2/14/08
By Trish Pennypacker
Critic ColumnistI was born a Vermonter but my roots lie neither here nor there. For the first twelve years of my life I lived in the same house. but alternated between public, Christian, and home school. When I hit puberty my dad hit a religious high: fanatical most people would call it. ”Cultish,” my grandmother said. Up went my hair behind a head covering. Down went the hemline on my handmade skirts. Out came my tender roots from the native soil.
It was 1987. My father and a few like-minded men were revolting against governmental and religious authority. High on biblical interpretation and disgusted with world greed they began to question their existence. “Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth. Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body what ye shall put on. For your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things,” or so Matthew 6 says. And thus my world changed.
My father gave up his business first, then electricity, our furniture, our house, our cars, and all but essential belongings. Nothing prepared me for this “simpler” kind of life, but with blind faith I drifted down the Eastern seacoast, rolled with the stern tide of subordination, an ephemeral moonbeam between child and woman. Of which purpose I didn’t understand.
People called us gypsies. And so we were. Pale, blue-eyed misfits traveling in a caravan of buses, sneaking glances through faded curtains at the grey, vast modern world: big hair and acid washed jeans, leather bomber jackets and knit miniskirts. But we were the merchants cast into the sea. We had given up materialism for the spiritual life, although it was sometimes hidden behind flea market jockeys, apron pockets jingling with change and banana boxes full of wares to sell. In time the smell of asphalt erased memories of fresh lilac blossoms in the New England air; the booming voices of vendors overshadowed the somber sounds of preachers, although each were skilled in the trade of deceit.
And so it went. Mile after mile across the United States, green hills turned to red dust in a blank horizon; swamplands held the tide brackish, rancid and still; the thick desperation of the overgrown inland left me homesick before endless tall-grass prairies bowed to hard mountains. I was nothing but a pod-less milkweed, a spur-less sandspur, a tumbleweed in the wind.
But somewhere in the endless knot of landscape, beyond the symbolic skirts and head coverings (Yes! We are God’s people!) the exoteric meant nothing. The slow possession the earth took upon my soul could not be measured by distance. That a consecrated beauty beyond the flaws of humanity exists, and I became aware of such beauty, was more inspiring than the Scriptures.
For years I hid this revelation. All of it. There was no forgiveness for falling to my knees at the glory of a sunset, or realizing that the hawk had more meaning to his flight than our own exodus as upside-down birds, eyes on a heaven. But my own heaven was shuffled into the dust from which all life begins and ends. I paid my reverence to purple mountains and restless prairie, a multi-colored and unparalleled sanctuary.
I wish I could say that my father found his peace beyond the endless highway; that shedding the need for authority and materialism gave him the key to Paradise. But this is not true. My father was ultimately a provider, and his God could only provide insomuch as my father himself could provide. Many of my father’s questions went unanswered. To him, who had surrendered so much, this was the ultimate failure. That my father questioned was not his sin. As Barbara Kingsolver says, “Questioning our government’s actions does not violate the principles of liberty, equality, and freedom of speech; it exercises them and by exercise we grow stronger.”
Inadvertently, this truth was borne out. Years on the road took its toll on my family. Faith was singularly important; tested endlessly it was forgotten. And grief that extended beyond the earth was imparted on a man without a home, without answers, without faith. The same furtive quest that weakened my father’s spirit expanded and strengthened my own. My wild longing to belong somewhere faded. I had as much right to belong to any one place as the tumbleweed. The earth is not mine to have, to possess, and yet my roots so long ago uprooted, have flourished like tillandsia.
Certainly time has turned the whispers, stares, and misunderstandings of my nomadic life to insignificance, the harsh realities of the world to wonders. In the great misty air of living I come back to Vermont. For within a great part of me, Vermont is the place I call home.
2/14/08
