“I forgot how much I hate people with opinions.”
My friend and I were quietly leaving a book reading last Tuesday night and those were his parting words. From what I could tell, the author in question had spent the previous night at the Donnybrook, that Canaan of Catholicism, and he had supped richly on the milk and honey. His poems were clean and his credentials were real, but his subject was indecipherable from his religious dogmas. He had a message. It was awfully specific.
Like any good, aspiring reactionary, I’m pushing violently against this: thus my decision to write an opinions column without an opinion to speak of (I thought it was clever).
Granted, I came to this decision while feeling tragic and listening to the National, so there’s no telling where this could go. Perhaps this is indulgent. It is likely self-serving. And I could go on like this forever, reflections heaped upon reflections. But let me say what I need to say: this is the story of my summer 2012 told in weekly installments.
May 26th found me in a white van with screaming Malaysian girls, a couple of ex-convicts talking “strategy in the back”, and a four hundred pound woman cuddling a double-double from In-N-Out. I sat with Natalie, a cross-eyed, illegal immigrant who had convinced herself that our destination was an amusement park.
Months earlier, I had sold my summer to Spencer, a middle-aged Executive Director of a Christian ministry that did not have a website but claimed to send students to National Parks with the opportunity to “get back to the basics like the Pilgrims and worship in the great outdoors!”
When I received this message, the words were printed on a soiled pamphlet that featured a silver-haired Spenser kneeling on Astroturf, clutching a blistered canteen, and offering an enormous smile with his right thumb pointing over his left shoulder. Behind him rose the pixilated outline of a photo-shopped mountain that could only have been found by typing, “cool mountain” into the Google search bar.
Needless to say, I applied immediately. One month later Spencer’s outrageous face appeared in my inbox: “Mount Whitney is calling! Will you heed the call?” Things were about to get spiritual and I was on board.
My Catholic mother who had graduated as the valedictorian from a New England university, home schooled six children, and worked as a professor of English literature, told me that I was not leaving for California. My Baptist father who had dropped out of a New England college, joined the Air Force, and raced dirt bikes professionally, thought it a hilariously good idea. Ultimately, Spencer’s “good word” carried me from New Hampshire to a van rasping towards Sequoia National Park. At nineteen, I was getting “back to the basics.”
As we moved up and through the darkening San Joaquin valley on the 198, I was trying to cultivate my habit of contemplation as Natalie absolutely massacred “Some Nights” by Fun. I thought of Job and Pieper’s Philosophical Act, wondering about loneliness as leading to a discovery of self and considering suffering as fundamentally pedagogical. I thought of the letters I might write home, the eloquence my voice would assume as I spoke of the knuckles of the redwood trees appearing as coals pressed against the lips of a breathing earth. I was in top form; the National played through my headphones.
I considered all this as the double-double woman began to poke me with a French fry. Really, it was more like a stroke as the wilted potato dripped wet and soft against my hand. She demanded my attention like a hungry child, and when she got it she attacked it.
“How do you feel about maids not changing bed sheets between customers? Where are you from? Do you know my Cousin? Are you gay? You look like my nephew. Are you from a temp agency? Are you a missionary?”
Perhaps it was my sullen, moralistic answers that gave it away, but she began to inform my co-workers that, “Oh Lord Jesus, this boy is a Christian.”
These were my people.
