Thursday, May 19, 2005
The Only Eden I'll Ever Know
My friend, Johnny, owns a flatbed 2-ton Chevy. He inherited it from his father who owned a farm. It’s a beat-up work truck with a misaligned door. The first time I traveled to the trash dump with him, I climbed in and attempted to close it, and he shouted, “Slam her good.” And I did.
The flatbed was full of junk we cleaned out of a storage room at the church where I was the pastor for a few years. He’s the head custodian at my daughter’s high school. He wears shorts and tennis shoes to work in the summer and fills a pair of overalls in the winter. He stands about six-foot-three-inches. His frame is large, give or take a few hamburgers.
Johnny loves to make nose jokes, and I love to slam him in sermons, but now I can only do it here. One Sunday at church he put a picture of a goat with my face on the big screen in the sanctuary. He thought it was so funny when he would randomly throw it up on the screen. We had these kinds of times. And on our way to the trash dump we looked like a giant belly and a big nose in a 2-ton Chevy.
Johnny loves 70’s classic rock. He gets in a classic rock battle with my brother, who calls himself The Last John Wayne in This Town. They fight over who can post the most quotes from classic rock songs on our ESPN NASCAR Challenge fantasy game bulletin board.
Both of them listen to classic rock as if it is the latest band fresh out of the LA club scene. But the radio doesn’t work in the flatbed, so Johnny rattles on and on like the 2-ton Chevy when it gets up to 50mph.
We decided the 2-ton flatbed Chevy would be easier to use for a hayride during our church’s fall festival. It beat having to secure a wagon and a tractor. I know it’s not the same, but it worked, especially when the pastor posted a few teenagers disguised as ghouls in the dark woods at the edge of a sweeping bend in the Tennessee River backwater.
The road in front of the church dead-ends into a wildlife refuge. It has that eerie feel to it. The teenagers really got into scaring the kids. They wore masks and everything.
The flatbed hayride became a tradition each year at the festival. We placed a few bales of hay around the edges, leaving a center aisle so the kids and a few adults could climb aboard, and face one another as Johnny and I got up front. “Slam it hard,” he reminded me. It took two slams of the passenger door.
He had a captive audience and he talked while I did the pastoral worrying about who might fall off the flatbed, about who needed to sit down, not taking into consideration the nightmares they’d have for the rest of their lives.
I heard “Don’t scare us!” and “You can’t scare me!” phrases being tossed out like cans into the ditch. Then the road turned to gravel. Johnny double clutched it and put the flatbed in granny-gear.
The Chevy motor whined and valves slapped inside the cylinder heads. The Halloween moon reflected on the slow churning muddy Tennessee River backwater that hid 100-pound catfish in its guts. So they say.
Then the teenagers jumped from the dark woods on each side of the narrow gravel road. Screams as sharp as fishing knives and laughs as large as catfish bellowed and boiled to the top of the night where the Halloween moon sat like a candle in a jack-o-lantern.
Most of the kids on the flatbed had attended two or three fall festivals. They knew what was going to happen. They knew the gravel road. They knew the teenagers were hiding in the dark forest. They knew they would jump out to scare them, but the knowledge of all this does not keep them from being afraid.
Fear never leaves us. It only changes the face of things. We don’t hitchhike because Ted Bundy-like killers hide in the dark recesses of automobiles and trucks. We no longer talk about the mountain, Big Sur, as the blackness we desire. We no longer pickup hitchhikers. This America has vanished.
Whatever happened to the Kerouacian vision of America with the roadmap across her face? Whatever happened to the America who knew the boundaries of her soul? Now the sweetness has become a shiner.
But there was an era (1943-1958) when Jack Kerouac (On the Road) hitchhiked all over America without a care. Two young blond farmers from Minnesota driving a flatbed truck picked up every single soul they found on the road—Montana Slim, Mississippi Gene, who was a little dark guy who rode freight trains around the country, two young farmer boys from North Dakota in red baseball caps, two high school football players from Columbus, Ohio, chewing gum and singing in the breeze. Then Sal Paradise, the hitchhiker on America’s soul (Kerouac's autobiographical character).
Kerouac calls it “the greatest ride in my life.” And I’d’ve given anything to be on that flatbed, as they zoomed across Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Utah desert. They were all after the essence of what America was once.
Flatbed trucks loaded down with lovers of the open road are gone now. We have to read Kerouac’s novels to find the sweet soul of America between New York City and San Francisco.
But in the flatbed 2-ton Chevy during the fall festivals, I pretended I was one of the boys from Minnesota upfront in the cab and Kerouac was in the back.
I thought about the sweet America that was young and innocent once, as we zoomed past stark cornfields and through low hanging trees that thinned to the sky on our way to a wildlife refuge.
I thought about Kerouac’s ride on the flatbed. I thought about the teenagers behind their masks in the dark woods, while Johnny ground through the gears.
I thought maybe I’d rediscovered the soul of America, but then I remembered the dark forest of my own heart. And what I fear is the part of me that wants to jump out wearing a mask. We can pretend and look so good for others or seem too crazy for some.
We can never become what others want us to be without losing our soul. To remain authentic is the hardest part of living. We can serve all the wrong things. This much is true. And innocence is the essence we seek. It’s the return to the garden, to what we lost there. But no open road leads to Eden.
Maybe this is why Kerouac’s America vanished. We finally realized freedom begins within. Freedom is a Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17).
This is what I seek. This is what I long for. The only Eden I’ll ever know in this world.
www.stofel.com
The flatbed was full of junk we cleaned out of a storage room at the church where I was the pastor for a few years. He’s the head custodian at my daughter’s high school. He wears shorts and tennis shoes to work in the summer and fills a pair of overalls in the winter. He stands about six-foot-three-inches. His frame is large, give or take a few hamburgers.
Johnny loves to make nose jokes, and I love to slam him in sermons, but now I can only do it here. One Sunday at church he put a picture of a goat with my face on the big screen in the sanctuary. He thought it was so funny when he would randomly throw it up on the screen. We had these kinds of times. And on our way to the trash dump we looked like a giant belly and a big nose in a 2-ton Chevy.
Johnny loves 70’s classic rock. He gets in a classic rock battle with my brother, who calls himself The Last John Wayne in This Town. They fight over who can post the most quotes from classic rock songs on our ESPN NASCAR Challenge fantasy game bulletin board.
Both of them listen to classic rock as if it is the latest band fresh out of the LA club scene. But the radio doesn’t work in the flatbed, so Johnny rattles on and on like the 2-ton Chevy when it gets up to 50mph.
We decided the 2-ton flatbed Chevy would be easier to use for a hayride during our church’s fall festival. It beat having to secure a wagon and a tractor. I know it’s not the same, but it worked, especially when the pastor posted a few teenagers disguised as ghouls in the dark woods at the edge of a sweeping bend in the Tennessee River backwater.
The road in front of the church dead-ends into a wildlife refuge. It has that eerie feel to it. The teenagers really got into scaring the kids. They wore masks and everything.
The flatbed hayride became a tradition each year at the festival. We placed a few bales of hay around the edges, leaving a center aisle so the kids and a few adults could climb aboard, and face one another as Johnny and I got up front. “Slam it hard,” he reminded me. It took two slams of the passenger door.
He had a captive audience and he talked while I did the pastoral worrying about who might fall off the flatbed, about who needed to sit down, not taking into consideration the nightmares they’d have for the rest of their lives.
I heard “Don’t scare us!” and “You can’t scare me!” phrases being tossed out like cans into the ditch. Then the road turned to gravel. Johnny double clutched it and put the flatbed in granny-gear.
The Chevy motor whined and valves slapped inside the cylinder heads. The Halloween moon reflected on the slow churning muddy Tennessee River backwater that hid 100-pound catfish in its guts. So they say.
Then the teenagers jumped from the dark woods on each side of the narrow gravel road. Screams as sharp as fishing knives and laughs as large as catfish bellowed and boiled to the top of the night where the Halloween moon sat like a candle in a jack-o-lantern.
Most of the kids on the flatbed had attended two or three fall festivals. They knew what was going to happen. They knew the gravel road. They knew the teenagers were hiding in the dark forest. They knew they would jump out to scare them, but the knowledge of all this does not keep them from being afraid.
Fear never leaves us. It only changes the face of things. We don’t hitchhike because Ted Bundy-like killers hide in the dark recesses of automobiles and trucks. We no longer talk about the mountain, Big Sur, as the blackness we desire. We no longer pickup hitchhikers. This America has vanished.
Whatever happened to the Kerouacian vision of America with the roadmap across her face? Whatever happened to the America who knew the boundaries of her soul? Now the sweetness has become a shiner.
But there was an era (1943-1958) when Jack Kerouac (On the Road) hitchhiked all over America without a care. Two young blond farmers from Minnesota driving a flatbed truck picked up every single soul they found on the road—Montana Slim, Mississippi Gene, who was a little dark guy who rode freight trains around the country, two young farmer boys from North Dakota in red baseball caps, two high school football players from Columbus, Ohio, chewing gum and singing in the breeze. Then Sal Paradise, the hitchhiker on America’s soul (Kerouac's autobiographical character).
Kerouac calls it “the greatest ride in my life.” And I’d’ve given anything to be on that flatbed, as they zoomed across Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Utah desert. They were all after the essence of what America was once.
Flatbed trucks loaded down with lovers of the open road are gone now. We have to read Kerouac’s novels to find the sweet soul of America between New York City and San Francisco.
But in the flatbed 2-ton Chevy during the fall festivals, I pretended I was one of the boys from Minnesota upfront in the cab and Kerouac was in the back.
I thought about the sweet America that was young and innocent once, as we zoomed past stark cornfields and through low hanging trees that thinned to the sky on our way to a wildlife refuge.
I thought about Kerouac’s ride on the flatbed. I thought about the teenagers behind their masks in the dark woods, while Johnny ground through the gears.
I thought maybe I’d rediscovered the soul of America, but then I remembered the dark forest of my own heart. And what I fear is the part of me that wants to jump out wearing a mask. We can pretend and look so good for others or seem too crazy for some.
We can never become what others want us to be without losing our soul. To remain authentic is the hardest part of living. We can serve all the wrong things. This much is true. And innocence is the essence we seek. It’s the return to the garden, to what we lost there. But no open road leads to Eden.
Maybe this is why Kerouac’s America vanished. We finally realized freedom begins within. Freedom is a Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17).
This is what I seek. This is what I long for. The only Eden I’ll ever know in this world.
www.stofel.com
© 2007 by Robert Stofel