Fueled by the belief that something better exists than the mundane life they've been living, free spirits Don and Paul set off on an adventure-filled road trip in search of deeper meaning, beauty, and an explanation for life. Many young men dream of such a trip, but few are brave enough to actually attempt it. Fewer still have the writing skills of Donald Miller, who records the trip with wide-eyed honesty in achingly beautiful prose. In this completely revised edition, he discusses everything from the nature of friendship, the reason for pain, and the origins of beauty.

As they travel from Texas to Oregon in Paul's cantankerous Volkswagen van, the two friends encounter a variety of fascinating people, witness the fullness of nature's splendor, and learn unexpected lessons about themselves, each other, and even God.

"A record of a classic road trip. Miller's tale is full of serendipitous adventures and thoughtful Christian reflection . . . offering the sort of deep-thought wanderings into meaning and significance that are the meat of college-age existence . . . a reminder that life was meant to be lived, not just gotten through." (Publishers Weekly)

THROUGH PAINTED DESERTS

Nelson Books

Contents

Author's Note........................................ix
1. Leaving...........................................1
2. Hill Country......................................17
3. Thin Ice..........................................37
4. Discovering George Winston........................51
5. The Gaze of Ra....................................59
6. Trouble...........................................63
7. Flagstaff.........................................73
8. Floating Bodies at Hoover Dam.....................81
9. Dancing...........................................89
10. Easter Descent...................................93
11. Phantom Ranch....................................107
12. Bright Angel.....................................111
13. Reward...........................................121
14. Miracles.........................................131
15. Vegas............................................143
16. California.......................................147
17. Milkshakes and Pie...............................157
18. Breakfast........................................165
19. Night Golf.......................................177
20. The Oregon Trail.................................189
21. Sinatra..........................................197
22. Kindness.........................................207
23. Ranch............................................217
24. The Woods........................................225
25. The Cave.........................................237
26. Ranch Life.......................................243
27. Sunrise..........................................249
About the Author.....................................254
Acknowledgments......................................255

Chapter One

Houston, Texas, at night, as seen from Interstate 45, is something beautiful. The interstate approaches and collides with the city's center in a tight, second-level loop that hugs skyscrapers three-quarters around downtown before spinning off north toward Dallas and south toward the Gulf coast. It is, as you know, an enormous city, its skyline brilliant with architecture and light. A landlocked lighthouse on the flat surface of south Texas.

Tonight she shines. The towers are lit and the road is ours alone. A bank sign marks the time at 2:30 a.m., alternately flashing the temperature at seventy-three degrees. Houston has an empty feel to it at such an hour. Her size demands traffic and noise. But this is a southern city and people sleep at proper hours, leaving the landscape to changing street signals with nobody to obey their commands. Night travel is best. Mild, thick air pours through the windows like river water, flowing in circles around our heads. Paul and I are quiet, our thoughts muffled by the tin-can rattle of his 1971 Volkswagen camping van. We are traveling north toward Oklahoma and then, perhaps, the Grand Canyon. After that, we have no plans except to arrive in Oregon before we run out of money. We share a sense of excitement and freedom. Not a rebel freedom, rather, a deadline-free sort of peace. There is nowhere we have to be tomorrow. There is no particular road we have committed to take, and I suppose, if one of us could talk the other out of it, the canyon itself could be bypassed for some other point of interest. Tonight we are travelers in the truest sense of the word, a slim notion of a final destination and no schedule to speak of. We are simply moving for motion's sake.

Our plans were shared with friends, but few understood. "Going off to find yourself" was the standard interpretation. I don't think that is really our point. We are shaped by our experiences. Our perception of joy, fear, pain, and beauty are sharpened or dulled by the way we rub against time. My senses have become dull and this trip is an effort to sharpen them.

"Does it snow much in Oregon?" I say to Paul in a voice loud enough to be heard over the wind and the engine.

"Snows a couple feet every winter out in central Oregon. Not a whole lot along the Pacific, though," he says, reaching to adjust the driver's side mirror.

"Do you think there will still be snow on the ground when we get there?"

"I doubt it. Most of the snow melts off in March. We will get there a couple months too late. There might be some snow in the mountains. We will see."

My mind has been swimming in mountain landscapes. Paul lived in Oregon most of his life and he's told stories of the geography. From him, I know the look and feel of Jefferson Park, of the Three Sisters and Crater Lake, all of them stitched together by a Pacific Crest Trail running up the Sierra Nevadas and then the Cascades, from Mexico to Canada. They've got trout the size of sea bass, bars thick with pretty girls, a cliff-bordered ocean, waterfalls, canyons, and just about anything Ernest Hemingway put in a novel. In Oregon, men live in the woods and let their beards grow. I know it happens the way Paul says it happens because he doesn't shift his eyes when he talks and his stories are never long.

Paul and a friend left Oregon several months ago and had been traveling around America in this van. Paul's friend found a girl in New Orleans and decided to stay, to play jazz on the street and try to make a new life in the South. Paul left New Orleans and made it, on his own, as far as Houston, which is where he ran out of money. He got a job at an oil refinery, walking along the top of tanker cars, checking valves to make sure they were closed securely, climbing the ladders of vertical pipe at the end of the evening to look out over the landscape of smokestacks and yellow light, to breathe the sulfur and salt and humidity as a way of noting its human beauty, but all this was done in a longing for his home, the way a man will hold the woman he has while thinking of the woman he loves. Somehow Paul met my friend Fred, and though he was only in Houston for a few months, we accepted him into our small group of friends. He was mostly quiet, but if you prodded him enough you could get him to talk about life in the Pacific Northwest, about the wilderness winding along river basins, along canyons, about the wildlife timidly footing through forests, still like statues when you came across them, flashing away like lightning when you raised your rifle. He'd talk like this a little and then get to missing it and just as soon shut up, passing the talking to someone else-someone from Houston who only had stories about bars and girls and football scores. His stories got inside me like Neverland. I knew anybody from a place like that could never stay in a place like this.

Houston is no city for a guy like Paul; he doesn't fit. Time moves quickly here; people are in a panic to catch up. Paul exists within time but is hardly aware of how it passes. I check my wrist every ten minutes out of habit, and I don't think he's ever owned a watch. He is a minimalist. Everything he needs is in this van. His gear includes a tool box, a camping stove, a backpack, and about ten Louis L'Amour books. I think he has a pair of jeans, some shorts, and tennis shoes stuffed behind the seat, but nothing more except the clothes he is wearing. He is living proof you can find contentment outside the accumulation of things. The closest I've come to this sort of thinking was pondering the writings of Hank Thoreau. But I went to Walden Pond a year ago, just to see and feel the place, just to walk alone around the water, and they've made a suburb out of it. It hurts to hear the traffic rolling in through the trees. People commute from the land of Thoreau's solitude to Boston, to work at banks, to work at law firms. And I wonder if Walden exists anymore. I am not talking about the real Walden, the one in Boston; I am talking about the earth God meant to speak before we finished His sentence.

Paul and I haven't known each other very long. Fred brought him up to a beach house that some of the guys and I rent every year in the winter when the phosphorus in the water dies. You can walk along the empty beach in the middle of the night and the waves glow bright green. There are no lights out on Crystal Beach, just scattered houses along the dunes, and out in the pitch black of the Gulf your eye will find an oil rig, and then suddenly from the east, a stream of green, a naturally lit wave will light out west for a hundred yards before folding into its own floating glow. It's the liquid equivalent of the northern lights. You can walk along the wet sand and turn to see your footsteps glow and fade out, the ones in the distance glowing least, the ones at your feet shining out in active chemistry. My friend Kyle discovered the phenomenon a few years ago and so we go out there every year and make fires on the beach and drink beer and every once in a while one of us will get up and walk out toward the waves to ponder the natural wonder.

He was doing pull-ups on a beam under the house when I arrived. Who's the surfer? I thought to myself. Paul is Oregon at heart but looks like California. He has wild blond hair and a smile that endears him to women. He's framed tightly with muscle, carrying his midsize stature in efficient, able-bodied strides. A swimmer's arms, not bulky with excess, but efficient, thick, and sun weathered.

There were old friends to catch up with, so we didn't talk the first day. Night came and I slept in a hammock on the porch. I was awakened shortly after sunrise by someone dragging a kayak over the dunes and onto the beach. I watched as Paul lifted the kayak to his shoulder and stumbled fifty yards to the shore. He dropped the boat into the water, pulled the two-sided paddle from the inside, and lowered himself into the opening. He launched out, through the short breaks, and slid along the still side of the Gulf for a few minutes, getting a feel for the kayak; then he turned away and paddled into the ocean till I lost him in the horizon. A half hour or so passed and he didn't return. Concerned, I rolled out of my hammock and stood against the railing. Still no sign of him. I kept mistaking waves for him, before finally finding his paddling motion, the oar coming out of the water like a pump, shoving back in on one side, then the other.

That evening, around the fire, Paul told us about his morning ride. He said he had found a school of dolphins and ridden above them as they crisscrossed beneath the kayak, playing with him, surfacing less than ten feet from the boat, and then diving into the deep. "It was as if they wanted to race," he said. "They were gliding beside me the way a dog runs beside a moving car."

These sorts of exploits earned our admiration, and once assured he was not interested in our girlfriends, we included him on road trips. Paul was welcome company, and his van came in handy. We made weekend runs to New Braunfels and central Texas, only stopping to pee off bridges, always holding it in through the pain and torture until finally we would hit a river or an overpass and we would fold out and stand at attention along the railing, holding our heads up toward the sky and breathing sighs of relief.

Soon we began talking about an extended trip, one that would have us living in the van for months, meeting new people and discovering regions of the country we had never seen. We plotted hypothetical routes up the East Coast or north to the Great Lakes. We bought a map and traced back roads connecting Civil War battle sites. We considered the Bible Belt and the Florida Keys. We pictured ourselves in New York and actually made a call to inquire about Yankee tickets. Paul and I began to consider the trip seriously. We spent days on the Internet and at the library flipping through glossy pages of mountains and rivers and cities at night. When our dreams gave way to plans, our other friends faded back into thoughts of responsibility and comfort. They became apprehensive; it would mean leaving their jobs or taking a semester off from school. Soon, Paul and I were the only ones willing to go.

There were, in our good-byes, sentiments of permanence. Some good-byes were more substantial than others. Kristin's last embrace felt difficult. Our relationship had come to an end because of this trip. I could not ask her to accept a halfhearted promise of returning soon, so a few days before we left, I called it off.

We parted with dignity. In our last hours she had asked, again, my reasons for leaving. I told her of the need to travel, to gain memories, and to be, for a while, completely free. She could not understand but accepted my explanation with understanding and an assurance there was something better for her just as there was for me.

Our time together ended too soon. We were to be at a friend's house where our close-knit group had gathered to say good-bye. Paul's van was already there when Kris and I arrived. We could hear people talking inside, so we walked in without knocking. The room was filled with familiar faces. Paul was on the couch with Bob, Jim, and Kyle. He was vaguely answering a question about our itinerary. Tia, Heather, and Kurt were standing in the kitchen. Jeremy, who was sitting on the stairs, playing his guitar, was the first to notice us.

"You know, I never took you as the hippie type," Jeremy said.

"Never took myself as the hippie type," I said. He took his hand off his guitar and reached out for mine. Gripping my hand tightly and matching my eye, he said, "I'm going to miss you."

"I will miss you too," I replied.

Within seconds we were surrounded, and Kristin slid off into the kitchen to avoid the reality of the moment. There were sincere good-byes; tones of loss were in our voices. It felt good to be in the spotlight, I have to admit. We were vagabonds, drifters, rebels setting out to see America. There were stories and laughter and promises to write. Fred gave us silver crosses on leather straps, and Dan gave us wool blankets he took from his Coast Guard barrack. I sensed an innocent envy from the guys. We wished they could join us, and they wished likewise, but school and work owned their youth. Trips like ours are greener grass left unknown for fear of believing trite sayings, sayings that are sometimes true. But theirs is an existence under the weight and awareness of time, a place we are slowly escaping, a world growing fainter by the hour and the mile. Our letters will arrive like messages in bottles cast from the luminary of distant shores.

Each mile driven lessens the weight in my chest. Our friends are back in their homes, long asleep. And we are fading from the familiar into the unknown. The glass towers have given way to suburbs and darkly lit shopping malls. We are in that part of Houston where the sons of the sons of cowboys live in master-planned communities and play golf on weekends. They married their high-school sweethearts and exchanged horses for Volvos, half of them Southern Baptists who aspire to be politicians.

The van moves slowly. I am able to focus on a reflector mounted to the concrete barrier separating the north from the southbound lanes. As we approach, I turn my head to watch its white brightness dim as we pass.

"At the rate we're going, we may not reach the Northwest till next winter," I observe.

Paul leans his weight into the gas pedal. "At this rate we may not even get out of Houston till winter."

Paul is more comfortable with the slow progress than I am. We are cruising at a sluggish fifty miles per hour, and when ascending an overpass, the van chugs and loses a few notches on the speedometer. From the passenger's seat, I can see into the console, where the miles are clocking at a snail's pace.

Paul has nicknamed his van "the road commode," and it's a fitting name. The box-shaped van barely passes state standards. Throwbacks from the sixties, these vans are mobile intimations of the Woodstock era. Volvo-encased couples pass us on the street, look into each other's eyes, and remember when. I understand why this is the hippie "vehicle of choice." The van can comfortably sleep four (five if you lay a board across the two front seats). Paul has reconstructed the sink cabinet with wood scraps. It sits directly behind the driver's seat. Beyond the sink, parallel with the back window, there is a bed folded in a bench. Another bed can be created by turning a crank that lifts a tentlike contraption on the roof. There are two boxes of books on the floor between the sink and the bench, and another box of groceries and utensils in the open space beneath the sink. Several blankets are folded and sitting on the bench, and both of our backpacks lean against the side seats where a person can easily get through to the back. The interior is a black, waxlike plastic and rubber. They built this van when plastic was a new material so it's more rigid than the stuff they make now. A working stereo hangs out of a hole in the dash, and there are a couple knobs that work vent directors within the console. The gearshift is long and comes out of the floor. Volkswagen vans have rear engines, so we are sitting at the absolute front of the van. A glimpse over the dash allows me to see the headlights and the front bumper with the road sliding beneath.

Stretched before us is an endless system of interstates, highways, and back roads, a trail system of sorts, connecting city to city and state to state, Home Depot to Starbucks. Every intersection passed is an artery leading to workplaces, schools, and homes. Small towns dot the interstate for more than fifty miles north of Houston. Each city its own world; high school football games, church picnics, and Boy Scout meetings keep lives moving in a comfortable rhythm. Tonight they are but clusters of streetlights strung from neighborhood to neighborhood. Each neighborhood with its homes, each home with its family, and each quiet soul sleeping one thin wall from another. Charles Dickens tells us every heart is a profound mystery to the heart beating nearest it, and I am starting to understand him. Watching the dark towns pass gives them a new significance. During the day the roads are clustered with cars at stoplights, but tonight the thick, dark lines simply separate one neighborhood from another, one socioeconomic group from the one it once was. And it is odd for me to consider the thousands of sleeping people, quiet in their homes, their clocks ticking on the walls, the dogs breathing at the feet of their masters' beds, and to realize there are six billion people living in six billion settings. These homes house families we don't know. So many sleeping people, all of them spirit, bound by flesh, held up by bone and trapped in time.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THROUGH PAINTED DESERTS by DONALD MILLER Copyright © 2007 by Donald Miller. Excerpted by permission.
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