I love the way the fog-bank clouds creep over the tops of the eastern mountains, but never descend as low as the river valley, like bear cubs sniffing out from a safe distance the pocket of people camping down here.  It’s dawn in Glenorchy, a little hamlet anchored at the end of lake Wakatipu and hugged on three sides by mountains.  The sun is not yet above the eastern ridge although the spiked peaks of the western ridge are lit up like matches.

Melissa and I camped here with Gertie our first night not 20 feet from where I type.  We loved this place so much, we wanted to end the trip here as well.  In one of those odd “male things,” backtracking feels wrong, but as we drove down the eastern shore of Lake Wakatipu yesterday stopping for a “short hike” that turned into an 11-mile trek, I was cured of any resentment or misgivings.  I could drive that stretch of narrow twisted road looking at that lake shimmering a shade of blue found no where else on earth, snatching glimpses of the mountain peaks, some glacier covered, a hundred times and never tire of it. Glenorchy might be one of the most beautiful places I have ever been, and it is certainly the most majestic. 

As evidence that I have reached a place of wonder unencumbered by thoughts or desires, I left my phone (and camera) in the camper van yesterday no longer needing or wanting to capture the experience digitally.  We had been here once already, camera out, seeking those perfect shots to share with all of you.  Perhaps selfishly I wanted the place to myself this time although I spent most of the hike thinking about how happy I would be to show all of you this place, like a kid at Christmas showing you the toys I got.

I have reached a point in my faith journey where I honestly (and at least sitting here right now) without fear admit that I have no idea what happens to us when we die – heaven, reincarnation, dust unto dust, recycled atoms?  I did not participate in any way in the cosmic or sacred event that landed me in my mother’s womb fifty-eight years ago.  I did nothing to earn the right to come into existence, temporary or not. Everything I have experienced, everyone I have loved, everything I have tasted, touched, seen, and heard has been a gift.  If this life, however brief or long or well lived or wasted, was given to me no strings attached, does it really matter what happens when it is over?  What audacity to look such a gift in the face and demand that it last forever. 

To love, to be grateful, to sit in a camper van in the cold morning air and watch the clouds lift off the tops of the mountains not knowing — truly not knowing — if I will ever return here is, it seems to me, the only way to thank and praise whatever creative force or happenstance put me in this spot to begin with.