Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  The next week Dr. Kielbowicz was waiting outside the conference room when I arrived. “Hey, don’t look so scared,” he said. “You’re ready.”

  We walked into the stuffy room, and I took my place at the huge rectangular table opposite five stern faces. My mind raced, memorizing every detail of my surroundings: the bowl shaped cover over the huge ceiling light, the glass bookshelf filled with communications theory journals that ran the length of the wall, the plum colored coffee mug next to Dr. Pember, Dr. Bassett’s unruly eyebrows sprouting out like a jumble of spider legs, Dr. Kielbowicz’s frozen half smile.

  For almost two hours the committee grilled me on the details of Roosevelt’s life and his relationship with the press. They asked about turn-of-the-century economic and social conditions, the history of modern journalism, and the Progressive movement. When I answered those questions, they broadened the circle to William McKinley and William Taft, the Spanish-American War, and the railroads. I felt sweat drops forming on my forehead, yet in a strange rush of masochistic madness, I was relishing the inquisition. After spending two years immersed in the world of the rough riding, trust busting Roosevelt, I was going to share what I had learned with anyone who was interested. As the inquiry wound down, Dr. Pember raised his index finger. The professor was infamous for coming up with one last question, typically one that the battered graduate student could not answer. Legend held that he combed the literature of your subject and almost always discovered one obscure theory you couldn’t address. No one ever failed the defense because of it—it was just to let you know that you weren’t such a smarty-pants after all. When Pember opened his mouth, the committee knew my time was at hand.

  “What name did Roosevelt give his foreign policy and why? Then give me an example of how he carried this philosophy out.”

  Dr. Kielbowicz’s jaw tightened, and he looked down. Luckily I had just finished The Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter’s superb treatment of T.R.’s international relations. Taking a deep breath, I waded in. I explained Roosevelt’s Jackson-Lincoln theory of the presidency—that he demanded absolute prerogative to make independent decisions concerning foreign policy. I gave examples from 1905, 1906, and 1907, when Roosevelt single-handedly ratified the Santo Domingo Agreement, Root-Takahira Agreement, and Gentlemen’s Agreement without the approval of Congress. As I spoke, I saw the lines in Dr. Kielbowicz’s face loosen. When I stopped, he looked up at me and smiled.

  The graduate committee recommended that I continue in the department and do a PhD on the subject. Although I felt proud of my thesis defense, I also realized that there was plenty about Teddy Roosevelt that I didn’t know, and that my ability to answer Dr. Pember’s question was luck, pure and simple. I’d jammed my head full of information but still knew only snippets of the T.R. story. The true value of my education was that I had learned enough to know how little I really knew. My time in college had given me the tools to investigate, to attempt to seek knowledge with an open but critical mind, yet also the perspective to know that no matter what the subject, I would never possess all the pieces to any particular puzzle.

  On a sun filled morning in June 1995, my parents and my sister, Melanie, arrived from Montana to attend my graduation. Dan and his wife, Mary, came as well, having just returned from leading a Christian tour though the Holy Land. As I put on my blue robe, the kids gathered around me. They laughed and hugged me, and Jason said, “Mom, your ears stick out from that weird hat. Let’s tuck them in.”

  That afternoon my graduate school pals and I gathered outside Hec Edmundson Pavilion in our bright robes and cords. There was a disturbance above us like a sudden rainsquall, and we looked up to see a flock of birds lighting in the cherry tree overhead, quick and random in their movements, skipping delicately from branch to branch, trading places—a mass of shimmering gray with here and there a glint of gold, a flash of scarlet. We could hear them at it, a continuous winged rustling like the tuneless murmur of crickets in tall grass. Their sheen was bright and lustrous against the afternoon sun, and then suddenly they were up and away in a flurry, dissolving into thin air on a fading burst of skittering wings, as we soon would be, dispersed across the nation.

  A flood of happiness overwhelmed me, and I bit my lip to fight back the lump of emotion lodged in my throat as the University of Washington Wind Ensemble started “Pomp and Circumstance” and we were ushered to start our march inside. Tom Brokaw spoke to us about the importance of education and what we’d all accomplished, and once his commencement address was finished we stood to receive our degrees. Dr. Dale Johnson, dean of the graduate school, took the stage, and when he called my name out over the loudspeaker, I suddenly remembered the times in the welfare office when I had been ashamed to hear it. Thank God those days are over, I thought. This is my new start.

  Fourteen

  Going Home

  DURING THE LAST QUARTER of graduate school I began working as an academic counselor at the university. After years of learning how to access financial aid, locate scholarship money, and plan my own class schedule, helping single moms and intimidated teenagers maneuver through the system gave me a sense of great satisfaction. They would come into the office looking as frightened and at sea as I had felt the first day I ran onto the Shoreline Community College campus. I pictured the single moms cramming sixteen hours of madness into every day, getting up at five to get the household percolating, an eight-hour day of classes and maybe a part-time job, home by six to start supper, grocery shop, do errands, wash laundry, attend soccer games, and then bedtime—four people in line to use a single bathroom. Any relief that I could provide with scholarship applications or schedule planning made me feel like Bill Gates adding another floor onto the Suzzallo Library.

  I felt content with my life and hoped that David would eventually pull himself together, despite all the sad dead weight of evidence to the contrary. He had been through two detox programs, yet still spent several terms in jail for driving while intoxicated. He no longer had a driver’s license and was currently without a job. I said nothing to the kids about their dad’s plight, but the night Micael came home and told me about the book he had asked her to read, I was livid.

  I was in the kitchen, counting ingredients into a bowl for quiche crust: 1 cup flour, 3 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon salt. I had grabbed the rolling pin and was pressing out the dough when she said, “Mom, Dad gave me an interesting book to read,” sitting the bright red hardback on the kitchen counter. It was entitled Is Alcoholism Hereditary? I’d heard of the book, which claimed that drinking problems were primarily genetic.

  “Dad said that he inherited his alcoholism from Grandpa, and since he, Uncle Freddie, and Aunt Sally are all alcoholics, we probably will be too.”

  “He what?” I shrieked.

  “Oh, he’s been telling Jason, Carise, and me that for a long time,” she said casually.

  I could feel a red rage burst from my throat to my ears in one heartbeat. Here was a guy who couldn’t pay child support or even buy his kids birthday gifts, but still somehow found time to lecture them on their inevitable alcoholism. I hadn’t seen David in months but at that moment I wanted to run him down, wherever he was, and hit him up alongside the head with the rolling pin I held in my hand.

  Instead I swallowed hard. “Hey, guys, everyone down here; let’s have a talk.”

  As they sat on the couch, I marveled at their likeness, all with their father’s olive skin and willowy height, his dark brown, almond shaped eyes. Carise had become a tenderhearted young woman of seventeen with a shy radiance that made teenage boys crane their necks as she walked past them in the mall. She didn’t seem to notice the attention and was more interested in filling out college applications for the fall and shopping with her girlfriends. She was an optimist concerning every issue I’d ever heard her discuss—all but one: the topic of God, a subject Micael would occasionally raise at dinner.

  “So who here believes in God?” she’d say.

  “Who knows?”
Jason would answer with a shrug.

  “I’m an agnostic. I don’t think there is any way we can know if there is a God,” Carise would invariably say.

  “I believe that some kind of divine spirit courses through the universe but that the energy isn’t necessarily male. In fact, after reading The Mists of Avalon, I think God is probably a goddess,” Micael would say in return.

  Strong opinions affected Micael’s theology as well as every other topic in her life. The year before, at age fifteen, she had decided to become a vegetarian because, “For every sixteen pounds of grain fed to cattle, we only get a pound back in meat. With all that wasted grain, we could feed the world.” Then she would hasten to add that she was keeping the conviction secret from her cattle ranching grandparents.

  At thirteen, Jason never discussed his feelings about God—or much else, for that matter. He spent most of his time alone in his room, playing video games and completely uninterested in the sports he had formerly loved. I assumed that his apathy toward soccer and baseball might be a result of David’s absence from his games. Even though Jason tried to act as if he didn’t notice, each Saturday his face dropped when his was the only dad missing again.

  That day, sitting on the couch, the kids could see by the color of my face that the conversation was going to be more than a theoretical discussion about God. Something big was up.

  “Do you believe you are destined to follow your father’s alcoholism?” I asked.

  “I think it has more to do with your upbringing,” Micael said.

  “But Dad says it’s in our genes,” Jason added.

  “I don’t know, Mom; it’s hard to know what to think. Dad says the latest research says that we are,” Carise weighed in.

  “Research says that you could have a propensity toward alcoholism. But your dad is wrong to tell you that you are destined to it. To me that’s like telling someone they’re destined to become a murderer because their father was. And no one makes anyone take the first drink. I want you kids to remember that you have just as much heritage in strong pioneers as you do in alcoholics.”

  I knew that whatever words I used to combat David’s fatalism, they would never be as effective as strongly rooting my children in their Montana heritage. The irony of my sudden ancestral pride didn’t escape me. I had spent much of my life keeping my rural roots a secret, yet now, in a time of trouble, I was turning to them without hesitation. Since the divorce, I had taken the kids back to Montana every chance I got, like a migrating bird returning to nest, the four of us slingshotting across the plains and grain fields of eastern Washington. We’d pack the aging 1978 Ford and head out in the predawn darkness when the stars were still blinking across the horizon. By that afternoon, we were climbing up into the Idaho Rockies, zipping past the Cataldo Mission that Jesuit priests built in the mid-1800s, through the silver- and coal-mining towns where whiskered men still patronized crumbling, brick-fronted bars as they had for well over a century.

  Once we hit Montana, I worried less about the speedometer—an infraction, no matter how egregious, cost five dollars. The law mirrored the territory, a place where most things were untamed, independent, and more than likely reckless. We’d speed past the Ten Thousand Dollar Bar into St. Regis, getting off the freeway for a last leg of dirt road, across a land that seemed out of step with the rest of the world. Over the sage and shortgrass a red-tailed hawk might emerge from a line of cottonwoods, assailed by a pair of magpies, diving and pecking at their eternal enemy. As we wound deeper into the hills onto the Flathead Indian Reservation, silence encompassed the entire landscape.

  One year Carise’s friend Amanda joined our adventure. Amanda had never experienced the rural West. By evening, as we had made our final crossing over the Clark Fork River on a highway with no streetlamps or passing cars, her small voice, tinged with alarm, sounded from the backseat, “It’s so … lonely out here.”

  It was the same calm loneliness that renewed my soul. It had taken me nearly half a lifetime to recognize the healing quality of the West’s silence, how its stillness could infuse people from the inside out, creating patience and endurance that grows even in the face of life’s grinding disappointments. Its quiet coaxes the mind to wait, trusting that the rains will come in time to water the grain and wash away the grasshopper eggs, so they won’t become a swarm of locusts and turn the alfalfa into a crop of toothpicks in the hardpan.

  Seeing my children embrace the wide-open stillness of the West gave me confidence that they would learn the value of patience and endurance. During mild summer mornings we would hike to the crumbling homesteads I had explored as a young girl, and I would repeat the tales my father told me as a child as if they traveled across oceans of time to reach me, even from beyond the memory of his voice. I’d see in the kids’ stunned faces the dawning realization that people had survived in shacks with no running water or electricity, or that Grandpa had been born in one such hovel without the help of a doctor. We’d walk along the Flathead River to marvel at the prehistoric Indian paintings or out into the fields to check the hay and mint crops. In the evenings we’d head for the Corn Hole, an ancient mineral mud bath permeating the air with the earthy, soothing smell of sulfur. Since time immemorial, Montana’s Indians had considered it a magical curing place. My dad would wedge himself in up to his waist, letting the mud envelop his wrecked knees and ruined hip, injuries sustained from throwing himself in front of bolting cattle and falling off the barn roof during a long hard lifetime of ranching. His grandchildren would climb into the warm muck, their silky brows creased with alarm over Grandpa’s crippled body.

  Even at seventy-two my father’s massive arms and barrel chest bulged with muscle, though his weathered skin was brown and eroded like the western landscape around him. Decades of tireless farmwork had broken him down like an old McCormick tractor, and I watched him with the same concern and love as his grandchildren did. After I had my own kids, I had made my peace with my father, for only then had I realized how much I must have terrified him—my bullheadedness and wanderlust dreams had no doubt made him aware that I was not prepared for the harsh, cold realities of life.

  During these visits, Dad and I would jump in the pickup and head out to fix fence or water cows, and I would roll down the window to let the smell of ripe, sweet alfalfa fill my head. The years of our silent animosity had vanished into the high-country air, replaced by comfortable chatter, the same kind I had heard years before, when Dad’s cronies came by our house to eat huckleberry pie and cuss. Our conversation would move on to the particulars of NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO as we’d step out of the pickup to check the creek level—brimming with water murky as chocolate milk, swirling around the roots of the cottonwoods and filling the irrigation ditch. We’d walk out into the budding field and smell the sun warming the hay into maturity.

  “Some folks find God in a church,” Dad would say, “but I find Him here on this prairie, all around me, everywhere.”

  These retreats to the farm helped me rediscover my own spiritual footing. I felt the enduring geography that had nurtured me as a child come alive again. After the kids were in bed, I would sit on the porch and watch the wind sweep across the valley like a mother’s hand combing her baby’s hair at bedtime. The same breeze that had touched my face decades before, now reconnected me again to its rhythms and smells, its patience and tranquility. Coming back was like a prodigal’s return: only by having abandoned my heritage could I now appreciate its wealth.

  I remembered those long-ago hot summer days when I would rush into the land’s swelling embrace, feeling the foxtails brush against my bare legs and smelling the grassy musk rising up from the earth. The breeze would caress the vast prairie, coaxing the meadow chickadees out to join it, rising and swirling in a soft gale. I’d stand and listen dreamily to the meadowlarks serenading one another, trading beautiful stanzas carried on the wind. Before long, from across the valley, another small creature, and another, would answer with their own unique songs. I’d l
ook across a land that in ages past had been grooved by buffalo herds and veined with winding Indian trails. The U.S. Army had marched across it, surveying and mapping, jotting notes full of longitudes and latitudes, and now Herefords nibbled at their shadows along its swooping hillsides. And still it was as it had been since ages past, as I had found it when a child, as I had come back to rest in it when an adult: hushed and sacred and filled with a magical presence. Slowly I was beginning to feel a quiet peace emerge in my life.

  Fifteen

  The Gun

  JUST ABOUT THE TIME I was making peace with my past, David seemed to be headed in the opposite direction. Considering his capability for violence, I had never aggressively pursued child support payments over the years. But once I began collecting welfare, the state stepped in and began attempting to garnish whatever wages David made so that they could reimburse the system. They had not been successful in the past, however, because even though he had been making money over the years preaching in a Religious Science church in Seattle, the wages were not being reported to the state and so they could not be traced. Now, however, David had begun construction work and so the Division of Support Enforcement and Recovery had a trackable wage to go after.

  The case had landed in the Family Support Division of the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, and the prosecuting attorney immediately subpoenaed David. When he appeared before the court, the commissioner ordered him to pay four hundred dollars each month in child support and informed him that if he failed to do so the state would imprison him. When David didn’t make his payment the following month, he was arrested. When he could not raise the two-thousand-dollar bond, he was incarcerated in the King County Jail. Several months earlier David had lost his job as a minister, as well as his driver’s license, because of numerous DUIs. He told the commissioners he was desperate to make a new start but needed help in beating his alcoholism. When a space opened up, he was admitted into a government detoxification program.