Chapter 1.
The Concept: Doing
Something
Big Together
A Matrix
Many years ago, my wife, Viann and I had small children. They required much attention. At first it was diapers, feedings and comforting, nearly an around-the-clock demand. Then it was toddler-hood, also an around-the-clock demand with the delicates, the fragiles and the dangerous retreating ever upwards all over the house. I had always been busy all the time as long as I could remember, learning things, doing things, failing, succeeding and leading. The condition of having small children had drastically changed that course. No longer was I the sole concern. Now it was all about us.
Growing into this new phase of life was not easy. After much agonizing and reflection, it turned up that it was time to make hard, conscious choices about many commitments. I stepped down from a major volunteer activity and coasted in others. I re-focused my efforts at work and moved towards a more conventional, middle-class life. Always struggling for organization and control, I looked for new, formalized projects that would be a worthy use of my time.
In the midst of these changes, I took a six-month break from those voluntary tasks that involved only me but not other family members. During this time I recovered from burnout, reflected, reconsidered, re-planned, and at last, dreamed.
It had been an analysis of a matrix of commitments that had led me to step down as Vice President (Operations) for AMSAT, an international organization of volunteers who built and used low cost amateur radio earth-orbiting satellites. The matrix was eight by eight and listed everything important: family, church, job, AMSAT, and so forth, once along the top and once down the left side. In the 64 cells in the middle I had written what affect one responsibility (left column) had on the other (top row). I had discovered that most items were roughly in balance and mutually beneficial except for AMSAT, which was a bad influence on everything including itself. The AMSAT commitment was also the major source of overload. Clearly it had to go and soon I was left with only seven responsibilities and a matrix of 49. Life was already less complicated by a factor of a fourth!
One of those important things was "family" and the family energies were now mostly spent on the children. The oldest, Viannah was in her first years in elementary school. Katherine was two years behind, in co-op nursery school. John was about to be a toddler
A Geometric Progression
One evening (May 6, 1992) as I wrote in my journal, I remembered something Rob Aanstoos had once said.
Rob was my friend from pre-high school days. We had both arrived in the Taylor, Texas public school system at the beginning of seventh grade, he from a local parochial school and I from suburban Dallas, my father an oft-moving Methodist preacher. We were alike enough in features to be confused at first by the indigenous Taylorites. After a year we had discovered more than just cosmetic similarities. We spent eighth and ninth grades building a friendship by forming organizations, usually with two members, going on missions, righting the wrongs of the local world and investigating the universe. The summer before tenth grade, my family picked up and moved again, this time to the even smaller Hubbard, Texas, a hundred miles away. We stayed in touch through mail for a while, then got into amateur radio and continued talking, scheming, and acting together multiple times weekly until we were out of high school. We went on a couple of bicycle tours in early college years though we had attended different universities. As with all friendships, there had been close times and distant times, joint undertakings of great importance and fallow years.
And so it came that I was in California working for NASA-JPL and he was in Austin working for the State of Texas and one night we were talking on the phone, no one remembers about what any longer, when Rob made a reference to the current relationships of the family in which he had grown up. The Aanstoos ancestors had migrated from Holland to work on the Panama Canal project and from there had moved to central Texas. Rob was the fifth of six children, a grandchild of the original immigrants. Discussing his current immediate family relationships, or perhaps it was with the early death of his own father in mind, he had said to me that evening, "... in all possible combinations, " the idea being that the mixing and synergy was best if people interacted in all possible combinations with each other. While the axiom was debatable, it was the seed of an idea, a plan, a structure; an approach to how I might face my own obligations. This was something I could approach mathematically.
I turned the page in my journal and doodled with figures for a minute to determine that, for a family of five, there were 32 such combinations (counting "all" and "none"). As one of those members, I was involved in 16 of the combinations. I sketched out, by name, all the 16 groupings that included me. I put them down, not systematically but in the order that they came to mind or in the order that they seemed important. Then, checking to see that I had them all written down, I sat back and studied the list to see how well I was doing in each group.
First there were the extremes: All five of us together; yes, this happened some. Virtually every night we were all together at bedtime (at this point in time we lived in a two bedroom house of about 800 square feet). There were meals, family outings, trips to church, yes that seemed all right. There was me alone. As a loner, I tended to need some quantity of time to do things on my own. As head of a family of five, there wasn't much of this, but there was some and that was all I could expect for many years to come. There were the groupings of three with one absent. John would usually be asleep first and one of us would read to the girls. Viannah went to school leaving the rest of us at home. Sometimes I would take the girls places, or the little kids (John and Katherine) or the parents would go to a school parent's night with just one of them. Mentally reviewing my day-to-day and week-to-week life, it seemed that all the combinations of three and four were covered in some way, sometimes even a constructive, non-mandatory way.
But there was a big hole in the chart. Every case of one-on-one was lacking. I didn't have much time alone with Viann, my wife, and I didn't have much time with each one of the kids by themselves. It wasn't obvious how or why it was turning out this way, but there was a clear direction to aim, if one bought into 'Rob's Axiom of Maximized Familial Combinations.'
Obviously, I could easily have arrived at this conclusion from purely non-mathematical reasoning or just feelings. One-on-one is essential to any close relationship.
Grandiose is Normal
What was to be done about this situation? In coming years there would be assisting with homework. There would be the possibility for sponsoring group activities like scouting or sports. The former was likely to occur on a case-by-case need and the latter (though I would sometimes step up to such jobs) was not my typical style. Neither seemed satisfactory or potentially satisfying as a solution to the need for one-on-one. Joining Boy Scouts full force, for example was the opposite of a one-on-one experience. I needed some project to do with each of the kids, some undertaking of large enough scope that I would be forced to carve time out of my schedule and chinks out of my personality to meet the challenge.
Sometimes people would start up hobbies with their kids for a purpose like this. I didn't need new hobbies and was already too expert and too involved in the ones I had. That wouldn’t be fair. In any case, how would I manage some major avocation times three, potentially something different for each of the three children? No, I was looking for something meaningful but finite, something with a beginning and an end, something that would generate lifetime memories and maybe bragging rites. Something Big.
I brought up the topic with Viann. She listened politely and made suggestions. As usual, her point of view was so different that I didn't like any of her suggestions. I felt I hadn't communicated the concept very well. She marveled at the steps it had taken me to arrive at yet another "common sense" insight. As usual, we had to end with, "You'll have to work this out for yourself, then."
What if I laid out the big calendar of child raising and planned to do something big with each one about once every quadrennium? Yes, Viannah would soon be eight, that would be a good starting age, then we could do something again at 12 and 16 and.... And then she would be gone! She wouldn't want to be seen with me at 16 and probably wouldn't be in the same state (certainly not the same state-of-mind) at 20. Well, not to get too far ahead of myself, the other kids, at about the same ages, would have turns too. Katherine, two years younger than Viannah, that would alternate nicely and John, three years further behind, would benefit from what I learned starting with the girls. And I would try to do something big with Viann every four years to round out the plan too and satisfy the axiom. A real honeymoon would be nice, for example, our original honeymoon had been about two days, from mid-day on a Saturday after the wedding until mid afternoon the next Monday when my shift dispatching Balch Springs Policemen began.
Viann, for her part, noted on her own work schedule that she had every other weekend off from her job at the hospital and started taking the children and I out to breakfast, each one in turn, early on her Saturday mornings off.
Planning
is Everything but the Plan Itself is
Nothing (Eisenhower)
The question now was, what to do? It had to be big enough but not too big. It had to be something that we could both buy into, it had to be something that we could both actually accomplish.
At age five, Viannah had flown to Texas with me to keep me company as I brought my sister Wilda’s truck from Hillsboro to my house near Los Angeles. From there, Wilda had picked it up and taken it back to San Diego where she was stationed with the Navy. This had already been something big, by five-year-old standards. It seemed unfair to go around again with Viannah next. Still, she was oldest and was ready for things first. I would rotate similar opportunities, if any arose, through the other kids and, in the unforeseeable future; they would still be home after Viannah had left anyway.
We talked. Viannah was non-committal, thrilled at the idea of all this promised attention, willing to go along with anything, but didn’t have personal preferences yet. She was going to be a fan of horses, but this seemed expensive, given our living base in the city, and wasn't particularly appealing to me. (Although I had been raised around horses, I had rarely been on one for any reason.) I got seasick easily, that would seem to rule out anything to do with boats on the oceans. There was bicycling, traveling, hiking, camping.
My best memories with my own dad were of what people would now call "day hikes." We would go to some wide-open place, maybe some ranch land near Marysville, Texas where dad knew the ranch owners personally and could get permission for such outings. We would spend a couple of hours driving out, tromp around for most of an afternoon then drive back after dark. We'd explore to find a place to cross the creek, or use a small military shovel and dam the creek up. We'd climb fences, climb bluffs, avoid the bulls in people’s pastures and comment on all the things we found on the way. "Look, the Indians had rubber!" dad would say, finding a tire in a creek bed (or "glass," finding a broken beer bottle).
Skipping ahead from the 60s to the 80s we had visited the Grand Canyon as a family in 1989, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. We drove to both rims in one day, then on to St. George, Utah for the night, much too big of a stretch for two little girls in the back of a Honda Accord, or for their mother in the front. I remember standing at each rim looking wistfully down the trails, down into the constituent side canyons, wondering as I always did what was beyond the next bend, around that last outcropping. Hikers arriving on the rims from the depths mid-day, celebrating their hiking and climbing accomplishments, aggravated the feeling. I suggested to Viann that Viannah and I could hike across from one rim to another next year when she was eight. "Oh, she's just a little girl!" was the reply, "you should wait until she is ten." Ten! That was years away, an eternity, a plan buster by my impatient standards!
I wanted to get started. Other suggestions were put forth, climb some mountain, sail some lake (Viann and I had taken Sailing and Canoeing as a physical education elective at Baylor, I thought I could handle modest inland, fresh water outings), do some sort of exploration. I made up a list and presented it to Viann and Viannah. A walk across the Grand Canyon seemed the most plausible, the most concrete. It could be a big adventure, would require training and would probably take just a day or two. What was it? It was only twenty some-odd miles across? Presented with the choice, Viannah picked the Grand Canyon hike. Perhaps she remembered seeing the Grand Canyon. Perhaps there was some status in her mind about such a project. Perhaps she had an instinct for the "do-able," like her mother.
Some notes were made in the journal about potentially picking up the other "Big Things" with the other children. Maybe the sail boat idea would be better with Katy, I also wanted to build up a big "discone" antenna for high frequency hamming and thought I might get her interested in helping with a scale model. Maybe for Viann and I there could be a get-away trip "up the coast". John was too little yet for such speculation.
I wanted to teach both girls Morse Code (a prerequisite for ham radio) and to play piano. These were grandiose plans indeed!
A
Brief History of Hiking
There wasn't much reason to believe that Viannah would take well to hiking. During Thanksgiving break when she was age four I had taken her on our first hike in California. I didn't know where to go or what to do. I didn't know any friendly ranch owners in the Los Angeles area. We went to the top of La Crescenta and found a place where development bordered the hills to the north. We got out of the car and headed up what looked like a trail. In fifty yards it was no longer a trail but rather than go back the way we had come, we cut through brush and thistles in the general direction of the car. Within less than 100 yards we were scratched up, tired and sweaty. This was not the experience that would leave anyone begging for more.
Later times we went as a family on some of the fire roads or horse trails around La Canada, but not often. The girls enjoyed pushing gravel around and prying rocks out of the cuts beside the road. This didn't seem like "progress" to me.
I wondered where the trail on the east boundary of JPL led and fantasized about riding my bicycle up to see with the kids behind in a bugger. At length I bought a trail map of the Angeles National Forest and studied the possibilities. One Saturday in March of 1990, I had hiked by myself the trail from Switzer's campground and day use area down a mile to the waterfall then back out.
Later, on a day in the wet season, I took Viannah, then five, on this route, planning to go the whole nine miles or so down to Altadena. Just below Oakwilde Campground, where the trail is in the streambed for over a mile, we were crossing a rivulet and she fell into the rushing ice water. I waded in and grabbed her right out, she was never in any danger, but we weren't prepared for this contingency with extra dry clothes. I put my jacket around her and carried her on my back a couple of miles down to Paul Little campground. Then, thinking from the map that it would be a shortcut, we hiked up out of Gould Canyon rather than down to the bottom at JPL. As it turns out, the distance was about the same, but up the canyon road it was 5-10% uphill grade all the way. I coordinated with Viann by radio and had her pick us up at the top of the road where it meets Highway 2. We were beat.
This trail, though used by mountain bikes, was not generally suitable for my street bike and bugger. Another fantasy had fallen to realities.
In a few weeks, I took Katherine, age 3, down the same route to Oakwilde campground and then tried to cut the hike in half by returning to Highway 2 from there. We accidentally wandered from the trail and climbed what seemed like 60-degree sloped ravines much of the way up. I didn't know if I would make it. Katy rode on my back in a carrier frame, singing a song about lichens that she made up as we passed many varieties along the way. I struggled and panted up the hill, fifty feet at a time with Katy on my back repeating my groanings into my ear. We called Viann on the radio to pick us up. She was to work the evening shift at the hospital that day and she came to recover us, but was an hour late for work as a result. I was beat again, this time to the point of nausea as I started my afternoon and evening supervision of the kids at home.
Then in the fall after John was born and after I had investigated that trail out of Oakwilde, the whole family took the same route with the girls walking and John in the baby carrier. Viann had to work that day too starting at 2:30 p.m., so the long day hike had started quite early.
This was representative of our experience leading up to the selection of a hike across the Grand Canyon. Not all bad and not all good, but all adventurous.
Life
Goes On
On those rare occasions when I've gotten enough sleep for a few days, and not over-eaten or done something else mildly abusive, I could feel pretty good and start to dream and feel energy and plan great works. These ideas would show up in the journal much as had happened in this case but then the days would stretch into weeks and months and the seed of the idea, though planted, would become invisible and be forgotten for a time. Nothing much seemed to happen for the rest of 1992. I had begun graduate school, taking one course each semester until I had completed nine courses. Homework and tests and projects consumed more than all of any spare time I might have. During the semesters I was swamped and during the summer interludes between, I was too tired to do much but recover and brace for the next course.
For twenty years, I'd had a dream to travel to Alaska, driving up the Alaska Highway. The trip was being planned for 1993, but we were too busy and too poor. It was slipped to 1995 then forgotten again for a time. Rob (“… all combinations”) got married in the summer of 1992. We went to Texas where I played the pipe organ at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Taylor for the Independence Day ceremony. Being away on the trip caused us to miss the Lander's Earthquake back in California. I started the girls on piano lessons and on Morse Code but Katherine wasn't ready and was too stubborn. Viannah worked with it for a while but then we got mired in other things again and put the plans on hold. Life went on and older plans, engaged, prior to the inception of this grand project played out laboriously towards their eventual conclusions.
But, viewed from afar, there was some change in the habits of the family in support of the new plan, the new direction. I looked at a map of the Grand Canyon. It was going to be about twenty-two miles. I wouldn't want to walk twenty two miles on a flat, soft trail on a favorable day without baggage, much less down and up through heat and cold and maybe rain in full pack. This was going to be a camping trip or at least there would have to be sleeping facilities that could be used. The trip to Alaska was supposed to be car camping as well. We needed to work on our camping skills, we needed to generate opportunities for family hikes and we needed to visit interesting places nearby. A camping initiative could satisfy all of these.
We camped in our back yard with our old camping gear. The five of us were able to get in my old two-man tent (which had somehow seemed roomy when it was just me at Enchanted Rock for Halley's Comet in 1986) but in less than an hour the infant John and I got up and went in to a bed in the house. We tried sleeping without a tent, under a full moon. That was a disaster for me; it might as well have been high noon!
In April 1993, I came across a used tent for sale in The Universe, JPL's company newspaper. A dome tent with slip, it claimed to be able to sleep six. This seemed like the ideal step up for the camping family. I bought it for $55. We tried it out on Mt. Pinos in August, our first family camping trip. I accidentally broke the glass in the Coleman lantern and learned a lesson about the care of equipment and the stocking of spare parts so far from home.
Later in the fall I tried walking to work, about four miles in about an hour each way, and found it quite possible, time permitting. The first trips were straight down the busy main street, Foothill Blvd, noisy and busy.
We bought and moved into a house in an out-of-the-way neighborhood on Rockmere Way. Moving day was my 38th birthday, February 26, 1994. On that day, a Sunday, I decided once and for all that I would reserve Sunday for "other things," no matter about the pressures of work or school or escrow just as Stephen Covey had advised by example in his book Seven Principles of Effective Living.
In August 1994, on a visiting swing through Texas, Viannah rode Arlie Beckendorf's horse across a Rose Hill pasture and was solidly hooked on horses from then on.
I decided that we would camp out once a month in preparation for the future planned events and that we would work on various camping skills with each trip. In September, we went to Buckhorn, up Highway 2 in the Angeles National Forest, the skill for this trip: "Learn to use vault toilets."
We camped near
the beach at
Halloween and then at another beach over Thanksgiving before having to
stop for
the Christmas crunch. We learned
without having really planned to how to camp in chilly weather and how
to deal
with the long autumn nights. At the end
of the year, I reflected on this great master plan, wishing only that I
had
three months off from work just to work out the details, much less the
actuality of any of it.
And so it went week-to-week and month-to-month, the years slipping by as always. Camping, learning, births and deaths, purchases and losses, mistakes and corrections, emergencies and boredom, inspirations and mis-cues, my journal was full of the same old questions about purpose and meaning, feeling bad and insufficient, wondering about God, concentrating on the aches and pains, not the glass 95% full. In April 1996 someone came to the door wanting to buy the bugger that was sitting out in the front yard. It wouldn't have even been sitting out front like that if there had been a place in the garage to store it. It dawned on me that all three kids were now over the 40 lb. weight limit and would never again be able to ride in the bugger again. I asked $30, he bought it on the spot and it was gone. Now it had another good home and I had another tinge of despair.
On Saturday, May 11, 1996, I finally graduated from USC with a Master’s, the last test, the last homework, the last form filled out, the last fee paid. It was over and I was going to have a life again, at least for a few years, before starting into some crazy plan like that again. On May 18, it was time to get on with it. If something was going to happen we had to focus on it. No more distractions. Viannah, now ten, and I sat down together to outline The Plan.