I was six years old when I saw my first movie in a sit-down theater instead of from the back seat of my father’s old Chevy at a drive-in. My mother, her friend Donnette, my little sister, and I rode the bus from south Atlanta to the Fabulous Fox Theater in downtown to see Son of Flubber, Disney’s follow-up to The Absent-Minded Professor. In both films, Fred MacMurray played Professor Ned Brainard who invented flying rubber—flubber—that could levitate large objects like cars and give athletes incredible leaping ability. It was silly slapstick and perfect for a six-year old.
Usually, when we saw a movie, it was at the drive-in, huge screen in front of us and a metal box speaker on the driver’s side window. Mom and Dad hoped my sister and I would fall asleep after the cartoons and, usually, we did. If I happened to wake up, it wasn’t hard to figure-out what was going on: the movies always had two sides: good versus bad—a hero and an adversary or gang of adversaries. We saw all three of the spaghetti westerns that starred Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name, a bounty hunter with nerves of steel. We never missed Sean Connery as “Bond, James Bond,” 007, or John Wayne, whether as a soldier or a cowboy.
My father chose the movies, and he wanted them to have clear endings—at least happy and preferably triumphant, with all the loose ends tied up. He would have been confounded by 1917’s ending: with Schofield under a tree gazing at a picture of his family, instead of back in his hometown, sweeping his wife up in his arms. After all, with Schofield under the tree, we can’t be sure he made it home. Jojo Rabbit would have flummoxed him. I imagine his saying something like, “What’s with dancing kids and a quote that didn’t rhyme from a poet that nobody ever heard of?” The poet, by the way, is Rilke.
Clear endings are hard to come by in life and in movies true to it. Great movies live on well-past the final scene and the scrolling of the credits. In fact, we don’t know what a movie meant or means or might mean until after the ending. Since we try to make sense of the ending, it isn’t yet the end, As with movies, so with life: the endings aren’t often clear, because the story doesn’t find its completion until after the end.
*
Scene 1: Bus Station, Alamosa, CO
A weather-worn four room house, with a sagging stoop at the front door, served as the bus station in Alamosa, CO. On the door, which was open more often than closed, there was a faded, rusting Trailways sign.
A family lived there; its matriarch was also the station master. Her den, where kids sat eating Fruit Loops and watching television, was also the waiting room. There were a lot of kids and a few passengers.
From her kitchen counter, she replenished Fruit Loops and sold bus-tickets, money-orders, and occasional cups of coffee, served in mugs that were more or less clean.
Passengers used the family’s tiny bathroom.
Zoning and licensing regulations in Alamosa were lax.
The house sat on an island of gravel surrounded by cracked and buckling asphalt.
I was there to catch a bus to Denver to start a series of flights to Atlanta in the hope of seeing my father before he died. He’d had lymphoma for ten years; had gone into remission early-on, relapsed, and had been recently hospitalized at Emory to prepare for a stem-cell transplant. The preparations didn’t go well; he caught an infection that wouldn’t clear, and my sister got word to me that if I wanted to see him before he died, I should “come home.”
It was a four-hour car ride from Alamosa to Denver; the trip with Trailways was going to take roughly ten hours. I was taking the bus so that my departure didn’t interrupt my friend Terry’s retreat. We’d been at Nada Hermitage, an hour from Alamosa, high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains for three days; we had planned on four more.
*
Scene 2: Nada, the Mountain, the Bear and the Storm
Nada is near Crestone, a village of around 100 year-round residents that is also a kind of magnet for religious seekers; in the area are a Zen Center, a Hindu Temple, several Tibetan Centers, experiments in communal living, and a variety of retreat venues. And, there’s Nada, a small Carmelite monastic community—the monks are men and women—that supports itself primarily by hosting retreatants. It’s nestled in a high valley, at about 7,000 feet. In that desert, stark quiet deafens; night darkness illumines; expansive vistas embrace.
On our third day there, the day before he drove me to the bus station, Terry and I hiked toward a glacial lake, situated near a peak, at about 14,000 feet. We had about 2.000 feet left to climb and came to a lovely meadow, lush and green and full of wildflowers. Our map told us that, on the other side of the meadow, there was a small waterfall, with a trail behind it, that we would take to continue our ascent to the lake. But, in the middle of the meadow, a few hundred yards away, between us and the waterfall, was a huge black bear.
The bear had seen us and was watching us. He hadn’t come toward us—yet. We were frozen in place. We waited to see if he would move away. Instead, he took a few lumbering steps toward us. Only a few, but they were more than enough. We started back the way we had come.
Just then, a thunderstorm broke across the mountain—gashes of light, cracks of thunder, hard rain, and, soon, hail. The hail and the rain were cold; the hailstones were big enough to hurt, but not much. We would have taken cover and waited out the storm, but there was this bear . . .
The bear wasn’t hurrying. We were trying to. We sloshed and slid and fell and got up; sloshed and slid and fell and got up.
I was afraid and thrilled.
The hail stopped, though the rain continued. The bear lost interest in us. We stopped to catch our breath. I was soaked. My heart was racing.
I was in God-knows-where Colorado, and no one else knew where I was.
No one knew who I was.
It was great.
Really.
We were on a mountain that had turned wild. We’d been followed—it felt like chased—by a bear. We were caught in a raw storm. I felt small and insignificant and free and glad. I laughed and cried. I was as alive as I’d ever been.
The experience was exhilarating because it wasn’t at all about me. It included me, but it wasn’t for me or because of me. The bear, the meadow, and the storm were completely independent of me.
Conditions hadn’t been curated to enhance my growth. If what happened on the mountain became meaningful to me, it would be because of the story I found in it and told about it—the movie I made in my mind and played on the screen of my heart.
That night, back at Nada, after evening prayer with the monks and Elijah Craig with Terry, I got the message from my sister.
*
Scene 3: On the Trailways Bus.
When I got on the bus in Alamosa, the only open seat was next to a woman who had a huge Bible in her lap. As soon as I settled-in, she showed me, with pride, her new Jimmy Swaggart Study Bible, faux leather, which she had gotten when she sent a $150 donation to Jimmy’s ministry. She also asked me if I knew that Swaggart’s cousins were Mickey Gilley and Jerry Lee Lewis. “All those boys sure can play and sing,” she said, as if she knew them. Eventually, she ran out of things to tell me about Reverend Swaggart.
I pulled out the novel I was reading, Special Topics in Calamity Physics. The woman next to me read the title and looked puzzled. Soon she asked me, “You taking courses?” Her question confused me. I said, “I’m not sure what you’re asking.” She pointed at the book and said, “Well, physics and all, I thought you might be in school.”
I said, “Oh, no. It’s a novel.” She said, “That means it ain’t true, right?”
I was too tired for an epistemology conversation. I just said: “Well, I’m enjoying it.” But I kept thinking about what’s real and what’s true—about the stuff that happens and the meaning that we find in the stuff.
*
Scene 4: Airplane and Airport.
Eighteen hours later, my plane from Denver landed in Dallas. I turned on my cell phone. A single voicemail said my father had died.
Alone in Dallas, I jogged through the airport to make a tight connection, juggling my backpack. I was disoriented but jolted by how alive I felt.
I was in a crowd of strangers who felt like kin as I imagined where they were going and why: to hold a newborn grandchild, close a big business deal, enjoy some down time, attend a wedding, or interview for a dream job. They had their own ends—their own purposes and stories.
I was journeying toward death--my dad’s. A few years later, I went to Durham, and, on his birthday, began the process of a stem-cell transplant. Several days later, on the anniversary of his death, I had what the caregivers at Duke call a “second birthday”; they gave me back my stem cells in the hope that they would help me recover from the lethal drugs they set flowing in my veins the day before.
I nearly died there, twice, and I learned for myself that death is a vast and wild mystery, an ending which, before it arrives and after it comes, inspires dread, joy, reckoning, gratitude, freedom, stories, movies, music, dancing, and poetry, poetry like he lines from Rilke at the conclusion of Jojo Rabbit:
"Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final."
Guy Sayles is a writer in Asheville, NC. Find him at the intersection.
