|
Chapel Talk – September 19, 2005
Patrick J. Clements
Many of
you know I like to ride my bike. Sometimes I ride riding my bike across campus,
sometimes I ride my bike with Geronimo the dog; sometimes I pedal to class,
to practice, to town, to Community Meeting.
Last spring, on the second day of classes, I pedaled down to Geiger
Reeves on my bike, and, as usual, I left Community Meeting on my bike.
However, this time I circled around a bit, headed out onto Ward Street, hung a left at the Peddie front
gates, and headed down Main Street, down past the golf course, over
the Turnpike, through Allentown, and then kept going all the way
to California!
The
veterans here have heard the rationale for this silliness, so pardon me a
quick recap for our newer Peddie fellows. I am an English teacher here at
Peddie, trying to help students read hard, think and write complex ideas, and
speak bravely and listen gently. In English 11 we study some American
literature, almost off of which depends on the great power of this new land,
the hope it offers for those who have spread across it, and the liberating
ideals and enslaving shortcomings of the American experiment. In the spring I
often offer elective courses like “Literature of Travel and Adventure,”
courses in which we read, and try to emulate somehow, the literature of those
who have headed off from the warmth of home to explore the world outside their
home.
It’s no
surprise therefore that mixing a love of cycling and exploration with a
personal and professional intrigue with American literature and culture
results in this cool project: to ride my bike across the country, slowly,
riding down the old routes people used to head to new lives in America, and
to talk to people along the way about their Dream of America. That’s what I
did last spring. Main Street out here is the old 17th
c. “Old York Road,” a wagon road from New York to Philadelphia. I road that down to Camden and then crossed over into Philadelphia. West from Philadelphia I rode
what was the Philadelphia Wagon Road, the road through Lancaster, York, and
Gettysburg that turns west at the Blue Ridge mountains, heading south into
Virginia past Winchester and up the Great Valley through Staunton,
Harrisonburg, and Lexington to Roanoke, Virginia. From Roanoke I headed west and south further
on The Wilderness Trail, an 18th c. route through the rest of Virginia that crosses the Cumberland Gap into the Wilderness of Kentucky.
I crossed the Gap, on the same rocky scree that a quarter of a million white
settlers trod in the first 35 years after the war for Independence. From the Appalachian corner of Kentucky and Virginia I turned south to Nashville TN to pick up the 19th c.
Trail of Tears, the path the Cherokee followed when they were forced from
their homes in the Cherokee Mountains and removed to the Indian Territories in what is now Oklahoma. Through Tennessee then and
western Kentucky I rode on, sleeping the night on the banks of the Ohio,
crossing the river in the cool of a spring morning in a fisherman’s boat,
rolling over the hills of Southern Illinois to the Mississippi, crossing a
bridge over in the ripping wind that leads a wall of thunderstorms. I stayed
with Olivia Maki’s family there in Cape Girardeau, then headed on up the Mississippi, then across the Ozarks of
Missouri into Arkansas and finally finished the
Cherokee’s Trail in Tahlequa, Oklahoma, the capital of the Western band
of the Cherokee Nations. I headed down to the town of Sallisaw, Oklahoma, to begin a new story line for
the road. I found a farm that looked like it could have been that of the Joad
family from Steinbeck’s novel The
Grapes of Wrath. Following along the novel, I headed west as the Joads
and so many others did in the first half of the 20th century,
traveling the Mother Road to the promise of plenty in California. I rode through across land once
reassigned to the Muscogee, the Seminole, the Pottawotamie, the Okfuskee,
through Woody Guthrie’s hometown of Okemah, through land that the wind had
blown away in the dustbowl of the 1930s. I rode into Oklahoma City, and the followed Route 66 the
rest of the way across Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, all the way to its terminus at
the Pacific
Ocean,
one street up from the Santa Monica Pier. …..
What I
want to share today is not the trip, but two ideas:
1) the power and difference between primary and secondary
experiences
2) the kindness of beauty of people at home..
One
summer afternoon in the late 1980s, at a cookout at John Plant drive where
the recently married Ray and Sue Cabot lived, I mentioned that I’d like to
ride my bike across America someday. I’d not really thought
about it, being new to cycling again. But once the words were said, they
stayed said, and, unlike Huck, I’d never put them out of my mind. But like
many dreams, many of which are pretty selfish, this idea was shelved because
a thousand other delights of life took precedence. Nonetheless, I’d read lots
of travel literature, and lived a thousand trips vicariously, across North
Africa with Hasan al Wasan, up into land of the Snow Leopard with Peter
Matthiessen, across the Pacific with Ishmael and Melville, down the
Mississippi with Huck and Jim, and then with Sam Clemens himself. I read
cycling stories around the world by Barbara Savage and Willie Weir, by Dervla
Murphy and Josie Dew, the story of
John Boettner taking middle school er across America by bike, even stories of young T.E.
Lawrence slipping away from Jesus College Oxford in the summer to explore and
study Crusader Castles in France. All of this travel material was
exciting, and in the world of reading, rich primary experience. Nonetheless,
the cycling part and the travel part of that rich experience were secondary.
Wouldn’t all that learning be made richer by my own original experience?
Last
Thursday in frosh-soph football, we had special practice devoted to play. Not
playing football, but to play. Primary play, play that kids control. Many of
the guys on the team entertain themselves with Madden, another pushbutton
form of entertainment that seduces into us a passive secondary experience of
something whose original merit the entertainment cannot reproduce. Playing
Madden is not about playing football. It’s about NOT playing football. In a world of air conditioning, suburbs,
playdates, and organized community sports, min-vans and SUVs, and well
intentioned loving parents who want only the best for their kids, many kids
haven’t had the chance to learn much about “Go Outside And Play,” the
ultimate primary experience. So, that’s what we did: we JV coaches taught the
kids how to Go Outside and Play, touch football, without the game being run
by well meaning adults. Playing sports is a terrific primary experience, as
is acting and singing and playing music, and sculpting and writing poetry,
all primary experiences in a day often full of secondary experience, where
you learn about stuff, rather than learn the stuff itself. Further refined
are primary experiences in which the individual organizes the experience and
makes the decisions by herself, where the player calls the plays, not the
adult coach. That’s what we did Thursday, we went outside and played.
So too
did I want to do that I my learning. I wanted to go follow the footsteps,
literally, of settlers leaving Philadelphia for new land in the west. I
wanted to head up the valley and feel the rain and snow of travelers from an
antique time. I wanted to walk beneath Mantle Rock, a highland bluff above
the Ohio
River,
where thousands of Cherokee huddled for weeks during the brutal winter of
1838, waiting for the ice in the river to subside, so they could continue
their 900 mile forced march to some new land they knew nothing of. I wanted
to follow the road the fictional Joad family and thousands of real life
Midwestern farmers took when they fled the dustbowl hopelessness of
desiccated farms and headed toward California, where they’d heard workers were
needed, where fruit fell from the trees to be gathered like manna, a land of
hope and dreams. I wanted to cross the plains of Oklahoma and Texas on old
Route 66, and follow the Mother Road, the Main Street of America, as it
headed west across the thousand miles of high desert across Texas, New
Mexico, Arizona, California. I’d read about it all and enjoyed the
experience. I wanted to experience the experience. So I did.
I feel
asleep to the sound of rain, to the snap of spring winds whistling up from
the valley floor, to the distant echoes of coal trains softened by night and
valleys far away, I smelled the morning river chill on the banks of the Ohio,
and woke to the diesel thrum of river tugs bulling their way up the
Mississippi channel. I felt the shift in space that happens near central
Oklahoma, about the 100th meridian, where all of a sudden the
horizon falls to infinity, the roll of the land diminishes to nothing, like
the sand bottom of deep steep ocean
floor, where a silo down the road that had before seemed three or four miles
away was now eight or ten, where the wind from the southwest arrives at ten
in the morning and doesn’t exhale until about midnight or so. I fell down
from the capstone of the Llano Estacado at the edge of Texas and roared down a thousand foot
ledge into the moonscape of New Mexico. I pulled out of the wind in the
Navajo nation and watered up in towns like Gallup, where I had breakfast with
Navajo children at Saturday morning market, towns like Holbrook that were
once, “too tough for women or children,” or Winslow Arizona, where I was
particularly raggedy, such a fine sight to see, where nobody stopped to take
a look at me. Like the Joads, I filled up extra bags full of water and headed
out again into the high desert wind, to Flagstaff, to Williams, to Seligman, up
into the vast lovely desiccation of Truxton, through the Havasupai
reservation where in the night wind the Mountains make their own music. I
climbed a mountain pass east of Oatman where wild burros wandered uphill
too,, looking at me oddly across the valley we were both climbing. I crossed
the Colorado
river at
Needles and entered California hoping to find that land of milk
and honey, where fruit fell from the trees, but found instead the Mojave desert stretched out before me. I
decided to hitchhike across the bulk of the Mojave, for it was over 100 miles
between water spigots, all into the wind. I hung out at the last interstate
exit before the long haul to Barstow with Clarence Brown, an old man
struggling to stay alive in rough country, a guy once called a hobo. He gave
me his spot in case I might turn his luck, four hours and not a ride. I did
get a ride in the back of a pickup and flew across a desert stretch that
would have killed me on my own. I rode on from Barstow, rising steadily to the last
mountains before California’s collapse into Los Angeles and the Ocean. I crossed El Cajon pass, snow up on my right, desert
scrub at my feet, and roared down into the gloom of the Los Angeles basin, and then millions of
people and two days of sprawl. Down into a dreamscape of cars and traffic and
heavenly town names, to San Bernardino, Rancho Cucamongo, Claremont and Glendora, Sierra Madre and Arcadia, Pasadena, Los Angeles and Santa Monica. That’s some of the experience.
It was absolutely primary the whole way. I didn’t learn about the staggering
size or fearsome power of the land and wind and weather. I didn’t learn about
the fundamental elements of earth, wind, water, fire, and spirit. It was all
around me.
But there
was a part of the trip that was more moving and relentless than the land. It
was the relentless kindness and broken in beauty of people along the road. I
met and stayed with several people with whom connections had already been
made: In Gallup New Mexico I met and stayed with colleagues of friends Josh
Charnin-Aker; in Arkansas I stayed 80 year old friends of
friends of my mother; in Cape Girardeau I stayed with Olivia Maki’s
father and brother, enjoying with them great meals and long conversation.
However, most of the people I met were new folks down the road, and I could
tell a score of stories of kindness. Of the hospitality of families I stayed
with in Kentucky and Oklahoma, folks who grabbed me and my bike
and took me into their homes when bad weather loomed, people who paid grabbed
my check in the diner after we’d chatted about their county and their lives.
But I want to tell one story of uncommon kindness and beauty, an uncommon
kindness that was finally was not uncommon, but seemed the steady reality,
not the exception, and inside this story was the story of this journey.
After
crossing the Cumberland Gap and heading into Kentucky, I turned south toward central Tennessee, aiming for Nashville. Deep in the Appalachians, I headed
south down long valleys, climbing and plunging interior ridges as forks of
creeks split, then headed west over larger ridges to the next river. The
loveliest valley of the trip was an hour in running the length of Elk Valley, in Campbell County Tennessee, a
modest valley with good bottom land, steep and well forested ridges, and New Canaan Baptist Church at its western, coved end. I
stopped there to repair a slow leak, one I had tried to fix the day before.
That first time, back on Pine Mountain in Kentucky, I had pulled into a church
parking lot, eaten a snack, and dried out in the warm sun. Then, as I was
stripping out the front tire's tube, a handsome woman in a shiny new car
pulled into the lot, circled round, and then asked if I was ok or if needed
help. I told her that I was fine, just taking a break, enjoying the lovely
stream by the church, and fixing a leaky tire. She smiled, then reached into
the backseat, grabbed a trio of bananas and handed them to me. "I just
came from the store. You might like these," she said. "There's a
nice Bible college up the hill where my husband studies, with waterfalls and
lovely grounds. Feel free to walk around," she said, and drove off. My
concentration broken, I bungled the tire repair, missing the cause of the
slow leak. This time, though, here in Fox Valley, I'd take my time and find
whatever tiny sliver was slowing me down. Sitting a second time a church
parking lot, I examined my tire carefully, found the tiny wire that was the
culprit, and put things right. As I was putting the tire back on, two men
emerged from behind the church. One man had a big barrel chest, suspenders
arching over his shoulders, working hard to hold up his trousers. The other
was tall and thin, his belt wrapped around past the buckle, his plaid shirt
and dungarees carefully tucked together.
Carrying styrofoam food containers, they walked to me, said hello, and
the offered me lunch, "You probably work up a good appetite on that
thing. The chili's mighty spicy, so y'all be careful." This was my
introduction to Maynard Crabtree, Deacon of the church, the thin man with the
leather belt and a weathered face. later joined him and a growing group of
folks in the hall behind the church, where they were selling lunches and used
clothes and bric-a-brac, raising money to finish the roof on the hall. After
scoring some powerful peanut butter candy, I sat and listened to Maynard, a
woman helping with the sale, and a handsome young man with a terrific voice
and a brand new mandolin, sit down near the used clothes, tune their
instruments, and begin making music. The beautiful On a sunny Saturday
morning in Elk Valley Tennessee I listened to some folks sing "Down by
the Stream," "The Sweet By and By," and a couple other tunes.
They tried to convince some others to become their fourth voice, but it
sounded might fine to me. Maynard sang bass, an unwavering, trustworthy
bottom to the songs. The young man's tenor was sweet and strong, just pure
goodness at ten in the morning.
So
there I was, an English teacher from new Jersey, sitting in the meeting hall of
the New Canaan Baptist church in Elk Valley Tennessee listening to Gospel music on a
sunny Saturday spring morning in Appalachian America. There was nothing
artificial or secondary or false in the entire experience. I did not know
then that people would later take me in out of tornado weather or hailstorms,
that people would drive me all over their counties and show me where they’d
grown up and got married and that over there is where the bald eagles now live
again. I didn’t know that a hobo would give me his hitchhiking spot for a
while, that a recovering meth head would offer me some of his sandwich at a
campground in LA, or that I’d be offered lunch at the patio of the Wilshire
in Santa Monica. But there, in valley of Appalachia was one of a steady stream of
unbidden acts of kindness and generosity, people sharing the sustenance of
their homes, all across America.
(ad lib
ending…)
-- PJClements
Sabbatical Address to the Faculty– October 17, 2005
Patrick J. Clements
Sometimes our work here is a job. Old fashioned get up in
the morning, feel like you’re punching in and heading up on the roof with the
rest of the crew, hoping it doesn’t get too hot too soon so the tar goes soft
early, busting it until lunch and wild stories from Hank, and then hanging on
until break, and a smoke, and then whew!, anyone can make it until the
afternoon whistle.
Sometimes our work is our profession. Put on the tie, the
khakis, standard schoolman’s clothes, head to our daily expertise and tend to
the business of this day, our specialized, subtle techniques of crafting this
task, advancing that project, focusing on today’s new idea.
Sometimes our work is our career, a patient unfolding of
last year and next year, a reach for a new achievement, a path of work that
comes clear over time.
Sometimes our work is our practice, the steady repetitions
that make rituals of our lives and give us shape.
Sometimes our work is our vocation, what we do because we
hear that this, for me, makes the most sense.
Our work is never one of these, and every day and year
it’s an odd mix of all of this. What distinguishes what we do here at Peddie,
or in any good school, is not the
special nature of the institution, or of this
institution, this school, for these are nouns, things constructed within
our society. What distinguishes what we do here is our understanding of the
fundamental activity inside the institution: it’s not a noun; it’s a verb.
People invent themselves here.
Young men and women create themselves
here at Peddie. Metaphors that include phrases like “value added,” though
very helpful for some analyses, don’t tell this story, nor do other marketplace metaphors. We are not
providing specialized services for students and their families, though this
idea is crucial as we examine our work. We are not, in the language of
bureaucrats -- please God, please!--
“delivering education.” What we do
is this: together, we create,
every day, a community in which our kids shape
their minds, adopt a practice
of life, and, in the doing, invent themselves
as adults.
Because we have chosen to be a residential school, we
exploit metaphor, not in words so much but in actions, of how these verbs are
best enacted. At home. We feed our kids, focus their lessons, fill their
lives with work and play, encourage several forms of love to grow, and push
out these fresh adults when it’s their time to leave home and go learn
elsewhere.
As we live our lives here we model for our kids lives to
be lived. Our best preaching is our actual practice. So, as I considered
designing my sabbatical proposal, I thought that if my best teaching is my best practice, then maybe I ought to pay
attention myself to Peddie’s unique language: our mission to challenge kids
-- and ourselves too, no? -- to reach for levels of achievement not attempted
before; our philosophy of honoring the dignity and worth of all; our steady
practice of the five enduring values; and a dream, a kid’s dream, to head out
on “howling adventures.” All these voices, plus a note from Melanie that read
“Travel on or stay put,” together hollered, “Go ride your bike and talk to
people.” So I did.
Last spring I rode across the country talking to people,
asking about their Dream of America. For a teacher and student of American
literature, for someone who believes in the value of layering different kinds
of learning, this was an extraordinary, and scary, experience. I finally had to take my own
advice and do what I’ve been coaching kids to do all along: read the books,
and then go find out for yourself. That was the model: me and Whitman, and
Twain and Steinbeck, and Least-Heat Moon and millions of travelers heading
west, all in search of a Dream of America.
Specifically, I traveled a number of routes people have
used to head to new homes in America. I traveled down the 17th
century Old York Road, Main Street in Hightstown, a route that
connected New York and Philadelphia. From Philadelphia I headed west, as Germans and
Scots-Irish did to settle the uplands, heading across Pennsylvania on the 18th century “Great Wagon Road” all the way to the wall of the
mountains, and then south and west up the Great Virginia Valley. I headed into and across the
mountains on the Wilderness Trail, with Daniel Boone carved over the Cumberland Gap into the wilderness of Kentucky. I headed down into Tennessee to join the 19th
century Trail of Tears and one route the Cherokee took as they were forced
from their mountain homes and removed to the Indian Territories. From Tahlequah Oklahoma I dropped south to Sallisaw, home
of the Steinbecks’ fictional Joad family, and followed their route, and the
route of hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners, heading across Route 66 to
the promised land of California. Along the way, along these old
roads, I talked to modern people, and
asked then what was their Dream of
America. What they said was pretty interesting.
But here we must change course for a few moments. As I was
riding I too was wondering what was my Dream of America? And what would I
learn from everyone I met? So too do I wonder what your Dream of America is.
It IS an odd questions, sometimes in the asking, sometimes in responding. So,
let’s get after it, together. Go to the last page of your handout, and
respond to the question yourself. Feel free to use the prompts I’ve written;
feel free to devise a fresh syntactical approach; feel free to doodle and
draw as your write! Five minutes. Go.
So, what did people say?
Sometimes their answer was in their words. Sometimes it was in their
actions. The want peace and stability (Some were pro-war; some anti-war; all were worried about abuse in households
they know); they want to be able to live a good life, one without inordinate
hardship (Many mentioned better jobs; all wanted work with benefits and
health insurance); many wanted government not to screw it up (national,
state, and local politics), and to support
better what was necessary (jobs for the region, education, drug
control).
In Cumberland Gap, TN, in Sue Webb's Country Kitchen I
found part of an answer. I had a long talk about the region, town, and hopes
with Joe Webb (long time resident of Cumberland Gap) and waitresses Patsy Johnson
(originally from Kentucky) and Lorraine Nieto (14 years
here since California). They filled orders, wrote up
tickets, and talked with everyone on the run while I sat at the counter
resuming the conversations when they returned. They feared a growing police
state ("Did you know that right here in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, the police can run roadblocks
and searches, for no reason? Six dollar an hour police troopers with no
insurance and guns. Damn. I've been all over the world in the service, and
there's less freedom here sometimes.") They nonetheless love their home,
their land, and their freedoms. They want less stupid interference. They want
more jobs in the region, “and good ones, with benefits.” They hope gas prices
come down. They wish, or rather Joe wishes, that the state hadn't ruined the local
fishing by adding Rockfish to the reservoir. "Rockfish, they're terrible
fish, schooling and all the good fish you fish for in the first place.
Rockfish, They're terrorist fish." Lorraine disagreed on loss of freedom:
"We have more freedom here than anywhere. I love American, but everyone
needs to get along."
Later, in Cape Girardeau , Missouri, Allan Maki, summed up one
version of this, “That decent people not get screwed. Like the people in Pensacola [whose roofs had yet to be
repaired a year after Hurricane Ivan} You don’t need to give good people
much, just don’t take things away, don’t make them less.”
These larger selfless goals always seemed to include a
focus on home, and on attitude. Jean Deckard, just outside Niangua, Missouri,
“My Dream of America is that people get down on their knees and thank God for
what they’ve got and quit bellyachin’ about that they don’t have.” This from
a woman who’s spent 17 years being beaten by her husband, a woman who’d later
marry the cop who came to the door to keep that first husband from shooting
her.
And, for many, their words about their Dream of America
become deeds. From a home deep in the woods of Crofton, KY, the words of Judy and Granvel
Dulin. Judy picked me up in a parking lot in Hopkinsville, KY
just as a purple sky of a hailstorm about swallowed us.. She took me
home and I spent the evening with her husband, their three children, and a
swarm of grandkids." Married at 16, and married forty something years
since, she said “I'm sometimes really afraid for America. We're turning out carbon copies
of failure. My Dream for American, is for kids to be raised right.” In a
voice that seemed a smooth cousin to Shelby Foote's, her husband Granvel
added "It's a rough row to hoe now. To change it, looks to me like
you've got to start with the young folks, But have the teachers and leaders
gone too far to know how to step back and fix things with the children?
People aren't bad. Just lots of them are on the bad track." Judy added,
"Somehow lots of parents just lost their vision. My Dream of America is
to have parents step up the plate and do what they should do for our
kids." Judy is a founder and Board Chair of the Heritage Christian School, an 11 year old charter school in
Hopkinsville.
From
Robert Lewis, a Cherokee man whose father is Apache and Navajo, "I
saddens me to see that it is so often tragedies that pull Americans together.
Here in Oklahoma City in April 1995, and at 9.11. The collective sense
is powerful then, but the cause is sad. I'd like to see a more peaceful
society, and an end to racism. They gloss over it an awful lot. I'd like to
see equality between the sexes. Women are still considered subordinate,
especially at work, where they are paid less." And then, sitting in
buckskin beneath an arbor sunshade, the ends of his long black hair
flickering in the breeze, he paused. "And I'd like to see more concern
for education in schools."
However, as I traveled and connected to people, I noticed
something new. In every home I stayed, I was taken out and shown some larger
version of home. With the Dulins in Crofton, we drove for an hour all over Christian County (“That’s were the bald eagles now
love, and over there, there’s some fine turkeys.” “I used to live on that
farm, when I was a girl.” “And I stole you away!”) With 80 year old Ed
Puglsey In Buena Vista Arkansas, I walked the neighborhood, and
then rode 30 miles with him and his bike club on their favorite ride. With
Charlie Russell in Fayetteville, I was driven all over town, to see the
Waltons’ influence, so explore homes designed by Fay Jones and Jim Lambeth,
to genuflect at the home of football legend Frank Broyles, and to explore the
farmers market at the town square on Saturday morning. In Gallup, New Mexico, Jason Slesher not only took me
to the Navajo market on Saturday morning, but drove also up into the Zuni
mountains south of town in the fading desert light, near where he’s bought
some land and is dreaming a house. I finally realized I was a guest in
people’s homes, even when I was on the road, and that’s what they shared with
me, their homes. The radius of what each person defined as home varied, but
when people showed me their town, or their county, or their mountains, or the
petroglyphs they’ve kept hushed up, or when they brought food out to me in
the parking lot and then sang gospel music in the church hall during the
rummage sale, they were sharing their homes. That’s was true no matter the
lead time in hosting the traveler. It was true in the JavaCycle coffeeshop in
Williams, Arizona, or in Elk Valley, Tennessee.
And in a way, that’s what we do here. We invite all these
folks to come stay, we all share our lives while we teach and learn our
lessons, and we get to shape them every chance we can.
This is not a new perception, but it’s deeper for me now
than it was. If we’re to be teachers we need to be, we need to live the lives
we want our kids to use, and in the doing we will practice ourselves being
the people we prefer to be. And thanks to the Sabbatical Program, I go the
opportunity to live a dream, and learn that lesson once again.
-- PJClements
|