Here's a recent photo of my son Darren, helping with a service project in Honduras on his church mission. I think it's cool that missionaries are now expected to put in x number of service hours per week or month. I look back on my own mission and think of all the time we spent trying to proselytize during what were typically unproductive hours of the day, and I wish we could have used some of that time trying to fulfill people's temporal needs. (I'm sure it creates much good will.)
Darren has now been in Honduras for two-and-a-half months, and, knowing him, I suspect his Spanish is pretty good already, especially since his companion is a native Spanish speaker. He's started asking me about my missionary experiences all those years ago -- something he never seemed too interested in before now -- which has only heightened my love and empathy for him.
Pinegrove Cabin is a timeshare, near Pagosa Springs, Colorado, that a number of LDS investors from the Albuquerque area built sometime in the late 1970s. My in-laws were among the original shareholders, and I first visited the cabin in 1985 after I married Dorine. For the first few years of our marriage, the cabin was our salvation in terms of vacations, as it provided a ready-made destination several times a year that created very little out-of-pocket expense, and there was always a lot to do. The Rio Blanco runs by the property, and in the early years we could float long distances on the river on innertubes. Also, Pagosa Springs lies within driving distance of numerous regional attractions -- Treasure Falls, Wolf Creek Pass, Great Sand Dunes, Mesa Verde, Silverton, Ouray, various hiking trails -- and, at least when my mother-in-law was alive (and when we generally stayed most of a week at the cabin), we often took interesting day trips. At one time, we had access to a couple of "family" snowmobiles, which made winter trips to the cabin a blast. (With them, we'd tow the kids up and down the road on innertubes; we'd get out on the frozen "pond" -- a vestige of a gravel mining operation just down the road -- and do donuts, hauling an adult on an innertube and spinning him around with increasing centrifugal force until he went flying out across the ice [great fun!]; and we'd cross the river to a gully that made for fun up-and-down riding.) In short, I have a lot of great memories of various times spent with my family at the cabin in the last 23 years.
Unfortunately, the place isn't quite as fun as it once was. The water level in the river has dropped off markedly after up-river diversion took place -- which, ironically, benefits the city of Albuquerque -- making floating on innertubes an iffy proposition. People have moved in full-time at the cabins across, and at the end of, the road, creating a sort of claustrophobic feeling in the neighborhood that didn't exist in the early years (a feeling, I might add, that has only been aggravated since a gate was installed at the bridge, which requires a combination for entry). The kids, who often took the most joy in visiting the cabin when they were small, have all grown up (although all of them still love it up there). My mother-in-law died in 1990, taking a lot of the life out of the cabin for me, and my father-in-law remarried and pretty much stopped going. We no longer have access to snowmobiles for winter fun (and having full-time neighbors and a regularly plowed road would put the kibosh on snowmobiling, at any rate). The town of Pagosa Springs has grown a lot and thus no longer has the cozy, romantic atmosphere it used to have. And worst of all, the water table near the cabin has dropped significantly, causing the old well to go dry and a new well not to produce much. (We've had several stays when it seemed like I spent most of my time hauling water from the river so that other people could flush the toilet.)
Despite it all, we've found it impossible to let the cabin go entirely, as too much of our family's history revolves around it. Thus several members of our extended family have paid my father-in-law for his share, and have agreed among ourselves to rotate stays, although, due to cabin bylaws that prohibit the splitting of shares, he is still the nominal owner. (Obviously, we'll need to decide on a new one eventually and effect a formal transfer.) I don't even know when Dorine and I are supposed to have the cabin next; at this point, however, I do little else up there besides lament how things have changed.
Here's a recent photo of my son Darren, helping with a service project in Honduras on his church mission. I think it's cool that missionaries are now expected to put in x number of service hours per week or month. I look back on my own mission and think of all the time we spent trying to proselytize during what were typically unproductive hours of the day, and I wish we could have used some of that time trying to fulfill people's temporal needs. (I'm sure it creates much good will.)
