Less than a year later John requested a special meeting with his boss and, accompanied by his wife and two children, John informed his employer that because of his commitment to the truth and to something he called "right livelihood" he could no longer serve the firm—a consulting company called Western Operations—as its main computer programmer. John thanked his boss, he said goodbye to his associates, and he resigned. He bought and restored a 1948 International Harvester school bus, transformed its interior into living quarters for his family, and joined the caravan of other used school buses, old trucks, and Volkswagen vans that Stephen Gaskin led on a tour—a pilgrimage—around the country. When John's vehicle stalled, he was flat broke, and he called me to ask if I would lend him two hundred dollars so he and his family could return to California and start over.
John was my best friend.
I did.
No questions asked.
Not more than a year later John spent two nights with me and my family in Tempe as he hitchhiked his way to and from Summertown, Tennessee, where he said Gaskin and his disciples in the caravan had just returned, bought farmland, and founded a monastic collective and commune they called The Farm.
When he stopped overnight with me on his way back home, John told me a story of one of the nights he had spent at the commune. The community had gathered wood and built a huge bonfire, and members of the The Farm sat or stood in a wide circle around it. Gaskin, with a full beard and shoulder-length hair like every other man at The Farm, had sprained his ankle earlier in the day and on the night in question he had leaned on a staff, looking like an Old Testament prophet, John told me, as Gaskin addressed his hundred and fifty or so disciples. They were still living in their buses, vans, and trucks, or in tents, and Gaskin had been trying to rally and inspire his weary and discouraged followers. He sensed something, he had told the group, bad vibes he said he couldn't quite put his finger on.
"What is it?" he asked.
No one knew.
"I feel it," Gaskin said frowning. "What is it?"
No one knew.
"What is it?" Gaskin asked again.
John told me that his paranoia ratcheted up another notch each time Gaskin had inquired. John was certain it was his own lack of faith in the idealistic enterprise that his teacher felt. It was his own doubt, his own failure of belief, that was the source of the negativity.
John was sure.
John said he felt like Judas must have felt at the Last Supper.
"What is it?"
"It's me, it's me!" John told me he was just about to shout. "It's my doubt that you feel! It's me!"
But then only a split second before he confessed his doubt and embarrassed himself, John said, someone on the other side of the circle had called out and suggested that everyone was just worried and tired. The spell that bound John was broken and the speech and actions that followed were ordinary.
We laughed about it.
Joked.
Unable at that time to join them, in 1972 John moved his family back to Ames, Iowa, where eleven years earlier he and I had first met as classmates in freshman English, and now in Ames John had been employed in a variety of jobs, the last as a rodman on a survey crew for the state highway commission.
The war continued.
A million dead.
Two.
Here's what just a hundred look like—
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkk
The prayer of Robert Bly, "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last," written in 1970, I did not know until decades had passed. But it has helped me more than I can say. Here is part of it:
But if one of those children came near that we have set on fire,
came toward you like a gray barn, walking,
you would howl like a wind tunnel in a hurricane,
you would tear at your shirt with blue hands,
you would drive over your own child's wagon trying to back up,
the pupils of your eyes would go wild.
If a child came by burning, you would dance on your lawn,
trying to leap into the air, digging into your cheeks,
you would ram your head against the wall of your bedroom
like a bull penned too long in his moody pen.
If one of those children came toward me with both hands
in the air, fire rising along both elbows,
I would suddenly go back to my animal brain,
I would drop on all fours, screaming,
my vocal chords would turn blue; so would yours,
it would be two days before I could play with one of my own children again.
On June 8, 1972, Nick Ut photographed Kim Phuc, a nine-year-old girl in Vietnam, screaming, crying, naked, running up the road from her village toward the camera in agony, terror, and pain, the adhesive jellied gasoline called napalm burning hellish holes through the skin and muscle of her flesh to the bone. It haunted me, it haunts me still, I think it will haunt me forever.
I want to drop on all fours and scream.
Yes.
I want to drop on all fours and scream.
I want to drop on all fours and scream.
I want to drop on all fours and scream.
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