A Spiritual Passage Through an Extraordinary Life with Rand R. Timmerman

Rand R. Timmerman grew up in a village called Adams, New York, in a place he describes as having more cows than people.

He went to bed hungry. He wore other people’s worn-out clothes and shoes with holes in them. His father was a Mustang pilot who came home from World War Two, had Rand and his brother Ron, and then contracted polio. Rand’s first memory is Christmas Day 1950. A tree with a couple of bulbs. His little sister crying all day because she wanted a doll. Under the tree, a pedal wagon their father had found at the dump, sanded back, painted until it looked like new.

He remembers thinking: why are we being punished?

He also remembers walking across the street at twelve years old, into a neighbour’s barn, saying he would do anything they needed, and getting a quarter and a tractor. He drove tractors and spread manure before most children had any sense of what work meant.

That combination, the poverty and the discipline, the grief and the grit, is the soil everything else grew from.

The bottle at thirteen

At thirteen, at his first real party, invited for the first time, Rand found a bottle of Jim Beam in the basement.

He took a mouthful and his first thought was: how can anybody drink this stuff? And then it was like a cape went right over his body. He went from five foot eight to six foot four. He was handsome and funny and confident and smart. He was, in a word, transformed.

He knew, the morning after, that he had an affinity for alcohol that was probably going to be a problem. He made a conscious decision that day never to do drugs. He never did. Why would he, he says. He had found the perfect elixir.

A drunk night and a war

Years later, in his third semester at university, working midnight to eight as a janitor, changing his major every semester, selling Amway products on weekends, Rand got drunk in a bar and woke up alone on a pool table. The owner came in, turned the radio on without a word, and started cleaning. On the radio, a news announcer was talking about the first Marine Division going into Vietnam: body counts, engagement reports, the weight of it.

Rand was a patriotic kid. An Eagle Scout. A vigil member and member of the Order of the Arrow, the highest level of scouting. His father had been a pilot. And lying there on a pool table in a bar at eight in the morning, something clicked.

A month later he was at the war memorial in Syracuse with his hand raised. Nine months after that he was in a rice paddy in northern Vietnam, near the DMZ, looking north toward the layoffs, thinking: what did I do that for?

He did thirteen months. His firearm was never more than an arm’s length away. Sometimes really bad things happened. And then one day he got home.

The guardian angel

After Vietnam, Rand went through Officer Candidate School and then the basic school, and ended up at his first duty station at Cherry Point, South Carolina, where one of his old drill instructors, now a captain, happened to be officer of the day when he checked in.

They had run into each other in Vietnam, where the man had been a gunnery sergeant. Now here he was again. The captain looked at Rand and offered him a list of schools. He mentioned Newport, Rhode Island: JAG School. Rand said he had never been to Newport. Two days later the orders were typed and he was checking in.

He was the only second lieutenant in the class. Everyone else was a captain. Most had law degrees. Some had passed the bar. Rand decided to focus and do the best he possibly could. He was the class honour man.

Then, every time he came close to a Vietnam deployment, he found himself sent to Puerto Rico to handle Article 32 cases at the Navy base there. After the second time, he mentioned it to his captain friend. The captain told him plainly: Rand, I keep sending you there because if you go back to Vietnam you will get killed. You have used up all your angel points.

Rand never saw him again after he left the Corps. He calls him his guardian angel in the Marine Corps.

The nightmares

Rand graduated summa cum laude from Syracuse Law School in 1975 and built a legal career that spanned four decades across five counties in upstate New York. He ran twenty-six marathons. He did cross-country ski races every winter. He worked eighteen hours a day and slept like a stone when he finally stopped.

But while he was in law school, the nightmares began.

The first one was so real he believed he had been bayoneted. He could smell the gunpowder and the flashbangs. He woke bathed in white light to find his wife on the floor, where she had crawled to reach the light switch. He was soaking in sweat. He had voided himself in the bed. His wife looked at him and they both knew: something was very wrong.

His father’s advice, given on a drive to an airfield when Rand had started to describe one of his experiences in Vietnam, was simple and absolute: don’t talk about it. Put it in the back of your brain, never think about it again. Move on.

And so Rand did what his father told him. He kept it in the back of his brain. All of it. And he medicated himself with alcohol from time to time, and kept the rest of the day as full as it could possibly be.

The war inside

For decades Rand kept going by force of will. The legal career thrived. The running continued. But there were three divorces. His first wife, the mother of his children, died of alcoholism. And in his early sixties, alone more often, the alcohol finally had room to take over.

He went into treatment programs. He relapsed. He attended around two thousand meetings before he stopped relapsing. He was hospitalised more than once with suicidal ideation. He describes one particularly bad period: five or six days of cherry vodka, drinking and passing out and coming to and drinking again, until he could no longer pass out. It was Saturday morning. He was sitting on the steps of a liquor store in Syracuse at seven o’clock, the store not open until nine, thinking he either had to die or something miraculous had to happen.

He was not thinking about anything miraculous.

Billy Cook

A man named Billy Cook was heading out to go fishing that morning.

He saw Rand on the steps. He put down his fishing poles. He came over, sat down beside him, and said: I know you. I’m just like you. What do you want to do?

Rand said he just wanted to die.

Billy took him to hospital. He sat with him on the gurney all day, with tubes in Rand’s arms, telling his own story of coming into the same recovery programme thirty years earlier, and of not believing in God when he started. He came to see Rand every day in detox. Five days later he collected him from detox and took him to a meeting. And after the meeting, when everyone else had left, Billy looked at him and said: Rand, you need to pray to that God you don’t believe in. Or you will get drunk again.

Something inside Rand broke like a glass vase. He started crying. He told Billy he did not know how to pray. They went out to the car park, got on their knees together, and said what is called the third step prayer: three sentences. Billy asked Rand to say it every morning, first thing, and to ask God each day to help him not drink, to help him not think about drinking, and to smash the idea that he ever had to drink again.

Rand has done that every morning since that night. At the time of recording, he has nearly twelve and a half years of sobriety. After thirteen months sober, a young man came up to him and asked him to be his sponsor. Rand told the young man to come back tomorrow. Then he called Billy and said he was not ready. Billy told him: Rand, you’re ready. You’ve got a lot of bad experience. And now you’ve got over a year of good experience. Go for it.

Since that day, Rand has never not had someone he was working with. Even on the Appalachian Trail, he had two men calling him every morning. He would turn his phone on at the top of a mountain and answer.

Ron, Edie, and the trail

Ron, Rand’s younger brother, served in Vietnam at the same time, in the army, in the southern part of the country. When Ron came home, he met Edie, a woman fourteen years his senior, who showed up to their first date with three of her seven children. They married. They never had children of their own. They moved to Utah, where Ron became a bishop in the Mormon church and flew commercial planes, mostly freight. They hiked together in Utah. He loved her deeply.

In 2011, Edie had a massive stroke. She never recovered. Ron cared for her for seven years, unwilling to let anyone else do it. He was still a runner. He would put Edie in her wheelchair in front of the window, go out for a run, pass the house, wave hi honey through the glass, and keep going. When she died, he was not all right. The grief was overwhelming for a man who had expected to be able to handle it.

He decided to hike the Appalachian Trail. He figured enough physical pain might replace what he was feeling. He had the maps, he had the gear, he had the plan. He told Rand he was going to take a bus to Springer Mountain, Georgia and walk to Katahdin Mountain in Maine.

Two thousand two hundred miles. Fourteen states. Over six hundred mountains. Four hundred and sixty-five thousand feet of elevation change.

Rand said it was all Ron’s fault.

Walking the trail

They did it with two vehicles, which gave them an advantage. Most days, Rand walked north while Ron drove down off the mountain, parked at the next road crossing, and walked south. They met in the middle. Rand slept in a tent on the trail every night, though he acknowledges his truck was sometimes ten feet away.

He stopped looking at maps. He stopped trying to picture what was coming. He decided to walk as if it were 1970 and nobody knew about any of this yet. He took thirty, forty, fifty photographs a day. His trail name was Rambo. He kept a journal of funny things that happened and of the trail names people gave themselves. Ron kept a journal of mountains and distances, which, Rand says, is how pilots think.

On Blue Mountain in Pennsylvania, the highest cliff on the Appalachian Trail, two women had got halfway up and frozen. They could not go further or back. Ron, without hesitation, took their packs one at a time to the top, went back down, and brought each woman up one at a time. Rand’s favourite photograph of him is from the top of that cliff, where Ron looks like he is flying.

It was the hardest thing Rand has ever done. And nobody, he says with a quiet kind of satisfaction, was shooting at him.

The book

The idea for the book came after the trail was finished. Rand had five hundred photographs and two journals and a life that had somehow delivered him to his early seventies, sober, walking two thousand miles, still here.

He wanted Ron’s enormous family to know what they had done. He wanted someone elderly, sitting at home wishing they had done the Appalachian Trail, to be able to follow along daily through the pictures and see exactly what it looked like. He also wanted to tell his recovery story, in the hope that it might help someone. And Ron had his own miraculous moments on the trail, things that happened that were simply, as Rand puts it, godly. Moments of peace and serenity that Ron had not expected.

He called it A Spiritual Passage. Because that is what it was.