Are you ever curious about what’s going to happen next?
I know I was after I graduated high school and prepared to enter college.
I attended a small midwestern Christian college (B.A. English Lit, if you must know).
Before I began my freshman year, I learned about an optional pre-orientation “wilderness leadership practicum”: a two-week camping trip in the forests of northern Wisconsin and U.P. Michigan.
That’s right. Camping for credit.
I thought I enjoyed camping, so I signed up.
I arrived on campus that August, two thousand miles away from home. Fifty or so of us assembled on the front lawn and the program coordinator invited us to ask questions. The material about the program had been a bit vague, so we had lots of questions.
Nearly every question elicited the same answer: “Well, it varies from group to group.”
Around midnight, with the first fireflies I’d ever seen flickering all around us, we hefted our luggage onto the tour busses and rode north through the night.
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Part of me is still back there, basking in the sun beside Lake Superior, resting in the beauty of God’s creation.
And another part of me remains up on that railroad trestle, flashlight swinging, all of my being focused entirely on placing one foot after another.
Wondering what’s going to happen next.
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That’s why I love stories. I want to know what happens next.
I love a story that keeps me guessing until the final resolution.
I love a story that pulls me out of the dullness of daily life and shows me vivid wonders and ghastly horrors in sharp contrast.
I particularly love a story that speculates: what’s going to happen next? Next year? Next decade? Next century? Next millennium? And what about after that?
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At around 6am the busses pulled off to the side of an empty stretch of highway deep in the woods. They hustled us off the bus and into the early morning drizzle. Groggy and squinting in the morning light, I lugged my suitcase over a ditch and up onto a grassy hill above a clearing.
A fellow with a gray beard met us all out there. He introduced himself as the program director.
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On the second day of hiking, we knew we had a problem. Luke had asthma and struggled under the weight of the pack. We’d barely covered half our distance before we had to make camp.
Next morning, Boone woke us early and outlined the new plan. Luke couldn’t continue. Boone would hike out to the road with Luke carrying a light pack, make a phone call to arrange a pick-up, then hike back and meet us a few miles up the trail.
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One foot in front of the other. One foot in front of its brother. There was no trail, just a compass to keep our bearings among the trees.
And then the trees broke and we hit the pipeline. We knew where we were! Roughly.
We headed north along the pipeline. At this point, we’d probably been hiking for eight hours or so.
We’d run out of water in the swamp, so Chris had broken out the iodine pills and we were drinking handkerchief-filtered swamp water.
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Hours passed. We came to a wide, dark river.
Our campsite was on the other side.
Peter again consulted with Boone and Chris.
There were two bridges near us. The closest was a railroad trestle. About a half a mile on, we could see the headlights of cars on the highway crossing.
Would there be enough of a shoulder on the highway bridge to cross safely? Nobody knew.
Finally, Boone made the call.
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I imagined losing my balance, or stumbling and missing the next tie. Would I break a leg? Would I fall into the river?
Or what if a train came? I imagined the sound of the horn, the light of the engine coming around the bend across the river. I imagined how I would take my pack off and throw it into the river, then jump after it.
How deep was the water?
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And there I was, out of high school, legally an adult, and everything had been stripped away from me.
All the comforts of home and family.
Most of the accoutrements of civilization, save a change of clothes and a toothbrush.
I didn’t know where I was.
I didn’t know what time it was.
It was dark. I couldn’t see.
All my strength was gone.
Everything in my life had been sharpened down to this one point: one foot placed carefully in front of the other, guided by the faint but necessary light of a swinging flashlight.
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Reader, the train never came.
None of us missed a step. Nobody stumbled and fell.
We crossed the river and found our campsite a few hundred yards away from the tracks.
Even with my pack off I was staggering on my feet while gathering firewood.
Boone told us later that after that one long day we’d made camp around 1am and eaten dinner around 2am.
That night I slept like a dead man.
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After a few days more of much easier hiking, we met up with Luke again and hiked the last few miles in the rain to Lake Superior. A storm was raging over the lake. The waves were crashing on the beach, and I was sure we’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and hit the Pacific Ocean instead.
The next day, the sun came out and the lake was peaceful and still.