by Gary Priour,  HCYR Founder
    Standing at the edge, in Huntington, California, on July 20, 1982, the Youth Ranch family had made it, and was playing in the Pacific. So many obstacles had been overcome and left behind in order for us to be there. It was a consummate high, a time of knowing victory, and everyone was included.
    As I stared into the unfathomable distance and felt the impenetrable depth of the water as it stirred in me what the ocean always stirs in me of awe and wholeness, a HCYR houseparent and co-adventurer, spoke from the same viewpoint, "The edge is so wide, so wide."
    And it was. There were swimmers standing a hundred yards out into the ocean, and the beach was wide enough to play football, with the ocean as goal. Here, at the edge of the continent, at our farthest point west, at the turnaround, at the limit, was enough room for all the happiness we could feel. Here, where land met ocean, where worlds intermingled, where there was a line, the edge was wide.
    Having shared so much with all 26 on the trip (18 kids and 8 staff), both in earning money through hard outdoor work during June and July in the baking summer sun of central Texas, and in making the journey over mountains and desert in a 1963 air force bus that wouldn't go faster than 45 miles an hour, communication had somehow become good, deep, easy. At some point on the journey, we had broken through to an awareness that we were together.  And it somehow just got good.
    Our new language about "the edge" was instantly understood by all, and "going to the edge" became a daily call to get ready for new experience. The edge came to mean the present, the forward "edge" of our becoming. Things in the way of going to the edge were problems that had to be cleared each morning.
    As the trip continued, it became obvious that the group had discovered a process that kept working. On one "edge" after another, kids who had been complaining hours earlier, were suddenly ready to stay and make a new life in the forest, or along a river, or as mountain people. Out of these repeated "natural highs" came a growing awareness of the group as family, the kind of family many of us had never known about.
    And these "highs" were producing the opposite of the isolation of artificial "highs" some of the kids were familiar with.   In the midst of these "highs," older "cooler" kids would become aware of the smaller ones, take time to teach or share, put a pillow under a head that had worked its way into the dirt, tell the group about a new awareness of nature, or bear witness to a new confirmation of God's protective presence in our lives.

   
  Out of the mouths of the toughest, "brother" and "sister" began to be heard.
    I'll never forget the awareness that none of us wanted the trip to end. At the end of our visit to Disneyland, on July 25, we met as a group and decided to extend the trip without a definite itinerary. We would start by driving north, to see the great Redwoods. We would enjoy each moment and be bound by no picture of having to be anywhere by any time. We would navigate by trust, trust in ourselves, in God, and in those we would meet.
    For the next three weeks, as we drove through ten states and over 6000 miles, 26 of us with never a reservation for even one night's accommodations to count on, the process sustained itself, and we were okay wherever we went. The group had learned to listen for its wisdom in the silence and in each other.
    Somewhere in Idaho, in a national wilderness campground found just before dusk, the reverie was interrupted with the sadness of a departure from the group. On his last night with the group, before returning by bus to start football practice back in Ingram, Alvin Leonard, a 15-year-old street kid who had seemed to many to be in a shell too deep and too tough to break out of, talked to the group around its Idaho campfire:
    "The thing I feel about the trip is that people have stopped being afraid of me. It seems like everybody talks to me now and I'm part of what's going on where before I wasn't. I'm grateful for that. Y'all have a good trip home and I'll see you there. Good-bye."
    How did the edge get so wide, how did it get so wide?
    In the years since that very special trip, I have wondered about reproducing its effects, and I even occasionally get trapped in the idea that I will just have to load everyone on an old bus and take off for parts unknown. But then it comes back to me, and I am spared. So, of course, is everyone else.
    For the edge is the present, where we stand now, at this moment. It is the forward "edge" of our becoming, and the magic waits only on us to give in to it all one more time, to get involved and let life takes its course. Work at what's given us to work at. And then somewhere, in the tangled web of the journey together, right in the middle of life's most difficult conditions, it just gets good.

Written in August, 1982, upon return

from the Ranch's first summer adventure trip.

- GaryPriour