Good News from North Haven

by Michael L. Lindvall

  Which was exactly where the first Treasure Box of the Day had been placed by the Jaycees. We were not the first to arrive, however. Monday’s fifty-dollar gift certificate went to a brother-and-sister team, Danny and Amy Olson, for whom “bands” had immediately meant just that.

  It took our failures to solve the Psalm-based clues of Tuesday and Wednesday to demonstrate the pointlessness of overanalysis of Jasper’s hints. For instance, Tuesday’s clue had been Psalm 78:46: “He gave also their increase unto the caterpillar, and their labour unto the locust.” The treasure box had been under the seat of a yellow bulldozer in the County Road Department’s yard on the edge of town. Good fundamentalist that he was, Jasper had no time for matters as arcane as metaphor. Everything “meant what it meant,” as he would say. Bands were bands. Caterpillars were caterpillars.

  Every morning that week, Chris and I would get up and have our breakfast and then listen to the “Sun’s Up, What’s Up?” show together. We’d laugh at Bob Schlict’s lame jokes, and when it came time for the clue, Chris would hand me the pencil and the paper, climb into my lap, and put his finger to his lips as Jim read the clue for the day. He was enjoying the treasure hunt immensely.

  By Thursday, however, I was getting increasingly frustrated. I was determined to outwit Jasper Werzinski. Actually, outwitting him was not so much the challenge. Thinking as literally as Jasper was the challenge.

  When we dashed out of the house on Thursday, I was muttering the clue over and over to myself as Chris joyfully tagged behind. As we passed through the front door, Annie said to me, “Getting into treasure hunting, aren’t we?” I feigned a mad grimace and Chris answered, “Dad and I are gonna find treasure for sure, Mom.”

  But Thursday saw another failure for the Battles team. The clue was Psalm 68, verse 25: “The singers went before, the players on instruments followed after …” Chris and I and a few dozen other hunters went to the field in back of the high school where the marching band practices. The treasure box for Thursday was found in the alley next to Betty’s Knit ’n Sew (“Distributors of Singer and Bernina Sewing Machines”).

  Failure was playing differently on me than on Chris. By Friday I felt as though I were locked in mortal hermeneutical battle with Jasper Werzinski. I felt that Chris must think me a silly kind of minister to have been stumped four times in a row by clues from the Bible, the book about which I was supposed to be an expert. Chris, however, was simply enjoying the time in front of the radio, enjoying the time in the car, enjoying poking around the town with me for hidden treasure. He seemed undaunted by the fact that we had found nothing.

  On Friday I decided that we would tune into the “Sun’s Up, What’s Up?” show on the car radio to give us just a little jump on things. We listened to Bob Schlict’s seemingly endless banter as the time came for the last clue to be read. Chris was on my lap. I was beating the steering wheel with a pencil and growing impatient. Finally I muttered to the radio, “Good God, you fool, get on with it!” Chris looked at me quizzically and said nothing.

  Bob finally got on with it and read with especially dramatic pauses the clue for Friday: “Psalm 65, verses 12 and 13.” Chris handed me the Bible from on top of the dashboard and I read out loud: “They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness: and the little hills rejoice on every side. The pastures are clothed with flocks; the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing.”

  “There’s only one spot that can be, Christopher, the Hofer place.” The only geographical feature in the North Haven area that could even optimistically be called a hill was Hazel Hofer’s farm north of town toward the river. When we arrived, I was excited by the realization that we were the only treasure hunters at the site. “This will be the day,” I said to myself. We drove the roads around the farm for about ten minutes looking for some spot where all the features of verses 12 and 13 were more or less present: “wilderness, little hills, pastures, flocks, and corn.”

  About a mile down County Road 18 from the Hofer driveway, I looked to the left and saw a small sign set a few feet back from the road that read: NO HUNTING, WILDERNESS WETLANDS REFUGE. I looked to the right and saw a large cornfield and behind the field, rising like Zion, that ridge on the north edge of the Hofer farm that is our only hill. We had just passed a pasture with sheep grazing in it. “This is the place, Christopher,” I said.

  For an hour we wandered up and down the road. We poked through the high grass along the shoulder of the road and searched the area around the Refuge sign with special thoroughness. Leaning against the car for a rest, I noticed that if I positioned myself even with the “wilderness” sign and looked north to the highest point of the ridge (the “little hills”), my line of sight went straight down a row in the middle of the cornfield. “It’s got to be out there,” I said to Chris. It never occurred to me that whoever was leasing Hazel Hofer’s land would not be pleased with treasure hunters traipsing through a field of soon to be harvested corn. I told Chris to wait by the car while I walked into the cornfield.

  A stand of field corn in late summer is much like a dense forest. The stalks are a good seven or eight feet tall. The rows of corn are close together and you have to almost push your way through the sharp foliage as though it were jungle. But it’s easy to stay oriented because the corn is sown in long neat rows. To get out you simply retrace your steps back down a corn row.

  But about two hundred yards into the field, the rows changed direction. I suppose I should have walked back to the car by the same row or the one to the right or to the left. I was so sure I was close to Friday’s treasure. I went into the next field and pushed my way across the rows toward the “little hills” that I could no longer see. Suddenly the direction of the planting switched again, not 90 degrees as they had the last time, but maybe 45. Whoever had planted this corn was using the slight contour of the land to best advantage. After about forty-five minutes, I had still not come out on the other side of the field as I expected I would. I decided to return to the car where Chris was probably getting anxious.

  I turned back down the row I was in and walked till the direction of the planting changed direction. I looked to my right and to my left down the row I had come to. I walked a few paces down it to the right, stopped, and thought, No, I turned to my left the first time the rows changed, and to the right the second time … or was it the other way around? There was no point of reference. The day was overcast, hiding the sun. There was no way to see over the eight-foot cornstalks. The slight roll of the land confused me. I started to walk across the rows, pushing my way through the sharp and brittle foliage. Every row looked like every other row. Every stalk of corn was identical to every other. I was moving faster and faster, almost running, turning a number of times down rows that looked somehow familiar. It took me a few moments to realize that I was lost. I stopped to think, and what I thought of was Christopher, for whom rows of words on a page were as labyrinthine and mysterious as this cornfield was for me.

  For those who have never ventured into a large stand of mature corn, the idea of being lost there seems impossible and absurd. But it is possible, and I was feeling quite absurd. And I was just at the edge of frightened, not so much for myself, but for Christopher. The control implicit in knowing what direction is what is snatched from you. You do not know whether you are walking swiftly toward or away from your child waiting alone by the car.

  But this anxiety was mixed with the larger question of how I was going to keep Chris from relating this story to his mother, who would not approve of my leaving a seven-year-old alone in the country, but would certainly enjoy the tale of my getting lost in a cornfield. I knew I would eventually emerge from the field onto one of the roads that surrounded it. “Eventually” could be this afternoon, however.

  As that thought struck me, I heard the car horn honk. Three short blasts followed by silence and then three more. The pattern repeated itself, and I knew that somebody must have come across Christopher, who was probably in
tears, and asked him where his daddy was. Concluding that the Presbyterian preacher from back East had gotten himself lost in a cornfield, they sat down to honk their horn as a beacon for me.

  I followed the sound and came to the edge of the field around the corner and a half mile down the road from where I had left Chris. As I approached the corner, I expected to see a dozen cars. They would have called Annie, who would be holding her son, eyes reddened by tears, head on her shoulder. She would shake her head at me in disbelief. Maybe Billy Hobart would be there with the lights on the squad car flashing. The crowd would be watching me with their arms folded in front of them. Billy would speak into his radio microphone and say, “Call it off, George, we got him.”

  But as I rounded the corner and looked down the road, I saw only our blue Ford Taurus and, through the windshield, the top of Chris’s head. He was sitting in the driver’s seat, honking the horn at intervals. When he saw me, he scrambled out of the car and, leaving the door open, ran to me, jumped into my arms, and said, “Dad, I found you!”

  On our way home, we drove around to the other side of the field in which I had been lost The north side of the field runs along County Road 19, which rises slightly as it skirts the edge of the “little hills.” From that rise you can look across the field to the “wilderness” where we had been parked. Danny Olson found Friday’s treasure box at the high point of the road. It was sitting in plain sight in the gravel of the berm. It contained a fifty-dollar J. C. Penney gift certificate. This time we had at least been warm.

  Chris was in high spirits, proud of himself for honking the horn for me. And I was proud of him and surprised that the idea had come to him. He was also relieved, of course. And I was relieved when he said, “Let’s not tell Mom about this.” He moved over to the middle of the seat and put his left arm onto my shoulder. “I sure love treasure hunting,” my son said. “Can we do it again next year?”

  We had both found treasure, of course, in being lost together, I in the corn, he in his letters. I’m sure we will do it again next year. In fact, maybe he and I will start to hunt treasure all the time. So often, the treasures that life hides from us are to be found not at the end of the search, but in the searching itself, especially when you look together.

  – 14 –

  The Dreadful Omniscience of God

  Last week’s presbytery meeting in Mankato was a vaguely uncomfortable one. It was all entirely polite, of course. People here are agonizingly polite and restrained, and talk on touchy topics is wonderfully circuitous. A raised voice is looked upon as a manifestation of poor self-discipline—behavior typical of spoiled children and people who live too near one of the coasts of this country. Difficult conversations are conducted in a slow and deliberate voice. Generally, the slower and more softly you speak the angrier you are. Everybody understands this, so it works well. But it can be mystifying, to say the least, to someone like me who grew up too near one of the oceans and who actually has seen unrelated people yelling at each other.

  An outside observer to that Presbytery meeting would have never guessed that any but a cordial felicity was the order of the day. The Presbytery voted upon the dissolution of the pastoral relationship between the Reverend Mitchell Simpson and the Johnston Memorial Presbyterian Church in Mankato. First we heard a brief report of the congregational meeting at which the church voted to accept the Reverend Simpson’s resignation. The first hint of an unspoken subtext to these proceedings occurred when the neighboring minister, who had moderated this congregational meeting, said, “A quorum being present, the congregation voted eighty-seven to three to accept the pastor’s resignation.” What was wrong was what he didn’t say. He didn’t say “voted with regret to accept the pastor’s resignation.” The congregation always votes “with regret” to accept the pastor’s resignation, even if they’ve been trying to get rid of him for ten years.

  Next there were two polite but carefully worded speeches by a couple of elders from Johnston Memorial. One said that the Reverend Simpson’s children would be missed in the youth group, and the other made veiled remarks about “our former pastor’s many challenging new ideas and his unique candor and ever-present frankness.” Even people at the Presbytery meeting who didn’t know the real story were starting to listen.

  Next it was Mitch Simpson’s turn to say the requisite words of lament and farewell. Mitch is from New Jersey and was not raised in this culture of circumlocution. His speech was unusually brief. In his three years in the Presbytery, Mitch came to be known as a maker of frequent and indignant speeches, often raising his voice and making actual gestures with his hands. But this time Mitch spoke in even tones and kept his hands at his sides. He said his family would miss Minnesota, that the three years really seemed much longer than that, and then he said good-bye.

  What Mitch would really have liked to say is that he wished that wireless microphones had never been invented. But the incident with the wireless microphone was not the real problem, even though Mitch thought it was.

  The real problem was that Johnston Memorial Presbyterian Church and the Reverend Mitchell Simpson were an incredible mismatch. This had become apparent to everyone except Mitch in the space of about a month. Johnston Memorial is an aging—in fact, aged—congregation possessed of a magnificent stone building unhappily located between a new freeway and an old set of railroad tracks. Warehouses lie to one side, a struggling downtown business district to the other. The neighborhood that built the church went from “residential” to “commercial and mixed” thirty years ago, and most everybody moved out, including the Mr. Johnston who built the warehouses and paid for most of the church building. It is a dying church, and all it needed was and is a loving pastor to do a lot of funerals and to let the church slip gracefully into history.

  But Mitch Simpson came fresh out of seminary, gripped by a vision. This was a vision not so much of an invigorated Johnston Memorial Church, but more a vision of the Reverend Mitchell Simpson, dynamic young clergyman who turns around a dying downtown church. The members of Johnston Memorial, every last one of whom is retired, were wise to the ways of all flesh and saw the hubris at the root of Mitch’s energy. When Mitch’s proud vision of pastoral triumph failed to materialize, he took to scolding the congregation in his sermons. They took it stoically. But it only took the wireless microphone to bring this unfortunate union to an end.

  The wireless mike was, rumor has it, Mitch’s idea. It was hardly necessary, as the back half of the church had been roped off to make everybody sit up front. The old pulpit mike worked fine. But a wireless mike represented cutting-edge technology for the church and was somehow part of Mitch Simpson’s vision of his destiny as a clergyman.

  Now, these gadgets work like this: you wear a tiny microphone on your lapel and a wire connects it to a transmitter hitched to your belt; a two-foot antenna dangles down your side. All this sends whatever the mike picks up to a receiver in the storage room at the back of the church. The receiver is connected to the speakers in the sanctuary. The preacher can then roam from pulpit to communion table and up and down the aisle without any wires connecting him to anything and still be amplified in the whole church.

  The instruction booklet noted in bold letters that THE USER MUST TAKE CAUTION TO ACTIVATE ON/OFF SWITCH ON UNIT ONLY WHEN READY TO BROADCAST. The on/off switch was, however, very small and not clearly visible when attached to the user’s belt. The Sunday after it arrived in the mail, Mitch wired himself up, put on his robe, and reached inside to check the switch on the unit hooked to his belt. He pushed it down, which for most switches means off, but not for this one.

  As the congregation of Johnston Memorial waited for the service to begin that day, the first odd sound they heard was the rustling of papers as Mitch shuffled through notes in his office. Then Mitch, it seems, finished shuffling and took one last look out his window. He saw a middle-aged couple he knew to be from the Congregational church on the other side of the freeway. That church was in the middle of a grand batt
le over something or other and folk were reputed to be leaving in droves. Mitch opened his office door, which caused the entire congregation to look up at the ceiling speakers. Mitch saw an elder walking down the hall toward the church and called out to him, “Sam, the Bengtsons from the Congregational church are coming in the front door. I want you to go and make nice to ’em.” As Sam marched off, Mitch muttered the fatal words to himself and to an attentively listening congregation: “Maybe a few mad Congregationalists can breathe some life into this corpse.”

  Now, Mitch had drunk four cups of coffee that morning, and the next thing he did was to walk to the washroom, open the door, do what he needed to do, flush, walk out, shut the door, and sigh deeply. All of this, of course, was clearly audible to the stunned congregation. The full range of Mitch’s humanity, physical and spiritual, had been broadcast to his entire congregation. A less prideful person could have laughed with the church, who would have been more than willing to do so. Oh, they laughed, most of St. Paul laughed, but not with Mitch. Mitch Simpson was not a man to abide humor at the expense of his great pride. Being who he was, he decided to resign.

  Driving home to North Haven from the Presbytery meeting, I got to thinking of all the things I have said that I wouldn’t want the world to hear. Then I got to thinking of all the things that I have thought that I certainly wouldn’t want the world to know. Words uttered before thought, angry words, vain thoughts, idle thoughts, stupid thoughts, all the things that I would not want another to know.

  A verse from the 139th Psalm came to mind: “O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me! … Thou discernest my thoughts from afar … and art acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.”

  The Psalmist is saying that we are all fitted with a wireless mike patched into the divine mind. And the on/off switch is always “on.” This image, pressing itself on my mind along U.S. 169, terrified me for a moment: to be altogether known. Every thought known. Every passion known. Every moment of doubt and jealousy known. Every motivation—the real motivation—known.