IN BLOOM: Rite of Passage at the Corner of the World

by C. C. Kimmel

“I think this is where Kurt Cobain was born.”

We were about three hours into our drive from Portland, Oregon, to Olympic National Park and we’d just entered Aberdeen, Washington. The car trivia app we downloaded had already served its purpose and the comfortable silence of long road trips had settled between my son and me.

“I guess we should play some Nirvana,” Kyler said as he reached for my phone. “You know, in his honor.”

We decided on “In Bloom,” a favorite of mine, and let the angst and power of the lost boy from Aberdeen wash over us as we started north toward the Olympic Peninsula. Within four days, our adventure would take us over 650 miles in two different countries. When I asked my son Kyler what he wanted to do for his thirteenth birthday trip earlier in the year, he said camping, flyfishing, and “it would be cool to go to Canada, since we’re so close.”

Given his wishes, we planned his rite of passage to Olympic National Park, with a quick trip into Victoria, Canada, before heading back to begin his larger journey toward manhood.

In Jon Tyson’s book The Intentional Father, Tyson writes, “Somebody is going to disciple your son. Somebody is

going to give your son wisdom on how to live. …Your son is going to become someone—he is going to grow up. His character will be formed by someone.”

I want to be that person giving wisdom. I want my wife and I, and the community of men and women in our life, to form his character. Though the trip itself carried less stakes than other ancient rites of passage (we did not send him out into the wilderness with a spear like the Spartans), the stakes of going from a boy to a man are high, and chance is a cruel teacher.

We lost signal shortly after Aberdeen, and for the rest of the drive Kyler was forced to listen to the indie rock I had saved on my phone, which he will claim was the most difficult part of his journey. Going north on the 101, we felt nothing but possibility. Possibility for our trip. Possibility for his life. He was already showing evidence of the change. He can comfortably borrow my shoes. His face shows traces of facial hair and his voice is now a solid bass. As we peered over forests and oceans and the rising Olympic Mountains, I saw in my son a blooming of potential waiting to be actualized.

We stopped in Forks, Washington, to get our fishing licenses and a few supplies before heading toward our campsite. I made as many Twilight jokes as I could, which was my duty as his dad, and then we pulled up to the ground we would call home the next few days.

I didn’t grow up camping. Though I love to travel, I’m not what anyone would describe as outdoorsy. There was a small moment of panic as I unloaded the last of our borrowed camping gear and realized that it now had to be set up and functional for life. But Kyler was eager, and together, we figured it out.

I made an internal promise at the beginning of our trip to lean into the surface moments. In an attempt to be intentional, I can often move too quickly into the “lesson” or the “wisdom” and forget that relationships are built on the ordinary togetherness of life. So, with a few exceptions, I was intentionally unintentional with our time. We cooked our hot dogs over the fire. We played chess and talked about music. We put on headlamps and read while the flames turned to embers and the stars grew bright through the forest canopy.

I am painfully aware of the challenges that lay ahead of boys growing up to be men right now. I have four children, three of whom are boys. In the New York Times opinion piece “The Crisis of Men and Boys,” David Brooks writes, “If you’ve been paying attention to the social trends, you probably have some inkling that boys and men are struggling, in the U.S. and across the globe.” Between lower academic performances, growing apathy, and higher rates of suicide, boys and men are in crisis.

My sons will face this crisis. They will come face-to-face with the foolish cruelty of masculinity defined by power and force. They will fight against the growing apathy found in modern men and the temptation of remaining a boy forever. They will have to learn to feel their big emotions without being a servant to them. They will have to face their own demons and find their place in the larger story God is writing.

My son sleeping next to me, though he was filled with possibilities and dreams, was also on the brink of the greatest fight of his life—the fight to be a good man in a world that values the shallow, the cruel, and the aimless. As we slept that night, I felt the weight of it all and knew that it would be an uphill battle.

We had to get going early the next morning. We made the pancakes and bacon quickly before driving to meet the fishing guide. Before we left, we had one of the few planned intentional moments of our adventure. I asked him what it looked like to be a man. Of course, he listed off everyone but me as an example, including my brother and Thor.

The measure of a man is his capacity to serve.

He gave short answers. The conversation wasn’t long. But over the course of our breakfast, he heard me tell him something that I think many boys both need and long to hear: being a man means using our strength and our position to serve and care for those around us. It has nothing to do with sports or cars or muscles. It is not about bank accounts or influence. It is not about high cheekbones or body counts. The measure of a man is his capacity to serve.

We met the guide at a nearby store and followed him out to the Hoh River, a few miles inland from where it rushes into the Pacific Ocean. The Hoh River flows out of a glacier in Mount Olympus, cascading west through a rainforest before sprawling out into the wide bends we found ourselves in that morning. The river was low compared to the other seasons, and the fish, though present, were less enthusiastic than in the peak winter season. But it didn’t matter. Kyler and I walked into the river in our waders and felt the magic of standing in such remarkable beauty. The river was nectar cast down from Olympus and we were there to witness its power.

Our guide led us down the river by raft, where we saw a herd of elk before we made our first stop. Apart from an equally unsuccessful fly-fishing trip when I was about Kyler’s age, I was just as much a novice to fly-fishing as my son. We spent the next few hours trying not to break anything. Our guide was patient but seemed resigned early on that this was not really going to be a “fishing” trip. We were going for summer steelhead, and even saw one leap into the air about a hundred feet from our raft, but the fish were safe. No steelhead were harmed while we practiced our three-stroke cadence of launching our fly into the water.

By the time we returned to our car, our socks were soaked through and our arms and shoulders sore, but we did it. We successfully answered the question of whether or not we could last longer than a day on the show Alone And we were happy.

Before driving back to camp, we stopped at the Hoh Rain Forest. With over 170 days of rain each year, the ancient forest is home to thousand-year-old trees and moss-covered paths. Kyler is not a hiker, so he decided the faster he hiked, the sooner it would be done. This turned out to be a win-win, since I love to work up a bit of a sweat while hiking. But the forest, in all its power, had a different plan and made us pause and watch the work of millennia. In one particular spot, we found a network of connected trees with their roots aboveground. The fallen nurse tree that brought the trees to life had decomposed and disappeared.

Not to be morbid, but I know that one day that’s all that people will see of me. I will be gone and in the ground and the only witness to my existence will be the strength of the trees that sprouted from me while I was here. I made Kyler take a picture next to it.

We spent our last night at the campground much like we did the night before. Bad hot dogs. S’mores. Chess and poker. The ebb and flow of conversation and the comfortable silence as we read next to the fire.

Part of the challenge that boys face as they become men is an insufficient understanding of what it means to be great. There is a desire for glory in everybody that is not rooted in vanity or greed or ambition, but rooted in the glory of the God who created us. The word for glory in Hebrew is kavod, the same word for “weight” and “heaviness.” For too many boys, their greatness—their glory—is too light. Money that can be lost. Strength that will wane. Power that can be usurped. True glory has been replaced by a cheaper and lighter substitute.

One of my favorite quotes from the early church fathers comes from Irenaeus: “The glory of God is man fully alive.” Too many boys are growing up to be men not fully alive. They train to carry the lighter and cheaper weight of meaningless material glory and, when they become men, lack the strength to face the adventure they were created for.

Kyler may not have caught a fish and he might have sped by a tree he should have paid more attention to. But on this trip he was a witness to the glory of God. He was a witness to the full life lived in the presence of true glory.

The next day, we had to be in Port Angeles to board the ferry to Victoria by noon. We made more breakfast and began the task of cleaning and packing up. We were comfortable in our spot by then and a bit of sadness hung in the air, knowing that we were over halfway through a trip we had dreamed about together for almost a year.

There is a desire for glory in everybody that is not rooted in vanity or greed or ambition, but rooted in the glory of the God who created us.

During breakfast, I reviewed yesterday’s brief lesson in manhood and started on the second day’s theme. Once again, his answers were short and the conversation brief. Conversations like this for a thirteen-year-old boy are almost as bad as having to listen to their dad’s music for hours of a drive. I wanted to be intentionally unintentional, but there are things fathers need to tell sons. So we talked about wisdom.

I told him that just like the measure of a man is his capacity to serve, his wealth is found in the wisdom he accrues in life. Something all sons need to hear: wisdom is your greatest asset and the only way to get it is through suffering, mistakes, and time.

As I’m writing this, I’m about six months away from my fortieth birthday. Overall, I have lived an incredibly privileged life. Yet, I have suffered. I have made mistakes. And I’m just now starting to see the payoff of the interest my suffering and mistakes have accrued. I hope that my son, as he grows into the man God made him to be, will remember the ancient trees, the canyons carved by glaciers, and the patience that wisdom demands.

It took longer to pack up our gear than expected and we had to forego our plans to paddle board on Lake Crescent before stopping for lunch in Port Angeles. We were done with the rugged part and back in the type of travel I’m more suited to. We boarded the ferry with our freshly minted passports and watched as the Olympic peaks came into sharper relief behind us.

Though Kyler had technically been out of the country as a baby, this was the first time he was aware of being

in another country. We both leaned over the side of the ferry as we approached the magic of Victoria’s harbor. The city feels transported from England, a truly foreign place within a few miles of the upper-left coast of the U.S.

We decided to spend the hours before dinner seeing the city, so we rented e-bikes. One of my hopes of the trip was that Kyler would get a glimpse of what growing up will look like. I want him to look forward to becoming a man, to experience the freedom that will come with his growing responsibility.

Too often, youth, and the carelessness that youth allows, is put on a pedestal. Thanks to the prevalence of young adult fiction—an American literary invention—and countless movies of the old galavanting as young, aging is passé. A reality to be mourned.

But I reject that, and I want my son to reject that as well. I want him to always see his next years as his best years. I want him to cling to the power of Proverbs 16:31: “Gray hair is a crown of glory.” On that afternoon in Victoria, Kyler got a glimpse of the exciting, big world he would get to explore as he got older.

We skirted along a bike path on the south coast of the city. Driftwood trees lined the sullen coast and the city rose to our left. After traveling a few miles, we decided our e-bikes would be better used exploring different bookstores, so we turned inland for literary treasures. After struggling with the locks on our bikes, we made it into a store in the heart of the Fairfield neighborhood, bought a few books, and stopped for coffee.

Kyler hates the smell of coffee and opted for hot chocolate. As we sat there, I saw both Kyler the boy and Kyler the man. A shiny new city explorer with a heart filled with wonder sipping on a hot chocolate. The possibility that imbued our trip was written on his dark eyebrows scanning the street for where our adventure would take us next.

After returning our e-bikes, we had about a mile walk to our Airbnb. We were tired, but I’m a firm believer in walking new cities, so we made our way through the narrow streets of Victoria to a civilized room with a real bed and TV and showers. After washing days of dirt and sweat from our bodies, we walked to a restaurant of Kyler’s choice—a ramen place with a view of the harbor.

We devoured our bowls. It was the best ramen we’d ever had. I’m sure the fact that our previous dinners consisted mainly of bad hot dogs and just-add-water mashed potatoes helped that fact. We began the natural talk of home that creeps in near the end of an adventure. We talked about his mom and his siblings, his friends and school and church, the remaining trips of the summer.

I don’t know if I could tell you exactly what we talked about that dinner, but I do remember looking at my son and seeing the change. This was the son I carried on my shoulders on hikes, built pyramids out of blocks with, and taught to ride a bike. This was the son I held to sleep at night and trailed behind as he went door-to-door in his Halloween costume. This was my little boy.

Maybe one of the reasons we try to downplay big transition moments is because they are always a mix of grief and joy. My son was gaining his adultness, but at the cost of his boyhood. Kyler was only ever going to get older. Over time, the lingering vestiges of his youth would vanish unannounced and be replaced with the sproutlings of adult cares and joys and fears and sadness. I was not having dinner with a boy. I was having dinner with a man filled with potential, and I was filled with grief and joy.

We caught the early ferry back and made our way along the 101 on the east side of the Olympics. Kyler had a tower of books at his feet and we enjoyed the music he made sure to download before our drive. We drove along forests and lavender fields, the river mouths emptying into the deep blue bay.

The conversation was natural and content. Before we got too far, I concluded the final act of intentional moments and told him the truth about him, a version of which all sons and daughters should know: God made you uniquely suited for the adventure you were born to live. I told Kyler that he would face suffering, pain, and loss. Every joy he has will be the flip side of the coin of grief. But he has what it takes. I listed off the unique gifts I see in him. How God will cultivate his wisdom to better serve those around him. I told him I would do everything in my power to help him become who God made him to be, like a nurse tree in the forest.

After driving for hours through small fishing towns and verdant Washington forest, we crossed back over the Columbia River and arrived home. Our trip ended with inside jokes, a smell that lingered for days, a stack of books, gifts for the siblings, and the opening pages of a story Kyler will write the rest of his life.

“Bruises on the fruit Tender age in bloom”

Kurt Cobain

C.C. Kimmel is the executive director of Grace Based Families. He is a writer, musician, former pastor, and current host of Lightcatchers Podcast. He lives in Portland, OR, with his wife, four kids, and a big dog named Wendell.