikes in North America. Probably due to a lower percentage of golfers, that doesn’t translate into the second highest number of actual lightning deaths. Florida is higher in that category. But still. The storm was absolutely directly above us. This, on the Weather Channel, is when the idiot Storm Chaser shouts, “Let’s Get the Hell Out of Here!”

For obvious reasons, I viscerally recalled at this point the terror of that earlier year’s promise-inducing run, despite the time that had passed; it was that vivid. That 2007 storm had moved in so fast. By the time I crested my own ridge and still found myself a good quarter mile from the descent down the Funky Butte Ranch’s exposed, Black Diamond driveway, almost-blue lightning bolts were striking ground within my rain-fogged view about once every twenty seconds.

I tried describing it to KB on the soggy adobe trail. “I remember noticing as I peaked atop the ridge there (I pointed to a spot about a mile behind and above us) that Sadie (my terrified dog), who had been tripping me up by trying to hide between my jogging legs, looked like one of those eraser gnomes: all her hair was standing straight up.” (In recounting this moment in Farewell, My Subaru, I observed, “I almost laughed, until I noticed from my arm hair that the same was true of me.”)

KB answered studiously. “That’s when your best move is to hit the ground and spread your limbs out. Disperse your atoms. Remember Ben Franklin.”

In the end, on days with this much lightning (the current jaunt and the run two years ago), it’s really just a case of a few trillion electrons traveling down one path or another path, whether or not the situation is explicitly Divinely ordained. I was concerned with the bigger picture, though. Many, maybe most, of the world’s faiths document clear ramifications for speaking with a forked tongue to the Creator. It’s one of those core, never-reversible moral issues: you either never cheated on your spouse, or you did. You either spoke the truth to God, or, well, Western myths and Bibles have some people turning into salt, others banished to distant islands, and still others eternally pushing rocks up hills. Plus, it’s good practice: if you can maintain unequivocal truth with an entity you have only faith exists, then keepin’ it real with fellow, tangible humans should be no sweat.

I began to brood so hard that I didn’t at first notice the sky taking on a less deathly shade of black, the rain lessening, and, yes, the rainbow unfolding (talk about Biblical – shades of Noah here). We had sheltered under a Butte’s eaves for a water break, and I was making nervous notes about all this, trying to summon my words from a year earlier in a sort of self-ouija experience. (I had to this point honored the promise when it came to afternoon runs, by the way. More than once I’ve pulled off my running shoes right before heading up-canyon simply because I heard distant thunder. Hey, a promise is a promise. And both I and my dog had very nearly died that day back in ‘07. Our survival could legitimately be included in the dictionary under “miracle.”).

I was finding it difficult to write, because my beard was dropping sweat and rain and organic jasmine green ice tea onto my brand new notebook, a lovely pocket-sized recycled job with a sort of Partridge Family-era paisley pattern on the cover. My sweetheart had given it to me, which for whatever reason brought me some comfort. It was at this moment that I realized that for the entire initial hour of this hike, I’d been a sort of Supreme Court, interpreting the content and meaning of my earlier Divine Promise.

What a break-in for this notebook, I thought. A Start With Memories, a gorgeous energizing hike dissolving into a peach molten sunset with glowing white LED highlights along the horizon. Outside of our shelter, an Indian paintbrush blossom glared Crayola orange to the point of pupil-dilating. And that, in the end, is what sent the Supreme Court into deliberation in the Case of the Electrocution-Avoidance Gratefulness Promise to The Creator.

I decided not to hear the case. And not because the weather was clearing up. But because yet another day was proving so beautiful, spiritually and physically. Absolutely in sync. The self-analysis was part of it. Maybe that’s why the Creator bestowed words upon us: they will inevitably need to be examined in new contexts, and hopefully, a timeless truth will within them be realized. I felt I understood my promise and intended (as I still do) to keep it. Forever.

There’s one thing I haven’t yet revealed. The day’s hike wasn’t a stand-alone experience. I’m a sample size of one, in an admittedly small (let’s call it prototype), as-yet unfunded field experiment looking into the level of correlation between practical philosophy and real-world life happiness. The philosophical theorem being tested, in my case, is my tendency to try to seek out the Best Possible Explanation of any situation. To step back a few paces, and look for a way that the current set of events -– say, a near-death lightning experience — might be another case of universal love and joy — what I like to call the Cosmic Joy Interpretation (CJI). I’m only 39 years into it, and any researcher would be a fool to prematurely announce conclusions prior to publication and at least tentative offers of tenure, but I can say the experiment is showing some positive results.

6 Responses: