The day dawned hot; the very sky seemed feverish, swirling in hues of yellow, yellow above the yellow dust of the streets, and brown above the brown of houses and trees covered in a light sheen of that same dust. Miriam rose from her semi-recumbant position and looked briefly, carefully, as she always did, across the rooftops fellow to her own: she had slept up here, for the coolness. One of the good things about her illness was that she was largely left alone. Yet this was a bad thing, too, for Miriam was a bright light shining, a woman of deep prayer. She had been praying, but in that odd position of semi-recumbancy, because this position allowed her the least amount of pain.
She stretched as she stood, and then bent over and winced. She had not yet, in the two years since she started bleeding most days instead of just a few days between new moons, learnt to anticipate and avoid these sharp stabs. She tensed and held her position until the throbbing subsided, and then, seeing the sun more insistent in this curried sky, rolled up her pallet-taking more care to move smoothly-and picked her way down the stairs. Each step darkened a little more as she went down, and this always made her think of death, her death which she assumed was coming soon. Somehow, though, she did not fear death, but she did not want to die.She felt the loving, familiar shapes in relief on the stone and sand wall as she descended into the delightful grind of another day.
Miriam was smiling at this incongruency in her thoughts, when she met the eyes of her father looking up at her from the bottom of the stairs. His eyes were like sparkling onyx stones in a wrinkled and long face. Even though they were hard, and full of disappointment at her unclean state, at her returning in shame from her husband’s home, there was love-around the mouth. How she knew this, she could not tell, because he never spoke about it. But it came out also in his actions, for he would let her go out, go to the market attended by one of the children, let her be useful in public.As she came down into the main room of the house, he nodded his head in a silent greeting and left, disappearing out the door in a flash and glow of yellow light.
The other room of the home, the eating and cooking room, was full of light, for it had a smoke-hole in the roof and two windows to further let out the heat. And today these windows and the hole would be needed. Miriam thought of the huge, reed-woven fans of Egypt: one of the strange folk-memoriabilia to survive, along with the flesh-pots, thought Miriam wryly. Her older sister, a widow, was tending the baking of the cakes in the pitted oven and already she was pink and sweaty, for she had started too late this morning, and would have to suffer more heat than usual. She turned when she heard Miriam’s tentative scraping footsteps on the floor. “Miriam,” she quipped, but not unkindly, “wake that sleeper Ruth and go to the market for some beans-plus the usual things," and she sighed: “I have started too late again.” She turned back to the hot pit, and added, “Hurry- before it gets too crowded.” Miriam moved to apologize for not being able to help with the daily cooking, but stopped when she saw her sister’s methodical, kneading movements.
Ten minutes later, Miriam and Ruth, a ten-year old child of Miriam’s sister, walked, and Miriam held a small basket made by herself for her own use-no one else was allowed to touch it; their head-cloths were in place and their feet shod in simple, leather sandals. Miriam mused, as she moved down the street in companionable silence with the little girl, that although she was largely relegated now to silence and the company of children, this was in reality not a lower state. She was lonely sometimes, and sorrowed over the loss of having children herself; but she had learned silence, and the fullness of the Lord in silence. She, a woman! But the tall, stone fences around her, now that she was perpetually unclean, made her unsure as to whether the Lord would actually visit her at all, really. She wondered sometimes, and it brought the deepest swirl, ugly and dark, with putrid bits of real despair, of loneliness, when she thought that she might be cut away from God because the blood would not stop, and the pain grew worse, slowly, like a bite which gets infected and swollen.
A sound like the roar of an angry wind yanked her out of herself. Ruth, her little face blanched, had stopped in the middle of the quiet, gray street and was looking down towards the noises. They were in a narrow passageway between two houses, which would, if followed, open suddenly out into the glare and noise of the market. Miriam motioned to Ruth to follow, and they moved slowly against one wall, so as to be able to look round the corner before descending the two deep steps into the glare and the place of the crowded stalls. There was more than the roar: they could feel, inexplicably, the excitement, the almost desperation, of a roused crowd. This was always frightening, especially in these days of Roman anxiety; for the soldiers, under the recent instabilities in Rome, and the resulting fear of the Governor of Judea, had become more quick to arrest and even quietly murder those who disturbed the peace in their areas.
But when the two looked around the corner, there were no soldiers in sight. Perhaps they’d been drinking the night before and were sluggish in the already insistent and nagging heat. There was a crowd- but not the usual circling, orbiting, quiet crowd of a normal morning; this was a crowd like a clump of bees crawling on a hive, a hive just disturbed by the hand of a desert wanderer: agitated and buzzing, and calling out: “Rabboni! Rabboni!” There was shoving at the outer edges. The stalls were guarded only by women, normally non-descript figures who sat down behind the stalls, preparing the wares. Now they were standing, and staring at the crowd, which was moving now, following something or someone towards the well in the center.
Miraim and Ruth, deciding that there was no real danger but only some great interest which did not concern them, sped towards the stall of the beans.As Ruth picked out the things they needed, putting them in the household basket which she carried, poor little thing, and putting into Miriam’s basket the things she needed for her own meals, they moved from stall to stall and tried to ignore the noise of the crowd. Miriam, though, felt something strange welling up in her. She finally got the courage to ask one of the women at a stall about the disturbance. “Oh,” the woman said, “there is a Rabbi here, a teacher-“ and she bent a little closer, “and some say he heals. That he makes the blind to see, and the lame to walk…as they say,” she shrugged as she said the last words, as if to take herself back out of caring about this. But Miriam felt a shock go through her heart. She quickly motioned for Ruth to sit by the side of the stall and put her basket beside the girl, who obeyed quickly but who had gone now completely white. “Aunt,” Ruth whispered, “Aunt.”
“Wait here, Ruth. But if you do not see me return, run home. Leave my things. It does not matter.” And Miriam turned towards the crowd, which was moving again. It seemed to Miriam that someone new had entered the hive and there was the sound of a wail in the middle. The crowd surged away from the well, headed towards a main street leading away from the market, and this gave Miriam a chance to slip in amongst the followers. There were some other brave women in the crowd, but it was mostly men, with their carefully woven cloaks in blues and rusts and browns. The dust beat up unmercifully into her eyes and mouth. Hannah pulled her head covering close over her face, so that she would not be recognized, and with her adrenaline drowning out the stabs of pain, and despite the blood which she knew was flowing more freely now, she tried to move her way closer to the head of the heaving and hurried cloaks and sandals and past the rough movements of the men. Some pushed her away, and she thought with some sadness, that they did not know that they were touching an unfortunate: a woman, an unclean and useless woman. But she kept on.
At the head of the crowd, behind which all followed in greedy interest, she saw a man, a leader of the synagogue, in earnest conversation with another, shorter man in a poor, off-white cloak. Miriam knew of the leader of the synagogue, and so surmised that he could not be a healer, or she would have been told- it must be the other man. She got closer and closer, partly because of her size- and the agility she’d once used, as a girl, to climb anything and everything, in joyful expectation of a view above the swirling dirt. Now, she used what was left of this child-energy, which had laid hidden by the sorrow of the last two years, as if those two years had given it time to germinate and build up; or perhaps the sorrow and her outcast state had made her care less about the swirling dust and long for what lay beyond. Perhaps she had stopped caring so much what others thought.
She found herself looking at the cloak of the healer, the edge of it trailing just a few inches beyond her reach; no one had noticed her because they were all listening to the pleading conversation of the the synagogue leader and the soft answers of the healer- those listening in were insatiably eating up both the high man’s misfortune, and the wonder of him sharing it so desperately and publicly- and the ill one just a child, and a female child at that- the wonder of it. But Miriam had only grasped bits, for she began to reach out her hand, to touch the rough, off-white fibers which moved with their owner in a peaceful sway. In a long instant, her hand traveled out-just a touch- just-
…the roughness of the garment surprised her; she thought healing would feel like Eastern silk. She felt a fire go through her body, and instantly, her hand moved to her abdomen. She stopped suddenly, bent over, and was knocked side to side by those who were following- but just as Miriam thought she would surely be knocked to the ground, the crowd stopped. There was a silence. And then, a voice of quiet strength.
“Who touched me?” Heavier silence. Hannah felt the blood coursing deeply through her entire being, blood moved by embarrassment, and also, still, the fire. Again the voice rolled out above the crowd: “Who touched me?" Hannah wished that she could just back away quietly; as she began to go, a rumbling started in the crowd, an uncomfortable reaction to intolerable silence, and another voice, in some confusion and rattled tones cried,“Master- look at the crowd! It is pressing all around-“
Miriam stopped moving, because she realized that everyone was quite still, like the leaves on a tree in the silence before a storm, and that any escape on her part would be impossible. She looked around at the feet of those around her, and then pulled her head covering back a little, and straightened up. She dared a glance at the healer, to whom she was now a few yards away. She could only see the side of his head, a side of thick, common brown hair and a beard. Only an instant or so had passed since the last query, and as Miriam inched her way around the obstructing figure in front of her, so that she could get a better view of his face, his quiet voice, with a slight reluctance to it, broke in on the crowd again, and in answer to the other man’s logic: "I felt power go out of me.” The crowd sucked in a communal breath, and the healer said again, with gentleness, “Who touched me?”
At that instant, Miriam had got herself a place for a full view of his face, and when she looked up, she found herself looking into brown, earth-colored eyes, eyes with sorrow and joy woven , eyes that contained the very fire she felt still in her. She followed the gaze with her body and moved towards him, finally kneeling before him in the dust, the sounds of “I did” somehow escaping her lips. The crowd moved back, with more sucking of air, a sucking sound of petrified disdain. Miriam took this all in, but some thread in her stayed with that gaze and she looked at a face which seemed to reflect, and know, the pain of the unwanted.
Not only did the healer look at her, but breaking through a cold, invisible, stone wall put up over millenia, he kneeled in the dust in front of her, and took her hand in his. Quietly, with the softness only deep courage and profound, divine humility can produce, hesaid, "Your faith has healed you.”
Image: "Woman with a Hemorrhage" by Louis Glanzman
What does it mean to be an exile? I suppose you'd have to talk to one to understand; perhaps even an interview with an exile wouldn't give you much real information, either. You'd have to have been exiled. But the question is not, "What does it feel like to be an exile?" but rather, "What does it mean?"
"Meaning", used in this question, has the connotation of 'purpose': What is the end, the directing paradigm, the teleology of being an exile?
I can think of many types of exile in my life. First, a very concrete one at age ten, when I was forced to leave Greece, where my heart lived. I have never gotten over this, this splitting of my soul. Do exiles, the more deeply suffering ones, exiles from their home because of war, ever get over it? Do exiles, the political ones, ever get over it? Do exiles, the third-culture kind, like me, ever get over it?
I have read in many stories, especially of the medieval bent, how a hero or villain is "banished" and he pleads, begs, for some other punishment, even death. I have felt my heart go back to that time, at ten, when I also wished to run away from my parents (a child's version of wishing for death) rather than leave my beloved Anatolia, for some foreign place; I had some presentiment that it would not be a place which welcomed me, that I'd be somehow an outcast. I was right. But are we meant to become so entwined with a place, a physical place? What is the mystical connection between ourselves and a place comprised of dirt and rocks with some culture plastered on it? No, I know it is more than that. We are deeply connected to places because we are composite beings, and we humans, because we are also spiritual, imbue places with spiritual realities: even as children, we sense this and connect with all of it much more easily and deeply than we do even as adults. That is why the places and people of our childhoods always retain a certain luminosity, a magic, which never leaves many of us- perhaps until we visit and see its destruction. Then our hearts are broken.
I have also felt exiled from people I've loved. From childhood friends, from those I've loved on the crest of life and lost due to the changing, sometimes inexplicable currents of lives meeting and sundering. I have never forgotten, not in my heart, those moments of joy, and in those memories do I most chafe against a linear existence, one we cannot escape, in which those times of real love, in deep sweetness or in friendship become hard jewels set in the past. We cannot escape the linear nature of our existence; in fact, it has been ordained for our life on earth. So there must be a meaning in it, similar to the meaning of being an exile. Time itself creates the state of being an exile.
There is an old proverb, which I hate: "Love makes time pass, and time makes love pass." I hate it because I think that then it cannot be love. This is speaking more about pleasure, I think. Love does not pass, not real love. But how does an exile from loved ones go on in a healthy way? How does one re-invest, an important stage of grief, if time does not make love pass? And the most important question: how do we truly continue to love if the real person is not with us, at least from time to time? Does it become the unhealthy love between ourselves and a vaporous memory?
I have also been an exile from myself, in those periods when I have tried, for safety or love, to fit into a mold which others set out for me, and consequently lost my own voice. To lose oneself is part of the pain associated with both the concrete, physical exile from the soil we love and the exile from those we've loved and lost. When we left Greece, I had certain knowledge that I'd left part of myself there, that I could no longer live to the rhythm of joy and sunlight, that the sea and the colours of beauty and light were drained from me, and I went on my journey a shell of the person that I was. In rebuilding, trying to fit into a new culture, into an extended family whom I did not know, into a culture which seemed gritty and twisted, I lost myself for many years. I lost my God because I had no real face or voice left with which to know Him. But as my sister, my partner in this loss, once said in a song, "You danced with me, through a bend in time." And He does.
Sin itself, trespassing the moral law, also creates in us an exile from ourselves, from our real face which is always before God, and destroys the true love which is the bridge between ourselves and reality, and the 'other-ness' of those we are called to love as well as the ultimate Other, our God. And sin can take larger, social forms, such as trying to be in the inner circle, to please others for the sake of advancement or to create a facade, becoming a fake of ourselves. All this is deep, hellish exile beside which the physical exile because of war or simple loss becomes a potential portal of growth and hope.
For me, my physical exile from the land of my blood and heart has made me feel like a wanderer, of sorts, on the face of the earth. I have struggled for an identity, and held understandings with other third-culture kids, understandings like the lighting of one candle to another. I have felt myself a citizen more of the world, and had no phobic patriotism which might blind me to the actions of the country in which I hold citizenship. I have become a culture-explorer and discovered richness everywhere; and in the pain, I have grown to understand how to discern bad culture from good, however amateur and often mistaken I've been at times.
There is still the question of exile originating in a linear existence, of the loss of those we love in this life, and the question of how love lives, real love, based in real people and not just memory. I think that there is an essential, real, eternal person inside each of us, and true love, rather than being blind, has true sight. If we love, we can see more like God. We see, if we truly love, the potential, the person that ought to be, whom God wills, whom God is trying to accomplish despite flaws and sin. If we love, we become co-conspirators with God in helping this person become what he or she should be. This is true, I think, for the love of friendship as well as eros, although the love of eros has an arrow-like strength for the melding of two persons into each other, and in a mysterious way, echoes the love of God for the soul, in that in becoming loved by God, we begin to be melded into Him, to become like Him: although mysteriously, this love, if true, and moral, always retains and enhances our uniqueness. Eros, and the love of God, is a beautiful paradox, and the person we love, whether with us in the day-to-day or not, is truly with us in essential things. Is the only thing that can separate us the marring of sin which destroys, in the end, the person meant by God? I do not know, but the person who loves always sees, and hopes, like God always loves and hopes.
So we see something eternal and real, and non-linear, when we love truly. This does not pass with time. There are those whom I have seen again after ten or twenty years, or more, and knew as I knew them so long ago: it is expressed in, "we picked up where we left off". I believe that part of the fear of loving is the fear of the loss of self, of exile, and of loss in a linear existence. But this fear is a half-truth, because in love, we are multiplied, we can become more ourselves even as we give ourselves away, and love does not die or impoverish, even in loss in this life. It is not easy, and there is pain, there is real exile. But there is hope, not necessarily for the consummation of real love in this world, but hope nonetheless. It is why people who have faith in a good God can continue through great loss, and even in time, grow though it.
I have felt my soul stretched and raw, when I've been through a leaving, an exile made necessary by circumstance, sin, or choice-for in every choice there is a yes and a no; and sometimes I have felt that I was, as Bilbo says in The Hobbit, "like butter spread over too much bread"; and like Frodo, feeling that some wounds do not heal with, or in, time. But still, I will to believe in love, in love that does not pass with time, a love found again in the ultimate eucatastrophe, or sudden turn from bad to good, that is found with God after this life. God willing I will make it there, past this exile. I hope it looks like Greece, too.
Perhaps the real meaning of exile, of a linear existence, is to test us in our hope, our love, and to teach us the real meaning of home- for as it is said, and I like this much better, "the darkness helps us to understand the true value of the light." Or something like that. I could change it, like this: "being an exile shows us the true meaning of home."
Or, perhaps, I just want too much and should just be more easy come, easy go. However, like Gandalf says at the end of The Return of the King, "Not all tears are an evil"; in other words, some things, some necessary exiles and goodbyes deserve the honor of tears. To deny this is to become flippant and shallow, I think, or to become a person who embodies the life equivalent of a womanizer. A lifenizer, in the endless search for the easy life, the perfect situation, quick-releasing anything that requires the risk of pain, or exile.
Maybe I can still believe in endless, eternal love, and be the exile of solemn joy traipsing through a field on a full spring day- like the Mole in The Wind in the Willows, who leaves his home and marvels in the River and the Rat, rejoicing in what is, what will be with God. And yet even the loving, happy Mole, upon scenting his old home in the midst of deep winter, weeps about the loss of it after so many months away. And, in one of the most beautiful metaphors on friendship, the Rat puts his impatience with all this weeping aside and helps the Mole find his home; then as they find that his home has been left in a shambles, the Mole weeps again in his shame over having the well-to-do Rat see his humble abode. But the Rat, with true charity, "-praised everything he saw, and said, 'Why Moley, you've a capital little place here! Capital!' " And they feast, as only love can do, on the remains of a sausage. It is a moment of kairos, a time when the love of God breaks through into existence and exile.
For you, you exile full of angst, and sorrow, do you not know, exile, that I know every hair of your head...that I know when each lark falls to the ground, and you, you are worth many of these...
I arrived in Athens on Tuesday, June 9. As we landed, I just started crying, and the New York Greeks near me politely stared for a second. It was twenty-four years since I'd last landed there, and that time I was fifteen: when you come back suddenly to a place like this, after so long, you can see yourself, like in a video. And that time, as a fifteen-year old, I was in the throes of that teenage time, where the thoughts in your head about actual reality are much less important to you than your thoughts about what other people are thinking about you.
But now, this time, I come just to be- with Greece, with my sister, and my oldest friend, Iris. When I saw the sea, the brown and green hills, the little vineyards and olive groves, I knew why I'd loved Santa Barbara- there was something there of Greece. As I walked through the joi de vivre energy of the airport, and got my tickets for the bus and felt the humidity, I knew why I'd liked New York; there was something of the people there which reminded me of Greece.
But here, I noticed, as we traveled through Athens toward Syntgma (Constitution) Square, there was that energy of New York, but also a real understanding of leisure; of being. I saw men sitting on benches or cafe tables, and my American instinct thought, "what are they doing just sitting there by themselves?" and then my Greek instinct remembered leisure.
As a child, my sight was much more like my sight now- I am too old to care about what other people think of the way I look, and no one's looking anyway- good thing in a Mediterrenean country; and besides, there's way too much for Greek studs to look at these days- and so, like a child, I bound along, suitcase in tow, delighting in the lucid air, the curry smell, the soft dang of a little church bell, the little shops, rowed one after another down the little, narrow winding streets. I hear my mother telling me to stay on the sidewalk at all costs, as she, amused, watched the little old ladies navigating a jay walking journey with inches to spare. On my own steam now, though, I can trundle down some steps in a small, quiet square and enter an ancient Orthodox church. Now, I know, as I didn't as a child, that I can venerate the icons of Christo Pantocrator, or the Annunciation. The religious landscape of the land of my childhood has become more accessible to me now, and the simple joy this gives me can't really be expressed- it is like a soft breeze of love, coming from the past.
I reach the hotel and my sister is there. How long we've been trying to do something together- and God, in His gifts, gave me this one- to be here in Greece with her! And the cornucopia opens further, when Iris, whom I haven't seen for twenty years, comes to the door the next morning. We spend three hours talking in a taverna next to the ancient Agora, and I imagine Socrates sitting in something like this, quite near, 2300 years or so ago, agitating and educating the populace- with a little wine and olives. We have "cappucino freddo" with the thickest, coldest milk I've ever seen.
We go then to Marylynne's gallery, where twenty-two people, mostly young twenties, are putting up art work, creating art work...the gallery is located in an old apartment building, due for condemnation after the show. There are old, beautiful old doors and shutters; the place has an elegance, and the marble floors, that particular Greek pattern of mottled marble, reminds me of my childhood- I would lay on these floors in the heat of summer, and just think.
A girl from Holland is doing cardboard towers, to be installed on the rooftop; a Japanese girl is creating hundreds of fishwire strings with resin dripped down them; a delightful Englishman from Manchester is putting videos on the wall, and the air of nebulinity, the aura created by a lot of artists together, is thick. Margarita, the curator, a Greek woman closer to our ages, is bustling around in a Greek way- last minute (made time for leisure, see) everything. Marylynne gets down to measuring and working through problems with a plinth. Iris and I, with a futile offer of help, break out into the clear air of simple reality again. I think about how Aristotle wrote about poetry, art, as a teacher, an imitative teacher, for the soul- art as a doctor of sorts; and how so much art has become more a vehicle of expression for the radically individual. And I think about how this can be good, too, although we humans always seem to default into imbalance. Marylynne's work is the most tied to reality, to beauty, as a teacher of order.
We walk through this condemned area, and we begin to understand the riots of a few months past. Hordes of young immigrant men, and Greeks, hang out listlessly( nothing to do with leisure) on the corners, many of them skin on wasted frames, with the occasional desperate face. This is a drug area, and the storekeepers, many of them immgrants, look tired and worn, as if the very air were poison. I feel sad, so sad.
We make our way to the Plaka, the oldest neighborhood, just below the towering figure of the Acropolis. The Acropolis still seems like a beacon of beauty and order, rising like a king above the sprawl of white houses, a sprawl which reaches for twenty miles or so all round. The ancient Agora, below the Acropolis, was a marketplace- but also much more. Here Socrates walked, Aristotle came to the "thinkery" - a civic building set aside for thinking- and Pericles probably had an office here.
To be continued.....when I can get on a computer again!
Do you know how I feel? Deep down? Now that I am returning to you, to your brown breasts, salt and olive-scented to your pearly teeth on the mouth of the sea But even deeper down, the clarity of the water which mirrored the child-clarity in me:
I touched every stone and every bloom creeping out from among their rough faces, in some wall at the edge of a garden somewhere in the folds of your dress; I did not need its history. I named the dirt, a certain tree; I knew the abalones and the jellyfish knew me I breathed your air and drank your wine I danced a dance of the soul with you.
I an exile of thirty years, will you recognize me? As I roam always, always lonely, on the shoulder of a road I did not pick out to travel, will you know me, a woman covered with the dust of others? did you know I left unwillingly?
The rose-water light of a summer night ancient Athenian stone ladies caught forever reflecting light in their own way like the inside of a white shell retsina on the Plaka my sister there and me home.
So why do I weep, now, that I am returning? It is seeing the fingers of God stirring the water and not being able to get into it because I am now lame, the free child I was is lost my heart has been entangled, twisted so often: but at least, I am weeping. I am not hard, I hope, too hard, and I will touch your walls, your flowers...may I be able to float once again, in your ambrosia depths, and just be in a horizontal minute of life my sister there and me home, like Home.
We went camping last weekend: three little kids, two parents (clueless city-idiots) and four college students (camping geeks after their NOLS training).
Of course we were late: why on earth were they leaving at 8:30 am on a Sunday? Were the mountains on a schedule? So the fact that we were late, and oh- yes, we brought our dog, Lucy: "I've never gone camping with a dog" said one student, politely- all this together, meant that we knew that they were slightly regretful for inviting us and Chaos, who seemed to sit on the back of our city Volvo.
We were late, oh yes, so we were too embarrassed to mention that we weren't sure we had enough gas, as we-too late- looked at the gauge on the car. "Hmm," we said, "hmm." We kept going, because I am too shy to pull alongside a van full of skeptical students and yell through the wind while the damn dog is trying to kill herself by jumping out. As it was, she had my head pinned to the headrest in her interest in every smell carried on the wind.
Surely Jeffrey City, on our way out to the Agate Flats, would have a gas station. As we drove past it, we realized that Jeffrey City is in its death rattle. There was a Texaco sign half gone, and the only thing still open was a liquor store. I wondered if they had moonshine strong enough to count as petrol.
So it was that we ended out in the high desert, on a cattle track on the moon, with the gas gauge lit up. The students were surprisingly kind. I think they finally decided we were funny. "I want to go home," said Sophie. "Let's try Muddy Gap", I said to one student,"it's about ten miles east." "Can you make it there?" "I think so." "Okay, we're behind you." Rocking and rolling, over insistent sage brush and granite, we made it back to Hwy 789 and headed towards Muddy Gap. "Let's pray for a station kids, and hey- maybe God will make one be there for us," said brave Dad. We shot down the highway, coasting when we could and feeling like- well, you don't want to be out in the middle of Wyoming, with no cell service, no gas, at any time of the year. Only idiots from urban areas would get themselves in that situation.
"Where in the hell is Muddy Gap?" queried worried Dad. All we could see was an imposing mountain covered with snow, and the highway leading on, looping up and down over the blank land. The kids were even silent for once. If I could think of music for this moment, it would be some agitated Celtic song that you desperately want to end.
"Where the hell is Muddy Gap?" Repeated a few times.
I looked up to see a flashing light, a stop sign- and not much else. Then I saw the station I remembered, up on the hill, and with a sinking heart, thought, "Why on earth would THAT place be open on a Sunday?" We pulled up anyway, in desperation- we'd decided that we'd just flag someone down to help us get gas from Rawlins, sixty miles away, and let the students go on their way to their wilderness adventure. I'd had enough of adventure already. The only one who seemed to want more was the dog.
Our tires crunched on the uphill driveway into the station, and we passed a white van parked there, which had black letters on the side that said, "Where the *&$ is Muddy Gap?"
The pump was on.
The door said, "Open". We all trudged inside as our car filled up hungrily. We were greeted by a small Arab who said in dulcet tones, " Welcome to Muddy Gap. We having the cleanest restrooms in Carbon County, and please we're happy to have you." The store was clean, the restrooms were clean, and the white walls and ceilings of the entire store were covered in happy graffiti in red, blue, purple, pink, green and yellow: lots of other people who thought this place was something of a miracle, too.
There was a museum of sorts adjacent to the food store, filled with memorabilia of the Mormon Handcart tragedy. I looked at the story: as the Mormons fled West in the late 1800's, they were so poor and persecuted that they had to travel the thousands of miles pulling handcarts; they were too poor to afford a beast of burden. They did not make it to Independence Rock, a marker used by Pioneers on the Oregon Trail, by Independence Day. The common wisdom was that if you didn't make it to Independence Rock by July 4, you wouldn't get over the mountains before the snows came. They died by the hundreds in the frozen desert in which we now stood.
I mentioned this to one of the young people, and she replied, "Who would want to remember Mormons?"
"I would," I said, "they are people, too." I knew that she was young,and kidding, and yet I disliked the comment. I no longer cared that she was a NOLS expert, nor that we'd almost run out of gas, as I looked at the paintings of children in the snow, in that desert outside the doors of that little haven that was the Muddy Gap Station.
We shot back down the highway, the car full of gas and us a little less full of gas, sobered. We went on another crazy jaunt through the cattle tracks, thinking about Ford trucks with super-suspension. We hiked four miles through the sage brush, sand, cactus and grass, the dog bounding joyfully, all of us glad that it was unseasonably warm. We made it to our campsite, and the student experts found 'a source of running water and a sheltered campsite'. They immediately began setting up the 'kitchen', and we set up tents and the kids bounded over the rocks, the mountains reaching suddenly out of the desert in pink hues, rocks lain over rocks in rounded shapes, trees hovering around in the crevices. We looked back over the desert as the sun went down, and the mountains in the distance, down towards Muddy Gap, called back to us in beautiful tones of blue and white.
Pat, one of the students, took the kids on little climbs, and I began to see his kind and loving spirit- he was someone who saw past the intricacies of expert camping to the purpose of being out, way out and away: to just be, just be with beauty. And to go rock climbing, although he put the real stuff aside for our sake. The men slept out in the open, just to be men, I guess, and the dog slept inside with the rest of us. I experienced the whole night.
We had made it past the view from the highway, and got to know the life in the desert, walked past sage brush the size of small trees, and found the beauty of the pink-rock mountains; we weren't at some groomed campsite, but found our way into the heart of the land, and got to know it as it is, at least a little. The view from the highway doesn't look the same after that.
We hiked out of there, all regrets and suspicions ground away by camping together. The young people went on the the next site, to serious rock climbing, bumping away on the cattle track, while we made our way home across the high desert, the white peaks of the Wind River range laughing in the distance, joyful and impervious in the sun. We went down a thousand feet, ever closer to the Winds, down through red canyons and past brave ranch houses surrounded by quiet cattle, down through yellow hills and brown ones with sage brush clinging to life. We came back up slightly, into the foothills of those white mountains, so close to them that you can no longer see the peaks, and into Lander. We went to McDonald's, as if in revenge, and sipped our sodas, and felt very proud of ourselves for completing a winter camping trip on the freaking moon. "That wasn't so bad," said someone.
A few days later, we were told that we were crazy because it can snow five feet suddenly out there. We went back to feeling like idiots.
There were four of us, ladies in desperate search of metropolitan culture, going to the opening night of Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers” in Denver. We live in Lander, Wyoming, about 350 miles from the nearest city.
Nancy, the driver, is a Latin language expert, and a culture aficionado; she speaks a few languages and has been to many cultural centers of the world. In the front passenger seat sat Edie, who is a young grandmother and a native of Lander. This was to be her first opera experience: brave lady. Aileen and I were in the back, two escaped mothers.
Ours was a motley crew, but we like each other a lot and we have the faith in common, so in that love, all our differences become fascinating journeys into real education. As we drove south out of Lander, the snow lightly falling, Edie taught us about our environment and the creatures- well, the strange doings of people, actually. That’s most what women are interested in. That and food. So we did stop for chocolate as she regaled us, saying a jaunty “Happy Valentine’s Day” to the Rawlins-mellow store clerk (the wind blows so hard that they just stop trying to be jaunty). True to feminine form-or substance?-we played the game, “You Are What You Eat” with our choice of Valentine treat. I was a colorful, hard shell with sweet, cheap chocolate on the inside; Nancy was a hard, shiny chocolate shell with a tangy, powdery milk substance; Aileen was a soft, chocolate cover with crunchy nuts and chewy nougat; and Edie was, simply, nuts.
Edie told us about Lander as we drove on past cultural black holes like “Grandma’s Café –Open”, the kind of place you’d make a horror film about a family from New Jersey stopping there to use the restroom.Edie knows mysterious things like the restaurant in Lander where they leave the side dishes out all night and serve them the next day (important info for the rookie); the Maverick station (where you get good snack food) which was once a dumpy trailer park with a sandwich shop in front. So that plot of land always had a sandwich charism, and now it is fulfilling it completely- no messing around with trailers. The next-to-best story was of Amoretti’s, a beautiful old building and former swanky Italian restaurant on the corner of Second and Main. After a year of twenty-dollar, lacy salads and such, the owners just- left; locking the door, they left the place ready for dinner that night. For weeks and months afterward, Edie said you could still look in the dusty windows and see the fancy place settings, the wine glasses slowly being covered with dust. Lander’s own Great Expectations…and finally, the best story: a WyomingRomeo and Juliet: I said, remember, Wyoming style: In Hudson, a town near Lander built around a curve in the two-lane highway entering Shoshone and Arapahoe reservation territory, there is a sign that says: “This is the greatest food in the world”. I was busy laughing about that and the “Happy Hocker Pawn Shop” when Edie chimed in, saying, “It really was great food.” The restaurant in question was El Toro, now defunct like Amoretti’s. “Was it Mexican food?” I asked. Edie looked at me in that Wyoming way, just a straight look. “No, it was steak.”
“Oh”. I remembered that this is Wyoming, not California. Edie went on: “El Toro and Svedtler’s were in competition..”
“Was Svedtler’s Mexican?” (I was trying to needle her.)
“ No, Svedtler’s is a German name.” Another straight look, and she continued, “..anyway, these two places were in competition-“
“Two steak places competing in a town with the population of about 50?!”
“Be QUIET, Tami!!” Chorus now.
Edie tried again: “Well, El Toro’s was by far the best. Then, the owner of El Toro’s married the daughter of the owner of Svedtler’s.”
“A Montague- Capulet story! What happened?” exclaimed gentle Nancy. Edie replied in her no-nonsense Wyoming tones, “El Toro’s owner just lost interest in his restaurant and closed it.” There was silence for a few seconds.
It was Nancy’s turn to educate us. She had a collection of CDs; Turkish medleys, Mexican Baroque-“Mexicans do Baroque?” I asked, displaying my shallow-ness- and the best, an Italian Michael Bolton-type. We put him in and he started crooning, “Senxa una donna” (without a woman). The snow was falling now more seriously, and we were on Interstate 80, climbing over the pass from Laramie to Cheyenne. I looked up from my book, Peace of Soul, by Fulton Sheen, and saw the big patch of slush just before we hit it. We started fishtailing at fifty-five mph, and Nancy tried to correct us so we didn’t go off the edge of the highway, down into the trees and rocks in the gully along the highway. In the next instant, we were spinning. For me, it became slow-motion, like when your spider-sense kicks in. Zanchurra the Italian was still crooning and Nancy was yelling “Jesus”, Aileen was praying “Hail Mary”, Edie was frozen, and I was- what was I thinking about? The median wall charging at us and the strange similarity of feeling to a Tilt-A-Wheel ride.
We slammed into the median wall at about 50, and the Tilt-A-Wheel, true to experience, flung us the other way. Suddenly we were driving forward again, and Nancy got us off the road. We all looked at each other, checked poor Aileen’s head, felt our bruises. The car was smoking from a smashed-to-hell engine, so I told everyone to get out so we could check it. As we surveyed the scene, trucks filled with kind, wide-eyed Wyoming tough guys came to help out. They pulled car parts off the highway and smiled at us. We felt better, and just so thankful for being spared. Nancy said flatly, as a huge semi roared past us, “We could have been hit”. The Tilt-A-Wheel image exploded, except that I mused, based on our last thoughts, that Nancy would have been going to see Our Lord, Aileen would have been in the arms of Our Lady, and me? At the eternal Tilt-A-Wheel? That sounds like hell. In my shock state, I was worried about this for awhile.
The Wyoming HP came, the wrecker came (car was totaled) and I got a ride in the back of the patrol car, in the “perp cage”, furthering my worry about my eternal destiny. But I was jolly enough to take a picture of myself and hope for God’s mercy on a frivolous soul, a soul not always in reality enough at the important moments of life. Like the last one.
We got to Laramie, Wyoming’s second or third largest city (not saying much, since the largest, Cheyenne, has only 53,000). Everything on a Saturday closes at noon in Laramie; so we found ourselves with Chad and Misty and their kids, Edie’s family, riding into Cheyenne over the same pass on which we’d crashed.
Nancy: “Well, shall we go to the opera?”
Aileen: “Let’s find out the weather conditions.”
Tami: “We have to take down Denver, remember?”
Edie: “I am going to stay in Cheyenne.” She hugged her grandson.
A few hours later, three of us got a rental Chevy Cobalt from a metaphysically sleepy Avis agent at the- I must say it- absolutely pathetic excuse of an airport that is “CheyenneInt’lAirport”. I drove. Before leaving we hugged Edie and her family, our rescuers from the wilderness of Laramie, and began our culture-seeking, Frodo-esque journey once again.There was black ice, there was the 7:30 curtain-up deadline; there was the unknown city maze of Denver- the white sharp-tooth mountains rising in the distance; there was the ominous warning of the Cheyennites of “traffic always in Denver”: but we steeled ourselves, thinking of the pioneer women who “did whatever the men did and had babies”. We pulled up to the Grand Hyatt, and the pioneer woman metaphor could go no further. She stayed at the door, her skirts flowing in the wind, looking at us ruefully.
Rushing into the elevator, we were almost bowled over by a man who was holding his chest and calling out for Our Lord. “Alright”, I thought, “there’s a theme going on here.” We called over the hotel staff and he assured them he was fine. “Just a cramp!” he yelled. We continued on up to our room, got ourselves dressed, down again, and got into a taxi. I was expecting a “New York rush” as soon as I got into the taxi, but instead I got “Denver doldrums”. We could have walked faster.
We swooped into the “Ellie Caulkins Opera House” at 7:30 on the dot, transformed into preened peacocks, a far cry from the forlorn little sparrows next to a smashed car. We drank red wine and had a chocolate cookie at intermission, mingled with ball-dresses and very cool, orange-vested western tuxes, and with frightening mini-skirts on sixty-year-old legs and with well-painted, ordered faces. We watched a large man rolling around in exotic silk dress on the stage singing about lust (and I wondered at the ironies of high-culture); but there were a few moments of true sublimity in sound.
After the opera, we decided it was time for dinner, at 10:30 pm- how European of us- and we also decided that we needed a drink-how Western of us-and so we settled ourselves in a hopping Denver place off 16th St. I made the mistake of having two glasses of wine, which I later put down to pure shock.
We made it back to the Grand Hyatt, and I consider it a great feat that I made it back balancing on little tiny heels. I must have looked like Barbie when you try to make her stand up. As we entered the lobby, Aileen wisely asked about Mass times for the following morning. I thought the surreality of the day was done, but I was mistaken. The man behind the desk, an otherwise typical Colorado boy, asked jauntily, “Well, do any of you speak Latin?” Unbeknownst to him, with us was Nancy, who is probably the ONLY person in a thousand-mile radius who speaks Latin, and fluently. She said, “Ecce boalpoh f lpofpom” (that is what I heard-two glasses, remember?). The bewildered bell-boy said to Aileen, as if Nancy was a foreign personage, “What did she say?” Aileen quipped, “She said, ‘You are handsome’”. The bell-boy, red, looked at Nancy and said slowly, “Well, you’re sort of beautiful.”
As we were lifted to the sixth floor, Nancy said finally, “I guess after forty you get compliments like that. Sort-of beautiful? What is that?”
The next morning, we got ourselves to the Holy Ghost Church for the Latin Mass. We walked into a stunning creation in mahogany and brown marble, with the redeemed Garden of Eden painted and carved into the walls and trimmings; the candles near St. Therese, St. Joseph and Our Lady burned with a strong and gentle light. Our souls were feasted in glorious musical courses: Faure, complex Kyries, the choral voices perfect with ordered passion. The columns, standing like ladies-in-waiting along the side of the main apse, seemed to sing as Our Lord was raised in sacrifice.
“Here” I thought, “is high culture.” And I thanked God for my life, and asked Him to order my soul.
Later, much later, as we drove through the beautiful, open, endless rolling grasslands and eerie, fortress-like rock formations, I remembered Brandy at the Cheyenne airport, a young girl we’d seen while in our rental car fury, on our high-culture search, a girl traveling on her own. She had a shaved-looking head, a beautiful face, and she talked loudly, with Midwestern pancake-tones in the “Cloud-Nine” bar about her back-yard lake in Michigan. We were busy rolling our eyes at this young pup, when we heard an old Wyomer say to her, “You got such a pretty face, young lady, what’s with the hair?” She gave him a sparkling smile. “I was diagnosed with cancer in September, and I lost my hair. It is growing back though,” and she patted her own head affectionately. “It is finally starting to lay down.” The bar fell silent. We fell silent.
As night slowly fell outside the window of our traveling car, as I remembered Brandy, I looked out to see the stars. Out there, in cattle land, cowboy land, the stars are not poking through like pinholes in an opaque black paper sky. They are in the millions, taking over the expanse, and the sky is not flat, but full-form space, and the stars hang down in the living air, within reach like ornaments on invisible strings: millions of tiny glass ornaments, reflecting a light from another source. I felt simultaneously, after a weekend with the theme of approaching death, very earth-bound and yet still desirous about the door to beyond those stars.
Above all, I did not strike the flint to make the spark that is my life; the spark is given me to help start a fire for God in this world. Someday, I pray, in His hands, my spark will float up into the night, disappear, and light up in His heart again.
Driving close to home, through the sad town of Shoshoni, we played the “You Are What You Eat” game again. I was dried out, cured, heavily peppered flesh, Nancy was a Dinty Moore stew, ‘hot and substantial’, and Aileen was, simply, nuts.
