“I hope you’re getting all this…”

For the past two summers, I’ve been immensely blessed to work for generous government wages on a generous government schedule with three-day weekends. I’ve also been immensely blessed to learn after only two summers that I don’t care much to work for the federal government ever again. Back when I was a fresh high school grad and fledgling outdoors aficionado, I quickly found three-day weekends in Southwest Montana to be an altogether different beast from the five-eights summer life I’ve known as long as I’ve been old enough to work. When the playground that is my neck of the woods is in operation for another 24 hours every week, it just opens up a whole new world of intrepid adventuring and tomfoolery with the added benefit of enough time left over to get a reasonable amount of sleep before the 6 o’clock Monday morning alarm (unless it’s Memorial Day…because that would be a paid holiday). After the first summer, my fledgling days came and went rendering me nothing short of a backcountry snob.

The perks of seasonal Park Service life even carried over to Virginia, where I attend college. For my first two years of undergrad, it was wonderful not having to watch my spending like a hawk—what with the frequent cross-country travel and getting acclimated to an altogether new state, let alone town and school. To be fair, that was a season of careless stewardship. It wasn’t until spring of this year that I finally understood what it meant to ask for and receive the daily bread. One day, I guess I woke up on the right side of the bread—I mean, BED—and it finally occurred to me that Jesus probably attributed a fair bit of weight to all those things He included in the Lord’s Prayer.

So naturally, I felt pretty lousy for all those half-hearted monotone drones of “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” I was dumbstruck when I came to find that what I had been saying actually reflected what I’d like to see happen. My suspicion that such would hold true for all the things Jesus put in there was affirmed when I gave it further consideration. And boy, was that line about the daily bread on-point. I mean what a concept—having enough confidence in Christ’s all-sufficient, all-atoning blood to say, “Yeah, God, I know that you know what I need better than I do. And you intend to give me exactly what that is exactly when I need it with or without my asking for it, but I’m going to ask you to do it anyway as an expression of my faith in your sufficient grace.”

That’s all to say working a government job is sweet if you’re fixin-to practice generosity, but as a dependent living with a parent, it doesn’t exactly encourage thoughtful stewardship. Stewardship: now there’s something that’s gone right over my head for the majority of my life. Realizing the breadth of my ignorance and apathy has definitely been a constant in 2013. The nuances that ordinarily escape my attention are usually most pronounced when I catch them in familiar, comfortable settings—i.e. the Hell’s-a-Roarin’ horse drive through my hometown of Gardiner. Every year, one group of local outfitters corrals about a hundred horses from the Gardiner rodeo grounds up to their summer headquarters near Eagle Creek. I knew it went on every year, but I regarded it as nothing of consequence—just Southwest Montana cowboy shenanigans as per usual.

However, I’m starting to see that most of what I’m accustomed to in this Yellowstone gateway community is a bit different from the average American’s experience. So I’ve done some recalculating and am testing my new theory whereby anything that’s gone on in my hometown for as long as I can remember must be something pretty cool that nine out of ten people don’t really see in a lifetime. I didn’t bother to compare that ratio with the Census Bureau’s figures on urban-dwelling Americans, but that’s the demographic I would flag as least likely to have daily contact with horses and wild-ish animals (let’s be real, critters in the continental U.S. can probably predict our behavior better than we can predict theirs). So I’m going to assume that’s about the same number of people who don’t really see a hundred unbridled horses corralled through their hometown on an annual basis.

I think I had a superficial understanding of the novelty of the event when Becca told me she was videoing and photographing the event for the Chamber of Commerce. I knew also that Becca joined the chamber because she’s convinced that Gardiner could really hone what it has to offer as a destination in its own right apart from its obvious relationship to Yellowstone. She put the Hell’s-a-Roarin’ drive into perspective this way: “Jackie, they herd the sheep through Reed Point every year and literally thousands of people come to see it. They’ve done things similar to this in Three Forks with horses and they charge photographers $1,500 to shoot it.” That really struck me because I’ve taken for granted that a.) neat stuff happens here, b.) the residents don’t insist on price-tagging it, and c.)the number of cases that fit both criterions are getting fewer and farther between in such a consumer-fixated American climate.

Another thing I can really appreciate about my homogenous, white-bred state chockfull of libertarians: people driving a hundred horses South on U.S. Highway 89 don’t ask for compensation from spectators as if it’s some kind of wild west amusement park. They just ask that they can block off traffic for a mile or two to keep people out of the way while they turn their livestock up the hill. After videoing the whole endeavor from the bed of Becca’s pickup, it occurred to me that I definitely take the goings-on of my hometown for granted. I couldn’t help but notice how plainly that motif came up again during the very last hours of the same Saturday.

Note to readers: this photo is not the work of the co-author of this blog who is actually a professional with the camera. Don't think any less of her work just because the writer wanted to incorporate an additional illustration. :)

I noted the night before, Friday the 24^th that the moon was BIG and bright (and a clear Montana night for one of those is about as nice as the Good Lord breeds them). I looked at the calendar, fingers crossed that I hadn’t missed the full moon and found out I still had another night. So after I got home from helping Becca, I notified my friend Laura of the full moon and suggested an outdoor evening. So we drove to Norris Geyser Basin after sundown—about a half hour from her house in no traffic, which is only the case at about the hour we were on the road. We covered a good portion of the boardwalks when about 10-20 minutes before heading back to the parking lot, we were in a wide-open area where the moon’s glare seemed to be on every square inch of all surfaces within 50 yards of the boardwalk. It was about the third in my series of “Why do we live in such a cool place?!” freak-outs of the night, but it was definitely the most animated and dumbfounded proclamation of how blessed I felt. I told Laura, “I just forget that we’re so lucky to be able to come here during a full moon, have this basin all to ourselves, and not have to battle for a parking spot while most people might come here once in a lifetime during the day.” She nodded and reminded me, “and on a whim.”

The next day as I was uploading photos from the previous night, I came to regard what I was doing as pretty pathetic. I thought about getting on my knees and venturing a concerted apology to God for trying to capture His work on my Canon point-and-shoot with minimal to no knowledge of how to use it at night. But never mind that the picture quality was laughable—not even the perfect photo could recreate the bells and whistles of being alone in an active geothermal area at night. The ground rumbles and hums at every corner. 2X4’s flop under the weight of your feet on stretches of boardwalk that have been buried under heavy snowpack all winter. All you can do is laugh nervously and hope they don’t give out under your own weight. In lower places where the moon’s still hidden behind a hill, you notice temperature change before you notice change of surroundings. The perpetual steam plume over Steamboat—the world’s tallest active geyser—is an easier and quicker point of reference than any map of the boardwalks. I’m otherwise remiss of words to describe the experience. After all, explanations of experiences are just incidental and watered down in my opinion. The essential nature of experience is the subjective perception of physical presence.

The unexplainable nature of being at Norris under a full moon was likewise for the horse drive I had filmed earlier that day too. About 20 riders form their own little mobile retaining wall around a drove of unsaddled horses and bring them all to a trot. Cowboys at the front emit periodic whoops and occasionally wave their hats to signal their companions (God knows why. For all I know, it could be for show). If you’re facing them once they get far enough uphill, they carry on with this while the tallest peak in the Montana’s Gallatin mountain range comes into view behind them. All I could think to say to Becca was, “that’s pretty cool.” To which she responded, “yeah, I hope you’re getting all this.” She, of course, was talking about video footage, but I kind of took it as a sober word from God about His intention in bringing me home for a different kind of summer—it’s a daily bread that has less to do with physical and social needs and more to do with experiential provision. During the Hell’s-a-Roarin’ drive: “Jackie, I hope you’re getting all this.” During the full moon at Norris: “Jackie, I hope you’re getting all this.” And by that, I don’t think He means simply, “I hope you’re taking this all in,” but something more to the effect of, “I hope this experience makes you more curious to get to know the idiosyncratic Author of this unusual story.”

And I think I’m guilty of attributing too much experiential daily bread to coincidence and incidence. If God’s sovereign, then it’s all of essence—that is, it’s all essential means to the end of greater intimacy with our Creator and Heavenly Father. He has an interpretation for every experience if only we appeal to Him for it and take the time to listen.