Have Pen, Will Travel
It’s been quite a Fall season for the Yanceys! In September we made a trip to Bogotá, Colombia, and on the way back stopped off for a few days in the Amazon rain forest of Ecuador. We hiked on muddy trails, visited a butterfly farm and animal-rescue station, traveled from place to place in canoes, and slept under lazy ceiling fans. Janet felt right at home, since she spent her childhood in a similar setting as a missionary kid in the Peruvian jungle.
Amazon jungle explorer
The day we returned from South America it started to rain in Colorado. A front stalled over the foothills west of Denver where we live, and rain fell for five days straight, dumping our entire annual allotment of precipitation in less than a week. The creek behind our house became a roaring river, and we watched astonished as large trees and even bridges came zooming past, carried on waves big enough to surf. Several times I waded through soggy grass with a flashlight in the middle of the night to measure the creek as it rose a foot, two feet, up to five feet above normal, cresting just ten inches below the level that would have flooded our house. We had major damage to the creek bank, but nothing like the devastation experienced by others: 18,000 homes were damaged or destroyed by what’s being called “the thousand-year flood.”
Winter sunset in Colorado
And now we’re returning from a trip to the Midwest. We spent several days in downtown Chicago, visiting friends from the years we lived there. I felt like a country bumpkin in the big city, having lost the edge for things like jay-walking, parallel parking, coping with city traffic, and negotiating the rapid transit system. We also got a reminder of what we miss about the city: great museums, racial and cultural diversity, restaurants and coffee shops on every block, the background buzz of human ingenuity in all its forms. Cold weather moved in, and on our last day a flotilla of boaters brought in their yachts from Lake Michigan for winter storage; one by one the great iron drawbridges raised up, in a kind of reverse bow, as the stately sailboats passed beneath.
Chicago’s lakefront skyline as seen from the stainless steel sculpture
known as “The Bean.”
From Chicago we drove through stunning autumn scenery to Petoskey, Michigan, up near the top of “the mitt,” as Michiganders call their mitten-shaped state. I spoke at a C. S. Lewis festival in Petoskey, a small town that hosts one of 200 C. S. Lewis societies around the world. To date some 200 million of Lewis’s books have been sold. I know no better example of the expansive power of words: a bachelor all but the last few years of his life, a man who never had children, who rarely traveled and never learned to drive, nevertheless continues to stir the minds and hearts of children, agnostics, doubters, and believers alike through his amazing output of writings. Lewis died on November 22, 1963, as did Aldous Huxley, though both deaths were eclipsed by John F. Kennedy’s assassination that same day. This month, the 50th anniversary of his death, Lewis will be enshrined in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, a well-deserved recognition of his accomplishments.
I never write a book without going through my shelf of Lewis books, thumbing through highlighted and earmarked pages for insights into whatever subject I’m grappling with. When I write about suffering, I know no better resources than The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed, two very different books that taken together plumb both the intellectual puzzle and the human anguish.
Rain forest, big city, Midwestern fall—we’ve had our share of variety these last two months, and it’s time to settle in for winter. And I can’t think of a better place than Colorado for that!
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