A postmodern heretic's spiritual journey
It was a perfect New England summer day — breezy, about 85 degrees, gentle blue sky — so Carol and I decided to take a walk at Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge this afternoon.
Above: Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, Concord, Mass., looking north over the lower impoundment
Above: Northern Water Snake (Nerodia sipedon)
Above: Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), with unidentified pollinator
Yesterday evening in Oldwick, we saw a spectacular thundershower go through: sheets and waves of wind-blown rain, spectacular lightning right overhead, and through it all the fireflies rising out of the brilliant green grass.
Above: Oldwick, N.J.
There were a few showers this morning before we left New Jersey. By the time we were in Connecticut, the rain was coming down steadily. It was going to be a wet Independence Day in southern New England.
We arrived in Stow, Mass., at about four o’clock, just in time for an indoor picnic lunch with Carol’s dad and stepmom and some of their friends. After dinner, we tried to go for a walk in downtown Maynard, Mass.
Above: Maynard, Mass.
At first it was pleasant walking. We stopped in at a combined video rental and used book store, called “Movie Signals and Art Signals,” that was open on Independence Day. They had more customers than I would have thought; but then, what else are you going to do on a rainy Fourth of July? — you’re certainly not going to go watch fireworks. We stayed for a while, then tried to keep walking, but the rain was coming down even harder, and my pants were soaked through and my rain coat started to leak — Carol was fine under her umbrella — so we gave up and went home.
E and her sweetheart and Carol and I spent the morning in Lambertville, New Jersey, a town where people have front porches that come right to the edge of the sidewalk. Some of the porches feature interesting decorations; one porch featured a collection of plastic dinosaur and dragon toys.
Above: Lambertville, New Jersey
Then we went to Grounds for Sculpture, a sculpture park in Hamilton, N.J. Not only did we see some very fine work by a wide range of contemporary artists, but I felt the grounds were particularly well-designed to display sculpture.
Above two photographs: Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, N.J.
We were also able to get a brief tour of the Johnson Atelier, a sculpture foundry next door to Grounds for Sculpture. I once worked for a sculptor who cast work at the Johnson Atelier, but I wasn’t part of the in-crowd so I never got to go along when he was casting work there. The Johnson Atelier no longer pours molten metal, but they do everything else involved in the founding process: enlarging, mold-making, chasing and finishing, applying patina, etc.
The Johnson Atelier leases part of their space to the Digital Atelier. They do highly accurate laser scans of three dimensional objects, modify the scans as necessary in CAD software (enlarging, fixing problems, etc.), then produce a 3-D product in foam (which can then be cast in bronze or another metal) or wood using a CNC milling machine. I asked the man who gave us the tour of the Digital Atelier about 3D printing, and he said 3D printers could not yet work at the large scale they needed, he was watching the technology closely.
The technology of sculpture has come a long way since I worked for the sculptor.
Most of the middle of the continent is empty enough that driving can be a pleasure: you can actually look at the scenery without having to worry about looking out for other cars. But today, we drove through the northeastern U.S. megalopolis: one big city after another, the roads always full of cars, I had to concentrate all my attention on driving. But when we pulled in to one rest area along the New Jersey Turnpike, my friend E and I both pulled out our cameras to take a photo of the rest area building painted bright red and vivid green, with a tall greenish water tower behind it, and fluffy white clouds floating in a bright blue sky above.
We left Asheville and drove up over the Appalachian Mountains along Interstate 26, passing through Sam’s Gap at 3,760 feet above sea level. We stopped at a “Scenic Overlook” along the highway, and looked back at the Great Smoky Mountains, mysterious and blue behind us.
The peaks around us were obscured by low drifting clouds. “They shouldn’t be called the Great Smoky Mountains,” Carol said. “They should call them the Misty Mountains.” I agreed.
The rest of the drive to Alexandria wasn’t particularly notable: we just drove through Western Virginia, turned east, and watched as the population density crept up and up, until at last we were in Alexandria. We sat up late talking with a college friend of Carol’s who works for Pew Charitable Trust, doing research on American religion. He said that Pew Charitable Trust, which has long been known for its helpful mix of quantitative and qualitative research, will be de-emphasizing qualitative research and focusing almost exclusively on quantitative research. I told him why I thought that was a bad idea, and he wisely did not engage with me. Instead, he and Carol talked about old college friends while his wife and I listened and enjoyed their stories.
Carol went off to visit her co-author Dave, while i wandered around downtown Asheville. I liked Malaprops bookstore, and I liked the public library (which has a good used bookstore), but the rest of downtown Asheville seemed to me to be dominated by two kinds of people: white middle-aged and overweight tourists who lumbered from gourmet restaurant to fancy gift shop, and white twenty-somethings who asserted their individuality in anxiously loud voices.
Carol picked me up, and we began to drive back to our motel when we saw a huge garden, half an acre or more, in front of Grace Covenant Community Church, Presbyterian Church USA. We decided to stop and walk through the garden.
Above: Community Garden at Grace Covenant Church PC-USA, Asheville, N.C.
We saw tomatoes, squash, beans. A woman who was also walking around stopped Carol and said, “What is that?” Carol looked and said, “I think it’s watermelon — something in the squash family, probably a melon.” We asked her if she were part of the church, but she said, “No, i just love looking at this garden, and since I had a few free minutes, I thought I’d walk around in it.”
I went in and asked in the office about the garden. Leah, one of the church staff members, told me that seventy percent of the harvest goes to alleviate food insecurity in the region. It is a cooperative project with church members, and members of the wider community. She gave me the email address of someone who was instrumental in making the garden happen.
Just outside the church office was a “World Garden,” a demonstration garden showing tire gardens and bag gardens to grow a lot of food in small spaces.
Above: “World Garden” at Grace Covenant Church PC-USA, Asheville, N.C.
We made one more stop before we went back to the motor court for dinner: the giant Goodwill store in Asheville. We skipped the furniture outlet and went in the retail side. I looked at their used books while Carol shopped for t-shirts. They had an eclectic mix of books: a book on choral conducting, several copies of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, a book about schnauzers, a children’s book of train stories which I had read as a child; I bought a cheap science fiction paperback.
Above: Interior of Goodwill retail store, 16161 Patton Ave., Asheville, N.C.
Yesterday evening and this morning we had to complete some necessary tasks — do the laundry, get the oil changed in the car, and so on. We grabbed a quick and unexciting lunch in a fast food place in Alpharetta, then started driving north.
Pretty soon we were in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the highest mountains in North America east of the Mississippi River. Compared to the mountains in California, these are not high mountains — the highest is Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina, at 6,684 feet — but they are just as beautiful. Perhaps they are more beautiful, because they are greener and shaped in more interesting ways by glaciers, and because the air here has more moisture which lends a mysterious bluish cast to objects in the distance, and because the weather is more variable at any season, with passing sunshine and rain showers and thunder showers and mist and fog in the summer, and snow and sleet and hail and hail and freezing rain and even occasional sunshine at other times of the year. And as a result of all that variable precipitation, everything is so brilliantly green.
Above: the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, from U.S. 23
After driving through thunder and lightning and showers and downpours and sunshine on winding and sometimes steep mountain highways, we arrived in Asheville, N.C., where we are staying in a 1930s-era motor court, where each of the bedrooms is a little log cabin — not a conventionally-framed building with fake log cabin siding, but an actual log cabin. When you stay in an actual log cabin, the first thing you want to do is get out your guitar and sit in the rocking chair on the front porch, and play a little something while you rock back and forth.
But it looked like it was going to rain, so we walked down to the Bavarian restaurant at the entrance to the motor court, and had some gourmet turkey bratwurst.
A little before ten this morning, Carol dropped me off at Big Creek Primitive Baptist Church in Alpharetta, Georgia. The church has been engulfed by upscale suburban sprawl — office parks, gated communities, tasteful shopping malls, impeccably maintained four-lane roads — but once you get on the church grounds, you enter into a different cultural landscape. The church, a plain and attractive brick building, is surrounded on two sides by moss-covered gravel parking areas shaded by trees; quite a few cars were already nestled in shady parking spots. Behind the church was a cemetery with quite a few older gravestones, and some gravestones that looked very new.
Above: Big Creek Primitive Baptist Church, Alpharetta, Ga.
Inside, the church was quite plain, as you’d expect in a Primitive Baptist Church: little ornamentation, plain white walls, simple but attractive pews — and no musical instruments. Fifty or so singers were gathered up at the front of the church. I went to sit in the bass section, and noticed that in the hymnal racks on the backs of the pews were hymnals, Bibles, and fans in case it got too hot. I opened up my copy of The Sacred Harp, and got ready to sing.
The singing, the 146th session of the annual Union Musical Sacred Harp Singing Convention, belonged to this other cultural landscape, removed from the gated communities and office parks. It’s music that’s meant to be performed and shared, not consumed; it’s a democratic musical tradition where everyone sings, and anyone can lead a tune if they want to. The singing rose up into that plain white sun-washed church, loud and triumphant. It had that old-time lonesome sound that lets you know that in spite of all the sorrow and troubles we face, God is in heaven and all is right with the world.
Above: View from the bass section, 146th session of the Union Musical Sacred Harp Singing Convention
A seven year old girl got up to lead “Africa,” an old Isaac Watts hymn — a hymn seems to me to express a Universalist theology of hope and assurance — set to music by William Billings in the late eighteenth century. Between the words to the hymn and that self-possessed girl leading the other singers so well, I got a little choked up and couldn’t sing for a bit, and maybe there were some tears running down my cheeks.
Lunch was served in the time-honored custom of dinner-on-the-grounds. There was a small kitchen building behind the church. Extending from that was a long table, perhaps fifty feet long, built on concrete blocks. Everyone who had brought food to share laid it out on this long table. Over the table was a roof to keep the sun and rain showers off, and between the posts holding up the roof were boards set at a height where you could put your plate while you stood and ate and talked with everyone around you. The woods stood near at hand, and some people from the church instructed us to through any food that was left on our plates out to the varmints in the woods.
Carol had come to the singing by now, and we got our dinners: ham, pulled pork, collard greens, fried okra, perfectly ripe cantaloupe, broccoli casserole, and some of the best layer cake I’ve ever eaten. We stood and ate and talked. I talked with Henry from Alabama, with whom I talked universalist theology. I talked with Nathan, an art historian who’s moving to North Dakota, who specializes in spiritual painters in the southwestern U.S. in the early 20th century. We talked with Shawn and Natalie, who live in Melbourne, Australia, and who sing Sacred harp there. I can’t remember who all we talked with.
The singing was just as good in the afternoon session, if not a little better. During the afternoon break, I got involved in a brief and somewhat technical discussion with a couple of fourth- or fifth- or maybe sixth-generation Sacred Harp singers on the proper tempo for “David’s Lamentation,” a William Billings composition. The piece has become a standard in the repertoire of college choirs, where it is often sung at a slow tempo, and apparently some people have tried leading it slowly at Sacred Harp singings. But the three of us all agreed it should be led at a fast pace (not that my opinion counts), which is both the traditional way to sing it in the South (and not coincidentally, the way Billings clearly preferred it to be sung).
The singing ended. Jeff offered to give me a ride back to the motel. We pulled out of the parking lot, leaving behind a cultural landscape devoted to shared experience, democratic traditions, and matters of the spirit, and re-entered a cultural landscape dominated by consumption and competition.
We planned to meet Carol’s cousin for dinner; that left us with the rest of the day to spend in Montgomery.
We went to the Rosa Parks Museum and Library, which is part of Troy University in Montgomery. The museum has a well-designed exhibit that tells the story of the Montgomery bus boycott through artifacts and creative audio-visual displays. The audiovisual presentation on Rosa Parks’s refusal to get out of her seat on the bus was especially good: it told and showed enough so you could follow along even if you didn’t know much about Rosa parks, but it left enough not told and not shown so you recreate the story in your imagination, which is what really makes it come alive.
Out in front of the museum is a historical marker that reads:
“At the bus stop on this site on December 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to boarding whites. This brought about her arrest, conviction, and fine….”
There isn’t much except the marker to remind you of 1950s Montgomery: there’s no longer a bust stop, the sidewalks are different, all that’s there is that historical marker with some words on it.
I wanted to walk up towards the Capitol building to see the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, and Carol was willing to go along. You couldn’t get near the church; the whole city block was closed to pedestrian traffic because Oprah Winfrey was filming her movie “Selma.”
A couple of white guys with cameras were standing there talking. “Last night they let me walk up to the church,” one of them said. He had a fancy-looking digital single lens reflex camera on a monopod. “They changed the name on the church to the original name” — that is, to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church — “and on the sign board it said, ‘Sunday morning, Dr. Martin L. King preaching.’ I got some good shots of that. But now they’re not letting anyone in.”
Small buses rolled in regularly. Extras in 1950s-era clothing walked from each bus into the Dexter Avenue Baptist church. A middle-aged black woman came up and cheerfully asked when Oprah was going to show up. Someone said she was going to be there at 5:30. We hadn’t seen any stars; all we had seen were extras.
I got to talking with the man with camera on the monopod. He pointed out his church, in the next block down, the River City Methodist Church. He said that they had gotten down to four members, when the bishop stepped in and settled a dynamic young pastor there. This pastor, said my friend, got rid of the organ music, brought in a praise band, started a thrift store, reached out to the homeless population in downtown Montgomery, and in less than a year had gotten the membership up to 65 people. My friend with the camera was the drummer in the praise band. “We’re Methodist in name only,” he said. “I was a Baptist, but they chased out the pastor of my church, just when River City Church was looking for a drummer. My sound guy used to be a Pentecostal, and I’ll look out when I’m playing and he’s there with his arms in the air. We’re from all different backgrounds. Our pastor says, ‘Church is not inside this building, church is out there, everywhere.'”
We left Montgomery to visit Catherine Coleman Flowers, someone Carol had met through her work in ecological wastewater management. Catherine was born in Lowndes County, Alabama, one of the poorest counties in the state, and is now the executive director of Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise (ACRE), a non-profit devoted to environmental justice. Catherine told us about a study recently conducted by ACRE that discovered evidence of hookworm in close to half of the stool samples they tested. This is a remarkable study because hookworm was supposedly eradicated from the United States in the early twentieth century. Yet people who live in poverty in rural areas may not be able to afford to install adequate wastewater management systems.
Plus, because of global climate change, Catherine believes that hookworm may find the South a more congenial place to live these days. Here is a serious issue linked to global climate change that cannot be solved through installing solar panels and purchasing fuel efficient cars — the solution will involve a combination of economic justice, economic development, and ecological justice involving decentralized wastewater management solutions.
If Rosa Parks were alive today, I’ll bet she’d be involved in environmental justice.
Before we left Russellville, Carol wanted to stop in and check out Jim and Ed’s Old House, which was a sort of cross between an antique store and a thrift store down the street from the motel. One of the proprietors — I never did learn whether it was Jim or Ed — greeted us cheerfully and told us to look around, and to be sure to ask him if we had any questions.
After we looked around a bit, he remarked on my height: “You’re taller than I am,” he said. “How tall are you?” said Carol. She had to repeat her question a couple of times before he could hear her. “Six one,” he said. Carol pointed to me, said, “Six five,” and held up six fingers, then five fingers. He smiled and nodded. I said my height came from my German roots, and asked him if he had any German in him. “No,” he said, “no German in me. But I’m part Indian.” “Which tribe?” I said. “Cherokee,” he said, as if there were no other possibility. “And they’re tall?” I said. “Oh yes,” he said.
He showed us around the house, and told us how they were going to pull down this wall, remove the kitchen, and greatly expand the space they had to show their merchandise. Carol finally bought a little pitcher in the shape of sweet corn. But we kept right on talking, and it took about ten minutes to say good bye, and another five to actually get out the door.
We ate lunch at the Panda Buffet in Lonoke, Arkansas. Carol went into a thrift shop while I walked around town. The malls along the interstate have sucked much of the life out of the old downtown, but the county courthouse and its attendant law offices mean that there are enough people to support a few restaurants and small businesses, a used book store, and even a storefront church. I was disappointed that the used book store had closed for the day. But then I came across a Tudor Revival wood frame church building, a once beautiful building now in sad disrepair. It stood a block from the old depot building, nicely sited on the corner of Second and Depot streets, a building with a definite character and personality.
(A little research on the Web tonight reveals that the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and that it even has its own Facebook page.)
I couldn’t help comparing First Christian Church to the storefront church a block or two away. Storefront churches avoid the expense and hassle of maintaining their own building, but there is no beauty or character in their architecture.
As we drove through Mississippi, I was amazed by how incredibly green everything was. And how wet everything was — the air was humid, we hit little rainshowers throughout the day, and in some of the fields there was even standing water. California never feels this green, or this wet, not even in the depths of the winter rainy season.
We stopped for coffee in Potts Camp, Mississippi, and wound up at Flick’s Country Restaurant. Carol got to talking to a couple of older white men at the table next to ours. One of them left not long after we sat down, but the other stayed and talked with us for some time. He had been a pilot in the military, flying MD-11s, and also had a private pilot license, although, as he said, “The doctors don’t let me fly any more.”
He asked where we had come from, and we told him, and he wondered what brought us to the South. Carol said we were visiting a cousin of hers in Montgomery. I asked him if he had ever heard of Sacred Harp singing. “Oh, yes,” he said, “my grandparents used to have a singing [I think he said at their church]. People used to come from a hundred fifty, two hundred miles around to sing.” I told him I was going to a Sacred Harp singing in Alpharetta, Georgia.
He told us about Flick’s Country Restaurant, and nodded at the next table over, where an elderly man sat with three other people. “That’s old Mr. Flick himself,” he said. “No longer runs the restaurant, but there’s his picture there on the wall.” The photograph he pointed out was clearly of the same man, perhaps forty years younger, with a hair style from the early 1960s.
We said we had better get on the road again; we had to make it to Montgomery tonight. “You’d better start driving,” he said, and shook both our hands before we set off.