A Moment of Clarity

On Memorial Day, 1974, an itinerant drunk named Pablo made a spiritual discovery. Hunkered on a highway west of the Palouse, he glimpsed a life in disarray, shorn of insight, heading nowhere and running scared.

It takes a moment to recognize a life as your own. One thing is certain: that turning point, without light or air, from which he struggled as from an undertow, was in fact a divine panic: terror not of heartbreak or brain seizure, but of spiritual death, the heart vacant and staggering without purpose.

On that point he's definite. Sick, broke, without future, at a point of no return, a man is thrust face to the wall. On that day, in that hour, a breeze whispers in the trees, or it doesn't. Still to recall it makes him shudder.