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Springtime in the Rocky Mountains brings brilliant sunshine, cool air, and melting snow. A certain spring day in 1986 found me crossing Wolf Creek Pass in the San Juan Mountains which adjoin the Rockies.

At almost 11,000 feet above sea level, the mostly two-lane alpine highway had only two runaway truck lanes on the westbound side. But I was headed northeast back to the Denver area where I worked in an oilfield job for a wireline logging and perforating company. A branch of our company needed a truck and driver to report for a few days’ work in Farmington, New Mexico. Assignment concluded, I was returning on the “Wolf” as that highway was known.

Wolf Creek Pass crosses the Continental Divide with a 7 percent grade and several switchback turns — one of them notorious. Drivers traversing this road warn each other, "Beware of the Wolf.” And for good reason: it's considered the most dangerous road in Colorado.

The truck I drove pulled no trailer. It was a 50,000-pound straight truck 32feet long with 10 wheels: two up front eight in the rear. The promise of spring spilled through the windshield of my cabover truck while peril awaited not far down the road. The peril had little to do with the inherently dangerous Wolf, but you might say a wolf of a different sort had led me to this point in my life.

Utterly thrilled to be drinking in the journey's spectacular beauty, I was only minutes from a disaster, where the truck would come near to plummeting hundreds of feet down the tree-studded abyss.

How did I find myself in such a predicament? Mechanically, it was no fault of my own. But spiritually? Well, that's another story.

It began in 1979 between Christmas and New Year’s Day. That particular giving season found me intolerably selfish as I had resolved for rebellion.

Married only a few years, I had built a business, bought a home, owned a van full of equipment, and was making a decent living for my wife, son, and me. Cynthia and I were active church members. Life was good until selfishness overtook me.

Selfishness overruled sensibility and spirituality when in the winter of 1979 I left Cynthia and my toddler son for work in the oilfields of Wyoming. That’s what I told everyone. I was going to work in the oilfield to make fists full of money.

Thus began the long season of my self-absorbed life. Even in those days, I recalled the Bible story about the Prodigal Son who spent his inheritance on riotous living.

One thinks that satisfying as many desires as possible will bring maximum happiness, and it does, momentarily. But there is no joy, not a speck. Where I thought I‘d find fullness I found emptiness. And more than emptiness, I found a vacuum — a powerful hollowness, a voracious glutton — that devoured any felicity from my life. 

This is how deceitful satisfying one’s self is. This vacuum is a thief, a lying thief. The more I tried to answer the emptiness with the things I believed would bring joy, the bigger, the deeper, the blacker the hole in my life grew. The insidious cycle proved insatiable, claiming more and more of me. How blind can one’s soul be? Instead of rejecting the life-stealing poison, I accepted more, sought more, longed for more. And with every indulgence, the more my soul darkened.

Call it desperation. Call it a guilt trip. Call it loneliness. Call it what you will. Remembering life with Cynthia and how fulfilling that relationship was, I called her about a year later in an attempt to make amends and start again. When I left her, my assurance was to move her and our son to Wyoming. But I had little contact with her because I was the most important thing in my life back then.

Idiot me. Despite a few months of renewed marriage after moving my family to Wyoming, I had made no substantive change in my heart and mind. When I left for a two-week assignment in North Dakota, I told Cynthia to be gone when I got back. She said, “But I’m pregnant.” And I said, “I don’t care.”

Norm Miller can be contacted at nmiller@montanacc.edu