Author normanjameson

Building for the past

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During our 40th wedding anniversary trip to Europe this spring, my wife and I visited the underground bunker being restored by enthusiasts at Schoenenbourg, France.  This impressive fortification is one element in the defensive Maginot Line built after World War I to keep Germany from invading France ever again.

Named for French Minister of Defense Andre Maginot, the line was a 450-mile long series of bunkers, barriers, artillery casemates and passive impediments along the border between the two nations. The Schoenenbourg bunker is one of the few remaining vestiges of the earnest effort.

It housed more than 600 soldiers who lived 100 feet underground in a virtual city equipped to support them for months. Food, supplies and munitions moved through the mile long system on a rail network. Telephone communications connected outside spotters to inside decision makers. Redundant air pumps and filters kept the atmosphere belowground inhabitable.

There were 45 such bunkers in the line to provide live resistance to a potential invasion, along with 352 casemates and more passive barriers such as angled concrete pillars.

The Maginot Line represented a massive commitment by France even as it struggled to recover from devastating WWI. But the perceived threat of a restive Germany and centuries of cross border infiltrations and alliances merited the investment.

The problem was, the Maginot Line was built to defend against a past threat. It was built to stop infantry, open-air troop carriers and thin-skinned battle tanks of WWI experience.

When Germany invaded France in May 1940, they flew over the Maginot Line, rolled around the end of the line through Belgium and through a break in the line through the Ardennes, which Maginot deemed too impenetrable to require fortification. Germans blew past passive defenses with their fast and powerful Panzer tanks. In seven weeks they were in Paris and the French government had surrendered.

French intentions were right. Their execution was good. But they built to defend against issues and fears of the past without accounting for future threats that would be significantly different.

This is not an uncommon situation.

In current times, the music industry built a line against pirated CDs while online music distribution flew over the defense.

American automakers defended themselves against each other’s paltry products, while higher quality cars invaded from overseas.

Furniture factory owners in North Carolina defended themselves against unions and lower profits by clinging to antiquated production methods, while Chinese manufacturers built efficient new factories from scratch.

Are you crouching behind a Maginot Line at work, clinging to former processes, staffing and equipment, while competitors punch through your product line with better tools and innovation?

Is your church trying to defend itself from the perceived threat of its surrounding culture while young people who easily learn to navigate the culture are finding your bunker increasingly irrelevant?

Those who build to defend against a past threat will be overwhelmed easily by the real challenges of the future.

Rainy walk proves journey is key

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Rainy weather washed out our plans to ride bikes on the greenway. So my 7-year-old grandson Grayson and I rolled pennies, of all things.

Sue Ellen and I had months of loose coins that we’d started rolling the day before, but we weren’t going to do the pennies. We were going to just run them through the bank’s counter and pay the confiscatory fee by which they charged us to count money we were going to put into an account in their bank.

We’d sacrifice the 8-10 percentage tariff for the pennies, which weren’t worth the effort, but not for the big coins.

But, with us scrambling for entertainment on a rainy day we decided to roll pennies. Anything you can do with a little boy that gives him a sense of accomplishment is a good thing. So efficient were we, that we ran out of coin wrappers.

That necessitated a trip to the Dollar Tree a mile and a half away to get some more. I hated to drive the car that short distance, and the roads were too wet to safely ride our bikes. But the misty rainfall was not too furious to keep us from walking.

After assuring me that he could do the round trip, Grayson and I took off for an adventure, him in an old cap of mine, and a raincoat that dwarfed him.

We observed three power company trucks driving through the neighborhood as we walked, and remembered how the lights had flickered at our house, but hadn’t gone out. Odd.

We chatted as we walked, noting the quiet swimming pool on a rainy day, revisiting my recent bike wreck when he had gone for help, talked safety rules about walking on the road, teased about “chasing girls” in a few years that made him turn red.

I realized he didn’t think he’d have to wait that long. On the return trip, I made sure to inform him girls have cooties.

We talked about how a hill looks much higher and steeper from the top of a previous hill, but seems to level out as you walk it. So don’t be discouraged, keep moving forward.

He sounded the “how much further” refrain after the first mile, but by then we were in the shopping district and I could point out the traffic light we needed to reach. Alas, when we got there, the store was dark.

Employees sitting in front said they had no power and could not let us in the store. I moaned. A long walk for “nothing.”

Disappointed that we couldn’t accomplish our goal, and knowing how fragile a 7- year-old’s countenance can be, we started the long walk back home empty handed. We noticed, however, that on the other side of the street lights still blazed – including at a donut shop.

I suggested a detour and took the opportunity for more teaching about power lines, grids and transformers and how one side of the street can have electricity, while the other side remains in the dark.

I also shouldered my grandfatherly responsibility to illustrate the distinct taste advantages of an apple fritter over a chocolate covered cake donut.

Just when it looked like our adventure was a strike out, a hot and tired grandson with a chocolate smear on his face said, “We’ve got to do this again, papa.”

Grayson reminded me that time is our most precious currency and when you invest it on the journey your destination is irrelevant.

 

 

Learning terror on the highways

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Self-driving cars are racing into our future. They supposedly will cut fuel consumption, extend our suburbs yet decrease commute times, cut the number of cars on the road by more than half, ultimately make our roads safer and cure the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Scientists theorize that a car with a dozen or more computerized “eyes” that are constantly alert and instantly responsive will be safer than a car with a human driver with just two eyes whose response times vary because of distractions like sleep deprivation, cell phones, music, mirror checking and messy sandwiches.

In the meantime, we humans are going to have to continue to navigate our crowded, crumbling roads and teach our offspring to drive safely upon them as well. It’s an important, and potentially terrifying lesson.

In fact, I remember just how terrifying it can be.

The 1979 movie “Alien” was the most terrifying cinema I’ve ever watched. I was sure the monster was in the cat and I urged Sigourney Weaver to leave it behind as she abandoned her space ship, but she went back for it!

I didn’t know until the final credits rolled that the movie was over. I relaxed for the first time in two hours and my stomach was sore three days from the tension.

But I didn’t know terror.

I’ve been trapped in a July hailstorm above timberline on Pikes Peak with the trail disappearing beneath ice and darkness approaching. We couldn’t have survived a night on the mountain me and three buddies braved the storm, climbing, exhausted, to the top.

But I didn’t know terror.

When I was sideswiped on a rain slick interstate by an 18-wheeler on a cold dark night, I still didn’t know terror.

I’ve taken the subway from New Jersey into Manhattan at midnight, heeding a native’s warning to sit as far front and as near the conductor as possible. I perched on the scarred plastic bench holding my country mice eyes unseeing, straight ahead. I pled silently for a cloak of invisibility to drape over me and to cover the neon sign I knew flashed above my head saying “Easy Mark.”

But terror remained only a textbook definition, a movie subject, an Edgar Allen Poe concoction. I only thought I knew terror, like a boy thinks he knows love.

Then, I took my 15-year-old daughter driving for the first time. And I discovered terror.

I grew up on a farm, driving tractors and trucks in the field from age 11. I learned the levers and pedals that made things go in slow-moving vehicles, in wide open spaces.

I had no idea until that first driving lesson how narrow are the roads or how close to the roads are mail boxes, or how sharp are the curves and how abruptly the pavement drops at the shoulder, or how wide are oncoming vehicles.

In the very first moments, after Erin adjusted the seat, mirrors, seatbelt, radio, sunglasses and hair, and figured out which pedal was go and which was stop, she almost took out one of those mailboxes. Fortunately, the ditch we rolled into on the other side kept the box safe.

It’s a helpless feeling, to be sitting on the rider’s side, with no brake and no steering wheel when all manner of disaster careens at you. I pushed a size 10 footprint into the floorboard when Erin didn’t seem to turn the wheel enough to accommodate the slow rolling curves. Unlike a 3-D movie simulation, these terrors really can jump off the screen like a Velociraptor to bite off your head.

I told Erin to ignore the cars on her bumper, and not to fear the ones coming toward her seeming to take up the whole road. When they get closer, you’ll see the road really is wide enough for both of us, I assured her. And the bridges only seem too narrow. And 30 miles per hour is fast enough!

You cannot imagine how dizzyingly fast 40 mph seems to a dad when his first time driver is behind the wheel.

To her credit, Erin finished the one-hour session with a new appreciation of how difficult and mind bending it is to drive well – a task that looks so easy when observing an experienced driver. She made a lot of progress and our next session was much easier. (I won’t go into the part about trying to teach her how to drive a stick shift.)

And importantly, I was reminded that the best way to overcome the terrors that lurk “out there” – under the bed, around the corner, in the operating room, on the next calendar page, when the phone rings, when your wife says “we need to talk” – is to face them. Get in the car with them and stare them in the eye while racing down the open highway.

Of course, it’s better to have a brake pedal on your side when you do.

 

Don’t Blink

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At the doctor’s office this morning I looked down to fill in the remaining blanks on the form at the receptionist’s desk. It was my first visit so, of course, they wanted to confirm my willingness to sacrifice my first born if necessary to pay their bill.

The office computer had auto-filled some of the information and I just needed to fill in the rest. Staring up at me in simple black text over the white paper form were the identifying factors that would enable them to track me down should I limp out of there with their charges unredressed.

One simple number struck and confused me: 63. I thought at first it was “Question No. 63,” but it was on the first page and the form wasn’t that long. Then I thought it might be a part of my address, or something to do with the third of June. Of course, all of that flashed through my mind in a second before I realized the number represented my calendar age – the number of years since I emerged large and in charge from my mother’s womb.

I would have shaken my head except it’s still wobbly atop my neck from my bike accident, the reason I was at the doctor’s for a follow-up.

Seeing that number reminded me of when I was being transferred from one emergency room to a more capable trauma center three weeks earlier. The medic riding in the back of the ambulance with me called ahead to the trauma center, alerting them that he was about to arrive with a “63 year-old-male, with head injuries.”

“Poor sucker,” I thought. As best I could, since I was strapped to a neck board, I craned my eyes to look round the ambulance because I thought I was the only one riding to Winston-Salem. Turns out I was alone. Then I realized he was talking about me.

Sixty-three? When did I get to be sixty-three? Except for the momentary and exceptional fact of a fractured skull and several vertebrae, I felt 40. Sixty-three was my dad. Sixty-three was grandpa when I was a kid. Sixty-three was plaid pants and knee socks in gray walking shoes, and dinner at 4:30 for the discount.

Sixty-three was not me.

During the first third of my life, I always looked younger than my actual age, and it bugged me to no end. When I was 25 I was married, living in the second house that I’d owned and a college girl came to my door to look at some furniture we were selling.

I opened the door and she said, “Is your mother home?” It took my wife three weeks to re-inflate my pride.

Twenty years later I stood at the register to order a coffee and cinnamon role at Bojangles and the server repeated into the microphone, “One senior coffee and a cinnamon role.” I tried not to cry because my associate who was with me was too busy laughing.

In twenty years I went from “Is your mother home?” to being offered a senior discount.

And now the paper says I’m 63. The mirror agrees. My body nods affirmatively. My mind shouts vehement denial. Goodness, I’m embarking on new ventures infused with still developing hopes, dreams and plans. To quote Buzz Lightyear, I’m setting sail, “to infinity, and beyond!”

I turn to my wife, a wrinkle of concern still lining her forehead as we await the doctor, and ask her to verify the identify of the patient on this form.

That’s me? Age 63? How did we get here?

Don’t blink.

Healing power of the right word

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I suffered a pretty awful accident May 14 while following my grandson on a mountain bike down an open, sloping field on his parents’ property.

We’d been tooling around for an hour, just enjoying a simple ride on a perfect spring day. Who needs a helmet for that? Well, Grayson wore his because he told me, “Safety first.” I should have listened.

He led me to the top of the hill, launching from his uncle’s driveway down through the field. I took a moment to soak in the sight and relish the feeling. His joy was palpable.

He was out riding with his papa, atop the freedom of his wheels and the thrill of a downhill slope. Giving myself just a moment to appreciate the scene, I took off after him, cutting a new path to the left of his line.

A lip at the edge of the field dropped several feet. I intended just to ride it down, hanging on tightly to reach the broader, softer slope. I didn’t see the hole at the bottom until it was too late. In an instant of clarity my brain registered, “This is not going to be good.”

My front wheel hit the hole and the bike stopped dead. I kept flying toward the ground like a spear and landed on my head

Grayson ran back up the hill to see if I was all right. “No, Grayson, I’m not all right. Go get Nana.” I felt like someone had hit me in the head with a 2 x 4 and that I’d lost six inches of height from having my spine compressed.

Within moments Nana pulled the Subaru into the field beside me. She sent Grayson to his uncle Bubba’s house at the top of the hill for a towel to stop the bleeding and for an additional hand to get me into the car. By this time I’d surveyed my extremities, all of which functioned, so I knew long term I would be fine. But, oh, I hurt.

Later tests would reveal fractured skull, cracked vertebrae, bruised spleen, lots of abrasions and cuts that required 10 staples to close. But for now there was just lots of activity with the other grandkids and Bubba and his wife, Sonya while we debated calling an ambulance.

In the midst of that hubbub I heard the sweet voice of 7-year-old Grayson saying, “It’s my fault. I should have told Papa about that hole.” I reached for Grayson’s leg and told him never to think that. He bears no blame.

But during the next 15 hours in two emergency rooms and calls back and forth among family, I kept hearing that Grayson was feeling responsible. That is a heavy burden for a bright, sensitive seven-year-old. It saddened me that he felt that way.

I was released early the next morning and went home with a neck brace to rest and heal. Grayson’s mom and dad, who had been out of town celebrating their 12th wedding anniversary during all the excitement, brought the kids by the house to see that Papa was OK. I knew I needed to find the right words to relieve Grayson of his self-imposed burden of blame.

His face was painfully tentative when he saw my brace, staples and stitches and he was wondering how I would react now that I was upright. In an instant I smiled big, held out my arms and loudly said, “Grayson, my rescuer! You’re the one who rescued me when you went for help! Thank you, buddy.”

In that instant his face transformed from hesitant to happy, from reluctant to rejoicing, from tentative to triumphant. He went from self-blaming to knowing he contributed to my being OK after a bad spill.

Choose your words carefully. A well-chosen word has the power to heal. A quick, harsh word has the power to destroy, to tear a hole in the cloth of confidence.

I know people who still labor under the self-image an angry parent imposed upon them 50 years ago, rather than with the reality of the bright and beautiful people they are today.   Grayson is young and aggravating sometimes because he is so intelligent and curious and he insists there is nothing he cannot do.

But from this day forth, no matter how many times I huff and puff and say, “No, Grayson, you cannot use the chainsaw,” he will know that on May 14, he rescued his papa.

Coming down County B

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Pew research says 63 percent of Americans have moved from their hometowns. Some 15 percent, like me, have lived in at least four states. For most, it was to pursue economic opportunity.

If you’re among the 45 percent of movers who return home to visit a time or two each year, you know the feeling that envelops your soul as you near the place where you grew up.

It wraps me up when I turn off Wisconsin Highway 22 onto County Road B.

I’ve lived in the South since Uncle Sam crooked his finger in my direction in 1972, so coming home has always involved driving north, through the capital city of Madison. Forty years later I need my GPS to get me through town. New interchanges would divert me through strange suburbs sprouting where I once picked peas and corn as a summer canning company worker.

Billboards tout products and services that didn’t exist when I left town: computer sales and repair, wireless telephones, home health, Kia, Hyundai and Honda dealers, Mexican restaurants.

Traffic lights direct cars through intersections where cows once lumbered toward the dairy barn twice a day to make their contribution in an era when we thought, “milk does a body good.”

Driving north out of the big city toward my little hometown the change rate diminishes. I see some farmers have built new houses in corners that weren’t much good for crops anyway. There are fewer farmers, but they have bigger tractors.

They plant every inch, from ditch to ditch, mostly in corn, some soybeans. Oats, alfalfa and other food crops have been squeezed out, thanks to the insanity of subsidized ethanol production.

Fence rows are gone, to give big tractors space to turn, and in favor of raising crops to feed animals in enclosed places, rather than fencing fields for grazing.

Then I come to the top of the hill, and turn right at Rocky Run Cemetery, onto County B. The cemetery seems the same; no one has left.

A restful blanket of snow drapes over the sentinel stones.

County B needs repaving again.

It’s three rough miles down County B to the farmhouse where I grew up; where my parents lived almost 40 years. Each mile wafts the fragrance of memory through the car windows.

I see the Nelsons painted their barn; the Johnsons finally cleaned up that tangle of brush in the front yard; the Rogers’ neglected barn collapsed onto itself, its beams sticking out from the rubble like sun bleached ribs of an elephant carcass.

Hoel’s pond would be good for ice skating this year. In most years cattails eat up the space at the edges and make the ice rough. This year it’s clear.

The pond was our hockey rink. We just had to shovel off the snow. If the ice was thick enough, we could use a tractor and blade.

Driving past the home place the trees are bigger. All the buildings are smaller. Aren’t they?

The “new” owners don’t care for the place like we did. It looks seedy, like a newly retired man growing his first beard.

Dad bought it as a place to raise his family, and a place to putter when he grew old. Puttering there lost its charm with the ambulance that carried mom away.

I don’t stare at the place like I used to when dad lived there. He lives in town now, with a wife of almost 19 years. Although the old place is in the country, “in town” is just a mile further, where County B ends.

The big sledding hill behind the school building I attended for all 12 grades has been knocked down. In fact, the school has been knocked down in favor of a senior adult living center.

Houses fill the old playground. Dad lives across the street.

I drive a lot of roads to get home, but County B forever connects the child I was to the man I am.

 

 

Snowflake Tech Aids Worship

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Record snowfall paralyzed the east coast during the snow event of Jan. 22-24. Churches almost universally cancelled services throughout the Atlantic states buried beneath 20 to 40 inches of snow.

While many Christians likely welcomed the “free Sunday” to sip an extra cup of coffee and stare transfixed at the Weather Channel looping footage of slipping cars, jackknifed trucks, empty grocery shelves, snow shovels in someone else’s hands and people skiing through parks, some others of us felt a small, worship shaped hole in our hearts.

I’m a church person. I like church. I like to be in church among other people who enjoy the community that common fellowship provides in our disjointed world. But wisdom prevailed over valor and we left the car in the garage.

Then George Bullard, executive director of The Columbia Partnership, a group of which I’m a ministry partner, offered to his Facebook friends the opportunity to worship together over the TCP conference call line. We conduct a national conference call 44 Thursdays a year, interviewing thought leaders who have insights that contribute to the TCP mission to “transform the Church for vital ministry.”

This line would be open Sunday, so George enlisted a couple of ministry partners and we notified friends on our social media that we would be having a 30-minute worship time over the conference call line. Simply dial in and join us.

It was spontaneous, creative, and insightful and met a need. Those friends who were camped out on Facebook that morning jumped in and we worshipped, reading scripture, talking about the beauty of creation in the blanket of white and the sound muffling nature of snow.

Our leaders were in three different states. We took prayer requests, prayed and blessed the 10 or so participants who found their way to the phone.

While many of us who want to help churches become Faith Soaring debate its effect – positive and negative – on worship and community, the fact is technology is an increasingly predominant element of daily life – for everyone. Ignore it at your peril.

In the midst of a blizzard of information and opinion here is one little snowflake of insight: don’t let the enormous capacity and complexity of “technology” put you off because you’re not current. Find the niche in which you can utilize the technology you command to build community, even if it’s just the telephone you hold in your hand.

Accidental Tradition

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I love it when gifts start to accumulate under the Christmas tree. They mean it’s really going to happen – again. Until they do, the tree, ornaments, garland, Santa house and candy dish only set the stage.

Like luminaries, but with less fire hazard and less gaze gripping power, the decorations I pull out of the attic for my wife to put up each year, light the way for other Christmas traditions.

I remember when we’d been married a few years and she said to me, “We need to establish some traditions.” She’s so adorable.

“Well,” I said, “the things we do each year are our tradition.” Traditions aren’t established by plotting. They become tradition from accidental repetition.

We traveled at Christmas then, since both of our extended families lived in lands far, far away. Eventually the kids wanted to wake up in their own house on Christmas morning.

The last time we went to Wisconsin for Christmas it was 13 degrees below zero; which is why that’s the last time we went to Wisconsin for Christmas.

We stalked and bagged a tree each year, and decorated it with ornaments often homemade and always meaningful. As young married couples, we and our friends often exchanged ornaments as a way to start each other’s Christmas decoration attic stash.

We treasure many of those ornaments still. They are precious packets that emit sweet memories each time we unwrap them. Our tree today is adorned with little round pictures of our children at very young ages – and now their children.

I marveled to pull out an ornament featuring the face of our first child, born in 1979. This season we hung that ornament on a tree in our house for the 36th time. There’s an unintentionally established tradition continued through 10 houses.

This year we made ornaments of the faces of his three children. Side note: if you teach little ones in church, have an ornament making Sunday. Their parents will call you blessed for decades.

We’re on the third year of an artificial tree whose primary attribute is that it is pre-lit. I slam the three sections together, plug it in, hit the switch and voila! No more wrestling with tangled cords and the only “blue” in the air is on the ornaments.

Oddly though, the lights overwhelm the ornaments. We can see only the light and not the bells, balls, bulbs, pictures, angels and sleighs that hang there with them.

We had the presents under the tree, wrapped and ready, a week before Christmas. But, I just carried them all to a hiding place because the grandchildren are coming for dinner. We aren’t prepared to deal with the pestering questions, package shaking, hovering and begging that would ensue if they were out there in the open but unavailable to open.

When they leave I’ll pull the gifts back down and spread them again under the tree, my own anticipation growing for when they will be back to share the innocent wonder of what must be the most exciting day in their lives.

The stage is set. Tradition lives.

Dreams come true

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A pink bicycle with handlebar streamers and an ice cream truck bell waited in our house all week for a birthday surprise for Adeline, our neighbor who was turning six years old. Her dad stored the bike at our house to make sure it wasn’t discovered before its time.

Grandpa and grandma were down from Delaware. Video camera batteries were charged fully and the stage was set. Then our door bell rang and daddy Greg was there to wheel the surprise over to his house.

We followed him with the camera to record the moment and got just the reward we were looking for: through the view finder leaped a thrilled-beyond-words, literally jumping for joy child who was tickled pinker than a handlebar streamer to see the royal carriage rolling her way in daddy’s hands.

She ran across the yard to meet him, shouting deliriously, “It’s just what I dreamed.”

Daddy’s love to fulfill the dreams of their children. It’s seldom easy because the dreams daddy’s want their children to dream too often are bigger than daddy. When we luck out and strike the right chord and respond correctly to the right cues our own joy is a big explosion in a small container, fueled by our child’s joy.

Adeline herself is a dream come true. She is a miracle baby having had several operations as an infant and her parents still are ever alert to fevers. All the neighbors know to be extra attentive.

All afternoon Adeline worked to learn how to ride that pink bike. Balance was still a problem and she didn’t reach that one magical moment when learning to ride a bike when you’re just about to tip over but something clicks and instead of putting your foot out to brace yourself, you push hard one more time on the pedal and your momentum catches and you’re riding.

After persistent effort, one day she hopped on that bike and zoomed down her driveway completely in control, her hair flying and her smile a wonder.

I imagine her daddy looking out the window, thanking God and saying, “It’s just what I dreamed.”

Keep Turning the Crank

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I avoid cycling in the rain when I don’t have to, but sometimes I must get from Point A to Point B even when the clouds are dumping on me. The last week of September I rode the North Carolina Mountains to the Coast event and it was almost all in the rain.

We rode in the rain, camped in the rain, packed our tents in the rain, set them up in the rain, ate in the rain, walked into the rain from the shower trucks and constantly checked the weather to see when the rain would stop. All we saw was “rain expected throughout the day.” Every day. When the sun surprisingly broke through on day four, we all felt like vampires who must hide from its rays.

As luck has it, we were riding toward Hurricane Joaquin. NC Emergency Management eventually called the ride off with two days to go to keep 1,000 crazy cyclists from peddling toward the very town Joaquin was targeting on North Carolina’s east coast. I did not protest.

My buddy Steve Moorhouse, a fellow draftee in 1972 who had traveled from Colorado for the ride, and my local riding buddy Tibor Shimek rode 300 miles — along with 1,000 of our closest friends — the first four days coming out of Waynesville, to Hendersonville, to Shelby to Concord to Southern Pines. We were blessed to spend three nights with friends, rather than wrestling with the rain and equipment in the campgrounds. Basically, that gave us a night to dry our equipment after packing it up wet in the morning. We were so grateful.

Our first day of riding included a four-mile hill of 10 percent grade. That ascent is difficult for you to imagine but think of the steepest hill in your neighborhood. It’s probably a few hundred yards long and requires your hardest effort to climb or walk. Now stretch that effort the length of four miles.

I wanted to quit on it many times. But I couldn’t find a good place to dismount because the road was littered with walking cyclists! No, the real reason I gutted the climb was because of a failure five years ago.

On the last day of RAGBRAI, the annual ride across Iowa, 10,000 riders faced Potter’s Hill, a one-mile climb that reached the nearly impossible grade of 19 percent at one point. Yes, in Iowa.

I didn’t make it up Potter’s Hill without walking my bike for a spell and it has bothered me ever since. I didn’t even dip my tire in the Mississippi at the end of the ride because I felt I hadn’t earned the privilege. That failure motivated me up the NC mountain through Pisgah National Forest.

Climbing the switchbacks on the mountain road that passes Sliding Rock and Looking Glass Falls on its downside, I could  see only a hundred yards ahead. I had no idea how many switchbacks remained, but I found a cadence I could maintain, though it required my strongest effort. Each turn revealed only another section of hill.

I don’t know how much longer I could have gone, but when I made what turned out to be the final corner and found myself at the top, I was too tired to cheer. I wasn’t too tired to feel awfully proud. Many others made it without walking, but probably half did not.

Our reward should have been a long, swooping descent with a light feathering of the brakes to keep our speed under control. Instead, the downhill was tense because the roads were wet and covered with slick leaves, it was raining and my hands cramped trying to create enough braking power on slick rims to keep from straying into oncoming traffic or going into the ditch. I was unsuccessful only once, but the ditch was shallow.

The beauty of riding in the mountains is that hard climbs are usually rewarded with lovely descents. There is a gift for your sacrifice. Of course, some riders think the climb is their reward and a descent is a waste of time. They are the crazy ones that mothers warn their daughters not to marry.

If on your ride, or in your life, you’re in a hard spot, keep pedaling. Find a cadence you can maintain and turn the crank. The top is around the next corner. Surely.

But you know what? If you must walk it for a while, that’s alright too. It’s not really a failure, and it may motivate you for the next big hill.