Maybe (Maybe Not) (5 page)

I’ve never figured out how that ad would make me want to buy a truck, but I do know why I would want to spend time in a place that seems so open and empty and far from civilization.
Because
it is open and empty and seems so far from civilization.

My wife and I lived in a small house in this landscape last year. Twenty miles from town. No telephone, no television or radio, no newspaper delivery. The daily news is what time the sun comes up and the phases of the moon, whether or not there is firewood, and the effect the seasons have on living things, including me.

If you fly over it, the landscape seems rugged, dry, and barren. Not so. Its best parts are just spread out over time and space. You have to look. Within an hour of my house, I’ve stood in dinosaur tracks more than 140 million years old and picked pine nuts for lunch; watched wild horses run and slept in an Indian ruin abandoned nine hundred years ago. I’ve been where it was so quiet and still I could hear the sounds made by the wings of ravens as they flew overhead.

It’s not as remote as I had expected. Maybe nowhere is remote anymore. The interstate highway is thirty miles away. In the nearest little town, most people have satellite-TV dishes that pull in more stations than you’d get in a city.
USA Today
is on the newsstands early every morning. UPS and Federal Express deliver “second day.” And the kids in the local
high school look and dress and think like their peers in Seattle or L.A.

There’s been a lot of human traffic through this countryside. At one time or another, during the last thousand years, the culture of the area has been shaped by Anasazi, Ute, and Navajo Indians, Spanish explorers, Mormon settlers, cattle ranchers, sheepherders, pinto-bean farmers, uranium miners, mountain bikers, river runners, Jeepers, big-game hunters, and drive-through tourists. Everybody passing through leaves a mark.

It’s not paradise. The once-charming little centers of civilization have died off or become motel strips. The weather contrasts are extreme. Drought and downpour, 105 degrees in August and 10 below in January. A week of dust storm followed by a week of icy gale is not uncommon. It’s not hard to die of thirst if you get lost in the back country. The fear of rattlesnakes, black-widow spiders, scorpions, and biting flies is barely counterbalanced by the anticipation of wild-flowers in spring and aspen trees in the fall.

Still, I like it. Something is there that sustains my spirit and lifts me up.

It’s a matter of locale. I think everybody resonates to some specific landscape. I grew up in open country—hot and dry country—and spent the happiest days of my early life on horseback as a working cowboy and dude wrangler. I have photographs of my father
and his father and his father and his father—all on horseback in work clothes.

I’m not a cowboy now—don’t pretend to be, but I am most at ease in that raw country and feel comfortable in my own skin when I’m surrounded by that rough environment. It’s where I go when I get confused. It’s enough just to be for a while in a place where all I can hear is the wind blowing, and all I can see is a long way off in the distance on the earth around me in the daytime and a long way off in the distance in the night sky above me. It is there and then I know I am not lost.

A
telephone call last October. “Mr. Fulghum, our first-grade class would like to involve you in a field trip.” It’s the chairlady of the Outside Education Committee for the first-grade class in the only elementary school in our small nearby town in Utah.

A field trip! Yes! Talk about magic words! Next to Show-and-Tell, I liked field trips best when I was in school. Actually, I’d been thinking about field trips quite recently. About a month before receiving this invitation, I stood on the sidewalk of the town and watched with envy as a fire truck rolled by very slowly with its sirens wailing. This was to please the first-graders who were sitting in back on top of the hoses, holding on for dear life, grinning from ear to ear, thrilled beyond words by a trip down Main Street
with the firemen. A small voice in the back of my head said, “Take me, too.”

I remember with astonishing clarity my own field-trip experiences of fifty years ago. To a fire station, a bakery, the Coca-Cola bottling plant, a dairy, the police station, the city dump, and a construction site. During second grade, we visited an automobile-repair garage, rode a city bus around and back to the place where the bus was kept at night, and toured the county museum. We walked up and down our main street going in and out of businesses to see what was going on behind the scenes where groceries and goods were being unloaded and unpacked. And, of course, the zoo—we went to the zoo several times. And when the circus came to town, we were there to watch them unload the animals from the train and set up the tent.

Looking at a book in a classroom could not ever compete with a field trip.

How sorry I was when education shifted to matters that could only be studied in school in the classroom. How glad I was to take geology in college and go out on field trips again—to walk on and touch what I was studying.

When my children were young and the call came from school for parent volunteers to chaperon field trips, I was their man. Once a field-trip project involved building a fifteen-foot-high hot-air balloon out
of paper—then flying it at a nearby park. The balloon caught fire up in the air and floated toward a landing on the roof of a nearby house. The fire department was called. Very exciting! When calm had been restored, the students wanted to do it again. Not just the balloon, but the whole catastrophe, launch, flaming balloon, fire department, and all.

When I became a schoolteacher myself, of drawing and writing and philosophy, I learned to drive a school bus so I could take my students on field trips. At the heart of my drawing class was the notion that an artist begins by looking carefully at the real world. An artist never looks away or turns away. An artist’s job is to see. And to go out in the world and see it firsthand, just as it is; to report with line and words what is seen. To be
in
the world, not just study
about
the world, that is the artist’s task. So we got in the bus and sallied forth.

Even as a parish minister, I held to this notion. When I was in seminary, I read about something called the French Catholic Worker-Priest Movement. These men had regular jobs during the week like everyone else—plumber, electrician, teacher—any useful job at all. On the weekends, they celebrated mass. They chose to be part of the world, not just work in the church.

I decided to follow their example. During the years I was a parish minister, I usually had a full-time week-day
job like everybody else. I had to be at work on Monday at seven-thirty. I made a clear choice. One could concentrate on being
in the world
, or one could spend time mostly
in the church.
One could address the world or one could do church workwork.

Only now have I finally realized that my life has been an unending field trip.

And I have tried hard not to be a tourist.

But to be an adventurer, a traveler, an explorer, a learner, and a pilgrim.

So you can understand my enthusiasm when I was asked if I would like to be involved in a first-grade field trip. This is not kid stuff. “Of course! Wonderful! Where are we going to go?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Fulghum, I guess I didn’t make myself clear. We want to come see you. You are our field trip.”

I didn’t know what to say.

The ultimate turn of the wheel of life, I guess.

I have
become
a field trip.

“Well,” I sighed, “come on over—my zoo is open.”

I
n 1991, two hikers found the mummified body of a man in the melting ice of a glacier on the Swiss-Italian border. The early scientific studies indicated the man had lived and died 5,300 years ago. In the Bronze Age.

Out of all the fascinating conclusions reached by the examiners, one in particular lodged in my mind: The man’s hair showed clear evidence of having been deliberately shortened.

In whatever passed for a Bronze Age barbershop, our man had a haircut.

I read about this in the newspaper while sitting in a barber’s chair getting my own hair trimmed. Looking at the sketch of the “ice man” and looking at the crew sitting around in chairs waiting their turn, I figured if this ancient one walked in and sat down, nobody
would pay him that much attention. He’d fit right in with the crowd that hangs out in my barbershop.

Weekly, I go for a haircut. Not because I’m that concerned with tonsorial tidiness. I have a fondness for small-town barbershops and the tale-tellers who hang out in them. Old guys who fought and still fight the Great Wars, but who spend a lot of time discussing prostate problems and the new nurse over at the clinic. A relative newcomer like me is fair game for the tales they’ve told a hundred times. Here’s one told on a Saturday afternoon in October. Have a seat.

Our storyteller is best described by his cousin as “barbed-wire lean and barbed-wire mean—he chews nails and spits rust.” A flinty little old man with a plank-flat face weathered ruddy brown below a line just over his eyebrows. Above that line his face is pasty white from a lifetime of wearing a hat. Add to his two-tone face a nose red-veined from too much hard drinking, plus some curly tufts of hair on the side of his bald head, and you have a joker’s face without benefit of greasepaint. It’s hard to believe he was once the town mortician and a deputy sheriff. He’s eighty-two now and occupies his time being the resident historian at the barbershop called Moon’s.

“Moon’s Barbershop. Used to belong to old Moon McCloud. That’s where this place got its name, you know, from him. He run the best barbershop this town ever seen. They called him “Moon” because of what he
did in the Big War. Got himself captured over in France and them Germans they hauled him off to a prisoner-of-war camp. Well, he got fed up with them krauts who ran the camp and one day at a count-up when his number was called he turned around and mooned ’em—dropped his pants and hung his behind out at ’em. One of them krauts shot him in the butt right there. Bam. Wrecked his ass all right, but it made him a hero. The other prisoners called him “General Moon” after that. Give him a medal made out of tinfoil—for bravery beyond the call of duty. A little hard to explain when he got home, but word got around and people was always asking him to drop his pants so they could see his war wounds. Moon he wouldn’t do it. But he was elected commander of the American Legion on account of what he done. A hero. Only one we had.

“Well, old Moon he opened himself this barbershop in the back end of his daddy’s old service station. Learned to cut hair in the prisoner camp. He hated being a barber, but he said it was a job he could do standing up, since he had half his butt missing and sitting down was hard. He only had one price and one kind of haircut—cheap and guaranteed to be shorter when you left than when you come in.

“Moon he was ambitious. He ran the service station and the barber shop and got himself appointed to be a justice of the peace and a notary public, too. When the uranium boom come to town, old Moon he added a little café and grocery store to the barbershop. Said he was going to be the first stand-up millionaire in the world. You could get just about anything you wanted
over at Moon’s—haircut, get married, eat lunch, tank of gas, six-pack and a quart of milk, loaf of bread, and drive off. We always said all he needed was some hardware up front and a whorehouse out back, and he’d have all the bases covered.

“But Moon he died before he was sixty. Right in the middle of collecting the offering in the Methodist church one Sunday morning. His heart attacked him. Preacher said Jesus took him. Hard to believe Jesus needed a barber. Don’t ask me. Don’t know nothing about religion. All I remember is Moon saying he didn’t care where he went after he died just as long as he could sit down in comfort forever after. A lifetime is a long time to stand.”