quakerthink

. . . and now for something completely different . . .

2016-07-31T19:17:00.002-04:00

hey folks

been awhile, but i'm still here.

lots of water under the bridge since i last posted, and to get my feet wet again i'll talk about something a bit different from the usual quaker blog-- Land Speed Motorcycle Racing.

land speed racing is a passion i've had all my life, and only in the last several years have i actualized it into something real. in LSR, you take a machine-- any kind, any configuration-- and you build it into something that goes as fast as you can make it go. then you take the machine to a track, perhaps a salt flat, a dry lake, an old airport runway, and you fly it down the line.

there's nobody else on the track with you, there's nobody waiting with money if you accomplish anything significant, and there's nothing to gain in recognition except among a half-dozen people world-wide who pay fierce attention to what you do.

sort of an internal landscape, if you will. quakerism turned into a racing machine.

my own journey has been amongst the ancients. i race a motorcycle first built over fifty years ago: a triumph bonneville. this motorcycle first saw the light of day under that name in 1959, and the machine i ride is a 1965 vintage, sort of:

it started a bit sparse a few years ago, but i quickly added a motor:

and various internal components:

. . . and now i have something that may move by itself:

this 50-year-old machine ran 110 miles per hour earlier this year, until a magneto rotor broke. i have since rebuilt the faulty components, and towards the end of september this year will take it back to the track and see where we are.

to be competitive i have to look for 130 miles per hour. not a lot, by modern standards, but then i'll be riding a vehicle designed in the 1930s, with only minor concessions to the progression of the twentieth century.

we'll see how it will do.

and welcome back, folks.

twilight

2014-05-09T00:38:00.000-04:00

i drove a frac pump across this evening here in ohio, 87,000 pounds of steel and rubber. as often happens at twilight, i felt the connection with god that the more busy day tends to obscure. the red and turquoise light against the darkening sky and the cool wind through the open window of the tractor stimulated my senses and again made me conscious of the guide that i try to follow, as i observed his work in other spheres that did not concern me.

carlos casteneda once commented upon a yaqui indian belief about the twilight, which he called the crack between the worlds. where the terminator sweeps across the earth, the forces of day and night are equally strong, and equally weak. within this brief period the powers of the yaqui sorcerors are at their dailypeaks, and the contacts with the spirit world are more frequent and more intense.

i don't pay much attention to yaqui mysticism, but i also don't deny that the shamans were right when they percieved an enhanced sensitivity to the spirit world at twilight. for myself, twilight is a time of clarity, and of communion. i feel the immanence of god most clearly in the twilight creation, when i have a chance to reflect on the immensely large canvas upon which i am a tiny mote among billions of others. i see the wind move among the trees, the clouds shift and coalesce into other forms as the warmth of the sunlight leaves them in the cooling sky, and i feel the hand of god working within the world he created, a thing of richening smells and small sounds in the underbrush.

my relationship with god is not one of study, of earnestly looking through old books or re-reading the discoveries of other people with whom he has had conversations pertinent to their conditions. i don't discount those sources, and i frequently seek them out for insight into aspects of my relationship which i do not understand, which are many. but in the end, my god is a living thing, a personality with a presence that is more important than a history.

and in fact, i believe that the history is less important than the presence, very much so. the history of the incarnation, the resurrection, and the redemption is one which can be read in mostly the same form in a variety of documents. the importance of what took place pre-anno domine and after is not to be discounted. but while its value remains the same, it is eclipsed by our roles in actualizing the relationship that is demanded in the dispensation of grace, the obedience and faithfulness required by a god who will be obeyed, now, here, rather than merely read about and quoted.

as night finally fell, i parked the rig, dropped the pump, and bobtailed back to the yard to pick up another in the cooling darkness. i don't pretend to understand god's plans for me or for anyone else, but i am content to follow where he leads, and to perform the tasks he assigns me.

Quakers in the Country: Sandworm

2013-11-28T21:19:00.000-05:00

After 500,000 miles as an over-the-road truck driver, I have taken on a new job.

I have become a Sandworm.

It's kind of an odd title for what I do, I suppose. My job consists of several tasks, and only one of them is actually tending the sand hopper. But as a newbie to the company, I'm still a worm, as the oilfield phrasing goes. So "sandworm" has a certain satisfactory ring to it, and it makes me laugh. But more specifically, I'm now working for a well completion company based only 14 miles from my house. In the vernacular, I frac gas wells.

"Fraccing," as it's called, is a technique for increasing the productivity of shale gas reservoirs, and is responsible for economic booms in several oil-producing regions in the United States, most specifically, Right Where I Live, in eastern Ohio. "Hydraulic fracturing" involves starting with a pre-drilled well and then pumping down a slurry of sand, water, and chemicals under immense pressure. The pressurized fluid travels down the well casing and emerges through perforations into the reservoir rock some eight to ten thousand feet below the surface, along a horizontal well bore some five or ten thousand feet more. As it enters the formation, the pressure opens small fissures, which are propped open by the sand being carried in. When the pressure is relieved and the well allowed to flow back into catch tanks on the surface, the cracks remain open, allowing oil and natural gas to bubble back up the well bore to be recovered at the surface and piped to a refinery.

The newbie job at a well pad is to tend the sand hopper, which is a big steel tub into which the sand is dumped from a conveyor belt. The job is very simple, and very important. The slurry being pumped into the well is pressurized to as much as 10,000 psi. If the sand hopper is allowed to empty completely through error or inattention, the pressure in the above-ground steel pipes spikes and may cause them to rupture or explode. Believe me, hundred-pound sections of steel pipe flying through the air high above a congested work site will get your attention real quick. Even if the pipe doesn't break loose, a stream of water at that pressure can cut through your leg like a knife. To keep people safe, nobody is allowed to walk around near the iron when it's under pressure, except one or two crew members specifically assigned to look for problems. That's fine with me.

There's a lot of controversy about hydraulic fracturing right now, and a lot of people trying to come to grips with a technology about which they know relatively little, and sometimes about which they have been deceived by various factions on both sides of the issue. Fraccing has been blamed for earthquakes, groundwater pollution, excessive truck traffic and road wear, environmental spills, noise and light pollution, and so on. Some of these issues are genuine and should be addressed. Some are not, and are the product of misinformation, ignorance, and occasionally outright deception. While we're thinking about it, though, it's important to remember that the process has been a part of American oil field practices for some fifty years, and is one of the chief means that our 21st century lifestyle is allowed to continue. By 21st century lifestyle, I'm talking about those things that we all take for granted: heat, light, transportation, and plastics, all of which depend on natural gas and oil wells.

Just as an aside, the oil fields aren't new to me. I'm from Oklahoma, and the farm my great-grandfather plowed behind a pair of mules was home to four oil wells during the time I spent there. The hollow thumping of the casing head gas engines driving the slowly-bobbing pumpjacks is an inseparable part of my childhood memories of the farm where three generations of my family were born and grew up. My father was an operations geologist, and would take me along on his route from well to well, where I would kick my heels from the steel bench in the doghouse, a few yards from the roaring Caterpillars and the swinging stands of drill pipe. As a teenager, my first real summer jobs were as a roustabout on drill ships anchored off the coast of Borneo. During college, I worked in the Gulf of Mexico and sunny Caribbean Sea on seismograph boats doing both streamer work and backdown drag. One summer I spent in Custer County, Oklahoma, stomping geophones for a doodlebugger crew that still used dynamite as a sonic source, rather than the modern vibro-seis trucks. And my first job out of graduate school was as an operations geologist with Exxon Corporation in West Texas, where I worked with mudloggers and wireline crews to pick core points and evaluate reservoir potential in Permian Basin wildcats.

It's been a long and circuitous journey from then to now, but still, the oil fields and their culture are familiar and unmysterious to me. So I'm somewhat bemused by the hostility and fear that the process of well drilling seems to instill in many people, especially when they depend so heavily on its products for their own lifestyle choices. Obviously oil and gas are limited resources, and equally obviously there is going to have to be a transition from them to other sources of energy such as solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, and likely as not, nuclear. But until then we're stuck with what we have, and I believe we should use the extra time made available to us by the current shale gas developments to make these alternative sources a reality for more of us than just the editors of Popular Science. And of course the vast dependence of our culture on the availability of inexpensive plastics—which come from oil and gas wells—is seldom given the airing that it needs in this discussion. Plastics, industrial chemicals and lubricants, fertilizer, and pharmaceuticals are the elephant in this room that still has to be acknowledged.

These decisions came into focus recently when my Yearly Meeting decided to decline the offers made to it to lease oil and gas rights under the 270 acres it owns in Ohio. This decision was made during a called meeting of Yearly Meeting members, and all the points were given a chance to be aired, both for and against the question. In the end, the decision was made in unity, although what exactly that unity consisted of is still somewhat fuzzy. But made it we did, and we now have a responsibility to act upon that decision and become a part of the future that we chose to embrace.

What that action will be is problematic. I and the other members of my meeting heat our houses with oil and gas. We light our homes with oil and gas. We drive to and from meeting using oil and gas. And I'm typing these words on a computer made from oil and gas, using a desk lamp made from oil and gas, while in my kitchen my dinner is being cooked using oil and gas. As Friends, what shall be our witness about oil and gas development? Are we justified in refusing to be a part of the oil and gas development in our own neighborhoods, while remaining active consumers of the oil and gas produced in the neighborhoods of others?

To my way of thinking, this is an extremely important point that many Friends seem to push under the carpet. Remember John Woolman, that 18th century Quaker who rejected slavery and worked hard to make the rest of the Society of Friends do the same? Woolman provides an important example of how to make one's profession match one's practice. Not only did Woolman pioneer for the rejection of slavery, he refused to accept the economic benefits that slavery made possible. As a merchant clerk, Woolman refused to accept payment for writing a bill of sale that included ownership of a negro slave. Later, he sacrificed business opportunities and refused to write wills that listed slaves as property. When he travelled in the ministry among slave-owning Friends, he would pay the slaves for their services in attending him. Woolman even refused to eat from silver plates and cups, as he believed that slaves were abused in mining.

What should be our own witness in this matter? For myself, the question is moot, as I personally support oil and gas development so long as we are simultaneously working towards sustainable alternatives. I am slowly introducing solar illumination to my own home, and will eventually install wind turbines. Our newly-drilled water well will use an electric pump at first, but eventually I plan to install a windmill and an elevated water tank to supply our house. Our household heat was formerly lump coal, is currently electric, but may eventually use our fifteen acres of hardwoods as a sustainable source for an outside boiler. In other words, I'm trying to be a forward-looking part of the solution, at least with respect to energy.

But as part of the larger culture, what should the witness of the Society of Friends be? If we are against oil and gas development, how can we reconcile our profession with our practice? If we support it, what are we doing to transition our use to sustainable sources before we are driven to it by scarcity and price? And since so much of our foreign policy is driven by involvement in the oil and gas-producing regions of the world, how do we reconcile our views of oil and gas production with our beliefs about our political activities there?

The questions are important ones, and the answers aren't easy. But in the meantime, I'm home every night now, and my houseful of kids now has a father that they see a lot more often than when he was driving a truck 25 days out of thirty. So for me, the 14-hour workdays are worth it. But I'm concerned about the bigger picture, and I'm equally concerned that the Religious Society of Friends provide a witness to a forward thinking part of a solution, rather than to a self-centered and selfish part of the problem.

So far the solution to that dilemma is in doubt.

Canaan

2012-01-24T17:10:00.004-05:00

It is a blazing hot morning in a dry, dry, land. A barefoot man dressed in a ragged brown loincloth stumbles behind a pair of skinny oxen, sidestepping over the ragged furrow dragged into the ground by the worn wooden plow. He pauses to wipe his brow, and looks over the green, sprouting barley in the next field, to the hilltop. As he watches, a mass of men appear above the horizon, the sun glinting off hundreds of spear points.

He pauses.

He watches a moment more, his mouth and fingers moving as he counts, then drops the plow handle, and runs towards a shaded grove of trees near a shallow stream. As he nears it, he shouts to a short woman already watching the hilltop, and then snatches up a toddling boy and keeps running. He and the woman splash across the stream, while a teen-aged girl looks back, dropping a basket of half-cleaned vegetables to the ground.

As she looks, the men descend the hilltop, and a mass of people begin to fill the horizon. They are led by a curious procession of oddly-dressed men, surrounding a small box carried between them on poles. When they reach the oxen, still standing placidly in the field, one of them steps aside and swings a bronze-colored axe, sweeping the head from the nearest ox. It falls, dragging the second down next to it, bawling, still yoked. A second sweep partially decapitates the second ox, and the girl turns and runs after the others, leaving the basket spilled over the ground.

The runners don’t pause until they reach a village, where more people are arriving from other fields, hurrying through the wooden gate in the low, mud-brick walls. The man pauses while the women rush inside, and another runs out and hands him a short javelin. Together with twenty other men he watches the approaching strangers as the gate is dragged closed behind their backs. The pounding of the wedges being hammered in is the only sound louder than than the cooing of the doves sitting on the top of the wall.

The mass of men approach, the ones in the midst dragging a log. The man sees that the log is the central pole from the sacred grove near the stream, the source of his village’s prosperity and the symbol of the goddess that they trust to bring fertility to their crops and families. Now it has been cut down and turned against them as a weapon of war.

The forerunners don’t pause when they reach the defenders, who wait, standing their ground. Ten men move forward for every defender, and they are instantly hacked down. The man in the loincloth is among the first to fall. The attackers step over the bodies and drag the sacred pole to the gates, pause to gather their strength, and then smash the pole against the wood. the gates crack and bow inward. the men swing the pole against the gates again and one half breaks free from one hinge and swings aside, dangling from the gatepost.

The men drop the pole and run inside, scattering chickens and pigs, and spread out across the courtyard, filled with old men, women, and children, shouting and clutching at each other in fear. They hack at them with their swords, impaling others with their spears and javelins. The villagers scatter, running to hide, crawling into the storerooms, behind the wattle fences, into the shadow of the walls.

The short woman and her child flee into the darkness of a stable, followed by the teenaged girl. As they scrabble among the straw, a man in a short woolen kilt pauses in the light of the door, a short sword in his hand. He quickly walks to the woman, who now cowers on the ground, covering the crying child with her ragged cloak. With a blow, he slices off her arm, and the child screams, still clutching the detached arm that protected it as it falls away. The woman looks up at him in shock, and a second blow splits her skull. She falls into the straw of the stable floor, while the teenaged girl looks on, her mouth working soundlessly. The man picks the child up by the feet and swings it against the door post, smashing open its skull. He drops the twitching child, grabs the girl by the hair, and drags her through the door. Out in the sunlight, she finally she finds her voice, and screams and screams.

The small courtyard is littered with bodies of old men, women, and young boys. The girl is thrust among a group of a dozen other girls, their wrists now being tied together by cords by two of the attackers. As they watch, pressing against each other, some of the strangers methodically set fire to the houses, stables, and storerooms of the village, while others run after the pigs, sheep, chickens, and donkeys, killing each of them where they catch them. The noise of the screaming girls and dying animals is deafening, but the strangers work silently, knowing their business, without speech.

In just a few minutes it is all over, and the strange procession of men carrying the box enters the village and sets it down. Several of them bring in a sheep from outside, and the men begin to prepare a sacrifice of thansgiving. The girls are led outside the walls, and the smoke rises into the clear blue sky as the flies begin to gather on the pools of blood, and the bodies.

* * * * *

Folks, this is a little story, one that i just made this up, right here and now. But if scripture is accurate, then this scene was repeated in many variations during the Israelite conquest of Canaan many centuries ago. I don’t have any doubt that an event just like this occurred, and that such scenes were common at that time and within that culture.

What I do doubt is that this scene was commanded by a God who tells me to love him, and to love my neighbor as myself. Many people tell me just that, and i have heard various reasons.

What is your opinon? Is this event justified by the gospel of Jesus Christ? Why?

The reason I am asking this question is because I do not believe that an inerrant reading of Christian Scripture is adequate to define Christianity. As a Friend, I hold Scripture to be very important to my understanding of God, but I also hold that the reflections of the Light within us are affected by the color of the glass through which we perceive it. I believe that the Scriptures are inspired, but I do not believe that what I read there today is has been transmitted infallibly, nor do I believe that what I read there is likely to have been recorded infallibly in the first place.

Think about this, please. We believe that the Light provides guidance to us from heaven. Is our reception of it perfect? Can any of us stand and say, "I speak infallibly for God, because inspiration renders my understanding without flaw or error." I believe the ordinary and humble answer is, "No," and that this answer has been assumed to be the case for thousands of years among those who attempt to listen and follow, as opposed to those who attempt to speak and demand obedience. I believe that the same scrutiny that we as Friends apply to the inspired ministry in our monthly meetings must also be applied to the physical documents relating the history of God's dealings with humankind.

Scripture has it both ways. On the one hand, Old Testament Scripture records the divine sanction of violent war:

Deuteronomy 20:16: But of the cities of these people which the Lord thy God doth giue thee for an inheritance, thou shalt saue aliue nothing that breatheth:

And on the other, New Testament Scripture teaches that God now commands the opposite:

Yee haue heard, that it hath beene said, Thou shalt loue thy neighbour, and hate thine enemie: But I say vnto you, Loue your enemies, blesse them that curse you, doe good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully vse you, and persecute you: That yee may be the children of your father which is in heauen:

But what is your own belief, Friend? There are long-standing apologetics available within any Scripture commentary that will explain the slaughter of the Canaanites in light of a primitive people who required a progressive revelation, of a doctrine of successive dispensations, of another of continuous covenantalism, of the sovereignity of a God who rightfully destrys the flawed pottery to make way for the better. Are these explanations sufficient to reconcile the apparent views of a God who loves his creation, and of one who hates it?

What is your view, Friend? How are you led?

Three Good Days

2011-09-03T18:31:00.002-04:00

You know, raising kids is a full time job for most responsible parents. For me, as I drive a truck over the road with just a three-day weekend at home every couple of weeks, it actually isn't as full-time as i would like. What happens is that it becomes more or less double-time for my long-suffering wife, what with five maniacal imps of chaos spending their time disassembling the house and wreaking havoc in various other ways that I won't go into. Sometimes it seems like the kids are growing up more like those wolf-changelings so common in Hindu folklore, like old Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli.

What in the world possessed Rudyard Kipling's parents to choose to name their son "Rudyard?"

Anyway, what this means is that generally when I do come home, it's to a skeptical group of self-aware and highly critical scary geniuses, ranging in age from six to fourteen. At that age, fathers often know very little about the real world, and are generally not competent to venture an opinion that a sub-adult offspring can respect. Golden, my youngest, puts his hands on his hips and speaks slowly and clearly to me when he decides that I need to be educated about how things really work, while my oldest just shakes his head and storms off in frustration. The three in the middle generally roll their eyes when I tell them something, the old "Oh no, here we go again. Don't be fooled . . . " My life at home is full of denunciations of what I know, including the memorable, "Well, when you were young cities weren't invented and everybody lived in grass huts."

So when I do achieve a measure of public validation at home, it's a red-letter day, one that I chalk up in my bank account of credibility that my kids will start withdrawing from in ten or twenty more years, by which time I will hopefully have learned a great deal. And recently, I had not only one good day, but three in a row—three good days in which grizzled old Kevin demonstrated a level of competence in urgent affairs in the life of mice and men that hopefully made an impression on my flinty-eyed brood. Maybe only a temporary impression, possibly, but it was very good while it lasted, and I'll take what I can get, you know.

The First Day: Broadband

The first good day was my first day at home. Since the invention of the internet, my household has remained separated from the dominant culture in a lot of ways, as a result of our choice to live off the beaten path. One of them has been the internet. We've actually had net access for several years, but not in the way that many people consider adequate. After all, we live in a ramshackle old farmhouse, for a hundred years the last house on our road, until Jim dragged an old mobile home down into the copperhead-infested bottom a mile below us and installed power. Not a lot of high-tech compatibility in a house built without running water or even anything thoughtful in the way of electrical wiring.

We had a telephone, although not much of one, so we could have dial-up. But our telephone lines are old, and solid copper. That means that with local dial-up net access, our data speeds are positively chelonian, and it gets worse whenever the wind blows and makes the wires bounce around, or when it rains. But we were used to pressing "enter," and then having to wait two or three minutes for the screen to paint. My kids used the net more or less sparingly, because it was always more exciting to go outside and watch the old trucks rust.

But now things were going to be different, because Kevin was bound and determined to Do Something. I had met another truck driver at a rolling mill in Cleveland, and he had a little gizmo that he took around with him that accessed the net through a cellular telephone connection, right out of his truck, and gave him WiFi broadband more or less wherever he went. What an excellent concept, I thought, and an improvement over the clunky air cards of several generations back (see, you're old, too, now). So when I arrived home, I visited the local telephone company and brought back a little thing about the size of pack of Lucky Strikes, with one button and a little light. A MiFi, they called it. It was even smaller than the little brochure that pretended to be the manual that came with it.

I took it back and plugged it in, which these days is essentially all you have to do with new hardware. After a bit, the little light started flashing purple, and a dialog box on the lap tops' computer screens suddenly inaugarated a new world of broadband net access to the family. We were connected.

"Wow," said my skeptical imps, one after the other. "Look, YouTube even works."

YouTube, of course, is inaccessible without broadband, as are many net features the dominant culture takes for granted, like utilities websites, or the abortive net-based home-schooling program offered by our state board of education. Before, one minute of YouTube took about one hour of download, so we just didn't bother. Now, however, the kids were exploring a world of internet trivia that they had never before thought possible. News, and games, and heavens forbid, FaceBook.

"You're on FaceBook? Since when?"

"We use the WiFi at the McDonald's."

I remember signing onto FaceBook, from about the first day it went online. But it quickly turned into more of an annoyance to me than it was worth, and I deleted my account. I haven't been back since, but my kids got on all by themselves.

Even Shawna was impressed, which takes a lot as well. I tried to present it in its best light.

"Look, Shawna. Now you can pay all the bills online, twice as fast as before."

"Thank you. Very nice."

And so the day was a success. Dad had demonstrated himself competent on the cutting edge in the modern world of high tech, and introduced something previously unheard-of to the household electronics menagerie. Even if he couldn't figure out how to make the mean-faced little mercenary jump out of the attack boat in his son's murderous video game, at least he could install broadband. The kids disappeared to investigate the stimulating new world of intermittent high-speed internet, and Kevin retired to the couch.

And the evening and the morning were the first day. And it was good.

The Second Day: The High Board

The second day was clear and warm, with a blue sky that just invited a day outside for the whole family. And so, of course, we drove all the way to the local public swimming pool in town.

We have a perfectly good tree-shaded swimming hole just down the road from where we live, past the abandoned schoolhouse and the flat spot by the creek where the blacksmith used to be. But there's nothing like novelty to excite the kids, and the swimming pool in town has real diving boards, after all.

Now, diving is not something that one normally practices in the kinds of swimming holes that we have near the house, both because the only available places to dive from are generally the old bridges across the creek, and because the water under them is not usually deep enough to go into headfirst anyway without risking cervical readjustments of the type not normally recommended by the local chiropractor. But the pool in town has two diving boards, one about four feet up, and another way up in the sky.

"Kevin, you're going to dive off the high board," challenges Griffin, my Number One son, and the one most skeptical of my general abilities and wisdom.

"Okay," I say nonchalantly, looking up at the underside of the board, way, way up there in the clouds.

I looked it over while the kids got wet. Out here in Appalachia, the high boards are more or less considered crazy zones by everybody. Nobody ever goes off them headfirst, for two reasons. First, there simply isn't any good reason to go and do something as dumb as dive headlong off a little springy platform up in the altosphere, and second, there is no need for any other reason beyond the first.

But today, Kevin had a good reason, because the kids were watching, and gauging, and making conclusions.

"Have any of you kids ever dived off the high board before?"

"No."

"Low board?"

"Of course," says Griffin. "And I've jumped off the high board, too."

"I've jumped off the low board," says Devra.

"Me too," says Paoli.

"All right," I say, heading for the ladder. "You all watch."

Up on top, I look down into the cool water far below. It's really only twelve feet, but to leap off anything from twelve feet headfirst is not something that is instinctively attractive. But I step to the end of the board, give a big bounce, and do a test jump into space, feet-first.

Wham! The water hits my feet like a flat paddle and I'm instantly enveloped in the cool blue wetness. Not so bad, I think, surfacing and swimming to the side. Hauling myself over the edge, beard dripping, I get back in line for the high board, with the kids still watching critically. Nobody, ever, dives off the high board at this pool. My moment has come.

At the very top, I wait patiently until it's my turn to walk the plank. I pause halfway out, judge my distance, and with three quick steps and a jump, I launch my fat old fatherly figure into the air, arching into my best interpretation of a classic swan dive, heels together, toes extended, arms out and then swept into position in front of me, as the blue blue of the water rushed forward into my face as I descended.

Wham! Old dad hits the water in a vertical dive. Probably not something to score for at the Olympics, but the first dive off the high board this little pool has seen all week, I imagine. I arch up to miss the bottom, and break the surface in the middle of the deep end, flicking my head to clear my ears while I tread water.

To my great satisfaction, I am facing a row of open-mouthed astonishment, as my kids observe that once more, useless old Dad can accomplish something that nobody else dares. This is too good not to milk some more, I decide, and head up the ladder to the high board again. My triumph is reinforced again and again, as I repeat the performance under the eyes of my children, until I finally decide that even I have had enough accolades, and take a break.

And the evening and the morning were the second day. And it was good.

The Third Day: The Serpent

Out in the sticks, we have a lot of wildlife, of various kinds, sizes, and taxonomic affinities. Some of them are snakes. We have copperheads, the beautiful but poisonous pit vipers down in the bottom lands. We have a myriad of lined snakes, ribbon snakes, garter snakes, and so on, down in the grass and on the edges of the swimming hole, all Thamnophis, but beyond that beyond my remembering. We have the clownish black and brown hognose snakes, always ready for a bout of playing possum. And we have the elegant rat snakes, Elaphe obsoleta.

The rat snakes are viewed with suspicion by the locals.

"Those black snakes are interbreeding with the copperheads, you know," Jim tells me.

"How do you know that?"

"Just look at 'em," he says. "You can tell."

I happen to love the Elaphes, and catch all that I can get hold of to let go around the house to keep the mice down. This often makes for amusing travel, as after I pick one off the road I have to drive home in the old one-ton, shifting the four speed while holding a struggling three or four-foot snake in my gear shift hand. Once I had to stop as one tried to escape down the ventilator duct on the floor of the truck. Not a good place for a snake to die, so I held tightly onto his tail and eventually coaxed the busy end back out of the hole. Elaphes are pretty docile, as snakes go, although they will happily bite you a good one if you introduce yourself to them too abruptly.

"Dad, there's a snake on the porch," announces Devra, my number one daughter.

"That's nice," I say. "Is it alive?" First things first. With cats and dogs in the house, we have lots of things show up on the porch that aren't alive, and in many cases aren't even anatomically complete. So I always ask.

"Yes. Come and see."

I get up from my lunch and step out onto the kitchen porch, where all five kids are staring intently at something half-concealed in the tall weeds that fringe the ancient concrete slabs I dragged there when we re-did the meeting house sidewalks. We're cheap, so I'll make a porch out of anything handy, and these old slabs of sidewalk work great, both for us, and as warm relaxing places for visiting snakes.

Resting calmly on the concrete is the head and a few coiled inches of a large snake. A good-looking black one. So far so good.

I step over to the snake and look down, making sure I know what I've got. We don't have cottonmouths this far north, but whip snakes and racers are sometimes dark, and they're nervous snakes, prone to bite. The hognose snakes won't bite, but this isn't one of them. It's a nice big rat snake, maybe even one of the ones I dropped off on the property a season or two before. No way to tell how big it is, as it's mostly hidden in the weeds.

Shawna stands inside the kitchen, watching through the screen door and trying not to look anxious. She's not scared of snakes, really, at least when she's inside and they're not, but she'd usually just as soon not have them surprise her by twisting and writhing under her bare feet when she steps onto the porch in the morning. Mice are another thing entirely, and will always cause her to scream as they scurry across the kitchen floor, tail straight up and diving for shelter. But the kids watch me and the snake closely, looking to see what I'll do with this interesting anomaly.

And I know just what to do with big snakes, which is always what I do: pick 'em up and see what they look like. I carefully reach down to grasp the rat snake behind the head, but as soon as I touch it, it jerks its head backwards and scrambles for safety, the weeds next to the slab suddenly coming alive as it boils and loops itself around to disappear.

But I'm prepared for this, and quick as I can I reach down grab the snake by the middle, and swing it up out of the grass, where it hangs reeling at both ends like a flexible black thunderbolt in the hands of Zeus.

And like Zeus, I triumph over nature. I spin, gently swirling the snake out like a rope, and then quickly swing it between my legs and clamp them shut on it, trapping its head behind me with its tail end still firmly in my hand. But my triumph is somewhat marred, as I inadvertently leave too much snake loose behind me, and the offended reptile lunges its snaky head around my leg and firmly bites down on my trousers, a bit too close to my trouser fly for comfort.

Shawna gasps and wrings her hands from behind the kitchen door. The kids stand and stare, and Dad carefully disengages the lovely four-foot snake's jaws from his unharmed leg and loops the body around his forearm, in the correct herpetological manner of holding a snake to both calm it down and keep it from harm. The snake becomes immediately docile, and I invite the kids over.

"You can tell it's a rat snake because it has a completely flat belly, with the body like a loaf of bread in cross section. See the white belly with the little dots?"

"Can I touch it?" asks Starbuck.

And so as the evening progresses into a gentle calm, and the lightning bugs venture out to illuminate the hilltop, I spend a few minutes basking in the warm glow of accomplishment. And I realize that this was the evening and the morning of the third day, and it was just as good as the two just preceding it. In a scant three days, I had demonstrated a practical grasp of modern high-tech computer science, physical bravery in the face of almost certain death, and a mastery of the mysterious things of biology heretofore only expected of nature gods and other fabulous characters.

And I also know enough to enjoy it while it lasted, because one of the things that grizzled old gray hairs know for sure is that the memories of the young are ephemeral things, and while I'm looking good today, tomorrow won't be building itself on any foundation older than its own sunrise.

But by gosh, it's good to look good, every now and then. And doing it three days in a row was a gift that doesn't come often.

The Great Hot Air Balloon Failure

2011-04-23T21:12:00.000-04:00

My kids are a curious lot, perpetually interested in making things, destroying things, changing the shape and/or color of things that I would rather they have left alone, and so on. We give them a lot of freedom in this respect, as we consider experimentation an important part of a quality General Education. As part of this philosophy, we homeschooled them until we got too many to keep up with. I suppose lots of what we try to do with them still constitutes experimental education, from “Adventures in Rhetoric” with my Number One Daughter, to “Don’t Set That on Fire, It Will Explode” with my Number Two Son. But one of the things we do a lot of is just basic experimenting.

Experimentation is the best way to learn about the world, in my opinion, and is one of the things that make Quakerism significant to me. After all, one of the foundations of Christian Unprogrammed Quakerism is that personal experience lies at the base of all knowledge of God. Of course, most all interpreters of Christianity will say that, but they will usually add “. . . and this other person’s personal experience is the one you should listen to . . .” My lovely wife and I take a different approach to the matter, sometimes intentional, sometimes accidental. Rather than learn about the Creation from the hoary experts in their ivory towers, or from the hoary authorities in their cloistered rectories, I try to let my kids learn as much about the world as they can directly, from the hoary world itself. And of course, they always have their hoary father around to assist them in avoiding the incineration of their home and other such unintentional consequences.

Our kids are especially fond of bright colors, paper, defying gravity, cutting things up, destroying solid objects, and discovering new uses for fire. So one day last week, I considered that it was time to teach the children something useful about all of these things. How, I wondered, could I possibly fit all this into a single day? Fitting it into a single day is important, because driving a truck for a living means that my home time is extremely limited. We’re still waiting for the opportune moment to glue the masts onto the ships they built inside old whiskey bottles the time I was home before last. I didn’t quite ream out the holes in the wooden hulls big enough before we glued them inside the bottles. Manipulating the masts and sails into place at the end of long , slender drinking straws turned out to be more difficult than I expected, and we ran out of time before I could come up with an alternative technology. But not to worry, all I have to do is sneak a few more whiskey bottles past my wife, and we’re ready to try again.

Anyway, I hit onto the solution to the current problem while driving across Wisconsin, and immediately called Shawna to make the necessary arrangements.

“I need you to buy some stuff for me for when I get back.”

“What stuff?”

“Well, I need some long tissue paper, some tomato paste in the small cans, some glue sticks, and some 90 percent isopropyl alcohol.”

“Why should I help you build a bomb? We can’t afford insurance.”

“It’s not for a bomb. We’re all going to build a Hot Air Balloon. And I just want the cans for the burners.”

“You mean you’re going to throw away perfectly good tomato paste?”

“You can make spaghetti for dinner.”

“No.”

And there you have it. A quick project that involves the exercise of solid geometry, convection, a bit of history, requires the uses paper, glue, an electric drill, perhaps, and would result in a spectacular and emotionally satisfying visual extravaganza to seal the lessons into the malleable and receptive minds of my five children. It would also show my lovely wife that I could actually do more during my 72 hours at home than just sit on the couch rolling lint out of my navel. Yes, such are the dreams of mice and men, but little did I realize how soundly my hopes would be dashed by the cold hard reality of nature and nature’s laws. But I digress.

I arrived home to discover a complication already waiting for me.

“Your son’s science teacher said to use Sterno for the heat source, so that’s what I got.”

“Sterno? That won’t work,” I said, hefting one of the heavy cans filled with an evil-smelling pink gel. “Why couldn’t you just buy the tomato paste and alcohol?”

“Stuff it.”

So we made another trip to the grocery store in the next town, my wife having washed her hands of this stage of the affair. At lunch at the McDonald’s, I grilled my Number One Daughter on her geometry skills, because at the age of 13, it would be her responsibility to supervise the design of the gas envelope.

“Devra, what is the value of pi, to eight decimal places?”

“Three point one four one five nine.”

“That’s only five,” I said. “What are the next three?”

“How should I know? I can’t remember. Two six nine, maybe.”

“Wrong! Two six five!”

I consider pi to be an important number for children to know, and make sure that its value is included in their education somewhere. After all, it’s a necessary number for making Hot Air Balloons, as well as for many other household tasks, such as determining the amount of cornbread batter to prepare for a round baking pan if you want the cornbread to be a certain thickness. You know, important stuff.

“Okay, if you want to make a round balloon about three feet in diameter, how many one-foot wide panels do you have to cut?”

“Nine.”

“And if you want the balloon to have a one-foot hole in the bottom, how wide do the panels have to be at the bottom?”

“Um, three feet divided by nine? Four inches?”

“And what is the angle of the top of the panels, to make them fit together right?”

“How do you do that?”

“You take the number of degrees in a circle, and divide it by the number of panels.”

“Um, forty degrees?”

We were all set.

Constructing a hot air balloon is something everybody should do at some point in their lives. Building a lighter-than-air craft, even in miniature, is an interesting lesson in convection, in relative air density, in buoyancy, and in history too, for that matter, as well as being fun. After all, the first man-made vehicles to venture off the earth’s surface were the hot air balloons of those old Montgolfier brothers, and the technology has been fundamentally the same ever since. My own experiments as a teenager in England used lightweight tissue paper for the gas bag, but my wife explained that tissue only came in small sheets in America these days. Innocently, I chose to substitute longer gift-wrapping paper. This was my first mistake, but it would be a while before this one came to light, and in the meantime there was plenty of opportunity for making others.

Most immediate was my preoccupation with burner construction. To make a good burner for a hot air balloon, just take a small tomato paste can (or similar), stick it over the end of a piece of wood, and drill a whole bunch of quarter-inch holes in it. Leave enough non-perforated space at the bottom to hold some alcohol, and attach a loop of flame-proof bailing wire at the top to hang it from under the balloon. Voila! Instant burner! A bit heavy, though, I thought. In England, I had used aluminum pill bottles when I did it, but those are hard to come by in Appalachia. We set the tomato paste can on a flat rock on the dining room table, poured in some alcohol, and I dropped in a match.

“Is that all it does?” My Number One Son Griffin queried us skeptically from his position of safety behind the fire extinguisher in the kitchen. Griffin is fairly blasé about fire. In fact, he was the trigger man in the Great Hilltop Grassfire a few years ago that taught my city-slicker wife how unexpectedly exciting it can be to try to burn a dried-up old Christmas tree in a dried-up old hayfield next to your dried-up old house. Which is another story, but one that may never be told for diplomatic reasons. But truly, the burning rubbing alcohol was not a very impressive sight—a tall, cool, yellow flame that smoked and didn’t seem to put out much heat at all.

“Give it some time to warm up and start boiling the alcohol into a vapor, “I suggested hopefully. “I remember the flame making a tight cone of purple fire that really put out the BTUs when I did it.”

After a while it did get a little better, but not much. Another mistake. Puzzled, I thought about why it wasn’t burning like I remembered. Then I remembered that I had used methanol in my own attempts, years ago.

Methanol. Wait a minute—that was the answer. There had been no water in the fuel I had used, it had been pure wood alcohol. Thinking about it, I realized that a 91-percent isopropyl flame would never get really fierce, because boiling the water mixed into the rubbing alcohol was absorbing the heat produced by the combustion, making steam instead of hot air, and decreasing the heat available for raising the temperature of the air going into the balloon. Heat of vaporization and all that. Not good. A better fuel was necessary.

“We need some meth,” I said.

“Excuse me?” replied Shawna.

“Methyl alcohol, you know, methanol, methylated spirits. I need to get some at the apothecary.”

“The fact that you buy it at ‘the apothecary’ is an indicator that you aren’t likely to find what you need around here. This isn’t England anymore.”

But another trip to town netted a small can of pure wood alcohol from the paint section of the hardware store. Refueling the burner with the methanol brought a dramatic change, and a tight purple cone of hot, hot flame hissed gently above the top of the tomato paste cans, just as I remembered. We were in business.

In the meantime, my daughters were busily snipping out panels for the balloon, using a large pattern cut from a cardboard box we’d salvaged from behind the drugstore (not from the apothecary, note.)

“How many do we need?” asked Paoli. Daughter Number Two is likely to turn into an artist like her mother, and was instantly involved in the patterning and cutting of the panels. This was her element. She’s also a literary type, so I’m making plans for a future project to capitalize on that. In the meantime, a three foot balloon will need pi times 3 (or so) panels to get all the way around.

“Nine panels for each balloon. Let’s make just one first, and see how it goes.”

Fitting the panels together was sort of like building a giant paper fan, except that the glue sticks didn’t seem up to the task of holding the paper together, in the neat edge-to-edge match necessary to produce a clean, prolate spheroid when unfolded. Another mistake, I realized. But with a judicious application of packing tape and staples, we managed to produce something that looked like a cross between Humpty Dumpty and one of my grandmother’s cotton quilts. A ring of bailing wire at the bottom to suspend the burner was installed, a round paper cap at the top to seal the crown, and the balloon was done! A bit heavy, I thought innocently, not yet having perceived my technological humiliation rapidly approaching from the far distance.

“Hold this up, “I said to Shawna. “I need to see into it to center the hook so we don’t set it on fire when we light it.”

“On fire?” asked Griffin, still in control of the fire extinguisher. “Aren’t you going to take it outside to test it?”

“Nope. Too windy. We’ll just fill it a little and try it here in the dining room.”

“Can you do that? Did you do that when you built yours?”

“Of course,” I explained, neglecting to mention how my own balloon had met its dramatic fiery end in the basement bathroom of my London high school.

“Can I have a can of Sterno?” asks Starbuck. He will soon be nine, and playing with matches is a wonderful way to anticipate a birthday. Playing with a can filled with napalm is even more interesting.

“You can’t take it away, but you can light it here if you want to watch.” I decide that gathering all the pyros into one place would concentrate the danger, and would likely make adequate response more timely.

“Can I have the other can?” asks six-year-old Golden. I nod. Starbuck and Golden are close enough in age to plot together at acts of destruction. Luckily Golden’s attention span isn’t as long as Starbuck’s. When he catches up, I imagine that all the remaining screws holding the doorknobs to the doors will disappear to wherever Starbuck put the first ones. And the bolts holding the bunk beds together. And everything else he has taken apart since he discovered how to use a wrench and a screwdriver. Golden is still in the more direct hammer-and-hatchet phase, and has blazed every wooden object near the house with his signature series of gnawing rodent imitations, including the porch railings and the bench by the front door.

But now we’re ready for the big moment, the moment when I shine in front of wife and children, when obscure and mundane components unite in a miracle to vindicate my claim that Dad Really Does Know Something Interesting After All. My time had come.

“Shawna, stand on top of this milk crate and hold the balloon up, so I can light it from below.”

Obligingly, Shawna takes hold of our alcohol bomb and I get down on my hands and knees to light the burner hanging underneath. (She’s sort of short, even standing on the milk crate.) After a moment, I step back, and the little burner hisses out its little purple cone again, this time directing the heated air straight up into the one-foot wide basal orifice of the magnificent Hot Air Balloon.

And then we wait. And wait some more. A little too long, I think. It wasn’t going up.

“It’s not going up,” Shawna observes.

“Let me hold it a minute,” I suggested.

“I can feel the heat coming out of the holes in the top. It’s burning fine. And look at the ceiling.”

Holding the balloon by its crumpled crown, I can feel the heated air slipping out between the badly glued edges, past the many staples, and past the packing tape patches, then escaping to the ceiling. Looking up, I see ring after ring of concentric diffraction shadows rippling across the ceiling just above the balloon, proof that the hot air was pumping out of the burner. Just not enough to lift the leaky balloon, which by this time was getting pretty heavy, what with me having to hold it up in the air. Obviously, we had a weight problem, combined with excessive leakage.

“Okay. Let’s think about this.”

While I thought about it, Griffin returned the fire extinguisher and sat down in front of the computer to slaughter as many Third World mercenaries as he could in his new video game. Starbuck and Golden disappeared to burn up the Sterno in unsupervised privacy. I sat with the two girls looking at the failed balloon.

“Just not light enough, I think. The tissue paper version was lots lighter. And I used balsa wood to reinforce the opening in that one, not bailing wire.”

“Should we make another?” asks Paoli.

“No. Go get a garbage bag, and we’ll test whether the burner is up to the job.”

So there in the kitchen, we built another balloon, smaller and lighter, this time. I couldn’t help but think of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, laboriously building his first boat so large that he was unable to launch it, and had to build a smaller, lighter one, nearer to the sea. This new balloon was just a simple lightweight garbage bag, with a ring of wire at the bottom holding the same burner. I filled the burner, lit it, and held the bag up over the gently roaring flame.

“Look! It’s lifting!”

And it was, but that was all it did. The lightweight garbage bag filled into a satisfying balloon of heated lighter-than-air air, strained to the ends of its tether, and floated in mid-air over the burner, which still sat solidly on the wooden boards of the kitchen floor. We had fuel, we had ignition, we had containment, but we had no lift off.

And that is where we ran out of time.

So at this point, the Great Hot Balloon Project is still in stasis, as I write these words to the sound of the rumbling diesels alongside me in this small Oklahoma truck stop, ten days out from the house. The procedures have worked well enough to vindicate science, but not well enough yet to vindicate our interpretation of the technology. We have heat, probably enough, but we have too much weight, or we have too little volume, or both. Alternatively, perhaps what we need is a steeper density gradient. Perhaps if we had taken the balloon and tested it in the colder cellar, the difference in weight between the inflated balloon and the cold air it displaced would have been enough to generate sufficient lift to raise it, possibly to the point from which it could have ignited the kitchen floor from underneath. Perhaps it was all a combination of these things. Perhaps the stiffness of the wrapping paper envelope prevented it from expanding into a large enough volume to hold adequate heated air (it was open on the bottom, after all, and could only hold so much).

So, for the next iteration of this continuing project, we are first going to conduct a post mortem with the children, and enlist their help in the design of the Great Hot Air Balloon, Mark II. Probably we’ll return to the lighter and more flexible tissue paper, but if we do we’ll have to build the panels from multiple pieces. Probably we’ll make the balloon bigger, which will make it that much more impressive if it works. We seem to have reached a technological ceiling with the burners, except for further experimentation with the small aluminum prune juice cans that are much lighter than the tomato paste versions. Maybe we could use a better fuel, after all. I had briefly considered using nitromethane, but decided that race-car fuel would not be a safe heat source. But maybe being wise wasn’t so smart, after all. I'd also thought about generating hydrogen using water and an automotive battery charger, as the old method of dropping iron into sulfuric acid was likely too hazardous, even for us. And perhaps we’ll dispense with the bailing wire, except for the components directly in line with the flame.

In the end, there’s no telling what we’ll do. After all, this is Experimental Learning, and therefore a failure is just as informative as a success. It just doesn’t make Dad look as good, you know.

Maybe we should try making black gunpowder next.

Quakers in the Country: Spring Chickens

2011-03-22T21:33:00.001-04:00

A few days ago was a holy day for our family. Not holy in the religious sense, which as Quakers we tend not to spend a lot of time over, but holy in the old Hebrew sense of being “special.” Today was the day we went over and took a look at the Spring Chickens.

They’re not really chickens, at least not yet. So far they’re just chicks, just baby chickens. Chickens tend to reproduce according to a schedule fixed by the increasing day length of the approaching vernal equinox, which means that they tend to show up in the spring. That makes a lot of sense for a bird that has to be able to find enough tender young plants and hatched-out insects to grow and take on the world before very many days have gone by, and so young chickens tend to show up in the springtime. I have heard it said that the term “Spring Chicken” once had a specific economic implication, in that the fryers and broilers that people brought to market were distinguished by being “Spring Chickens,” (hatched that year), versus “Something Else Sneaked Into the Crate,” (like last year’s left-over chickens, which were not quite so desirable). Whether this is true, or whether “Spring Chicken” just meant one that’s pretty young is beyond me. But I do know that newly hatched Spring Chickens are adorable, inexpensive, useful projects for five juvenile Quakers, and make great food for Burmese Pythons. And springtime comes just once per year.

When chickens get ready to break out of the egg, they finish up the last of their development and absorb the last bit of yolk from outside their body. This little bit of moist nourishment is what gives precocial birds like the Galliformes the wherewithal to jump up and run after momma just a few minutes after hatching, like quail, and ducks, and other ground-nesting birds. And if you think about it, getting up and taking off is a pretty important thing to do if you hatch out at eye-level with rat snakes and possums and such. That last little bit of yolk is also what makes it possible to hatch out a bunch of baby birds, drop them into a cardboard box, and then take them to the Post Office to be mailed around the country, like so many Christmas presents, or Valentine’s day cards, or all those other things that non-Quakers associate with the holy days we don’t observe, or at least didn’t used to, or maybe just sort of don’t pay as much attention to now. Something like that, anyway. A box of chicks can be shipped through the mail with a reasonable expectation of profitable survival at the other end, so that’s how it’s done.

The significance of all this to us is that this is the year That We Are Going to Have Chickens Again. Before we had a lot of kids, Shawna and I lived on the edge of a canal bank out in California’s Central Valley, and we had chickens. Lots of chickens. We moved into a trailer in the middle of nowhere and inherited a lot of culture from the previous residents, who were from way in the middle of another nowhere in south Mexico. Among these left-over items were a hand-made clothesline, laboriously braided from many pieces of bailing twine, an industrious stack of concrete slabs upon which to beat our laundry clean, and chickens. They were not ordinary chickens, either, but were Mexican fighting chickens, the kind that were bred specifically for chicken-to-chicken combat in the arena.

These were amazing birds, beautiful dark roosters with golden collars, high combs, terrific spurs, and terrific attitude. They spent their time crowing, herding their personal harems of brown, tan, and orange hens, and engaging in spectacular bloody and often fatal fights with each other. The fights were inevitable, and served to keep the population of chickens down somewhat. I say only somewhat, because these Mexican birds were spectacular not only in their abilities to die, but also in their abilities to raise chicks. The hens were all broody, all of them, seemingly all the time, and would successfully hatch out clutches as large as ten or eleven chicks, over and over. Some hens would disappear for a few weeks, and then reappear with more than a dozen yellow chicks trailing behind them. These hens were mostly wild, and along with the roosters would spend the nights up in the eucalyptus trees, out of reach of the striped skunks and coyotes that otherwise did their best to limit the numbers of chickens too. But the little chicks couldn’t get up into the trees, so their mothers would gather them up in the tall grass in the evenings and spread their wings over them all, doing their besto keep them dry in the spring rainstorms that added hypothermia to the hazards of being a Spring Chicken.

We started out with seven of those birds in the first winter, and by the next fall they had ballooned into a noisy flock of over 60 birds, of which more than half were beautiful roosters, ornate, loud, and vicious in their interpersonal relationships. The coyotes, skunks, chicken hawks, and rainy weather took them down to about a dozen by the following spring, but then they blossomed back up into another flock, this time over 70 birds. The population booms and busts were distinctly tuned to the seasons, to the hazards of being a chicken in the country, and were at best only somewhat under our fairly hands-off control. Under a philosophy of benign neglect, we tended to let the chickens do what they did best, which was to live out their lives in our company mostly as picturesque companions out on the canal bank, along with a vast menagerie of other neighbors. We provided feed, grit, and nominal protection from the skunks. The dogs kept the coyotes away on a part-time basis. We couldn’t do much about the hawks, but they had trouble lifting more than the smallest of the birds, anyway..

But these elegant fowl provided us with an endless supply of eggs, and a source of fresh meat for our neighbors and for some of the members of our meeting who didn’t mind being handed a headless, half-plucked dead bird a few minutes before worship. So there were advantages to sharing our canal bank with chickens, after all, besides the entertainment value, or the novelty of returning home to find a freshly-laid egg on the bedroom pillow, or on the kitchen table.

And this is where we return to the current story. I’m a vegetarian now, so I don’t eat chickens any more, even the unhatched kind. But there are five growing primates in my house now, most of whom are quite happy to eat a chicken. Two are teetering on the edge of vegetarianism, but haven’t yet made the leap into grass-eating that I committed to years ago. So I think along with my practical and lovely wife, there are enough mouths interested in eating chickens in my house that we decided to go ahead and finally get some more.

And so we gathered up our own brood off to the farm supply store, and looked down into the yellow mass of baby chicks scrambling about under the heat lamps inside the watering troughs that the store personnel use in preference to the more universal but less sturdy Cardboard Box. The kids all peer into the tanks, ogling the babies, like looking into the middle of a glass-bottomed boat, except with less water. There are a several different kinds, mostly about a week old, I judge, with developing pin feathers in the wings. That’s good—if chicks are going to die from the stress of handling, they’ll do it sooner rather than later. These older birds will be strong stock and hardy.

“What kind of chickens are these, exactly?” I ask because I know that there are more different kinds of interesting chickens than there are stars in the sky, but I’m looking for cold-hardy free-range breeds, with hens that go broody and love to roost in the trees. No need to reinvent the wheel, after all.

“Farm supply store chickens, mixed, Reds, Bantams, Cornish, you know, whatever was left over at the hatchery that was cheap that day,” says Shawna. “These are the sexed pullets, and those over there are straight-run, pullets and cockerels mixed. The straight-run is cheaper, so that’s what we’re getting. But not today. We’re just looking, today.”

This sounds good to me, because I know from years of experience with smaller animals that they love to die, and that chickens are as bad as hogs in terms of dying in immense numbers, just not with as much devastating financial costs per animal. And right now we don’t have as much as a wire pen to put them in. So if we’re just looking at chickens, then that’s the best of both worlds, all the benefits without the long term commitment.

“I want you to build me a moveable pen that I can pull around the property,” says Shawna.

Uh oh.

“What kind of pen,” I ask, carefully. “And how big?”

“Just something about eight feet long that I can put the chicks into until they’re big enough to fend off the cats.”

“I can do that. You want a little hoop-house made of poultry netting, right?”

“I’ll show you when we get home.”

And so I’ll leave the rest of the visit for discussion at another time, the debates about wood versus metal fence posts, and which garden vegetables, and whether to fence the donkey in or the goat out, if we should begin construction on the giant bat house this year, and all the other various discussions that naturally come about in the spring time at the farm supply store, including my observations upon chicks and Burmese Pythons. Because it’s more important to live life than to plan it, sometimes, and I know that by the time we get home the peepers will be calling down by the creek, in the clear and chilly water tumbling down the evening-shaded channels from the springs on the western ridge. I love to walk down to the water to hear the peepers in the spring, the smallest and the loudest of the amphibian heralds of the new year.

And springtime comes only per year.

East to West

2010-09-29T12:48:00.001-04:00

It’s early September, and I’m in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I’m waiting in the truck lot of a metal fabrication plant, where I’ve just delivered a load of sheet from a factory in Ohio. It’s the end of summer up here. The autumn flowers have been roaring for two weeks now, mostly goldenrod, although a few others hanging on tell me that the autumn honey flow will be a good one in these parts. Goldenrod makes a dark honey that is interesting to me because in the evening when the bees are fanning to evaporate the moisture, the bee yard smells like something died in it. Whatever the bees are busily evaporating out soon leaves, though, and the honey becomes thick, rich, and dark, but no longer smells bad. But that’s part of a different world at the moment.

My QualComm unit beeps at me, my satellite connection to Dawn, my dispatcher, far away.

WANT TO GO TO CA?

SURE, I type back into the little keyboard. ANYTIME

After a bit Dawn sends me the dispatch, and then I’m off, headed east across Wisconsin, first a few hundred miles to pick up my trailer of stainless steel tubing and elbows, and then to turn around to take it west to San Diego. A good trip—2300 miles, and not a lot of extra time wasted at either end. I do the math, and see that the trip is 38 hours, and that I have 39 legal working hours available before delivery. A very, very tight schedule—I’ll have to drive my butt off to keep from going into violation at the end.

I meet another driver at a truck stop in the rain in mid-state, and swap my broken-down curtainside for his empty 102-inch flat. He will haul it south to Chicago for repairs, and I keep on going east to Green Bay. I make the mistake of telling Dawn about a broken airline check valve on my old tractor. I’d planned just to pick up a new one next time I drive by a terminal.

PICK UP A REPLACEMENT AT KAUKAUNA THEN HEAD WEST. ONLY 30 MILES OUT OF ROUTE, she tells me, shooting from the hip.

Bad news. The Kaukauna terminal will actually add 100 miles and three hours to the trip, I calculate. I’ll really have to hustle to get to San Diego legally, now, as my destination is suddenly 100 miles farther off. I swing by the terminal, snatch up the valve from the mechanics, then head south an hour to the shipper.

“We haven’t finished loading your trailer. Would you like to wait in the break room?”

Off the clock, I stand in the entrance foyer and chat with another driver. He has a similar load, but is headed for Northern California. We make small talk, discussing issues of importance to professional drivers—Federal regulations, different routes, customers to avoid. He won’t go to Canada.

“Why not? I’ve never had any trouble.”

He has, apparently. For reasons I can’t figure out, I never have a problem taking a tractor trailer through customs. Other drivers tell me horror stories of being detained for hours, searched, interrogated about their past, where they’ve been and where they’re going. Me, never. Maybe the plain Quaker clothing throws the border guards off-script. All I know is that they’re always polite, always friendly, and always let me through. Even when I do something stupid, like drive the wrong way through the X-ray lane.

Eventually the pipe loaders are done, and I drop my empty, hook to the loaded trailer, get my paper, and pull out on the road. I’m carrying 44 pieces of stainless steel sewage tubing, elbows, and reducers, beautifully welded and precisely cut to blueprint, all destined to fit together like a puzzle at a jobsite half a continent away. It’s a lightweight load. And I still have time for a few hundred miles before I stop for the night somewhere in Iowa. So I sit back, put my foot to the floor, and watch the scenery fly past my window as I head west-southwest. My seat in the tractor cab is comfortable, a good perch from which to inspect the passing world.

It’s late in the year, and the agriculture tells the story. The corn is mostly dry or drying, brown ears on brown stalks, hidden behind the brown leaves. The miles and miles of soybeans are finishing up as well, turning yellow in broad patches among the green as they cycle out their season. As I pass by, I wonder why the beans all change color in huge patches, at different times in the same fields, like the groves of aspen in the Rockies that all turn yellow together at different times in the same woods. Microclimate, I suppose, vagaries in soil composition, fertilizer glitches, or perhaps drainage. Occasional late plantings still have a week or two to go, but for the most part the farming here is settling down to the season of spending money, instead of making it. As a beekeeper in California, September for me was always a busy time of gathering up the beehives and hauling them across the coastal mountains to the wintering grounds along the Pacific Ocean, then hitting them with medication and pouring in the feed, getting them fat and happy for the brief winter. September was the season of spending money there as well, seeing as how honey was mostly a waste product, often not worth the cost of removing it from the hives.

Here in Iowa, the bees will be mostly done as well. As I stop along the road to check my straps, the grasshoppers rattle through the Bird’s-Foot Trefoil at my feet, the last of the summer flowers, little yellow blossoms carpeting the ground under the bunched and brown seed heads of the Queen Ann’s Lace, which itself has finished up a week earlier. As I climb back into the truck, a flock of red-winged blackbirds wings overhead, also bunched, and gathering for their flight south. Nature here is winding the clock, in preparation for dormancy. I pull into a small Iowa town for the night, find a dirt lot over by the propane distributor, and park in the back. I don’t have any fuel credits for any company nearby, so I can’t trade them in for a shower. I go immediately to sleep instead.

The next day I cross into Nebraska at sunrise. I begin to climb, slowly but noticeably. The boundary between the low plains and the high plains is delineated by rainfall, and although no rain is in sight among the two-toned gray stratus clouds, the change in moisture is betrayed by the vegetation that depends on it. The lush herbaceous ground flora and hardwoods that characterize the eastern woodlands and the river bottoms of the low prairies gradually give way to dried bunch grasses and scattered cottonwoods, with occasional pines and junipers. Sunflowers appear, first a few, and then an exploding miniature forest that turns in unison to gaze into the rising sun at my back as I power up the east-facing incline, mile after mile. Another key to the rainfall is the change in agriculture. The corn remains, still late in the season, but the bean fields become rarer and rarer, and are replaced by sorghum and beef ranches. Dry-land farms give way to irrigation, the giant center-pivot rain machines slowly crawling in circles around and around the fields, a gentle spray of water dropping over the crop every thirty feet or so, delivering the moisture that doesn’t fall from the sky. Along the roadside, the last of the goldenrod flickers and goes out, as the sunflowers come into their own.

A pair of great blue herons slowly rise from a slough off to the north and head into my path. They spot me at the last moment and veer up and away, as I pass beneath them. In the mirror I watch them settle back down into the sunflowers, silhouetted against the sun.

I’m still short on hours, and I stop only when I have to for the Federally-mandated load checks every 150 miles. As I pull into Ogallala at the end of the day, I have 10 minutes left on my legal 11 hours, and 643 miles on the clock. I’m exhausted, but I have only 10 hours off-duty before I start again, so I heat up a can of beans for dinner. No credits for a shower here either, as it’s a chain that I rarely fuel at. I scrub off with a handful of baby-wipes and crawl into the bunk behind the seat.

The next days follow the same pattern, hour after hour, mile after mile. From Nebraska, I climb the plains that front the Continental Divide, the stony spine that separates the Pacific drainage from the Gulf of Mexico. The Rockies will be the major climb on this trip. As I enter Denver, a sign reminds me: SEPT THRU MAY-TRUCKS MUST CARRY SNOW CHAINS.

Oops. Everybody forgot this, including me. I acknowledge that I’m a criminal, and peer up at the sky. No sign of snow, and I’ll be through the tunnel and over the top before lunch. I make a mental note not to come back this way without the legal equipment, and grind up to the 11,000 foot pass and to the tunnel, then descend from the top of the Rockies into the long narrow canyon that spins me through the descending mountains like a leaf in a rain gutter. I pass through narrow gorge after narrow gorge, the rocky walls of sands and volcanics giving me a view of a new cross-section of the mountain’s roots at every turn of the road. Finally the highway spits me out into the badlands, and the canyons disappear behind me like slamming a screen door. I enter the Great Basin.

The Great Basin is high elevation desert—hot and dry in the summer, cold and dry in the winter. It yields no water to the oceans—a closed system, all rivers and streams that enter eventually evaporate into the sky. Playas and sands, brush, cattle, and hardrock mines. The Great Basin is a far different place from the Wisconsin dairy land that began this trip. I stop and pull into dirt lot at a truck stop, 551 miles on the clock for the day.

“You going to spend the night here?” the driver I met back in Green Bay asks. “There’s a better place down the road a mile.”

With identical loads, identical trucks, and identical regulations, likely as not we’ll meet again at dusk in another state or two. But I have no reason to look for a better place to sleep. Everything I need is already in the truck. I’m a vegetarian and bring all my food with me, so I don’t look for restaurants, and all I need is an occasional shower. But somebody stole my fuel cards the week before, so I’m starting from scratch accumulating points again with my new ones. Until I get a few hundred more gallons through the 450-HP Mercedes Benz that powers my home, I’ll be a little grimy. More baby wipes, and it’s time for bed.

I spend the next morningpassing through the uplands above the Mojave Desert. I’ve spent a lot of time in various deserts, and they always seem so much more alive to me than woodlands and farmland. People from wet places tend to think of a desert as a dead thing, but they don’t see them as they really are. What looks like a desolate wasteland changes when the stars come out, and a bustling community appears, where the rodents dig themselves out of their burrows and scatter across the stones, the predators patrol their territory, and the reptiles and arthropods all begin their own busy nighttime activities. I’ve set transects of live traps through the woods and meadows of the central plains, and ten catches out of one hundred traps is considered pretty good. In the desert, 100 catches out of 100 traps is routine before midnight, and you can empty the traps and catch another 100 before sunrise. Kangaroo rats, pocket mice, wood rats, white-footed mice, coyotes, kit foxes, gray foxes, porcupines, not to mention bat species by the dozen, all people the desert at night, as do the reptiles, birds, and invertebrates. A wonderful place, but this trip is all business, with no time for time exploring for tracks and skeletons in the scrub at my inspection stops.

Las Vegas is an amazement to me. I haven’t seen it in years, and no longer recognize it. The Vegas that I knew was a small town in the shadows of the alluvial fans, clear desert air and dry scrubland. The city itself was tiny, with a little brightly-lit strip of astonishment in the middle where all the casinos were built. You entered on the two-lane, bought breakfast at a casino, and were out of town in a mile or so. Today, Las Vegas is a metropolis, with a skyline, busy freeways, housing developments, a strange and bloated caricature of its former self. The old one has passed on, taking its own stage sets and actors off into retirement. Vegas is a new act today, and will be remembered equally clearly, but very differently by the people that pass by in another generation or two.

I realize that I have made a mistake when I discover that today is Labor Day, and thousands of drivers will be heading south on my road, back to los Angeles and San Diego, ready to go back to work Tuesday morning, fresh from a weekend of Vegas debauchery. Ahead of me the line of traffic slows to a stop, bumper to bumper, closed up and crawling for as far ahead as I can see, miles after mile, up and over the next pass. As a Quaker, I don’t pay much attention to holidays, and sometimes get caught as a result. Today is one such day.

The CB crackles. “Hey, northbound. How much more of this is there?” Another driver trapped like me, one of hundreds in this mess.

“What you see is what you get, all the way back to Barstow, and then some.”

Barstow was to be my stop for the night, where I could finally trade my fuel credits for a shower. But I have two legal hours to make the fifty miles, and at ten miles an hour I know I won’t make it. At the last moment I slip off into a small town for the night and find an empty lot off to the side of a restaurant. I carefully pull the rig into line with the afternoon sun so that the cab is shaded and the 107-degree heat won’t bake me into a tortilla. As I fill out my log for the day, the endless stream of traffic passes me by on the highway, car after car after car, eventually sparkling into a line o fheadlights and tailights in the dusk, reaching up into the mountains for twenty miles each way, far into the night.

At sunrise the next morning I reach my destination—a construction site on the Mexican border, so close to Tijuana that I can watch the traffic. As the day clears, the foreman guides me into position under the tower crane he will use to lift the tubing off my truck. I hurry to unstrap the load and stow the equipment. Out of the 39 hours to work I had when I started, I have only one left, and I still have to find a place to park the truck after I’m done. I’ve been burning my driving hours 10 to 11 per day since I started, and I won’t have any more legal hours to drive after I shut down for another 34 hours.

With the equipment stowed, I’m off the clock, and can relax for a while. As the workers carefully sling the heavy tubing from the trailer, I look over the border into Tijuana. It’s a busy morning over there, rush hour in the metropolis, the Mexican sister city to San Diego. Between me and the Avenida Internacionale, there is a chain-link fence, a concrete wall, and then another fence of steel mesh. Between the two fences is the dirt road patrolled by La Migra, the American Border Patrol that keeps the Mexicans out of the U.S., or at least tries to. Above the busy Avenida is a steep hill covered in a patchwork of stuccoed villas and small storefronts, power lines, and fan palms. As I stand watching, shots are fired in one of the city streets, two sharp cracks from a handgun, then silence. The traffic continues unmoved, but after a few minutes two patrol cars arrive at the hill top, blue lights cycling, and work their way down into the neighborhood and out of sight.

I turn to one of the workers standing next to me, watching as the tower crane operator high above us carefully swings the tubing off the truck and into the dust alongside the construction, guided by a man holding a rope attached to one end.

“You guys hear a lot of gunfire here?” I ask.

“All the time,” he says, not turning from the pipe slowly passing us by overhead. “It’s a different world over there.”

I turn back to Tijuana, and the traffic continues to rumble on, just another busy day on the frontier with El Norte.

Eventually the truck is empty, the papers signed, and I’m released.

“We’ll help you back out,” the foreman offers.

“Nah, that’s okay,” I reply, looking in the mirror. “If you’ll let me roll into that dirt straight back there, I can just kiss that surveyor’s stake with the tires and get out by myself.”

With only 45 minutes left, the last thing I need is someone trying to help me. In truck driving, it’s always nice to have help, but if the helpers don’t know what you really need, they mostly just get in the way. By myself I can wiggle my way out backwards through the forklifts, pickups, and sand piles in a minute or two. If someone helps me, it might take half-an-hour, and I don’t have that to spare.

My truck stop guide claims that there’s a fuel station with parking eight miles away. Emma, my GPS, agrees, so I program her to guide me there and head back across the Tijuana River, east paralleling the border. As she calmly intones my directions, I inspect the roadside for alternative places to spend the next two days, should my truck stop turn out to be closed, full, or non-existent. If I run out of time before I stop, I’m a criminal. Should I be involved in an accident, it will legally be my fault, no matter what the circumstances. If anybody dies, for any reason, I can be charged with vehicular homicide. I take hours-of-service regulations very seriously, and last-minute parking is always stressful for me.

A mile ahead, I spot the sign for my truck stop. Thank goodness. As I pull in, I scan the lines of idling big rigs for the best empty spot, one facing the shaded north that I can approach from the right to make backing in easy. I also want one facing uphill, if that’s an issue, because if it faces downhill I’ll be rolling out of bed all night. And if possible, I don’t want to be next to an idling reefer or a truck from back east or the north, because they’ll run their engines all night to keep their air conditioners going. Eventually I find an acceptable spot, pull in and shut it down.

I take out my log book and calculate my hours. 2337 miles, not my longest trip, but certainly the fastest within recent memory. I’m bushed, with a string of 600-plus mile days behind me, up and over the mountains and through the long winding canyons. Autumn in the central plains to the dry late summer of the deserts. A pretty trip, but one that required constant and careful attention, hour after hour. But I’m out of time now, so there’s nothing to do now except take a breather and go to bed.

But first, a shower.

Quakers in the Country: The Swimming Hole

2010-07-17T09:24:00.003-04:00

The afternoon is hot and muggy, a sunny day floating halfway between spring and summer. I’m back at home for a few days out of the truck. Shawna pokes her head in the door, looking at me where I sit peacefully vegetating.

“We’re all going down to the swimming hole.”

“Okay.”

“You’re going, too.”

“No.”

“Yes, you are. You have five children you haven’t seen in two weeks, and they want you to go swimming with them.”

“Okay.”

Such are negotiations in my household. Sometimes they take longer, but they often follow this general pattern. And really, I don’t have anything against being cooperative, but I learned long ago that when I receive a marital ultimatum, it is very important that the initial response be “No.” This is mostly because it’s always easier for me to reverse myself and say “Yes,” than it is to change a “Yes” to “No.” But also, I am married to a strong-willed, left-handed, yellow-headed bark-eater who is both wonderful and accustomed to being in charge, and starting out with “No” reminds her that in the end, I don’t have to do what she says just because she says so. Not at first, anyway.

But the swimming hole is a wonderful asset to raising children out where we live, and she is right to stand there with her hands on her hips and stare crossly at me from the doorway. Here in Appalachia, there is water everywhere: springs, rivulets, brooks, creeks, rivers, lakes, and swamps, and it’s a sin not to take advantage of it. Our own property is bounded to the east by a deep ravine that funnels all the spring water for several miles into one channel that runs out by Jim and Jan’s place to the south. It crosses over the road at a submarine bridge, and then dips under it under a real bridge half a mile farther on. When it emerges from under the second bridge, it pours over a little waterfall into a large, round, and deep pool: the swimming hole.

Our swimming hole is pretty different from the typical city swimming pool. First off, of course, the hole is natural, with all the advantages and disadvantages that come with that. In town, swimming pools have clean tiled edges and concrete walkways. Our swimming hole has smooth gravel on the bottom and sandy banks between the water and the surrounding woods. In town, the municipal employees keep the grass mowed and the weeds pulled. In the country, the thistles scratch bright red runes on your bare legs like bored Vikings as you pick your way through them to get to the water. In town, there are fences to keep intrusive animals away. In the country, we walk around the swimming hole to look for the muddy footprints of the deer, raccoon, possum, and woodchuck that visited the night before. And in town, the water is cleaned and chlorinated by mechanical filters and chemical injectors. In the country, our swimming hole is full of algae, and sediment, and sticks, and green leaves. Fresh spring water is aerated by cascading over the stones and ledges of miles of open flow. And stuff lives in it, around it, and visits it whenever we’re not there. And sometimes when we are.

Today, we drive down to the swimming hole accompanied by only one dog, loping alongside the beat-up van as we clatter down the gravel road to the creek. Normally there are three dogs, but the two older ones apparently have other tasks this day. The swimming hole is only a mile down from the house, and we walk to it in the evenings all the time. The exercise this afternoon would do all of us some good, especially me. But somehow piling into the car makes it more of an event for the children, so that’s what we do. When we stop the car, the kids jump out immediately and climb down the bank to the water. Golden carries the little inflatable life ring he has brought down with him. Starbuck grabs his new fish net and makes a beeline for a position from which he can ambush the local wildlife. The dog snuffles through the ferns and lilies looking for mysteries to solve. I take off my shirt, pry off my sandals with my toes, and walk down the bank to the water and step in. Then I wade slowly through the gentle current out into the middle, where the water is up to my chest.

It’s cool, but not at all cold, and the flowing water is very comfortable in the hot and humid afternoon. The current keeps the water stirred up, so the temperature around my feet is as comfortable as the temperature around my middle— very unlike a lake, where the stratified water means your toes are always chilly. I sink down over my head, then surface and shake the water off my face. Ankle-deep in the shallows with her skirts hiked up, Shawna leans out to catch the dog by the collar, and then industriously begins to work over his neck, looking for the ticks he can’t scratch off himself. Always the practical woman, I observe, scratching myself absent-mindedly.

“Dad! Throw me!” shouts Paoli. I look up to see her waving both arms at me. I slip through the water, then pick her up bodily and throw her as high and as far into the middle as I can. She goes under, then surfaces, grinning and bouncing on her toes to keep her face above water too deep for her to stand in. It won’t be but a year and she won’t have to bounce to keep her head above the surface, I think to myself. All the kids are growing pretty quick. It’s made more obvious to me now that I only see them for a few days each month while I drive a truck, fighting a losing battle to try to keep them in shoes. Every time I see them they all seem to be taller, thinner, more aware, and more sarcastic than the last time.

“Throw me too, Kevin,” says my oldest son Griffin, eyeing me speculatively.

“Not on your life. You’d break me,” I reply. “You’re taller than Shawna now.”

“I know,” he says. He turns away and paddles over to the girls so he can pick a water fight with them.

He has become significantly taller than Shawna, I notice, as he stands and initiates sibling combat. It seems like just yesterday he was learning to talk. Maybe someday soon he’ll learn how not to.

I sink back up to my neck again, and then turn and tip-toe slowly through the deeper water over to the bridge. The bridge shelters a wide but shallow concrete spillway, a low-roofed shaded cave with the gentle stream overrunning the floor. Under a few inches of water, the smooth slab is blanketed in dark green filamentous algae, all stretched out straight in the current, wiggling their tail-ends in the little waterfall, there at the boundary between the dim and the brighter light. I climb up onto the slab and stretch out in the flowing water, wiggling my tail-ends in the little waterfall as well. I could stay right there all afternoon, but my biology-minded Number One Daughter has other plans.

“Dad! Did you see the snake?” Devra hollers.

“What snake is that?”

“The one that lives in the crack over there between the rocks.”

The kids return to their splashing and wading, while I reluctantly rise out of the current and wade over to the corner of the bridge. Down here closer to the creek, it’s always appropriate to check out snake discoveries. We don’t have copperheads up on the ridge top, but in the shady hardwoods the beautiful gray and brown pit vipers are a reasonably common discovery under the decomposing logs and between the stones that crop out in the ravines. I sink way down into the water, and peer into the narrow crevice between two of the old concrete highway slabs our township stacks up to make bridge abutments. There in the half-light, a small Thamnophis stares back at me impassively out of one eye, the little waves reflected from my own body sending small sheets of water across the few inches that separate us, rocking it very gently.

I stand back up. “Garter snake!” I announce to the kids, who have forgotten all about the snake and are busy splashing water into each other’s faces. The little garter and ribbon snakes are much commoner than the vipers, and generally hang out close to the water to pick off the frogs and tadpoles. They’re good-natured creatures, although they generally defecate on you when you first pick them up to remind you that they’d really prefer to be left alone. I sink down into the water again and look back into the darkness. The little snake has disappeared, having apparently decided that being left alone today might be more difficult without some pre-emptive action on its own part.

A kingfisher suddenly rattles overhead across the stream, halfway between the water and the treetops. There’s lots of different kinds of birds here by the swimming hole, most of which are off in the branches or underbrush right now waiting for us to vacate the premises. There’s a great blue heron, or maybe two, that come back every year to live through the spring and summer in the brushy, more private parts of the creek farther upstream. In the undergrowth you can sometimes spy a woodcock with her babies, little feathered miniatures of their mother. If you surprise them, the hen will fly into the shrubbery but the babies will squat down and peep, waiting for their mother to come back and gather them up. At the moment all I can identify is a robin, calling in that slow-paced maniacal lilt that they favor, away up the slope towards the ridge top. Were I to come back and sit here very quietly, I would undoubtedly be treated to a psychedelic show of eastern passerines: tanagers, orioles, warblers, buntings, finches, and who knows what else, drinking or bathing at the edge of the water. Maybe even Paoli’s yellow parakeet, the one that unaccountably opened its cage door one day and flew through the front door into uncertain freedom.

None of those are around right now, though, so I step up out of the water to see what else is visiting the swimming hole today. Down by the tail end of the pool, the banks narrow in and the current speeds up as the water forces its way down the rocky channel. There in the taller weeds and thistles, a dozen dark and iridescent damselflies are hunting moths and mosquitoes. They’re all the same species, fairly large with glossy black wings and bodies, and blue highlights wherever the light is reflecting. I look closely at one perched on top of a bent blade of grass, and see it carefully munching the remains of a midge of some sort. The damselflies are very different from the dragonflies—the darners and such that also reproduce and hunt in these pools. You can tell a damselfly when it alights for a rest because it will fold its wings together above them like an old Navy fighter plane, while a dragonfly will rest with its wings held out horizontally. This particular species is also apparently a weak flier, always choosing to hunt in the quieter air within the woods, while the dragonflies can be found more or less anywhere their powerful flight systems might take them. They’ll hang out here for the rest of the season, flying, eating, mating, and dying, an annual cycle that’s been underway for millennia.

As I watch the damselflies flutter back and forth across the creek, I feel a gentle, inquisitive nibbling at my ankle, down in the water. Minnows, usually. There are various species of shiners and suckers in the shallow water, and this late in the year the little darters in the riffles will also be a few inches long. I look down, but the water is too natural for me to see more than a foot or two below the surface, so the identity of my visitor remains a mystery. It could be a crayfish. We have lots of those in here as well, and once we even tried to keep a pair of them in our fish tank for a while. They’re not really compatible with the fish, though, as the crayfish proved to be expert minnow-catchers, and quickly reduced the fish population in the tank to near zero. The crayfish are too fast to catch with Starbuck’s dip net, and we usually only get them by accident. Now, if I had a seine, then we could really work the creek over to see who and what made its home in there. But that will have to wait. Starbuck has decided to wait, too. He’s taken a Styrofoam boogie board and stuffed it into the back of his T-shirt, and is now lurching across the surface like some sort of aquatic Quasimodo. Golden is faring much better in his inflatable ring, navigating the entire pool with the happy competence of a six-year old tool-using primate. I remember doing the same thing myself, long, long ago in a swimming pool out on the Kansas prairie.

I step over to the bank and up onto the cobbles than line its edge, and that poke sharp little dents into my feet. Most of the stones are homogeneous gray limes and yellow sandstones, which of course is only to be expected, because that’s the rock that the stream is cutting through all the way up its ravine to Dave’s place on the hill above us. The pebbles and cobbles here are an endless source of road metal for the township, which is good. The township has 86 miles of road to take care of, and virtually no money to do it with, so free gravel is always a benefit. Old Melvin Kemp will come down to the creek with the township’s front-end-loader, with his brother Kenny driving the dump. Melvin then steers into the water and loads up enough gravel for the day, and then he and Kenny go deposit it uphill on our road. Of course, when it rains or when the snow melts the same gravel and pebbles tend to roll and slide right back down into the creek, so perhaps one of Melvin’s grandkids will scoop it up again from the same spot in another fifty years for some future road project yet to come. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen either of them for some time. I wonder if the township has run out of money completely.

Above me the slender but towering black locusts shade the swimming hole from the sun except for the brief hour or two when it is directly overhead. The locusts are wonderful trees, tall, straight, and quick-growing. The wood doesn’t rot in the ground, either, so they make tough and long-lasting fence posts. And as an added bonus, in the spring they produce thousands of beautiful pendulous flowers, which you can smell a mile away on the warm, humid nights. I have a tin can full of locust pods that I picked off a tree at an Amish sawmill I loaded at last summer. I meant to plant them in the spring, but missed my window, and now I’ll have to wait until next year. Planting trees is a hobby of mine around here. I scatter hundreds of tulip poplar and maple seeds along the roads and the edges of the woods every fall, and also toss all the peach and plum pits out into likely spots whenever I have them. I’ll be long dead by the time any trees reach full size, but then, that’s no excuse for not doing necessary work right now. People take being dead far too seriously, in my opinion. If anticipating being dead meant you shouldn’t be doing worthwhile work, then nothing would ever get done.

I’m brought back into present time by the kids shouting happily at each other in the water. Shawna is standing over on the bank with her skirts still hiked up, surveying the scene like Pharaoh’s daughter inspecting the Nile for crocodiles. The dog, released finally, wanders back and forth along the edge, searching for raccoon sign in the shallows, and the waterfall continues to murmur quietly to itself under the bridge. A peaceful, complete, and fleeting afternoon in the springtime.

The afternoon won’t last, and neither will this little swimming hole. It never does, because transience is the nature of things. Towards the middle of the summer, the rains begin to fail, the springs give out, and the flowing creek flickers finally into isolated pools and gentle trickles. The cool water warms up and loses its oxygen, becomes shallower and murkier, and swimming here becomes a less popular event. But that’s far into the future now, months away, and today the swimming hole sparkles at its peak of late spring glory.

Shawna was right to pressure me to come down here today, because this brief intersection of all our lives is now stored forever in my mind. Many years from now, when the kids have children of their own and the world has turned a few thousand times more, I’ll still remember this day: the children, the water, the stones, plants, and animals. And living out here so far from anyplace anybody else wants to be, the swimming hole itself will likely be more or less the same, but with grandchildren and great-grandchildren hollering and splashing under the bridge.

And maybe another snake in the crevice will look out at them, and decide to wait until the evening to come out to hunt frogs.

Quakers in the Country: We Remodel the Bathroom!

2010-05-30T21:48:00.000-04:00

Quakers in the Country: Cowhand

2010-05-12T11:55:00.001-04:00

It’s morning on the ranch. After we feed the stock, Roger and I check with Joel to see what he wants us to do for the rest of the day.

“First, I need you to go get WinWin,” says Joel. “It’s time to measure his horns.”

And so it begins . . .

WinWin is a fully-grown Longhorn bull, currently out with the cows across Muskrat Road from the big house. Dickinson Cattle Company is the largest Longhorn breeding ranch in the United States, and happens to be in Barnesville, Ohio, about twenty miles from where I live. For a while I had a job there as a cowhand, one of the things a Quaker can do from time to time, when he lives in the country. If I lived in a place like Philadelphia, I might have a different job, maybe a school teacher, or abbot of a Quaker monastery. But I live in the country on purpose, and one reason is because I’d rather punch cows than be tempted to punch people.

Cowboys tend to look a bit different from what many people expect. I don’t wear a cowboy hat (unlike various of my recent ancestors), but I do use a leather thong threaded through a couple of grommet holes in my Amish-made broad-brim to let it hang down my back, which fits in with cowboy chic. And I’ve worn cowboy boots ever since I was a kid, given a choice. I’m from Oklahoma, after all. But otherwise I look more or less like any normal plain-dressing Quaker, rather than a cowhand. Most people seem to picture a cowhand looking more like that old picture of my Uncle Willie, there to the right, all saddle leather, lariat, and dramatic moments. And I suppose if Uncle Willie were still around, he might agree. Certainly his photograph is pretty impressive. But I expect that most cowboying back then was as routine as it is now: feeding cows, herding cows, sorting cows, medicating cows, finding lost cows, finding lost calves, building fence, digging holes, and on and on. Chores are always divided up, and my own personal task every morning and evening was feeding the bulls in their stalls and shoveling manure. Did you know that a full-grown Longhorn bull can fill an entire 7-cubic foot wheelbarrow full of manure every day? And somebody has to shovel it. The bulls just ignore you while you work around them, because dealing with manure once they’re done with it is beneath them. And as an annoying monkey, you’re frankly beneath them as well. Except when you get told to do something unusual, like to go get WinWin and put him someplace where you can measure his horns. Then you have to deal with them on different terms.

WinWin was out doing his job. Hanging out with the cows, waiting for the few fleeting hours when they would go into a standing heat, and then making sure that they delivered a pedigree calf later in the season. That’s what he was good at, and WinWin took his job seriously. Roger knew about where he would be, so we mounted up the four-wheelers and rode off.

Dickinson Cattle is a modern cattle ranch. Seven hundred cows and calves, four or five ranch hands, four or five four-wheelers, three moldy saddles in a trailer, and one horse. The horse was wise to ranch work, and spent most of his time avoiding people. Not a problem, as the cowhands preferred the ATVs. No catching, no saddling, no bridle, no cool off, just turn the key on to go, and turn the key off when you’re done. Simpler, and much more to the liking of the horse, who would make himself scarce anytime anybody looked like they might get close enough to actually put a bridle on him.

It was a beautiful spring morning in the month of May. We puttered down the lane between the fenced pastures, stirring up a little dust behind us in the warm air, passing late mustards and locust still in bloom, occasional sky blue chicories to the sides, the cherries and elms on the slopes and behind the fencelines in full leaf. A warm breeze blew over the green pastures, carrying the smell of sunny meadows and cool shady woods, water-wet creek bottoms, and murky cattailed sloughs. Longhorns are descended from the cattle brought to the Americas by the Spaniards centuries ago, and are lean and very self-sufficient, with several centuries of evolution to adjust them to the dry climate and scarce feed of the arid west. But the Longhorns liked the eastern deciduous woods just fine, and used them to their advantage when hiding out from cowhands like Roger and me.

Eventually we find WinWin, lying in state in the company of four or five of his harem, calmly chewing his cud, already having filled up on water earlier in the day.

“How many?” I ask.

“Just him,” says Roger. “It would be easier to take him and four or five cows, but Joel only wants him.”

And of course, it will turn out exactly as Roger predicts. WinWin rises to his feet, a magnificent bull weighing over two thousand pounds, brown and black splashes on a smooth white coat, his horns spreading something over sixty inches from tip to tip, the whole reason for the approaching adventure. He inspects us calmly, still chewing, powerful and composed.

WinWin isn’t dangerous out on the grass. None of the bulls are, except by accident, really. In general, Longhorns are intelligent and easy-going animals, and only when they’re confined in stalls and have clearly defined territorial boundaries do you have to look out. Then they can maneuver their horns through the bars with mischevious accuracy, and knock off your hat or break your ribs, easily and at their own discretion. But out in the open, they have nothing in particular to defend, and will quite happily move along from place to place at the whistles and hoots from a pair of monkeys on ATVs.

But they’re still cows, and cows are herd animals. WinWin doesn’t mind getting up and moving, but he doesn’t like the way we slip in between him and the others, trying to push him in the other direction. Nothing good can come of that, he knows. The cows instantly recognize that they are free to go, and treacherously abandon WinWin to his fate. WinWin watches for a moment, and then deftly steps around us and trots away, after the girls. Roger cuts in front of him, WinWin makes up his mind to run for it, and we’re off.

WinWin is a huge animal, five feet at the shoulder, five feet across at the horns, and when he runs he shows just how much power a Longhorn bull can command. He thunders across the flowers, Roger on his right shoulder and me close in behind as we try to turn him in the direction of the pipe corral to the southwest. His immense body rocks above the ground like a battleship, the rhythmic pounding of his hooves propelling him forward, a giant mammal at home on the grass under the blue sky and cumulus clouds, in his element and confident. He turns to the right and slows suddenly, then slips behind Roger and heads east again, back to the cows, back to common sense. Roger guns the throttle and circles around to his right, pushing him back to the west while I move in to his left side to keep him from repeating the trick in the other direction.

“Look out, Kevin! He’ll jump!” Roger shouts.

WinWin’s hooves slam into the ground as he races us to the trees in the creek bottom. At his left shoulder, I push ahead and close in at twenty-five miles per hour, my hat flying behind me on its thong like a kite, crowding him away from the trees but not getting too close. WinWin is quite capable of leaping clean over my head as I approach, and I see him rolling his eyes at me to gauge my distance. If he makes a mistake and lands on top of me, it could well be fatal, so I drop back a few feet.

WinWin seizes the opportunity and dives into the trees, running for the other side between trunks too close for Roger to follow quickly. While Roger twists and turns the handlebars to get through, I turn and tear around the woods to the north, across the slope and down to the creek on the other side to get in front again. WinWin emerges triumphantly from the brush and steps into the water, looking back at Roger, just as I reach the creek and jam the ATV to a stop directly in front of him. As he pauses to reassess, Roger catches up. Then together we pinch him between us, and urge him back to the southwest, towards the fenceline.

Again and again we cut and push, gradually working WinWin closer to the fence. The waltz between the cow and the cowherders continues for another twenty minutes, slowing all the while as Roger and I get more and more tired. WinWin is exhausted by this time, too, his rib cage heaving. Finally we reach the fence and block him in, Roger off his right shoulder and me again urging from behind. With nowhere left to run, WinWin acknowledges temporary defeat and slowly walks along the fence towards the corral, head hanging low under the weight of his mottled brown and black horns

He enters the open gate and Roger and I ride in after him. Roger drags the fence panel closed, and I turn the key and climb off the ATV, whistling and hooting gently to urge WinWin into the corner where we can drag the panels closed alongside him in a makeshift squeeze cage. Joel is already there with the tape measure.

“Dang! What did you do to him? He’s leaking from everywhere.”

Head down, WinWin is indeed leaking: urine, green manure, drool, and a running nose to boot. More exercise than he was expecting. I refrain from telling Joel that I’m close to leaking from everywhere too, and instead slap WinWin on the butt to encourage him into the corner.

With the three of us heaving and pushing, we finally get WinWin positioned alongside the fence and squeeze the panel against him, holding him securely in place while Joel stretches the tape between his horn tips. Spread is important in pedigree Longhorns. If a bull manages to grow his horns over sixty inches between the tips, it’s an automatic $5000 increase in his sale value. Dickinson Cattle has bred the world’s record Longhorn on their ranch, a beautiful and sweet-tempered dapple-gray cow named Shadow Jubilee, with horns over 82 inches across. More cooperative than WinWin, too.

WinWin is a bull, not a cow, so his horns are shorter and heavier. After thwarting several attempts, WinWin finally holds still long enough for Joel to read the tape measure.

“Sixty-five and five-eighths,” he says, stepping back. WinWin is a very good bull.

Roger and I unchain the fencing panels and drag them back so WinWin can step out. He looks at us wearily, and I can almost hear him cussing us in disgust. He finally steps out of the corner and walks slowly to the open corral gate, and then heads back out into the grass, back towards his cows, back towards peace and quiet away from the annoying monkeys. I’m still tired, and still close to leaking.

“Okay,” says Joel. “Now go get Victory Lap.”

And so it begins . . .

* * *

By the way, all the cow photos were taken by Darol Dickenson on his ranch, and are used by kind permission of Dickinson Cattle Company, Barnesville, Ohio. I have no idea who took the photo of Uncle Willie.

Great Basin

2010-04-20T21:42:00.005-04:00

Romans 1:20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse . . .

They call it the Great Basin, and after the last two days, I know why. I was sent through here with an oversize load of farm equipment, headed through Kansas, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada to California’s Central Valley, 2000 miles through springtime in the American West. With a full day and a night in the Great Basin.

It was certainly a full day for me, 500 miles, more or less, although 150 years ago the trip took much longer. I have the advantage of 450 horsepower, ten gear ratios, 18 wheels, and extremely well-built roads. But the one the permit department assigned me was Highway 50. I looked at my maps, and then asked Dawn, my dispatcher, about it.

“My oversize route through Utah and Nevada says Highway 50, not the Interstate.”

“Take whatever they say. You have to follow the permit route.”

“It’s the old two-lane right through the middle. There’s only two towns and no rest areas for 486 miles. Where do I park the truck for the night?”

Eventually I look more critically at my maps and see a few possibilities. And in truth, I know from spending half my life in the west that stopping for the night is actually not that hard. West of the Rockies, I can find places here and there where a 72-foot truck 12 feet wide and 14 feet high might be tucked in without attracting attention. So I agree, and set off.

Driving a truck across the west is easy compared to the old days. I know, because I can read the evidence in the topography. When a modern road crosses the mountains, it cuts across the ins and outs of the necks and draws, smoothly following curve after gentle curve up and down through the road cuts. But if you look, you can often see the traces of the older road, the one that runs the passes farther into the draws, and farther out on the necks, sharper turns, and steeper grades, necessitated by the smaller graders and dozers of the old days. Often the pavement is still there, a reminder of the Ford V-8s and Nashes that once chugged up that slower and more difficult path, boiling their radiators the whole time. And if you know what to look for, you can sometimes see an earlier road still, one diving even higher in and lurching even farther out, criss-crossing all the newer roadbeds, one built by mules, and by men with picks and shovels. I’ve walked those early roads before, and they speak of Spanish missions and pack trains. Sometimes you find old campsites, and once I picked up an ox shoe off the rocky road bed.

I drive a day and a night through mountains, passes, snow capped ranges, perfectly sloped bajadas and alluvial fans. Where my road passes through the dynamited cuts in the country rock, I am treated to endless cross sections of massive lavas, cinders, pyroclastic flows, ash falls weathering to a rainbow of clays. The horizons are composed of lava flows tilted and eroded flat eons ago, buried again by more ancient eruptions and now exposed once more, standing upright like the giant pages of a stony encyclopedia telling a story of cataclysm and quiet. Occasional sandstones and quartzites tell of wetter days, or sandstorms long gone by.

And life abounds, too, in distinct communities that come, go, and come again as I travel up and down through the life zones that radiate from a eutectic of elevation, water, and solar aspect. Ephemeral herbs in the wet springtime playas give way to upland sages and Mormon tea, which then yield to Limber Pines, Pinyons, and Junipers. In the canyons the mule deer look up as I pass, always startled somehow by my noisy arrival, so different from the self-composed bighorn sheep that won’t deign to lift their gaze even when I let the air horns loose to see if they care. Jackrabbits and avocets, vultures, ravens and bluebirds, all ignore me as I pass, but sometimes come close to investigate when I stop to check the chains holding my load. And of course, I know that the real world comes alive at night, when the kangaroo rats dig themselves out of their hidey-holes to look for seeds, and the kit foxes come out of their own holes to look for the kangaroo rats. Three kangaroo rats a night, I remember, and a kit fox never needs to drink liquid water. Bats and bears, pocket mice and wood rats, snakes, lizards, moths and beetles, the Great Basin is an immense and interlocking system of flora, fauna, minerals, and topography, all intricately linked together to maintain a dynamic equilibrium that reflects relationships maintained for millennia. Like a marble rolling to the bottom of a mixing bowl, the different life zones that I pass all hold together in their own way, and adapt to changes in the orientation of the bowl by rolling to a new center, a new balance point, one that automatically shifts to recover stability.

I see the handiwork of Creation in this stability, in these various self-correcting systems that characterize the world, and not just here in the Great Basin. To me, they are sufficient evidence of a Creator. But then, I’m easily convinced. It’s just as easy to look at them and deny the role of conscious creation in their patterns of balance and complexity. Various non-theist Friends tell me in conversation that nothing is demonstrated by nature’s balances that can’t be easily explained without the imposition of a conscious hand at work behind them. Nature needs no explanation other than nature, they say, and the complexities are of no more consequence than the complex shape of a puddle of water that just happens to fit its depression in the ground with molecular accuracy.

And of course, they have an excellent point. If you start with their assumptions, then this view of the universe makes perfect sense. There’s nothing wrong with its logic. Now, understand me when I say that non-theist Friends are a diverse and complex bunch, and some will also explain that non-theism doesn’t discount the possibility of a creator, it just doesn’t require one. But others will sometimes say that they won’t believe in something that can’t be proven, and isn’t necessary to explain the data. In that respect they have some affinities with the first generations of Friends, who also refused to integrate discoveries that were not personal, but sought their own visions like the Paiutes and Shoshone that occupied the valleys I drive through now. But these first Friends also credited the experiences of others as starting points of their own spiritual journeys, and then chose to investigate them themselves, ultimately to possess what they said they professed, to credit the discoveries of others when they were convinced in their own lives. I don’t always see this receptivity among non-theists, this willingness to be convinced.

I once asked a non-theist what physical evidence could convince him of the existence of God. He answered, “Nothing.” And of course, with that attitude, nothing ever could.

Part of the reason may be that many non-theists are strong logical positivists, believers in a philosophy that assumes that the world must be explainable in terms of empirical phenomena, “natural” things that can be tested and verified, at least theoretically. I’ve heard a non-theist explain his beliefs in those terms, and I was surprised. Logical positivism has faded in philosophy in recent decades, but some non-theists will roll it out and dust it off as if it made sense. Among others, Karl Popper punctured the idea that only seeing is believing in the 1930s with his publication of The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Popper showed that in the end, nothing can ever be proven—only disproven, and disproving falsifiable hypotheses is how modern science works. This subtlety escapes a lot of people who claim to believe only in things that can be verified. When I ask them to verify their hypothesis in the non-existence of God, they have asked me if they should believe in any old stupid thing that can’t be disproven, neglecting to notice that their own belief system is one of them.

But as a Christian unprogrammed Quaker, I’m not the person to adequately defend empiricism, or logical positivism, or the various other –isms of the Enlightenment. Although I’m a hard-core defender of a mechanistic universe of orderly laws and principles, I see no conflict with a theistic interpretation, nor do I see any need to assert the old deist argument, the hand that winds the clock, sets it down, and wanders off to other celestial interests and pastimes. To me, the difference is in the assumptions.

Old Thomas Kelly once wrote, “Logic finds, beneath every system of thought, some basic assumptions or postulates from which all other items of belief are derived.” In many ways, my own assumptions are those of a simpleton—I don’t require the world to make sense to me, no matter how much I know about it. I’m willing to believe in things even when they’re metaphysical and just can’t be proven at all. I assume that the ultimate engines of the universe might operate under different laws than those which turn its proximate wheels. When asked the question, “What happened the day before the Big Bang?” one non-theist I know answers by stating “I don’t know, but I’m confident my system of belief will someday have the answer.” I’m a bit different, there. I don’t assume that the world has to cater to my understanding in order to be credible.

This is in sharp contrast to folks who see no need for a Creator. Sometimes when I ask about their assumptions, they tell me that they don’t have any. I once asked an atheist physicist if he could explain his world view to me. He told me, “I don’t have a world view. I merely believe in what nature demonstrates to be true.” He was a tough nut to crack, because somebody who doesn’t even recognize the underpinnings of his own understanding is walking the world in a blindfold.

Ultimately, I suppose the answer lies in whether we require our assumptions to be proven. I don’t require very much proof to be convinced of things, so in many ways I’m a pretty sloppy thinker. But what I do believe, I believe in a positive way, in that I believe in things. When asked what Quakerism meant to him, one non-theist Friend I know of replied: “The rejection of sacraments, the rejection of clergy, the rejection of steeple-houses, the unprogrammed nature of worship, the lack of dogma or doctrine, the lack of an infallible scripture, the Quaker business method, and the commitment to live life through the testimonies and the Quaker community . . .” His view of what he called his religion was essentially negative, a list of things he didn’t believe in. After you took those away, there was actually little left except practice, devoid of underlying meaning, to my way of thinking (not his). Now, this is not bad. Jesus himself had little good to say for belief that didn’t result in practice: “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.” But inherent in my world view is that why you practice something is ultimately significant, sooner or later. I might row a boat across a river in the company of a cheerful and hardworking companion at the oars. But when I reach the other bank and discover that he is a cannibal conducting me to his family’s dinner, you can see that practice is sometimes only equivalent at the surface, and underneath things are not so congruent after all. But of course, a non-theist might reject the existence of an underneath in the first place, or of the other river bank. Again, a difference in assumptions.

And so it is with the Great Basin. As I write, I have left the deserts behind, and a cool night has covered the western end of the valley where I have parked for the night. The air is wet with the smell of irrigated alfalfa, and the evening sounds of a small Nevada town fill the background, passing pickup trucks and clear but distant voices, rather than the quiet heartbeat of a wilderness devoid of human beings. The Great Basin has reminded me of why I believe in the things I do. In my own experience, I find the answers to questions of existence best provided by the metaphysical view of a conscious creator. My assumptions are different from those of my non-theist Friends and acquaintances. And in truth, I find my assumptions supported regularly, when answers come to questions in the form of omens, impossible coincidences, visions, auditions, and the discoveries of others that are coincident with my own. Many non-theists aren’t satisfied with that level of verification, and continue on looking for sharper answers to the hard questions, or give up asking.

But I’m content with my own solution. Like I said, I’m easy to please.

A Sense of Place

2010-04-19T00:27:00.001-04:00

I slowly climb the steep slope through the chaparral, picking my way carefully between the wait-a-bit thorns of the catclaw and the black spines of the agave, both tenaciously gripping the sparse and shallow soil in the open areas between the trunks of the Ponderosa pines. My boots are no match for them anymore, the heavy soles worn paper-thin and tied crudely to the tattered uppers with scraps of parachute cord. The thin air on the Mogollon is already warm in the late morning, the sun bright, high, and hot, reflecting off the south-facing outcrop back into my face like a heat lamp.

And then I notice something out of place. Uphill and 30 feet ahead of me on the sandstone lies a small piece of chert, its snowy whiteness a geologic error against the green and brown pine needles and the buff slickrock. The thick limestone a few hundred feet below me is full of chert nodules and lenses, but uphill from this sandstone is nothing but basalt and the clear blue sky. The chert is unnatural in this Place. There is no reason for it to be here.

I walk over to the chert and pick it up. And then I understand. It’s not a nodule after all. In my hand is a stone knife, a Neolithic scraper with a flaked edge the radius of an old silver dollar, and a carefully napped hilt. As I turn it in my hand, my thumb slides naturally into a larger percussion hollow, and then the knife slips into place, a perfect fit between my fingers, the first hand to hold it for centuries.

He was right-handed, too, I think to myself.

And I look up from the knife, and then the shapes shift, the light changes, and present time melts away in anticipation of the Visitor. I am in the same Place, but a different Time, one no longer bound by the small cutpoints marking the beginning and end of my own life. I share a moment out-of-time with a man dead for a thousand years, and see the world simultaneously through both his eyes and my own. The Ponderosas we stand under are the same, the clean brown sandstone and the Manzanita chaparral are the same, the view of sixty miles of open country to the south is the same. But it is a sameness shared across a gap of many lifetimes. The sameness attests to a shared experience of this Place, this little clearing, unchanged between the moment one passed by and misplaced a tool, and a different moment another passed by and picked it up.

The sense of timelessness passes on, and once again I am left alone in my own Place, in my own Time. I slip the stone knife into my frayed canvas belt pouch and continue uphill towards the basalt flows. Hours later I will discover that my rock hammer is missing, the steel ring in my belt empty. Instead, in my pouch is a stone knife, a trade I have made with the guardians of Time, a piece of his Place exchanged for a piece of mine, two hands reaching through the portal in opposite directions, making contact.

I’m occasionally granted a sense of place in this way, a privilege to see things, or at least to suddenly understand them in a way that is so clear that it becomes sensory. Usually the moments arrive in the form of a recognition, a sudden sense of the world that has always existed just beyond my understanding, just beyond a curtain. The Visits are usually in the form of a consciousness of a larger cosmos, the awareness of an actor observing himself on the stage, of footfalls fording a braided stream of places, events, lives, and deaths.

I think that the key isn’t so much in any particular knowledge as it is in a receptivity, a readiness to step out of one’s own time and see with different eyes, to hear with different ears. It can happen to anyone, and I read of the same experience that I have in the lives of others. The universe tells its stories to anyone who will take the time and trouble to listen. But so often we just don’t take that time and trouble, we’re just never ready, or we’re too busy to notice the Visitor.

In another Place, at another Time, I sit down on the dry grasses atop a little hill overlooking the creek bed and pull out my lunch of oaten cakes and cheese. My hands are still oily from the tetracycline patties I have just rolled into two truckloads of beehives, sitting in 30 neat clumps of four down in the tarweed and bluecurls below me, tiny children’s blocks from this elevation. The thinly-grassed hills to either side descend smoothly into the flat valley floor and disappear sleepily beneath the sediment, but the stream bed cuts a vertical-sided arroyo that wrenches from side to side, gouging a trench across the valley floor steep enough to break a cow’s leg. It’s not stable, I think, it doesn’t fit here. This topography is depositional, but the stream erodes. There’s no reason for this little prairie to be like this, I think to myself, not for the first time.

And then the shapes shift, the light changes, and again, present time melts away, and the Visitor returns. I look down the valley and see the same Place, but in a different Time. As I watch, the bright yellow tarweeds transform into thick grasses, and clumps of cattails appear. Water appears, the dry arroyo narrows to a clean and flowing rivulet, following a meandering course through the valley, overgrown to the sides with overhanging vegetation. The bare hillsides to either side suddenly sprout young pines, which rise to become forests. I no longer view a dry valley from the 20th century, but instead see an Ice Age landscape from a hilltop of another Time.

It was a cienega, I think to myself. Of course.

The secret of the valley is clear to me now. In the presence of the Visitor, the eroded and gullied valley now tells a story of deposition, of clear-flowing creeks bringing rich soils and minerals from the glaucophane hills above down into the floor with every rain, slowly burying the ever-rising marsh, home of sloths and elk, voles and jumping mice, food for the foxes, wolves, and bear.

Again, I am granted a vision of continuity, a sense of Place and of Time, of my own role as a player in a small scene within an eternally unrolling tapestry, a piece of an immense canvas, one much older, but much younger than myself. I see my own story of wintering my bees here in the tarweed as one chapter of many taking place in this valley, not the first, and not to be the last. The lush Pleistocene valley is written in the meandering stream course, in the thick alluvium, while the hot and dry desert of present time is disclosed by the dry hills, by the vertical stream banks, and the excavation of the rich sediment from another Time, in this same Place. For a little while I see both lifetimes of this Place, and then, as always, the sense of timelessness recedes into shadows again. After a little while, I stand to finish my work among the bees.

Elsewhere, in another Place, at another Time, I lie on my back on the weathered clay and gravel, gazing into the scattered blue light of the sky, the familiar tiny flecks of light wiggling across my field of vision, the countless scintilla that no ophthalmologist has ever been able to explain. Beyond this small mystery in my vision ride the greater mysteries above me, the moon one day past new, a narrow white smile pasted high into the sky, and the sun setting yellow and cheerfully over the mountains in the cool spring evening. I lie on the clay, oriented north and south, and visualize the arc of the sun’s path as it rises on my right and curves to the left, followed a few hours later by the waxing moon. The bodies are unmysterious, as well known to me as the robin that sings in the nearby junipers, amiable companions on my journey through this life, often present, but seldom consciously observed or even thought about.

And then the shapes shift, the light changes, and again, present time melts away in anticipation of the Visitor. The ground heaves under the great circle beneath my back, rotates through a quarter, and reappears as an immense planetary body in a strange and unfamiliar form. I adhere to the vertical side of a slowly spinning sphere, an immeasurably small mote clinging to a colossal ball of heavy metals, aluminosilicates, and gases, itself only transiently held together by the same forces that pin me to its surface. My point of view wheels up and through the atmosphere, and the blue sky fades to the deep black of hard light in the airlessness above.

The flat crescent moon grows in my vision and fills out into another sphere, the reflected light from behind me resolving the complete body in shades of cratered brown and black, illuminated harshly sunward and dimly by earth and starlight on its other half, clearly visible to me now. Against the darkness, the sun hangs in flames at the center of the enormous cosmic dance, tiny balls of heavy elements like the one clutching at my back whirling in huge ellipses around its vastly greater center of mass. Without pause, my vision races farther out still, until the sun and its system of satellites shrink to a miniscule orrery within a seemingly limitless universe composed of countless other systems, some smaller, some larger, but adding up by the thousands, by millions, of suns, and planets, and then of galaxies. And close at hand the stars hang in the Heavens, their fusion furnaces blazing in ecstasy. I see the candles of the Lord sing together, the sons of God shout for joy, in celebration of the beauty and wonder of Creation, the messengers hurtling outwards at immense speed with the good news.

And as quickly as I ascended, I am thrown back to the surface of the earth, the gravel again sharp against my back as the blue curtain of the sky is drawn over the black and infinite Heavens. The stars recede into the distance, and the song of the robin returns. Above me the smiling moon still serenely trails the sun towards the sunset, drawing the terminator ever closer, the edge of darkness that trails the Light.

A sense of Place is a humbling thing, but not humbling in any way that implies diminution, of a loss of value or purpose. The Visits come and go at their own schedule and their own purposes, but are always meaningful, always instructive. For me, the visitations provide a context, a view of who and what I am that enables me to become more fully attuned to my own role in the cosmic dance, a more sensitive participant, one more deeply aware of my assigned steps. And one day, of course, the Visitor will return, and take me away with it when it goes. I have no fear of that day, for nothing in its arrivals or departures hints of animosity or indifference. Instead, the lessons are personal gifts—generous and welcoming previews of a greater and deeper sense of place that one day won’t fade and retreat, but will remain with me forever.

Cleansing the Temple

2010-04-03T22:14:00.001-04:00

And the Iewes Passeouer was at hand, & Iesus went vp to Hierusalem. And found in the Temple those that sold oxen, and sheepe, and doues, and the changers of money, sitting. And when he had made a scourge of small cordes, he droue them all out of the Temple, and the sheepe & the oxen, and powred out the changers money, and ouerthrew the tables, And said vnto them that sold doues Take these things hence, make not my fathers house an house of merchandize. And his disciples remembred that it was written, The zeale of thine house hath eaten me vp -- John 2:13-17 --1611 Authorized Edition

You get to meet really interesting people when you drive a truck. Yesterday I was up in a steel mill in Wisconsin, where I’d loaded eleven slinkies onto the trailer to deliver to a wire works in Pennsylvania, the day after Ishtar. A slinkie is more or less just what you might expect it to be, a tightly coiled up roll of wire just like that ancient children’s toy, the one that rings in your hands when you juggle it, and topples down staircases so gracefully. But mine are much bigger and heavier. The ones on the back right now are all 5/16-inch unpickled steel, and each four-foot coil weigh about 4000 pounds. To hold them onto the bed, you have to lace them down with the four-inch nylon straps, weaving the straps in and out and down to the winches so all the slinkies are held tightly to the trailer bed and to each other. When they get unloaded, they’ll turn into log chain, or nuts and bolts, or threaded rod, or fencing wire, or who knows what. It’s raw material for the factories of America, and what I haul by the ton will someday end up cluttering that drawer in your kitchen along with the string, the miscellaneous nails, and the broken screwdrivers.

Anyway, I’d arrived at the mill at midday with just enough legal hours left to load, strap, and tarp the trailer, but not enough to go anywhere else, so I’d resolved to spend the night there and clean up in the morning in Chicago. I can spend the night most anywhere, as I live in my truck and don’t need anything else except a bathroom. And so to pass the afternoon, I walked around helping other drivers strap and tarp their own loads of slinkies. This sort of help is welcomed among flatbedders, especially when the wind is blowing hard and the tarps flop around like angry pterodactyls while you try to hook up the bungees. I get to talk to lots of different people, and they all have stories to tell.

One of them was Robert, a young driver with a delightful enthusiasm for hermeneutics, and a command of Biblical chapter and verse that eventually left me hopping from foot to foot trying to listen and avoid permanent paralysis at the same time. (I sprained my ankle on a load of aluminum extrusions about ten days ago in Michigan, and can’t stand for long. But Robert was too interesting to leave). Robert's Bible was the 1611 Authorized Version, an unusual choice for a trucker. Amid rapid fire excursions into Exodus, Proverbs, Acts, and the Gospels, Robert focused on the New Testament account of the cleansing of the Temple in Jerusalem.

“You ever think about what that means, spiritually, I mean?” he asked, spitting tobacco juice onto the asphalt from his perch on the bed of his truck.

“Sure.”

“No, no, I mean in the context of the temple of your body. What did Paul say about your body?”

“He said that our bodies were the temple, that they made it up. The Body of Christ.”

“Exactly! And what did Jesus do in the Temple in Jerusalem? When he went in there?”

“Well, he tossed out the money changers, let all the animals loose, and generally upset things.”

“Yes! Now, what does the Holy Spirit do in your own body, in the temple of the Body of Christ? It cleans out your misplaced passions, it drives out the evil, it sweeps it clean. See? The same things. And what did Jesus do after all that?”

“He wouldn’t let anybody else come into the temple while he was in there, taking shortcuts or setting up the tables again.”

“Yes! Remember what he said about the wicked spirits in Matthew 12:44? About how if they come back and find it cleaned up, but empty, they just move back in and you’re worse off? That’s what Jesus does—he comes into the Temple, into your own heart, he cleans it up, he throws out the dirt, and then if you let him, he lives in there, and keeps it occupied, and keeps the wicked spirits from returning.”

“You got it, Robert.”

Robert pauses again to spit more tobacco.

“See? The whole story was set up so Jesus could explain in the Bible what he was going to be doing inside the hearts of people, if they would let him in. He would clean them up, keep them clean, and make them into what they were supposed to be. That day he planned a lesson for us right now”

As the shadows lengthened and the light grew yellow, Robert and I talked about other discoveries he had made in Scripture, among the parables, and within symbolic narratives. Actually, Robert talked, and I listened, and tried to remember as much as I could. Robert was an inspiring evangelist, a man whose enthusiasm for God was boundless, and only matched by his amazing happiness in the discoveries he lived. He told of problems he had, too little money and too many bills. Also, he said, “I’m not very prompt.” Not a good trait for a truck driver. But after he became a Christian, he said, he looked up and visited every person from his past he could find that he had ever wronged, and apologized to them, face to face.

And he was happy. His face literally shone with it in the golden light in the evening. He was an inspiring visitation, an example of one who had welcomed God into his own heart, and had had the money changers thrown out, and the Light take residence inside him. So it should be for us all.
I go back to this mill regularly, and I’ll see Robert again. I have more questions to ask, and I know he’ll have answers to some of them.

But next time, I’ll be ready with a pen and paper.

Not One of Us

2010-03-21T19:35:00.002-04:00

Friends, I'd like to take an opportunity to talk a bit about something difficult. The subject is abortion—the elective termination of pregnancy. I'd like to do this here for two reasons. First, members of the Society of Friends have a long-standing united front in the areas of human life: personal violence, peace, capital punishment, euthanasia, and so on. Second, on abortion, we don’t.

I want to share some thoughts on the subject that I don't recall anybody paying much attention to. And I want to be clear that I’m not talking to the dominant culture, and advising them what they should be thinking or doing. They march to a different drummer, and they maintain a different profession than we say we do. I am talking to Friends. If that’s what you are, then I am talking to you.

You see, unity on an issue like abortion can only come about when we listen to our Guide together. As Friends, it doesn’t matter what you think of it, or what I think of it; the issue is what our Guide thinks of it. We claim to be attentive to the Light. We claim to be following our Guide. Yet when abortion comes up, the arguments I hear have very little to do with following our Guide. To me we look more like an old-time circus performer, cantering around and around the ring in our costume, one foot each on the backs of two very different horses, smiling at the crowd while we perform an impossible feat, one founded in intrinsic contradiction.

Where do Friends disagree on this subject? Most of us don’t believe in killing people, and we often cite the influence of our Guide as the source of our belief. Look at our record against warfare, violence, capital punishment, euthanasia, and so on. But I think we can all agree that aborting an embryo makes a member of the human biological species die. It's not a hamster, a tapeworm, a toe, or a fingernail clipping, after all. Yes, it’s uniquely related physically to its mother, more so than any other living creature can ever be. But equally, it’s not part of her—the placenta is a physical and philosophical barrier that is also unique and critically significant.

I'm not trying to solve issues of social justice, economics, gender politics, or the sad history of treating girls or women as second-class citizens (or non-citizens), or any of the usual historical positions. These are profoundly important topics, but they're secondary. I want to explore why that developing member of the species Homo sapiens is somehow something different from you and me, why for some Friends it is somehow not one of us.

Let me start by listing some of the traditional arguments supporting elective abortion:

Poor people are penalized by unwanted or unaffordable children. I agree. Economics do penalize poor people who can't afford to raise children, for reasons not of their choosing and not under their control. But we don't let people kill their children because they discover later they can't afford to raise them. The argument is the same, so something else must be going on.

Underage parents aren’t equipped to raise children and forgo opportunities in later life, especially single mothers. I agree. Young people do make inexperienced parents, and young single mothers give up a lot of opportunity by trying to raise children too young. But we don't kill their children at the age of ten if the parent’s inexperience or opportunity cost only becomes clear when the parents are older.

Some pregnancies are the result of rape or incest, and are not voluntary. I agree. I can think of no experience more undeserved and painful than being forced to carry and give birth to a child that was the outcome of a brutal and exploitive experience, whether one-time or the result of long-term abuse. But we don’t kill a teenager because we discover later that she was the product of a rape.

Sometimes the embryo is diagnosed as deformed or mentally subnormal. I agree. But should being born crippled deserve a pre-emptive death sentence? My Aunt Alma was born with spina bifida, and couldn’t walk, live alone, or support herself for the 94 years she lived. But she gave my own mother her first bath the day she was born, and held both me as an infant and my own infant children in her arms decades and decades later. Her life was always a burden to others, but was it worthless? Did she deserve death? Are the lives of the smiling, hardworking people with Down’s Syndrome equally worthless burdens? If so, then we should be able to gather them all up and dispose of them right now, no matter how old they are. But we don’t, because something else is important.

It’s my body and my life. The private decisions I make about my body are nobody else’s business. I’m afraid this one has holes in it too, although it’s the one that makes the most sense to me. First, we all acknowledge that society can interfere with our bodies when what we do with them poses a danger to someone else. And as a culture we acknowledge that other people can make decisions that affect our bodies, even overruling our own. We deny people the right to kill or hurt themselves, to use certain kinds of drugs, we make motorcyclists wear helmets and auto drivers fasten their seatbelts. If society has a right to overrule decisions about my body for the benefit of someone living outside it, then it has the right to overrule my decisions about my body with respect to someone living inside it, if that entity living inside me is truly a someone. The nature of that embryo is very important to this question, because if it is one of us, then an abortion affects more people than just the mother. If it is one of us.

That seems to be the key. All the arguments I have heard from Friends justifying abortion seem to hinge on the assumption that somehow, the embryo is not one of us, and can therefore be treated differently without disobedience to what the Light tells us is our duty with respect to other people. But what makes it not one of us?

Is it that the embryo isn’t a human being? Ask any zoologist what it is and you will get a simple answer: the embryo is a developing individual of the species Homo sapiens. It's a genetically complete, diploid chordate, being carried and nurtured during ontogeny across a placenta in the uterus of another member of the same species. Biologically it can’t be anything but human. Killing it kills a biological member of our species, but somehow, the embryo is not considered one of us, even so. And the existence of that placenta unarguably defines a physical boundary between the mother and the embryo that marks a distinction between two organisms. Yes, the boundary is internal to the mother, and yes, all nutrition is transferred from the mother to the embryo across it, and yes, the embryo’s life is utterly dependent upon her. But they are different creatures: blood types, skin colors, body features, half of the time even different genders. If the embryo is just a piece of tissue within the mother, then that definition must logically extend to the moment the umbilical cord is cut after birth. Having personally held five wet, squirming, and hollering newborns still definitely attached to their mother through a living, pulsing umbilicus, I find it hard to extend it that far. But that would be the necessary logical conclusion.

Is it that the embryo is still dependent on its parent, and can’t survive on its own? That can’t be it, either. Children are dependent on their parents for years, and very young ones can’t survive on their own at all, either. The difference between a very late-term foetus and a very premature newborn infant is a moment-in-time, a philosophical distinction, not a natural one. This is clearly shown by the earlier and earlier ages at which a premature baby can now be born and be expected to live as medical techniques improve. But in some circles it is acceptable to abort a late term foetus, but not to kill a premature newborn. Somehow, merely by virtue of being unborn, that organism is still not one of us.

Is it that it’s undeveloped, incomplete, and doesn’t even look very much like a human being? I’ve already addressed how underdeveloped premature infants are still treated as human beings. Does it have to already look like us to be human? Maybe it has to be pretty, as well, or have the correct number of legs and arms. If that was the case, then the adult mainframe computer operator at a university I attended wasn’t one of us either, as somehow he had been born without any arms at all. Still, he was a very knowledgeable and helpful computer operator, in spite of his status.

Is it that it's not a person that makes it okay to kill it? It’s not someone who grew up, and has a life story, and matters to someone somewhere? After all, the embryo has no connections to society that we need to honor and maintain. It has no family stories known to anybody, and is a stranger. But when an elderly stranger dies in my town, the coroner takes the body and performs certain legal procedures, spends taxpayer money making sure that the body is treated honorably, and ensures that all due process is followed that is required by the natural death of a human being. We assume he was a person, although we know nothing of his story or history. We treat him as one of us anyway.

Is it that the embryo isn’t a citizen, something with legal rights and standing administered by the government, and so it doesn’t merit equal legal status or protection? This is the usual pragmatic legal approach, where laws arbitrarily allow elective abortions in the first trimester but not later in the term. This is a distasteful compromise, what the dominant culture does. But it isn’t what Friends do, or at least, it isn’t what we are supposed to do, as I see it. I want to achieve that unity that we claim is how we make decisions. Besides, even if it isn’t a citizen, and has no legal rights in society, it still is not treated as one of us the way other non-citizens are treated. The apple pickers in my town on work visas from other countries aren't citizens, either, but I can't kill them without legal penalties. We treat them as one of us in spite of their lack of legal equality.

And as a Friend, I don’t grant my local government the right to make moral definitions for me anyway. I don’t want to hear legal definitions or arguments. I want to hear the moral ones.

And now that we’ve come to this point, I would like to hear them from members of the Religious Society of Friends. Respectfully, Friends, I would like to know what it is that makes that little blob of cells that we call an embryo something different from the Mohandas Gandhi or the George Fox that it might be destined to become. It must be different in some way, because our Society has no unity on how to treat it. But I can’t figure out what it is.

And to answer this question, I would like to hear us practicing what we preach, that we listen to our Guide, that we follow a leader larger than ourselves, that we rely on the Light, on immediate revelation to show us the Way. I want to hear the debate shift from secondary pragmatic discussions of social justice, economics, and gender politics to a primary discussion of conscience, morality, right and wrong, and the leadings from the Guide.

If the embryo is one of us, then it deserves the same consideration from the Society that we extend to condemned criminals, victims of warfare, those helpless individuals abused by social injustice, and the terminally ill woman given a secret overdose of barbiturates to put her out of her misery. If the embryo is not one of us, and doesn’t deserve that consideration, then I would like to understand why, and I would like to hear it explained in terms that we as the Religious Society of Friends can unite on.

I think we need to decide what it is we stand for, and reconcile our position on abortion with our positions on violence, peace, capital punishment, and involuntary euthanasia. I would like to achieve unity with our Guide and with each other, and begin to labor openly and charitably on this topic until we come to that unity. I want us as a Society, as a community under a Guide, as a people who claim to follow a special Light, to choose which horse we will ride, and to let the other one go.

I think it’s time.

Driving with Big Trucks

2010-03-09T19:11:00.001-05:00

I’ve held down a lot of different job titles over the years. Some of them are sort of normal-sounding, things like Cashier, or Technical Documentations Manager, or Apple Picker. Some of them are a bit arcane: Jug Hustler, Air Gun Mechanic, Roustabout. Some of them sound familiar, but indicate that there’s a story in there somewhere: Cowhand, Beekeeper, Paleontologist. The job I currently hold down might fall into the last category: Big Truck Driver. I drive a Big Truck for a living now, and while lots of people might consider that a fairly mundane way to spend 70-hour work weeks, I can attest that there is a lot that goes on that most people are simply not aware of. I know this personally, because driving a Big Truck exposes me to people every day, in every part of the country, who not only are not aware of what is going on with a Big Truck nearby, but are also unaware of how close they come to death by making bad decisions in its vicinity. Driving 400-plus miles a day for weeks at a time, I see the bodies on the roadside under the sheets often enough to know that some of them came too close.

First, please let me introduce you to a Big Truck: mine. My truck is a fairly standard vehicle, a conventional Freightliner with a sleeper cab. With the 48-foot flatbed trailer that is behind me as I write, I am about 71 feet long, give or take a few yards. Empty, I weigh about 29,000 pounds. Loaded, I come as close to 80,000 pounds as I let the shippers get to. Right now I’m carrying the last of the load of ceiling tiles that I picked up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and brought across Ontario and Quebec to a contractor’s supply house here in Maine. They weighed about 44,000 pounds, so all that the interstate highway had to support was a measley 73,000, only 36 tons as opposed to the 40 it could be. So fully loaded I weigh only about as much as seven elephants.

But I am very large, and I am traveling at 65 miles per hour. I want you to think about that, because I regularly have to compensate for people who don’t, and I genuinely and truly don’t want to be the agency of your death. Because, you see, if you make a mistake driving near a Big Truck, you can die very quickly. In fact, every day in the United States, about 14 people do die in close encounters with commercial vehicles, and it’s very seldom the driver of the Big Truck who gets covered with the sheet that I mentioned earlier. It’s also very seldom the fault of the truck driver.

So I’d like to offer some suggestions about what exactly goes on with a Big Truck, from the perspective of the truck driver, and therefore to help you (who probably don’t drive a Big Truck) to be a bit more aware of how to make a truck driver feel better about sharing the road with you, rather than filling the air waves with colorful radio commentary about your skills and abilities so every truck driver for miles is warned about what you look like and how to stay away from you.

Friends, the most important thing you can do to help me out and to stay safe when you share the road with me is simply to stay as far from me as you can. I am large, slow, and maneuver poorly at highway speeds. There are blind spots on all sides that small snazzy brightly-painted cars can remain hidden in for miles at a time. You can be behind me, to either side, or even in front of me without me being able to see you. Many people like to drive so close behind me that the only way I can keep track of where they are is to look for the faint shadows they cast to either side of my trailer, or the reflections of their lights in the wet pavement. This is dangerous, because if I don’t know where you are, I can’t always avoid you if I have to move quickly.

When you decide to pass me, do it decisively. There are 18 very large tires on my truck, and although they last a long time, they sometimes choose to go out with a bang. An exploding tire sends heavy rubber shrapnel in all directions, and if you are loitering alongside when one hits a road hazard and lets go, it can destroy your car. If you ride a motorcycle, pass trucks quickly and in a far lane if you can. Don’t drive alongside me any longer than you have to.

Sometimes the wind hits a truck and tips it over on its side into the next lane. Think about that.

Think about what lane you’re driving in, as well. In cities, Big Trucks are often restricted to the lanes on the right (except in construction zones, where they make you go left-right-left-right so rapidly you think you’re marching in a parade). This means that a Big Truck can’t always pass you on the left, the normal passing side. So if you see a Big Truck in the mirror coming up behind you and you’re in a middle lane, do everybody a favor and shift to the left or the right, whichever is convenient for you. The truck driver often can’t, and then has to hang back behind you until traffic clears enough in his limited options in order to get by.

By the same token, if the truck driver finally is able to change lanes and starts to pull ahead, let him go. Sometimes I’ll catch up with a driver going slower than me, but as soon as I change lanes and move alongside, he will remember how fast he wanted to be going and will speed up until his speed matches mine. Now I’m stuck, because I can’t return to my lane, and if I slow way down and get back in behind him again, the scenario inevitably just repeats itself a bit farther along. In the meantime he hovers in my blind spot, down there where tires blow out and he can’t maneuver around a pothole or a piece of trash that shows up in his lane. And traffic builds up behind both of us, with everybody back there getting more and more impatient.

If you decide to pass me, please go right ahead. But please don’t get 30 feet in front of me, slip back into my lane, and then slow back down. I keep seven seconds of empty space in front of me, and if you’re in it, I’m doing my best to drop back. But I’m moving 80,000 pounds at 95 feet per second, and if you suddenly have to brake before I can open up a safe following distance, my last sight of you will be as your car disappears under my front wheels. If you do have to merge in closely, move away as quickly as you can. You can make it easier by not slipping back in too soon, and by not slowing down again until you’re up ahead.

This one is sometimes amusing. You know those white stop lines in town, painted across the ends of the traffic lanes, underneath the traffic lights? Notice how sometimes the ones close to the middle of the road have you stopping 10, 15, or even 25 feet farther back than the lanes close to the curb? That’s for me, because when I make that turn, the giant wheels on the back of my trailer cut the corner and cross your lane just in front of those painted stop lines. If an auto driver sleepily ignores them and pulls up in front of them waiting for the light to change, he is parking in my path. There’s not much I can do in that case except to turn as much of the corner as I can and then stop, placing the wheels of my trailer right in front of the now wide-awake auto driver. After a while he generally realizes that neither he nor my truck is going anywhere until he moves out of the way, which means he and everybody behind him has to back up. I just sit and drink my coffee while the lights change, and eventually people figure it out. But it’s nicer for everybody if we don’t have to do it that way

When you merge into traffic from an on-ramp, finish merging before you shift your attention to anything else. It’s a natural tendency to get situated onto the on-ramp, and then to settle down to return to whatever unfinished business was interrupted. But you’re not safely in a traffic lane yet. Over and over, I see people merging into fast-moving traffic flipping open their cell phones and punching in numbers, or reaching down to pick up that fast food bag to make sure that they got their onion rings, or opening up a map to see where the next exit is going to be. Sometimes the next thing they notice is that they are alongside a very long truck that is blocked in by other cars in front, behind, and to the side, and they have to put the cell phone down because they are now driving at highway speeds in the grass. I try to help them out in advance by adjusting my own speed for them, but often there’s nothing I can do. Too often.

Anyway, there’s lots more I could say about this, but I’ll save the rest for another day. Everybody has every right to be out there on the highways, but a Big Truck has lots of limitations that many auto drivers have no reason to ever be aware of. If any of this helps keeps any of you out from under those sheets that I pass by all too often, I am eternally grateful. And if it helps any of you understand why it is that the Big Truck seems to be behaving in a strange way, I hope that that has helped as well.

Happy motoring, and let’s all be safe out there.

Dust

2010-01-31T22:36:00.003-05:00

Genesis 2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

I grip the steering wheel and glance back in the rearview mirror. The narrow blacktop receding behind the small white four-door shines in the clean air, the red dust to either side temporarily metamorphosed into red mud, wet from the thunderstorm that has left the air cool, fresh, and new. It fills my lungs with the organic living smell of springtime in the Texas Panhandle as it sweeps by me outside the open window. The car lurches as the wheels bounce over a bump on the road, and the gray aluminum hard hat beside me on the seat slips to the floor, followed by a paper waterfall of maps, electric logs, and cross sections, my guide to the wildcat where I will spend the next two weeks watching and waiting as the bit twists into the Permian, there beneath my feet and 200 million years before my time.

I reach forward and turn the knob on the radio. A familiar train of guitar chords emerges from the speakers, an old song that haunts the chapters of my life, appearing always on cue after every change in course. I listen to the words, and mentally cut another benchmark signalling a turn in my life.

I close my eyes,
Only for a moment, and the moment's gone.
All my dreams
Pass before my eyes of curiosity.
Dust in the wind,
All they are is dust in the wind.

Alongside my road, the line of tall brown telephone poles narrows to a distant point on the llano estacado, redirecting my attention from the past to the future. The section lines pass by at precise one-mile intervals, the crossroads appearing and disappearing, ticking away my life one minute at a time.

I grip the steering wheel and glance back in the rearview mirror. The four lane highway glows in the yellow California sunset, receding behind the marker lights of the rattling two-ton flatbed. The coastal mountains shadowed by the setting sun dip down and disappear beneath the alluvium in the valley floor, which itself narrows to a vanishing point ahead of me intersecting my road, strung along a narrow grade above the prune orchards and safflower fields. In the mirror I inspect the ropes holding the beehives to the truck bed, 112 red and white eight-frame doubles, headed out of the almonds and into the cherries. The bees are quiet, the cool evening air blowing fresh clouds of oxygen between the stacked boxes, keeping them content and quiet inside until the sun goes down. Beside me on the seat is an old gray aluminum hard hat, now drilled for four small bolts that hold the knitted veil in place over the broad brim, the zipper below sealing the veil to the white beesuit I still wear for warmth, now as the sun goes down. On the inland slope above me, an array of giant steel towers parallel the road, the cables stringing them together tying the hills, the road, and my path along them into a distant knot, far ahead.

I click the knob on the dashboard and the song appears, the familiar chords presaging the familar words, as yet again, it announces the departure of another crossroads slowly disappearing behind me.

Same old song,
Just a drop of water in the endless sea.
All we do
Crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see.
Dust in the wind,
All they are is dust in the wind.

I grip the steering wheel and glance back in the rear view mirror. The ice-covered highway behind me recedes into the distance, an exact reflection of the highway focusing to the vanishing point ahead of me through the windshield. The ragged corn stubble beneath the Minnesota wind farms to either side is covered in snow, under a thin blue sky empty of clouds, the interference patterns of the sun dogs refracting like a flock of washed-out rainbows hovering above the generators, high overhead. In the mirror, I inspect the chains holding the water chiller to the truck bed, its squat 27,000 pounds filling most of the 48-foot trailer, headed out of Wisconsin and destined for Indochina, months away in its future, but not to be part of mine. The tractor wheels hit a pothole in the frozen highway, and an old gray felt Quaker broadbrim slips to the floor, followed by a paper waterfall of maps, road atlases, and hours-of-service logs, my guide to the 3500-mile trip to the Seattle seaport and return.

I press the tiny button on the dashboard, and the song appears from the speakers, the words from the past reminding me to take note of the crossroads. On either side the ranks of colossal electrical generators parallel the highway, their stately aerofoils windmilling in the frigid prairie breeze, turning in unison like the hands of gigantic clocks, ticking off the intervals of my life as I run the gauntlet between their slowing turning blades.

Now,
Don't hang on.
Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky.
It slips away,
And all your money won't another minute buy.
Dust in the wind,

All we are is dust in the wind.

I look up into the sky as I pass under the generators, the immense blades cutting the air, impassively slicing the stream of time into discrete intervals, one after another, ahead of me along my road.

Genesis 3:19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Wilburite Friends and the Atonement

2010-01-22T22:52:00.033-05:00

Remember old Elias Hicks, the long Island recorded minister who was such a central figure in early 19th century Quaker history? There’s an old story about told about Hicks, making trouble in Philadelphia many years ago. Hicks did this regularly, but one day it finally came to a crisis. Walt Whitman tells it this way:

. . . a meeting of Friends in Philadelphia crowded by a great attendance of both sexes, with Elias as principal speaker. In the course of his utterance or argument he made use of these words: “The blood of Christ—the blood of Christ—why, my friends, the actual blood of Christ in itself was no more effectual than the blood of bulls and goats—not a bit more—not a bit.” At these words, after a momentary hush, commenced a great tumult. Hundreds rose to their feet . . . . Canes were thump’d upon the floor. From all parts of the house angry mutterings. Some left the place, but more remain’d, with exclamations, flush’d faces and eyes.

Elias was elaborating on his view of the atonement, using terminology from Hebrews 10:4:

For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.

In Hick’s view, the physical body of the Jesus Christ was just a physical thing, like yours and mine. His blood was ordinary blood. As Elias preached here and elsewhere, the important part of Jesus’s sacrifice was inward, not outward:

And what was it that was a Saviour? Not that which was outward; it was not flesh and blood: for "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven;" it must go to the earth from whence it was taken. It was that life, that same life that I have already mentioned, that was in him, and which is the light and life of men, and which lighteth every man, and consequently every woman, that cometh into the world.

As Whitman described it, the Orthodox Friends in waiting worship broke concentration to express cane-thumping disapproval of this heretical doctrine, which seemed to devalue the atoning physical death of Jesus Christ. The story is often quoted to show that Elias denied the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, a denial which would lead to the First Separation of 1827-1828, and the subsequent creation of Liberal Friends as a separate wing of the Society.

Now, I wasn’t there, but I have a very strong suspicion that this furious disapproval was not a united expression, even factoring out the contingent of Elias’s supporters that tried to be present whenever he spoke. In my opinion Elias ran ahead of his guide on some very significant issues, but on this matter the old farmer was mostly right. His views were very similar to those of the earliest Friends, including George Fox, and very similar to many of the Friends also in attendance there in Philadelphia, who in a few more years would be called “Wilburites.”

The Wilburites would themselves break from the cane-thumping Orthodox on just this issue, as well as others. But at that time the future Wilburites and the Orthodox were uneasily united in a front against the creeping Unitarianism that many of Elias Hicks’s followers were running into. I can imagine the Wilburites sitting in that meeting house groaning inwardly, saying to themselves, “Oh, Elias, why does it have to be thee who preaches what we believe?”

So just what exactly did the first generations of Friends see in the atonement? What did the Wilburites think of this idea?

The answer is in two parts, and has to do with how the earlier Friends saw the historical Jesus and the Inward Christ as two manifestations of the same entity: one whose atoning death would both put man in a capacity to be saved, and whose Inward Light would teach him and enable him to do the inward work to then allow it to happen. There are many competing theories about the atonement, but C. S. Lewis said it best:

Theories about Christ’s death are not Christianity: they are explanations about how it works.

Essentially, atonement theory doesn’t matter. Whether Jesus’s death on the cross was a substitutionary blood sacrifice to appease a wrathful god, or whether it was a ransom of captive hostages, or whether it was a moral example, or whether it was any of the other competing theories, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the Quaker view that something very significant happened there for all people:

(John 1:9) That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

(2 Corinthians 5:19) To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.

The Quakers asserted that the atonement was the essential, timeless, and worldwide universal reconciliation of Jesus Christ, and was provided for all men, everywhere, of every kind of man. It had redeemed all people, had paid the price for all people, had put all people right with God, and it served as an example for all people. The atonement had wiped the slate clean, so to speak, and had given humanity a fresh start, one somehow free from the encumbrance of the sin that came with being a creature born and raised in a fallen world. Importantly, you didn’t have to know about it, understand it, or have faith in it for it to be effective—Christ died for us while we were still sinners, like the apostle wrote. His redemption was a gift for all men and women, freely given, with no strings attached, including the strings of knowledge, understanding, and faith.

So this was the first part of the original Quaker message about the atonement, but only the first. The necessary second part was what got Quakers thrown into prisons, flogged, and executed. It also made the Orthodox thump their canes in disagreement that day in the Philadelphia meeting house when they heard it from Elias Hicks, who was doing no more than asserting a Quaker truth that dated from the beginning of Christianity, but that the Orthodox Friends were beginning to openly reject. This second part was the recognition that the physical death of Jesus Christ, by itself, was indeed ultimately no more efficacious than the blood sacrifice of bulls and goats denied by the author of Hebrews. His physical death in his earthly body set the stage, but it didn’t lower the curtain. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ remits sins, enlightens us, and puts us in a capacity to be made righteous, to actually be justified. But it is the subsequent inward work of the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ that actually enables us to be sanctified, to put on Christ, to be renewed inwardly, and then to experience the justified state in which we are saved. By itself, the atonement didn’t save you—what it did was make it possible for you to be saved, to be put into a relationship that you weren’t in before. It was the gift of the Light.

Robert Barclay devotes page after page to this two-fold nature of Christ’s work in his Apology for the True Christian Divinity. A single excerpt will serve, I hope:

By the first of these two . . . we are out into a capacity for salvation, having the glad tidings of the Gospel of peace offered to us, and God is reconciled unto us in Christ . . . By the second, we witness this capacity brought into act, whereby receiving and not resisting the purchase of his death, to wit, the Light, Spirit, and Grace of Christ revealed to us, we witness and possess a real true and inward redemption from the power and prevalency of sin, and so come to be truly and really redeemed, justified, and made righteous, and to a sensible union and friendship with God.

And how do we do this? The answer can be found throughout New Testament Scripture: by not resisting the work of the Holy Spirit, by emulating the Christ, by obedience to his commands, by doing the things he asks us to do, and by accepting the assistance of the Inward Light, that he provides to help us to do it. The Gospels record story after story, parable after parable, teaching after teaching, in which Jesus Christ himself tells us that that we must actively participate with the Holy Spirit in our sanctification. Over and over, the Gospels tell us of a Jesus who came with a message for us to actually be something new and renewed, to act, to follow him, not to rest easy in Zion with a hope of glory founded in a passive acknowledgement of imputed justification. The Protestant opponents of Quakerism derided this belief as “works righteousness.” The Quakers countered by pointing out that it was what Jesus told us to do.

This was what old Elias and generations of Friends before him had to say about the atonement. But what did the Wilburites themselves say about the matter? Were they quiet, and content to let the Orthodox thump their canes and carry the flag of Quakerism back 150 years into the Protestant camp of it had left behind? Because, after all, the Orthodox view was essentially Protestant in nature, and would come to another crisis in the Second Separation in just a few more years.

In fact, the Wilburites weren’t shy about expressing their view that the outward atonement was insufficient by itself to provide salvation:

In attempting to counteract the sorrowful effects resulting from a denial of the benefits which accrue to mankind from the sufferings and death of Christ, as the propitiation for the sins of the whole world, the subject has been pressed so far as to give the countenance to the idea that Christ has paid the debt and done the work for us, without us; and that by a profession of faith in and reliance upon him, as their atonement and righteousness, the ungodly may be justified without experiencing sanctification through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Elsewhere:

There is hence a danger of separating what our blessed Lord has done for us, without us, from what it is indispensible to experience him to do for us within us; and of thinking that a man may be a true Christian because of religious belief, and without his doing the will of God through submission to the power of the cross of Christ.

This was a major point upon which the Wilburites differed from the Orthodox, and could hardly be put more clearly: Christ’s material death, alone, was not sufficient to ensure salvation—he required something more from us than merely showing up, so to speak. The Wilburites explicitly denied the Protestant belief that the death of Christ imputed sufficient righteousness to the faithful, and warned against the hazard of believing in it:

Is it not possible for persons who have been educated in the belief that Christ has suffered in their stead, the penalty due to their sins, and that they are saved by his imputed righteousness, to place their whole reliance for their salvation on his sacrifice, and to conclude that they are perfectly safe, while they are rejecting the visitations and requisitions of his Spirit, and are no better than nominal believers of the truths of the Gospel? Can such a literal belief make them participants of the body and blood of Christ, while they know nothing of the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, not having been made conformable to his death?

Pretty plain speech for 19th century Wilburites, and hard core Barclay, as well. The atonement is the overture that precedes the performance. It is Christ knocking at the door, where he waits, ready to enter. But the actual putting on of Christ is what does the trick: the subsequent washing and sanctification is where the justification comes in.

This two-part view of the work of the historical Christ and the Inward Christ is one that Conservative Friends today sometimes lose sight of. Although we descend from the Wilburites, many of our modern beliefs seem more similar to those of the Orthodox who separated from us than those of the earlier Friends and of the Wilburites who tried to conserve their message. Many of our members seem unaware of the changes and as a result don’t see a difference today between the beliefs of our spiritual ancestors and those who took the Protestant path instead.

But I believe that the original Friends had it right, and that the Wilburite view had it right as well.

Perhaps it’s time to abandon the Conservative reticence to talk about these things, and to spend some time in contemplating just where we came from, where we are now, and where we’re going. Because doing the will of Jesus Christ is what’s it’s all about, I think. And troubled though our beginning was in the 19th century, when it comes to what God expects from us, I think the Wilburites mostly got it right.

And even old Elias Hicks, troublemaker as he so often was, mostly got this one right, too.

Quakers in the Country: Transportation

2009-12-19T16:07:00.038-05:00

I guess that we have a different view of transportation than do people who live closer in to town. We’re not really that far out, perhaps two miles to the blacktop and three more to the post office and feed store. Of course, in the metropolis of Belmont, Ohio, that’s about all you get. There’s a little dry goods store there in town, all creaky old board floors and glass-fronted wooden cabinets that haven’t been moved in 75 years, probably. But if you want to buy green onions, it’s a 50 mile round trip to a chain grocery store, and going to the very good local library is at least 20. And of course, now that the kids are attending the giant public elementary school across the interstate, they ride the school bus about an hour each way. You know you live out and away when the school bus drives up for your children, turns around in your dooryard, and heads back the same way it came.

Being far away from town means that transportation is an issue. The little town of Zebra up the road to the north about two miles closed its post office in 1901, and now David Kemp parks his pickup in the cellar under the old dry goods store. So we can’t buy anything there, nor can we buy anything in Lampville, about a mile to the south, because there’s nothing left there except a couple of old derelict pickup campers for the deer hunters and a one-holer outhouse that we occasionally use when we take walks in the evening. Nope, if we want to buy a gallon of ice cream or a hammer, it’s a twenty-mile round trip. To buy a piece of plywood is 50 miles, like the green onions. They tell me that there’s another general store in Centerville, about 15 miles to the east, but I’ve never been there, as it’s not on the way to anywhere I need to go. The reality is that out where we live, being able to go to meeting, to the grocery store, to the library, to anything like that, all require a commitment to some sort of significant transportation device.

The local Amish use buggies, surreys, and hacks to get around, at a pretty smart clip, too, with those standardbreds that they use. Toby Yoder once told me that one particularly good horse he had could make the 28 miles to Quaker City in about two and a half hours. They’re also the best vehicles for snow country, as a lightweight buggy can go places where any four-wheel-drive would founder hopelessly. We could buy a very decent buggy for about $1500, a sort-of decent horse for another $1500, and then a new set of nylon harness for about $300. Not too bad, and we have enough hay field to keep a horse fed cheap except in the winter. But so far all that we have is Dude, the twenty-five dollar donkey who is actually worth much less, as far as I’m concerned. The kids tell me that he is broken both for saddle and to drive, but Dude’s major function up to this point has been to provide sympathy to my hard-working and lonely wife when she wants a break from five demanding children and from coping alone with our perpetually deteriorating infrastructure, while I’m out on the road. When she needs a kindred spirit and I’m out driving through snow storms in Iowa, Shawna heads out to the old post-and-beam barn that Dude lives under, and shovels out his accumulating piles of organic matter. Then she sits down in a clean spot, and Dude comes up for companionship and to investigate her pockets for carrots. Dude doesn’t think nearly so well of me, and when I hold out a carrot he just stares back warily as if I was some sort of noxious vermin. The feeling is entirely mutual. One of these days, we’ll build a donkey cart out of pieces of old Chevrolet, and Dude can start contributing in other ways, but until then the donkey is mostly just a work- in-progress.

The kids are all self-taught bicycle riders. We live on a hilltop, so teaching yourself to roll down is pretty easy. They all start with the off-road tricycles their very kind grandmother bought for them from Lehman’s Hardware in Kidron, and graduate to two wheels whenever they want. But the bicycles are strictly recreational. They don’t work in the snow, which can be considerable, and the problem with hills is that every time you whiz down one going away, you have to chug back up to get home again. And the kids all know that going to see the neighbor kids is at least two or three miles, and while I’m not at all averse to telling them to hoof it, my lovely wife is more gracious and takes them in whatever excuse for a car we currently drive.

We consume cars out here, because our life is not gentle to them. Our roads are gravel, mud, dirt, and snow, and to leave our house in two directions you must drive through the creeks to get out (unless the water is too deep). The third direction is a long exposed ridge, about the highest place in the county. There’s no water up there, but after a snowfall the road may be as much as a foot or two deep in powder. The only way to take it then is with speed and dedication, but once you learn where the road is under the featureless blanket of snow on the hilltop, it’s actually not bad. While the snow is actually blowing and the windshield is blank, you have to steer slowly along the road by looking out an open side window and gauging your distance from the fence that parallels the road on one side. This is important, because if you stray too far to the other side, you tumble down a forty-five degree slope into the holler and won’t be found until spring.

The fresh summer road gravel sandblasts the car’s undercarriage, and the winter salt corrodes anything that can oxidize. We have a useful little minivan right now, and the sheet metal has holes in various places underneath where the gravel has eroded the metal away. In the summertime when the roads are dusty, the car fills with clouds of silt that get sucked into the unibody through the holes, and then is blown into the interior through the inner body vents thoughtfully provided by designers who obviously didn’t live in the country. When I drive, I steer with one hand and hold the door open with the other to let the slipstream suck the dust back out as it comes in. I have to open the door because the designers also equipped the car with power windows, which of course don’t work anymore and cost hundreds of dollars to fix. (The used ones I bought from the junkyard didn’t work any better than the used ones they replaced. I have never been able to learn that simple lesson. Oh, well.)

Tires are a problem, too. We don’t buy high-quality tires, because the sharp limestone and cinders the township uses for road metal shred them too quickly. Shawna doesn’t even have the replacement wheels mounted on the car anymore. When another one starts to leak or shows too much wire in the tread area, she goes down to Joe’s Tires and has Joe or his brother put on a new one and lift it into the back, behind the rear seat. Then when the tire blows, she changes to the new one on the roadside and has the next new one mounted and thrown into the back in turn. I asked her the other day if it would be easier just to bungee the new tires onto the roof, but I got the impression she was concerned by what people would say.

We have a few other vehicles kicking around. The old one-ton market van is sitting down by the warehouse, waiting for me to do something to it. It has a rear axle that howls and it needs valve seals, but since we don’t go to the Farmer’s Markets to sell beeswax and honey these days there isn’t much incentive to fix it. Besides, with the 4:11 rear end it only gets six or seven miles to the gallon, and though it holds all the kids legally and groceries too, it really isn’t economical. But it has lots of useful parts that can easily be adapted to other deteriorating vehicles we might end up with, so I keep it around. Besides, it's a cheap place to store things that the raccoons might otherwise make away with.

The two bee trucks are more useful, potentially, anyway. We used them to move us and our bee business from California when we came east to join up with Ohio Yearly Meeting. The little one-ton flatbed dually is four-wheel-drive, and can get in and out of the property on days when the snow or the creeks are too deep for anything else. When the well goes dry in the summer, we also use it to haul water from town, because the 4000-pound water tank is too heavy for anything else and the county won’t let us fill it from the nice new fire hydrant just two miles up the road. Currently it’s parked like the market van, because the front end has a frightening way of shaking its head violently on smooth roads, and we don’t have the thousand or so dollars it will undoubtedly take to fix. It’s only got about 40 or 50 thousand miles on its fourth engine, so we’re going to keep it until the rust makes it disintegrate.

The two-ton flat bed is parked out by the old carriage house. We bought it when I rolled the last one in California. Ever seen 15,000 pounds of honey spilled out over the road? Not pretty, especially when you’re hanging upside down from the seat belt. It has a nearly new Payne beehive loader on the back, but runs on propane. A propane truck is a good idea in some places and times, and when agricultural propane was cheap it made good sense to run it, even though it only gets 3.7 miles per gallon. A two-ton is a critically important tool to use if you’re running a 900-hive bee outfit, like we did in California, but out here in Ohio it seems less useful. But since we couldn’t get any money for it if we sold it, we leave it parked there, for the time being. I miss keeping bees, and running a few hundred hives is not a really time-consuming sideline if you can be there at the right times. Not right now, while I’m working as Billy Big Rigger.

And of course, there’s my ancient Triumph Bonneville, kept down in the warehouse. I’ve had that old motorcycle seventeen years longer than I’ve had my wife, and while that’s not a value-for-value comparison, I have no intention of relinquishing my relationship with either one. Motorcycles make excellent sense out here, although a four-wheel-drive ATV would be more useful in the woods. I’d like a sidecar for it, but that’s a low priority plan.

I’d trust the kids on an ATV sooner than I’d trust them on a motorcycle anyway. The two oldest can drive a car now that they’re tall enough. We start them out when they’re ten or eleven to get them used to the machine. They both need lots more practice, but where we live it’s not like there’s any traffic to worry about. We just don’t want them dropping off the road into the ravines by mistake. Or on purpose. There’s no such thing as traffic cops anywhere near where we live, now that the sherriff’s deputy and the nice young lady just up the road have apparently parted company, so there’s no societal issues involved in letting a ten year-old get behind the wheel on a public road.

But maintaining all these machines costs money if you use them, and I’m also getting more and more fed up with the aggravation and hassle of depending on internal combustion engines and machinery for transportation. A typical Amish buggy is about as low-tech as you can get and not be walking, and in our neighborhood you don’t need the electric lights and hydraulic brakes that the modern buggies a few counties north of us all come with. As fuel becomes more and more expensive, our lifestyle may be approaching a point where the regression lines cross, and suddenly animal traction begins to make more sense. We’ll need to modify our household economy, and not having the community infrastructure that the Amish have will mean that we’ll never be rid of the family car completely, but it’s becoming a more attractive alternative every day.

And since driving in a buggy means exposure to cold winter weather, we’ll need something nice and warm to spread out across our knees. We don’t have any buffalo here to make robes with, but I happen to know where there’s a fair-sized donkey that I could skin out in a jiffy. Besides, I hear that donkeys make excellent sausage, and I’m the only vegetarian in the house.

Maybe I could work something out here.

Quakers in the Country: The Wife

2009-12-13T21:48:00.018-05:00

Proverbs 31:10-12 Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.

Living in the country and trying to make ends meet and keep things from breaking presents a lot of challenges to people, and one of the things that I recommend to any potential Husband who is contemplating a life spent on dirt roads far away from town is to work out a deal with a Wife. Not just any Wife, because not just any Wife will do. There are very specific and very difficult aspects of this sort of lifestyle, and yoking to just any Wife that comes along and expresses a desire to live forever with an outdoor toilet is likely to result in unforeseen incompatibilities. I have discovered a formula for solving this problem, and while I admit that it may not be applicable to every Husband’s situation, it certainly provides some general guidelines, which I am happy to share with you now.

Wives, please sheath your various implements of destruction. I have no experience with locker room conversations about Wives and their characteristics in that venue, and mean no disrespect to those of us with those extra X chromosomes. I merely have some basic knowledge to impart to potential Husbands, and if it doesn’t apply to you, please don’t hold it against me.

First and foremost, Husbands, find yourself a Wife with whom you are functionally compatible. By this I don’t mean that you must share political views or possess identical tastes in foreign food. But if you plan on moving towards a subsistence household economy with an agricultural substructure, don’t bother to begin negotiations with a potential Wife who hates soil and dislikes plants and animals. Find yourself someone who likes to grow flowers, especially one who likes the idea of growing plants and then eating them. Plants can be pretty, but a Wife who knows that good-looking plants can be eaten as well is what you’re looking for.

Functional compatibility takes on other aspects, too. Living in the country requires an intimate relationship with dirt and mud, so investigate the preferences of any potential Wife in these areas. In my own case, I discovered an instant combination of an agricultural predisposition and a high tolerance for mud when I noticed sunflowers sprouting from discarded seeds in the impressive layers of mud packed into the carpet of one potential Wife’s otherwise shiny red pickup truck. “Hmmmm,” I said. “This one bears further looking into.”

Of course, a pickup truck is itself a good sign. It doesn’t need to be impressive, or large, or have extra levers in the floorboards. But if your potential Wife drives a pickup truck, rather than, say, a Vespa, then you’re on the right track. Nothing wrong with Vespas, for people who live in town, but a pickup truck is more suited to carrying goat feed, pieces of pipe, very large dogs, and other country necessities. Your potential Wife doesn’t need to actually be doing these things when you spot her—owning the pickup is a pre-adaptation to country life that is already a useful indicator of compatibility.

Another thing to look for in an appropriate Wife is a willingness to give up large portions of financial security for an almost inevitable helping of uncertainty and a lowered level of income. Country life is like that. You ain’t going to be rich, and it’s important to look for a potential Wife who is tolerant of a similar downsizing of financial goals. It helps to locate one who isn’t really interested in expensive possessions, foreign vacations, or decent clothing and shelter. Instead, find one who is willing to wear rags, live in houses condemned by the county, and will spend her time looking over potential farm property in places like Oregon, for instance, or Ohio. If she can do this all alone without you being there, so much the better.

Resourcefulness is a desirable characteristic that varies among potential Wives, and a high degree of resourcefulness will pay you many times over when things break and you can’t be there to make them right again. I am fortunate enough to have a Wife who is willing to tackle any repair job she encounters, armed with nothing more impressive than packing tape and pushpins. She can patch sheetrock, install room partitions, seal blown out windows, and perform many other tasks using only these mundane miracle tools. I once proudly told her that the Titanic would never have sunk if she had been on board with a large enough supply of packing tape and pushpins, but I’m afraid she didn’t see it as a compliment.

Resourcefulness is important in larger ways, too. On occasion, our ancient fire-breathing coal furnace under the house will burn out its shroud and begin to puff coal smoke into the house through the vents. When the temperature is only a few degrees above zero Fahrenheit, this presents a dilemma. Should we freeze to death, or perish from asphyxiation first? A Wife with a sufficient amount of resourcefulness will ascertain that a chimney flue can be satisfactorily repaired with aluminum foil and wads of fiberglass batting from the auto parts store. A few pushpins are helpful, too.

A hard-headed sense of financial priorities is something that makes a certain type of Wife extremely valuable in hard times. When money is tight, a financially-competent Wife will know that it is more important to pay the electric bill than the garbage bill. Of course, it would help to tell the garbage people to come and get their dumpster rather than just letting the bills stack up, but you can’t expect everything. An understanding of financial priorities when raising five children alone is important too. When faced with purchasing groceries or making sure that the kids have the supplies for their upcoming Christmas parties at public school, a financially-competent Wife will realize that while an eight-year-old will not long remember eating fried dough for a week, she will remember the trauma of being unprepared for her class party for the rest of her life. Besides, fried dough is actually not too bad. In John Steinbeck’s epic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, Ma Joad’s family learns to eat fried dough in California’s agricultural Central Valley. And so did I, in the company of a Wife who knew her business.

A lack of squeamishness is very important to look for. Of course, giving birth at home to five children under conditions reminiscent of the motion picture How the West Was Won would tend to erase squeamishness in most people, but it still helps to have as little as possible going in. Having a high squeamishness threshold is helpful to a Wife who needs to regularly empty the bathroom bucket that a house with five small children and no indoor plumbing will find essential. And occasionally lifting dead 120-pound Rottweilers out of the van and burying them is a task that many lesser Wives might quail at. Living with a sink full of dirty, smelly dishes that must sit for a week because the well has gone dry again requires a tolerance for grossness as well, as does the accompanying infrequency of taking a bath. And of course, cats, dogs, and children seem to collect portions of eviscerated wildlife that squeeze softly under your bare feet when you step outside the kitchen porch in the pre-dawn. (What is this, now, another short-tailed shrew or just a length of deer intestine? Do I want to turn on the light or just hope the dogs eat it before I find out what it is?)

But aside from skills such as these, the kind of Wife you should be looking for is one who has a sense of proportion, coupled with humor, because if you can’t laugh at the tragedies and misadventures of living in the country, you won’t last long out here, no matter how competent you are in other ways . I have been particularly blessed with a Wife who can see the humor in many of my beliefs and activities, and who doesn’t hesitate to assist me by frequently pointing out the amusing stupidity of one or another of my actions, and always offers useful corrections for me to undertake. This is of immense value, of course, and I pay strict attention to every detail and invariably take her advice.

There are also apparently minor characteristics that seem to take on added importance during various encounters with fate and fortune in a country-based lifestyle. I heartily recommend seeking out a potential Wife from among the very small but very significant pool of blonde left-handed belly dancers with degrees in English Literature, preferably no more than five feet two inches tall. Of course, your own situation may be different, but these characteristics seem to provide a foundation for making a good Wife that is hard to further identify, even though it seems to be important. The five-foot-two stature cannot be overrated, because there is no better technique for deflecting a devastating point in debate than to approach the Wife closely so that the top of her head is located directly beneath your chin, and then to ask, “Did someone say something?” as you look blankly around the kitchen.

Finally, a common interest in spiritual matters is a key to life-long compatibility and a functionally successful relationship. Such a Wife will not only provide great value to a household economy, but will also perceive strategic avenues in making a relationship with God a matter of growth and improvement, rather than stasis and stagnation. This common focus also manages to bridge over the low points and inevitable compatibility crises that any marriage to a temperamental, hot-headed, and immensely stubborn Wife will occasionally present, especially when the money and food is gone and the coal pile is scraped down to the underlying snow. In the final analysis, this is probably the most important aspect of the relationship to consider, once you establish that you both speak the same language.

Then again, in my own relationship with my own Wife, I realize that we really don’t speak the same language, at least not always, and sometimes not very often. Yet it seems to work anyway, so perhaps that isn’t as important as I had thought.

So, Husbands, I hope some of these pointers will prove useful to you in your seeking after a compatible and complementary Wife, and I wish you good fortune in the search. I’m not looking anymore, and you can’t have mine, but I will indeed hold my own Wife up as the example that all of you should look to in your own search.

Best wishes and may Providence bless you as it has blessed me.

Proverbs 31:29-31 Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all. Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates.

Simplicity

2009-12-13T16:22:00.017-05:00

Matthew 6:22 The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

Simplicity.

Try just repeating it to yourself: simplicity. The word itself sounds so, well, simple.

Why is it that we Friends are so concerned with simplicity? We seem to write about it a lot. I’ve thought about it a lot, too, and as I see it, simplicity is not as easy as you might think. Simplicity means very different things to different groups of Friends. Most Friends’ books of Discipline or Faith and Practice will address the issue somewhere, either under “Testimonies” or the category of “Advices and Queries,” if they still maintain them. In the older Disciplines, it won’t appear as “Simplicity,” but will show up here and there under “Temperance and Moderation,” “Plainness,” and the like. We don’t know where to put it, but we manage somehow.

In general, the recommendations fall into two categories. First, the pursuit of simplicity calls upon Friends—and everybody else, too—to avoid superfluous possessions, expenditures, and consumption, so as to simplify our responsibilities and impacts as stewards of the creation. That’s commendable and pretty straightforward. Second, it calls upon people to avoid activities, occupations, and excessive attention to anything that might result in a lack of attention being devoted to more eternally significant spiritual matters.

My own Ohio Yearly Meeting’s Discipline section on “Simplicity” follows our traditional practice of never stating anything clearly when oblique and vague alternatives are available. (You gotta love us.) “Simplicity” is talked about in several places, but never defined. The best we can do is to state this much about simplicity:

The heart of Christian simplicity lies in the singleness of purpose which is required by the injunction to seek first the Kingdom of God. As men seek to express the spirit of God in the daily lives they realize the necessity of putting first things first . . . . The call to each is to abandon those things that clutter his life and to press toward the goal unhampered. This is true simplicity.

Actually, this isn’t so bad, for Conservative Friends, anyway. We also mention it in other places, too, here and there, without really going into why simplicity is less distracting than complexity. After all, having too much of something is sometimes less distracting than having too little of it. Food, for instance. Or shelter. Many years ago, George Orwell wrote that the only people who didn’t think about money were people who had lots of it; people who had very little money thought about it all the time.

And is there a point where the pursuit of simplicity becomes a distraction? Can simplicity itself become a notional pursuit that enslaves, rather than frees, the follower? What about Zen and the art of archery, or Lao Tzu and his impossible parables? And voluntary poverty, and those annoyingly persistent Franciscans?

It turns out simplicity is actually sort of complicated.

In my own case, the pursuit of simplicity has been a calling that I have pursued all my life, consciously, actively. With greater and lesser success in different ways, at different times. When choosing between two tools to add to my inventory, I generally choose one that solves the problem with the fewest unnecessary features. Features are the enemy of simplicity, the mission creep of non-necessities that whittle away at our attention. When selecting a new pocket knife, for example, I avoid the all-in-one tools with a gadget for every purpose. My pocket knives all have a single blade, one that locks in place so that it won’t fold shut on my fingers, and a design that can be opened with one hand. That’s it. I used to carry switch blades because they satisfied all these conditions admirably, but that particular tool makes me unpopular in some circles, so I don’t carry them anymore.

There are other examples. In automobiles, I prefer cheap and easy standard transmissions to automatics, windows that crank open without a motor, rubber mats rather than carpets, and mechanical actuators and control systems rather than hydraulic, electric, or solid state. I also prefer carburetors to fuel injection, and no, I don’t care if it’s just a throttle body. In kitchen tools, I avoid anything with a power cord, and when I cook (rarely now that I live in my truck) I generally cook from scratch. (Ask me sometime about how I discovered that you can buy cornbread mixes in a box—I hadn’t a clue that you could do that.)

I bought a used motorcycle when I was in school, years ago. It worked okay for me, and so I’ve kept it for the last 33 years. It works better now than it did when I bought it, and I don’t see the need to replace it with something else. It’s not as quick or as fast as a newer, more complex machine, but I know every single part inside it personally and if I twist the throttle it will still double the legal speed limit.

And I’ve ditched televisions sets for many years now, and almost completely abandoned radios, too. I don’t have a lot in the way of recorded music, and I don’t pursue a lot of time-consuming entertainments: motion pictures, sports, politics and so on. Let’s not talk about books. I’m no good at getting rid of books, and besides, I don’t have to. God regularly destroys the books I accumulate in traumatic ways, so I try not to worry about them much anymore.

In a previous life, I used to consciously try to add to the complex of data available in my head. For instance, I made it a point to learn to identify all the species of mammals in my state, all the genera in my country, all the families in the world. Not so hard with mammals, actually, as there’s not very many of them, and most are my favorites anyway: bats and rats. I can still identify most of the canids in North America (wolves, coyotes, and various foxes) by nothing more than isolated lower jaw bones. But I’ve mellowed on mammalogy, and while I still enjoy the critters, now I’m not so intense. I’ve mellowed on a lot of things, actually, as I’ve learned that spreading myself too thin with interesting but distracting matters lessens the time I have available for each one of them. I try to limit my attention to fewer but more important things, and work on deeper understandings of each of them.

There are exceptions to this pattern, of course. I accept necessary complexity in aspects of my life that require more of it. I dress in the manner generally referred to as plain, and it adds complexity to my life that clothing myself more simply would avoid. It’s hard to get certain types of clothing in certain places, for example, and often more expensive. But I don’t dress the way I do as a witness to simplicity, I do it as a witness to other things. And living as I do out in the country with a wife and five kids, a four-ton pile of coal for heat, a twenty-four foot hole in the ground for intermittent drinking water, and a four-foot hole in the ground for a toilet, also adds complexities to my life that just living in town would remove. But I do that for other reasons as well.

I consider it distracting to have to relearn the same things over again unnecessarily, if obsolescence or progress renders a satisfactory system unviable. I recognize that my time is limited, and so is the attention that I can afford to devote to mastering duplicate additions to my mental chores. There are things that I want to know, and things that I want to become better at, and things that I want to understand. But there are also lots of intrusions into my sphere of simplicity that I reject out of hand, even if they might make something easier, quicker, or even cheaper. Like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, I believe that I have reached the point where I don’t learn something new without forgetting something that I learned before—I can’t become better at certain things without sacrificing time and mental energy to them that I might want to devote to other things that I think are more important.

I’m not always successful. I once spent most of a day experimenting with an electric fan and plastic airfoils mounted on the tops of toy cars, proving to myself that it was actually possible to sail a boat into the wind in the way my lovely wife patiently explained. I had never really believed it, but now I know it’s true. Could I have done something more spiritually useful to my life that day? Maybe. The problem with simplicity is that sometimes it’s not really obvious what things are actually distractions, and what are thresholds to new ways of looking at something important. There’s lots of things that still continue to clamor for my attention. Gyroscopes (try holding a spinning bicycle wheel by the axle), and mixing colored light, and how music works, and why salmon swim up into little creeks to breed, and the different types of woven textiles. Maybe I’ll have time to figure them out someday, or maybe not.

I choose simplicity, in the end, mostly for the reasons described in my meeting’s Discipline. I choose it because it frees me from distractions, and allows me to spend my energy, time, and thoughts pursuing other aspects of life that I find more important, rather than catering to the ephemera of transient complexity. I spend a lot of my time now thinking about God, and thinking about how other people have thought about God, and trying to get better at thinking about God. At least in the sense that I’m trying to get better at doing the things he wants me to do, and being the kind of person he wants me to be.

And I actually do end up with more time for reflection about God, and trying to understand more of what I’m to do in my life here in that context. By reducing distractions, I do find that I have been able to concentrate more on spiritual issues, and applying them to my life. So it does work, when I let it. But I have a very long way to go.

The problem is that these other various other topics are so interesting. But maybe some of them will turn out to be important to the way I think about God, and need to be added to the short and simple list of things that I pay more attention to.

Did you know that there are only 130 species of ferns in the whole world? Why did God do that? Ferns represent the only major biological group of organisms that a single systematist can ever hope to master in a lifetime. And there’s two species that I know of right down by the creek. I could start right there. Just a few months. How hard could it be?

You know, simplicity just isn’t easy.

The Words of the Preacher

2009-09-26T21:38:00.015-04:00

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. --Ecclesiastes 1:4

The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Spoken and written a long, long time ago. I think about those words from time to time, and what they meant to him, and to me.

What are the constituents of a life? Are they the plans we make for tomorrow, or for next year, or for many years to come? Are they the endless re-thinkings of the many yesterdays that have passed behind us along the path, the might-have-beens, the if-onlys?

The Preacher had much to say about a lifelong search for meaning, and of the generations that came, and the generations that passed by, day after day, year after year, century after century. What was it that they looked for, and what was it that they found? What did they take with them when they stepped through the door?

As a child, many years ago now, I came to a conclusion about life that has never left me:

There is no Past. There is no Future. There is only Now.

The past is an illusion, and exists only in the present, only in the re-living in the current moment of a different moment, one already gone by. There is no stepping back to the past, no chance of re-directing the flow of our life stream into another channel of the river that we have passed by, because the current that carries us only moves forward. Every moment spent in contemplation of yesterday is a moment stolen from today.

The future, for us, has no existence at all, no information that we are privy to of the plans of God. Our actions today certainly affect our course as we journey into the future, but when the future arrives, we discover that it is only the present, again and again. My five-year-old son once awoke early one morning and asked me about it.

“Kevin,” he said sleepily as I buckled him into the van in the pre-dawn for the two-hour drive to the city. “Kevin, is this tomorrow?”

We live our lives along the razor-edge between a past that exists only in our memory, and a future that never comes. A long, long series of nows; of momentary and unique assemblages of emotions and smells, sights, and sounds, each unique and each adding together to create what we will call a life, what we call our experience of this earth.

“Well, Hoss, what do you think?”

My uncle leans back on the bank in the cool shade, the bamboo fishing pole held over his faded blue overalls and then arcing over the water. The wind rustles the leaves of the black willows above him and then dances out across the surface of the pond, the ripples blurring the perfect reflection of the cumulus clouds drifting quietly across the blue sky. A mile away, the thumping and sputtering of the pump jacks sounds an irregular drumbeat, the soft popping and backfiring filling the distance every day, all day and all night.

I don’t answer immediately.

Instead, I watch the surface of the pond, picking out the occasional black points of the turtles surfacing to breathe. The barn swallows hurtle silently out of the sky and skim the water, darting down to within inches and then rolling off into the blue sky again, their forked tails clipping the air like scissors as they disappear.

I step across the concrete monsoon drain from the hot and crowded street under the covered arch of the sidewalk, then into the rank darkness of the open storefront beyond. As my eyes adjust to the dimness, the thick smell of animal life fills my nostrils: fur, urine, musk, decay. A marmoset no bigger than my hand looks up at me from inside a welded wire cage, its miniscule face a wizened parody of humanity. Tiny jungle finches flutter from side to side along one cage against the wall, above the rolled-up bird snares hanging on hooks. I walk slowly along the wet concrete down the narrow aisle, past cages of monkeys and parrots, past the cages with the huge black and yellow monitor lizards, around a golden pangolin, its scaled body coiled into a loose circle. On a back shelf above is a large, empty cage, higher up at eye level. I can see nothing inside it. I tap the mesh and instantly five small black cobras rear up above the bottom tray, spreading their hoods as they stare directly back into my face.

“Vanity of vanities. All is vanity,” the Preacher said. “There is no new thing under the sun.” But the Preacher was wrong, because every moment of every minute is new, every second the first second of all that are yet to come, and the only one that will be lived, because the future exists only in the now. “Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new?” he asked. “It hath been already of old time, which was before us.” But he spoke of knowing things that had not been his to know: the moments he claimed were those of another, of a life that he did not live himself. Vanity it was indeed, futile it was indeed, but not in the way he thought. His error lay in the arrogance of assuming that knowledge of the past was the same as the experience of it, that hearing of someone's journey on the river was the same as piloting the boat through the current himself. The Preacher was wrong.

I lean over the starboard rail, the stiff wind cool in my face as the mud boat pitches through the swells, the bow heaving and falling under my feet in a perfect circle that I compensate for by shifting my weight from foot to foot, left to right, left to right, all day, every day. I look ahead into the lighter gap between the dark gray ceiling of the storm clouds and the eternally busy surface of the sea to the source of the cool air, the wall of cloud immediately ahead of us stretching across the world from one end to the other.

Beneath the thunderhead, a blue snake appears, and gently feels its way through the band of lighter sky to the water, thousands of feet below. As it does, it transforms into an immense funnel that slowly turns white as it touches the surface of the sea. Next to it, another snake slowly slips out of the cloud bank to the surface. Together, the two funnel clouds begin a slow-motion dance across the band of light, curving and swinging from side to side together.

I look up behind me to the wheelhouse, where the helmsman has stepped out and leans against the upper rail, swinging from side to side himself as he looks across the bows into the future. I point to the funnels, and he nods briefly, unimpressed. I turn back to watch the slowly gyrating funnels. The first of the rain drops slap my face, heavy and cool.

I lean forward and rest my weight against the oncoming wind, the dry desert air at 100 miles per hour supporting me like a solid cushion. The sound of the motorcycle engine is also solid, the packed roar of pistons, pushrods, and valves reciprocating beneath me filling my ears and then radiating outwards across the desert evening in my wake. I fly down the road, riding a thundering Pegasus, aimed at the vanishing point far in front of me, past the juniper thickets and the pinyon pines which appear, slowly grow, pass by me, and recede. Forty miles ahead the basalt cliffs that ring the mesa tops remain motionless, their slow approach only perceptible after minutes at the same speed, the vertical fractures gradually becoming faintly visible and then finally clear. My hands wrap around the grips, twice their normal diameter as they vibrate in time with the machine, and I wind the throttle back to a steady 90 miles per hour. In front of me small tarantulas the size of a teacup appear on the tarmac, slice by me and are gone. I thread my way through them at 130 feet per second as the mesas slowly grow over the headlamp shell.

We live our lives like passengers on a train, always in motion, always seeming to hurry on to somewhere else, but in truth never leaving our compartments, riding along to our destinations in the company of those who stepped aboard with us at the beginning of our journeys. The scenery through the windows changes constantly, but it’s the world passing by us that really moves, while we actually remain still in the eternal now, in the present. At each station, older passengers leave the train and newer passengers step aboard to take their seats. The mix of people and stories changes at every station, but we’re all on the same train, all of us on the same tracks. All of us have stepped aboard when our turn came, and sooner or later, all of us will step off.

I stand on the hot gravel in front of the metal warehouse, listening to the high-pitched whine far in the sky above me. I can’t see them, but I can hear them coming. As I look up into the blue, suddenly the first bees drop within my range of visual acuity, popping into existence thirty feet above my head as they approach close enough to see. The first of the scouts descend at random, and then thicken into a spiraling cloud, circling and circling, finally focusing on a small twig in the blooming almond tree by the old flatbed. I watch from within a growing cloud of honey-colored insects as the bees begun to cluster on the branch, landing and falling, recovering and returning, a small brown waterfall intensely concentrated on one twig amid the pink flowers.

I walk to the branch, peering closely, and eventually locate the larger wasp-waisted queen walking on the branch, surrounded by workers. I reach into the cluster and gently grasp her by the wings, then tuck her headfirst into the tiny wooden cage from my pocket. I put my fingertip over the hole and hold her out at arm’s length. After a few seconds the cluster on the branch disintegrates, and I am again surrounded by bees, swirling and singing, closer and closer to me. Then the cluster re-appears, centered on my hand, and one after another, the swarm coalesces, bee after bee, until my arm is buried in a mass of excited insects from fingertips to elbow, more and more landing every second from out of the blue sky.

I sit on a dark brown wooden bench in the back row of the meeting house, one of a silent cloud of witnesses. I look down at the rear of the bench in front of me. The initials and doodling scratched into the varnished poplar testify to the generations that have sat in the same seat as me, for the same reasons, every First Day, thousands upon thousands of witnesses, for thousands upon thousands of First Days. The room is full of people, and full of a quiet anticipation that connects us together, a linkage of joint expectancy that we all share.

Slowly I become aware of a thought forming in my conscious mind, a string of symbols that swirls into the shape of an intelligible idea, that itself gradually takes on the structure of words and sentences. As I wait for minute after minute, I feel the tension appear, and I recognize that I have been selected to deliver a message. Another member of the meeting rises and speaks briefly, and I feel the living tension in me build. She sits, and for a few minutes more I wait, until finally the beginning of the message is made clear and my heart suddenly begins to pound violently against my ribs. I lean forward, grip the seat back in front of me and stand up into the silent and waiting room, watched by those in this world and the next one. Instantly I feel my heart rate fall to a slow idle, a steady tick over, and the tension disappears, leaving the message with me. I pause a few seconds, feeling the silence, and then begin to speak.

Quakers in the Country: You Can't Get Here From There

2009-08-22T22:35:00.026-04:00

We live on the edge of civilized world, or maybe just a little beyond it. I know this because there are certain signs that I can interpret. Where I live, for instance, I have no neighbors. Well, actually, I do have neighbors, but they usually visit either in a pickup or drive in on an ATV, because none of them lives less than two miles away. There used to be a school at the foot of our property, next to the Lampville blacksmith, down by the creek. It’s still there, but hasn’t had any students for nearly 100 years, so we don’t have any kids walking by. When my wife tethers the donkey, as often as not he stretches his rope across the road to eat on the other side, and we hear about it every week or so when a car blows its horn trying to get him to cross back. And of course, the dogs sleep in the middle of the road on sunny days, because such has been the right of dogs in the country since time immemorial.

But these are minor indicators of our distance from civilization, and aren’t strictly deterministic. Lots of people have animals loose around here, after all. Cows and bulls occasionally wander down the road, sometimes followed by their owners later on, sometimes not. Sheep are a real annoyance, because when sheep break loose, they don’t know what to do about it. And when they see you, they run up and mill about your legs, bleating piteously for mercy, because they hope you’ll be able to figure out where they’re supposed to go. So loose animals don’t do it, alone. And lots of places don’t have neighbors, at least residents, in the warehouse districts on the edges of big cities.

So how do I know that I live on the edge of the world? Because if you’re trying to use modern technology to pay me a visit, you can’t get here, from wherever you are, at least not the first time. In most places in 21st century America, you can use a road map to get to where you want to go. But where I live, a modern road map will take you into the woods and abandon you there to die.

I first became aware of this peculiarity while trying to use the county map to go from Barnesville to my house, after meeting one First Day, soon after we moved here. The county map is very detailed, and showed a clear route along Cat Hollow Road from Warren Township to Goshen Township, where we live. But as we drove along Cat Hollow, we came to an old steel cable stretched across the road to stop traffic. Cat Hollow Road petered out in the woods just beyond the cable in front of us, although the map showed it headed straight home. Curious, I thought.

Later on, I tried to get to town along Township 192, which the map showed heading straight east to Barnesville after it crossed the blacktop two miles over on the next ridgeline. But when I got to the ridge, the crossroads on the map turned out to be a T-junction instead, and my road didn’t exist. In front of me was a more or less endless cow pasture.

I asked about this from one of the members of my meeting.

“Ahh,” he said. “The roads on the map aren’t the same as the ones on the ground.”

“Say that again.”

“The maps show the roads the way they were before the strip miners came in and changed the topography. Lots of those old roads don’t exist anymore, or go somewhere different from what it shows on the map.”

“Then why are they on the map that way?”

“In case the county wants to put some of them back in. As long as they stay official roads, the county still has legal right of way. So they keep them on the map.”

This was brought home to me clearly one day while I waited for a garbage company from another town to deliver a dumpster out to our beekeeping warehouse. When he finally showed up, he came from the south, not the north, which was a long and difficult detour from what he should have been doing.

“Is this the right place? My map is confusing.”

“Show me your map.”

I looked at his map. It happened to be an old map of my county before any of the mining, and I couldn’t even find my own road. Now, I’m professionally trained in map reading, and I can find my way cross-country at night by looking at the stars. But his map was 25 years old and might as well have shown the surface of the Moon. I located my township (36 by 36 miles), then the blacktop five miles north, but that was it. I looked for my road in the southeast quarter of the southeast quarter of Section 8, and it wasn’t there. And my house has been here over a hundred years.

“Throw your map away and take this one, or you’ll never get out of here.”

“Thanks. Where do you want your dumpster?”

The next time I was in the city, where they have internet broadband, I asked a friend to let me into Google Earth. I punched in the data for where I lived, hit enter, and was greeted with a white screen. In the middle of it were three words: “No data available.”

“Hmmm.”

Since then we’ve gotten used to living out where there is no data available, and I suppose there might even be data available now, if I were to go into town and check. But then, maybe not. Our road has a characteristic valued by country dwellers who like quiet: there is nowhere you can go on it that you can’t get to quicker and with less hassle by going a different way. Two roads out of here force you to cross streams running over the road, and the last one is three feet deep in snow regularly during the winter.

As part of a recent career change to steering semi trailers cross-country, I bought a GPS unit at an Ohio truck stop. You know, a Global Positioning System machine. For a truck driver, they’re great, as I spend a lot of time going to obscure destinations at night, where messing up means a 20-mile circle finding somewhere to turn around. The GPS shows me in advance whether I can get back onto a highway if I take a particular exit, and leads me through difficult truck routes in difficult towns.

My first experience with GPS was over 30 years ago, when I worked summers as an air gun mechanic on seismograph boats in the Caribbean. Back then, a state-of-the-art GPS looked like a line of refrigerators, and you were delighted to get a position within 3000 feet of actual. Mostly we used old WW II-era SHORAN sets, instead. But this little job that I bought for the truck is the size of a Prince Albert can, and even talks to me while I try to steer the trailer around the countryside, letting me know when I take a wrong turn, and showing me the best way to fix it. It works great, except when I try to use it to get home.

Yesterday I stuck it on the windshield of the car while we drove back from the lake, after giving the kids what will probably be their last chance to swim until next summer. We got to the last town, and Emma calmly directed, “Just ahead, turn left.”

I said that now the GPS units talk to you. I prefer to listen to “Emma,” a sophisticated Briton with a low, sexy voice, who I might actually like to meet someday.

The kids all hollered, “Go home the long way,” so my lovely wife turned the car right, against Emma’s advice. Not a problem, as the street turned round and we would meet up with the secondary road on the other side of town. We’d hit the right road again in a few blocks. But Emma had other ideas, because, you see, Emma was using a map.

“Just ahead, bear right,” Emma directed.

“Go right?” said Shawna.

“Sure. Let’s see she how she does,” I replied. Emma is designed to instantly compensate for a wrong turn by finding the next alternate route, and directing you to it. This would be a good time to see where she would take us.

Emma headed us out on a string of tiny roads that wound through the countryside like a snake, and gradually took us to a heading that would take us home. She was looking pretty good. And then, Emma calmly intoned, “Just ahead, turn right.”

“What? Here?” says Shawna.

“She’s going for the road where the church used to be,” I said, a sudden suspicion growing in my mind. I knew now where we were going. It was one of the old strip-mined sections. A dead zone. Goshen Township’s Bermuda Triangle. Emma was headed straight for it.

More miles went by, and then I was sure. We came to a fork, and Emma calmly intoned, “Just ahead, turn right.”

Shawna stopped the car. “Chestnut Level is just up this road to the left,” she said. “I won’t do it.”

“Emma is headed for the creek road. You remember? It’s that old road that used to go from here to Lampville, down by the first ford. She thinks it’s still there.”

Of course, to a computer, the fact that the creek road appears on every county map in existence is sufficient proof that you can drive somewhere on it. You have to live here to know that the road has been gone for 30 years.

A mile farther on, and Emma’s folly is clear. The little yellow arrow on the screen directs us to drive straight west to our house, but the view through the windshield shows an old sign that reads, “Dead End.” Now, around here, you take signs like that with a grain of salt. One of the main roads to my house has more or less permanent “High Water” signs on it all the time, not because the creek is really high, but because the road falls into it so often that the township workers just leave the signs up permanently to scare the tourists away. But I know our Bermuda Triangle, and around there a “Dead End” sign means what it says. Emma had met her match.

Shawna turns the car around and we head up the previous fork to the ridge top. Emma objects gently for a while then reconciles herself to the new route and calculates a new set of arrows that actually do take us home, this time. As we pass by the road to the last creek crossing, the little map in the GPS unit shows a set of imaginary roads converging on the ford from the northwest, the direction from which Emma would have preferred us to have arrived. But out the car window in that direction I see nothing but 80-foot maple and locust trees.

So, if you ever decide to visit us out here in the country, don’t bother to use a high-tech GPS to get to the house, because you likely can’t get there from wherever you are. And don’t bother to use a map, either, because it won’t do you much good if you get lost.

Call ahead, instead, and I’ll give you directions from the real world:

“From town, go right at the third T-junction. Then left at the next fork, right at the next fork, right at the next fork, left at the next fork, and head for the top of the hill. Stop when you see the donkey in the road. You can’t miss us.

Among the Dirty Men

2009-08-22T00:53:00.010-04:00

I’ve done a lot of things in my life, been to a lot of places, and seen a lot of different things. I’ve re-invented myself a number of times as well, according to one friend of mine. Of course, he was a Presbyterian cowhand who believed in the transmigration of souls, so I’m still not quite sure what to make of some of his opinions of me.

The most recent change has been from technical copy editor to over-the-road flatbed driver. I used to edit (and re-write) manuals about oil field development and secondary recovery, or perhaps textbooks on implementing cybernetic feedback systems in designing efficiency plans for businesses. Then God said it was time for a change. Now I drive very large vehicles very long distances, and park them in absurdly small places.

Driving a combination vehicle is interesting and honorable work. I’m not expected to lie to people like I was when I wrote computer manuals in Silicon Valley, and I’m not expected to make hundred thousand dollar decisions after three days without sleep, the way I had to as a geologist in the West Texas oil fields. What I do have to do is take a 71-foot machine that weighs 80,000 pounds and pilot it cross-country to a place I’ve never been, across a maze of roads I’ve never seen, into strange and mysterious nooks and crannies of industrial civilization that most people in the dominant culture know only on a theoretical basis.

And I do it among the dirty men. You see, among truck drivers, there are different classes of driver, so to speak. Not upper and lower, because truck drivers are very egalitarian, but different flavors, different styles. There are the dry van drivers, who steer the big silver boxes with loads of paper plates, rolls of newsprint, bottled water, corn and beans, and so on. There are the tanker drivers, carrying diesel, milk, corn syrup, honey, and LPG. The day cabbers drive the doubles and triples for UPS and FedEx, moving packages and mail. And so on. Cranes, dumps, et cetera.

And then there are the flatbedders, like me. The dirty men. You see, all these other guys have one important thing in common. In general, they can stay clean. They don’t usually touch the freight, and often don’t even know what’s inside the locked trailer except by reading the bill of lading when they hook to it and take off. They drive up to the warehouse with an empty, drop it where they’re told to, hook to a loaded trailer and go. Then it’s time to crank up the stereo, turn on the CB, and start peeling miles off the schedule, 500 to 600 yard sticks a day, every day that you can until you run out of legal hours and have to stop and let the world catch up with you.

And while they’re driving off with that clean and locked-up trailer, I’m staring at a 48-foot flat loaded with 27,000 pounds of copper telecommunications cable, in five eight-foot reels. I have to calculate the weight, choose between straps and chains, decide how many to use and where to hook them, crank them down, and make sure nothing is about to come off. By the time I’m done just securing the load, those other guys are 120 miles down the road, or better.

And they’re still clean. I, on the other hand, have just threaded eight rusty and dirt-covered chains through the reels, cranked down on the boomers with my equally rusty cheater pipe, and now look like a monument to iron oxide in the shape of some sort of broad-brimmed Quaker. Or maybe I’ve tarped it. I once delivered 44,000 pounds of smelting minerals from Baltimore to a steel mill in Kentucky, tarped. I arrived in the rain, and pulled the wet tarps across the thick dust in the unloading sheds. Now, folding up and loading a 24 by 30-foot tarp that weighs 150 pounds requires the sort of intimate calisthenics that in notion pictures merits adults-only ratings. By the time I was done with my three tarps in that mill, the tarps, the ground, and me were all covered in a monochromatic mix of dust, rainwater, sweat, and general grime. A typical load for a dirty flatbedder.

We don’t like being dirty, but there is often not much in the way of washing facilities at lumber yards, steel mills, hay fields, chemical plants, foundries, factories, and so on. We drive as far as we can, then try to pull in at a truck stop that has showers. (The showers are generally nice, but cost about ten bucks unless you have enough recent fuel credits.) Where there aren’t showers, we fall back on our trusty Plan B: very large quantities of baby wipes. Did you know that dirty truck drivers are among the greatest fans of baby wipes there are? It’s true. I prefer the unscented styles, myself, but each to his own.

The dirt is inevitable, and we are known for it. I was once talking with my dispatcher in his neat, carpeted and air conditioned cubicle, full of high-tech machinery designed to help him keep track of 30 drivers without going insane. I had delivered a stack of trailers (two 48-foo flatbed trailers stacked on top of a third) in the Wisconsin winter. I had to crawl up underneath each one and attach and tighten the chains while sliding back and forth in four inches of snow on the trailer decks. So all my clothing was covered in dirt and melted snow on the outside, and covered in sweat and melted snow on the inside. I apologized to him for coming in looking like yesterday’s wet mop, and he said, “You look like an typical flatbedder to me.” Which of course was true, and I hear it from other drivers as well.

In the winter, the flatbedder wallows in snow-covered mill yards, and bangs the ice off the winches with the winch bar before they will work. The straps are frozen and won’t roll, and the tarps are so stiff with cold that they’re like folding pieces of plywood. The work is wet, cold, and dirty. In the summer, on the other hand, the dust is thick in the staging and loading areas, and you end up the same color as the 24-foot straps you had to drag through the dirt and roll up. You’re not cold anymore, but the dust sticks to the sweat. The work then is wet, hot, and dirty. Winter or summer, the truck stop shower is the first place I look for after loading.

When there is one, anyway.

But the lifestyle has surprisingly wonderful moments. Did I mention that aluminum van trailers in the truck stops sing to each other like gigantic aeolian harps when the wind blows across their roofs? Another time, perhaps. Or that driving cross country in the spring means that I hear half a continent's variety of frog and toad choruses at night in the sloughs behind the truck terminals? Today it's Bufo valliceps, tomorrow Pseudacris triseriata. And when I drive west across the Appalachians of Pennsylvania and New York, I see the entire history of continental collision, orogeny, deposition, and subsidence spread across the country like a textbook cross section.

Being a dirty man has its advantages.

Perfection

2009-08-21T20:32:00.014-04:00

And now for something completely different. Perfection.

Perfection is a concept used frequently by the first generations of Friends to speak of the foundations of the Quaker revelation of Christianity, both in the usage that we choose today, and in several other senses. Where a modern speaker might restrict the use of the term “perfection” to mean flawless, unblemished, or without error, a speaker from the 17th century would also use it to denote the related ideas of being complete, blameless, mature, unspoiled, repaired, and so on. In the Authorized Version, the English word “perfect” is translated from several corresponding Greek terms, including teleios, katartizō, holoklēria, epiteleō, artios, and plēroō. All mean approximately the same thing, but the two terms used most frequently in the NT are forms of telios and katartizo. In the first, “perfect” means “complete,” indicating maturity, something of final stature, a finished work. In the second, “perfect” indicates the state of something that had been broken and is now mended.

The Friends’ understanding of perfection was foundational to their beliefs, and was one of the unique aspects of the Quaker revelation of Christianity that got the early Friends into hot water with the Reformed Protestants and Anglicans of 17th century Britain and America. To Friends, perfection was the end-product of sanctification, of becoming holy. Friends’ understanding of perfection was closely tied to their belief that genuine, internal righteousness was a requirement imposed by God in order to justify a human and grant salvation. Perfection was the ultimate state that the Friend hoped to attain, the degree of sinless immunity to temptation assigned to them as his or her unique measure of the Light.

On the other hand, the Puritan interpretation of grace was that God imputed righteousness to you, and accounted you justified, while in life you remained depraved, a helpless prisoner to sinning “in thought, word, and deed.” The Friends’ view was vastly more optimistic and generous. The function of the Light was not to impute a forced righteousness, but to lead to a life of genuine righteousness, to a real state of inward holiness. George Fox regularly accused his opponents of “pleading for sin” when they cried that earthly righteousness was beyond man’s reach. Fox countered with the words of Paul from Ephesians 4:13 that “a measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” is not only attainable but an essential step in the Christian walk of faith. In his Epistles, “perfection” comes up frequently:

“Now what value, price and worth have they made of the blood of Christ, that cleanses them from sin and death, and yet [they] told people that they would bring them to the knowledge of the son of God and to a perfect man, and now tell them that they must not be perfect on the earth, but carry a body of sin about them to the grave?” Fox, Epistle 222.

But were the early Friends always “perfect?” Did they exhibit a state of complete sinlessness, of mended completeness, of total spiritual maturity? It doesn’t seem so. They feuded at times, and were unquestioned backsliders at times. What does this mean?

Robert Barclay provides the concise Quaker answer in the Apology for True Christian Divinity. For most of us all of the time, and for all of us some of the time, “perfection,” “completeness,” or “maturity” is not a static event, but a benchmark in a process. Just as all of us have been granted different measures of the Light, all of us have been assigned different levels-- and schedules-- of expectation. What is “conformed to the image of his Son” may be different for one believer than for another, and it may be a lesser value at one time in the life of a believer than it may become for him later in the process. Barclay is very careful to emphasize that this is what he usually means by “perfection:”

“. . . by this we understand not such a perfection as may not admit of a growth, and consequently mean not, as if we were to be as pure, holy, and perfect as God in his divine attributes of wisdom, knowledge and purity; but only a perfection proportionable and answerable to man’s measure, whereby we are kept from transgressing the law of God and enabled to answer what he requires of us . . . “ Robert Barclay, Apology

Barclay states that Christian perfection is exactly parallel to the perfection of the “good and faithful servants” in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30). In that example, the servant who did his best with only two talents was just as justified as the servant who did much better with ten. It isn’t the amount of the Light that we have that is important, for all of us have enough. Rather, it is important that we are completely faithful to the measure of grace with which we have been blessed.

Fox puts it clearly: “Therefore comes Christ, the first and the last, to destroy the devil and his works in men’s hearts and sanctify them by his blood, his Life, which was the sacrifice for the sins of the whole world and destroys the devil and his works through death . . . and sanctifies and washes men and women, and presents them back again to God perfect . . . .” Epistle 232.

Barclay devoted the whole of his Eighth Proposition to this subject in the Apology: “Yet we do believe that to those in whom Christ comes to be formed and the new man brought forth and born of the incorruptible seed, as that birth and man in union therewith naturally doth the will of God, so it is possible so far to keep to it as not to be found daily transgressors of the law of God.” Apology.

And in his writings, John Wilbur refers repeatedly to sanctification as the endpoint of the workings of grace. In his second letter to George Crosfield, for example, he refers to the workings of the Holy Spirit within men and women, in order to keep the opportunity presented by Jesus Christ’s atonement from being wasted:

“. . . for without [the mediation of Jesus Christ], man could not so much as be brought to repentance, and much less, to that which is the hardest of all attainments; the forsaking and ceasing from sin . . .”

And later, “And here we see the supreme excellency of the light and grace of this provision; that if observed, is able to keep us from a state, out of which the atonement itself is not designed to redeem us—even that of sinning against the Holy Ghost.”

A very important additional point is often forgotten, which is that achieving Christian righteousness is a gradual process, and not one of instantaneous, permanent salvation based on a snatch from the hands of the devil. It is achieved by steps, accompanied by works of faith performed through grace, by being faithful to one’s measure of the Light. And next, by receiving more Light and being faithful to that increased responsibility as well. Fox described his own first steps in his Journal:

“Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness, and innocency, and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus, so that I say I was come up into the state of Adam which he was in before he fell. . . . And the Lord showed me that such as were faithful to him in the power and light of Christ, should come up into that state in which Adam was before he fell . . .”

Even though the initial event lasted no more than a few minutes, it impressed Fox so singularly that it became the turning point of his life. Similarly, when the Apostles were granted the infilling of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4), this state of sinless grace didn’t persist uninterruptedly for the rest of their lives. The tongues of fire went away, after all. But the Holy Spirit didn’t leave them, and it returned again and again, working within them again and again.

And it can do the same for you. Have you ever experienced a moment, a minute, an hour or two, when you felt the Light so strongly influencing you to the good that all thought of sin passed away? A time when your soul was so perfectly in time with the rhythms of God that unfaithfulness was not even conceivable? Were you “sinning in thought, word, and deed,” even as God breathed the power of the Holy Spirit into you? Or were you experiencing the workings of the Light: perfection, sanctification, holiness, during that time, however long it was? The Friends’ message was that these moments were possible, and should be expected, if we remained faithful. And that they would continue, and continue to build holiness within us. Because over and over, Jesus Christ commands us to live without sin, and if this command is not achievable, then the Gospel is false.

Barclay is quick to point out that it would be presumptuous to pronounce himself sinless, and denies that he has achieved the state. “Others may perhaps speak more certainly of this state, as having arrived to it.” But perfection is the goal for Christians to pursue, as they work out their own salvation with fear and trembling (Philomen 2:12), the life of holy righteousness that Jesus told us to live when he said, “You are my friends, if you do whatsoever I command you,” (John 15:14). Friends of the 17th century died in prison for making this command of Jesus their goal.

Freedom from sinning in this life is a traditional goal of the Society of Friends, and perfection in this life can be expected to arrive in steps and stages, as events, rather than as a full-blown conversion. This is encouraging, as small steps to a goal are more easily accomplished than attempts to leap a giant chasm all at once, and more easily attained for most of us. But history repeats itself. Just as the Puritans denied this to be possible in the 17th century, the Gurneyite Orthodox Friends would deny it to be possible in the 19th. What has been the belief of our own tradition, of the Wilburite Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative?

There are various journals and records available to us. One such is a treatise entitled An Appeal for the Ancient Doctrines of the Religious Society of Friends, originally published in Philadelphia in 1847, and officially adopted by OYM in 1848. In that Yearly Meeting, clerked by Wilburite Benjamin Hoyle, the Meeting for Sufferings directed that 1500 copies were to be printed and distributed among the Ohio quarters in 1848, as representing the sound doctrine of the Society.

This lengthy treatise expresses the sentiments of OYM prior to the Gurneyite departure in the 1850s. It is hard-core Wilburite in tone, emphasizing the primacy of the Spirit over Scripture as the chief guide to faith and practice, the fallacy of imputed righteousness, and the Wilburite interpretation of the crucifixion as only the first step in the salvation process. It refers repeatedly and at great length to the writings of Robert Barclay. Sanctification in this life is mentioned repeatedly as a point upon which the Wilburite Friends differed from Protestants, and from those following the Gurneyite path that would soon lead to the second separation. The OYM opinion on perfection is concisely summed up in the introduction, which ends with this criticism of the non-Wilburite Friends: “Accordingly, under a high profession of religion, but in an intolerant spirit towards those who differed from them, they denied the possibility of being made free from sin in this life, at the same time that they considered themselves justified by faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.”

So Friends, when you feel the Holy Spirit filling you with Light, when the grace of God commands you to rise atop of sin and overcome it, when you feel both the call to be perfect and the strength to achieve it, don’t reject these gentle promptings in your heart. Receive them, keep them, live them, but never view them as unattainable. The belief that perfection in this life is the goal of the Christian is one of the founding beliefs of the Society of Friends, and one of the points upon the Wilburites divided from the old Orthodox Friends, creating Ohio Yearly Meeting. In the words of the Apostle:

“But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you.” (1Peter 5:10).