Less-than-perfect pilgrimage

One spring several years ago, I attended a Christian writer’s conference in California.

I particularly enjoyed it because we were not sequestered in a glass-and-steel anthill of a hotel, surrounded by freeways buzzing with traffic. This meeting took place at a camp called Mount Hermon, located in redwood country. Before Palm Sunday services, worshipers made an early morning pilgrimage to a cross atop Mount Hermon itself, a ritual that has continued for generations.

I skipped it. The dreary, drippy morning did not inspire my jet-lagged, brain-dead body to rise. A few days later, though, craving time alone, I set aside the hour someone told me it would take to climb to the cross and back.

I spiraled up the mountain road, marveling at enormous, feathery redwoods and giant ferns. Perpendicular homes perched on mountainsides. A sleepwalker’s step off a back porch would result in a rude awakening. Do sleepwalkers tend to live in the flat Midwest? If braver ones inhabit Mount Hermon, they sleep wearing parachutes.

I also wondered if a nap might have proved a better choice. I had forgotten the effects of higher elevation. My headache throbbed, as if a preschooler pounded a drum on my temples.

Still, solitude felt good. I inhaled the rich evergreen fragrance, blended with a hundred unfamiliar ones and the strong tang of spring that still eluded leafless forests back home. I felt proud that despite my senior status, I could climb and conquer this mountain.

Thanks to decades of marriage to a map fanatic, I carried one displaying what I thought was a clearly marked route. But when the road reversed, then reversed again, I searched the map in vain. Not knowing what else to do, I walked. And walked, huffing and puffing like my asthmatic coffee maker at home. Finally, I admitted I was lost. The only directions I felt sure of were up and down. Still, I did not want to leave the road, plunging through underbrush to discover the western version of poison ivy. Nor did I want to encounter wildlife to which I had never been properly introduced. Or irate landowners who might tip me off their back porches.

Where did I go wrong? Perhaps I had placed my trust in a pantheistic mapmaker who believes all roads lead to the same destination.

Supper aromas, like delicious incense, emanated from houses I passed. My stomach, unstuffed for the first time in days (the term “starving writer” does not apply to writers’ conferences) whined and demanded I return the way I came. But something inside me quelled its protests. I had climbed an hour and a half to view the cross, and I refused to turn back. I recalculated my route, marched up the mountain and spotted a fellow writer coming, I hoped, from my destination. I was wearing a jogging suit, but he was actually jogging. And smiling. I thought of tripping him. But my mission drove me to civility.

“Did you find the cross?” I gasped. “That way.” He pointed, still jogging. “It’s beautiful up there. This has been a great run.”

I passed a shabby house or two, including one with its own personal junkyard. Not the most religious atmosphere I have experienced. Finally, I spotted what I had anticipated all afternoon. The wooden cross, bigger than life, dwarfed the vast, achingly blue sky.

Was Jesus’ cross that tall? Probably not. Otherwise, its thick beams looked the right size, as if they could hold a Man in their deadly grasp. He carried something like that through streets of jeering people and up a hill called the Place of the Skull to atone for the sins of humankind.

I carried a water bottle.

I rested on a bench awhile, thanking Him for His sacrifice. For my salvation. I savored alternating lush and dry vistas in Scotts Valley and beyond to Mt. Umunhum and Loma Prieta. Finally, I stood, refreshed in body and spirit. Unlike Jesus, I left the cross.

And because of Him, I, despite energy drain and grouchy stomach, went back full.