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Incurable Untimeliness
The hawk was keening in the distance, likely as displeased with the steamy air it slogged through as my writer’s notebook, its pages rippling as the hot moisture seeped into the fibers. I had not been exploring myself there for a while and a fear had been building in me. What if, once I was able to get back to the blue lines and black ink, I would not like what my handwriting would record? Even worse, I thought, what if nothing would flow from my pen at all? It was a sad thing I had been becoming and I wanted to rewrite the script but I was having the toughest time with the beginning. Truth be told, it was so difficult to start because the ending scared me to death. Once begun, somehow I knew there would be no turning away from that trajectory.
I had taken a break from reading about Native American culture knowing we’d be back in that world soon enough. I had turned to some kinder, gentler authors—Robert Frost and Henry David Thoreau among them—as I researched an article I was writing. Being so steeped in nature through their words brought me great pleasure and I thought about how influences like that could seep into a writer’s work without him or her realizing it. I had seen this happen in my narratives: as I read these “mentors” my writing seemed to naturally deepen to a point that everyday subjects, especially where nature was concerned, were infused with significance through a personification I was somehow driven to achieve.
I was carrying a book of Frost’s poems to the screened porch when I caught sight of a spider web spun tightly to the railing on the deck. It caught my eye because the dew had collected in spots and the droplets were tiny prisms as the morning light flashed into being. I was always in awe of these webs—so beautiful in their artfulness while being deathtraps for winged things. How could the murderous snare look so pristine in the freshness of the dawn? I wondered, thinking of Frost’s poem “To a Moth Seen in Winter.”
Just as a spider web could be considered in a deeper context, this poem held reverberations for me. A moth, destined to die from the cold, lights on the poet’s hand, inspiring a reverie that has great emotional depth. The spider web I continued to examine from the shade of the screened porch and the unfortunate insects who ended up being the arachnid’s meal held echoes for me, as I felt caught in the web of a life that kept me from having the peace I dreamed was possible. If only, was the refrain that pressed itself into my mind over and over. It was as if Frost’s last three lines were as much a caveat for me as they were for that moth: no one could touch my life, much less save it, if I couldn’t figure out what it would take to solve my own dilemma. If only…
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- Posted from East Hampton, NY
Tortured Water
Once we crossed to the western rim of the river, the land grew a bit wilder, feeling more isolated and lonelier, especially on the Cheyenne River Reservation where the Convocation was underway. I was trying to nail descriptions of what I had seen in my writers notebook when the hymns that had filled the breaks in the programming ended, leaving only the sound of distant chainsaws to rend the sudden silence. They were being run by heavyset Native American men cutting and stripping the pine poles used for building the bowers, the new ones necessary to accommodate a swelling crowed. The rough-hewn constructs were fastened together with wire and topped with mesh over which dying limbs and branches were tossed to create dappled shade. The spots of light beneath them glinted on folding metal chairs and peppered crude benches made from planks of raw timber that had been nailed onto short sections of tree trunks.
A long line of presenters moved across the dais under the largest bower straddling the podium as the day’s agenda progressed. First up were the varied chapters of the Episcopal Church Women. Beulah Turgeon shared her details of the activity that had taken place on the Rosebud Reservation, noting that they felt a sense of accomplishment given the monies they’d raised from their series of lunches. Mrs. Runs With Enemy asked that grave markers be maintained more vigilantly in her parish because it was a sign of respect for the dead. The pleas of the women to follow were similar, each noting needs beyond their parish’s means. As the women wrapped their agenda, a group of men filtered in, separating into small clusters.
Mr. Little Soldier was the first to step up to the microphone. He asked, “Who is our God?” paused and stared keenly at the audience before adding, “Is he in favor of a separation of church and state?” Every so often he would break into the Sioux dialect, which made his sentences sing as his voice rose and fell, going soft on syllables like "ha" and "cha." English phrases emerged in the midst of the melodic language—“all this time” sandwiched between Woniya Wakan, or holy spirit, and niyelo, “it’s up to you.” He was a member of the camp advocating a vote to approve that both Lakota spiritual activities and Episcopal services be embraced by the Diocese. Some men offered murmurs of acceptance and others dissent, depending upon which side of the issue they supported. A critical argument had to do with whether traditional customs of the Episcopal services could be altered, namely the sips of wine during the Eucharist.
Not everyone wanted the custom to be changed, but the ones who did were adamant that using grape juice or non-alcoholic wine was of grave importance because it took only a tiny bit of alcohol to ignite a setback for the addicted. The sun illuminated the handmade quilts hung behind the podium as the debate wore on—the colorful stars and the war eagle so exquisitely crafted. Set in relief against the artful backdrop created by these beloved symbols, Reginald Bird Horse spoke of how the native religion was a comfort to those who still believed in the old ways. The parade of names of the ardent speakers as they presented their heartfelt positions on a string of issues quickly became a jumble.
Father Makes Good delivered his impassioned plea to preserve the Episcopal services as they had always known them. A lay reader from St. Elizabeth’s named Reginald Bird Horse remarked, “I’ve been to the hill. How long since we’ve been involved with alcoholism? And now it’s bingo. I have found myself by communicating with God; going to the hill to fast and pray.” He was advocating the use of the peace pipe and the drum in church services, and was one of the speakers to address the plight of those who had beat alcoholism only to be faced with the wine at the communion rail.
Nelson Young Hawk came forward and spoke of his tiyospaye, or extended family—his grandmothers and great grandfathers who had adopted the white man’s way by accepting their religion. He was certain that they should not change the services in any way; that these weekly rituals should remain exactly the same as they had been since the church first entered their lives. Simon Speaks approached the microphone and said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, “We don’t come together to think about the almighty dollar from the U.S. treasury—the Indian got along without it for a long time until they took our gold mines and now we can’t get our own money—we should take our religion back, too.”
As clipped, grey clouds drifted through a Wedgwood blue sky, Father Bears Heart took the dais and the men nodded as his voice cascaded through the Sioux language, a dialect that such a small minority within our country’s borders would recognize. His friendly face disappeared as another—thinner and more haggard—took its place, and the back-and-forth continued into the afternoon. I thought of Black Elk’s statement: “They talked and talked for days, but it was just like wind blowing in the end.” As the last man exited the low stage, the sound of crickets and the clink of metal from a small group of men playing horseshoes were suddenly drowned out as the recorded hymns flared from the giant speakers, which had been heaved onto a tall wooden platform.
I learned that day how important the word tiospaye is to Native Americans, and I also came to see that I was intruding on a discussion that wasn’t mine to hear. With a heavy heart, I moved to a bower away from the activities of the church after hearing Bishop Anderson tell those who were asking him to make a decision as to how their church services would be shaped that it was their decision to make, not his. He said decisions had been made for them for far too long and it was in their best interest to talk amongst themselves and come to their own conclusions.
As I noted how sadness seemed to be leaking from each person speaking, I wondered about the jovial demeanor of the people milling around a large pot of buffalo stew—such a contrast to those speaking that day. It took several men to stir it as it bubbled furiously, the intense flames beneath the black vessel holding the soup dancing vibrantly against the pot’s rounded bottom. I stared at the ground a great deal as the hours passed, walking around as I tried to get my bearings. As I did, I saw how the fine, silt-like dirt beneath the grass, which was so dry it crunched with each footstep, eagerly took the imprint of the logos and patterns carved into the bottom of each pair of sneakers that had passed over its surface. I had read that the dirt in this part of the U.S. was the drift left by glaciers of long ago and I wondered whether our version of hieroglyphics would be the motifs on the bottoms of our shoes when the next Ice Age hit.
A priest from Colombia struck up a conversation with me as I sat off to myself scribbling my impressions of things. He told me that he was Lutheran and that he’d had a falling out with his church. He had married an American and found himself on the Pine Ridge Reservation ministering to the Ogalala Sioux. “The American Indian is rich compared to the poor in Latin America,” he remarked. “Their poverty is not in their world, it is in their minds.” His words reverberated as we drove the serpentine road to Mobridge, stopping there for coffee before heading back to Sioux Falls. We laughed as Randy thought to officially welcome us to the land of “tortured water”—the name they’d given their particular brand of joe in South Dakota.
As we flew back to Tennessee, my mind was exploding as I attempted to process everything that I had seen and heard. My confusion as to whether western religions had any relevance for Native Americans had been amplified, and I thought it fitting that one of the first Lakota words I learned was skinciya, or struggle. Stevie Smith once wrote that a mind stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimensions. At that very moment, I was living, breathing proof that this was powerfully true.
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Utopian Attitudes
As we left the outskirts of Sioux Falls, our drive to the Yankton Reservation took us through an expanse of checkerboard farmland. It was deemed an open reservation due to the mix of Native Americans and white landowners within its boundaries, and this became clear as we pulled into Wagner, which looked as all-American as any other farming community in the Midwest. We met Father Field and his wife Mary, Rocky, Elmo, Edna, Peter and Annette that day—names of people we would come to know very well as we built a church they had been asking the Diocese to provide for them for many years.
Our second stop was Greenwood, which rests in the nipple extending below the rectangular state at its southeast corner, its meandering outline there defined by the Missouri River. The church we would be replacing with the one we would build was eerily quiet—its interiors musty from being closed up for quite some time because the community that once utilized it had moved to Wagner to be closer to the services a town provides. I’d never been as moved by “The Lord’s Prayer” as when I saw a large framed needlepoint of it, written in the Sioux language, hanging in the vestibule. It was as rag-tag as the little strip of land along the Missouri River we found ourselves walking along that day—the waterway nothing more than a stream indolently moving through a deep ravine the river had made before being dammed upstream. The quiet spot held a collection of abandoned churches and a few run-down houses, and I could feel the sweep of history, though not the bustling one that had long been silenced along the jagged banks.
After the lush vegetation of Greenwood, our next stop—Lower Brule, a closed reservation—felt barren and dry. We met Marilyn, Boots, Gloria and Mr. Small Jumper, all eager to greet us because they welcomed our help. Father James, who was younger than most of the priests we’d met in the mission field, had been assigned to the isolated reservation that held nothing but buttes and flats spanning for miles. When we left the Lower Brule, we traversed the Crow Creek Reservation, moving through undulant gold grasses as we listened to Randy explaining that the Dakota, Lakota and Nakota were all arms of the Sioux tribe, and that the first-letter change of their names designates their linguistic differences—certain words used by all the Sioux would begin with “D,” “L,” or “N,” depending upon which segment of the tribe the speaker had been born into.
As we headed farther north and west, we drove a rain-soaked road that rose and fell away, mimicking the undulant profile of the hills. The Missouri River tracked us, slithering out of sight through distant gorges and reappearing when the cliffs gave way to expansive meadows. We glided along the silvered ribbon winding through velvety green for several hours until we came to a field of flattened grass that was littered with beater cars, giant speakers, several pine bowers and an odd assortment of people, both Native American and white.
The four-day, out-of-doors Convocation was in full swing. Christian hymns blared from the speakers as we walked through the trampled prairie grass rousing grasshoppers with every step. I attempted to make eye contact with the Native Americans I passed, but my searching looks were met with stoic distance. I sat alone for most of the afternoon, watching puffy clouds glide effortlessly through an enormous sky as I wondered why my attempts to connect were being met with such resistance.
I realized there was so much to learn. I had always taken my ability to connect with other human beings for granted, and I had already been told once since we’d arrived that I was being very idealistic. What else is new? I thought, admitting that I could see this in most of my dealings, though I wouldn’t have been so quick to put a name on my emotional makeup. It was a bit like being categorized, then stamped with a number to be shelved in the “Idealist” section of the library. How did I come about these “utopian” attitudes? I wondered as I scribbled in the notebook in my lap, the smell of pine infusing the air.
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Some Hint of Myself
We were a few days away from taking our first trip to South Dakota and I had no idea what to expect. We would be attending the Niobrara Convocation, a church convention for Sioux Episcopalians, in Promise, South Dakota. The Bishop had mentioned we’d see a bit of the wild wild west as we traversed the Great Plains—prairie dogs, buffalo, antelope and miles upon miles of barbed-wire fences. Though not as “exotic” to me as the animals he listed, I was battling some pretty sneaky Tennessee wildlife as I tried to protect my herb garden on the mountain, and it had me wondering whether the native animal kingdom on the Plains could be any more troublesome.
For three mornings in a row woodchucks had decided it was their duty to dig around in my newly planted pride and joy—a series of mounds of dirt skirted by carefully placed stones from between which plumes of perennials and knots of herbs sprouted. I had planned this perfect garden for months and it had taken me an entire week to physically create it so I was understandably feeling a bit territorial. I had pegged the perpetrators as our regular visitors, the raccoons, until I caught the groundhogs red-handed one night. Just before heading to bed I had heard a noise that sounded suspiciously like terra cotta scraping on wood. I flipped on the deck lights to see the critters pulling my bay tree out of the dirt, placing it carefully on the deck beside the pot they were plundering. I left them alone, knowing the plant would survive the night in the open, and just before drifting off to sleep, I wondered if I should put some dried ears of corn at the bottom of the steps for them the next evening—a peace offering of sorts. Then I quickly realized how silly the idea was, as they didn’t consider their behavior destructive; they were simply foraging for food.
Jim had built me a remarkable potting bench for planting herbs and flowers, and I’d found the perfect place for it in a nook facing the woods. I was making my way to it to repot my bay tree the next morning when I nearly stepped on a large snake sunning on the deck. I thought I was going to drop dead from fear before I could reach the door to the garage, high-stepping more successfully than any drum major I had admired when high school bands were still known for turning out such prancing leaders!
I shuddered all afternoon thinking about how close I had come to stepping on the slithering creature. When I described it to my neighbor’s gardener, he declared it to be a harmless chicken snake but I felt certain it had been of the deadliest sort. I raced down to the bookstore to buy a guidebook so I’d be able to identify snakes from then on. Needless to say, I never nonchalantly walked around any corner on the deck from that day on, and when I would see an elongated reptile sunning on one of the large, flat rocks on the bluff below, I’d pull out my handy book and see if I could tell its type. It was a ridiculous effort, of course, because you had to get pretty close to a snake to make out its details and I certainly wasn’t signing on for that task.
The next day, we took off for South Dakota before the light had come up on the city and I felt inexplicably nervous on the flight to Sioux Falls as I fingered a newspaper clipping with my grainy visage stamped into it—an advertisement I’d used to mark my spot in Black Elk Speaks. I’d agreed to model for this ad at the request of several friends who owned First Impression, a clothing store they’d just opened. I scanned the image for some hint of myself—some sign that it was really me—and I found nothing that told me I was present when the photograph was taken! In fact, it had been an embarrassing endeavor as I tried to figure out how to pose because I’d never done so. Afterwards, I realized I should have practiced before I went to the shoot but that wouldn’t have occurred to me either. The photographer was completely green so he didn’t have a clue as to how to help me, and I had left feeling self-conscious. That’s what I thought about when I saw my wide smile, the discomfort causing me to jam the flimsy piece of paper into the back of the book as I vowed never to do something as out-of-character again.
I had made it about three-quarters of the way through the story of Black Elk’s story and was gaining a Native American’s view of how their lives were changed by the whites they encountered in the days preceding, during and following the “Indian Wars.” Black Elk, who lived in a log house on the Pine Ridge Reservation between Wounded Knee and Grass Creek when he was relating the story to John Neihardt, said,“…the Wasichus have put us in these square boxes. Our power is gone and we are dying, for the power is not with us any more. You can look at our boys and see how it is with us. When we were living by the power of the circle in the way we should, boys were men at twelve or thirteen years of age. But now it takes them very much longer to mature…Well, it is as it is. We are prisoners of war while we are waiting here…”
Until reading the book, I’d never heard the word wasichu, which means “white person” in Lakota. It was bizarre to be perceived as different because I’d never been put in a situation of minority before. I suppose something told me I was heading into tricky territory given the anxiety I felt as I finished the book, which I closed as we were beginning the final approach into Sioux Falls. I found myself swallowing tears as the medicine man’s words lamenting the moment when Native Americans were relegated to reservations echoed in my mind.
“And so it was all over…I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream…”
Black Elk’s story had been lived one hundred years before my arrival in South Dakota, and it made me sad that there had been even further decline for the freedom-loving people. “O make my people live!” Black Elk had wailed. It occurred to me that I would likely look back on Costa Rica as a piece of cake compared to the emotional territory I found myself entering in South Dakota. The thought was sobering as I stepped out of the plane and walked down the steps into the heat of the Great Plains.
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The Bottom of Discontent
I journaled most of the trip south, admitting in writing that I’d fallen completely in love with the mountain house, which was becoming hidden from the road as the woods dressed in shiny green—the lushness making me feel poignant about missing a minute of the ever-changing beauty. It seemed the only place I was ever able to relax was the screened porch with its “eye” on nature—her cooling breezes accompanied by an elemental soundtrack that included the splash of the waterfall and birdsong. But leave we always did and when we arrived at the fairgrounds in New Orleans, the festival was vibrating with so many types of music that the percussions shook the ground, a feeling akin to the earth having an oddly rhythmic form of palsy. The tents spreading out as far as I could see held gospel, blues, reggae, calypso, contemporary jazz, big band, Cajun, Zydeco and other genres of music I’d never known existed. The mass of people flowing through the grounds created a psychedelic ocean of color that not even Jackson Pollack would have thought to splash on the same canvas. I felt as if I were floating through a kaleidoscope of sound, hues and aromas.
The food ranged from barbecued alligator and crawfish étouffée to oyster poboys, and of course, beignets, which were brought to the festival by the famed Café du Monde. The aroma of barbecue was tantalizing as it floated above the row of food booths, battling it out with the smell of hot grease emanating from the proliferation of deep-fat fryers. Drinks were almost as varied as the dishes served—wine, beer and Bloody Mary’s tempting at every turn. I reached a point at which I declared I had to stop putting things in my mouth because the run I’d taken that morning was becoming a token effort given the excess of food and liquor I was consuming. There were so many outlandishly dressed people that my brain couldn’t fully process the scene as I scanned the crowd, trying my best to remember details that would color the backdrop of any story or poem I might write about the experience. My favorite fair-goers were the ones who stood as close as they could to the stage and swayed their bodies with the music—eyes closed as if they were making love to the rhythms.
One such guy was dancing in the grass by a steel police barricade that protected the acts on the stage from the public. He was moving to the music of the Bluebirds—his skinny hips gyrating in shiny tight leotards. His scrunched socks were pillowed neatly above his Reeboks, which shifted on the grass as he flexed his knees to coincide with the whine of the guitar and the pulsing drums. His tan was obviously hard won and he would monitor it as he went along, shifting a sleeve farther up his arm when he sensed the beginning of a tan line or adjusting his shirt at the neckline as he spritzed himself with a spray bottle he kept at the ready in the beaten-down grass next to a bright blue towel he used to keep the sweat from his eyes. His hair was the color of cinnamon sticks and was clipped short except for a skinny braid that flicked around on his thin brown neck. His head was the liveliest part of his body—it shot to and fro as his arms stayed glued to his sides. Watching his thin butt vibrate to the grinding of the blues made me chuckle, and I was irritated that Jim and the gang were determined to move me along because I could have watched him for hours as I absorbed details that might have explained a bit more about how he lived his life away from the gregarious activity he was enjoying so keenly.
As I sat in the hotel room the next day watching the ships coming and going, I pondered how life kept me tossed about, supposing it would for a while no matter how much I hoped for a better balance. I was grateful for experiences like the jazz festival but I wanted so keenly to be able to be still and write. It was almost comical how many people asked me, “What problems could you possibly have?” I couldn’t explain even to myself why I considered it to be an insult except that it brought about waves of guilt to think about how well off we were materially and how unhappy I could be at times. I guessed people believed this because for most of them, their nemesis had always been a lack of money. Even in moments when I doubted I had a “right” to my grumblings, there was one valid point at the bottom of my discontent and for this I wanted to give myself the acceptance to continue my search. I was extremely happy when I was bettering myself intellectually and creatively. In fact, doing so helped me to relax into a part of myself that was calm and loving. Therefore, I believed my desperation for betterment and for creative time was a valid one; not merely a phantom of psychological dis-ease. The bottom line, though, was that time for neither of these treasured things would fit into my life as it was, and my creative flow was drying up under the pressure of relational issues.
Knowing the spiral that took place when these subjects were uppermost in my mind, I decided that sitting and mulling them over would only push me into a darker place so I decided to take a walk. I headed to Jackson Square where I saw one of the most curious specimens of humanity I’d ever come across. It was a man who must have spent hours in front of a mirror putting on makeup and wrapping himself in rags. He had glued small tusks into his mouth, which pointed up into his painted, tortured expression. His eyes had been a lively shade of green before the bleeding of red had overcome them. He was a study in torn cloth, string and burlap—all smudged with dirt except around his shoulders where he’d fashioned the “costume” into a cape of sorts. At first, I couldn’t tell whether his skin was black or just so dirty that it appeared to be black.
His hairline answered the question, proving that he’d used dark body paint or some such substance to color his face because it had seeped into the hair framing his forehead. Were the blond and red goatees real or were they applied with glue as they extended from the bottom of a patch of white he’d painted to frame lips bulging with tusks? I wondered, standing completely absorbed as he slowly crawled toward a cigarette butt that someone had flipped onto the sidewalk. He extended his hand toward it in slow motion, picked it up with fingers slightly hidden by torn rags and raised it to his nose. He sniffed it like an animal would investigate something before eating it and then rolled it around in his fingers. I felt shy snapping photos of the man but the interest didn’t phase him—he must have wanted the attention given the trouble he’d taken to draw a crowd in a busy square.
Afterwards, I sat in a café recording my impressions of him, curious as to what type of person would think that doing what he was doing was fun. There had to be some thrill in it or he certainly wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble! I wondered what his mother would have said if she’d seen him in his get-up. Were there hints of his bizarre personality in his childhood? I questioned. Or was he perhaps merely a frustrated actor getting his kicks on a spring weekend? My musing made me think of a radio program I’d heard the week before during which Alex Haley said American family values were disappearing. While I listened intently to the interview with the famed author, I marveled at how he made me feel as if I were sitting on the back porch with him as he talked about his aunts, great aunts and grandmothers. He charged every person to interview his or her parents and grandparents because the current generation would be the first to not know who they were in terms of family if they did not. “Go and hug your grandparents,” he commanded. “Say thank you to them because it is from them that you received your life.”
I wondered about the swaddled man in Jackson Square. Did he stay in touch with his grandmother; was she still alive? Did his mother “get him”; was his father kind to him or did he see a man who was either insane or practicing his performance art in an embarrassingly bizarre way? Did the savage-looking man crawling along the cement know “who he was”? Did he care? Somehow it seemed to me his unique way of expressing himself was one of the most sane examples of individuality I’d ever witnessed, even while his behavior was about as demented as any I’d ever seen!
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The Life of a Writer
One of them called to a wasp, which had landed on the large mutilated shell at my feet as I combed the sand for unscathed offerings. I crouched and watched as it lingered a bit too long and was swept up in the surf, now littering the sand like its damaged fascination, its wings wet and useless. What an echo of life! I thought. The ocean had beckoned to the hungry creature, offering it a buffet of possibilities within the crevice it explored in the shell’s heart only to sweep it away with her choking liquid. As the wasp helplessly tumbled in her rolling embrace, I wondered why the ocean felt the need to take the breath of others. Didn’t she feel confident, as strong as she was, I questioned; didn’t she trust that she’d have enough of a life force to sustain her throughout eternity?
That night I watched a television interview during which Faye Dunaway remarked, “What do you do when you’re vulnerable? You cover it up and pretend you’re in control.” I thought of that wasp, so insignificant against an ocean that certainly wasn’t giving up its forcefulness. It struck me that my own sense of power had grown such a tiny bit as I continued to develop a small writer’s voice, and the thought soothed me as I turned out the lights to be sung to sleep by the waxing and waning waves.
The solace was short-lived as I faced the flight home the next morning. We slipped away from Panama City before dawn, the wings of our small plane vibrating in reaction to the unfriendly air mass we were battling as we clawed our way past Montgomery’s cloud-choked sky. The radar fanned on the control panel, seeking rain’s presence and painting itself spotty green in victory. It yellowed when finding heavy patches of Mother Nature’s wrath, the brilliance of the sunny hue the antithesis of what it represented.
Jim puttered around the cockpit doing what pilots do and I wanted to tell him to keep his eye on the road, though there was no need for him to peer through the embattled windshield, which was taking it on the chin as the rain pelted it in a staccato rhythm. Had the ride not been so bumpy, it would have been a pleasant experience sliding through the blueness of the sky as the day dawned bright above the blanket of clouds. I was determined to finish Weber’s article, which I’d started the day after I’d studied the boys on their bikes, but the plane shuddered to the point that the words were vibrating. As I held the magazine still enough that I could follow the text, I found Ford’s take on the life of a writer to be fascinating, as he saw it as a combination of self-sacrifice and self-championing. Could I champion myself if I ever found the courage to make the sacrifice to write? I wondered as I read that fiction writing was to Ford as useful a thing for a culture as there is. He went on to say, “Not that I’ve been so useful, but it is as high a calling as you can have…serious devotion to it purchases some rights: the right to presume, to make things up, to create.”
I knew I was doing certain things the “right way,” namely keeping my writer’s notebooks. Ford kept them; would spend months accumulating the “raw stuff” that would come together to make his novels or short stories whole. He maintained that anything that appeared to him to be singular would end up in his notebooks. “Here’s a sentence I wrote [that’s] not meant to be interesting to anybody else: ‘Christmas, comma, Jesus Christ.’ That’ll turn out to be a dialogue line.”
He went on to tell Weber, “A sentence in my notebook will come at a place where I never imagined it. And that’s what writing is for me, taking the raw stuff and recasting it into a logic that is its own. Taking lines which maybe occurred in life in one context, and then creating another context for them.” Ford says of the characters in Rock Springs that though readers may think of them as less articulate, the stories assert they have just as much to tell. When Weber mentions that the critics contend he gives his uneducated, unambitious characters too much credit, he responds, “It’s a philosophical point very near the heart of everything I write…If I were limited to just predictable responses, if we believe ‘Here is a guy who can only think this or that,’ that people live within their givens, then life’s pretty well set for us. But human beings continue to surprise us. It is just a fact of life that people pick up Volkswagens at moments of stress. People just say things that make you stare off, sometimes.”
As I clutched the magazine, stretching the page to a tautness that would keep the words from jumping around, I prayed I’d get to the point of being able to say what Ford declares next: “I’ve just given everything I’ve ever written my very best—my absolute, greatest best shot. And that’s all.”
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The Road to Promise #LetsBlogOff Nod
Follow the Leader
One night I tucked myself into bed with a magazine and came across this quote by Milan Kundera from The Art of the Novel: “Novels can flourish only where there is a spirit of inquiry, not inquisition. A novel worth its name asks questions about the world but won’t answer them, even if its author tries to. Most great novels are a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.” I wondered if this applied to someone like me who was completely without intelligence about the fiction I was writing given the fact that I was too new to have a clue. Somehow I thought not as I drifted off to sleep. What I would have given to be able to discuss this with someone as actualized as Mr. Kundera!
I was overjoyed to find that the bookstore at Seaside had a copy of Kundera’s book, which I bought and delved into as the light leaked from the evening sky. Quite a bit of it was over my head but there were moments of inspiration, especially when Kundera spoke about creating characters: “All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped?” I drifted off to sleep that night with these questions ricocheting through my brain. How does one even begin to answer such monumental questions? I wondered.
With Kudera’s questions fresh in my mind the next day, I decided to study three boys who’d taken over our little beachside street on their bicycles. They held sway over the crumbling asphalt that petered off to scrubby sand—little more than an alley, really, cut off as it was from any main route of traffic. The edges of the street were pocked with grasses and cockleburs, an odd setting for the crafty psychological machinations the kids were playing out. Two of them were obnoxious and bossy, picking on a smaller and younger boy, his size and age making him a target for their bullying. I stood outside the door of our condo pretending to read The New York Times magazine while Sam puttered around the driveway so I could eavesdrop. Their first “game” involved a stick, which they had set at a particular distance from a starting line.
Each of the trio was to try and jump past the stick on their bikes. The young kid shocked me by being the first to speak up. “I’ll betcha $60 that I can!” The mean kid moved the stick about six inches farther and said, “I’ll betcha $50 million that you can’t jump that.” They haggled ferociously, their voices growing louder and more raucous as a little girl with a big attitude walked up, putting her finger to her lips. The boys grew silent as she took on the role of mediator and judge. She moved the stick to a point that everyone could agree upon and stepped back as the little boy copped his most earnest expression and stomped on the first pedal to launch his bike into action.
He picked up speed and flung himself and his bike into the air, straining everything he had to “make it.” He touched the tip-end of the stick, which moved only slightly, then landed on the far side of it with an elated expression on his face. The mean kid said, “That was no good!” The little guy countered, “What? It is so; it’s exactly the way you did it across the street!”
“That was over there,” the mean kid responded. “This is over here and over here it doesn’t count if you touch the stick!” The little girl yelled, “You owe him $50 million!” The dejection on the smallest boy’s face was heart-wrenching. Their next game was “Follow the Leader” and you’ve likely already guessed who the leader would be: the oldest kid with the nasty attitude. The first task the leader set for them was to see who could pull off the best fishtail. Of course, fishtails are tricky because there has to be good speed, a spot of dirt on a flat road and perfect timing of slinging the backend of the bike around while simultaneously hitting the breaks hard.
The little guy had one tiny problem: he had no brakes. That didn’t stop him, though; he simply put the bike into motion and drug a foot while he scooted the backend of his bike around. I was amazed that he was coordinated enough to pull it off and I bet his mom was trying to figure out why the bottoms were worn off his Reeboks! After a perfect round of fishtails, the mean kid decided another round was required to see who was the winner. He went first and, as fate would have it, he fell while he was trying to execute his award-winning coup.
What happened next was brilliant on his part. He froze in position on the ground, clutching the handlebars of his bike just above shoulder-height and said that because it was “Follow the Leader,” each of them had to do a fall exactly as he had done. He stayed in what he called “crash position” and advised each of the other kids to closely observe how his body was placed so they could do the same. It was hysterical seeing the other kids try to make exactly the same move happen without hurting themselves, which fortunately they managed. Of course, the mean kid won because everyone else looked forced as they tried to execute a controlled crash! The next day, I learned that the young boy’s name was Jeremy and that Michael was the mean kid’s name. They must have raided both their father’s garages to gather such a wealth of paraphernalia for washing their bikes because they had the makings of a full-service carwash.
I spent the best part of an afternoon recording their shenanigans in my writer’s notebook and thought about how Michael’s psychological manipulations seemed so modern, something I wouldn’t have even thought about had I not read “Dialogue on the Art of Composition,” one of the chapters in Kundera’s book. “Encompassing the complexity of existence in the modern world demands a technique of ellipsis, of condensation,” he said. “Otherwise you fall into the trap of endless length.” This made me wonder how much of the information from the boys was simply background—for me to know—and how much of it a reader required to get the gist of their characters. The question lingered in my mind through dinner, when Jim commented how distracted I seemed. If he only knew how deep my processing as a fledgling writer was taking me…This, I have come to understand, is the epitome of living a deeply creative life.
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The Constant Companion
Tobie was the first to scream. I turned to see her frozen, a large lizard staring back at her from inside the dark refrigerator, its tongue flickering like there was no tomorrow. She quietly and ever so slowly closed the door, turned and leaned against it, her face as white as her tee shirt. Just as the refrigerator door closed, Christy let out a yelp. When she’d removed the lid from the coffee pot on the stove, a swarm of roach bugs had streamed out and scurried beneath the stovetop. (So much for the Kahlúa and coffee we’d planed to have for nightcaps!) I raised a dirty rag that had formed a large dollop of dry cloth in the sink after being left there wet, tossing it across the room in a knee-jerk reaction when a centipede crawled onto my hand. The three of us stood in the center of that gigantic kitchen and gave in to our collective overwhelm, breaking into fits of laughter so long and raucous we were bent of the island hoping to give our sore stomachs some relief. There was no way the place would ever come clean enough for us to eat anything we’d prepare there. It was just as well because what we couldn’t have guessed that day was that we’d come in from the jobsite so exhausted each night we wouldn’t have had the energy to cook a meal from that point on anyway.
Our work began the next day when we were ordered to Zent to tie rebar for the project. When Jim jokingly promised us a makeshift shelter to shield us from the sun, we said it would be a must or the rod buster’s union would shut the project down! Having friends along gave everything a new perspective for me. The jobsite seemed even more primitive as I saw things through their eyes—the uneven piles of ballast littering the muddy lot and fingers of rebar sprouting from rough grey cement columns that reached toward the sky as if trying to escape the crushing grip of the earthbound blocks. Looking almost glamorous and out of place, snap-ties, which we shuttled from the U.S. in our LL Bean duffle bags, ornamented the columns with their colorful flat heads. Rebar tied in windowpane patterns sagged between the columns over the dirty cement footings. Rocks of every color, shape and size composed the ballast that filled the insides of the spindly, weight-bearing appendages. This cacophony of gray and brown was surrounded by a riotous bounty of lush green: the contrast striking but somehow in sync.
As the guys drove cut and cleaned saplings into the ground to serve as the posts for our leaf-covered tent, I remembered how I’d heard that these stripped trunks would sprout green in no time because the soil was so fertile in Costa Rica. Evidence of this was everywhere, as the country’s lines of fencerows that began as bare saplings now consisted of orderly rows of bushy trees. We felt lucky to have the covering above us as a gray sky deepened all afternoon, building layers of clouds that piled one upon the other while we twisted wire under our tent. The men worked on a concrete form, improvising their tools and materials as they went, and it was just as they finished when the moisture that refused to hold sent them skittering from their makeshift wooden scaffolding and the tops of rusty metal barrels on which they’d been teetering. As the rain intensified, I caught a whiff of smoke and a sensory memory floated across my mind. I lowered myself onto a piece of plywood near a palm tree and pulled my slicker over my head, remembering the feel of autumn in Tennessee. That scent reminded me of a day Jim and I had driven to a football game in Knoxville when a similar smoky smell filled the crisp air. We hadn’t been dating long, and life seemed so grand and full of promise at the time. I let the memory hold for a moment, soothing ever so slightly the ache that had been my constant companion of late.
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Finité!
I had stayed at the center that day to read and write, retreating to our bedroom as quickly as was polite to do so. Sitting cross-legged on the bed with my notebook on my lap, I charged myself with the task of recording an episode that had taken place the evening before while Jim and I stood outside the center talking with Bishop Wilson. The event shined a spotlight on two dogs living in a scrubby yard across the street from the center, which was nothing more than a weed-pocked parcel of ground sliced in half by a slack clothesline that perpetually sagged under the weight of ragged sheets and towels. The dogs spent most days lounging in the heat and humidity, roaming around only when the sun trudged west enough to move the one ever dwindling, already scant patch of shade they could find. As we talked with the Bishop, a third dog trotted up to the edge of their yard, sniffing at an empty candy wrapper tossed onto the dirt. Being territorial animals, the pair charged it without a second’s hesitation.
The fight was vicious, and after what seemed like ages of snarling, lunging and biting, the third dog went on its way, shaking its head as it loped off, a spurt of blood flying from one of its floppy ears. One of the neighbor dogs seemed unscathed; the other limped back to the scrim of shade, whining as it went. It eased its rear-end onto the dirt near the foundation of the small house and licked the gashed leg it had favored in a rhythmic motion that went on as long as we stood there and probably into the night.
Like these canines, the people in Costa Rica, who were some of the humblest I’d ever met, lived with the persistent threat of cruelty. Disaster could (and did) strike so blatantly without warning but, unlike the scrappy dog nursing his wound, they withstood whatever challenged them with great equanimity. It struck me that evening that their serenity was the perfect paradox to the brutal natural world surrounding them.
After we’d said goodbye to the Bishop, my stomach still in knots from the dog fight, Jim and I walked to Mares, one of the better restaurants in town. It was a place we frequented and I was actually growing accustomed to the taste of spaghetti made with cilantro, much to my surprise. As I was twirling the noodles around my fork, Jim motioned to Armando, the waiter, to alert him that there was a roach on the table a few feet away from ours. Armando casually approached, flipped it into the floor with his towel and stepped on it. With a flourish, he turned to us and said, “Finité!”
Though the bug was one of the biggest I’d seen, I’d spied a larger one a few days earlier in the store where I normally bought orange muffins for breakfast. It was so huge that it reminded me of one of those trucks the owners would jack sky high—fitting it with monstrous hydraulic shocks and tires the size of giant boulders that would churn far below the wheel wells. Though this rally roach had appalled me as it flitted between the muffins in the case, I felt I had to give it credit for its uniqueness because it was the first jacked-up insect I’d ever seen. I left without the muffins that day. If the Zeus of roaches had brazenly braved the case in daylight, what else had been waltzing between the baked goods the night before? I wondered. That was one answer I was happy to leave unimagined.
With my musings about the canine battle for supremacy and our run-in with the roach safely on the page, I leaned my head against the concrete block wall above the bed and celebrated that we were about to head home. I felt excited that I’d once again be surrounded by neatness and order rather than dirt and a long procession of gigantic insects that gave the word menace a whole new meaning.
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Drip, Drip, Drip...
Violent storms were a common occurrence—such a different feel to the weather than we’d experienced during our first trip as we built the church in Germania. The thunder would rumble and lighting would incessantly rend the inkiness of the sky as it zigzagged from cloud to ground to cloud at night. I wasn’t as nervous about Mother Nature’s angry displays as I would have been were we staying in one of the slapped-together clapboard buildings we’d been able to find for lodgings before. The center was solidly built of brick and it had windows that closed to help fend off the reverberating noise growing louder as the storms intensified deep into the night.
The security had helped me to relax, and early during our stay Jim and I were less at odds for a change. I’d been praying we would find some middle ground on which to stand and it worked until I tried to discuss how long we would continue the work that was testing me to my very core. I broached the question yet again one night as we walked from a dinner at St. Mark’s. “I understand this is hard for you, but I believe we are doing the right thing,” he answered, his taut lips giving away his frustration. “I’m not sure how long we’ll continue so I wish you could just relax and pitch in when I need you.”
I hung on, holding back my emotions, because I felt I wouldn’t have been able to bear it if I’d lost him. All the while I wondered how I would keep my sanity if the work stretched on for years. One day I’d begged off from my duties as the delivery service to stay at the center and read. As I journaled about my conundrum, I cursed the commode in the bathroom next to our room, which ran incessantly. Its gurgling accompanied the continual staccato made by the shower head—drip, drip, drip. Was this trickling sonata similar to the water torture the Chinese are said to have perfected? I wondered. Tap, tap, tap, the water teased…
As my mind half-heartedly kept pace with the dribble, I wrote, “Each trip we take here shunts me from the life I live in the states to a life I don’t live in Costa Rica, and each transition is squeezing the vitality from me, drop by precious drop. Maybe the bathroom’s melody is the perfect soundtrack for the movie they’ll make about my tragic story someday!” It was a joke, of course—who’d want to make a film about such a spoiled human being incapable of giving herself over to God’s work? Seeking a way out of my downward spiral, I pulled the book about poetic forms from the stack on the bedside table with the idea of turning my past scribbles into structured ideas that I could hone when I had a more stable world in which to write. I made absolutely no headway because each entry I reviewed sounded trite, overly meager or far too depressing. I imagined someone reading these sad missives recoiling because the exercise was akin to being forced to drink an excess of espresso coffee—cup after bitter cup in quick succession.
By the time the sun was ducking below the horizon, I grew weary of the negativity of it all, retreating to fiction to escape my melodramatic grudge with the life I was living. The novel I’d chosen—Sally Bauman’s Destiny—had the perfect level of intrigue from the start. I had been lugging the impressively sized hardback with me as I zipped between Limon and Zent, tossing it onto the seat of the truck so many times I’d nearly broken the spine. I was happy to finally be delving into the plotline, glad to be in Edouard’s head rather than in my own.
When my eyes grew weary in the darkening room, I put the book aside and wondered what my friends at home were doing, words that suddenly felt so foreign and concepts that felt so far away. My truce with Jim had dissipated in a mere week’s time. My writer’s notebook served as a witness to how awful it had become: “I laid in bed a long time this morning; frustration was my sheet. You expect better of me, do you? That’s just it: everyone always expects better of me.”
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