Summer Service of 5 July 1998 Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence "Finding Ourselves Somewhere Else" David Mix Barrington and Barbara Smith *************************************** Order of Meeting: CHIME / CALL TO SILENCE WELCOME AND ANNOUNCEMENTS LIGHTING THE CHALICE *HYMN This Land is Your Land attached READINGS AND REFLECTIONS (Barb) SONG Keep Riding Roger Salloom READINGS AND REFLECTIONS (David) OFFERTORY Here's to the Life Roger Salloom FINDING OURSELVES SOMEWHERE ELSE David Mix Barrington, Barbara Smith *HYMN Not in Vain the Distance Beacons #143 *CLOSING WORDS Adam Zagajewski The day was mild, the light was generous. The German on the cafe terrace held a small book on his lap. I caught sight of the title: _Mysticism for Beginners_. Suddenly I understood that the swallows patrolling the streets of Montepulciano with their shrill whistles... and the dusk, slow and systematic, erasing the outlines of medieval houses, and olive trees on little hills... and any journey, any kind of trip, are only mysticism for beginners, the elementary course, prelude to a test that's been postponed. POSTLUDE (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66 Asleep at the Wheel (recorded) ********************************** WELCOME All are invited for lemonade and conversation immediately following the service, in the parlor (which is through either of the two doors behind the pulpit). Child care (for children at least 18 months old and walking) is available downstairs. MUSIC Today's guest musician, Roger Salloom, is a singer/songwriter with national credits, a frequent performer in our area and beyond, a syndicated cartoonist, and longtime member of the Society. ******************************* (BARB) When David first brought up the idea for this service he mentioned that he'd been inspired by recently reading John Steinbeck's TRAVELS WITH CHARLIE. Written in the sixties this is a wonderful observant tale about the authors journey through America with his faithful companion, Charlie a large standard poodle. Having last read it 30 odd years ago in High School lit, and looking for inspiration myself I searched out a copy in the newly organized stacks at the Forbes library and esconced in a quiet corner began to read. Well I didn't get very far! Page 1, line 8: "Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet , an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage." These words could have come from me though not as eloquently. He described so well my own visceral feelings about travel and travelling that I spent the rest of my "reading" time sunk deep in the chair daydreaming about past trips and travel memories. Some early ones surfaced quickly. As a child I remember driving the two + hours to the NY piers, to see family friends off on their yearly cruise to who knows where. There would be a huge bustle of people on the piers, alot of jostling and contagious excitement as the liner filled upand good byes were said. They'd show us their minute cabin and give us a mini tour of the behemoth.What I remember feeling most was awe and anxiety. Awe at this floating city with pools & ballrooms & stores and flowers galore. Anxiety & fear that somehow when the great horn roared I'd lose my way in the hubbub and not get off before she steamed out into the harbor,. A seven year old, alone, cast off without family, on the way to a foreign land. I hadn't yet caught the excitement of foreign places; for now just caught up in the excitement of the contrivances that carried you there. Airports rated even higher in the thrill department. A couple of times a year we traveled to the fledgling Bradley (just barely international) Airport near Hartford to greet my Canadian Uncle flying in from Toronto. All anxiety was gone, replaced by at least double the ocean liner excitement. It was a game to be the first to spot his flight.We cheered when we first saw the tiny incoming plane, running over to the windows noses pressed up close as we watched it slowly grow in size getting larger and larger. Then the miraculous touchdown then louder and louder as it rolled right up to our window. I can see us jumping up and down in excitement, hands over our ears.. Then abrupt silence as the engines were shut down. We quieted with them standing demurely ready to greet Uncle Lou politely and lady like when he disembarked. Several times as an adult I've lived by railroad tracks. By choice and with pleasure. Goose bumps emerge with the incoming train whistle and thoughts about who's aboard, where are they going, from where have they come linger on as the clattering wheels pass. Riding trains is even more exciting and I must admit the one summer I hopped a freight train in the Canadian plains was the thrill of a life time. Scary also as I misjudged the height of the platform and the strength in my arms to pull me up and on .For a long 20, 30, 60 seconds? I dangled several feet off the ground near the quickening wheels. As I'd already thrown my pack on I was committed. My loud yells brought my travelling companions running and a couple of yanks pulled me on board safely. I spent one of the coldest times of my life riding on that flatbed through the night and early morning hours from Medicine Hat to Calgary. Throughout my life I have thrived on travel. The changing scenery, people and places are so stimulating. The newness keeps me so alert and the most alive and exuberant I've ever felt. It often doesn't really matter where I 'm going. It's the journey that's the focus. As Steinbeck says: "A trip, a safari, an exploration is an entity different from all other journeys.It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike....We find after years of struggle that that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us." ********************************************************************** (DAVE) Tom Robbins' novel _Even Cowgirls Get the Blues_ is about many things: revolutionary cowgirls, whooping cranes, a mysterious clockworks, and America during the Ford administration. Its heroine is Sissy Hankshaw, a beautiful woman with oversized thumbs who escapes a miserable childhood in Virginia to become America's greatest hitchhiker. Listen to this scene where she is defending her lifestyle to Julian, the New York artist whom she will later briefly marry: "...what an enterprise! Hitchhiking. Bumming rides. I think of hitchhiking I think of college kids, servicemen and penniless hippies. I think of punks in oily denims and maniacs with butcher knives hidden in their wad of rumpled belongings..." "I've been told that I looked like an angel beside the highway." "Oh, I'm sure you are a beautiful exception to the rule. But why? Why bother? You've traveled your whole life without destination. You move but you have no direction." "What is the `direction' of the Earth in its journey; where are the atoms `going' when they spin?" "There's an orderly pattern, some ultimate purpose in the movements of Nature. You've been constantly on the move for nearly twelve years. Tell me one thing that you've proven." "I've proven that people aren't trees, so it is false when they speak of roots." "Aimless..." "Not aimless. Not in the least. It's just that my aims are different from most. There are plenty of aimless people on the road, all right. People who hitchhike from kicks to kicks, restlessly, searching for something: looking for America, as Jack Kerouac put it, or looking for themselves, or looking for some relation between America and themselves. But I'm not looking for anything. I've _found_ something." "What is it that you've found?" "Hitchhiking." I'm no Sissy Hankshaw, but I've spent a certain amount of time hitchhiking in Britain, Canada, and here. For the record, I've never met any maniacs with butcher knives, or anyone else who made me at all nervous about my safety. Over many years I received only one sexual proposition (from a man), which was polite and politely refused. I've usually been able to get rides toward where I've wanted to go, but there have been some long waits and long walks. As to the question of why, hitching for me was not a lifestyle but simply the most efficient and pleasant mode of transportation available to me, as a student without a car and without much money. Public transportation is quite limited in this country, and even in Britain where it's better it just doesn't go to a lot of the places where I wanted to be. For example, for the spring break of my year at Cambridge University, my English friend Anthony suggested that we both run in a fifteen-mile footrace that a friend of his was organizing over some mountains in south Wales, after which the university orienteering club was having a training camp in the English Midlands. Neither place was very close to a train or bus station. I hadn't hitched much before that point, but Anthony assured me it was a fairly ordinary thing to do there and gave me some pointers --- avoid motorways, find places like roundabouts where it's easy for a driver to stop, and so forth. I bought a good backpack, sleeping bag and road map and off I went. I've looked back at the journal I kept of that year and I'm startled at the change in my attitude the moment I got out on the road. It was my first year ever living outside of Massachusetts, and though I was gradually making friends in my dorm, my classes, and various running clubs, I was pretty lonely and homesick. Being on the road gave me a _reason_ to be alone that made sense to me somehow. I had a place to go next, and a beautiful country to see along the way as I never could from a bus or a train. There were also the people who picked me up -- an assortment of random Britons I wouldn't otherwise have met. I resolved to start my summer vacation with a few weeks of hitching around Britain, before getting a train pass to roam around the Continent for a month. I have some wonderful memories of that time, but the clearest is walking along a two-lane road in Scotland, through a shallow valley along a river. There isn't a house or a car in sight, but I know that cars are coming by every fifteen minutes or so and the first or second one is going to stop for me. My legs are strong and I could walk all day if I wanted --- in fact I will walk most of the day, just in a lot of different places. Ahead of me is nothing but more places to see and people to meet. Of course in a few weeks I'll go home to start graduate school at MIT, but that seems a long way off. Here comes a car going my way, just coming into sight around a far bend. Should I stick out my thumb, or is this place just too nice to leave... Hitching in the United States, when I did get back, wasn't quite the same. I made a few long trips to orienteering meets and to visit far-off friends: Maine to Ontario to Ohio and home, Atlanta to Birmingham and back, Utah to Alberta and back. There are fewer respectable people on the roads here, and the interstates are harder to avoid. But still I met some wonderful people along the way: a maker of heavy silver jewelry to sell at biker conventions, a Baptist minister who had the liberal church in his town because he got all the non-Mormons, some bar-hopping college students in Montana who invited me to stay with them on my way back through. Of course eventually I got a car, along with a home, a family, and a job, and today I only hitch occasionally to or from the car repair shop. I still pick up hitchers often, feeling a certain obligation to return the favors I've used. It seems to be acceptable to hitch here if your own car is broken, or if you can't drive it --- I've had more than one rider whose license was suspended for drinking. I've met some of the casualties of economic changes as well, and heard some good sob stories, true or not I could never tell. In any case I'm pretty happy with my own life, certainly in preference to those of most of the people on the road. But who knows --- someday, maybe when I'm near sixty as John Steinbeck was, it may be time to go out and try the road again for a while... (For the work of this society both among ourselves and in this community, the morning offering will now be taken.) ********************* (BARB) Travel pushes me. It prods me into situations I'd never get into at home based times. Whether into a trip or just having the lure of it ahead of me I've taken large risks, made major lifestyle changes. I become bolder, braver. I allow myself to be more vulnerable yet also strong. In 1987 I took the trip of my lifetime....so far at least. For 4 months a friend and I travelled through Thailand and the Indonesian islands buying crafts and woven cloth for his Vermont based import business. I gave up a wonderful apartment, packed away my fledgling home based business and all my belongings into a 5X10 storage locker, found a saint of a friend to take my cat and was off. I remember thinking this is important. Don't let this trip go without you. It is worth all this letting go. I was so right in myriads of ways. My stories would fill many services. Here is just one. We arrived on the small outer Indonesian island of Flores just after a major storm. The bus ride to our destination on the opposite coast took hours more than usual as we met tree after tree fallen across the road .The men riders swiftly macheted them out of the way just to let us ride on around the bend to meet another similar obstruction. Like the bridge that had been washed out. There we were stuck with several other vehicles as trees were felled and laid high above the stream in the ravine below to form a makeshift bridge. I chose to climb down and wade across and watch from the other side as our bus made the maiden ride across the new platform. It held and we were off again. Then there were the 2 or 3 flat tires that we soon learned was a standard of most out country trips. All through that day I smiled not in a hurry to go anywhere, nor to be anywhere. And most everyone around me were also taking it in stride, joking, smiling working together to clear our way through the jungle. Following rumors of outstanding ikat weavings on one of the other small islands we set out shuttling from one to the other til we arrived at the smallest. Years ago a truck had somehow been brought there but besides that the only transportation was horses and feet. The weaving village was reported to still be some 14 or so kilometers away so early the next morning we set out. Not really knowing where it was, nor where we'd stay, or was this still the weaving center it had once been. Well after many wrong turns we did reach the village set along a gorgeous beach of stinging hot black sand. We were such an unusual sight that as we passed one village schoolroom along the way (quietly we thought) we were spied and the whole school piled out to see us touch us ask us where we were going and of course the ubiquitous "Money please" from kids too young to know what it meant. Feeling embarassed from disrupting their lessons we relaxed when we realized the teachers were as excited as the kids. They followed us for several minutes to some invisible line at the edge of their village then waving goodbye they stopped and watched us til we were out of sight. At our destination, there was an evening volleyball game going on. We were asked to join and though Steve declined I threw myself into it aware it was part of some welcome and acceptance rite. As was the custom, the headman took us in for the evening., his wife feeding us gladly as the villagers especially the kids filled every window and door space to stare at these strange westerners. As it turned out the ikat textiles were stupendous in design and in price. We praised them, heard how the old weaving ways were being lost, how the bright threads from the markets were replacing the indigo and other traditional colors and made our leave the next day without cloth. As we approached the school on our return trip we stepped off the path and slipped by unnoticed. In 2 days we had walked more than 35 kilometers in tropical heat with less than a night's rest (as all night,folks came by our window to peek and sometimes giggle at us) No cloth in hand as the price was too dear but exhiliarated and with memories of generosity I will never forget. ****** (DAVE) Who you are depends in large part on your context --- where you live, the people around you, what you do every day. When you go somewhere else, all these things change, and to some extent you _become_ someone else. This can be a very romantic idea, even for a grown-up professional person like me. Most of my travel these days is directly related to my job as a professor. David Lodge starts his novel _Small World_ with this perspective on professional travel: "When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every heath, and the young sun has run half his course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages." "The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self- improvement. To be sure, there are certain penitential exercises to be performed---the presentation of a paper, perhaps, and certainly listening to the papers of others. But with this excuse you journey to new and interesting places, meet new and interesting people, and form new and interesting relationships with them; exchange gossip and confidences (for your well-worn stories are fresh to them, and vice versa); eat, drink, and make merry in their company every evening; and yet, at the end of it all, return home with an enhanced reputation for seriousness of mind. Today's con- ferees have an additional advantage over the pilgrims of old in that their expenses are usually paid, or at least subsidised, by the institution to which they belong, be it a government department, a commercial firm, or, most commonly perhaps, a university." When I go somewhere else on academic business I'm still myself professionally, but I do become a pilgrim in this way. I have a community of fellow researchers around the world, who are the only people who really understand and care about my work, so it _is_ really important that I meet them in person periodically, and we _do_ work pretty hard to further the cause of science. But Lodge has it right --- it's a lot of fun too. I'm grateful to have the chance to travel so much, never forgetting that it's only possible because Jessica is back at home covering for all of my family duties. ***** (BARB) Travel puts me smack in the moment, the present. It might take a few days to leave my world behind. Perhaps even an overseas call to a surprised friend to assure me that well laid plans went fine as I had to do this Spring . But after that and until a day or two before re-entry I am there where my feet are. In the moment. This is what's important. Life is simple, choices exciting and innumerable. ***** (DAVE) By going somewhere else, I became an American. I would argue that I was never really an American until I lived in England. Being in the United States, surrounded mostly by Americans, you can go through much of your life without thinking about other countries --- crossing over to Canada doesn't really count. But there were only a few other Americans in my college at Cambridge, and there I could start to see some of the commonalities I had with New Yorkers, Californians, Southerners, even my President, Ronald Reagan, about whom I had little good to say at home. I felt responsible for _my country's_ foreign policy, including our less than full support of Britain at the start of the Falklands War. I could meet an American on the road or in a youth hostel, and have this immediate kinship that would never have been there had we met in the United States. ***** (BARB) I have always been excited by far away places and people. I Have often romanticized about foreign peoples lives. Felt a specialness about those travelers and immigrants from far away. When I was young my family often had foreign students stay with us. Students from Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and India I remember best. Dennis a geology student at Yale from Bombay eventually brought his fiancee over and we hosted his wedding reception .I developed a deep respect and compassion for those far away from home. I expect I picked up a lot of this reverence from my parents. Though not great travelers at the time they loved people of all kinds and could have an easy conversation with a stranger on a park bench as easily as their next door neighbor. At 17 I had my chance to find myself somewhere else. I went on a bike trip to Europe with 17 other teenagers. Though a hard trip at times it was a watershed summer in many ways. I clearly remember when something large shifted quietly in me. An AHA moment of sorts. I was biking down a country road in France. All the newness the differences of this place were pouring in through my senses. The language, the food, the cars,the houses. Around a bend we suddenly came upon a small stall by the side of the road. Tacked to its side in crudely painted letters were the words FRAISES A VENDRE. It was a fruit stand. They were selling strawberries just like back home. Selling strawberries in a different language.The simple stall, the scale, even the money box could have been the ones down the road from us in the states. The differences I'd been focusing on fell out of my head to be left by the side of the road that lovely June day..These people about me spoke a language I only barely understood but they were really just like us. Going about their business and selling strawberries by the side of the road. ***** (DAVE) By going somewhere else, I became a stranger, a foreigner, a potential suspect. When you cross an international boundary, of course, you can be searched and you have to show your papers. If you are walking along the road, the police may decide to stop you and ask for your papers, as has happened to me both in Britain and in Utah. Fortunately, there were reasonably satisfied with the answers. It was an important lesson to be a stranger, but for me it was never more that a mild inconvenience. Why? The real answer is that my ability to travel without hassles is a result of privilege. It's male privilege that lets me climb into a stranger's car without worrying about my physical safety. It's race privilege that keeps me from being stopped on sight by the cops in most of the places I've traveled, as a black man would be everywhere except Barbados, I suppose. It's another sort of privilege that protects me once I am stopped, because my papers identify me as a citizen of the most powerful nation in the world. And even though a hitcher spends very little money, there's class privilege that comes into it as well -- to be able to take time off to travel, or even to come up with the idea to travel in the first place... ***** (BARB) I took a trip this May that was different from all others. It was deeper it was more sobering, less romanticized than my others. It was to visit my step-father's homeland of Austria. To see where he was a young man. To meet a few relatives. To travel with him, his niece and my mother into the mountains we all love. To see his country. My stepfather was 19 yrs old in 1939 the year that Germany entered Austria. As he says simply, he didn't like what was going on. Didn't want to be part of it. So with the help of family and friends he walked out of Austria into Switzerland. This is not a SOUND OF MUSIC tale. He left his family behind and it was many years before thay connected again. With the many other refugees in Switzerland he was housed in their jails as this was the best available space. After many months he secured sponsorship in the States. He was sent the fare and at age 19 knowing no English travelled 4th class on the Normandie to New York City. There were no flowers in his stateroom. He was fortunate. One of many thousands of immigrants to this country who was able to make a good life for himself.. On the airplane coming home from Vienna this past trip I tried to help some of my seat neighbors with their U.S. Immigration forms. The older gentleman in front of me was very frustrated and slowly using bits of German and our fingers and pantomine we slowly completed them together. It slowly came out that he was from Sarajevo. War torn Sarajevo. He and his wife were on their way to their daughter's home in Colorado. Some little town there. Something in our conversation made me realize that this was a one-way trip for them. Another set of travelers leaving home for good to find a life in a far away land. The trips that David and I have described were full of freedom, exploration, fun and above all our choice. There are many travelers who don't have that luxury. Who don't have a warm circle of friends to return to at the trip's end.