Highway 61...

runs through some beautiful country on the road from LaCrosse to Boscobel, WI. It's coulee country, hills with deep valleys that the Ozark folks call "hollows" and roads that wind in whatever gap is wide enough for lanes. I imagine how it must be in fall when everything is lit up with nature's own leafy fireworks.

Little towns straddle the road with names like "Mt. Zion" and "Soldier's Grove". Other towns are just a sign pointing down a side road and into another valley. It took a real sense of the need to get home to avoiding a turn and finding out what "Gays Mills" or "Wauzakee" looked like. But the skies above looked like rain and I wanted to rest just a little bit before the work week took hold. So the car and I pushed ahead, down and back, with little time for rest. Things to do, places to go.

I did, however, make one stop along the way and jogged north for a few miles past Westby, WI, to see Living Waters Bible Camp. When you're young and in the Plymouth Brethren bible camp is summer vacation and spiritual retreat combined and I was part of the group that helped build Living Waters back in the day when it was part of a farm and we camped out in tents at night and built things during the day, occasionally taking a break to wander in the hills.

The camp had, of course, added things in the years since I've been there but the shape is the same and just seeing it brought back memories. We had spiritual moments there and sometimes we had girlfriends of the kind you can only have at bible camp. Living Waters was the place where we fought for the sugared cereal in those little boxes at our campsites, where I got a black eye once but kissed a girl too (happened same year but not related) and also where we met distant friends and told stories long into the night.

As I drove slowly around the grounds all of it came back to me and it was everything I could do to not stop, get out, and see if there was anyone there I remembered. I still know the family names from the old days and they still, even though I haven't been with the Plymouth Brethren for decades, probably remember mine.

But there were, as usual, places to go and miles ahead and so I turned back up the valley and drove past the old tobacco shed (in the old days people around LaCrosse grew tobacco in the hills) and up the winding road. My dad, rest his soul, would be proud to see the camp he helped build still alive, functioning, and blessing. As for me it was about continuity, linking my past to the present and finding healing, strength, and joy in it all. How long ago it was and yet how close as well. For a moment I was both the boy who stayed in those dorms and wandered the hills and the man with the collar just passing through and pondering as time stood still.