For almost all of my childhood, growing up as a homeschooler was extremely lonely. My family knew very few families that homeschooled as we did, and I lost contact with the few we did know in California when we moved to Colorado when I was around 14.After we relocated from the west coast to our new home on the other side of the Rockies, just about everybody I knew that was my age either went to public school or private school, so I was almost always the odd man out.This was exceptionally frustrating...
For almost all of my childhood, growing up as a homeschooler was extremely lonely.
My family knew very few families that homeschooled as we did, and I lost contact with the few we did know in California when we moved to Colorado when I was around 14.
After we relocated from the west coast to our new home on the other side of the Rockies, just about everybody I knew that was my age either went to public school or private school, so I was almost always the odd man out.
This was exceptionally frustrating and depressing: feeling like an outsider everywhere I went—always—really bothered me, especially because I knew that A) it wasn’t my fault and B) there was nothing I could do about it.
Being a teenager in a conservative, homeschooled family with precisely one social circle (a church youth group) where we had almost nothing in common with everybody else in the group made things feel even worse.
When we left California and moved to Colorado, our parents decided we would start going to a Baptist church, probably because they simply couldn’t find any Mennonite churches in the nearby area, and they figured that was as close as we’d be able to get.
But it really wasn’t close at all: the kids at the Baptist church were nothing like us. They had never even heard of Mennonites before. When I told my new peers about the church I grew up in, they were completely clueless.
“Huh? You’re Mormons?” more than one person asked.
“No, Mennonite,” I’d insist.
“Dude, are you saying your family is like Amish or something? Do you drive around in a horse and buggy carriage?”
It was extremely embarrassing.
So, we were already in the minority purely from a denominational perspective, and now, adding on the additional embarrassment of being homeschooled was just icing on the cake.
The low-intelligence insults abounded:
* Hurr, hurr… so you’re saying your mom’s your school teacher? Who’s your principal?
* Will you take your sister to the school dance? Will you be the homecoming king and queen?
* What happens if you get sent to the office? Do you have to go to your bedroom?
* Are you the valedictorian of your house? Har har…
But it wasn’t just that our lifestyles were different: our family’s values were extremely different as well. Everybody we knew was far more liberal than we were. I still don’t know why my parents chose to keep going to that church, but it was what it was.
At least for the first year or two, my siblings and I were the only homeschoolers we knew in our entire group of friends, but I participated in everything the youth group had to offer despite the stupid jabs from the jerks I met because I was so desperate for friendship and connection of any kind.
Some of the kids I met in Colorado were kind, but almost all of them were public schoolers who had lots of friends and who lived what seemed like fabulous lives that revolved entirely around themselves.
They mostly came from very small families, often with just one or two kids, lived in big houses, participated in expensive sports and music programs, and spent every waking moment of their lives obsessing over shallow, vapid things like dating, wearing fancy clothes, watching tons of TV, and gossiping about everyone else they knew.
When I compared my life to theirs, the thing that stung most of all was that almost every kid I knew, upon reaching driving age, was given a car as a present by their parents.
There was just so much about their lives I couldn’t possibly understand. They went to dances at school, held hands, kissed each other, called each other “boyfriend” and “girlfriend,” watched movies I wasn’t allowed to watch, listened to music I wasn’t allowed to listen to, and were utterly, completely infatuated with “fitting in” and “being cool.”
They were extremely concerned about fashion trends, knowing the top radio hits, reading the right magazines, and going to movie theaters as soon as the hottest new movies came out.
I never understood this or cared about any of it, and it always bothered me that I felt like I didn’t belong in or around the one group of kids that I was supposed to spend time with.
I wouldn’t say I hated these kids my age, but I was certainly unimpressed and often disappointed in them. I couldn’t understand how people could be so completely shallow, so easily amused, and yet be so impressed with themselves for doing so very little. It often seemed like everybody I knew who was my age just fantasized about growing up to be a cast character on the TV show “Friends.”
When I completed the eighth grade and was now high school aged, I remember looking around at all the kids I knew and asking myself: “Do I really think I’ll still be friends with anybody here when high school is over?”
The answer to that was, clearly and sadly, “no.” I was completely different in almost every way from all the kids I was surrounded with. I couldn’t imagine what their lives were like as carefree, “normal” public schooled kids, and none of them had a clue about what my life was like as a homeschooler.
Until one day, when out of the blue, a stranger showed up at our church: a young man I’d never met before who finally seemed to have a few things in common with me… who gave me some hope.
One random Sunday, I met Shane, a relative of one of the boys I already knew in the youth group. His family, for some reason, decided to start coming to our church.
Shane was about a year older than me, about my height, had my same build, and even combed his hair to the side just like I did. He had a baby face that was COVERED in freckles, and he was socially awkward, but there was one thing about him that changed everything for me: he was a homeschooler.
A HOMESCHOOLER.
Just knowing that I was no longer the only homeschooled kid in the youth group (aside from my siblings) made him immediately noticeable and interesting.
Whether he and I had much in common personally or not, I was absolutely going to get to know this guy. We were now the only two homeschooled boys in the youth group, and that alone meant I already had more in common with him than anyone else.
Finally, I could talk to someone else who did his schoolwork at the kitchen table.
Finally, I’d have a kindred spirit who knew what it was like to be done with school by the early afternoon, reveling in freedom long before everyone who went to public school was even released.
Finally, I knew at least one other person who could also make fun of all the weird jargon public schoolers used. Strange words like: intramurals, mock trial, forensics, magna cum laude, hall passes, pep rallies, study halls, enrichment, advanced placement, international baccalaureate diploma programs, and all manner of bizarre concepts that all seemed like foreign language gibberish to me.
I immediately struck up a friendship with Shane. And it seemed promising… at first.
Like most other people I knew at that time, Shane came from a relatively small family: just four kids, which was just under half the size of my family, which had nine kids.
That wasn’t that big a deal, but I noticed that he did seem odd in a way I could never quite put my finger on, and he had a weird sense of humor, but I was just finally relieved to meet someone else close to my age who lived in Colorado and who knew what it was like not having taken ACTs or SATs or not even knowing what those were.
After we got to know each other over the course of a few months, he invited me to his house for a sleepover, and it seemed like my life was forever changed.
His family lived in an enormous, beautiful home on acreage in the Colorado mountains. They had all kinds of toys: a jacuzzi, ATVs, BMX bikes, and lots of other things that made their lives seem incredibly exciting compared to mine.
I could barely believe my good fortune in finding a new friend like this. He and I weren’t a perfect fit when it came to our friendship, but it seemed like we had enough similarities that it still made sense to be friends.
Or that’s what I told myself. I think if I were being honest, I was actually feeling like a woman who’d been asked out on a date by a man who wasn’t especially handsome but who drove a Corvette.
If I had said it out loud, I would have been embarrassed to admit it, but it was simply the truth that I was determined to develop a friendship with this guy, if only for his stuff. I wanted access to this kind of life.
Whenever Shane and I spent time together, I always tried to make sure I went over to his house rather than having him come over to mine. Even comparing our houses felt embarrassing.
He lived in what seemed like a luxurious mansion on a sprawling grassy property in the mountains that had a collection of incredible gadgets. My family lived in a decent-sized house, but it was also filled with people and was on a cramped lot in the city. And we had nothing like ATVs to play with.
His house in the hills had a natural pond out front, complete with a wooden bench next to a giant evergreen tree, and stocked with Asian Grass Carp. In my mind, it looked like it could have been a set for a romantic movie.
My house in the city had a figure-eight-shaped “koi pond” in the basement made of concrete and painted brick that was built in the 1970s and had been completely dry and abandoned for decades. It looked like it could have been a set from a wacky Woody Allen film or a documentary about people with hoarding disorders.
I wanted so badly to leave our house and live in a house like his. Everything about it was exciting and fun, and I couldn’t imagine how much better his life was than mine.
That first summer after I met Shane, I spent as much time as I possibly could at his house. They had an enormous fish aquarium in their massive living room, a huge back porch with an amazing mountain view, and a hot tub for soaking in late at night and looking up at the stars.
They had a video game console (which my family had never owned), and they even had a DVD player, which was something I’d never seen before. Shane showed me just how sharp and clear the picture quality a movie could have on their ginormous flat-screen TV they had that probably cost them $5,000 or $10,000.
All of this was intoxicating: I nearly felt drunk at the possibilities I never knew could even exist in this world and just how extravagant everything was.
His family seemed nice, and they were so permissive compared to my family that it was almost unreal. His parents let us stay out late at night, chopping firewood, building our own campfire, and sleeping on the top floor of their chicken barn.
I was almost deliriously happy with finding my new friend. His best quality, as someone older than me, was a total game changer: the fact that he owned his own car.
And not just any car: he had a Jeep Wrangler.
All of this coolness was almost too much for me to take in. Was it a dream? Was this an illusion? I now had a friend who lived in the mountains, who could now drive me around without my needing to ask my parents to pick me up and drop me off?
Having a Jeep was far cooler than simply owning a car: he had four-wheel drive, and sometimes we’d go off-roading in the mountains around his house. This was a total blast.
I hadn’t turned 16 yet, so this new development in my life meant freedom. Having a friend with all these capabilities: spending time in the forest, staying up late, driving to and from youth group events without needing to ask my parents for a ride, cruising across rivers and rocks in the mountains in a Jeep with the top down… it all seemed too good to be true.
And, over time, the honeymoon phase ended. I started to realize that, aside from having some similar interests and background, Shane was really nothing like me. And his family was really nothing like mine.
As I got to know him more, I slowly started to develop a feeling about him that was…eerie. I wouldn’t have been able to describe it if you had asked me, but I did sense that there was something about him I just didn’t trust.
It was never anything big—just occasional side comments he made every once in a while that would catch me off guard or small actions he took that I found slightly disconcerting.
I kept spending time with him anyway because I was so desperately lonely, and spending time with him, as awkward as it might have been, was still better than being stuck at home.
One of the biggest differences between our families was how his parents were so much more laid back than mine, to a level where it almost seemed absurd.
For one example, he was allowed to watch outrageously inappropriate movies like “Austin Powers.” The sheer number of jokes and quotes he shared from that disgusting movie made me feel sick.
He laughed and laughed about some guy named “Fat B*****d” and a scene where one man apparently drinks another man’s diarrhea out of a coffee cup. Yuck. I never wanted to see that movie, even if I had been allowed to, and I couldn’t understand why he did.
The way he took advantage of his parents’ hands-off approach caused me concern at times, too. One weekend, late at night, Shane, his brothers, and I all went to the back side of their property and lit a fire.
They had a very normal-looking fire ring where they’d clearly had fires many times before. But at least on this night, one of his brothers took a gas can and poured gasoline all over the logs they were going to burn.
In the process, though, he also spilled gas all over the rest of the ground, apparently thinking this would be a very funny way to start the fire.
A lit match was dropped onto the firewood.
WHOOSH!
Everything in the fire pit went up in flames… as did all the little trails of gasoline that had been splashed all over the ground.
Long lines of fire shot up all over the place in a labyrinth pattern, including where I was standing. We all jumped up in fear and ran away as the fire ripped right past us, between our legs, and all over the surrounding area.
The other boys guffawed, falling over with laughter at how hilarious it all was. I was terrified that they might have accidentally burned down the entire forest surrounding their house. At a minimum, I thought we’d get in trouble for being so careless.
But nothing happened.
To his family, it was apparently no big deal. Their parents never even came out to check on us at all. I thought this was extremely weird. What kind of parents let their teenage kids play with gasoline and light crazy fires without supervision in the backyard late at night… when they live in the forest?
But nothing bad happened, so I put it past me.
One thing that impressed me about Shane was his ability to provide for himself financially, though I could never quite make the numbers work in my mind.
For example, the fact that he was able to buy a Jeep at all was surprising to me because he didn’t even even have a job. He would sometimes babysit the neighbor kids, but he only got $10/hour for that and it was very part-time.
I asked him how much he paid for it and was stunned when he told me it cost him $7,000. “Wow,” I said, shocked at such a large amount of money for a young man who was barely old enough to drive.
He said he bought it used from a friend, which obviously explained the relatively low price for such an amazing car. But I was still confused: how on earth could he afford something at that price, whether it was a good deal or not?
“All I can say is,” he told me, “it was an answer to prayer.”
Well, his prayers must have been far more powerful than mine were; this big, beautiful Jeep Wrangler was the biggest answer to prayer I had ever seen in my life.
When winter came, Shane invited me to go camping with him in the mountains with just the two of us. As a young teenage boy, I had gone camping before, but almost always with my dad and never without adults.
“Really? You mean just you and me?” I asked.
“Yeah, just us,” he said. “It’ll be great. I’ll drive. We can go backpacking on Mount Evans. Have you ever gone backpacking before?”
I never had. Well, I had brought a backpack with me on camping trips before, but I’d never gone backpacking. I didn’t know exactly what that meant.
“Do you have a rucksack?” he asked.
“A what?” I wondered. I’d never heard of this before.
He told me a rucksack was like a fancy backpack for people who want to go hiking a long distance in the mountains. It’s built in such a way that it distributes the weight high on your back, so it’s not so heavy, and feels less fatiguing.
“I don’t think so,” I told him. All I had was a camouflage-colored “tactical” backpack that I’d gotten at an army surplus store.
“That will work,” he said. “Just make sure to only bring the bare necessities. We’ll be carrying everything in and out on our backs, so we want it to be as light as possible. I am ruthless when it comes to weight: I even cut the twisty ties on my plastic bags in half. Whatever you can do to reduce the weight, do that.”
Not having gone “backpacking” before, I didn’t appreciate the full weight (pun intended) of what he was saying, but I would soon learn.
He invited me to come with him for a long weekend: Friday night, Saturday night, then Sunday night, then we’d come back Sunday afternoon if memory serves. So we’d essentially be gone for three days.
Shane said it wasn’t really worth going all the way up to the mountains for less time than that. It was so much work just to get there and back that we’d want to have as much time as we could actually backpacking.
I asked my dad for permission to go, and when I told him our plans, he almost blew a gasket.
“You want to be gone for THREE DAYS?” he almost shouted at me, incredulous. I was confused about what the big deal was.
“I don’t even know this guy. He could be a criminal, for all I know! No, you can’t be gone for that long. You’re not old enough for that. Let’s try one night to start and see how that goes. Maybe you can take a longer trip next time.”
Well… that was really embarrassing, but I accepted it. I called Shane to tell him I could go, but only for one night. He wasn’t happy about this at all.
“Oh, come on, what’s the big deal?” he ranted. “Your dad sounds like a real control freak!”
In the end, he decided it was still worth going anyway. So, he picked me up from my house, and we hit the road.
Driving up the highway from the city to the mountains in a Jeep with the top down was an unforgettable experience. The autumn chill was in the air, the cool breeze zipped by our faces at high speed, and the view of the trees and valleys we drove past was simply breathtaking.
At one point during our drive, we had a really awkward moment: somehow, in the course of our conversation, we found out that we both had a crush on the same girl. I had been smitten with one girl in the church youth group—and always that same girl—since my family first moved to Colorado, and we started going to that church.
I don’t exactly know why it took me by surprise that he was interested in her as well, but I didn’t expect it. Let’s just say: the tone in the Jeep changed immediately.
We’d been chatting up a storm the whole ride so far, but this unexpected news created an unwelcome tension between us. Silence passed. I looked at Shane not just as a friend now but as a competitor of sorts… almost an enemy.
Part of me wanted to tell him: “How dare you! I was here first!” as though that really meant anything. But another part of me said, “Hold on, Ron, you’re not in a relationship with her anyway, so calm down.”
But the fact that he told me he’d recently made a pass at her was galling.
Who did this new kid think he was, butting in on my plans to pursue the prettiest girl in the group?
A few miles down the highway, we carefully worked past the uneasiness of this potential rift in our friendship and moved on to other topics.
I realized at that point, though, that Shane had always felt like a bit of a threat to me.
And not just because he wanted to start dating the girl I was secretly in love with… it seemed like he always had a strange anger management problem: I suspected there was a rage quietly simmering under the surface of his otherwise pleasant demeanor.
We kept driving, and the sun started to descend in the sky. I could feel the air get colder as we drove higher in elevation. We kept talking, and at one point, I brought up a topic that really bothered him.
“That really CHAPS MY ASS!” Shane shouted angrily in response to whatever it was—I can’t remember what—that clearly ticked him off. This outburst completely shocked me.
First of all, I had never heard this phrase before. “Chaps my ass?” Oh my goodness, what a naughty phrase this was!
Second of all, I saw his anger here for the first time, and it scared me. It wasn’t even directed at me, and I was thankful it wasn’t. But I was nervous about ever doing something to make him angry at me. How would he act then? I didn’t want to know.
I felt even more uncomfortable when I realized that he was driving, and I was now completely at his mercy. I couldn’t even drive a car yet, I didn’t own a cell phone, and I was about to go deep into the mountains, completely off-grid, to spend the night somewhere I’d never been before, with just myself and this new friend I’d recently made who was only a year older than me.
As we headed up the steep mountain passes, I pondered all of this. Dad was right, I thought. I was glad we were only going for one night.
There were many things he said on that road trip to Mount Evans that made me more and more concerned. I started telling him about one of the other girls in the youth group, Sarah, who was a good friend of mine.
“Sarah?” he interrupted me. “Who’s that? Oh, I know her… she’s got nice legs!”
What? This interjection made me lose my train of thought, and I couldn’t even finish my sentence. Why was he talking about Sarah’s body like that?
I had never really thought of her like that before… and even if I had thought of her in a romantic way, I certainly hadn’t noticed her legs before… and I definitely wouldn’t comment on them.
What was that about? Why was he talking like this?
Worse, when talking about another girl in our group, he told me how he’d seen up her dress while she was sitting down on a bench during a church potluck.
“She wasn’t wearing any underwear!” he snickered.
What? Once again, I was nearly tongue-tied, trying to take in what I was hearing. Here I was, thinking I’d found a fellow conservative homeschooler from a Christian family who was just like me… yet, it turned out, he was actually nothing like me.
This guy came across as a creepy, sex-crazed maniac who liked dirty jokes, looked up girls’ dresses, and constantly commented on their bodies, and was somewhat of a pyromaniac. I started to regret coming on this trip at all.
I realized that there had been some warning signs about his strange behavior a few weeks earlier. I had a flashback to where we had been sitting in church on a Sunday morning. As the pastor droned on during a sermon I wasn’t paying much attention to, Shane, who had been sitting next to me, gave me a nudge.
“Psst! Hey, hold out your hand,” he whispered.
Confused, I held out my hand in compliance and watched as he brought his closed fist above mine, then dropped some small, heavy items into my hand.
Bullets.
Staring in utter confusion, my brain tried to comprehend what I was now holding in my palm. Why had he just given me a handful of bullets in the middle of the pastor’s sermon?
Why did he even have bullets with him in the first place? He was just a teenager barely older than me: what purpose could he possibly have in bringing bullets with him to church, and why did he drop them in my hand without warning?
I looked at him, mystified, and saw him smiling with a big, goofy grin.
“Where did these come from?” I asked him, annoyed, almost outraged.
“It’s no big deal. I had them in my pocket,” he said, snatching them back out of my hand.
He put them back in his pocket, where, I presumed, he probably had at least a few more live rounds. The way he was still smiling and giggling as though it were so hilarious made me feel very uncomfortable.
My mind started to worry… did he have a gun with him as well? He really seemed to like surprising people with this sort of dangerous “shock factor” humor, but I found it odd and unnerving. I had originally told myself it wasn’t a big deal, but by now, all these incidents were adding up and making me more and more concerned.
At the end of our drive, we finally arrived at a trailhead and parked the Jeep. We took our gear out of the Jeep and put everything we had on since it was getting cold: hats, gloves, hiking boots, sunglasses, and, of course, our backpacks. Shane had his fancy, expensive, lightweight rucksack, and I had my squat, heavy Army surplus bag overloaded with way too many items.
Trekking up the trails, we walked for what seemed like hours in the pristine, cool mountains. Breathing heavily in the crisp, thin air, we stopped for water breaks, panting as we gulped from our water bottles.
“I made a mistake,” I told him as I took off my backpack during one break.
“Oh, I know,” he said, chuckling. “You brought way, way too much stuff.”
“I didn’t realize how heavy my pack would become! It didn’t seem so bad when I first put it on, but now…” breathing so hard, I couldn’t finish my sentence.
“You have to learn to live without things if you want to go backpacking,” he said. “I only bring the essentials, and I even cut things in half when I can.”
“I know,” I replied. “But I wasn’t sure what to bring. I didn’t have any dried food, so I brought cans.”
“You brought CANS?!” he almost shouted. “No wonder your pack is so heavy!”
He laughed at my idiocy but then gave me a surprisingly generous offer.
“Here, gimme your backpack. I’ll carry it for a while. Take mine,” he said, handing me his rucksack.
“Wow, thanks!” I said, surprised at such a kind gesture.
How nice. He didn’t have to do that, I thought.
We hiked and hiked deeper into the mountains and stumbled into a grove of aspen trees. I’d seen aspen trees before, but not up close like this: we were entirely surrounded by hundreds—maybe thousands—of beautiful aspen trees partially covered in patches of snow.
The sun was no longer directly overhead but cast a sideways glint on the trees. I noticed that one big section of the aspens looked very strange: they were all crooked.
They looked curved, almost like a fish hook or a shepherd’s crook. I asked Shane if he knew why this was.
“Oh yeah, it’s because we climb them and ‘bend’ them down. It’s a lot of fun.”
“What? You ‘bend’ them?” I asked, shocked.
“Oh, it’s a blast. You have to catch them at just the right time when the wood is still soft: you climb up to the top, and because it can’t hold your weight, the whole tree starts to bend over like that, and then you jump off. I’d show you how, but it’s the wrong time of year for it.”
I was incredulous. “Wait, you mean you bent these trees?”
“Oh, yeah. Well, not just me. All of us. My brothers and I come here all the time and climb them. Lots of people do it.”
“So they just stay this way? Isn’t that kind of… destroying them?” I wondered.
“Huh? Not really,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt ’em. Look at them: they’re still alive.”
“Yeah, but they’re all… deformed now. Do they ever ‘heal’ and go back to normal?” I wondered.
“Uhh, no? I don’t think so,” he said.
“And you’re okay with that? You’re just out here deforming dozens of trees out in the forest like that?” I challenged him.
“I guess,” he said slowly, irritated at my question.
I didn’t like this at all. I didn’t understand how someone could just damage whole swaths of nature and laugh at it like it was a joke. It bugged me a lot, but there was nothing I could do, so I just let it go as we put our packs back on and resumed hiking.
Eventually, we reached a clearing in the woods where we decided to make camp. After cleaning up the ground, we pitched a tent near the base of a tall tree in a spot that had a nice overlook of a river. It was all so beautiful.
We started a fire and made dinner. Sitting here, next to a fire, eating from a can, by myself, with just one other guy around my age, I felt like I was now finally approaching manhood.
My dad wasn’t here. In fact, there were no parents or adults here. It was just two teenage boys out in the mountains, doing what young men do. What a freeing, inspiring, manly experience.
The sun finally set, and the sound of the river combined with the crackling of the fire was soothing. We talked late into the night.
Shane told me how he loved coming out here to the mountains and wanted to move to the woods someday if he could. He dreamed of finding a wife who would live in the wilderness with him, completely off-grid, in a place that looked just like where we were.
I couldn’t imagine a life like that: I was happy to be there, in that moment, for a time. But to make a life out of it? That seemed almost impossible.
And good luck finding a wife who’d be willing to do that, I thought.
I told him it would be hard to find a woman who’d want to leave all the comforts of home behind to live out in the wild like this, but he immediately disagreed with me.
He told me how his own mother would have signed up for something like that.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“When my parents got married, the first thing they did was take a ten-day honeymoon out in the wilderness just like this.”
Ewww, I thought. No showers, no running water, and no electricity for your first ten days as a married couple?
I rebuffed him: “Going on a honeymoon for a week and a half is a totally different thing than actually living that way forever.”
It was hard for me to understand his desire. He lived in a big, luxurious house, with a hot tub, and all the toys a young man could desire. It was the best of both worlds: he already had a mountain view but also lived close enough to town that he could hop in his Jeep and run down to a local Walmart to get whatever he wanted whenever he wanted.
Why would someone with a life like that want to leave it all behind? I wanted what he had so badly and couldn’t understand why he didn’t appreciate how amazing it was.
There were a lot of things about Shane that confused me, and now, some things even started to make me feel self-conscious and self-loathing, but also… jealous.
For one thing, Shane was a real outdoorsy-type guy. This was obvious from the simple fact that this was the first time I had ever gone on a camping trip like this, while he apparently did it all the time.
He loved the rough, tough mountain life: camping, hunting, hiking, fishing, being outside, shoveling snow, off-roading, and just exploring out in the wild far away from everyone else.
I didn’t like almost any of that, but ironically, my dad did. I always had a feeling that my dad was disappointed in who I was because I didn’t like the same things he did.
Spending time with Shane on this camping trip made me sad: I felt like he was the kind of young man my dad had always hoped for in a son. The very idea of hunting sounded awful: I couldn’t imagine spending money on a tag, freezing my butt off in the mountains, sitting with a gun out in the wild for days on end, hoping the right kind of prey walked past me, or potentially going home empty-handed.
But I knew that if my dad had come along with me on this trip, he and Shane would have had a blast together, while I would have reluctantly followed along simply to be included in the group.
My dad had always said his favorite movie was “Jeremiah Johnson,” the 1972 Robert Redford film about a man who left the world behind to live alone in the wilderness. I never wanted to be like that, but I knew that Shane did. So the fact that they had this in common, even though they didn’t know each other, made me feel awful.
Why did they both crave this wild, grizzled mountain-man life so much? What was this obsession with living in the forest far away from people, shooting animals, wearing their furs, and spending every night in a sleeping bag?
What was so wrong with living in the city and having running water, store-bought food, and toilets that flushed like I wanted?
As the fire died down and we retired to the tent, I wondered about all this silently.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized I actually had almost nothing in common with Shane at all.
Nothing bad happened between us in the mountains, and (aside from our strange discovery in the Jeep that we liked the same girl), not a cross word was spoken between us the entire time.
But I had a sad realization that this guy, who I originally thought was like me, was so irreparably different from me that we actually weren’t even friends. We were just two people who knew each other.
When I met him, I had hoped I’d found a best friend, but I had misjudged badly.
The next morning, we woke up, stoked the fire, had some breakfast, and then set out to do some exploring. The river right next to our camp was half-frozen: there was ice on one side while the other side had free-flowing water.
I walked around on the frozen side, exploring the ice while Shane busted out his fly fishing rod and tried his luck at catching some trout.
I found a beaver lodge and wondered if there would be any live beavers in it. I spent probably half an hour pulling up logs, wondering if there were any beavers actively living inside. I was astonished to see just how tightly those fat little suckers can build a shelter: it was very, very well constructed.
Log after log, I kept pulling it apart, hoping to find a family of beavers deep inside the giant, muddy mass of denuded tree branches. I became so physically exhausted that I stopped to take a breather and realized just how silly my actions were.
If I pull the roof off of this beaver house and I actually find beavers in here, what would I do with them?
For some reason, I hadn’t thought of this before.
What if they are angry at me for destroying their house? Would they run after me and attack me? I knew that beavers had gigantic front teeth: could they bite me?
I realized that I had been ripping apart a wild animal’s house for the pure sake of fun and curiosity and that this was exactly what Shane had done by bending the aspen trees. This made me feel hypocritical, so I stopped.
I walked over to where Shane was fly-fishing and watched him. I asked about the weird, fat orange string he was using and wondered how that didn’t scare away the fish. He gave me a detailed explanation about how fly casting works, and while everything he said made sense, all I could feel was that I was in the wrong place.
I didn’t really want to know about fly fishing, and I couldn’t imagine wanting to. I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to learn to fly fish at all. And after an hour or so of watching him fly fish and not catch anything, I felt like this whole trip had been a waste.
I didn’t want to be in the mountains anymore. I knew we had to hike back to the car, and I’d have to carry my ridiculously overloaded backpack that was super heavy all the way back. But that was okay: I just wanted the trip to be over.
I felt so out of place. I looked all around me at the mountains. It was all so beautiful. But it also felt… so empty, alone, and depressing. I was so far away from civilization, and it was so completely, overwhelmingly quiet.
This day wasn’t like yesterday: today, the sun was nowhere to be seen. It was just cold, overcast, and gray.
I thought about how I didn’t like the vast, open remoteness of the mountains.
…or backpacking.
…or hunting.
…or fishing.
…or Shane, really.
And I felt embarrassed by that. All I wanted was a friend—finally, a homeschooled friend—who I could talk to and hang out with. I thought I had found one until I took this trip and realized that all I found was someone my dad would have wanted to be friends with.
We went back to our site, broke camp, and hit the trail back to the Jeep. It was a much quieter hike heading back to the trailhead than it had been on our way up here.
I was just ready to be done and go home. I was really glad that my dad said I couldn’t go for longer than one night. I felt like even this one night was too much.
When we got back into town, Shane dropped me off at my house, and he went back home. And that was it.
As far as I recall, I never went on another trip with him anywhere. But I did ponder my relationship with him and this whole weird experience of meeting someone who almost became my friend but never really did, and I thought of what might have been but wasn’t.
A few months later, he told me his family was moving to another state. He was really, really excited about this because they were going to live in the mountains. The vast, deep, remote, rugged mountains.
I was genuinely happy for him. I did not want to move deep into the wilderness like he was going to. But he did, and so that was fine by me. I wasn’t angry at him, and when he left, I had no feelings of “good riddance” or anything like that.
I was only relieved that, with him gone, now I could pursue the girl I had always had a crush on like I always wanted to.
I never did, though: one of the other girls in the youth group told me that my crush was “too preppy for me.” I had no idea what that meant at the time, but I sooned learned that this was essentially code for “she’s too rich for you.” That really hurt, but I think it was actually a fair assessment. All the kids seemed richer than me.
So, once again, I learned a new concept from public schoolers about unwritten social rules that I didn’t understand because I wasn’t like them.
A few years passed, and I never heard from Shane again. I started wondering what he had been up to since I last saw him.
Was he finally living his best life as a mountain man with a wild mountain wife somewhere with a wild mountain child, homesteading, completely off the grid, out in the middle of nowhere, shooting animals for dinner and sleeping by campfires at night? I was dying to know.
So, one evening, I got online and searched for his name to see if I could find out what became of him. Maybe we could connect on Facebook or something.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I discovered.
Shane had indeed gotten married. Good for him.
He had indeed had a child. Good for him.
But no, he was not living in the remote reaches of the vast, uncharted wilderness.
He was in prison.
I gasped out loud as I saw pictures of him on my computer screen. An FBI mugshot. An orange jumpsuit. My friend, in handcuffs, in a court room.
This young man I’d gone camping with had been arrested and was now serving time in federal prison for crimes related to domestic terrorism. His rap sheet included a long list of unbelievable charges:
* kidnapping
* conspiracy to commit murder of federal officials
* solicitation to murder
* conspiracy to kill officers and employees of the United States, including law enforcement officers
* …and more.
WHAT ON EARTH?!
My head spun as I tried to make sense of it all. What? Why? How? What had gone wrong?
All I ever wanted was to find someone I could finally have something in common with as a conservative homeschooled kid in my teen years. I thought I had found one, but, in fact, I had started a friendship with a strange person with creepy habits who had turned out to be a domestic terrorist, and is now serving more than 25 years in prison.
I don’t know what to make of all of this. I had—and have—so many questions. If Shane were here today, it would be hard not to just unload on him.
* What on earth were you thinking?
* Are you out of your damn mind?
* Why couldn’t you just be normal?
In addition to just being angry, though, I think I’d also vent about how I felt hurt:
* Why didn’t you ever call or email after you moved away?
* Did you miss me at all?
* Did you even think of me as a friend, or did I just imagine it?
I think I’d even have some questions for myself if I’m really being honest:
* I knew something was wrong… should I have said something?
* What could I have said, and to whom?
* Could I have stopped him somehow from going down this destructive path?
I don’t really know the answers to any of these questions.
What I do know is that the only camping I’ve done since that trip to Mount Evans is with my sons. I carefully watch them when they light the campfire, and we don’t use gasoline. I’ve still never gone fly fishing, I still don’t own a rucksack, and I’ve never disturbed a beaver’s lodge ever again.
I’m extremely cautious of people who give me bad vibes, and I listen to that eerie, uneasy feeling. I really trust my gut now, even if I can’t fully explain my reasons.
I make it a point to meet all the friends my children want to spend time with, and I try to keep close tabs on who they are and how much time my kids spend with them.
And I will never… ever get close to someone who jokes about looking at teenage girls’ private parts at church.
It’s been a strange, lonely road since high school. I like to go on trips by myself these days. And I constantly try to remind myself that it’s okay that I didn’t turn out the way I believed my dad wanted.
I’ve still never gone hunting, and I don’t want to be Jeremiah Johnson, and I’m not jealous of Shane anymore.
I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never been convicted of terrorism. And I’m not in prison.
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