In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [57]
Current events I had never been aware of announced themselves each morning in the newspaper’s headlines. In 1970, when we first moved to Lewiston, I knew little of Vietnam, but I felt the waves it created as the conflict settled into the pooled American psyche. Even in Idaho, would-be hippies brandished their peace signs like silver crosses, and from our pulpit came the verdict: the peace sign was indeed a cross, but a cross broken by the forces of evil to resemble instead a witch’s foot. Behind the movement to make-love-not-war lay the unbridled desire of people doomed to self-destruction, not by bombs and guns, but by uninhibited copulation and drug use. The evangelist from Kansas called for a record burning, and the church’s teenagers lucky enough to own albums by The Beatles and Black Sabbath made a pyre in the parking lot, which the preacher saturated with gas and set afire, damning Satan back to His hell.
Something in the drama thrilled me. Anything that warranted such protest held incredible power, although I could not then articulate it as such. But the lives of those my elders feared—the rock stars, hippies, gang members, runaways—seemed to hold some spark, some power my own life did not. Even while I prayed with the others for God to strike down the army of dissent rising from the ranks of the country’s youth, I found myself secretly wondering what it would be like to be among them. I knew that rock and roll promoted it all—disrespect for authority, anti-patriotism, drugs, sex, Satanism. “Strawberry Fields Forever” played backward was The Lord’s Prayer, and still I listened late into the night, unwilling to give up my radio.
Maybe it was the music. Maybe what I heard in the lyrics and the rhythm and the deejay’s voice was what shook me, made me desire more of the world. I longed to be part of the group of girls at school who marched at half-time beneath the lights while their ruddy-faced parents applauded from the bleachers, but when I asked to try out for junior high drill team, my father said the skirts were too short. My brother was encouraged to participate in sports, but I could find nothing acceptable to fill my hours between school, church and sleep. No to the after-school dance, the movies, the swimming pool. The threat of assault from the outside world coupled with the laxity of the church’s concern with modesty and strict moral behavior burdened my father with even greater responsibility. He drew his family tight. He would protect us, be the gatekeeper of our souls—his duty as a man.
My father became for me a wall of unreasonable denial, and I was unable to separate his distrust of the world from his distrust of me. He believed in absolute patriarchy and countenanced no questioning of his authority. His word was final. I chafed against his unwillingness to listen. I wanted only to assure him that I would be good—hadn’t I always been?—that I would not do anything wrong or sinful. His night job as a truck driver, hauling wood chips from the forests he once loved to the mill at Lewiston to be made into paper and plywood, distanced my father even more. I saw little of him except on Sundays, when he drove us to church morning and evening and slept the hours between in his recliner.
My mother too seemed to me more and more unreasonable.