Help! Fire! Police! What About the Riots in Greece?!

I get asked this too often for humor when people find out where we are going.

Riots=Greece. I think my dad might say, "What's a visit to Greece without some rioting?" He finds--what's the word?--sardonic? things to say like that. My sister and I call these slightly inappropriate, but layered-funny statements "Dadisms." Yes, it is meant to look like sadism. Not that he is always a satirical guy. He's just loves incongruity and finds convoluted ways to express it.

I think underneath all that, especially regarding culture (including American culture), is long experience with what I call 'culture clash moments': This when you simply don't get something, you need to, and you just make fun of it to keep your sanity. Also, my parents seem to have ended up in the middle of coups....a shah deposed in Kabul, Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed, a disagreement on a bus in Denmark (that probably made the Copenhagen paper), IX XI in NYC...

My dad, as well-traveled as he is, can't learn languages to save himself from a riot. When we lived in Greece, all he could say was "portokolada" which he thought was "please" (parakalo). He was actually saying to innocent bystanding Greeks, "Orange soda, where is the toilet?" My mom, exceptionally good at languages, smoothed things over; she sure was fluent when driving in traffic in Thessaloniki when I was young. It was part of it; it was almost expected. You were less acceptable if you didn't yell Greek imprecations on the head of a taxi driver, or give the disgusted flick of the head. It is part of the conversation of the polis.

Riots in Greece...I do know that the Greeks let it out when they feel it, and then they move on and enjoy their leisure and their friendships. I know the youth in Greece are, of course, a frustrated lot...they see themselves as paying for the sins of their elders (like the fairy tale of a budget that simultaneously got them into the EU and hot water). What the truth is, or the complexities are, I don't really understand. I just know they have Joseph Pieper's leisure down in some way, but infrastructure? The work-a-day world? Just think opposite of the most Germanic German you can fathom. There you go.

Besides, Athens is in some way a riot everyday--at least from a Germanic/American/British perspective. Traffic laws? Signomi? Thencatalavenete. My childhood and longstanding friend who knows Greece well and is German-Austrian, explained it: "The worst traffic bungles are in countries that pride themselves on following rules. You see, they are expecting others to follow rules--and when someone doesn't? They aren't paying attention. But Athens? You have got to be paying attention every second and driving like you'd drive through a obstacle course with cliffs on either edge, because that's what you're basically doing. Everyone is extremely offensive and defensive...so the serious tangles are fewer."

Just watch a bunch of Americans queuing with a bunch of Greeks. Americans: stiff, offended cats in as straight a line as possible, wanting to punch but keeping it in to fuel the competition for top sales, and Greeks: flies buzzing around meat, having the fight outright.

I think of Euripedes' The Bacchae when I think of Athens and rioting. I think the play is really about an order that drowns out proper outlet of feeling: Dionysus, a 'new' god of feasting and--well, Mardi Gras outletting--is refused a place in the Polis because he is suspect. Law, not passion, says the ruler, only reason and not emotion--that's for the women. The ruler is punished as the god takes revenge by taking the said women out of the city and driving them mad. They rip the ruler to shreds. Thus, in the oneiric world of ancient Greek morals, those who rely too much on law and force to create order, those who banish the passions and the feasting as threats to proper traffic, are themselves ripped to shreds.

Rioting is the Bacchic spirit taking revenge on the city--something has no outlet that needs it--government has been false or oppressive, or the culture itself has become fractured and incoherent. Madness has to be occurring, somewhere. The city is mad--and multiplied laws cannot heal it.

So I grieve for Greece, as I grieve for American cities with rioting. The arts, culture, leisure, education cannot flourish in a polis like this. Better to have Dionysus somewhere within the city--a cult of renewal, proper passion (Christian Dionysus). Not sure a Dionysian government would work well, though it is an intriguing thought. It needs to be a renewal, Christ as Dionysus, a passion for truth, for the Bacchic order of Beauty and Goodness, where human beings are treated and can live as integrated emotional and rational beings with an eternal end, not cogs in large economic power structures, or used plastic bits on the rubbish heap.

I think of Greece at Easter when I think of Christian Dionysus: families would go out of the city, into the woods, and roast a lamb and celebrate the renewal of life, salvation. Baskets and families are blessed by priests cloaked for the ceremony in mystery and royalty, and then the Body of Christ is sent out to joyous reveling. I think of Christian Dionysus when I remember Greek families walking together in the evening, down the road, old mothers and young daughters like gazelles, arm-in-arm, and young men laughing and putting their arms around each other's shoulders like comrades at the end of the fray. Greeks don't have dead space between people.

Greece is much deeper than riots. These are symptoms of an infection, but not a commentary on their art of leisure and life. I intuit (might be wrong) that Greeks see the civil law as servant to the people, not people servant to it...and they don't seem to have the terrible, silent malice of a people focused on global power chess. Silence in the USSR was more frightening to me than Greece screaming at itself--at any time.

Nevertheless, I hope for everyone's sake we don't have that lesson in drama or politics (is there a difference?). Since we're going with my parents, who have a strange track record, we just might.

Nostos

Nostos means 'homecoming' in Greek; in May, I plan to go home to Greece. I just thought I'd chronicle it...it is also a family reunion including my sister, my parents--and a chance for my husband and children to see my home. I really do wonder what they will think.

My husband loves Socrates but is rather inscrutable emotionally: for example, there's an ancient Greek bust of "The Philosopher" that looks like Thaddeus, with his irregular curls and strong, square face, and intense look,  in the National Archeology Museum of Athens; I can't wait to show it to him. The explanation card below it says, "The Philosopher is portrayed with a rough look, unlike the ordered, ideal portrayals of Apollo, etc.. This is because the archetypal philosopher does not care about the things of this world, including his appearance."  Thaddeus won't appreciate it, though. He won't eagerly tred in Socrates' steps, because the Socrates he cares about is the one who speaks in the texts, the one who lives in every other gadfly trying to wake up the Polis from its complacency.

 He might like the water and he'll get sunburnt on the back of his neck. He'll like the bread and (maybe) the ouzo and the coffee. The buzz of Athens will overwhelm him, but he'll like the turtles that live on the grass near Hephastos' temple on the other side of the ancient agora from the Acropolis; he'll probably name one "Clemmy" and want to bring it home.

For my children, on the other hand, Greece is almost a magical place because they know it is a part of their mother; they love it vicariously, as part of their own history, their own sources--that is one beauty of family. We raise to sacredness the small things of our ancestors, and in this, we honor them and ourselves. But I wonder if the reality will take the magic from them, or fulfill it somehow. We take risks when we open memory boxes for those we care most about; but the risk is a necessary part of love, too.

In the last few years, I've got more bold calling Greece 'home'; I'm not Greek by blood, which means in Greece that essentially, you don't belong--though Greece, over the millenia, is as much an immigrant melting pot as anywhere else, from the early Ionians to the present influx of Albanians, Afghans, Somalians, etc..But I lived there only a few years, so why do I care so much?

They were the four years of my life that contained, for me, almost unadulterated happiness--and I suppose part of that is because I wasn't yet an adult. I came to Greece from the high Himalayan plateaus of Kabul, as a five-year-old. I didn't really remember or connect to the native land of my parents; Kabul had been home, but I had set it aside in my heart because when we left, in the summer of 1974, I dreamt over and over that Kabul was lost in a mushroom cloud of fire. Though I didn't know that Kabul would indeed be lost in the fires of war five years later, I knew I would never be able to go back: I left it behind as a jumble of impressions and the love of people I knew there.

Greece, after that, was like an oasis, an Eden. We lived on a beautiful college campus in Thessaloniki complete with old German Nazi outpost cottages from the war with cellar steps receding into darkness and unexploded bombs left cemented over in the forest, the wind through the pines and the view, far off, of the blue sea. I grafted the land and the smell of pines, warm soil, and poppies into myself, into my child's heart. I came to reason, to self-reflection in the forests of Anatolia College, among ancient temples and clear water. I learned courage from rashness through dares to touch the old bomb and to sit on the one chair left in the darkness of the abandoned bomb shelter; I learned the fullness of silence and contemplation in the wind that came to me from the sea; I learned the deep value of a friend at Pinewood School. It was my world, along with the blue, clear waters off Neos Marmaras, a village on the 'second finger' of the peninsulas northeast of Thessaloniki, where we spent our summer vacations. There I learned simple pleasure and freedom in the water, along with the thrill of danger (sitting on the huge, powerful sprinklers at the local golf course, waiting for them to turn on--not too bright--some enema that would have been).

I would hang in the water, like a fish, a fish with fish, a droplet in the blue and golden world where God spoke to me, like He spoke to me in all the other dialects of Greece, the dialects of Beauty. In Greece one never mistakes human ingenuity for creation; it is as if the human beings, after Pericle's flowering of Athens in marble, have ceded the competition quite wisely, in the face of the natural and astounding colors, the graceful curves of the land, the stark exclamations of crag and mountains. The rather haphazard and rat-tat city streets are not desirable; perhaps one might desire only the white-washed, ancient towns on the edge of the sea, or the intricate towns like Metzivan in the forests--yet these humble villages have beauty because they work from, reflect, the nature around them. To me, most Greeks, though, live in relative hovels in the middle of a great and beautiful palace: a palace of sun, water, rock, of gold, blue, and browns. They don't need individual mansions when the communal one is the best in the world.

I left, unwillingly, when I was ten. Somehow, I knew that I was going away from light and into darkness, a dark night, because I reacted then as if I was going to an execution. I was not  wrong in this; it was for me an exile from beauty, from simplicity, from my own heart--but since then, my exile has given me the opportunity to grow, and to be a nomad in this world--which is a necessary lesson for those who love God. I have learned that we must chase our heart all the way to heaven.

My path has been a dark one at times--I am still, at nearly 47, learning to deal with pain of being away from the land that I love like I love my own hand, the only land on this earth I could understand fighting for, dying for, the land that is a part of my soul in some way, my foundation for a' sense of place'--everything from plants to food to building shapes, those things imprinted as 'home' in some way, especially upon the senses. Like a fly catching a glimpse of an eagle (well, it'd see about 100 eagles) I imagine Adam and Eve dealt with this in a massive way after being expelled, and I understand why Socrates did not wish to escape death by leaving Athens, and why, for Dante, exile from his beloved Florence would be worse than death. Is this strong sense of place just reserved for the jewels of this earth? I don't think so, but I think it also has to do with whether or not your childhood was also full of love and happy. Mine was, in Greece. My sense of place is tied up with watching my graceful, handsome father come out of the water with tanks on his back, the water running off him and my mother kissing him in welcome, and that same beautiful, young mother receiving kindly the basil leaves I gathered for her on campus; it is bound up with my sister and me, and Gretchen and Jeff, making up musicals and acting them out.

But a mystery of this life is that we cannot stay still in place, even if we desperately want to; time is a reality of this life, and we are timeless at heart, looking for eternity through a shifting maze of life choices and non-choices; so, God has been slowly taking the roots out, and a nostos, a homecoming, is sometimes--ironically--a way to do just that: take the roots out so that the soul can be ready to be re-planted in its true home. Seeing something again with mature eyes can disillusion us.

Greece, over the years, has also become a memory of pain for me, which should intensify my search for the eternal, unadulterated Good and Beautiful. Things happened which the child I was could not have received, things now known that--even though I am an adult--have nevertheless ripped my soul. I understand more now that the desire for nostos, though very human, and in many ways natural and good, is really a sublimation of True desire, of True Beauty. What is here always fails us and it is not a place of ultimate happiness, or a place where our will can rest.

My father and mother, myself, and my sister, my husband and my children: Between us all there are differences in world view, religious and political and social.  There is also deep love, but it has potential to be an exciting time.

And I hope we get there. We've got to get from one land-locked island, Lander, down to Denver, out to NYC, and then via Turkish Airlines to Istanbul and finally, to Athens.  I'll probably embarrass everyone by weeping uncontrollably when I can see the Three Fingers, the first recognizable sight of Greece from a plane, and down the east coast to the islands, Athens, and the Peloponnese.

I am hoping for some simple things: Coke and bread in the early morning with my sister, the light dancing on the water, dinner in the Plaka, and hearing the fruit seller crying his wares "Come children, delicious fruit" in Monastiraki Square. Beyond that, I hope to offer Greece to the part of my family that has never got a chance to bask in the magical light under which Phidias found form in matter, within which a new revolution of thinking emerged, under which a child found God and reveled in unadulterated joy for a few years in the 1970s before the path turned grey, turned towards the shadows that demand we look for a higher light.

I am not sure I want to know my family's reactions. I'll have to detach a little and hear them. Their Greece is not exactly mine. I must let them have it.

If Jane Austen Lived in Lander

Well, none of us would be safe from her clear, biting wit; and perhaps that is a good thing. Austen wrote to a young niece who was an aspiring writer, "To work on three or four families in a country town is just the thing..." and there is a very specific reason for her to say that, and it has to do with virtues and the nature of the small town.

In all of Austen's novels, various heroes and heroines must work through an moral education in the situation of the small town. I think of these venues as comparable to the small city-state of Athens in which Sophocles and Euripides produced 'ordering of the emotions,' The Republic of Plato, and the small kingdoms of Arthurian legend-cycles. In all of these, like Austen's English villages, virtue is best understood and worked out in something much smaller than the modern city, or God-help-us, the nation-state, or "God-help-us-more,' the so-called "Global Village." One can't really practice serious virtue via Facebook. If you think you are virtuous based on the number of comments you get on your clever posts, then you've got another thing comin' come Judgment Day.

You need to live in a small town to understand why. As Austen said via Mr. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice after his negligent, vicious parenting has been made very public, "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?'

Anyone who has lived in a small town perfectly understands this statement, but how many of us think that it has something to do with virtue, or a 'good' kind of gossip, if there is such a thing? We all drive around, visit Mr. D's, go to the Grand movie theater, try out the new Lander Bake Shop, poke holes in the ripe peaches at Safeway, get increasingly snobby about the increasing amount of Christmas lights each year, and do it as if no one notices us or talks about us. I suppose if we in Lander could sense via burning ears the amount of talk or speculation, or laughter, or genuine concern for ourselves in this small town, we'd none of us have ears left: just burnt-out holes. However, we all need to be known, and to know and to have to deal with each other in order to grow in virtue; in a small town, your ears aren't quite falling off, but they certainly get a hot wind of your behavior from time to time, and through others' eyes: a very valuable experience that is certainly harder to have in a city (or easier to escape, according to your wish to remain in the dark about yourself).

For example, if a landlord gets nasty with store owners and maneuvers to put their own choice business in where a store has been for ages, people hear about it and don't forget it; if a bank tries to intimidate a young couple with no money and sue them for something that isn't their fault, it gets around and someone will certainly call the bank. No one wants bullies, and in a small town, everyone knows who they are. If someone practices bad employment habits, it gets around--and stays around.

On the other hand, there are small-town models. Everyone knows the honest businessman who teaches CWC classes to help others be successful, and the ranchers who donate food in many humble and personal ways; the lady at the teller booth in the bank who makes your needs her own, and the friendly bagger's smile at Mr. D's who once graced the Mayor's Office.

If Jane Austen lived in Lander, or grew up here, she'd tell stories of young people growing into vicious or virtuous adults, and not in the shifting maze of unconnected car parks, malls, schools, playing fields, and churches of suburban life; rather she'd write her stories in a put-together puzzle, a microcosm world that a young person, especially, can see as a whole, and can see how the parts connect to that whole, a Main Street one can walk down easily (alas, not a English or European town square with a church presiding, but still a kind of center).

She would write about, probably, a homeschooled high schooler (she didn't like her school experience) or freshman college student who learns to navigate the dashing NOLS instructor or the WCC college man, or the son of a rooted, powerful ranching family. Instead of Ford's haberdashery, the place to be seen might be Main St. Books or Safeway, and instead of town hall balls, the young lady would have to learn courtship and friendship at the WCC swing dances.

Perhaps Austen would have gone in for a novel kind of catalogue of virtues: Cowboy Ethics. As CowboyEthics.org puts it:

"The iconic cowboy represents the best of America — the courage, optimism and plain hard work. Cowboys are heroic not just because they do a dangerous job, but also because they stand for something — the simple, basic values that lie at the heart of the cowboy way. Even though their way of life has changed over the last 150 years, cowboys still honor and live by their code. They are an abiding source of inspiration to do better and be better than we are."

And, from the same source, here is the basic code, or catalogue of virtues:

1) Live each day with courage.
2) Take pride in your work.
3) Always finish what you start.
4) Do what has to be done.
5) Be tough, but fair.
6) When you make a promise, keep it.
7) Ride for the brand.
8) Talk less and say more.
9) Remember that some things aren't for sale.
10) Know where to draw the line.

Our young heroine would have to learn courage, perhaps by just managing a winter, or building confidence on a horse. I, though not young, had something of this lesson the other day, when out with a Model of Cowboy Virtue on horseback.

"You want to ride Pavlova?" she asks me.
"I hate that horse, Patty, ever since she ran away with Marian and nearly got Sophie's throat cut out," I reply.
"Well, just give her a go."
"OK."
An hour later after much struggle with said hated horse:
"Patty, she's really trying to buck me off."
Said Model of Cowboy Courage says, laughing, "Oh, I just call those 'chicken hops'--she is just expressing her joy in life. You just need to build some confidence."
"You called that 'joie de vivre'?!"

Something about horses, about the relentless winter, the inexplicable lack of snowplowing in town, the temps below 0 F, the feeling of mandatory hibernation, and the constant, immovable mountain peaks, the absolute need for extra water supplies when going on any long road trip, and tiny cabin reminders, the remains in iron and wood of our pioneer forerunners, calls for a very basic courage. Every once in awhile, I still have that softy California reaction: "Why do people live here?" One transfers the lessons from learning to laugh while a horse is taking off with you (so as not to let it know you are nervous) to learning to laugh when a sickness lasts more than a year, in the face of the unknown (will the pain every go away?). Or death. Or marriage. Or a lifetime of exile. Or childbirth in a town where you wonder if the hospital is really trying to kill you or not.

Austen, like me, would have no idea what to do with #7 (Ride for the brand), unless that means a kind of communal virtue of honesty and teamwork, something Frank Churchill would do well to learn. He rode a lot, but not for any brand but his own, allowing him to think deception a necessary virtue. Miss Bates could do with a little lesson in #8(Talk less and say more), though I suspect this is a throw-back to the plethora of Scandinavian roots in the American Midwest and northern West. Scandinavians do make a virtue out of 'keeping things under the duvet'--but I am not so sure this is always a virtue. And being about 30 percent Scandinavian/Germanic, I know what I am talking about. Besides, what else would cowboys do around a campfire, 200 miles away from anything but sage brush and cows, who certainly exhibit this virtue? Charades?

We talk to each other, about each other. As Michael O'Brien once wrote to me:

"Communication is the ‘media’ of bearing truth in a damaged world in process of being restored to the Father through the sacrifice of the Son. The flow of all genuine communication should lead us to eternal communio in Paradise. Until we arrive there, all such communication is limited by human weakness, sin, subjectivity, immaturity, etc. Should we therefore banish all forms of speech between people?"

No. We not only provide good sport for our neighbors, we also learn about ourselves through communication with each other, about each other. Of course, slander happens regularly in a small town (lies that damage a reputation), as well as gossip (truths that damage another's reputation and are not necessary for the other person to hear); Austen deals with this, and I think it is simply too easy in a city to never face the ramifications of one's stray or vicious words--one can just move into another social group. In a small town, we can choose to put up serious facades and live in isolation, or we have to face ourselves.

There are all the Austen types in Lander. There's the well-to-do landowners, the intellects, the soldiers, the beauties and the homelies, the pert and the pretentious, the Emmas and the Miss Bates, the Mr. Martins and the Darcys--and one learns to navigate these types, as well as one's own vices and virtues, in the comprehensible world of the small town. Hopefully one is becoming more courageous and less prideful, more like Mr. Knightly or Jane Bennett (who has true candour--which is a true, real kindness that is yet honest and open), and less like Mrs. Elton or Wickham.

Candour, one of Austen's favorite virtues, is an especial feat in a small town. To be genuinely kind, to look for the good of others and yet not be a sugar Precious Moments doll with no truth is rare:

 "I just don't want to be negative about anyone."

"Even if someone is a veritable ass or a bully or false?"

"Oh, no, I just need to be a nice Christian."

"Whatever."

Candour, like courage, and the other virtues, must be built on a true heart that is founded on charity and humility. It cannot be counterfeited because it is a window right into the heart, and most people can see right through the appearance of it: especially, maybe only, in a small town.

If Jane Austen lived in Lander, she'd exclaim, when she saw the mountains and the desert, "What are men compared with rocks and mountains!!"; she'd fall over at the sight of carriages without horses; then she'd recover, put pants on, glory in the knowledge that marriage isn't the only viable occupation for women who don't have much to offer in that department or interest in it (but like Austen, have much to offer elsewhere), and write great Westerns.

Small Town Rule: City Plumbing

Now, some people rule small towns because, simply, they are so essential and they don't take advantage of this, but rather serve with honesty and father-like care.

Mike has a last name, but in Lander he is simply known as "Mike At City Plumbing." City Plumbing, run by Mrs. Mike At City Plumbing and other guys that look like Young Mikes At City Plumbing, is in a King Spot, right downtown on Main St, nestled between Neat Repeat and the Lander Journal; the City Plumbing sign is just simply, more than a fixture: it is a fixture. I can't really imagine Lander without the blue and white fifties-era sign, and I've always thought that Mike keeps the store the way it is, because he doesn't really need any more than that...his business is not about flash. or novelty, but about small-town connections and help.

In the same vein, Mike's front windows do not sport the coolest new toilet or shower, nor do they have posters of ladies smiling at flowing water in a sunny, immaculately empty?! (beyond the proverbial fruit bowl) kitchen. Mike seems to know that no one really cares that much--plumbing should be neither seen nor heard--and this is a good philosophy. Instead, he's got pictures of Old Lander--lots of old 4th parades, the biggest event in Lander. I like one photo, from probably about the time the camera made it out here: A row of cowboys--and I mean, down-and-dirty, decked out real ones, with faded blue jeans (from work) matching the ghostly-looking, intense, faded-blue eyes--stand one-legged cocked, relaxing, watching the parade. One of them is looking quite intensely, almost angrily, at one of the people passing by in the parade. If you follow his eye gaze, you come to rest upon an Indian--a real one, decked out in the amazing soft-leather beaded outfit, with a strong and beautiful profile and long, black braids, and feathers aloft. He looks like he is part of the horse he is riding, and he sits tall and proud, as he passes the cowboys.

I've spent awhile looking at the Old-Timer ghosts in Mike's pictures before going in to talk about plumbing issues.

Inside the store--well, it looks more like a workshop sort of organized into shelves. This is a working place, not a store, really. Mike has put up signs around, like: "Got complants? Go to Helen Waite." As I wait for Mike, I look through his other funny cartoons pasted to the back of his computer; finally, here comes the Man. He is a big and warm bear with blue eyes and a square Scandinavian face. "How was Australia?" he guffaws, "Glad to be home?"

"Oh, yeah," I say, liking being home more because I just remembered there's lots of people here like Mike, who remember you, and who somehow remember that you left and went across the planet, and wonder why on earth you'd want to do that.

He says, "So, listen, I'll talk to Polly over there and we'll fix up that damn boiler. You know, it is cheaper in the end to do it once and do it right."

Mike's got lots of time-tested common-sensisms like that and I like each one.

Why are plumbers rulers of small towns? Well, it isn't just any plumber--the only other plumber in town seems to get a kick out of gouging people when Mike isn't available. Mike, himself, is someone who will go to bat for you with insurance adjusters and will do exactly what is needed, not more, not less. He's honest and kind, and plays a mean games of racquetball, too.

Mike and the Young Mikes see you, often, at your worst moments, when you've been fighting with sh-% for hours and they come and save you; and they are no luxury in a small town in the middle of nowhere when the temps can go down to 30 below, and you need that boiler working and the pipes unfrozen. You're absolutely dependent upon them at times, completely helpless. So, you see, you can't do the Big City "Oh I'll just shop around"--in a small town; you do well to know Mike and be as honest and courteous with him as he is with you.

Home owners know that plumbers know your house better than you do--Mike also knows about our house in the years before we owned it. "Oh, yeah, I remember that weird dual garage/laundry room heater in there..."

Plumbers also deal with the waste and the heat and the water, all very basic things to keep our home a home and not a cold sewage swamp. They are like priests, in a way...okay, don't try to lynch me yet, Catholics. Remember that Hanging Tree is gone?

How are plumbers like priests? Or priests like plumbers? I'm thinking of priests in the confessional; a plumber, like a priest, helps you deal with your waste, with your most basic need of keeping things moving and healthy and warm and all that. Spiritual growth, charity, grace flowing...

You need a plumber, like a priest, in your worst moments, when you're the most helpless...and it helps, more than that, it gives you hope when you find a plumber or a priest that you feel comfortable with, whose advice you trust.

Okay, I know they are different, too. I actually got this comparison from a great priest, who told me once, when I was a new Catholic, that being  a priest in the confessional is like being a sewer pipe. It showed me how difficult that vocation must be at times.

Mike At City Plumbing, along with his family, help keep Lander running and happy. So make sure you visit City Plumbing and look at the photos in the window if there's a sign on the door saying, "Back at---."

Small Town(s) Rule(s)

 

I now, once again, live in a small town. Not only do I live in a small town, but one that is almost a five-hour drive away from the nearest large city. Not with quite the isolation of Perth (1500 miles from any other city), yet it is an island of Cowboys, Native Americans, Granolas, and Academics in a sea of high desert and mountains. Culturally, this is still the Old West in some ways (a handshake is as good as a contract and lots of people 'carry'), but it is an interesting mix of various eccentric adventurers and just comfortingly regular people. One characteristic that seems to bind together this particular Old-New West town is an independent spirit. From the Native Americans who once roamed this land in search of white-tailed deer and buffalo, to the pioneers and cowboys who built the ranches and the town, to the outdoor adventurers and the college students, the one common trait is that love of 'getting out there and getting something done.' And in order to stay here, in Lander, and to be happy, you have to have some of that. There ain't no café navel-gazing culture here. Well, maybe a little. I kind of like that, to be honest.

The old Lander held Butch Cassidy in it's little makeshift jail in the late 1800s; Calamity Jane cracked her whip hereabouts, and as one Old-Timer told me once while sitting next to me on the Vomit Comet (the small plane out of nearby Riverton), "Lander was a fightin' town, with bars up and down the dirt of Main St." This Old-Timer called himself a "half-breed" (half Native American, half European) and he was a thin giant of a man, who could carry the ten-ton cowboy hat with the feather in it like the best of them. Like many Native Americans, he could almost speak to horses and once trained for Roy Rodgers; also a veteran of the tough oil fields in Wyoming, he now travels to Russia (and maybe Perth, come to think of it) to inspect oil rigs. If you saw him in person, you'd believe every word of it. He grew up in Lander and told me that Main St itself, only paved in the 1960s or 70s, was made quite wide (a four-lane road) simply because ranchers used to run the cattle right through town. Cattle don't walk in single-file lines except on cliff tracks. Also, I imagine Main St. got wide 'cause everyone wanted to build their stores and bars well away from the cow patties.

With the paved roads came NOLS, the National Outdoor Leadership School, an organization that really pioneered the concept and the value of outdoor education as a means towards strength and leadership.

This was actually the second culture-clash, after the original one with the Arapahoe and Shoshoni tribes whose shared reservation is nearby.

The Indian-White clash was here, as elsewhere, a painful tragedy. The Arapahoe and Shoshoni tribes do not have anything in common, but they were dumped together here; the present-day situation is a complex, painful reality that most people have never deciphered, but the reservation towns are places people generally stay away from. I visited a Catholic church once in Ethete, one of these towns, and met some of the elders of the tribe. They have a certain, un-explainable, ancient wisdom and a way of looking at life and religion that is both pure and also eclectic, in some cases a mixing of sweat-lodge mysticism with prayers to Our Lord. In them, you can see the ancient East in conversation with Western tradition. Most people on the reservations live in abject poverty, as if they are reluctant or unable to tame or cow the land under them, their trailers and tiny houses mongrel descendants of the teepees they once folded up when it was time to move to the next watering place. They seem to live floating just above the ground, in limbo between an ancient way and modern life; and it seems to create a vacuum of purpose for the young. Another acquaintance of ours has spent his life on the St. Stephen's Mission, an oasis of church and school, and he and his wife have--oh yes--one of the few buffalo (or bison, because there are no pure buffalo left) herds in the world. Ron told us as we fed these enormous creatures, "They only stay here because they want to. There isn't a fence that could hold them, and they can jump over anything they can get their chin on." St. Stephen's, with the buffalo herd and the eclectic Native-Christian murals on the walls, is a place you do feel for a moment, some hope, but I often wonder how the Native Americans themselves see hope for the future; it has always seemed that a people whose relationship to nature and movement with her movements is so crucial, yet are forced to live in the modern world of fences, simply have broken hearts.

The NOLS culture-clash was the meeting of progressive, more lefty-environmentalist types with people born from generations of pioneers who have spent their lives in hope of survival and planting trees, building and repairing fences and barns, shooting predators that threatened their very lives. NOLS is a major presence in town; they took over the old Noble Hotel on Main, and they have huge offices, dorms, classrooms, equipment-stocking buildings all over town. They bring in groups of strutting, excited youths ready for the challenge of survival in one of the last true wildernesses.

Then, in 2005 or so, Wyoming Catholic College was born. This has imported the academic into the mix, along with a huge influx of young Catholic families and students into an established parish, into a town that has many little churches of different denominations. As I've got to know both the academics and the wonderful parish people, I have been fascinated by the meeting of  Landerites and a bunch of mostly intense academics, and between generally older Catholics who had got used to a Vatican II style worship and those who are part of that phenomena in the Church, the young who yearn for the grandeur of the old.

Lander, I remember thinking quite early, is a happy town. People think up things and believe they can do them--in this, both NOLS and Wyoming Catholic College do fit here. Perhaps this is an inheritance from both the morally upright surviving Siberia-level harsh weather and the morally down-wrong bandits who suddenly found they could get away with major robbery. "Damn we're good" I can imagine them saying while racing across the tundra on horseback, when the reality was that there were a lot of hiding places and few lawmen. But moral buoyancy or not, still, like an echo of the adventuresome past, there is a buoyancy at each stoplight, as you wave to the at-least three friends you see on each trip downtown; the almost-year-round sunlight, intense high-altitude sun, probably adds to this. Even the yellow caution lights are ridiculously short-lived: Yes, Lander lives strictly in red-light and green-light mode. "Okay this stopped us. But let's get going now."

One of my favorite people here, a woman who has lived here all her life, was described by fellow townsfolk, when they gave her an award, as "The Most Relentlessly Positive Person We Know." That's saying a lot in Lander. And actually, it is true. She's got me to do things on horses that really, I had no business trying. But boy, once you've done it, and the incredibly tense-muscled beast slows back down to a walk, you look out over hundreds of miles, from the Sand Hills to the north, to Table Mountain to the south, and you feel more alive--and positive--than you've felt for ages. Once, I was riding, in that top-o-the-world mood, with a group led by Charlie Whitlock or Shetlock, or some such name, and he said, "Lirk ova thur--yuh kin see the Al Crick maowtins." I queried, quite innocently, "Who is Al Crick?"

"Naw, AWL CRICK."

"Okay."

"Naw, like the animul thit goes 'hoot'."

"Oh," it dawned on me, "Owl Creek."

"Yah."

You're probably, though, wondering about my new blog title. I really want to, without getting lynched (oh, good, the Hanging Tree which sat down by the current jail did finally come down a few years ago), talk about some of the underlying things in this little town, the 'rules.' These say a lot, especially the unspoken ones, about what people really believe, and how 'good fences make good neighbors.' Being in a small town is really more like going on a road trip with a group of people; you start to figure out how best to live with each other: and you can't be fakey for long, because everyone will soon see right through you, yet you can't just say whatever you're thinking, because that just ain't a good fence. So, here's what the title means:

1- Small Town Rule: Who really rules a small town? The City Council? Or perhaps it is much more subtle than that. Is it the Old Timer types who run the coffee Power breakfasts at the local inn, and who, in this way, curb all the young bucks?  In Oakdale, CA, another small town where I lived for awhile, the Power Breakfast was at the Busy Bee Café. Could it also be certain ladies who--somehow through mysterious means and various forms of hospitality and family connections-- influence everyone else, even those thinking they are at the Power Breakfast? A lady saying to another, "Let's have coffee" can very well be a political move in a small town, I imagine.

2-Small Towns Rule: After living in LA-style Sydney, and bits and pieces of Manhatten, and other cities and large urban areas, I've found that small towns have something essential to the human soul that you cannot have in a big urban area--unless, like in Manhatten, your neighborhood becomes your small town. I don't know what that essential element is yet, quite, but know it by intuition.

3- Small Town Rules: Every small town has unspoken rules. Here, in Lander, there's something called "Cowboy Ethics." And there are others that are just 'small town' and these are quite fun, really, and very useful once you know what they are. Just a taste: People seem to know what routes to take through town and through the aisles in the grocery stores so as to avoid lengthy catch-ups, if one is in a hurry--and if you happen to catch each other's eyes, and one smiles quickly and looks back intently at the beets, well, then, that's okay. Catch you another time.

Small Town(s) Rule(s).

The Last Word

Well, now that we're 'back again,' I suppose it is time to move on to another blog title. It will be called "Small Town(s) Rule(s)" and I am going to try and talk about life in a small town. Might not work, because in a small town in Wyoming, we all know way too much about each other already...but I'll try to walk that tightrope for a couple entries and see how it goes. I may get booted back across the Pacific. Maybe I can direct the booting and get across the Atlantic this time. Spain. Portugal. Night Train to Lisbon.

At any rate, I let the dust of Australia wash off me yesterday in the shower, and then over dinner Ana wanted to read to us her diary entry, "Going Home." I thought she should have the last words of this chapter, adventure, or what I call "20,000 Miles to Get a Toasted Sandwich Maker: or a Risk Gone South":

Going Home
by Anatolia

Nobody has the perfect life; everybody wants to appear happy but by doing so, end up taking away more and more of what happiness is. Happiness isn't charisma.

Through this whole journey, what has haunted me the most was not losing people, suffering, the hardships of this adventure, but rather the attitude that was a mask, something I encountered in myself and almost everyone else. I tried to grasp depth, but with the fear of lying to myself by listening to the testimonials of others, I slunk back into a hole of maturity, or the appearance of it. I easily become engrossed in stories, movies, and songs, so much so that I seek to become what so many other artists have sought to inspire.

So, being a searcher for deep and dramatic things, I wanted to come back to Lander as someone new and improved, a weathered adventurer who would not fear anything again. Some of this I did gain, but by trying too hard I lost what I most wanted to come back with--a free, selfless heart and the ability to be what God made me to be at the beginning. What I now know is I'm not alone; this goal is something that takes a whole lifetime and not even achieved then. Only when there is only God, like a song that envelops you completely, only then can God destroy you, what you thought was yourself, and bring you to life. I feel this desire, but I cannot trust Him when He puts me in the thick of it.

We've passed the Wyoming border sign. I will love going home with everything, even if those people I wish to be perfect, to love me perfectly, let me down and even if I let them down. If I continue in humility, it will destroy my pride. For this home of mine is not my home. But it is not separate from it. It is a part, more than that, in the timeless picture of God. It is a musical phrase that will lead on, creating the next; I will only catch glimpses of the tonal note, then it will die out, until harmony will put each piece of the journey together; the note that began it will resound forever.

In our adventure, I had so many countless prayers, but prayer is not really asking, it is receiving. Indeed God knows our prayers before we know them, and even in prayer that is confused and muddled, we are letting God fill a little more. Our prayers for Australia God knew, but it was a prayer that we did not know. In prayer we ask for what will make us happy, as if God has ignored our ideas and plans for happiness. No, we should ask for happiness--it is a sign of the willingness to receive; our asking must reflect God. Then the deepest desires will be gained through the loss of ourselves. In Australia, we lost our dogs, we lost the comfortable security of things functioning. I lost part of my childhood, the appearance of a family whose job will work, whose children will not experience hard things.

There is a lot of pride entwined with the attachment to simple securities and appearances of this world. But I did not hate or condemn myself for these vices. God longs to give Himself to crush this fear in me. Indeed, even Mom and Dad were angry at God and we lost some faith. Though many people have seen too much and others live too easily, too well, to believe, the losses of this dog-loving, pizza-eating, shouting, arguing family whose pride is constantly being destroyed, will be filled with more of God. We have scars, and battle wounds, good memories and a lot of tears, and this was God's way of fighting for us and crushing the deepest wounds inside us, fighting the monsters inside us, and finally freeing us.

To sum up the philosophical, theological and intellectual journeys we made, I would say something like what the Aussies might say: "Keep Calm and Love God."

Back Again

 

We left Huntsville, UT on a cool, rainy morning, well-fed with laughter and love: my cousin Cameron and his wife Ashley are magical people. Ashley is the daughter of the well-known sculptor, Bob Bennett, and is an artist in her own right. Her work, along with other Bennett work, hangs in a gallery in Carmel and she talks easily about lunch with Clint Eastwood, an old friend of her father's.

But Ashley is no star-struck lightweight. She carries deep personal tragedy along with her; after the event that nearly destroyed her, she fought for healing and wholeness, and now pours the depths within her, carved out by fire and water, out for others. Cameron is her perfect partner--a depth of understanding under a layer of silly fun.

Cameron and I laughed hysterically together, a moment jumping forward from our childhood. We talked about how we both rebelled, in our own ways, to the expectations of family, for both good and ill.

So full of love, we started our trek through impossibly high peaks rising again like giants out of the clouds: you drove along their feet and looked up at their heads. I was, inside, deeply grateful for the rain. For many months, I have been irrationally afraid of the drive through the sage sea, dry and endless, that is southwest Wyoming. But instead of burning sun, the water poured down on us like an overflow of grace; the road was a river and it almost ran us off the road with the force.

As we drove out of Farson (where they have big ice cream cones and not much else), and out of Eden (what? Steinbeck irony?), and into the expanse, we could see the Wind River Range, a spur of the Rockies, standing wreathed in cloud, blue-grey sentinels. The last time we traveled this road, on our way to Australia, it was laced with snow drifting across the cement.

The kids made up a homecoming song: a hybrid of Soundgarden's Rowing and some Christmas song. It is a tradition they keep up, and now their voices ring out strong and deep, adult voices instead of cute squeaks. They sang and looked for what they've been waiting for, for months of emotional struggle, of exile: Red Canyon, one of the beauty spots on this earth: a veritable rainbow of different colored rock and sky.

I prayed, as we drove through clouds on South Pass (7000 feet), that Red Canyon would be clear.

It was so fogged in that I couldn't see fifty feet ahead. I've never, in all our years here, seen fog like that in crystal Wyoming.

The kids, keyed up emotionally, went down fast. Ana wondered why on earth God didn't make it clear for them. I had no answer. Life, being the potter's clay, is the answer. Living with God, yielding ourselves to re-forming after mistakes, after disappointment, after success, is the answer.

But Lander waited.

"There's the Trautman ranch!!"

"Holy Rosary Church!!"

"Oh. McDonald's is still there. Oh well."

"Gannett Grill! Ace Hardware!"

And then, down Third Street to Mary Dean's. This place, how can I explain it? Not only is it beautiful, with flowers everywhere and 100-year-old cottonwoods rising out of green grass and a small creek running under little bridges, it holds so many moments of love: Tea with Mary Dean downstairs, hours in almost-heaven with the SOS girls, Mark Randall playing jazzy Christmas carols long ago, deep discussions over Dostoeyvski with the college ladies, talks with the freshmen college girls, the house full of children filming their first movie. There are also memories of pain, too: friends who once sat opposite in all their unique glory no longer there, no longer sharing friendship; times of tragedy when we sat staring, shocked, across the living room. It is the House of Memories.

Mary Dean took the Nomadic Kozinskis up to Cottonwood suite and I laid down in bed that night, thinking of a time, long ago, when once before God provided an earthly mansion n the midst of a certain kind of dependence and poverty, that of the nomad.

Long ago, I drove through the mountains of Virginia, lost in more ways than one. There was no room at my destination, a lonely place that I simply cannot describe. They told me, "Try down the road." Eleven pm. Lady in lobby.

"Well, we're full....except for the mansion. You can have that room for regular price."

It was a mansion, a true Virginia estate home. In my loneliness, I suddenly thought of the verse that Kenon's husband spoke of, the mansions God has in store for us; the ones He builds as opposed to the ones we struggle to gain.

Yes, God, lets Red Canyon be shrouded in fog, and more seriously, Gazans continue to die and leaders who hold people's lives in their hands try to make others in their own image--and destroy everything in the process. But, as I've heard from friends over and over, God also writes straight with crooked lines.

Over these last days, I've reunited with friends and am so grateful for every "We're so glad you're back." How much that means.

Father Dave asked the girls, "Okay. It was tough. What did you learn?"

Ana said, "What true Christianity means."

He replied, "Yes. And sometimes you have to go away to value what you have."

We are the clay; and God takes even our mistakes and makes them times of remolding. We can go ego-defense about our mis-adventure, or we can go claylike.

So, we're in God's mansion until we can get back into our house--and then we have to replace the boiler. Bummer.