The Holiest Man I Know
I trace the origins of my fluency in nature to my dad. My sisters and I call him Papa, and it’s his birthday today. While I hadn’t imagined writing specifically about anyone in my family for this project, he’s just been on my mind. As I think and write about the things I think and write about, his influence on me – the person who grew up to take on a project examining her own connection to nature – is ever present.
When I was too young to remember it, my maternal grandparents bought a little mid-century rambler in the Southwest Michigan woods, a short walk from the lakeshore. When my family would visit, as we loved to do, we slipped into a blissful, naturally inspired rhythm.
Papa would wake me early in the morning when we were there, when the first light appeared in the sky and the birds began singing. He’d steal into the bunkbed room where my sisters and cousins and I were filed away and gently wake me. I’d slip out of bed and follow him out of the house.
Sometimes we crept through the private beach club across the street from us, noiselessly as the morning deer, until we passed the last tucked away cabin and emerged from the wooded trail to the top of the sand dunes that sloped away to the shore. Sometimes we got in the minivan and headed to Cherry, or Chikaming, or Weko, or Warren Dunes, or beaches farther north. Our favorites changed by the season and conditions, and one of Papa’s talents of precision was choosing a beach particularly suited to the morning.
Upon arrival, he’d lay down in the sand and I would curl up next to him, my gangly legs folded under the warmth of my sweatshirt, my head on his chest. He would then open a large, leatherbound Bible and read aloud from the book of Proverbs. There are thirty-one chapters in Proverbs, each with about as many verses, each verse of two lines – King Solomon’s poetic treatise on how to live. Papa read a chapter of Proverbs aloud every day of every month for years and years. And when we were in Michigan, he read them aloud to me on the beach.
I remember feeling embarrassed when other early-morning beach goers would eye his Bible and hear his voice – which didn’t change in resonance or timber when others were in earshot – reading the ancient poetry. But that didn’t happen too often, and no one was ever unkind. The even stronger memory is of hearing the sound of Papa’s voice reverberating from the inside of his chest, mixing with the rhythm of his heartbeat, mixing with the roar of the waves.
What I couldn’t have named then was that my dad was coming to this beach to take care of himself. This was how he calmed himself at the beginning of the day – he down-regulated his nervous system with the rhythmic application of his voice to King Solomon’s poetry and the energy of the waves. Unconsciously, I in turn was regulating my nervous system with his.
Not only was he modeling nervous system regulation in nature for me, but he was also making himself a safe person to be regulated with, to be around. This gift, wordlessly given, has continued giving throughout my life.
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Papa had a photo album of his adventures before the church (which we never called church – let’s call it “non-church”) and my mom and us girls. In it were photos of him and a couple of friends in the prime of their lives, each wearing bulging backpacks, grinning against gorgeous peaked and lake-studded landscapes of the American West. From time to time my sisters and I would pull out this particular album to wonder at the younger version of our dad and ask him to tell us the stories held in each sepia-toned image.
He’d tell us of catching lake trout in the backcountry of Glacier National Park and frying them with eggs in a cast iron skillet he’d hiked in, dangling from his external frame pack. He’d tell us of falling asleep under the stars and waking up in the first light of morning with a snake curled up in his sleeping bag with him for warmth. He’d tell us of the starriness of the night sky on a new moon, the milkiness of the Milky Way. Or of coming face to face with a bull moose. Or how he and his buddies would be out for days without seeing another person. He planted seeds in each of his three daughters and plenty of other non-church youth. Then he nurtured them.
At a time when this non-church was tightening its controls on everything, my dad increasingly found ways to weave nature into our otherwise highly controlled existence. He took up rock climbing when I was in middle school, and got us into it, too. He taught us rope skills and, on the rare free night, facilitated non-church-sanctioned youth get togethers at the first rock gym in the region – converted grain silos an hour’s drive from where we lived.
With these skills, he began organizing an annual camping retreat for the non-church’s high school youth from across the state. It was neither mandatory nor discouraged, a sweet spot of freedom for us. Each spring about 60 non-church youth and a comparatively small handful of adults would descend on the state parks and national forests of Southern Illinois to spend a few days climbing, orienteering, and hiking.
He bought me my first backpack at about the same time, and the two of us went on our first backpacking trip together – a couple days on the River to River Trail in the Shawnee National Forest. He told me that as a young construction laborer he got laid off a lot, and each time he’d pack up his backpack and head west. He’d stay out until he got word that there was a crew or a job that needed him, then he’d reluctantly head home again.
We didn’t go on many backpacking trips together, maybe three or four total over the years, but they were enough of a taste for me to have since continued on to backpack more and farther than my dad ever could with a family and a non-church and all they demanded of him. These experiences were enough of a respite that I learned – wordlessly for the most part, as is my dad’s way – how to replenish my soul in nature, and where to look for peace when all else failed.
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I once heard John O’Donohue say in an interview that his father was the holiest man he knew. He qualified this by saying his father had a way of “slipping into the present,” entirely undivided. I thought of Papa, and felt the same. He no longer attends non-church, nor church, for that matter. He no longer reads aloud from Proverbs each morning. But still.
I thought of a morning when I was very young, when he woke my sisters and me in the predawn of an autumn day and drove us to a nature preserve at the edge of town. We walked wordlessly and as silently as we could through fallen oak and sycamore leaves to a streambed. We laid down on our bellies in tall grass, our chins resting on our forearms, and we waited. Soon three deer emerged from the woods, announced by the sound of their hooves on rustling leaves just before we saw them. They moved cautiously to the water where they drank in turns. They eased. They drank their fill. We remained silent and still and breathless. They gently wandered off. We drank in the air we’d denied ourselves to prolong their visitation.
There are dozens of stories like this I could tell. Dozens more I’ve forgotten, I’m sure.
Papa, my inclination to turn to nature – for answers, for guidance, for solace, for a sense of who I am, for a sense of being okay, for a source of delight – came wordlessly from you. Grateful is not a big enough word. But thank you, Papa, inadequate as that feels. Happy birthday.
