3 September - Avalanche Campground, Glacier National Park

On the same sort of whim that set me off on this road I decided to bicycle through Glacier National Park instead of around it. This means I will cross Logan’s Pass (6600 ft) instead of Marias Pass (5280 ft). However so far (about 20 miles into the park) the scenery and the lack of logging trucks have been well worth it. The only caveat—well, aside from an additional 1400 ft of climbing—is that the road to the pass is restricted to cars from 11–4, so I must be up bright and early to be over before 11. The ranger said to expect 2.5–3 h to make the climb. Hopefully I will be able to see where I am going. Tonight is also my first night in serious bear country. All food and anything that smells like food has to be locked in a metal storage bin. Hopefully I do not smell too much like food. I imagine I do smell like sweat.

The weather channel nearly kept me inside today, yet another example of how the media can propagate an attitude of fear and trepidation in the guise of information. In fact I had a fair amount of sunshine and some pretty warm temperatures. God willing, I will have this sort of weather for at least a couple days, until Cut Bank. September is definitely a little too late in the year for comfortable bicycle touring. There is always the Burlington Northern line, fortunately, though I still maintain hope that there is at least one other person who is both as nutty as me and either a bit faster or slower than me.

I sympathize less and less with people who drive massive trailers and RV’s that cost as much as a small house. Not merely because their wide girth makes it difficult for them to pass me safely, but because they epitomize the crass American ideal of surrounding oneself with material possessions. The raison de (existence) of these possessions is comfort, which I understand, having felt my share of discomfort. But when you require a small busload of stuff to be comfortable, something is wrong with your ideals and your mode of existence. I have never been inside one of these things, but some must have TV mini-satellite dishes, king size beds, couches, full kitchens, and probably even swimming pools. They guzzle fuel by the hundred gallons and fly about the country in search of natural beauty, tourist attractions, and God knows what else. Soon there will probably be RV’s that function as boats, airplains, siege tanks, and underground nuclear bunkers, and can even lift off into space. Good riddance, I say. These people are probably as nice or nicer than the next person over, but they have bought into a value system that is ultimately worthless—good is defined as anything that makes one feel safe or comfortable. St. Augustine writes that he did not want a life that was free of pitfalls. He says that this is because he hungered for God, but I wonder if in his Platonism he failed to realize that a life spent searching for God cannot be free of pitfalls, failures, hardship, and even despair. Which is not to say that misery and despair are good in themselves, but neither is a life of comfort and safety. I myself suspect that it is pain, loneliness, and fear that most sharply define us, and that let us most closely see a God who is beyond any human conception of good. God is God of warmth, but also cold; of beauty, but also ugliness—and the ugly donkey praises him more earnestly than the swan; of terrible beauty, of danger, of anger and love; of hate as well as love. He is God of lofty thoughts, of stars and mountains and oceans. He is also God of meadows and creeks and horse shit. He laughs at us—as Augustine said—and with us, and he is able to be merciful because he feels our sorrow at the core of his being. He is ultimately unknowable, infinitely detailed and vase; yet the search for God is a question that can be asked in human words and feelings.

To be saved is not at all to know God. It is rather to seek God, to ask after God, and to be unafraid of the answer. To be saved is not a mystical journey; it is a dirt-and-bones admission of inadequacy. However, neither is it a final experience, a membership in the God club, a Christian-right born-again sticker that separates the damned from the elect. To cease searching for God is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of God and the nature of man. To cease searching is to accept a lie of complacency, of sin-and-forget-it immorality. It accepts the standardized, record-player version of the Bible and shrinks back from any contact with the living Word. At the same time it is more concerned with the markers of this world: of comfort, and therefore does not search itself for comfortable sin; of monetary success, and therefore does not look about itself to see what condition others are in; of strength, and therefore does not look out for the weak; of self-sufficiency, and therefore does not and cannot be honest about itself; of efficiency, and therefore cannot see the value of spending thought, time, or resources on the kingdom of heaven; on appearances and is satisfied with cheap imitations. All of these things are a chasing after the wind, a fruitless pursuit by a soul that cannot be satisfied by anything other than living water and the pleasure of God Almighty, the Eternal, the source of all that is real, the treasure that will not fade or decay.

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