In 1974 immediately after I left college, I was sent to Glenwood Springs, Colorado for a Texas based microfilm company. My job was to microfilm the courthouse records for Garfield County. The job lasted several months and in my free time I was able to become familiar with the area around Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction. It is a beautiful area and I enjoyed my time there which ran from sometime in January, 1974 until June. Platteville was selected only because of its proximity to Denver where the opening scene of Andy in the bus station took place.

The area of western Colorado is fascinating to explore because of the tremendous variety of terrain ranging from the high mountains of Aspen about 40 miles to the south, to the high prairie surrounding Grand Junction, and Grand Mesa, a 10,000 foot plateau just east of Grand Junction. Colorado National Monument is just west of Grand Junction and the Utah desert canyons are within an easy drive as well. There you can explore the famous Arches National Monument and Canyonlands National Park.

I’ve always preferred mountains for vacations and it was easy to imagine scenes placed in the scenic terrain and weather patterns of the area. Why not place a novel in and area where I’d like to vacation? It stimulates the imagination at every turn of the road.

Today we adopted our preliminary cover design. We’ll be making a few detail changes to it when we get the back cover copy finished. But, we thought you might want to see a thumbnail view of where we’re headed with the design, so here it is.

This particular photo captures the daydream-like quality image that Andy (and possibly Bronson) had in their minds while sitting on that boulder in Platteville looking West. Read the book after it comes out and tell me if you agree.

I was a professional photographer in Cheyenne at the time, and this photograph was what I call an “opportunity” shot because of the fluidity of scene change due to lighting, clouds and waning light just before sunset. The photo was taken in Colorado over 25 years ago when we were heading back to Cheyenne from a day of skiing at a Colorado ski resort somewhere West of Boulder. I was able to capture only a few frames before the clouds completely enveloped the snow covered peaks. A few minutes later the scene completely changed character and I packed up the camera and we headed back to Cheyenne.

The camera I was using was a wooden Tachihara 4″x5″ inch view camera. The film was Ektachrome Professional and the lens was a Schnieder 180mm Symmar.

“Dear Walt” was not premeditated!

Quite the contrary … after an extraordinary Sunday morning portrayal of Moses’ exile to Midian, unrelenting words invaded my thoughts, demanding to be heard, until I set them down on paper. Even so, I still cannot explain the insistence of those beginning words that I write them in a letter to someone named “Walt” that very Sunday afternoon.

There is no one person named Walt in my conscious memory of any particular consequence, and therein may lie the attraction of the name … that “Walt” is not associated with a specific person, but instead represents a composite of lives that have consistently steered me in this particular direction, even during the times I was in my own Midian desert.

I did not set out to write a novel. In fact, as I wrote the first few pages, I was hoping I could develop it into my first real short story. But as the characters took on their respective lives and relationships, they required the same thorough development and inclusion as the text of the Dear Walt letter that very first Sunday. The plot took shape and extended through its own energy, due in part to Pastor Dan’s continuing multi-Sunday treatise on the early days of Moses.

I simply could not dismiss the compelling parallels of Moses’ flight from Egypt because it was “a place he could no longer live” in his self-imposed exile, to Andy’s bus journey to Denver and his first days in Platteville. For Moses, Midian offered refuge from the immediate storms of life, as Platteville had for Andy. But over time, Midian was also the place where God prepared Moses for his eventual calling by transforming him into a shepherd, the same occupation which Jesus himself claims in the New Testament. Unwittingly, Andy was trained, much like a shepherd, to deal with difficult situations in other people’s lives as well, all the while kicking and screaming against God, and repeatedly dismissing the call to earnest prayer in the burning bush dreams.

In today’s society many of us have taken similar journeys away from “places where we can no longer live.” I know I have. My journey lasted three and a half decades. Sometimes our journeys are initiated by difficult family circumstances, or an overwhelming urge to express newfound independence as we grow into adulthood. In other cases we may feel hurt or slighted by a church or other untenable religious connection and rebel, as surely as Andy did, against God himself because of it. But if we are truly called by God, he will eventually find us in our everyday circumstance and confront us with our own burning bush experience, often in the middle of life threatening circumstance or our own self-constructed mess. The challenge is to understand in our own burning bush moment that we are standing on holy ground and have no choice but to acknowledge that we were never really in charge of our lives in the first place. The comfort in that moment comes only when we surrender control to Him and realize that with God there are no limits on healing.

Instead of turning away from the burning bush, perhaps we should seek it out.