By Reverend Laurie DeMott

The mist rose gently from the lake as I climbed out of my tent into the breaking dawn. A loon chortled from a hidden cove, its cry echoing off the low mountain peaks surrounding the island, and I made my way quietly down to the beach to watch the sun rise over the glassy water. My son, John, was still asleep in his tent since 13 year old boys are never keen on watching the sun rise no matter how beautiful the setting, and I assumed that my sister, Wendy, and her 13 year old daughter, Michael Anna, were likewise still dead to the world. My father, on the other hand, had probably been up for some time but he had chosen to erect his tent on the far side of the small island, telling us that he didn't want to disturb us with his early rising though I suspect the real reason was so that the kids wouldn't disturb him with their late night giggling. We were spending the week wilderness camping in the Adirondacks, baptizing my son and my niece in a coming of age ritual that my sisters, brother, and I had all experienced when we had each turned thirteen. Every summer following one of his children's thirteenth birthdays, my father would load camping gear, a beat up aluminum Jonboat, and a barely functional 3 horsepower motor into the van, and take the newly minted teenager to Cranberry Lake in the western Adirondacks. There he would launch the heavily loaded boat down the Oswagatchie River. The waters of the river led to the main body of Cranberry lake, but upon reaching those open waters, my father hugged the lake shore and bore right until he came to the mouth of Dead Creek Flow, a large inlet, at the far end of which was a tiny island my father had christened "Paradise Island." The year my father inaugurated this tradition with my older brother, the island appeared untouched by human habitation. After five children, however, and many solo trips of his own, my father's site took on a more permanent character and was even given an official number by the Park system, an upgrade that held for my dad a mixture of pride in its discovery with a heavy dose of frustration that he was forced now to call ahead in order to reserve his spot in Paradise.

The year my own son and niece both turned thirteen, my sister and I coaxed my father into recreating our childhood trips by accompanying us on an expedition back to Paradise Island. The only problem with this idea was that in the intervening thirty years, I had been on innumerable camping trips of my own with the result that I had developed quite a different approach to wilderness camping from that of my father's. My style, born of the environmental generation, had as its motto "leave no trace" and accordingly I packed a small propane stove, a backpacker's tent, a water filter, and even biodegradable toilet paper. My father's style had as its motto, "if it costs more than a few bucks, it ain't wilderness camping." He scoffed at my high tech, high cost gear, and instead pulled out a rusty hatchet, chopped a load of wood for a fire, and put water on to boil in an old beat up juice can suspended from a coat hanger. His eight person canvas tent required a front loader to haul in and out of the boat, an engineering degree to erect, and leaked like a sieve but Dad wore those faults like a badge of honor. I believe for my father the real point of wilderness camping was to prove that if you suddenly became homeless and had nothing in your pocket but a jackknife, you could go to the town dump and scavenge enough equipment to set up housekeeping on the shores of a good fishing hole.

Consequently, my father and I spent much of the week trying hard to tolerate the other's radically different views on camping, and not always succeeding. Nor were my father and I the only ones suffering from cultural differences. Michael Anna and John didn't seem to be appreciating this immersion into rustic life as much as we had hoped they would. Upon arriving on the island, Michael Anna asked for the directions to the latrine and was horrified when my Dad handed her a shovel. She disappeared into the woods for a good hour, and when we went to investigate her whereabouts discovered that she was digging a hole to the earth's core, determined to place as much space as possible between herself and the unpleasant business. One afternoon, I interrupted John and Michael Anna's UNO game to drag them down to the shore where I pointed excitedly across to a large spruce on the mainland.

"Look, it's a bald eagle," I exclaimed.

They squinted into the distance and Michael Anna said, "You mean that black lump on that branch?"

"That black lump is a bald eagle," I replied. "They were an endangered species for a long time and have just begun to make a recovery. Isn't it beautiful?"

Michael Anna shrugged. "Yeah, sure. Can we go back to our game now?" she asked with a martyred sigh. I waved them off and the two ran to the tent where Michael Anna zipped the door behind her to insure that no bugs, bears, or bald eagles could penetrate her small cocoon of civilization.

John bore up a little better having had a couple of years of Boy Scouting under his belt. One day he proudly demonstrated the skills he had learned from Troop 19 by getting a fire going in the pouring rain, and we all dutifully sat around it for a few minutes admiring his handiwork before beating it back into our tents to sit out the downpour, which lasted two more days. When the sun finally emerged, Wendy and I suggested an exploring expedition and loaded the kids into the boat, leaving my Dad on the island to enjoy some quiet time on his own. Unfortunately for John, our wilderness exploration led to a too close encounter with one of the local residents. We had rowed the boat down the inlet and put in at an another small island boasting a beautiful mossy glade. The kids clamored out, took a ten second run about the island, and before Wendy and I had even ventured ten feet from the boat, Michael Anna was back saying, "OK, seen that. What's next?"

Rolling her eyes, Wendy said, "Well, there's another island across the flow. Get back in the boat and we'll check it out."

Michael and John took a step toward the boat and then stopped, suddenly immobile.

"Well, are you going or staying?" I asked.

The two remained frozen and silent.

"I don't have the patience for fooling around," I said. "Just get in the boat ..." I began but before I could finish my scolding, John's lips moved as subtly as a ventriloquist's and he mumbled, "Hornets!" Suddenly I noticed swarms of yellow jackets buzzing madly about the kids, apparently angered when one of them had stepped on a nest.

"Don't move," I said quite unnecessarily since neither had so much as batted an eyelash in the last three minutes.

And then suddenly, the tableau was broken: "Ow!" John yelled. "My eye!" and, in an amazing demonstration of quick thinking, he ran to the shore and dove under water, a mad swarm of hornets streaming after him. Michael Anna took advantage of their hunt for John to jump into the boat, Wendy and I following suit. We quickly pushed off from shore and rowed toward John who had emerged just long enough to grab a breath before diving back under, stroking as if he intended to swim all the way back to Alfred. By the time we intercepted him, the hornets had given up and John miraculously escaped with only one sting, but that one sting caused his eyelid to swell to the size of a golf ball sealing off his sight in his right eye. We returned to Paradise Island, both kids feeling by now that the name was a serious misnomer, and John spent the rest of the day in an antihistamine stupor.

And so it was that as I stood on the shore of the island that last morning, listening to the loon, watching the mist curl in the dawn, I felt the weight of all of the disasters, conflicts, and adversity of the past week. All in all, John and Michael Anna's coming of age wilderness experience had not been the idyllic immersion in Eden that Wendy and I remembered from our own childhoods, but today was the final day, and so it would end as all of my father's trips to Paradise Island ended, with a hike up Cat Mountain, and then we could go home.

I left the beach and roused everyone for breakfast, after which we climbed into the boat and rowed to the trailhead at Janeck's Landing. My father's tradition of ending his trip with a hike up Cat Mountain arose partly because the trailhead was only a short distance from the island, but also because at the summit of this particular mountain was a massive boulder where my father liked to sit in prayer to, as he always put it, "get his marching orders from God for the coming year." When we were kids, my Dad had done his praying in private while we ate our lunch somewhere else on the summit but my father had decided that this year, John and Michael Anna would be allowed to join him. Even Michael Anna and John sensed then, that this particular hike was one to be respected and uncharacteristically they kept their grumbling to a minimum. John, Boy Scout training in full throttle, hiked manfully ahead, clamoring over boulders like a mountain goat, while Michael Anna dawdled behind picking violets as if she were on a stroll in the park. Fortunately, my father's pace had slowed considerably in his senior years and Michael Anna's casual walk was just about the right speed for my Dad so she kept up a companionable chatter the whole way helping to ease his frustration with his aging body. Wendy walked with my father and I tried to keep up with John to make sure that he didn't reach the top and keep right on going over the edge in his enthusiasm.

We arrived at the summit about midday. Cranberry Lake is not very far into the Adirondack Park system and the mountains surrounding it are not the park's most impressive peaks. Here on the edge of the range, only the very tops of the mountains are bare of forest, and they roll rather than soar, their ancient crags worn down by their years not unlike my father that day. Nevertheless, when you stand on the summit of Cat Mountain with miles upon miles of forested mountains at your feet, even the most jaded teenager is in awe. You feel swallowed up in a world where humanity has never existed, where the wind rushes across tree tops and sweeps across the granite summit like a spirit unimpeded by the touch of any human hand. Creation is bigger than you ever imagined, and alien in its beauty.

My father stood for a moment gazing at a view he had seen every year since he first brought my brother to the mountaintop, and then he walked across the summit to the boulder and sat down in the small mossy hollow growing in its shelter. And he bowed his head.

I don't know what God said to my Dad that day, but I know that for John, Michael Anna, Wendy, and me, all of the frustrations and conflicts of the week were swept away in the stillness of that prayer. The mountain was transfigured into an altar and as we looked over the vast range at our feet and felt the silent prayers of my father rising near us, we were filled with an awareness that we are part of something deeper, something larger than any one of us. To experience awe is to know suddenly that you are but a moment in time, you are but a speck in an immense universe, and all of your aches and desires and obsessions are ultimately as fleeting as the wind that rushes across the ancient rock before you. To experience awe is to be lifted into the very holiness of God and realize that there is more to the world that our eyes can ever see and more there than our limited brains can every fully comprehend.

Moments of awe are rare but they are absolutely necessary if we are to remember why we are here and why we serve. The incarnation -- the presence of God with us in the muck and mud of our lives -- comforts us with the promise that wherever we go, God will go with us but those moments of transfiguration equally remind us that no matter how often God walks through the mud by our side, God is still God, and for us to walk with God is to be humbled with the knowledge that such eternal infinite compassion would choose to spend itself on us.

We stayed on the mountain top an hour that day and then hiked back down the path, John galloping ahead, Michael Anna again lagging behind, and the next day we headed home with our very different memories -- bald eagles or lame birds, the call of loons or the buzz of angry hornets -- but all sharing the one common transfiguring experience of the mountaintop.

It was, as it turned out, my father's last visit to his altar. The body he thought was simply aging turned out to be breaking down and soon, walking across the yard, let alone up a mountain, required a herculean effort. The two years following that trip would be filled with suffering and difficulties as he lived out his final days, and many were the times when my family found comfort in the promise that God walked that path with us. But I think that for my father, it was not the promise of God's presence with him that gave him hope; it was the knowledge that there is something deeper, broader, and greater than any single human life. There is a holy compassion that is infinite and eternal, that is found not just in the mud of our lives but also soaring across ancient mountain peaks and singing in a voice that is as old as creation itself, and that when we step into the presence of this mysterious holiness, we can all be transfigured.