Until 12 years ago, I believed I’d never die.

It was 1969. The summer of love and the Hell’s Angels. The original moonwalk and the Stonewall riots. I was three. My mother, Helen, had been juggling a career ladder, three preteen kids and a deadbeat ex-husband when a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses came knocking on her door, peddling the Truth book and a promise of life everlasting on a paradise earth. Without hesitation, she commenced herding us to Kingdom Hall meetings in a ritzier section of working-class North Portland. That’s where she met Carroll Gunz, a 30-year-old part-time father of two who’d dropped out of med school and become a postman. Like her, he was not yet a full convert. Sparks flew. Dating ensued. My mom and Jehovah formed a side deal: Carroll would have to accept them as a two-fer. His leeriness about the religion was no match for her intense brown eyes and passing resemblance to a busty version of Audrey Hepburn. That summer, they got baptized and then got married.

While they were on their honeymoon, members of the Manson Family cult slashed their way into Roman Polanski’s home and butchered pregnant Sharon Tate and four others. Elsewhere that year, the Children of God were prophesying that, any day, an earthquake would shrug California off into the sea. Anton LaVey was publishing the Satanic Bible and Hal Lindsey was double checking his math predicting the appearance of the Antichrist for his novel The Late Great Planet Earth. Apocalypse was in the air. We began preparing for the worst too, because come October, 1975, Jehovah was going to plant hooks in the jaws of the nations and lead them to the Battle of Armageddon, whooshing our makeshift family into a second chance at prosperity in a millennium of theocratic rule. With six years to get ready, we had a lot to do. Some of our friends sold their houses to go preach in faraway lands. Witness youths dropped out of school to devote their remaining time in this old world to the ministry. Yet others treated themselves to spendy vacations, because—why not?—their credit card debt would soon be up in smoke. I drifted to sleep with thoughts of hair-raising cataclysms and pet tigers to come.

In the decade leading up to 1975, the Watchtower, Bible and Tract Society — publishing arm of the Jehovah’s Witnesses — whipped up feverish anticipation for the end of “Satan’s system of things.” Collage: Danny Haszard.

1975 came and went. Hundreds of thousands of disillusioned members abandoned the Witness membership rolls. We, however, remained on perpetual doomsday alert. After all, we were part of a unique, non-holiday-celebrating “great crowd” of true Christians who would yet survive God’s Day of Vengeance and never taste death (provided we remained morally pure).

Not that I had any choice to believe otherwise. When my older sister, Lynnda, started acting like a typical hormonal teenager, she was abruptly shunned by the congregation. Not a greeting on the street or a visit from mom when she fell ill and landed in the hospital. She was 18. According to official Witness newspeak, disfellowshipping is a “loving provision”; after seeing how the ordeal left her permanently wrecked, I wisely steered clear.

MY GLYPH. Rejecting Sunday school as a feature of “false religion,” Witness kids are expected to sit still next to their parents during the religion’s two-hour meetings. To keep me occupied, someone showed me the drawing above, instructing me to copy it without lifting my pen or retracing any lines. I filled countless hours and notebooks trying to solve this puzzle, but it’s impossible (without cheating by folding the paper a certain way). I’ve been trying to complete connections ever since.

In spite of a schedule of total immersion in mental sanitation — thrice-weekly meetings, family Bible study, personal study and weekly ministry — when I turned twelve, all urges dark and oedipal manifested themselves right on time. John Carpenter and Stephen King were off limits, so I settled for PG-rated thrills from the Master, Alfred Hitchcock, geeking out on his films, interviews, biographies and whatever else I could get my hands on. I compensated for those worldly interests by immersing myself in the black-and-white morality of the Watchtower and its fabulized history of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I tried obsessively to reconcile the two, soothing the cognitive dissonance with marathon bouts of masturbation followed by panic attacks, a dirty secret that would disqualify me from the paradise—or worse, if my mother ever found out. Shame is, by far, the heaviest form of egocentricity.

From Hitch (as he insisted his friends call him), I learned that no one is that good or evil. Mankind, like the San Francisco of Vertigo, is best viewed through a spiritually ambiguating fog filter, and even a sicko like Norman Bates has his finer qualities. Hitch’s films inoculated me against the judgmentalism that surrounded me and, although I put in my 10,000 hours in the door-to-door ministry, in three decades I never made a single convert. Perhaps my Bible students saw in my eyes my struggle — and failure — to square my belief with my ambivalence. Not that it did me any good at first. I grew up and got married to a fellow believer. Cultism being a communicable disease, we had two children and raised them to expect an imminent Armageddon.

Despite my best efforts to avoid it, in 2003, I was finally disfellowshipped for confessing to my dirty little secret. Curiously, the more I faced my shame, the more it shrank. The shunning gave me some much-needed critical distance. Soon I was questioning my beliefs wholesale. Do I believe in the Watchtower? In God? In the Bible? In my intelligence? Who am I? What am I? Am I Straight? Am I gay? Am I human? What’s a human? One day, as I was standing under a walnut tree lifting a bag of groceries out of the trunk of my car, it occurred me: I’m going to die. The realization hit me with unmitigated force.

But this wasn’t my native language. As if to draw a fine line under that epiphany, my hair continued to thin and more grey crept in, yet I refused to see what it was leading to. Literally. I shaved my hair off.

And then, this year, I turned 50—time for a proper midlife crisis. I decided to skip the enforced frivolity of a birthday party to take a closer look at this new-to-me concept of mortality. I loaded up my car with camping gear, bottled water, a cooler-full of sandwich makings and a few favorite books and hit the road for a week to explore the wilderness of the Old West and of my own heart. Like anyone going on an adventure, I embarked on this trip with a mix of high hopes and cold feet. I had only a vague idea of where I was going and just enough money for gas and food. I left my razor at home.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with the selection of the right traveling companions. When I started out, the whys and byways of this journey weren’t entirely clear. I was but mad North-North-East.

Day One — “He may be slow in starting, but there’s nobody faster down the home stretch.”

On my first day out, however, I’d gotten a late start and it was too cold to pitch a tent. Though I hadn’t budgeted for hotel lodging, I decided to rest for the night in Biggs Junction, home to two gas stations and two motels, two hours east of Portland and situated at the intersection of two highways — Interstate 85 and Highway 97. (If there were any more doubles in this place, I’d have to grant it honorary Hitchcock movie plot status.)

As far as I can tell, nobody actually lives in Biggs Junction except its East Indian motel operators. There’s nothing to do here except sleep, fill your gas tank and choose one of its four roads out of town. Almost boastful of its lack of any non-utilitarian features, the village caters to blue collar professional travelers, such as truckers and vending machine technicians, its nicked and travel-worn pragmatism a part of its charm, like a pro musician’s road case. The first time I shacked up at the Biggs NU-VU Motel was with my now-ex-wife when, on a lark (as is this trip), we’d hit the road to retrace the steps of our honeymoon. Since then I’ve stayed here several times more, sometimes alone, sometimes with a woman.

Biggs knows its place, that it’s built for passing through, not as a full-stop destination. Still, over the years, it’s become like an acquaintance who never rose to the level of friend, but with whom you once shared a secret ordeal, like jury duty or a dorm room. For me, it’s connected to memories both sweet and regrettable, along with some I’d rather forget and others I’d best not forget.

It seemed right to spend my first night here. I set my Jet-Boil up on the Formica countertop, snarfed a pouch of freeze-dried chili mac that I’d plundered from my girlfriend’s backpacking stash and washed it down with a few swallows of cheap merlot, from the bottle. In the morning, I packed my car and continued east along I-84.

Day Two—“In the world of advertising, there’s no such thing as a lie. There’s only the expedient exaggeration.”

For about 11 months of the year, the East Columbia River Gorge is dusty and ochre, enlivened only by scattered smudges of pale green deer sage. I was lucky to have timed it right. The highway followed along the great river’s slate expanse, flanked by vast grass-covered hills that were flecked with yellow balsamroot, purple lupines, orange poppies, white daisies and salmon-colored desert parsley. I sped by orderly green vineyards bordered by rows of upthrusting, gently swaying poplars. Sentinels against the relentless Gorge winds. As a little boy, I imagined those gorge mountains to be sleeping dinosaurs, and now, studded like acupuncture patients with hundreds of massive, skeletal white wind turbines, they looked even more alien.