At a Motel 6 at Gold Beach an Amish family pack their car. This is Rumspringa: their taste of the outside world, ‘running around’. In theory, there’s no adult control. There can be parties, mobile phones. Most find the taste enough and return.
The teenagers quietly obey their parents. The teenage boy has a beard that looks like thick fuzz. His sister has a pale blue dress and white headpiece that is both beautifully elegant and reminiscent of a dystopian novel. Are they leaving or returning? They seem in a subtle hurry, not drawing attention, just leaving. Heading south on Highway 101 through the southern Oregon countryside. We cross an invisible line and the car radio now rants about how false evolution is. Callers urgently state their claims, preaching to the converted. Apparently in Texas, they found dinosaur fossils with human remains or footprints. Megalodon sharks might still be alive, not ancient after all. No one knows what tonsils are for, you know. Or the appendix. We all stopped changing after The Flood, which wasn’t that long ago. The next morning in a coffee shop in Gold Beach. An animated old man holds court with a group of reverential peers, all entranced by his sardonic-tongued preaching. "Nearer we get to death, the more a church is our waiting room and the Bible our instruction manual." He starts describing a local woman as short and unattractive. Snuffled giggles from his complicit disciples. Sigh from a young woman listening at a table nearby. He nods her an apology. The cafe owner sits down and confesses her mother’s many heart problems, depression, numerous other ailments. Good days and bad. She sighs, heavy shoulders. “They fixed her heart. Old ma be haunting us for a few more years yet!" In a queue for the power boat tour of Rogue river a man talks about his first wife being Catholic. "But we had a bun in the oven under six months, so got married." His second wife is Jewish and he’s grown to really appreciate Judaism as he was always interested in Israel. We all board the boat and surge up river, into God’s own country.
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AuthorA poetic-essay style blog with a limit of 365 words. 365 like the days of the year - my name being one of those days! Archives
March 2020
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