The Treasures We Treasure

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

When Son #1 was four years old, we took him and his sister to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. An independent soul from the day he was born, Son #1 walked our whole two-and-a-half-mile trip by himself. When the Forest Ranger took us to the deepest part of the cave tour, he sat our group down, and then he turned out the lights to give us an idea of how pitch black the cave was for its first explorers. The darkness was so complete no one even bothered to try to see a hand in front of a face. About 10 or 15 seconds in, Son #1’s voice floated over the silence. “Mom. Tell him to turn on the lights.” Every adult laughed, then breathed a secret sigh relief when we could see one another’s faces again.

Carlsbad is like walking through a giant geode: crystal stalagmites and stalactites clinging to surfaces dripping with the icy waters that formed them millions of years ago; dark lakes reflecting eerie shadows reminiscent of Dracula’s subterranean secrets; narrow rocky channels which open up into a room where the ceiling is more than 250 feet above visitors’ heads; and the home of 1,000,000 bats which escape in black, turbulent waves every night for feeding. It’s an experience no one who has been there ever forgets. Not even a four-year old.

I was about 12 the first time I visited the Grand Canyon. We’d come from Dallas to meet an aunt and uncle’s family for a week’s adventure. It was the late 50’s, and the park was not yet “must do” destination for most Americans. Our campground was a roughed-out area maybe only a couple of blocks length from the edge of the North Rim. We spent a few days driving to the recommend “lookouts,” hiking easy trails (there were 10 cousins of varying ages between the two families), eating tinfoil dinners and barbecued steaks, studying the stars with my dad and my uncle, who had depended on those same stars to guide their aircraft missions during WWII, and sleeping in old army surplus canvas tents with stacks of blankets in the place of modern sleeping bags.

The night before we left, my brothers and my uncle’s two older boys were rowdier than usual, yelling and racing around, creating havoc in their wakes. My uncle grabbed one of his sons by the neck of his T shirt and grounded him to the front seat of their car for a 15-minute calm-down. The rest of us when back to building a campfire and fixing dinner when a panicked scream interrupted us. My uncle’s son, angry and flailing around on the front seat, had knocked the car into gear. It begin to roll down the gentle slope toward the edge of the canyon.

My dad, closest to the car, bolted in front of it, trying to stop it, but the momentum pulled him forward with the vehicle. Leaping head-first through the driver’s side window, my uncle slammed on the brakes with his hands, yelling at his son to jump out the other door. Campers from both sides of us came running, eventually ½ dozen men in front of the car with my dad. My uncle at the wheel and volunteers on three sides, they finally halted the car less than 100 yards from the rim. It is a moment etched into my memory.

Many years later, most of my eight children and their families convened in Washington, D. C. to see Son #3 graduate from medical school. We rented three vans and whipped around the city, 12 or 15 of my grandchildren in tow, showing them the history of our nation at the Viet Nam Wall, the WWII Memorial, the Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson monuments, Arlington Cemetery, the US Mint, and several parts of the Smithsonian Museum. We stood in the silence with a room filled with visitors as we viewed the original copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We walked the halls of the National Gallery of Art, where we saw paintings by Van Gough, Rembrandt, Andy Warhol, and Grandma Moses hanging in open galleries so easily accessible that  my sons could lift their little ones up close enough to see the brush strokes of artists whose names were famous world-wide.

I’m just an ordinary citizen, neither rich or famous, and yet I now have a Senior Pass which allows me free entrance into every national park and monument in the nation. I have watched the changing of the guard at Arlington and seen the profiles of four of this country’s most famous leaders at Mount Rushmore. There is a reason my neighborhood is filled with flags on national holidays. And we are not alone. For millions of Americans, July is a very good month to remember how blessed we are.