My grandpa was born 56 years before me, but I like to think that if we had been born at the same time we would have been childhood pals and we would have hung out. Well actually, I don’t think we would have done very much actual ‘hanging out’. I like to think the only time we would ever be just sitting around was because we were trying to decide what our next adventure would be.
Though to be honest, I am not so sure if I would have survived being childhood pals with grandpa. In his autobiography about growing up in Moab, UT he describes a secret oasis that he and some friends found on top of the large plateau south of Moab. One day, they took a new kid up to the oasis and the kid kind of freaked out because the final approach to the oasis was climb up a steep crack near a large cliff. So to help the new kid, Grandpa and his friends took off their shirt and pants and made a rope to pull him up the incline.
I’d always liked this story and so one time I decided I would go to Moab and find this place and take some pictures of it to give as a gift to Grandpa. In Grandpa’s book the details about the location were pretty easy to follow and Grandpa had an old picture of the area from a distance, so I used some maps and figured out where it was. I rode my mountain bike to the top of the plateau and after a little while exploring I found the route to the secret oasis exactly as described in Grandpa's book.
In planning this trip to Moab, I had figured “I’ve done a fair amount of scrambling, difficult hikes, and rock climbing, any crack that some kids was scrambling up barefoot with no climbing equipment in the 1930s will be no big deal for me.” And in the fact the first part of the route, while no cake walk, posed no real difficulty. But then I got to the final approach, the part where grandpa and his pals made a rope for the new kid. And I was like “What the gravy?” The final “crack” was a shallow indent of glassy smooth sandstone going up at probably a 45-50 degree angle. It didn’t look like there were any real handholds or footholds, it was all friction climbing. The climb itself was definitely something that looked doable with a little trial and error. Errors in this case would results in a painful slide and a few rug burns as you slid down the crack. Now normally, I could live with a few rug burns. But the thing that gave me pause was that if you slid down this crack, at the bottom there was not nice soft sand or even painful hard rock, but 100 vertical feet of straight down nothing. Now I understood why the new kid had freaked out.
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| Google Earth 3-D view of path to Grandpa's Secret Hideout |
At this moment I thought of a saying grandpa had taught me which apparently he didn’t always follow "There are bold climbers and there are old climbers, but there are no old, bold climbers." So then I decided to turn around. I was disappointed I didn't get any pictures of grandpa's secret oasis, but I returned home with a new respect for the boldness of grandpa as a youth and for the guardian angels that had watched over him. This story and many other stories of adventure I have heard from Grandpa’s youth about hiking, hunting, trapping and exploring have inspired me to go on many adventures of my own and have always made me feel a special connection to him.
But, It isn’t just the adventures of Grandpa’s youth that inspire me and make me feel a connection with him. I know a lot of people who once they get out of their teens or twenties decide that they are too old to have adventures and try new things. But that was not my grandpa. He never stopped trying new things. He worked as an airplane inspector during WWII. He followed his childhood dream to become a fur breeder and won many national and international awards. He traveled all over the country and world. After he retired he wrote five different books. Several of these books had to do with the early river runners of the Colorado River. As part of his research, a year or two before he turned 70 he decided to go on a river trip down the Grand Canyon with his brother Blake. And because he was Grandpa, this river trip was not a boring river trip.
I would like to read a small excerpt from his writings about his trip:
“We had lunch in the shade of a ledge on the left side at mile 76. After lunch we dropped down and started through Hance Rapid, the worst one we had come to so far. The stage of water was low (only 5,000 cubic feet per second) and the channel was full of submerged and protruding boulders. Midway through the rapid the motor scraped on a rock, so our river guide Whale cut the motor and raised it a little to avoid damage to the propeller. Ahead and to the left a sharp rock protruded four or five feet above the water.
When Whale raised the motor the current and momentum of the raft took it to the left and it slammed broadside against the protruding rock. The force of the current drove the right-hand side of the raft up the face of the rock and partially draped it around that obstacle. The left side was tilted downward into the waves, the nose of the raft pointed downward toward the left shore, the left rear side of the raft was trying to come apart, and the back end of the left side tube was bent upward at an awkward angle. One white grub box labeled “Whale’s Lunch” was loose in the water and being banged around by the fierce waves, but its ties held it to the raft. The motor compartment was bent downward into the rapid. Whale came bounding out of there with great speed. Surveying the situation, he exclaimed, “This is the worse thing that has ever happened to me”.
They were unable to dislodge the raft from the rock and because they were in the middle of some large rocky rapids there was no safe way to get to shore.
After several hours with the help of some other rafters and some park rangers, they were able to set up a rope and pulley system across the river and one by one each rafter put on a harness and was dragged through the water to the shore.
After Grandpa got home from this trip, one of Grandpa’s friends made a wood etching from a picture of grandpa as he was being pulled across the water on the pulley system. Whenever I would see that wood etching at Grandpa’s house, it would make me smile and make me think:
“I hope that when I am nearing my 70s I will still be unafraid to go on adventures like grandpa did”
Unfortunately, eventually age caught up to grandpa and he became mostly homebound. As Grandpa always said, “This growing old ain’t for sissies”
But even in the last decade or so when Grandpa mostly got around by wheelchair, once in a while I still saw the spark of adventure in Grandpa’s eyes.
When I introduced my then girlfriend/now wife Connie to Grandpa and told him that she had once been a river guide,an instance friendship developed. Whenever we would visit Grandpa, Connie would always make a point to share any adventures we had been on recently and Grandpa’s eyes would light up and he would say “Oh boy!”. Then he would start recollecting one of his many stories. .
Then there was one time when my oldest son Sam was three and we bought him a little bike with training wheels. He wanted to show Grandpa, so we had Sam ride it by Grandpa’s back sliding door so Grandpa could watch him from inside the house. After watching Sam for a minute we noticed that Grandpa had disappeared. Then all of a sudden he appeared outside by Sam. He had driven his motorized wheelchair out the front door and into the backyard. He and Sam then proceeded to chase each other around the backyard for twenty minutes. The photograph I have of Grandpa in his wheelchair and sam on his little bike is one of my most cherished memories.
At the start of my talk I told a story about trying to find grandpa’s childhood secret oasis in Moab. Last wednesday, the last time I talked to Grandpa in his last few hours of lucidness, I retold him that story. Half way through he interrupted me and said “Oh I remember that, when you tried to take a picture of my secret hideout”. Then he grinned at the thought of it.
Brigham Young once said:
“When you lay down this tabernacle, where are you going? Into the spiritual world…Where is the spirit world? It is right here... Suppose the Lord should touch your eyes that you might see, could you then see the spirits? Yes, as plainly as you now see bodies”
Joseph Smith said:
“The spirits of the just… are blessed in their departure to the world of spirits. ...they are not far from us, and know and understand our thoughts, feelings, and motions”
I like to think this is true. I like to think our departed love ones are not far from us. I usually end up going to Moab once or twice a year to go mountain biking or hiking. And I like to think that the next time I go there for some adventure or other, Grandpa will be right there beside me, grinning his big grin and loving every minute of it.
