We set out today at about 7am and had an uneventful drive through Fossil, Oregon, to Shelton Wayside Park on Highway 19. Enormous thanks to Charbonneau Rent-a-Truck for lending us the Ford F-350, which towed the North Trail up steep hills as if the trailer weren’t there. It’s an exceptional friend who will let you take his truck on a major towing road trip like this.

The park is deserted! There are about 40 camp spaces, and not a one has a square foot of level ground. It took us about 15 minutes to level the trailer and get things settled. This is a beautiful park in the Ponderosa pines. No power or sewer for us RV fools, but that’s why we filled the water tank and brought a generator, just in case. Space 33 is shaded by a couple of good-sized Douglas firs, one of which dropped a dime-sized dollop of pitch directly onto Ben’s head.

While riding bikes from one end of the park to the other, the boys and I encountered two gentlemen. They drove a Chevy S-10 pickup and came crunching down the road, stopping just past us. My boys ride on, ignoring them.
A gentleman, possibly in his sixties, hops out of the pickup, strides to within close-talker distance, and holds up his hand to measure my height.
“Hi, I’m Dennis. How tall are you?” he asks.
“Five-ten,” I say by way of greeting.
“Great. Got it, John?” he asks his companion (not my son), holding atop his head some sort of thumb/forefinger approximation of our difference in height. It looks an awful lot like “the shape of an L” on his forehead.
“Yep,” John replies.
Before sprinting toward the nearest tall tree, Dennis hands me two cards. One is an ordinary business card that reads

DENNIS BOKOVOY
INDEPENDENT KB AFFILIATE
TEL.: 541-xxx-xxxx
MAIL: xxxxx@GORGE.NET
WEB: WWW.MKBGOLD.US

[I’ll have to look up www.mykbgold.com when I’m back on the grid.] He hands me the other and says, “I’ll come back for that. It’s real gold.” This one is similar to the first, but is plastic instead of paper and contains a laminated 1g ingot of pure gold. As I’m trying to decide what to do with these cards, Dennis assumes a statuesque position at the base of the tall tree, “L” still positioned semi-squarely atop his head.
Meanwhile, John, walking stick in hand, bends down and picks up a random pine needle, eyeballs it between himself and Dennis, and paces, with one eye open, backward until he reaches a position at which I assume the height of the pine needle from his perspective matches the combined height of Dennis and his “L.”
At this point, John begins raising his arm in shaky increments, counting pine needle lengths from Dennis at the base of the tree to the top of the tree.
“OK, done!” shouts John.
“How many?” asks Dennis.
John shouts a number and Dennis paces carefully, counting each step, back to John’s position. He tells the distance to John, and then stands facing the tree again, straightens his arm, and waves it up and down, asking me and John to tell him when it is 45 degrees from the ground.
By this time I’m wise to what they’re trying to do and offer, “I’m not sure what you guys are doing, but I’m sure it involves geometry or trigonometry or both.”
Dennis says to John, “I got 170 feet tall. How about you?”
“210.”
I say, “Not bad. You’re only plus or minus about 20 feet! What in the world is going on?”
Dennis tells me that he and John are out measuring things to offer a different perspective on evolution, and in the process prove how God created everything. We talk about how the boys and I are on a long road trip. “Where are you headed?”
I tell him, and he then rummages around in the S-10 to produce a spectacularly illustrated hardcover, spiral-bound, full color travel book called Your Guide to Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks: A Different Perspective. It features 30 lb semigloss stock, 5-color printing, numerous fold-out pages, scientific callouts, and a wide variety of tips for the best places to see. It is exactly the book I was looking for but could not find at Barnes and Noble.
“John and I wrote it with two other guys. We sell it for sixteen dollars,” he says.
“Will you take twenty?”