[Note: This essay was originally published in Friends Journal; but it’s now behind their paywall. It still seems timely today; maybe more so.] Quakerism was born in a time of revolutionary upheaval. Yet it learned how to survive when the revolution failed and was followed by decades of persecution. I sometimes hear Quakers waxing nostalgic … Continue reading “Survival & Resistance” A Message from 2006 That is Timely Again
This outhouse looked like the ones I used to see in magazine cartoons sometimes, built like a big phone booth of wide wooden boards, with a slanted roof and three small holes at the top to let the smell out. Inside was a flat bench seat with a hole in it.
The boards were sunburned a dark grey and sanded by the Kansas wind until the looping wood grain stood out in wavy ridges that looked like a giant’s faded fingerprints. I stepped in, pulled the door closed, and sat carefully down on the bench — yes, with a bare bottom.
Of course, my grandparents had a bathroom inside, now. But the outhouse had been used by them and most of their children, summer and winter, for a long time before. To my parents, of course, this was just an old leftover, something to ignore. But I had never been this close to one before. The bench felt warm and ridged, but worn smooth, and much more comfortable than the prickly couch in the front room. Resting there, it felt like I was traveling back in time.
I looked around and listened. The air was dim except for slivers of light coming through cracks between the boards. The outhouse smell was not as strong as it must have been once. Beside me on the bench a thick old Montgomery Ward catalog leaned against the wall. The curling pages were yellow and brown, and about half were gone, used long ago for toilet paper.
It was warm and stuffy in the outhouse, but the sense of mystery deepened as I sat there, as if I was listening to it, hearing something I couldn’t quite make out.
I sat there until a big horse fly started buzzed loudly around my head. The buzzing mademe think of wasps, and I wondered whether there were wasps nests under the bench. Wasps, you know, can sting and sting, and I suddenly thought there was probably nothing they’d like better than a fresh bare bottom.
That thought brought me abruptly back to the present. So I tore a crinkly page, finished and pulled up my pants, and watched the horsefly warily. When it lit for a moment on a dim rafter above me, I jumped and ran, banging the door behind me as I hurried past the edge of the field toward the barn.
Some weeks earlier, an enterprising Irish student of TV production named Cormac had tracked me down on the net. He had discovered that in 1967 I was part of a large antiwar protest in Buffalo New York, organized by Quakers from near New York City, during which we walked across the Canadian border near Niagara Falls.
Sure, I remembered. We were carrying medical supplies for Canadian Quakers to distribute among wounded civilians on all sides of the Vietnam War; my stash was a packet of band-aids.
It was illegal for Americans to do this, under something called the Trading With The Enemy Act. So our border walk was open civil disobedience, and we were prepared to be arrested.
But we weren’t arrested. I didn’t recall publishing anything about this protest, one of many from those years; so how did Cormac, who emailed me from Ireland, know about it, and why was he interested?
Turns out there was an Irishman named George Lennon living near Buffalo at the time. He joined the border protest and noted it in his diary.
Now, 43 years later, Cormac and two classmates were making a postmortem documentary about George Lennon, based on this diary. (Decades earlier, Lennon had been part of the Irish war for independence from Britain, then later emigrated to the U.S., where he evolved into something of a pacifist.) Surfing for material, they found one mention of the Buffalo border protest: turns out it was by yours truly, buried in a talk to a Canadian group of Quakers, back in 1997, which I had since uploaded to an obscure web page (and completely forgotten about).
Which once more goes to show the marvels of the internet, the glory of google, yada yada.
“Sedition Watch.” This feature brings up “dots” of data that come onto my radar screen, which I’m working to connect. The implications of the potential connections are unsettling, and I hope the authorities are watching. The elements here are straightforward: there are a lot of upset people, mostly guys, with guns out there, and with … Continue reading Sedition Watch: Signs of the Times
Originally posted in July, 2009 In the current health-care melee, we hear much alarmist talk and Canada-bashing, aimed at their single-payer health system. A few days back, I had an unexpected chance to observe the Canadian system up close. What I saw was very instructive. Here’s what happened: on the last evening of a Toronto … Continue reading Dog Days Flashback: Enlightenment In A Canadian Emergency Room