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You will want to give up.

When you’re not even that far from home and you’re already stuck in a ditch. When your sense of adventure slams up against the inevitable reality of bills and homesickness and costs you couldn’t have budgeted for.

You will want to give up. Don’t.

When your best work falls short and the words don’t flow right, you’ll think of your bed back at home. You’ll remember the comfort of predictability. The safety of not trying. The ease of a life in which nothing is at stake.

You will want to give up. Don’t.

When you realize that nothing is working out as you expected. When you start to wonder if adventure is just another word for irresponsibility. When you doubt everything that at one time seemed so clear – when you start to feel the need to conform to the expectations of everyone around you.

You will want to give up. Don’t

When your popcorn maker burns out. When you run out of Sour Skittles. When you get lost and one part of your adventure takes twice as long as it should. When you get sick and tired of emptying everyone else’s waste (literally and figuratively).

You will want to give up. Don’t.

When your brakes give out and you’re losing control of your life. When your electricity doesn’t work and you fall asleep in a cold, silent, simmering anger. When you drive all day and don’t find what you’re looking for.

You will want to give up. Don’t.

When previous failures push fear to the surface. When each and every hill makes you wonder if there’s a runaway truck ramp. When the kids won’t stop talking, or you and your spouse can’t stop fighting, or you start to wish there HADN’T been a runaway truck ramp.

You will want to give up. Don’t.

Because if you had given up before, you wouldn’t be where you are. You wouldn’t have what you have. You wouldn’t be who you have become.

So don’t give up now. Your future self will thank you for persevering.

The greatest adventure is what lies ahead.
Today and tomorrow are yet to be said.
The chances, the changes are all yours to make.
The mold of your life is in your hands to break.
– JRR Tolkien

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The bus ground to a stop among the loose stones of the runaway truck ramp. My hands shook as I took them away from the steering wheel and placed them in my lap. My legs trembled as they let off the brake, and the burning smell of those brakes caught up to us, enveloped us, reminded us of how bad it might have been.

I looked back at Maile. Her eyes seemed stuck open, unblinking.

“That could have been really, really bad,” she said, her voice wavering.

I swallowed. Nodded.

She took the kids to the back of the bus and turned on a movie. I went out and walked around the bus. Smoke came out from behind the front wheels. So relatively slow had our approach to the runaway truck ramp been, and so effective the 8-inch thick layer of loose pebbles in slowing us, that the bus hadn’t even gone all the way in. Our back tires were still on pavement.

I looked out over the incredible view again – the trees and the cliffs and the mountains. Everything was completely still. Peaceful.

* * * * *

The next few hours passed in a post-adrenaline haze. The nicest officer in the world stopped and made sure we were okay, then called for the largest wrecker they could find. He invited me to sit in his car while he wrote up the report. Every once in a while he looked at me without saying a word, then shook his head in amazement and looked away. After doing that two or three times, he finally spoke.

“You do realize how lucky you are, right? How bad that could have been?”

I nodded, feeling a bit choked up, and looked out the window, up the mountain, in the direction from which we had come.

* * * * *

A few hours later the truck arrived. Two men were in it. One of them, a long-haired mountain man with a six-inch goatee and a few missing teeth, stared up into the bus at Maile.

“Everyone okay?” he asked in a genuine voice.

She nodded.

“White-knuckled it there for a bit, I guess?”

She nodded again, biting her lip.

We waited in the minivan at the bottom of the mountain and took a picture of the truck as it brought Willie down to us.

* * * * *

After a long discussion with the tow-truck driver, and testing the brakes, we went on our merry way. By now it was past 5pm, but we thought we’d still try to make it to Yellowstone, a few hours away.

Just outside of Jackson Hole a herd of bison crossed the road in front of us. The kids all crowded to the front. The huge beasts, from some other time period, lumbered slowly up on to the asphalt, then into the huge expanse of grass on the other side. It was beautiful. Breathtaking. Surreal.

Out of this silence spoke Cade, our prophet, and he summed up the whole day in one sentence.

“We must be the luckiest family in the world.”

For Part One (In Which We Lose Our Brakes at 8400 Feet), click HERE

We pulled away from the scenic view at the top of Teton Pass. Breathless. Anxious. Eager to have the ensuing four-mile descent behind us.

It wasn’t long before I realized we would be fortunate to make this stretch without incident. Even in first gear, I had to use my brakes too often, too hard. The air pressure dropped. The brakes smelled hot after just half a mile.

I pulled into a side pull-off area to give the bus a rest, and my parking brake barely engaged. Adrenaline left me feeling shaky. I opened the bus door. The cold air felt great, and behind us the mountain side was covered in snow, but both were contrasted by the smell of hot brakes. The smell of something important not going well.

After ten minutes or so, I released the brake and began creeping forward. The brakes felt okay, but not quite right. I had no idea what to do, but then I saw another pull-off a few hundred yards ahead. I decided to pull in there and park for an hour, let the brakes cool completely. We might take all day getting down. Oh, well.

By now Maile and the three older kids sat just behind me. Sam napped in the back. The kids chattered on and on about the view, the trees, and the bears they wanted to see. It was surreal – inside, I felt a massive sense of tension nearing panic, yet just behind me the kids were having a great trip. They had no idea.

But Maile – I could tell she knew what was going on. She asked me short questions in a quiet voice as we crept along at 5 mph, questions that I had no answer for.

“Are we okay?”

“Can you stop?”

“Should we pull off?”

I pulled our 20,000 pounds into that next pull-off, preparing to stop, put on the parking brake, and wait until the brakes cooled. But it was at that moment I realized we couldn’t stop, at least not completely. I pushed the brake all the way to the floor, but we kept coasting, a snail’s pace really. It’s amazing how such fear can rise up in the face of such a slow movement. In a last ditch effort, I pulled on the parking brake, but it did nothing. We kept coasting forward.

I had no other option but to coast back out on to the road. This is when we began gaining speed. This is when I reached over with my other foot, put both feet on the brake and pushed down as hard as I could. This is when I realized we could not stop.

A guardrail defined the next curve, to the left, a hundred yards or so in front of us. Beyond the road, a thousand feet of air and rock and evergreens. Beyond that, the town we couldn’t always see, like a tiny model village. Far beyond that, more snow-capped mountains.

Faster. Now we were going fifteen miles per hour. We came around the turn. I began calculating at what point I would need to wreck the bus into the side of the mountain. The brakes were no longer slowing us. Then we saw it – on the left, a runaway truck ramp, the kind I used to always look at and think, Seriously? People actually use those?

“Should we go in there?” Maile asked me. I didn’t want to. For a second my mind weighed up the costs – getting stuck on the ramp, having to get a tow truck. Surely things hadn’t gotten that bad? Then, in that same second, my brain calculated the alternative. There was no alternative. We couldn’t stop.

A few cars flew past us on their way up the mountain. A large gap in the sparse traffic let me cross to the left hand lane. We approached the runaway truck ramp. I committed to it, veering to the left. We hit the ramp at 15-20 mph, and the bus quickly sank into the loose gravel.

We stopped.

* * * * *

For Maile’s take on this near-disaster (and the way it can change your faith), check out her blog HERE. Come on by tomorrow for the final installment, in which we get off of this crazy mountain and move on with our lives. Sort of.

There is that moment in time when you know everything is about to go horribly wrong. It’s that feeling that comes just after the doctor tells you something unimaginable, or when your car starts sliding on the ice, or when someone looks at you and you realize they are choking. It’s when you realize that all the terrible things that happen in the world actually could happen. They do happen. And they are happening to you.

* * * * *

Thursday, May 17th. We are going down a 10% grade (think very, very steep). The bus will not stay in first gear – it keeps kicking up to second, forcing me to use my brakes. Each time I push on the brakes the air pressure drops, and drops, and drops.

Suddenly my foot is flat against the floor and the brake will not stop us. I bring my other foot over. Now I’m pushing as hard as I can on the brake with two feet, pulling on the steering wheel to try and leverage my weight.

“Can you stop?” Maile asks me, a tremor in her voice.

We are only going ten miles per hour, but that is increasing, and soon we will be going much, much faster. I look up at her quickly. I don’t say anything. I just shake my head, no, and try to push the brake harder. Nothing. Ahead of us the road curves to the left. Beyond the road, a thousand feet of air and rock and evergreens. Beyond that, the town, like a tiny model village. Far beyond that, more snow-capped mountains.

We are driving through the Teton Pass, 8472 feet above sea level. And our brakes no longer work.

* * * * *

Thirty minutes before that, we climbed the Teton Pass, amazed by the view. The mountains’ peaks, a harsh mixture of rock and ice, split the clouds. Warnings of a 10% grade didn’t alarm me, although they would be almost double the highest grade (6%) we had encountered up to that point.

We stopped two or three times on the way up to let the bus’s engine cool. The angle of the road began to unsettle me – creeping along at 5 to 10 miles per hour up that mountain, sometimes it felt like the bus could simply stop and coast backward. Eventually we made it to the top.

The view was like nothing we had seen on our trip. The mountain, over 13,000 feet up (5,000 feet above us), was covered in evergreens, a hearty, rugged color broken only by the rock faces of cliffs. I didn’t look forward to the trip down the mountain, but I determined to keep it in first gear and ignore anyone behind us who got upset about our tortoise-like pace. They would just have to deal with it.

I like to keep my posts at around 500 words, so I’m going to continue this one tomorrow. To all of those folks who posed questions to me last week, I hope to have a post with the answers by Friday. Thanks! (And if you’d like to ask me anything about our trip, go HERE and leave a question in the comments.)

Nevada contains inconceivable stretches of wilderness. Salt flats and brush and distant, crumbling mountains feel endless, like some kind of blue funk you can’t quite shake. But there is also something serene about mile after empty mile – a peaceful longing that makes me want to pull the bus over, buy 1000 acres for $6,000 (as the signs offer), and build a small shack in which to spend the rest of my days.

There is something the opposite of serene when you see the bus’s temperature gauge creep upwards on every uphill stretch. There is an internal tension, a focus of will power, a determining that the small red needle will not move any further. And then it does, creeping up over 200. 205. 210.

Then the red light blinks on. The bus shuts off. Since it is impossible to coast to the side of the road when you’re going uphill (at a snail’s pace to begin with), you put on the parking brake, the four-ways, and turn off the engine. Parked in the right hand lane of a two-lane highway.

And there you sit. Sixty feet of vehicle. You might as well drop a mobile home on I-80.

* * * * *

I have many responses to things going wrong. Sometimes I run around like the proverbial chicken, bouncing from one possible remedy to the next. Sometimes I sulk, entering that endless wasteland. Sometimes I lay awake at night, my brain on overdrive. Worry is usually the fuel on which all of these responses feed.

But when the bus overheated, there was one thing we could do: wait.

We waited as the tractor-trailers flew by, shaking us with their passage. We waited as tiny cars we had passed some time ago whirred along. We waited.

So often I try to busy myself to avoid the waiting, and in that busy-ness I miss so many of the things I could have learned, had I embraced the wait. I miss out on life by filling it up with artificial distractions.

After the diagnosis.

After the rejection.

After the failure.

Then, something beautiful: in the midst of the waiting, and the pain, and the disappointment, I find something. Maybe it’s just a small yellow flower growing in the shade cast by a rock. Maybe it’s another way forward. Maybe it’s a different opportunity.

Or maybe it’s an unopened container of coolant in the belly of the bus.

Sam is troubled in his sleep. He rolls from one side to the other on the couch in the bus’s back bedroom. The dim light we leave on for him lights up only one side of his face, the way the sun lights up one side of the moon. Always one side.

He looks like he might cry. His face crinkles up. Then he’s okay, again, having found some elusive peace. He rolls over.

My love for you comes easy
And it lingers very late
I’ve trouble sometimes to find where it hides
but it always shows its face

The next morning Cade climbs up in the passenger seat with a silly grin on his face. He talks to me for 60 miles about Lego castles and the true state of ninjas in the world. Then, when he runs out of questions, he realizes he is hungry and retreats to the back of the bus where he promptly body slams his 2-year-old brother.

Maybe in a deep dark canyon
or underneath the stars
lying in the deep deep grass
My love roams far

Abra points out every letter “A” on I-80 from Reno to Wells, both inside and outside the bus. That’s 250 miles of A’s. Enough said.

Roam far
Roam far
Lying in the deep deep grass
Love roams far

Lucy gently ushers the younger two into the short hallway on the bus and organizes a play time. They laugh and shout and call her “Sissy.” She uses a schoolteacher voice to stop their fights. She smiles peacefully and is a good sister to them.

You can count the constellations
or the wolves as they howl
Count my love for you if you want to
Won’t do no good anyhow

Roam far
Roam far
Lying in the deep deep grass
Love roams far

* * * * *

Italicized words are from the song “Roam Far” by Jake Lewis off of his album Location, Location. Simply amazing album, folks. Check it out HERE.