By car

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Here we are in Price, Utah. No, I hadn’t heard of it either, it just happens to be as far as we got today. And here I am, in the Holiday Inn lobby, using a slow public computer that seems to lose connection occasionally. Breath held for the duration of this…

“Road trip” implies vehicular travel. Vehicular in our case is a trusty black Honda Civic, which is giving us great gas mileage and works hard up and around the turns of the many mountain roads we’ve taken. It was rewarded with an oil change yesterday, and has been washed at least three times. (H. is of the opinion that a clean car performs better.)

I like travelling by car. There’s a coziness about it, the chance to change off the “work” of driving ( some of the mountain driving has definitely been work, matched only by fighting the wind across the Salt Desert of Utah earlier today). I like the way it facilitates both conversation (side by side, and stuck) and silence (side by side, not face to face). It’s a good way to be together at this stage in our marriage. (Thirty-six years, just last week.)

The particular pace of driving makes it possible to see and absorb the environment but also apprehend the way the terrain changes. It suggests independence, though there’s illusion in that notion; we do have to stay on the road. It involves the pleasure of maps, bringing the place names and road lines of it together with a real experience of moving through real places. It also involves interesting interactions with “Nellie,” our GPS.

Yes, I like travel by car. I’ve been reminded, though, that the decision about mode of travel always affects, even determines, the experience of the trip. I was especially reminded of this as we passed many bikers also doing the Oregon Coast highway 101. We did it at a very leisurely pace, stopping to view at numerous viewpoints, to picnic, or to take various touristy tours. I also got in my wee dream of flying our kite on a Pacific Ocean beach. I didn’t envy the bikers, not really, just admired them. We grew increasingly appreciative, in fact, noting the hills and curves and traffic, of what our daughter and her friend accomplished when they biked this highway in 2008. Didn’t envy, that is, until the time came to turn inland, east. To leave the Pacific behind. It was all so beautiful, awe-inspiring, the water and trees and rocks and mountains and dunes and after two-and-a-half days I wasn’t full enough of it yet. If we’d biked, we’d still be there.

Then again, we wouldn’t have crossed California, Nevada, and half of Utah. And you can’t sit side by side on a bike, or read!

Road trip

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I’m writing this five days into a road trip H. and I are taking, from Manitoba to B.C., then down the Oregon Coast, eastward to Denver, Col., to visit my brother and his wife, then back home to Winnipeg by mid-September. The first day, across the prairies, was the familiar section of the drive, not uninteresting, but too often done and too well-known to be really interesting, so we added some interest by reading aloud in Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew B. Crawford, which is the first book in this year’s “Take and Read” session with Paul Doerksen of MBCI. I’m probably going to have more to say about this book once we’re finished and we have the book discussion, but just to say now, it’s great!

We took the # 3 highway through the Rockies, stopping for brief visits with my aunt and a friend in Lethbridge at the gateway to the route. Our drive through the mountains was wonderful. For a good while the last day we drove blissfully along a section of the # 3A, not realizing we were off the route we intended. This error in reading road signs cost us several hours time, but since it’s a holiday, we enjoyed the unexpected detour and also the ferry ride that got us back on track. “And it’s free!” the woman at the little grocery where we stopped to inquire about our situation, once we realized we’d gone off course, announced. Apparently it’s the only free ferry in the province; I guess that’s why she was so eager to say so. Still, it was a long day, and that night, in bed, I felt my brain was still turning into the corners of all those winding roads as we traversed one mountain range after the next.

Yesterday we helped our daughter move into more permanent digs in Vancouver, in rain that was pouring buckets all day, and now we’re in Tsawwassen with our son and his wife and their four children. This morning H. and I took the oldest two of them to the local bird sanctuary. Our grandson, 8,  is amazing with birds: four times he had a chickadee land on his hand just by patiently waiting for it. He and his sister each have more energy than two of me would have, but they’re growing up into it well. Not only did they remember their mother’s instructions to thank us for the outing, but at lunch at the DQ, after he’d started his meal, our grandson said, “Just to get the lunchtime conversation started, what was your highlight from the bird sanctuary, Grandma?” Well that both impressed me and made me proud. Isn’t it wonderful when children learn the arts of conversation?

Travelogues (this sketchy, I mean) aren’t the richest of blog posts, I confess, but we’re travelling, and I just wanted to let you know. Friday it’s off to Oregon. Next time I’m near a computer (we don’t bring one along), I may stop by again.

More from Stanley Hauerwas

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Hannah’s Child, by Stanley Hauerwas, which I reviewed in the previous post, is one of those books I could not read without a pencil at hand, to mark spots I especially enjoyed with a tiny check mark in the margin, rather like notching a tree, I suppose, in case I wanted to come back and look again.

Here’s a quote or two from those markings.

On the influence of John Howard Yoder:
Yoder forced me to recognize that nonviolence is not a recommendation, an ideal, that Jesus suggested we might try to live up to. Rather, nonviolence is constitutive of God’s refusal to redeem coercively.

On the contingent nature of our existence:
To say that our lives are contingent is to say that they are out of our control. Being “out of control” is the central image that runs through The Peaceable Kingdom and much of my work… the image came to me because of the influence of Yoder, who taught me to think that following Jesus means you cannot anticipate or ensure results. Learning to live out of control, learning to live without trying to force contingency into conformity because of our desperate need for security, I take to be a resource for discovering alternatives that would otherwise not be present.

On friendship:
What it means for me to be a Christian and to be a friend has become so intertwined that I cannot untangle one from the other, nor do I wish to.

An interesting — surprising? — observation on institutions:
I have learned… that the patience and time it takes to build and sustain institutions like the church and the university are themselves an alternative to war.

And last, on having a novelist’s eye in his writing as ethicist, for what it also says about the novelist’s task:
We are complex creatures constituted by contradictions we refuse to acknowledge. The novelist must help us see our complexity without providing comforting explanations…. Reading novels will not necessarily make one better able to see without illusion, but it can help.