THE WALKING STICK
Paul D. Morris, M.Div., Ph.D.
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In what seems to me the ancient history of my life, I was once a young pastor of a small congregation in Southern California. Two men in the church put together a back-packing trip for the Junior High boys and invited me to go along. We hiked high into the sierras through 12,000 foot Mono Pass to a place called "third recess lake" at the 10,000 foot level. At one end of the lake the sides of a canyon met together to form a high, bathtub-lide wall, a granite escarpment from which there seemed to be no escape. Half way down the cliff, we could see the wreckage of what we assumed to be a small aircraft. So, it came into our minds to go and take a look. In order to get to it, we had to climb to the top and then carefully lower ourselves, holding precariously to the sheer face of the cliff. We found only the wreckage -- an ungainly pile of twisted metal and shattered plexiglass -- empty remains of death. At the top of the cliff, there lived the oddest shaped trees I had ever seen. Trees that lived their lives at eleven thousand feet anchored in granite -- unmovable -- monstrously deformed by unmerciful winds. How long had they been there? Some say centuries. |