A Revisionist's History: French Town Pond

This is French Town pond looking West.

My father, a wise man, realized the importance of building a relationship with his son before teenage dementia set in. To do this, about the time I turned ten, he brought home a couple of five-gallon buckets full of motorcycle parts. Then for a winter, I would stand beside him shivering in the garage as he pieced together the parts to resurrect a late 70’s two-stroke mini-bike.

Dad continued to nurture this hobby and our relationship by establishing a few traditions. Most prominent among those was our own version of March Madness. Every March my dad would take me out of school for a week and we would travel 800 miles south to the Moab and San Rafael Swell regions of Southern Utah. Four or five months later, we would also travel to the Sawtooth Mountains in Central Idaho and ride dirt bikes for another week among lodge-pole pine.

A Revisionist's History: Painter Hayes

This morning while driving to seminary, I was thinking about an acquaintance in the ward here that commutes daily all the way to Everett. He told me yesterday that the drive doesn’t take too long in the morning before traffic, but that it can stretch out into two hours in the evening. Fortunately, for Rob Harvey, he and his wife just closed on a home in Lake Stevens, which is where this story begins.

Years ago, while living outside of Seattle during my early teen years, a difficult and pivotal era for many reasons, I met a man named Jim Hayes. Jim became one of my earliest employers painting homes in the Lake Stevens region. As I remembered Jim on my drive this morning, I realized in retrospect that he also figures prominently among the cast of mentors from those formative years.

FAD 1: The Second Generation Chevrolet Astro AWD

It was probably 1986 when my dad purchased the first of two 80’s era, down-sized Buick Skylarks. Now don’t hang up or dismiss me—not yet! This is not a post to nominate the Skylark as a Fine Auto of Distinction. Because, it wasn’t—not by a long shot. In fact, it was that car and its sibling that caused me to appreciate the relative reliability of dad’s 1976 VW Karman Ghia, which repeatedly doubled as the family hauler while the shop rebuilt the Buicks.

Introducing: Fine Autos of Distinction ("FAD")

When I was about 12 years old, I realized that I had a budding interest in automobiles. About that time, I saved some of my paper route money and purchased my first magazine subscription to Car & Driver. For years, I subscribed to the magazine, and it became for me what sports were for other boys my age. I had my favorite brands and models. Every shoot-out or “comparo” took on the significance of key games between teams. Always patriotic, I spent a lot of time routing for American brands. Sadly, the late 80’s and early 90’s were not good times to pin one’s hopes on American automobile manufacturing. That was the age of the Chevrolet Corsica, the unforgiveable second generation of the Buick Roadmaster, and the Ford Tempo.

A Revisionist's History: Into The Wild

Years ago my father introduced me to Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, a book that has since gained a lot of notoriety from an author I have since come to distrust. In the book, Krakauer recounts the demise of one Chris McClandess, a self-described “supertramp,” who jettisons gainful employment, family, and the conveniences of modern life to embrace the life of a recluse. As far as books go, Into the Wild was a good read insofar as the subject matter kept me completed riveted.

Today: My Secret Addiction

In spite of a Christian upbringing and the example of good parents, I have these proclivities, these tendencies. It’s no use denying it. On occasion I succumb to a weakness that would shame my parents. If the people with whom I work knew my dark secret, conditions in the office would become intolerable, and for good reason.

A Revisionist's History: Mission Trips on the Altiplano

Over the years a tradition seems to have sprung up among parents of missionaries. These parents often travel to the country or state in which their missionary served when the mission ends. Prior to returning to the United States, they tour the mission with their son or daughter. Once the parents have forked over the Georges to pilgrimage all the way to the field of service, it then becomes the privilege of the missionary to shepherd her wide-eyed parents through the areas in which she served.

Anyway, I’m not really as negative as all that. I believe most parents really do want to see the mission their children knew. Fortunately, most kids are more than willing to accommodate them.


I remember once, during my mission getting off a bus on a high windswept plateau in the Guatemalan Highlands. The setting sun slid slowly off the Western horizon without bothering to color the sky. At 10,000 to 12,000 feet, the wind has a tendency to picar the nose and cheeks—even in Central America. The scene was undeniably beautiful in an incomprehensibly lonely sort of way. I contemplated the thousands of miles that separated me from my home, shivered, and tried to burrow more deeply into my wool army-surplus jacket.

I don’t remember exactly why I was there or where I was going, but I will never forget what happened next. Just at that moment, at the end of the day and at what might have been mistaken for the end of the world, isolated and alone as we were there in the twilight, a 1996 Ford Taurus (a frightening car in and of itself, as far as looks are concerned) approached from the south, slowed, and turned off this isolated stretch of the Panamerican Highway onto the dirt road headed to San Bartolo.


A dozen questions crossed my mind in that instant, where did that car come from? Had someone driven it down from the States? I had NEVER seen a Ford Taurus in Guatemala. To this day, I’m not certain how that Ford got there. I’m not aware of single Ford dealer in the entire country.

The typical Chapín had little use for a full-size sedan of any make. And for good reason, the roads in Guatemala—if they may be termed such—would shred a Taurus in less time than it would take a new missionary to consider contracting dengue rather than spending two years in this raw, third-world country. Simply put, most American vehicles simply weren’t up to the rigors of Guatemalan life.

Anyway, there we stood lamely staring west, as this Taurus pulled up and stopped. One of the windows lowered and we found ourselves staring into faces of two very ordinary, middle-aged North Americans: American Gothic in a Ford Taurus rambling through the Guatemalan hinterland.

A recently-released “sister missionary” jumped out of the back and greeted one of the other missionaries in the group. Evidently, they had served in a different zone together. I gathered that she had convinced her parents to leave what I was guessing was a modest home in Utah and retrace her Guatemalan adventure. Glancing back into the front seat, I wondered how badly they really wanted to experience la pura vida. They seemed a little nervous, but eager enough.

Honestly, I was shocked and more than a little worried (and not just for the car). What they couldn’t have known, what I barely understood myself at the time, was that the hills that stretched off in every direction from our windswept intersection harbored more than its share of skeletons in the none-too-distant past.

They wouldn’t travel too much farther down the road on which we currently stood before they’d enter a wide expanse of rugged, remote hills devoid of pavement, electricity and in many locations, running water. The people of those hills not only didn’t speak English, they didn’t speak Spanish.

This people had been the primary target of government violence, kidnapping, mass murder, and no-doubt much worse during a 20-year civil war that had “ended” only two months previous. In fact, the village in which they planned to overnight had been the stage for some very serious mob violence and lynchings not even a month in the past.

No, these clear-faced Americans knew nothing about that. But then, the hand of God often shelters the good, naïve, and even—on occasion—the reckless alike. I had certainly been the receiving end of that principle.

The concept of the mission trip must have been fairly entrenched by the time I wrapped up my two-year stint in Guatemala because dad sua sponte broached the issue in a letter I received a few months before coming home. At the time, he offered me the choice of a mountain bike or a mission trip. For someone who was ready to leave Guate far behind, this seemed like a great deal. I took the bike and counted myself lucky.