Revelations ~ November 2017

This is a monthly column helping us to get to know our friends and members in a deeper way. We thank Monte High for taking the time to do these in-depth interviews for our newsletter.
 
     Alive, balancing on the precipice. A monk on the rockface. God’s lightning Rod. Rock climbing has been an integral part of Gary Poush’s life – his extreme escape, his tremendous teacher. When you’re climbing, all focus and attention are on a few square feet of rock. Life (and death) is compressed into nothing but the present moment. The experience of climbing introduces you to flow*(Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). You enter a different state of being where everything flows purely – a heartbeat at a time, outside of time. If only it were easy to maintain the flow, to stay within the beatific state of being when you’re away from the mountain and living modern everyday life – caught up in the crush of humanity. So many distractions. The hope is to become more and more aware so that you realize it for longer stretches of time.
     Climbing was for Gary more than a sport; it was a lifestyle. Some of his closest friends are from his climbing past, going back into the 70s. Close bonds are formed within the climbing community. You get to know a person’s character when you’re clinging to a sheer vertical cliff and your survival depends upon his or her mindfulness. The need to let go of climbing is Gary’s biggest grudge against aging.
     Gary was born on February 7, 1947. He was the third of four children. At the age of 7 the Poush family moved from Iowa to Minnesota, where Gary spent most of his formative years. His father was a Nazarene minister. The Nazarenes are a conservative evangelical branch of Christianity. Gary’s social life was built around the church community, and there were few children. It was a weird upbringing, out of step with the rest of culture, separate. He spent a lot of time roaming the immense wetland woods of northern Minnesota, immersed in the natural world.
     Though climbing would later take it to a deeper level, the woods, and basketball were Gary’s introduction to flow, to getting into “the zone.” Beginning in his early teenage years, there were endless hours with nothing but the basketball and the orange rim in the sky. He loved it. Pushing the ball down to the ground to bring it back to his hand, caressing, weaving, over and over and over the ball finessed downward and bouncing back into his waiting hand, stop and go, running and twirling, lost in a dribbling dance. Grip the ball and point his elbow, extend his arm and let the ball fly skyward, watch it fall through the hoop and into the net, swish. When he finds himself lost in the zone, it is more than sport – it is meditation. And discipline is built through the dedication.
     The Poush family moved to Wyoming for Gary’s senior year of high school. Gary’s obsession with basketball earned him a scholarship to the University of Wyoming. The college courses expanded his mind and he began to question the beliefs from his upbringing. Studying science, he had to make a choice. The logic of science was impossible to deny.
     Because of a bad experience with the basketball coach, Gary lost his passion for basketball. After his sophomore year he gave up his full ride scholarship and worked his way through school to finish his zoology degree. During this period he got his first taste of rock climbing – it had an interesting flavor.
     Gary was drafted into the Army in the 1969 lottery, but wasn’t called up until January 1971. He wanted to be a medic, and because of his zoology degree the Army agreed with him – sort of. He was assigned to the dental Corps and spent most of his time at Fort Knox Kentucky. His experience of the Army was mostly boredom. Yet, all the time on his hands funneled into contemplation. The questioning of college became a searching, a wrestling match with philosophy and religion to find meaning in life.
     Shortly after Gary got out of the Army, he joined a group of Wyoming climbers on a two month expedition to the Cordillera Blanca (white mountain range) in Peru. The air at 20,000 feet slows everything down and effects your brain in strange ways. When he returned from Peru, Gary settled into the northern Wyoming climbing community near the Big Horns. This remained his home base for years, as a carpenter and a climber.
     Gary started getting into photography, getting lost in the flow of the shutter and the darkroom. His main focus was large-format black and white landscape photography. He worked his way into a part-time job as an adjunct photography teacher at Sheridan Community College.
     And then, in 1986 a good friend of Gary’s invited him up to the artist colony for a book reading. She managed the artist colony for the Ucross Foundation, which offered residencies across a wide range of artistic disciplines. At the meeting he met an intriguing woman who was doing a summer writing residency at the colony. Sandy Dorr. And so began Gary’s real life. With the end of summer Sandy returned to the University of Colorado to finish the final year of her graduate degree in creative writing. After graduation she returned to Wyoming, and Gary, and just over a year later Julian was born.
     Sandy and Gary both won fellowships from the Wyoming Council on the Arts, but they were barely scraping by, and with a newborn... So, they moved to Portland where Gary worked as a superintendent on large commercial building projects. Sandy worked as a freelance writer and taught writing classes at various colleges in the area. And then along came Lilly.
     The seemingly constant Portland rain began to seem oppressive. Yet, Gary’s gut was trying to tell him there was more to it than the gloomy weather. The real issue was something deeper. (Did you know that science is now affirming the belly as the second brain?) There was an ache at the core of his being. He was craving wide open spaces. He needed the experience of wildness, the real wilderness that is found in the Interior West. Portland is a great city, but it’s still a city, and the wild places nearby are not expansive.
     Searching, searching for a new place to land the family. Sandy and Gary desired a land with long wild stretches and large horizons; yet, they needed a place that would support their livelihoods, a place where they could play out all of their passions. They visited an old climbing friend of Gary’s and discovered that Grand Junction is a small city; yet, it is a regional hub with the amenities of a much larger city, with a growing niche of artists and writers and outdoor enthusiasts.
     They leaped and landed in Grand Junction without jobs. Sandy can always rely on freelance writing, and they were hoping to start a business – a contracting business – building custom, energy-efficient and sustainable homes. The business took off and for the most part has kept Gary busier than he’d like. Sandy started teaching writing and poetry classes at the university, and worked toward establishing a vibrant writing community in the Valley – a nonprofit Writers forum – teaching writing and poetry workshops and retreats, enticing well-known visiting authors, getting poetry in the local paper, poetry on buses... The region’s community of talented writers is now creating a hum of energy, a web of collective consciousness...
     Sometime around Y2K, Sandy and Gary met Shari Daly Miller and she pointed them toward the UUCGV. The kids were the reason they became regulars at the church. The adult RE discussion group brought Gary into a deeper involvement in the congregation. They grew to love the community and over the years have invested a lot of heartfelt energy. If you look closely you’ll see traces of blood, sweat and tears embedded in the UUCGV building (you’ll also hear plenty of joyful laughter if you put your ear to the wall). Gary put his experience in construction to good use, and gave countless hours of his time toward the renovation project. He is also a past president of the UUCGV board. The most valuable lesson Gary has learned while volunteering for the congregation is that each person in leadership brings their own history, each person has their own story to tell, their own ideas on how the church ought to be. He now has a better understanding of what the church is, in all of its variety. He realizes that UUCGV leadership cannot be about any one person’s vision –that perhaps the biggest challenge of leadership is to accommodate and align many different visions.
     Though Julian and Lilly have been gone for a good long while now, it seems like yesterday. You build your life around the kids, and they move on. Gary’s not sure if he’ll ever completely get used to it. Right now he’s in the process of trying to retire. He’s trying to turn the shack in the backyard into an office with a darkroom. He’s hoping to take up photography again, escape into the shutter. Sandy is currently the writer in residence at HopeWest, working on a collection of poetry. Sandy and Gary are hoping for more time to hit the trails – and the off trail backcountry wilderness. And, now that they are about to enter their second childhoods, they’re hoping to float the river more often and reconnect with their watery Minnesota upbringings.
 
Life goes on...      in endless song...

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