I also despise you because you remind me that we live in a world where bumper stickers pass for intelligent discourse, Grand Dragon Wayne. You’ve seen them: “You Can’t Hug Your Children With Nuclear Arms.” “When Guns Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Guns.” “Think Globally, Act Locally.” “Mean People Suck.” “I’m [insert indignant term here] and I Vote.” Etc., and yaddety. None of these one-dimensional aphorisms stand up well under examination, and I remain suspicious of anyone who can express their most deeply held convictions in the space of a bumper sticker. But that’s the way we’ve come to deal with things. Pick out the obvious, yell at or about it, and click off the remote feeling self-righteous. No heavy lifting required.
Simply railing at you is like displaying a bumper sticker—it makes me feel better, looks good to my assumed constituency, but accomplishes little in the big picture. There is enough disingenuous behavior on both sides of the race issue to suggest that the true path to reconciliation can only happen on a personal level, one to one. So I’m taking this personally, Grand Dragon Wayne. You and me. I hope to undermine you by taking your invitation, making fun of it in public, and then, more importantly, pointing out that as nasty as you are, you are only a marginal, distracting symptom of a systemic problem.
A guy like me, Wayne, I pay the rent by writing, a little piece about monster trucks here, and essay about the joys of summer there, all the while hoping I’ll have a chance to write something of greater importance someday. You’ve given me that chance, and I’m taking it. But I don’t mind telling you the fact that you know where I live frightens me. The fact that you sat down with a pen and wrote my name and hometown on an envelope makes me want to stay away from windows.
Do y’ like irony, Grand Dragon Wayne? Hope so, because then you’ll love this: When I found that envelope in my mailbox, it was nestled cheek-to-cheek with a letter from the Southern Poverty Law Center. They were asking me to support their “Teaching Tolerance” program. To take their “Tolerance Challenge,” and “say ‘yes’ to tolerance.” I admit I’m reminded of the bumper stickers. And their envelope was a mass-mailing job; no handwritten address. They probably don’t even know where I live. But I think I’ll send ’em a little something. Your name and address, for one thing.
Have a nice summer.
1998
People to Avoid on the Backpack Circuit
I’ve seen a bunch of territory with my backpack right behind me. Fifteen or sixteen countries, something like that. One winter, I moseyed around Central America. Actually, I went to Belize for two weeks, but it sounds so much more intriguing to say Central America. Conjures up visions of revolution, drug smuggling, and Harrison Ford. Anyway, I had my backpack, and I ran into some other folks with backpacks, and soon I began to notice things. Those things are listed below.
So you’ve decided to stuff your life in a reinforced nylon box and hoof it for hostel world—travel by foot and thumb, amble the back roads with nary a care, nary a plan, nary a feeling in your arms, the straps are digging in that hard. But be forewarned: tribulation (and a permanent subscapular cramp the size of a volleyball) awaits the backpacker! Never mind the wild-eyed street hustlers, the crack-addled pickpockets or the Kalashnikov-toting teenage border guards. They may chase you down the street, finger your lint, or confiscate your passport and string you up by the thumbs, but they’ll rarely stand on your face to reach the top bunk, prattle on until 3 a.m. about the meaning of life and a psychic aunt in Des Moines, or throw up on your sleeping bag—unlike your fellow travelers, classified and listed as follows:
THE LONG-SKIRTED EARTH MOTHER A vastly patient spirit. Speaks in the earnest monotones of a third-rate folk singer reciting a poem written by a third-grader about a dead dog. Likely to trigger repressed memories of support groups and bad incense. Certain to be outfitted with a handmade Guatemalan tote bag. Finds wonder in all things. Badgers you to accept a copy of a cancer-curing plantain poultice recipe channeled to her in a daydream by an eighth-century Mayan faith healer. Look, lady, I’ll sort my cans, I’ll cut back on the beef, and I’ll even hang a dream catcher from the rearview mirror, but in the meantime aren’t you late for a harmonic convergence somewhere?
THE “WHERE-THE-HELL’S MCDONALD’S?” GUY Say no more. More than likely, there’s a backward baseball cap involved.
RICH KIDS WITH GEAR A particularly revolting strain of happy camper. Usually reeking with an air of self-sacrifice, positively edematous with pride over their willingness to mingle with quaint third world beggar types. Generally packing things like miniature triple-locking machine-knurled aquamarine carabiner keychains, portable campfire espresso maker with brass steam pipe and oscillating rescue strobe, and fully digital titanium insect repellent dispensers. “Look, Mummy—it’s got 100% DEET!”
THE BOOBS OF BERLITZ These are people determined to inflict their hack native tongue despite the native’s desire to communicate in English, in which the native has been fluent since the age of three. The Boobs of Berlitz are easily recognized. They generally walk around with their finger stuck up their phrase book.
MULTILINGUAL, HISTORICALLY AND GEOGRAPHICALLY INFORMED EUROPEANS These people make you feel ignorant and inferior. As well they should.
Now then. Excoriating these folks without affording them the opportunity to defend themselves is hardly sporting. But it is certainly good fun. To prevent my completely alienating anyone who ever hoisted a pack, however, I reckon it prudent that I answer the question, “OK, Mr. Crabby Pants, where do you fit on the list?” And then I must admit that at any given time, I can be placed in nearly all of the above categories. I mean, I’m no earth mother, but on a recent backpacking trip to Belize, I did pack a tube of camper’s biodegradable soap. Great stuff. Smells like coconuts. Gives you that fresh, clean feeling, as if you’ve been scrubbed with…coconuts. As far as the McDonald’s guy, well, I was doing just great, eating nothing but jungle rat and unidentified tubers, until that lonely afternoon in Orange Walk Town when I spotted a woman selling Snickers bars…. And I’m certainly no richkid, but I do have gadget disease. Got me a portable water purifier before I left. Aw, it’s great. Top o’ the line. Fits right in the backpack. Tubes, plungers, little hoses, charcoal filters, the works. This thing would separate Rush Limbaugh from a box of chocolates. Of course it never came out of the box. They may be a third world country, but they got bottled water. I don’t carry phrase books, so I’m not really a Berlitz boob, but I did once spend five minutes dancing around a small post office in rural Germany, holding a postcard in my teeth, flapping my arms and saying “luft!” over and over. Eventually the postmistress looked at me and said, “Air Mail?”
Which brings me back to those self-satisfied, smug Europeans. That’s the one group in which I can’t claim membership. But I expect the look of smug will soon be replaced by the look of mouth breather. On what do I construct my thesis? Why, the fact that the most popular television show in Europe is…Baywatch. For the moment, they’re multilingual. But when we get done implanting Pamela Anderson in their national semi-consciousness, I expect their love of language, history and culture will rapidly devolve into monosyllabic ruminations on reruns. And then, finally, there will exist among the tromping ranks of backpacking a subgroup that we can approach without trepidation and compare subscapular cramps.
1996
P.S. Again, I retract the Limbaugh comment, for reasons already stated on page 49. It may be of anecdotal interest that at one time I was paid roughly $6.50 an hour to listen to Rush Limbaugh. If you’re keeping track, that’s just under twenty bucks a day. It was 1992, and my employer was an overbusy conservative who wanted to know what all the fuss was about. I’d listen to the car radio in the parking lot and report back. Frankly, Rush was funnier back then.
I recently backpacked out of the Grand Canyon following a six-day river trip. My day pack felt a tad heavy. Having made the 4,400-foot climb out of Bright Angel Trail, I discovered that some wise guy had hidden a five-pound rock bene
ath my gorp baggie. A well-executed practical joke is a thing of beauty, and I laughed out loud. That said, I have compiled a list of suspects. Time is on my side….
Falling Together
An elderly woman has fallen in the street. It is London, noon, rush hour. She lands violently, on her buttocks and elbows, her head snapping back on impact. Her capacious white poke of a purse pinwheels across the zebra crossing, spitting handkerchiefs, pill bottles, a compact, pens, bits of paper, a trove of clutter. Thirty yards up the road, the traffic light switches to green, releasing a horde of small cars. The purse slides to a halt, bright and gaping in the sun, the white plastic brilliant against the oily tarmac. The cars surge forward, toward the old woman.
Seated in the upper level of a double-decker bus stopped at a light, I’m looking down on traffic. The bus is enclosed, a sleek, soulless version of the classic red double-decker. A morning of unrelenting sun has turned it into a rolling hothouse. Several passengers are smoking; the smoke and the sun have worked behind my eyes, and the inklings of a headache have begun to seep through my temples. I’m tracking the cars and considering sleep when the flash of the white spinning purse catches my eye. The woman next to me squawks and whips on point like a weathervane, her arm extended stiffly, index finger waggling. The old woman is just off the front of the bus and in the opposite lane. Her cheerfully patterned dress has flown above her waist, revealing doughy thighs and gray cotton underpants. But she has seen the cars, and her fear eclipses her mortification. Weeping and screaming, she claws at the sky, her fingers splayed and crooked, as if she hopes to hook the air and find her feet. The cars are gaining speed. She kicks a leg straight, and a shoe flips loose, arcing up and over her head, then skittering to the gutter. The heel is broken, set at an unnatural cant, like a dislocated thumb. On the bus, the passengers are on their feet. They gasp and ogle, bump shoulders for a clearer view.
An old man lurches from the curb, running to the woman with herky-jerky steps, as if he is on the strings of a palsied puppeteer. His loose brown pants flap at his shins. He bends stiffly, at the hips and knees, and reaches both hands to the woman. His eyes are wide, his fingers set to trembling so violently I can see them flutter from the bus. His jaw is working, his mouth springing open and closed as if he has a tongueful of hot food. The couple’s hands meet and clasp, the old man tugs and shuffles backward. She is nearly upright when his grip fails, and she crashes back to the pavement.
I find myself rising from my seat, intent on disembarking. I will flag traffic. Pull the woman to safety. Put an arm around the old man’s shoulders, lead him safely to the curb. The thoughts are reflex, and I am just off the cushions when the bus lumbers ahead and the woman is cut from view. On my feet now, I crane my neck with everyone else, and see only the pack of cars, their headlong charge unabated. Two blocks farther on, someone flags the toothy hospitality woman and orders tea in a paper cup. The sun is tropical. Ten minutes later, I doze.
Ten years later. I am passing through London and think of the old woman. I would like to think the cars stopped. Perhaps they didn’t stop. Perhaps they did stop, but in the fall she broke a hip, and her husband came to the hospital room holding miniature daffodils cut from their garden. Perhaps she never went home again. Her story is part of my story, but in my story, her story ends without conclusion.
If you accept that time is linear, and that we are propelled by time, it follows that life is a proposal of position and momentum, and that we are continuously hurtling through an infinite bristle of convergence. Yesterday I folded cilantro into a venison stir fry using a spatula hewn from a tapered strip of birch. It was carved by an old man in Norway. We met briefly over a small dinner in his sister’s garden. He spoke only Norwegian. Taking his leave, he simply handed me the spatula and smiled. I knew seven phonetically memorized Norwegian words, and used three of them: “Monge tusen takk”—many thousand thanks. A decade later, I bring out the spatula several times a week. I stir water chestnuts and thyme, and wonder if the old man still lives.
One need not leave the La-Z-Boy, much less ride a bus through London or hitchhike across Norway, to transect a fragment of drama or intimacy. Like the actors in Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, we are simply Brownian particles made flesh, following a fractured arc defined as much by chaos as purpose. But when we wander, when we step outside the familiar, by choice or by chance, the reductive powers of displacement effect a distillation that casts distinct events in sharp relief. The old woman’s tragedy becomes mythic; unable to reach her, I leave her forever in the street, forever before the onrushing traffic. The old man’s spatula becomes totemic; passed from his hand to mine, it represents the intimate, fleeting points of intersection we find only on the wander.
Shedding the mundane everyday, and moving, always moving, the wanderer experiences a constant juxtaposition of intimacy and transience that produces a chronology of focal points to which we anchor distinct moments in time. An old woman falls and screams, and shows me the primal soul of her. An old man hands me a blade of wood and I cook with it forever. We share an intimacy far exceeding the intimacy I feel for people I see daily.
Sleeping under a small tent in the outskirts of Budapest just before the fall of communism, I was awakened after midnight by a thief kneeling on my feet. I remember the darkness, and the sound of his fingers rustling through my backpack, his breath as he leaned above me, and I remember the fear that flash-froze my guts. My first thought was of home. Then I rared up and drove my fist into his face. He rolled backward out the tent, and I heard his feet pound away in the dark. I wonder about the thief sometimes, who he might have been, what he might have intended, and how it is that we came to converge, as close as skin on skin, linked forever, even as we ricochet away at the speed of time.
1999
Branding God
Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, “going to church” meant going to someone’s home on Sunday morning and gathering quietly in the living room. We prayed, sang a few austere a cappella hymns and read verses from the Bible before offering up brief, homemade homilies. You could usually smell a roast simmering in the kitchen adjacent. There was deep comfort in the quiet assemblage.
When I was sixteen, I began a five-year stint working on a Wyoming ranch run by a family of my same religion. I didn’t know it then, but I was taking the first steps on a skeptic’s journey. Today, I can no longer believe as I once did. But I am no bitter heretic. The people in this story, the people I met with for an entire childhood of Sunday mornings, the parents who raised and taught me in love, are people whom, quite simply and profoundly, I owe.
Brother Tim Copper was preaching brimstone, and God Himself was bringing the backbeat. We were gathered in a long, empty, quonset-style granary, seated on wooden benches, receiving the Word. All around the granary, wheat fields stretched away for miles. Brother Tim was working Revelations, if my recollection is correct—and it might not be, I had my eye on this particular girl—and the Good Lord was working a towering thunder bank just off to the southwest, sliding it in on golden shafts of setting sun and legs of lightning, all the while staccato-dancing his fingers across a kettle-drum forged in the storms of Jupiter. The hot wind pushed sweet rain-a-comin’ dust under the granary door and set the ladies’ skirts to stirring. Bible pages riffled, and the young girls put their hands to their hair lest it come unpinned. Brother Tim had Revelations, he had the terrible, swift sword a-flashing from the sky, and he had the admonitory thunder. He had the groove.
I’ll give him this: He knew how to work it. The nearer that storm drew, the more the wind made the roofing nails squawk and the tin roof retch, the taller he rose, glowering from the plywood riser, squeezing the Word in one hand, index finger bookmarking verses he knew by rote. His perfervid eyes swept the congregation like a shark working a beach. This was no come to the warm and sheltering bosom of Christ speech, this was an operatic Armageddon rafter rattler. Brother Tim was recommending Heaven by pointing the way to Hel
l, double-timing our sorry souls like a drill instructor assigned a platoon of pudgy mollycoddles. The march was on, he said, lag behind and be damned. We trembled with truth.
We weren’t used to this sort of thing. Our Sunday meetings were hushed, reverent affairs, parsed with sotto voce prayer, subdued testimony, and muted hymns. Even for this, the Saturday night service of our yearly convention, a service in which the meeting is typically “tested” at the conclusion to see if anyone will stand and silently profess their willingness to walk with God, the thunder from the dais was unexpected and unusual. Even I, distracted as I was by the young nursing student two rows forward and one bench down, found myself caught up in the terrible power of the whole thing, moved by the cinematics of it all: Brother Tim’s bituminous eyes, his portentous certainty, the way he seemed to summon thunder each time he punched the air with his Bible. It was as if Wagner’s Valkyries had dropped in on the Quakers.
I don’t go to church anymore. I was a young cowboy then, working summers on a ranch in Wyoming. Six days a week we worked, with Sunday a strictly observed day of rest. Sunday came from another world. We sat through meeting reverent in our clean socks and stiff boots, then lazed in the cool bunkhouses or fiddled around down by the river. Out by the shop, the equipment that smoked and roared all week sat silent. I used to stand among the tools on the cool concrete and look out through the greasy glass panes over the grinder and marvel at the way the ranch changed on its day off. A per-meant placidity settled over everything, from the woodchucks sunning on the junk piles to the tall grass waving easy on the plateau above the river. Today, an afternoon seems constrained, only a matter of hours. Then, on a Sunday, time was expansive, gracious, accommodating. One Sunday, after meeting had drawn to a close and we had returned our Bibles to our bunkhouses, we gathered in the cookhouse for dinner. I remember roast beef and gravy, but then that would be a fairly safe bet. The women had a little extra bustle about them this Sunday, because brother Tim Copper was at the table. In our little corner of Wyoming, Brother Tim was seen as the heavyweight champ of preaching. Church members would grin and shake their heads in benevolent wonder when recounting his exploits; the deeper implication was that he was not to be messed with. Preaching or not, Brother Tim tended to Hold Forth. This day he was in strong, confident voice, sharing the stories of sinners and their weakness in the face of salvation. There was a woman nearby who had been coming to church off and on for some time. She was a beautiful thing, and, as the story went, had worked as a model. We heard anecdotes of her struggle, of her inability to adhere to our dress code, for which women are forbidden to cut their hair or wear pants. After working with her for some time, with mixed success, Tim paid her a surprise visit. She answered the door in a pair of shorts. By his own account, Brother Tim spun on his heel, walked right back out the sidewalk to his car, and drove away. The woman who first told me this story chuckled with admiration for Tim’s resolve. But the chuckle was double-edged; it also conveyed condescending pity for this woman who didn’t know enough to slip into a skirt and save her soul.
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