Complicity

            Life can get uncomfortable, but rarely so awful as Samuel Huffman’s final moments. In 1845, at nineteen, Samuel Huffman pioneered west to Oregon with the Nahum King party. Yearning for something more, Samuel survived Stephen Meek’s calamitous shortcut, tending the sick and scouting for water. Maybe he even handled the legendary blue bucket gold. With luck and gumption, Samuel arrived alive. He carved a farm out of the rolling hills of Wren and started a family. Then, according to the King Folk newsletter, in 1854, at twenty-seven, Samuel Huffman caught rabies and got so sick his brave friends put him between two mattresses and smothered him.

            That’s about how I felt, crouched, suffocating, wedged between my urge not to play the fool and my impulse to please Pop. Light rain gently pattered. I looked out, watching the evening fade through two tiny, round windows. The descending night draped a chill over the ridge as I struggled not to faint in the synthetic stench of my sweltering shelter. Several minutes remained before my cue. Feeling forced, as if fate had pushed me into this senseless situation against my will, I reminded myself why I was here:

            Pop drove my young nephews Jaden and Beckam up from California for a short visit. Along with the boys, Pop brought a rented item, and a stealthy plan. After lunch, while the boys played Frisbee, Pop and I sat at the table.

             “Remind me about the two Buddhas,” Pop said, “Who’s who?”

            “One Buddha, from different angles.” I said, “Different transmissions of Siddhartha’s epiphany traveled different directions in separate tongues. Mahayana means ‘great vehicle’ and Theravada ‘school of elders.’ Theravada trickled south exclusively in the Pali language, through Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Laos and Cambodia. Mahayana diffused north through Tibet, China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, rooted in Sanskrit, but absorbing local languages along the way.”

            “Which Buddha is laughing,” Pop asked.

            “Mahayana. The fat one.”

            “That’s my guy!” He smiled. “Let me show you something.”

            We went out to his car and he opened the trunk. I looked inside and gasped.

            “I want to give the boys an experience,” Pop said.

            “You can’t use that here, Pop. People believe.”

            He paused, taken aback by my honest alarm.

            “Well, no… I was hoping you would.”

            “You want me to do it? No way, Pop.”

            “The boys should get a feel for the Northwest!”

            “Not like this, Pop.”

            “We all need to laugh more!”

            “No, Pop. No way. We just moved here. The neighbors…”

            “It’ll be fun. Think of the wonder,” Pop insisted.

            “Pop, It’s hunting season. There are crazy people. Big rifles. Eyes everywhere. Itchy fingers.”

            “But I can’t do it,” Pop said. “If I’m gone the boys will suspect something.”

            “They will,” I agreed.

            “You’re our only chance,” Pop pressed. He laid out his plan, and how I fit into it.

            Pop has always orchestrated overly intense pranks: counterfeit lottery tickets, real gold for pretend prospecting, alarming calls from contrived consulates. As I pondered, I recalled other experiences he had provided. Once he came home wrapped in a toga, driving a borrowed DeLorean he claimed was a time machine. Another time he staged a fake break-in, staying late at work, using an old cassette recorder to capture a long, loaded silence followed suddenly by smashing glass and conspiring voices in hushed, menacing tones. To replicate furtive, aggressive rummaging, he screeched an obstinate couch across a wood floor and knocked over an old console television. He smuggled the tape machine home in his briefcase and hid it near the window behind the peace lily. Then, after M*A*S*H,  he pressed play and cranked up the volume while Mom flossed her teeth. They went to bed. Forty minutes later, well you can imagine it. What infuriated Mom most was that Pop wouldn’t get up to check. She called him something that she won’t repeat, grabbed a shoe, and went out by herself. Pop bit his pillow, swallowing giggles and feigning sleep.

            In fourth grade I learned first-aid. Pop hired a friend and a make-up artist to simulate an accident in order to sharpen my skills. Walking home from school, my friends and I encountered a man sprawled awkwardly in the shrubs under the eaves of a church, gushing blood from several mortal wounds, compound fractures protruding everywhere, barely breathing.

            “I fell off the roof,” the man gasped weakly.

            “Don’t move,” I said, my mouth suddenly dry.

            While Pop’s friend bled out, softly moaning, obviously dying, I gathered sticks to fashion splints, too shocked to think. My friends mulled uselessly around, chalk-pale, hyperventilating, trying not to puke.

            “Really Pop, I can’t.”

            “Please, do this for me,” Pop said.

            “What kind of person do you want the boys to think I am,” I asked. 

            “Please,” said Pop, “I’d do it for you.”

            “I know you would, Pop. Okay. All right, I will. Give it to me.”

            So, with a million excuses, I did it anyway. Why? What changed my mind? Viewing myself momentarily from a wider frame of reference, as a small part of everything, I just figured, why be a stick in the mud? We’re barely even here, and then for only a short moment. So, reluctantly, I acquiesced. Life is hard enough. Why be dull? I’ve spent my time at the school of elders, searching and studying. Why not mount the great vehicle and blast off?

            Certainly we do all need to laugh more. Maybe the enemy is not corporations or guns or republican or insane or immoral or religion or anarchy or management or federal or oil or buried or secret or sin or conspiracy. The trouble could reside in our own overblown sense of order, our insistence upon measuring ourselves against each other and our environment, quantifying everything. It’s not our fault. This habitual differentiation naturally results from eons of obsessively scrutinizing various berries for poison, discriminating between harmless and rotten meat; our brains easily jam in low gear, antique programs looping, running uselessly on and on. Our actual foe might be our rampant drive to divide and subdivide everything into tiered groups. These compartments aren’t real, they are just old tools, obsolete metaphors. There are no legitimate boundaries to anything at all. Perhaps qualities exist in us from more primal times that we should just find the courage to smother.

            Science and religion agree that we are all the same in substance, and that that substance is slippery, sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes nowhere. For even the densest matter is only statistical mist, and the closer we look the less we can measure. Miraculously, here we are anyway, hoping and feeling, breathing through this electromagnetic dream, flying by the seat of our pants at the random whim of something infinite, steering a meteor. With chaos always at our heels, we ought to enjoy the world’s cornucopia without judgment, examining and expanding, understanding without rating, observing without critiquing, trying without expecting. Living with heart and enthusiasm, perhaps we can outrun pessimism, naming and appreciating the components of our shared universe along the way, searching always for truth, reaching for answers, wringing knowledge from stone, sustaining our journey. But until we confess that we as humanity comprise a single organism, that we are one with our Mother Earth and with one another, taste buds on the tongue of God, we can’t create the reality we deserve. Without love we will not last. Void of awe, we are nobody. Progress requires a deeper camaraderie. And we ought not pass our cynical burden on to another generation.

            After we finished dinner, I snuck outside. While Beckam commenced his incessant handstand practice, Jaden sat on the sofa next to Pop, reading. Pop, flinging angry birds on his ipad, surreptitiously texted me.

            In an unreachable pocket, my phone buzzed. Through an inadequate breathing hole, I seized three deep breaths, sucking rubber hard against my sweating face, pulling in sweet fresh air. Evening, fading into gentle darkness, kindled wildness inside me. I arose, unconcealed at last, and loped, hoping the neighbors wouldn’t see, lanky and feral, in a shaggy, matted gorilla outfit, through the bushes, over the ditch and out into the open. Then I turned and meandered compellingly through the yard and past the living room window. Lingering as long as I dared, I paused in a posture of vague perplexity, cocking my head momentarily toward the chicken coop, displaying mild interest. Then I looked all around, sniffing at the air, and ambled away toward the woods.

            “What was that?” Exclaimed Beckam, running to the window.

            “Wow!” Jaden dropped his book and they pressed their noses against the glass.

            “There’s something weird out there!”

            Pop looked up gleefully from his ipad, breathless. “What is it?”

            “Something big and dark,” Jaden said. “It’s not a bear.”

            With no desire to deceive my nephews or stoke Pop’s dangerous obsession, I really didn’t want to don that costume. Carl Jung called Sasquatch a manifestation of our collective unconscious. The Tao points beyond the ten thousand things to a flow of wholeness where every possibility exists simultaneously, namelessly. Buddha followed an eight-fold path to similar relief. Jesus, Muhammad, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Jr. and countless others spent their energy spreading the same peaceful message. Ken Kesey and the Pranksters pushed it further. Bob Marley, the most familiar figure on the planet, called it One Love. Perhaps they’re all trying to coax out of us an endemic rabidity that, instead of inducing dread of water, makes us afraid of each other, skeptical of ourselves, oblivious to nature, petrified by our own and only situation. They worked to eradicate an epidemic of isolation in this enormous crowd, guiding us toward a more simple reality. We imagine the world as complicated, but it is not. One Buddha sits earnestly, while the other laughs.

            What kind of person do I want my nephews to think I am? Well, I suppose I want them to know the real me, Pop’s kid, the type of human who, for the right reasons, might put on an ape suit and become Bigfoot. It’s easy to think it’s too late, that we’re too far gone, that humankind has spun out of control. It’s natural to feel doomed. But it doesn’t have to be so. Now that this new age has arrived, I am hopeful we can learn to get along and love one another the whole world over, taking trouble less personally and ourselves less seriously. Things are not so grim. Whether we meditate stoically, or hoot like the world is a joke, we must treat each other as we would ourselves, acting and reacting always with kindness, respect, honor and equality.

            Sadly, another small gravestone snuggles against Samuel Huffman’s. Chloa, his two year old daughter, drank from his water glass, caught his rabies, and died too. It’s a deep and genuine bummer to end your life between two mattresses, mad-ass rabid, squirming and drooling, thirsty and terrified, raving, smashed and blue. But it’s much worse to take your precious offspring with you. So, to the misguided powerful and the selfish rich, to the bored, the fearful, and the stiff, the unsatisfied and the indignant, to those who refuse to let in the light, to change, and change again, and keep changing, embarrassed to become and remain flexible and spontaneous as little children: There is still time. I entreat you, for Pop’s sake, in the words of the great liberator Moses, and in the distinctive voice of Charlton Heston, “Let my people go!”

            Laughing or weeping, we are temporary and aggregate, stuck here together, complicit with all, a compound singularity. Rising Buddhas. Ghosts dancing.