LETTERS 

I will say this writer. It was not all sweetness and light. There were people there who lived in a kind of penitence. I can remember one conversation, in particular, that I had months after I had been in the mountains. He was small in stature with this wild black beard and black hair. He would work hard in the field, breathing hard and jabbing his spade into the earth as if he were looking for something. I noticed that he would only speak when spoken to and would avoid eye contact with me. We had an opportunity one day to talk. It happened this way: We were sent to buy some supplies in a town about 15 miles away. He drove. He seemed nervous. "Eh, so what did you do before you came up here?" He asked. I told him. There was a long silence. The road was an old horse path the county had lately paved over and the truck made it down stealthy like. I had wanted to get splendid scenes of the mountain and stream but the man wanted to talk. "Think you'll stay a year?" I told him that it was possible. A year seemed a long time during those days. A year? May as well have been ten thousand years. I finally asked him what he'd done for a living.

"I did many things I was ashamed of doing. Time has given me distance but I don't like talking about what I did."

This struck me as par for the course for the people of the mountain and didn't follow up. But there was tension. And when I felt tension I always spoke. "One single thing? Was it one thing you did?"

"Yeah, one specific, single thing that has changed everything. It made me understand the evil in my own spirit. Before I was glib about evil, ah the world is evil but not I. That was my thinking. I revealed the darkness in myself. And I was smiling the whole time! Can you imagine? I did something totally opposite my common sense. It perverted my integrity and virtue but I did smile the whole time as if it were another daily task."

"But you won't tell me what it is?"

"No, never, no one knows but the God I give me conscience to. He has judged me and lifted my guilt so I don't feel any need to confess. But, I can assure you it was a terrible thing to do."

"Well, could you tell me why you did it?"

"I can only say this. If a man isn't rooted in the conscience, if he isn't rooted there he becomes a leaf in the wind and emptied of everything but a bunch of jaded desires the world puts into him. His body becomes an instrument the world manipulates at its will. Oh yes, the pressure to do this is immense. Every word and gesture confirms it."

"What made you see this?"

"Profound shame. Weeping. The innocent faces of these children. The blight of the city I was living in and which I hated but which I became through my hated so added another stone to its yellow dust."

I felt disturbed by the man. There was a hint of violence he passed unconsciously.

"Never follow your first dream, that's all I can say. If you follow your first dream you'll be destroyed by the world, taken in by its shabby temptations and turned into darkness laying in potential in every spirit. Break that first dream down through an act of some kind. And then recover and learn. This is what the mountain provides; a place to recover and learn."

"Do you think you'll return to the city?"

"Perhaps. Look at here."

He took a hand off the steering wheel and pulled out a tattered paperback book and threw it on my lap. It was on the politics of technology. It contained an attempt to articulate the ideology of technology.

"This book is teaching me quite a bit. I'm re-learning many things. I was oblivious for a long time. I didn't read, not even the newspaper since it all made sense in a crazy way. Every event reported in the paper I could understand, even war, murder, political scandal, every bit of violence and evil I saw there."

The man stopped talking. Someone said he had Indian blood. I had met women with Indian blood but few men. He seemed on the verge of tears. His face suddenly became very expressive.

"...but I felt it was all my fault somehow. But I couldn't control it. Couldn't control any of it."

About that time the truck went up a little rise and when it leveled out I saw the little town with its gleaming tin roofs and old cars and old signs come into view.

© 2000 David Eide. All rights reserved.

David Eide
May 1, 2000
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