In 1999, Christian was outprocessing from Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, where he had been stationed as a weather officer for three years. He requested that his father, a clinical social worker at the VA hospital, fly from Salisbury to Alaska and drive him back home to await departure for his next assignment, in Korea. Father was excited, for he hadn’t seen son since moving him from Biloxi, Miss., to Elmendorf — a trip during which Charles kept a vague journal of his visit.

This time, he decided to keep a more detailed account of the four-week-and-a-day-long adventure he would take with Christian.

“I was writing it, thinking I was going to call (the Salisbury Post),”Charles said, “but I wrote it, too, thinking that it was something that Christian and I could share.”

What Charles didn’t count on, though, was that during the course of crossing four time zones, two countries, 11 states and three Canadian territories, he would discover so much about his son and himself.

On August 30, 1999, Charles recalled in his first journal entry, Hurricane Dennis was making headlines. What made him most anxious was not the storm “slapping the coasts of Long Beach and Wilmington,”but the journey that lay ahead.

Charles says he and Christian share love — for each other, for nature, for the wilderness. So, as they left Elmendorf, “Christian is sad in saying goodbye to his first home,” Charles wrote. “This is where he changed from an adolescent to manhood.”

Here, Christian had learned to appreciate the forces of nature after experiencing extreme ice and snow and earthquakes, and seeing the topographic effects of “the great one,”which is said to have destroyed Alaska in 1964. He had seen Denali, the great mountain Native Americans had christened, the “Northern Lights” and the Iditerod. He had camped as grizzly bears walked around his tent, come upon an angry moose while hiking, and boated beside whales and sea lions. And he’d done it all alone.

“In Alaska, people are getting killed by natural events daily — animals, floods, avalanches …” Charles said. “The wilderness is right outside the door …. You see places that are so beautiful and it creates a feeling of tranquility, but you can never relax because death is just a blink of an eye away.”

The pair felt at ease as the Tarheel blue blood ran warm through their veins after finding, during a visit to the Alaska State Fair in the Matanuska Valley, a Russian Orthodox Church. Two “rugged-looking” priests had a bit more to share with them than the religious paraphernalia they were selling.

“When asking where we were from, we answered, ‘North Carolina.’ The priest helping us smiled and loudly exclaimed, ‘Tarheels!’ ” Charles recorded. “This surprised us since these priests often live in very remote places, even for Alaska. However, he has kept up with the ‘Tarheels’ ever since a friend and fan introduced him to them. … Duke may boast the backing of the Methodists, but Ihave learned that Carolina has the backing of the Russian Orthodox, Isuppose providing some competition in the religion department.”

Passing into Canada, Charles’s own “religion”was deepened when he and Christian, who both had awakened from their sleeping bags at 1:30 a.m., experienced something quite heavenly.

There, where there were no clouds in a sky full of bright stars, the two saw a glow “in a shape like a cirrus cloud reflecting the moonlight.” Dancing, the glow soon “exploded,” and rays fell toward earth. The glow turned into a wishbone shape and soon, the aurora looked as if it would expand to earth. Charles was breathless.

“Inever thought Iwould get to see an aurora,”he wrote. “This had been a dream Ihad since childhood. Ithanked God for this present during my prayers as I went to sleep.”

As the two traveled through the Canadian town of Deese Lake, through the Canadian Rockies to Quebec to a small “hippie town named ‘Field,’ ” extraordinary adjectives to describe what they saw eluded Charles and he resorted in his journal to “describing by cliches” — phrases like ‘breathtaking’ and ‘jaw-dropping.’ ”

Especially “jaw-dropping” was “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump” in Canada, where Plains Indians migrated and camped along a creek below a cliff. The men would chase bison over the cliff, and others would wait at the bottom to kill any surviving animals. The animals were then skinned and cut for meals.

“One would think that the name ‘Head-Smashed-In’ would refer to the bison, which were stampeded to their crushing deaths. However, it was named for one hunter who, for whatever reason one could only imagine, decided to wait under the cliff and watch the bison stampede over …. It was his head that was smashed in. Ithink Ihave known some people like this hunter.”

They hiked through Waterton National Park, where they ate wild berries — until Christian told the story of a young man who wanted to live off the Alaskan land and died after confusing berries and eating a poisonous one — and where Charles was bitten by a nostalgia bug as he dipped a foot in clear, cold water. It was like being a child again, he said.

But no child was as important as his own, as sightseeing in Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons brought the two to Jenny Lake.

“Christian and Igingerly stepped and hopped across the stones of the shore and in the lake to a boulder .… We sat down, side by side. What a wonderful feeling this is … (being) with my son and enjoying the wonders of nature ….

‘I wish this moment would not end,’ I said. Christian agreed. Sitting with him there, in the pristine beauty of the Tetons, enveloped in its quietness after being separated from each other by three years and thousands of miles, it felt like holding him for the first time when he was born.”

Not quite an epiphany, but surely an experience of celestial magnitude that set the mood for what they would find near the lake.

There stood the Episcopal Chapel of the Transfiguration, where the Barnes decided to accept the invitation posted on the door that welcomes anyone to come in and pray. Another sign on the door asks that people not leave unless they have left a prayer for themselves, for those who provide worship services and for members and activities of the church.

“Christian and Ientered the chapel. We slowly walked to the front pew for prayer together. We were quiet and looked from side to side as we walked to observe the chapel. The atmosphere created an encompassing emotional response …

Beyond the cross on the altar, through a large picture window, they saw “the most stunning sight Ihave ever seen in a church,”Charles said. Silhouetting the cross were three enormous peaks of the Grand Tetons, which became “the most majestic, amazing and humbling church spires Ihave ever seen.”

They were grounded when they left Yellowstone and sped down Interstate 90 to the Little Big Horn Battlefield.

“We were so moved by this battlefield, where there are markers across the field to indicate where people were slain,” Charles said. “It was interesting to me that the Indian scouts Custer had were Crowe Indians, whom the Sioux had forced off the land. That’s why they joined the U.S. Army, to try to remove the Sioux from the lands that used to be theirs. But they knew they were going to die that day and they prepared themselves.”

“There is something eerie about seeing where people died in battle across the landscape. We all appeared to be struck at the same instance by the realization of violent death for the poor souls before us. Idon’t want to make any political statement about the battle or the Indian wars with Custer. The realization of the tragic death was touching everyone and this transcended politics.”

During the third week of the trip, they traveled through the Badlands, Kansas City and Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee.

At the end of that week, they toured the Smoky Mountains and crossed into North Carolina to visit Liz, Charles’s daughter, who attends Western Carolina University.

“When we got to the Smokies, what was interesting about it was that after being in all these other biomes and different biological climactic regions and having camped and hiked several of them, it ended up being like seeing it for the first time — like getting a fresh look at our own environment,”Charles remembered. “I had been away for some weeks, and it was like being in a time warp.”

When they arrived home, they found that not only had Hurricane Dennis ravaged the coast, but Hurricane Floyd had done major damage, as well. Though their bodies were exhausted and their minds overwhelmed with all the sights they’d taken in, they were happy to have been together.

“We got a chance to talk about different things that had been tragic to us, like my mother dying the year before,”Charles remembered. “(Christian) had been very close to my mother, and we had time to talk about that. And, of course, cramped up like that we would get on each others’ nerves so we had to be tolerant of each other.”

The presence of the natural world, including the danger that exists in it, Charles said, was elating and unlike anything he could find on this side of the country.

“I find in the States that I don’t have the induced tranquility of seeing the natural beauty here,” he said. “Like when I’m on the highway … I’m kind of geared up.

“It’s (something) to sit on a hillside and look down a slope at beautiful water, hear beautiful sounds, smell these wonderful scents … but know, at the same time, a grizzly might be lurking. You’re always present with that knowledge … that you have to respect the wildlife.

“That’s what’s different here, you have the beauty of the wilderness and the danger of it here, but where most danger lies is not where it’s beautiful.”

He might not have been able to bring back with him the sights, sounds and environment from his travels, but he can conjure up all those when he looks through his journal, a copy of which he will send to Christian in Korea.

Undoubtedly, son will be just as thrilled to recall those memories. But he might be most moved when he reads his father’s words: