by Sarah Vowell
I was a believer. But there was something stronger than my belief in God. The thing the preacher said that I believed more than anything else I heard at church was that I was a sinner. When I sang “Amazing Grace,” the key phrase wasn’t the title’s promise of redemption but this: wretch like me. Even as a six-year-old I knew I’d never be good enough to get into heaven. Thus I seized on the escape clause I dreamed about, the idea that I could refuse the mark of the beast at a grocery store and everything would be all right. I knew I was evil, I knew I couldn’t get through a lifetime adhering to daily virtue, but I was pretty sure I had the guts to withstand two or three seconds of machine-gun pain when the time came. This comforted me. It kept me from panicking about the eternal consequences of every childish trespass.
Still, Armageddon is kind of a lot to lay on a six-year-old. The Book of Revelation includes verse after verse of dragons and demons and the blood of the lamb. A typical passage reads, “And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.” Frankly, I could have done with fewer seven seals and more seven dwarves.
There are people in this country who will argue that because of the demise of morals in general and Sunday school in particular kids today are losing their innocence before they should, that because of cartoons and Ken Starr and curricula about their classmates who have two mommies, youth learn too much too soon about sex and death. Well, like practically everyone else in the Western world who came of age since Gutenberg, I lost my innocence the old-time-religion way, by reading the nursery rhyme of fornication that is the Old Testament and the fairy tale of bloodbath that is the New. Job taught me Hey! Life’s not fair! Lot’s wife taught me that I’m probably going to come across a few weird sleazy things I won’t be able to resist looking into. And the Book of Revelation taught me to live in the moment, if only because the future’s so grim.
Being a fundamentalist means going straight to the source. I was asked to not only read the Bible, but to memorize Bible verses. If it wasn’t for the easy access to the sordid Word of God I might have had an innocent childhood. Instead, I was a worrywart before my time, shivering in constant fear of a god who, from what I could tell, huffed and puffed around the cosmos looking like my dad did when my sister refused to take her vitamins that one time.
God wasn’t exactly a children’s rights advocate. The first thing a child reading the Bible notices is that you’re supposed to honor your mother and father but they’re not necessarily required to reciprocate. This was a god who told Abraham to knife his boy Isaac and then at the last minute, when the dagger’s poised above Isaac’s heart, God tells Abraham that He’s just kidding. This was a god who let a child lose his birthright because of some screwball mix-up involving fake fur hands and a bowl of soup. This was a god who saw to it that his own son had his hands and feet nailed onto pieces of wood.
God, for me, was not in the details. I still set store by the big Judeo-Christian messages. Who can argue with the Ten Commandments? Don’t kill anybody; don’t mess around with other people’s spouses; be nice to your mom and dad. Fine advice. It was the minutiae that nagged at me.
One of my favorite television characters was Star Trek’s Mr. Spock. I would torment my hotheaded sister, Amy, an extreme child who batted back and forth between only two emotional states—love and hate—by reproaching her feverish fits (while ducking her punches) with the comeback “You are being so irrational.” Same goes for church. My Spockish nature tended to clash with some of the more fanciful details of Bible theory and practice that are part of Pentecostal life.
It was made clear to me that I wasn’t supposed to trouble the moody Creator with any pesky questions about the eccentricities of His cosmic system. So when I asked about stuff that confused me, like “How come we’re praying for the bar to be shut down when Jesus himself turned water into wine?”, I was shushed and told to have faith. Thus my idea of heaven was that I got to spend eternity sitting at the feet of God, grilling Him. “Let me get this straight,” I’d say by way of introduction. “It’s your position that every person ever born has to suffer because Eve couldn’t resist a healthy between-meals snack?” Once I got the metaphysical queries out of the way I could satisfy my curiosity about how He came up with stuff I was learning about in school, like photosynthesis.
Until the mark-of-the-beast police machine-gunned me to that Great Q & A in the Sky, I soon figured out that I should keep my qualms to myself. Christianity is no different from any other cult—it isn’t about faith. It’s about agreement, about like-minded people sitting together in the same room at the same time believing the same thing. That unity is its appeal. Once someone, even a little six-year-old someone wearing patent leather Mary Janes, starts asking questions that can’t be answered, the whole congregation’s fun is spoiled. (Though my mouth was the least of my mother’s worries at church. My sister’s constant childish fidgeting was a more pressing concern. During one Sunday sermon, as Mom was dragging the little hellion out to the parking lot for a spanking, Amy kicked at the pews screaming at the congregation, “Pray for me!”)
However much I privately questioned the logic of Genesis, I never once doubted the inevitability of Revelation, never once doubted that the world would end. Because living in eastern Oklahoma and believing in the Apocalypse made a lot of sense. When I read the part in Revelation about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, how the end times will be set in motion by horses breathing fire and brimstone, it reminded me of the near-death trips I’d taken with my own pet, Stockings. My dad had given me a Tennessee walking horse—but not a saddle. And so I rode bareback, clutching Stockings’s mane, praying that she wouldn’t get spooked, though she always did, tearing off into the woods, breathing fire. By the time she stopped, after thirty-nine thousand repetitions of the command “Whoa!”, the hickory branches would have etched my skin into a bloody gingham. If one of the four horses of the Apocalypse had to be put down, Stockings was ready to ride.
I could buy the gaudy deaths and grisly details set forth in Revelation because Oklahoma itself was a biblical landscape. We must have been on tornado watch half the year. And the place was literally crawling with snakes—snakes in my treehouse, snakes on the porch, snakes in the yard, snakes on Rainbow Mountain, which my mom found out the hard way used to be named Snake Mountain after one of its copperheads put her in the hospital. Because I was baptized when I was eight in a water moccasin–infested lake, and, as if I wasn’t petrified enough (fangs and drowning being two of my bigger fears), Sister Minnie’s drunken husband drove up to the water’s edge in his pickup right after I came up for air and he started scream-singing the hymn “Shall We Gather at the River.” Because our cousin Gary John’s wife got shot dead in the head with Gary’s own gun by Gary’s sister’s husband, who was joking around and didn’t know the gun was loaded, ha-ha. Because the leader of my Brownie troop was smashed into a million pieces trying to cross the train tracks. Because my grandfather Pa Vowell buried another wife every few years. Because my other grandfather Pa Parson was a Cherokee wart doctor who could tie a string around a wart and bury the string in the ground and that made the wart go away. Because my grandmother Ma Parson lost her mind one day and couldn’t remember my name though she could remember all the words to “Bringing In the Sheaves” and today we call this Alzheimer’s but back then we called it “God’s will.” Because on Wednesday nights my mother would drive this ancient witchy widow to church—a lady who believed haircuts for women were a sin, which did stop her from trimming that mangy white rope dangling off her scalp around 1923 but did not stop her from scamming rides off my mom (a former hairdresser); my sister and I dreaded the moment the woman climbed into the car because she’d give us the evil eye and tell us that our perky, little-girl pixie cuts were some kind of fatal flaw we’d go to hell for.
So in such a superstitious town among such accident-prone citizens, Revelation seemed more like a gossip sheet than a ghost story. In fact, cons
idering all the random wrath of God around me, Armageddon appeared refreshingly well thought-out. And that was its attraction to everyone at church. We gathered together to reassure one another that no matter what horrible thing just happened, no matter whose daughter just got scraped off the train tracks, whose mother was in the hospital with fang marks perforating her leg, God had a plan. A cruel, kooky, murderous horror movie of a plan for sure, but a plan nonetheless.
That’s what even the gloomiest sermons were about—the future. And that’s why in the gospel hymns we sang, “will” was the most popular verb—“I will meet you in the morning,” “There will be peace in the valley someday,” and my favorite, “I’ll fly away.” Even now, a quarter of a century after I learned those songs, they’re still stuck in my head. I miss singing them. I miss the harmony. Some Sunday mornings, in the middle of secular superstitious rituals like reading The New York Times Magazine or watching that berserk Sam Donaldson on TV, I’ll hum “I’ll fly away” as I make coffee, remembering what it was like to have a Sunday morning purpose, remembering what it was like to have someplace to go, even if it was just hell.
APOCALYPSE 2: THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU
I’m not exactly proud to admit this, but I owe my life to Ronald Reagan. My family moved from Oklahoma to Montana in 1981, the year Reagan was inaugurated. I was eleven. Away from the Bible Belt, my family was forced to attend a bland, nondenominational church about which my mother said, “Too much teachin’, not enough preachin’.” Religion became an increasingly less urgent part of my life.
This did not mean that the end of the world faded from the forefront of my psyche. I merely replaced one apocalypse for another. In the early ’80s, President Reagan made so many mortifying announcements about the “evil empire” and his Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. Star Wars, and “We begin bombing in five minutes” jokes that I was utterly convinced I was not going to grow up. By 1983, he’d made the whole country so nervous that there was a prime-time TV movie about nuclear winter called The Day After. I have never seen the movie, however, because my mother decided our family wouldn’t be watching it as that would be “too disturbing.” I guess talking to six-year-olds about the reign of the Antichrist is fine, but letting teenagers watch Jason Robards stumble through rubble for a couple of hours on TV is unthinkable.
What with waking up every morning surprised there was still a world to wake up to, I was not a particularly fun-loving high school student. By junior year—1986, Chernobyl—my free time was filled up with doing my homework and writing orchestra music derivative of my then-hero, Philip Glass, repetitive music predicated on the notion that time, perhaps, is going nowhere. Ah, sweet sixteen. But then my more sociable sister, Amy, told me that some kids she knew from art class were starting an antinuclear group. I was immediately excited, impressed.
I only knew the kids who, like me, took band. I thought the art class students who showed up for the first meeting of what would become Youth for Global Peace were the most glamorous people I’d ever met. They played in rock ’n’ roll bands and wrote poetry and didn’t eat meat. They had spiky hair and smoked cigarettes and debated whether or not William Burroughs’s Junky was better than his Naked Lunch.
Yeah, yeah, we talked about nukes. We were . . . against them. We’d meet every Saturday night at Greta Montagne’s house and oftentimes some adult from the local chapter of Alliance for a Nuclear Free Future would talk about some nuclear subject. We made antinuke T-shirts and wore them to school. We handed out pie charts of Reagan’s 1986 federal budget (in which defense spending was the biggest slice of pie) at grocery store parking lots. We got up really early one morning and plastered the school walls with xeroxed posters of a mushroom cloud on which we scribbled “This Could Happen to You.” We had a No Nukes banner in the homecoming parade (which I couldn’t walk behind because I was up front playing baritone horn in the marching band). My biggest contribution was probably representing the group in a roundtable discussion on the local public television channel; the adults said a few mundane things about a saner nuclear policy before I started screaming, “You got to grow up! Do you know what it’s like to think you’re not going to grow up? Do you?” Why the station manager didn’t immediately grasp my broadcasting potential then and there based on my nuanced, articulate approach and offer me my own show remains a mystery.
In retrospect the antinuclear part of the antinuclear group was the least important thing for me. For starters, they introduced me to the Beat Generation. I remember the first time I read Allen Ginsberg’s poem “America,” with its famous line that America should “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” I didn’t know you could say that in a poem, but I recognized the sentiment. Later in the poem Ginsberg writes, “It occurs to me that I am America.” I loved that line because it solved a problem, because it shook its queer fist at the rest of the words, words about being a stranger in a strange land. I was more alienated than usual that year. Eleventh grade is the year Montana students are required to take American history and American literature. I was having trouble matching up the founding fathers’ ideals we read about in history class and the less mythic goings-on in Reagan’s Washington I read about in the newspaper. I was having trouble matching up Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” and the cookie-cutter mandate of high school social customs. (Though I did relish the moment in English class when I was asked to read “Self-Reliance” aloud. I got to look the boy who always called me “weirdo” in the eye and proclaim, “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” My italics.) I admired Emerson’s lone-wolf laments, but I needed the Beats more.
The Beats wrote about a freewheeling alternative to the rigid social confines of the 1950s. I have only a vague, secondhand notion of what it must have been like to be young and uneasy and outraged in the Eisenhower era. But I have an intimate knowledge of what it was like to be young and uneasy and outraged under Reagan. My high school was 1980s America in miniature—you either belonged or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, you learned to seek relief where you could find it—and for me, that relief was with the other black-clad malcontents who could quote defense-spending statistics even though we were barely passing algebra. The people in the antinuke group weren’t just my friends, they were my congregation, and our bible was Kerouac’s On the Road. Even though we spent our days watching clocks crawl, that book taught us that there was fast music and fast thinking ahead, that there were jazzy, drunken highways leading out of purgatory, to the West Coast, to the East Coast, anywhere but there.
Except that, deep down, I didn’t believe I’d live long enough to hear that music, to get out of town. I thought I’d be blown to bits, probably sitting in Mr. Crowley’s French class, conjugating verbs in the future tense at the precise moment my future went up in smoke. But I wanted more than anything to do what Kerouac did, to conjugate American verbs and write pretty sentences that stretched on forever, or small, simple ones that said, “Yes, zoom!” I wanted to light out and see the towns of the U.S.A., to notice how the sky looks when the sun goes down over places I’d never been. Elko, Nevada. Flagstaff, Arizona. New Orleans.
That year, a middle-aged acquaintance asked me what my favorite book was and I said, “On the Road.” He smiled, said, “That was my favorite book when I was sixteen.” At the time, I thought he was patronizing me, that it was going to be my favorite book forever and ever, amen. But he was right. As an adult, I’m more of a Gatsby girl—more tragic, more sad, just as interested in what America costs as what it has to offer.
We all grew up, those of us who took On the Road to heart. We came to cringe a little at our old favorite poet, concluding that God was likely never Pooh Bear, that sometimes New York and California could be just as isolated as our provincial hometown, and that grown men didn’t run back and forth all the time bleeding soup and sympathy out of sucker women. But those are just details, really. We got what we needed, namely a passion for unlikely words, the willingness to improvise, a distrust o
f authority, and a sentimental attachment to a certain America, still so lovely, as Kerouac wrote, “at lilac evening.” I have since played the slots at breakfast in Elko, walked in the Flagstaff moonlight, had the hiccups in New Orleans.
If I’m still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre—the poems, the poems!—in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac’s horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford’s poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it’s all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.
As political movements go, our antinuclear group was wildly ineffective. Like, we showed a documentary about the effects of nuclear winter one school lunch period and the only person who showed up to watch it was a West German foreign exchange student. We were much better at getting attention for our other, artier exploits, the most famous of which was a performance-art brouhaha we staged before an unsuspecting English class. We all dressed in black, entering the room one at a time, blankly commanding, “Applause. Applause.” (There wasn’t any.) Carol Hollier bowed weird whatevers on her cello; I blew into my plastic recorder as hard as I could, pulling it in and out of a bowl of water; Paul Anderson thumped on an African slit drum; Rob Lehrkind recited his poem about how “God is in the drying machine”; and my sister and Nikki Greever flipped a slide projector around to different surrealist artworks, including Méret Oppenheim’s 1936 sculpture Fur-lined Teacup.
At the time I thought we were, like the Beats and surrealists (and, distant third, nuclear freezers) we so admired, a movement. But now I see that the importance of the group was, for me, that we were friends. I’d had friends before them, but I’d never had a gang, never had a group of people I liked and admired and enjoyed. The antinuke group taught me a lesson which changed my life—how to hang out. For every hour we spent talking about intercontinental ballistic missiles, we spent twelve hours at the 4-B’s diner drinking coffee and discussing the glory that was Eraserhead. And the first time Matt Brewer, the coolest boy, invited me over to his house and I got there and he and Jimmy Harkin were sitting around listening to Black Sabbath and spray-painting Legos black, I sort of hugged myself—contrary to conventional leftist wisdom—with nuclear arms. I didn’t know life could be that fun.
