FOURTEEN
Fight-or-flight running while unconscious
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Flight into the forest. The deep, dark woods.
There are misconceptions, held by some, about the fight-flight process and how much personal agency one has over the decision to do either. With a shift to a directly threatening situation, a momentary freeze happens first, during which one's biology assesses the best prospects for survival (in this cold, harsh world). It's said the thing usually remembered is prior what follows that initial freeze, the moment one becomes aware of the threat, such as when the drama involves a person who becomes a potential assailant, when their expression changes in such a way that peril is comprehended as immediate. That change can be as subtle as a trace flicker of movement out the corner of one’s eye, one flinches at a momentary blur on the ground, a shadow, and one wonders was that a rodent or not and is suddenly on edge because you want it to be nothing, a figment of the imagination that has disrupted one’s peace, but the ancient guardian of self-preservation triggers an alert and the hair on the back of one’s neck rises. In the case of a human assailant, one may not even be conscious of the change and how it has signaled threat, but depending on what follows that initial freeze, the momentary assessment of the offender’s expression may be the last thing remembered. The momentary assessment freeze I'm describing is not what is called a situation of tonic immobility or collapsed immobility, which is the freeze referred to in the full fight-flight-freeze-fawn-flop breakdown of trauma responses. I've experienced all these things, and this story is about flight, when the body calculates, of its own accord, that you're in a position to be able to run, takes control, and away you go. Never mind when one's reactions are strictly conscious and strategic, this is about the unconscious and the body teaming up and doing with you what they will to preserve the probability you continue to be the eater of meals rather than becoming a meal.
Despite everyone having experienced the unconscious override of fight-or-flight at some point in their lives, many imagine that how one acts in a threatening situation is always a matter of explicit conscious decision. How could it be otherwise? There is a big box, I’m going to pick it up and I know from the occasional contact with how-to warnings that I should bend my knees to protect my back, which doesn’t mean I will follow this advice but I automatically reflect upon how I should. There is my new Ikea whatever, maybe a bookcase, and here is the printed sheet that tells me how to put it together. If I follow the instructions, I will be able to construct a bookcase even if
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I’ve no prior experience, I have put together many Ikea bookcases, also chairs, tables, a bed, even couches, and what I’ve learned is that I will be able to do the job if I have all the parts, before one leaves the store one perhaps needs to crack open the box and check to make sure nothing is missing but it’s likely this won’t be done because it’s a pain and one instead hopes that expecting all the parts will be there will mean they will be. There is my dinner on a plate and I use a fork to eat my mashed potatoes, for though I could eat them with a spoon that would seem weird to me because the acceptable American etiquette is, post-toddlerhood, to use a fork. That kind of planned, conscious decision-making (I am perplexed as to why my brain conjured these mundane examples) is believed by many to be what happens even in a traumatic situation, and if one fully freezes then it’s a personal failure to respond appropriately, a person may even be said to have been compliant with rape. People who understand the unconscious override is possible may still imagine it would never happen to them. If they are in peril, they imagine their conscious intelligence will control their actions, just like in the movies people save themselves by clever thinking. All the movies with violent interactions one has watched may even be perceived as rehearsals, one has thought about “What if I was in that situation” and will know what to do. Maybe they do act like little rehearsals and help. Maybe not. Maybe they aren’t adequate to meet the situation and unconscious self-preservation says fuck that and takes over. Just as one’s heart beats of its own volition (did you as a child experience panic when you learned your heart was controlled by the autonomic nervous system and you worried that the automatic nervous system might forget to be automatic one day) so might millions of years of evolution have their way under certain circumstances, which doesn't mean the unconscious body is going to be inarguably right in the choices it makes, which doesn't mean there weren't other options, but the unconscious doesn't care, it's making up its mind for you when evolution kicks in and it decides it has no other choice but to act as it will.
Previous experience, training, culture, and, yes, force of will, can have their part in response. Everyone who regularly drives a car will more than once find themselves in a situation in which training and quick reflexes under the pressure of the split second have prevented an accident. The military relies on rigorous training to oil the battlefield. But what if one is valorous against the enemy then is raped by one's general, how does one's training service them? If you’ve been trained to sacrifice yourself for the chessboard’s king, what happens when the chessboard’s king becomes the enemy? A fair amount of one’s training in the military is to override self-preservation instincts so one will even intentionally stride with one’s companions into a senseless battle in which one is almost certain to be killed, rather than running in the other direction, which would be “desertion” and if you’re caught by your own side could mean you die anyway as desertion during war-time might get one the death penalty. After all, the military can’t have soldiers who, observing a killing field, feel they’ve the freedom and right to say, “No, I’m not sacrificing myself to that grotesque futility.” The military must have full authority and the soldier must submit without argument to their place in the chain of command.
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Fight or flight. When AK was five, and a pit bull-rotweiller charged toward us (before one gets upset I note the breed, when I was about twenty-five and out for an early morning run I was held in place for a half hour by three variety dogs who came out of their yard and surrounded me on a street down which no one passed the entire time, I couldn’t move an inch without them bristling, growling and moving in closer, then as if by magic after about thirty minutes they stepped back in unison and allowed me to slowly continue, what worries me about pit bulls is their jaw pressure death grip when they do decide to attack and how children don’t have a chance) I placed myself between the charging dog and my child, as I faced the dog yet got my child inside, I didn’t have a chance to get inside myself it was that fast. A combination of instinct and conscious abdication of my own self-preservation had been at work when I got my child to safety, my brain was engaged, I calculated what I had time to do. However, no matter the love I had for my child, I’ve no idea if a simple unconscious preservation of the next generation of my personal gene pool was at play, or an instinct to get the littlest and most vulnerable to safety. My child no longer threatened, I consciously froze, backed up by the dog against the (outward opening) screen door to our kitchen, I didn’t risk an attempt to open the screen door from behind me and slip in, the dog’s attitude made me worry that one move on my part would provoke it immediately, I wouldn’t have a chance to get inside, I didn’t want my son to witness that, so there I quietly stood trusting the dog would be satisfied with a stalemate. For all I knew the dog would have continued its charge and attacked if I had not gotten AK out of sight behind a barrier, but now the dog had only me before it, the adult. The situation was that we were in the shared back area of an apartment building, owners of dogs weren’t to let their dogs out unleashed, but the owner of this dog had, while AK and I were out back, let their dog out down the the rear fire escape while they remained inside, and the dog immediately interpreted us as violating its space and tore down the fire escape after us. After a couple of minutes of my facing off the dog, which had planted itself a foot from me, neither of us moving, the owner opened the door and called their dog back in. Early that evening, I went upstairs and complained to the couple to whom the dog belonged and the male partner responded the dog could smell fear and that’s why it went after us. I don’t know if I expected an apology, my goal was for this to not happen again. The landlord had told me a couple of days earlier how he was worried about the dog, it had threatened him in the back area, holding him at the gate, and he’d reminded the couple the rule was dogs were not to be let out in the back off leash or alone. They were gone in less than a couple of months, having purchased a home as the wife was pregnant and nearing her due date. I hoped there would be no problems between the dog and an infant. Those are people one wonders about, what happened with their personal story.
This is a harmless little fight-or-flight story in which three faced the same perceived threat at the same moment and each responded differently.
At fifteen, a sophomore in high school, I have a friend who was very nice, we’ll call her Rhonda, and I prized her for how flagrantly normal she was. By nice, I don't mean she was just innocuously pleasant or sweet. I mean she had an engaging personality, she
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liked people, she was never deliberately mean, yet she wasn't without the capacity to be wittily acerbic, and her humor was even sometimes irreverent, though she rarely used expletives, or if she accidentally did she'd immediately clap her hand to her mouth, her eyes laughing astonished and supposedly aghast at her misstep.
Those rare foul words she’d accidentally say, then clap her hand over her mouth in astonishment that one had escaped her, raise the question as to what makes them dangerous. What are “foul” words and why. Take, for instance, the word “shit”. When I was young, one could say “poop” but one couldn’t say “shit”, not as an expletive, not as a descriptor, a noun or a verb. When I was young, to say poop was alright because it was baby talk. My family didn’t say “poop”, my family said “number two”. I disliked both terms and found them unnatural, silly, absurd, which left me in a bit of a situation as how to describe basic bodily functions. To say one urinated or defecated was, I guess, a little too direct, though “poop” was also direct in as much as there was no doubt what it meant. It may be that “urinate” and “defecate” are both a couple of syllables too long—though not longer than “number one” or “number two”—and call too much attention to themselves in the time taken to say them. Though permissible, “urinate” and “defecate” were podium terms, words one would read in a textbook, a little formal and not normally deployed. I remember when the word “shit” first popped out of my mouth, as an expletive, not a noun or a verb (I never adopted it as a verb or an infinitive), I was ten and standing beside the station wagon in the carport on Edinburgh, something happened, not major, I don’t recollect what, and out popped the word, “Shit”, not directed at anyone, not with an exclamation mark, just there. So was my mother there, I knew she was there but I had hardly taken notice of her, as if I’d forgotten about her, and she was quick, whap, I was slapped across the face, which shocked me because I wasn’t immediately conscious that I’d accidentally said the word “shit”, which was a word I had never used, I heard it used by some others, but I hadn’t adopted it. By the time I was fourteen, outside the home it had become an oft-used word with me, like, “Fuck.” But when I was ten I was content with saying, at my most rare extreme, “damn”, which was then a word frowned upon until one was a teenager though in certain contexts of use it was near permissible. “Damn” was, however, a hard word, a word of force, and considered beyond precocious if uttered by a younger child. One couldn’t say “God damn it” because most people believed in God, or acted like they did, one was not to take the Lord’s name “in vain” according to the Ten Commandments, and to say “God damn it” was near superstitiously treated as a curse, one supposedly couldn’t involve God in this way, though people did all the time, such as when they called upon the almighty to raise their hand against homosexuals, heathens, communists, and the star player on an opposing football team. A five-year-old or a seven-year-old wasn’t of age yet to say “damn”, but at the age of ten one could sometimes get away with a “damn” if it wasn’t too vigorous and as long as one didn’t use any other swear words. What was and is acceptable language will be different according to one’s family and community, but there were and are certain understood rules that kept one from using what were and are considered curse words in any social context that might be overheard by any but one’s peers. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) helped lay down the rules, all around the
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land, of what was frowned upon and what was completely out-of-bounds, but these were already words not said in “polite” company, not spoken from the podium. What is decent or indecent? What is indecent but permissible because it hasn’t somehow crossed the border into what is obscene, and the question then is why is it obscene. I’m not talking about ethnic or racial slurs, words that come with a loaded history of systemic hate, just words like shit and fuck. When someone says “fuck this” they don’t literally mean “fuck this”, it’s a nonsense word at that point drawn from the list of criminal words. The soft expletive “darn” came from “darnation” which was a euphemism for “damnation”, and all it took was switching out an “m” with an “r” for a word to become FCC acceptable. I only brought this subject up because my friend would rarely say one of the more minor of the words and then respond with gleeful aghast horror that this had happened. Her parents would have undoubtedly frowned on any use of curse words but I don’t know how she was taught they were not to be used. And I know she would have been taught that “darn” was an okay word to use. Disney even used the word in the title of the 1965 film That Darn Cat. If cute blond starlet Hayley Mills, of That Darn Cat, could say it then you could too. Hayley Mills wanted to play Lolita in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, and if Hayley had gotten her way then she would have been no longer the teen starlet standard-bearer of cute, but Walt Disney didn’t let her play Lolita, so Hayley Mills remained the measure of what was acceptable behavior. Even “hell” was, bizarrely, an out-of-bounds word, and was near shocking to hear an adult utter, much less a child, as in a teacher would never use “hell” as a minor expletive before a student. Ministers and others could tell you all day long how you were going to hell if you weren’t “saved” or didn’t walk the straight and narrow, someone’s aunt could announce that a person or situation was going “to hell in a handbasket”, but to lowly mutter or briefly explode with a “hell” was a threatening disruption of order. For the exclamation of “hell” to pass the lips of a teenage girl was to rip her out of the bosom of polite innocence and reveal she was a person with a rough interior, and a person with a rough interior was suspect, a bad girl, she was open to about anything, she might smoke, drink, do drugs, have sex, be a whore. She may even be a feminist, which was more concerning because that was a person with a social agenda. Those who were status quo never had an agenda, only those who were suspicious. To be any kind of an “ist” was to be a fanatic, with the exception of being a capitalist. Or an anesthetist. Or an archaeologist, or an aerialist. It was OK to expect some rights as a woman, but to define oneself as a feminist was to take a declarative stand perceived as hostile, a step removed from being a socialist or a communist, maybe even an anarchist, a gateway to harder drugs. To declare oneself a feminist was to make one a part of a movement, a seething pack of bacchantes with knives out to sever the root of the patriarchy. Even such a word as “patriarchy” made god-fearing men and women nervous, for it affirmed a problem by identifying and defining it, and the only ones who were anxious to identify and define it were those who would be looked upon as acting up, which women weren’t supposed to do, they were intended to be submissive, as were men on the descending ladders of status supposed to be submissive to those above, and anyone who wasn’t white was supposed to be submissive to white men and women because white people were real people as opposed to those who faked being real by
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way of civil rights. To be an art-ist was dangerous and counterculture if one’s subjects and style didn’t make it immediately plain you were on the side of gentle portraiture and landscapes and still lifes that were easy on the eyes and mind. The raised question mark of an eyebrow could only momentarily hang above the living room couch in the form of an abstract or abstract expressionist painting, which was all right if quickly recognized as nothing more than a pleasing arrangement of shapes and colors, not a statement that implied a judgment and demand for accountability. The century-old impressionism of Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a movement officially born in 1874, was accepted, even enjoyed, also Vincent Van Gogh’s postimpressionism, as long as the viewer wasn’t pressed to struggle over depictions of prostitutes or nudes or dour impoverished potato eaters, but also identified the limit of how far art could venture before it became an assault on conventional prescriptions of order and beauty or stressed as an intellectual exercise.
A reason to enthusiastically support a criminal list of curse words is that exclaiming them when one is in pain is scientifically proven to lessen the sensation of pain by as much as thirty-three percent. The thirty-three percent seems too precise to be an unfailingly real measure reproducible in other confirming experiments, because pain is hard to define from person to person. “How much does it hurt on a scale of one to ten? Seven? How much does it hurt if you yell ‘shit’? 4.69? Wonderful. That is the norm for the extremity of pain reduction.” Swear words function as stress-induced analgesics through their tying in with a fight-or-flight response and causing the amygdala to release adrenaline, this pain-killer only accessible due our perception of certain words as off-limits, bad, anti-social. The same effect isn’t had with words one might make up as a replacement. The analgesic word has to be the real deal, traditional, guaranteed to make your churchgoing grandmother swoon, and you can’t swear all the time because a swear word’s power as a pain-killer diminishes with frequent use, which doesn’t mean they don’t remain words that signal “here there is an emotional response that says fuck you to your criticism that a more imaginative and less criminal vocabulary would better suffice.”
A swear word is pure uncut emotion. “Fuck! I cut myself!” People who swear are found to lie less interpersonally and even have higher integrity, because they are more honest in the expression of their emotions. Still, as a caveat, the authors of the study that reported this have warned their findings don’t mean profaners might not engage in immoral or unethical behavior.
Swearing is also shown to lessen not only physical pain but psychological pain, such as swearing after relating a distressing memory has a like analgesic effect.
The frequency with which I curse perhaps signals my fight-or-flight impulse has been hyper-aroused by my history (I’m half joking here), but since I so frequently curse, the analgesic effect having less impact, may be why I am less satisfied with one simple, “Fuck”, than a “Fuck, fuck, shit, fuck it.” When my son was born, I felt I had to put that aside, because I didn’t want to raise him hearing me constantly swear, that wouldn’t be good for him, so I stuck to a diet of legitimate words, as did MK, which isn’t difficult to do when you have a little one delighting in learning language and you
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share in that delight, but he heard me swear sometimes, it wasn’t taught as a bad thing, just a behavior one had to be careful about as it aggrieved some people. Then when he was a teenager he naturally came upon the utility of swearing, and I was eventually free to swear again as I wanted, and we both just continued to be careful to not swear in professional and sensitive areas, one didn’t swear in public, and especially not during bi-annual visits with his widowed grandmother, by which I mean his father’s mother who has never uttered a swear word in her life I don’t believe. Except for “damn”, I never heard my mother swear either which leads me to believe this is less a matter of only religious inculcation than very successfully instilled middle-class expectations during their formative years. My husband’s father once told me that he had never even thought a swear word in his life, an accomplishment in which he took great pride, which one would understand if one had known him, but I consider may be a thing of which he convinced himself for sake of his ministerial dedication to such self-control, a vow it seems he made to himself when he was a child, maybe in response to the character of his alcoholic father who would occasionally land in jail for a month or two for public drunkenness or vagrancy, for which reason MK’s father also never touched alcohol, and for which reason MK’s paternal grandmother sued for divorce when his father was six but not until after bearing six children. Not even my husband’s mother would ever insist she’d never thought a swear word.
I knew there was a reason I digressed when I came upon the topic of Rhonda swearing and slapping her hand to her mouth, astonished and joyful, and also bonded. Because swearing amongst peers is part and parcel of cathartic bonding. Rhonda knew she wasn’t supposed to swear, but she also knew I wouldn’t look down on her for it. When she accidentally swore, there was an aspect of togetherness, an expectation of trust. She wasn’t mad at me, which is different—for swearing can be used manipulatively and abusively, a verbal assault. Swearing can be an abuse of power, as in, “I’m the boss, I’m free to swear as I want.” The bonded familiarity of peer swearing isn’t that. Our complicity as mutuals was, at the moment of her accidental swearing, a proven. Unbeknownst to either of us, when Rhonda accidentally swore she was in a fight-or-flight response. It’s too distancing to say fight-or-flight was being activated, she was already in fight-or-flight and the swearing was a product of this. She was taking flight from an unconsciously perceived threat and we were in it together. We were safe with one another.
She was enthusiastic, full of laughter, neither mature nor immature for her age, a repository of very common teenage doubts that she was always willing to talk about, which may have been her most endearing characteristic, that she was so open, and about the most positive, energetic person one could imagine. She was intelligent and made good grades. She was what people called well-rounded, always engaged in a variety of activities that would help pave her way into a university, and never resentfully participated in any of the standard socially acceptable teen activities as she loved being a teenager. Not only was she academically engaged, she enjoyed observing sports and participating in them, and in this way she showed an interest in
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competition without taking it crushingly seriously because every activity was as much about simply enjoying the associated aesthetics as well. She was athletic, a swimmer with a swimmer's long torso. She may even have been a cheerleader for a while, I'm pretty sure I remember her wearing cheerleader togs at some point during the years I knew her—bright white cheerleader socks and two-toned saddle shoes, the kicky skirt and the bulky letter sweater (this was before tumbling and the shift to lighter fabrics suitable for athletics)—but I could be wrong, she may not have been a cheerleader, and if she was I don't think it was a long-term thing because I remember the only time I went to a football game was with her and our sitting in the frigid cold in the stands, which she loved, the cold was a part of the fun for her, a knitted scarf around her neck and matching knitted cap pulled down over her head, she eagerly threw herself into the attendant rituals, eating a hotdog, cheering on the team, leaping and pumping her fist in the air when yardage was gained, footballs were caught, points were scored, she was all about things like that which I didn't begin to like and I didn't understand (except for baseball) but I'd do them once or twice to see how it felt trying the experience on.
Solidly upper-middle class, with a doctor father, and a mother who both worked and was involved with organizing the activities that would help her children get into university, she and her family did things together, forging memories. They went on long vacations in the summer and short vacations during the school year, and she'd come back and tell me about what they had done, which was how I knew adventures like this existed and got a glimpse of some of the essential paraphernalia. She blithely took it all so for granted that there was no bitterly envying her these privileges, plus many of the activities she enjoyed were ones in which I had no interest except to watch how she approached them and how easily they had their taken-for-granted place in her life. She played tennis and had the requisite tennis dresses with the sporty little skirts that revealed underwear-style-panties-worn-over-underwear with every jaunty step. She had the clothes and canvas shoes special for boating, her parents owning a boat that wasn't so ostentatiously big it couldn't sit to the side of their driveway outside their very ordinary brick three-bedroom no-frills ranch house that was still standard for nearly everyone in the white-collar subdivision that was home to a lot of medical people and people at the medical college. She loved snow skiing, her family did enough of it that she had her own equipment, though I've no idea where she went snow skiing, I couldn't imagine that part or their flying to Colorado to stay in a lodge and run the slopes. She was always so normally but not exceptionally good at things that it was a surprise when in high school she fractured her leg while skiing. Returning from that holiday to school with her calf and thigh consumed by a huge cast that was eagerly signed and decorated by everyone, she regaled with a breathtaking horror story of falling and looking down to see her leg bent the wrong way and bone sticking right out of her skin, and somehow managed not to be traumatized though she was as horrified as those to whom she told the tale, just not so horrified that she wasn’t confident this was no more than a bad ouch bump on a long road of great adventures, she could laugh, and laughed too when telling about the accident because it was just so audacious and crazy to her that it had happened. She energetically and enthusiastically hobbled around for a while on
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crutches, recovered beautifully and life soldiered on, because it was all about attitude for her and she was indefatigably positive. Though they were well off and she had no need to earn money, every year, for the experience, she worked up to the winter holiday at a Christmas tree lot, I think this was perhaps associated with the church she attended, but she was monetarily compensated, and she loved doing that, it was all for fun, she would talk about how they sang carols and drank hot cocoa and ate hot chili over a fire in a metal barrel that kept the workers warm, and when the season was over her hazel eyes (she looked like she should have brown eyes) would get sentimentally teary that it was over but not in a sad way, I never saw her cry out of sadness, instead it was a happy cry because she'd loved it so, then school would close for the holidays and she'd pull out her heavy parka and she and her family would go away to have fun upon a snowy mountain filled with other people having snowy fun.
To say she was not exceptionally good at anything is not an insult, it is instead what happens with a teenager who does a lot of different things but not any one particular thing. She also played a musical instrument, I believe, but was not very good, too busy with her many activities to afford the instrument a dedicated practice. Again, she was what adults would approvingly call well-rounded.
Without ever desperately insisting, “These are the best days of our lives”, she thought being a teenager was just about the best invention imaginable.
It's not overstating the case to say she acted like she was largely unperturbed by the cast on her leg, though it would have impacted her greatly, considering her athleticism. What might be a calamity to another she could shrug away. When we were twelve, she related to me she had been walking home from school with a friend and a man pulled up alongside her in a car, next a church they were walking past (Our Redeemer Lutheran, corner of Boy Scout Road and Auburn Road) and exposed himself, masturbating. At first, she had been unsure what was going on so she'd walked up next to the car because she had no caution yet about approaching cars. She had no issues talking about this and was startlingly frank about it. I thought the experience had to have made more of an impact than it seemed, but she said that instead of being frightened she thought he looked funny-strange and then it was just, “Oh, gross, nasty!” and that it was more irritating than anything else, and horrible, yes, but, mainly, “Yuck!” At least when I knew her, that's how she felt, the way she dealt with things, she didn't see any reason to be very bothered because life was bigger than all that. The man exposing himself didn’t destabilize the core part of her. The core of her went through the experience intact and protected, just like the breaking of her leg didn’t have any great impact. She didn’t come away doubting herself or shell-shocked or traumatized. She didn’t lose her confidence. She didn’t wonder if she had attracted the exhibitionist by being a young girl, which is to blame oneself. The latter inculcates shame, or springs from inculcated shame. She didn’t have that in her. She could feel shame and be ashamed, but it was built into her not to blame herself for the man exposing himself to her and her friend and this knowledge seemed to help protect her.
She didn’t cover her walls with posters of teen heartthrobs, which I appreciated, because I didn’t either. These were flesh and blood humans, not gods, it seemed to me
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celebrity worship deprived both sides of the essential, healthy reciprocity of people comprehending one another on level ground. I had no idols. She had idols but she didn’t care to advertise them. An acquaintance was the local president of a fan club for a teen idol, and neither one of us got the devotion, but if anyone had asked us about her we’d have just said she was a nice person, which was what we’d observed and was what mattered, we accepted we were all different, with different interests. Before we became close friends, Rhonda had been a Girl Scout with all the badges, and was always on the cusp of being a teacher's pet (at the least she never did anything that made them scowl) but she lacked the sweet obsequiousness that would make a bad teacher dote. Then suddenly we were teenagers, her glasses were exchanged for contacts, her braces came off her teeth, her hair became what was very fashionable, long and straight, a glossy dark brown, she acquired the straight, lean, even flapper-ideal figure that was perfect for certain fashions of the 70s. If she just missed being classically beautiful she was fine with that and didn’t strive to be otherwise, if she believed she might have too many freckles she didn’t struggle to not have them, she accepted herself as pretty but not glamorous and was just fine with being pretty, lacked any self-conscious poise, her laugh turned heads because it erupted from her in a raucous loud snort, and the future opened up for her with the excitement of every teenage moment being preparation for her prospective self, while not knowing what she wanted to do yet, and it was fine not to know what she wanted to do because it was all great fun, everyone should be having fun and she didn't understand why they weren't if they weren’t. Had she been a little taller, she could have been a model, but would have chafed against demands she found ridiculous. If they were giving out awards for the All American Contemporary Teenage Girl of the post flower child 1970s, in a not nationalistic way, she should have won in the category of doesn't drink or do drugs and is boy crazy but not ready for a relationship and doesn’t take any of it too seriously. Very well-rounded.
She was also an oddity to me because she was accepted by everyone—stoners and outsider communities considered her "nice" and OK, she never ragged on them or openly criticized them or looked down on them, they were kind of simply beyond her comprehension, she didn't have her nose up in the air, which lent her the air of being perhaps progressive, and at the same time she was fully accepted in what were conservative spheres. How we came to be such close friends for a while, I don't recollect, because I was anything but "normal", my life at home had never been "normal". She was, however, someone who had been in my school environment several years, and despite our many differences we came to spend a fair amount of time hanging out when we were in high school. She thought I was artistic, and I remember she liked that because she didn't count herself as being artistic. Being artistic was something she lacked so maybe that's why we were friends. I thought she was insanely normal and I was amazed by her optimism. I'd walk over to her home (no one ever came to my home for good reason) and check out the normalcy of it all as I crossed through the kitchen and family room to go back to her room, wondering when her mother was going to tell her "You can't hang out with that person anymore" because I believed her mother always looked at me like "What are you doing here".
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Some other mothers would make a stab at conversation, but her mother treated me like I was taking time away from better activities, despite the fact Rhonda had another friend who was very troubled, but the another friend treated the mother like she was her second mother, confiding in her, going to her for help, spending her time with Rhonda’s mother in the dining room while Rhonda and I were in her bedroom talking. Rhonda’s mother took the another friend under her wing like a baby bird plaintive beak open crying for better worms than what its home nest cared to provide, but she instead looked at me with the attitude that distance was preferred. That Rhonda’s mother took the another friend into the dining room for mom talks, like she was another daughter, awed me. She wouldn’t have done this with me but then I would never have wanted to go into the dining room for a mom talk with Rhonda’s mother.
I couldn't talk to Rhonda about my world because she was too normal to begin to comprehend it. Instead, I was around her to get a dose of normal. When I was fourteen and losing it, not long before I went in the hospital, I showed her I'd been cutting myself. I couldn’t talk to her about my mother and father and other bad wrong things but I did that one time show her that I was cutting, and I realized in that moment she would never ask "why" in the right way, that it was too distant from her, too outrageous, too incomprehensible, and I knew it was unfair of me as well to approach her with this. She was too young to begin to know how to cope with such a revelation, and I immediately felt guilty for disclosing this to her. I don't believe I ever attempted again to let her know about my world because in her world all it seemed to take to fix things was a bowl of chicken soup. She was all about inspiration, and it's a wonder the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, not published until 1993, weren't written by her. I remember her talking about how great was the book, Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, which I’d not read and never did read (I did watch the movie after writing here about the book), so I didn’t really know anything about it, but I was put off by young adult literature about getting to know yourself and the fact it had Margaret talking to God was even more off-putting. When I was a preteen, I didn’t plea with God to help me, I would instead go out in the driveway, stare up at the sky, and desperately wish for aliens to swoop down and carry me away. “Are you there, aliens? If you are, please, get me out of here.” That stopped when I began menstruating and decided that I should only live where feminine hygiene products and painkillers were readily available.
Rhonda was a very contemporary American girl in that she was able to not only talk about menstruation without being embarrassed, she could talk about it with the requisite Rhonda enthusiasm. I was also not embarrassed about menstruation but I didn’t care what Are you there, God? It’s Me, Margaret might have to say about the subject. When I was thirteen and walked into class one day in junior high and some girl peers immediately swarmed to form a wall around me and desperately pulled me aside to secret secret let me know that some boys had gone through my bag hoping to find gum or candy and instead found sanitary napkins and tampons, it was expected that I would be as mortified and embarrassed as they were and wouldn’t want to openly claim that bag. Which was absurd. It was art class and because we all sat at communal tables the girls had their bags lined up on a shelf, and these girls were treating the situation as if our bags were anonymous, but just as these girls
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knew which bag was mine so would many of the boys. How would it benefit me to deny my bag? I was instead mad and reasoned it was infantile to not acknowledge females who menstruated were present, I wasn’t going to apologize for that. Females my age menstruated and males my age needed to grow up and get over it. I stepped aside my worried friends and went over and claimed my bag, and none of the guys gave me a hard time, they were mum, and I was unabashed because the only ones who should be embarrassed were those who had invaded my privacy. Had Rhonda been in that class she would have probably felt as I did. Or maybe she would have needed a moment to think about it then would have decided that was the right kind of bold to be. Teenage girls quickly become used to menstruation but it’s not just a personal female initiation into physical adulthood, it’s a community one, with boys having to learn how to cope with it as well, that girls have become creatures who can breed which is undeniably irrevocably a grownupness of bewildering magnitude that is suddenly on their doorstep too. What a jarring comeuppance reminder that the girls have suddenly advanced into the living mysteries of Persephone and Demeter, to go hunting through their bags for childish candy and find instead tampons and sanitary napkins that will later be saturated with blood.
We knew almost nothing about that blood, which is different from what flows from a cut. Menstrual blood says an egg was there that wasn’t fertilized, and the uterine lining, the endometrium, that had thickened to support the implantation of the blastocyst, the result of a successful fertilization, now sheds, the unfertilized egg absorbed into the body. Menstrual blood has fewer blood cells, mixed with the slough of the endometrial lining and vaginal secretions. As many cultures have had taboos about menstruating women, physically or psychically segregating them as unclean, even menstrual hygiene products can carry the residue of that mysterious uncleanness, blood that didn’t flow from a wound.
In our junior high, built when girls still had to wear skirts, the architects had the genius to install open riser stairs, and boys would congregate under them in order to look up through the slats of the stairs and catch a glimpse up skirts at the underwear of the girls. Carrying their burden of books in one arm, with their free hand girls gripped their skirts tight around their thighs, to keep their underwear from being seen, it was the girls who were shamed, rather than the boys, and especially shamed if their underwear happened to be stained with blood that betrayed their period.
Though we were taught about Persephone, teachers made only the vaguest of connection to the transition that was taking place with their female students as their bodies changed, their trust perhaps placed in our imaginations to see ourselves—we who shuffled from one concrete block school room to another, over asbestos-linoleum floors, clad in silky viscose and double-knit polyesters—dancing through Sicilian fields in diaphanous tunics as we gathered Sicilian wildflowers, then Hades sweeps us up, one by one, and kidnaps us, screaming, to the underworld to be its queen, which is where we begin to lose the thread, how the danger of Persephone’s hunger, appeased by six pomegranate seeds, had doomed us each year to winter in the dark, deep underground related to romance, love, and the difficult female
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mysteries of childbearing. My interpretation of the kidnaping was that one day you were a girl and then, possessed by nature, you bled once a month. Though television commercials and magazine ads depicted young womanhood as associated with fertile spring, sunshine, blue skies, and flowers, because of the womb were women and childbirth instead more closely associated with death, the underground, and Hades? While a female was depicted in contemporary culture as being only relevant and meaningful as a young and attractive sexual being attractive to men, plus bearer of the next generation, did the Persephone story instead hint that a woman lost a part of herself during those years, for which Persephone’s mother, Demeter, who would be an elder Persephone, grieved?
Menstruation wasn’t welcomed with bells and whistles, some mothers congratulated their daughters on being a “woman”, kind of like them but not really like them until you’d earned the battle scars of being a woman. You learned codes for communicating when you were on your period, words that were entirely irrelevant to you when you were younger, but as you approached menarche, an inner clock began to tick and, just as in Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, you became anxious for that next season of life to begin, it having been imparted to you by generations of preceding women that with menarche came the keys to great mysteries, and yet one didn’t feel the women who surrounded one had any especial wisdom, not to mention they still had little power to own themselves when lorded over as inferior by Popes, priests, husbands, fathers, male professors, lawmakers, politicians, and a Bible that had cursed women to sorrow in childbearing and submission to men, she must be ruled by them because she had been disobedient, eaten the forbidden fruit, and beguiled Adam to eat it as well. I called my period my “period”, was unsurprised by it, experienced no distress when it started when I was twelve, and only informed my mother that it had begun because I now needed pads and tampons, otherwise I’d not have mentioned it to her because we didn’t have a normal mother-daughter relationship and I didn’t want to discuss with her anything as personal as my reproductive system and how it was progressing. Rhonda’s mother probably gave her a welcome-to-womanhood hug. While some called menstruation “the curse”, Rhonda was one of the many who called her period her “visitor”, and would laugh over its inconvenience, she was never very angered or upset over anything.
Rhonda knew that being a preteen and teenager was bizarre and could be stupid, but that was part of her joy at the newness of it all.
She would sometimes consider the hard questions. She played around with being sometimes interested in what was going on politically and socially in the world, but she could only consider it so much, until it got in the way of having a good time.
By the age of seventeen we had drifted well apart, though I recollect her introducing me to shrimp cocktail that year. I had told her I'd never had one, which she responded to as an impossible deprivation, so one evening we were on our way somewhere and she pulled out of her jacket a thick glass cup of shrimp cocktail she'd stolen away from the family dinner to give to me because she thought I should experience how
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great shrimp cocktail was. I always wondered why she had to steal from the family dinner table a shrimp cocktail to give to me, why she couldn't ask her parents for it. That struck me as an odd thing for someone who came from such a healthy-seeming family. I didn’t know whether I should read that as her having to hide the fact she was taking it to give to me whereas it would have been alright to give it to another friend, but opted to not be paranoid. We completely parted ways when I fled home, I remember one last short visit with her, made to her home, no more than a few minutes, I’ve no idea now why I was there, and her mother gave me the impression I wasn’t welcome as long as I was in my peculiar situation, estranged from my family. Rhonda went on to get a good higher education, and found work in an upper-crust advertising agency. When I was about twenty-three, an invitation to her bridal shower (not her wedding) made its way to me though we'd had no contact since high school. I attended and was the outsider, most others looking sorority-bred for life after school. The shower was large enough that it was held at a properly historic antebellum house rented for such occasions, or maybe some membership granted use. She made an entrance down a flight of stairs, and eventually a few seconds were spared during which she superficially, briefly greeted me and I responded in kind, whereas when we were teens she was prone to shrieking in excitement and running to meet one and jumping up and down while she bubbled over with things to tell you. She became politically conservative.
But when we were fifteen she was still open and amiable with a lot of people, largely apolitical, in flux on what to think about hard subjects, but wanted the Vietnam War ended, and wore a bracelet engraved with the name of a soldier who was either a POW or MIA that was only to be taken off when they returned home living or dead. She was Christian without being very overbearingly Christian, probably a Methodist or Presbyterian, it was the 1970s, the television broadcasting day ended with a glorious patriotic view on the military accompanied by that musical sensation, The Star Spangled Banner national anthem, and the broadcasting day probably began on one’s local station(s) with a steeple, inspiring words, and a moment of meditation. Open with God and a meditation of spiritual uplift to help you face your problems, then off to bed with guns and stars and bars and the reminder of the fundamental obligation of sacrificing oneself for God and country. Even if one wasn’t a Christian it was going to be assumed you were culturally Christian.
As a teenager, Rhonda wasn’t a capital C Christian. She was the kind of everyday person who had been brought up to be check-the-religion-box Christian because hers was a Christian family passing that infant baptism membership from grandparents to parents to children which meant you were automatically Christian with no further thought on the matter required. Which was how it was supposed to work. Like you were born in the U.S.A. and grew up American with no further thought required, or should I say anticipated, unless you were American Indian or another minority and or your African ancestors were forcibly brought to America as slaves, which a fair number of white Christian Americans would look on as lucky for you because that meant you were in the best possible place on earth, American children brought up to believe they were tantamount to God’s chosen because they were on
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the right side of 1776 and all that had since happened in the world. When I say no further thought required I mean that America’s the Best vibrated the atmosphere all day long. But then one transforms from child into teen and more than a handful of teens are going to find themselves skating near some of the hard questions as their rational adult perceptions on the hard facts of life kick in concerning not only their changing bodies but religion and history and politics and nationalism. Rhonda acknowledged the hard questions, she went through the list of them, some she could cope with and others needed to be set aside for the fun-loving duration until she was fully grown up and had more understanding to be able to make any life-altering assessments. “I’m just a teenager. I’m not that smart,” she’d matter-of-factly laugh, not meaning she didn’t think she was intelligent, but she’d considered an issue and reached a point of discomfort and needed to back up into her safety zone. I overestimated what I thought should and would be a natural inclination of some of my peers to reject conservatism, and would later realize that the future I had envisioned Rhonda would naturally fall into via the enlightenment of higher education was not the path down which she was headed, she was more entrenched in the foundations of trans-generational American mainstream white Christian nationalism than I’d realized. Indeed, a possible abdication of childhood faiths and myths and legends for science and hard facts, during adolescence, is recognized by adults and countered with a demand for blind faith. Suddenly there would appear the instructional leaflet that informed on how faith in things unseen was the essential engine of one’s Christian belief system. Facts didn’t matter. Facts weren’t to be trusted. This picture of the engine of faith pulling the Christian train of beliefs was all the evidence required to know the faith your parents passed along to you was the right one, because trains exist, you’ve seen how they work, the engine pulls them, and that’s the faith that’s now required of you. Questions are doubt and doubt is the enemy. And, actually, the train image that was used wasn’t exactly how I described it, instead facts were the engine, faith was the coal car, and feelings were the caboose. Which is rather the wonder of it all, one is told that facts are the basis of your belief, fueled by the coal of faith, and to counter anyone telling you that your fuel is simply emotion the leaflet lets you know that feels lead up the rear, which is also reassuring if you have no feelings to guide you, or if your feelings tell you, “This isn’t right, I don’t feel like this is true.” Forget those feelings because you’ve got facts. But what are presented as the facts? I’m looking at that train leaflet right now, having not seen it since I was a teenager, and the fact engine is simply “God and his word”, which means the Bible, faith is trust in that particular fact engine, and feelings are the caboose that potentially deceive and lead astray. Though “facts” are shown as the engine, as depicted by the train diagram, they are meaningless without one’s faith. They aren’t facts in the normal sense of the word. In that respect, the pamphlet is right in showing coal as the faith that makes the engine run, but it’s twisted logic, the train diagram means nothing except it illustrates that a train needs some sort of fuel. I breathe oxygen, I must have it to keep this body running, that is a fact. It is a fact that doesn’t need faith, it simply is. A train needs fuel, that is true. And it’s true that one doesn’t need to feel the earth is round because it quite simply is, it’s not flat. It’s a fact that on August 21 in 1983 the high temperature measured in Atlanta, Georgia, was 101
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degrees Fahrenheit at the place where it was measured. For me it’s a fact that a few moments ago I pulled out a can of sparkling water and popped it open and just took a sip out of it, but you only have my word for it, so it’s not a verifiable fact for you, you’ve no evidence that what I have written is true. Rather than the Bible being indisputably, factually the inspired word of God, it’s a fact that some people say it’s the word of God, yet even among those who attest this, what those words mean has been hotly disputed for a number of centuries. If you substituted a train engine with a chair, no amount of coal is going to make it run because it’s not a train engine. And while it may be there are people who believe the Bible is the word of God and that works for them, and thus faith does fuel their train, it is still not a train with facts for its engine. Whoever came up with the meaningless fact-faith-feelings train illustration was a genius at marketing because they hook the mark with a picture that takes the place of any sensible explanation, the fact that a train needs fuel is transposed onto the Bible and makes the Bible fact, and if you have any doubts about this forget them because doubts are counted as feelings and feelings aren’t facts. Though the train is based on the English Baptist Reverend F. B. Meyer’s mid-nineteenth century literature on fact, faith, and feeling, it was retooled for the twentieth century by Bill Bright, a founder of Campus Crusade for Christians, during consultations with a salesman, Bob Ringer, on how to successfully sell their Gospel product which wasn’t getting a good reception, and then in 1965 was turned into a train by Gus Yeager who went into selling insurance.
A 1971 pamphlet of Bill Bright’s titled Jesus and the Intellectual insists, “Commitment to Christ involves the surrender of the intellect, the emotions and the will—the total person.” This is the message that was making its way down to adolescents through a number of pipelines in the 1970s. You’d be invited to an event that purported to be one thing and the next thing you knew you were being told you needed to surrender your intellect, emotions and will to Christ. For factual evidence of Christ, Bright pointed to the calendar which reads B.C., “Before Christ”, and “A.D.”, anno Domini, “in the year of our Lord”. A calendar which was established in 731 C.E.
Why did Bright focus on universities? Because Bright was anti-communist and anti-left and he saw higher education as a breeding ground for leftist and Communist thought. Campus Crusade for Christ operated like narcs. Anti-communist and anti-left, Bill Bright conceived of the Christian World Liberation Front, sending out people who masqueraded as counterculture in a bid to infiltrate and convert, but then the counterculture masquerade ceased to be only a mask and began to turn anti-establishment itself, and Bill Bright ceased funding the group.
Rhonda started going to Young Life at some point and I don’t know if she went to many Young Life meetings, I didn’t even know she had started going to Young Life, but she invited me on a weekend retreat, which is how I ended up spending a couple of days at a Young Life camp deep in the mountains of North Carolina when I was fifteen. Not knowing anything about Young Life, despite Rhonda’s endorsement, I first asked around and found that some other friends had gone to meetings, friends who smoked cannabis and did other drugs and mushrooms and drank, though certainly
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not Rhonda, she wouldn’t have done anything like that, but other friends did so I didn’t think too much about what exactly was this Young Life thing to which Rhonda had invited me except that some of my drug friends had been around it and said it was “okay”, that what they mostly did was singalongs in a folksingy way. Rhonda would have enthusiastically enthused, “It’s so much fun! Everyone is so nice! You have to go!” And after checking with my stoner friends and learning they sometimes attended, I would have thought that so much fun with my friend, Rhonda, sounded prospectively nice, I shall try it out. Plus, if my parents (cross fingers) let me do this thing with my friend then I would have an opportunity to be away from hell house for a couple of days, which was the best part.
Though I’d not previously heard of it, Young Life wasn’t new. Young Life had been around since the 1940s, begun in Texas by Jim Rayburn, a Presbyterian minister. I didn’t know that and thought it was new, for all I was aware it could have materialized the year I went to the retreat. I didn’t know it was evangelical Christianity targeting youth, catching adolescents as they negotiated the questions of the new world availed them by maturing brains and growing independence, springing upon them the must of not losing childhood’s blind faith which was to choose to be a rider on the fact-faith-feeling train and pitch oneself dedicatedly into believing things not proved, which couldn’t be proved, like the virgin birth and death and resurrection of Christ. I don’t know if Young Life was intentionally sneaky in the manner it presented itself so you didn’t really know what it was until you eventually got a hard sell, but I soon learned they started out with heavy love bombing, and love bombing is the fairytale gingerbread house to many out wandering in the hormone-addled wilderness of one’s teen years. Just by showing up you were immediately one of a great big family. Young Life preceded Campus Crusade for Christ and I read that Bill Bright and Jim Rayburn were friends, which is how Bill Bright began, he said that without encouragement from Jim Rayburn his Campus Crusade for Christ wouldn’t have happened.
But was Young Life intentionally sneaky? Yeah. Rather. The idea was to get in on the same “turf” as the kids and reach them there, which was called going “behind the enemy lines”. This became running Christian camps for, to quote Rayburn, “non-Christian” teens, luring them by providing an unforgettable camping experience at the “classiest camps in the country.” I think the key tell is that Young Life saw itself as going behind “enemy lines” in order to make contact and convert. That positions Young Life’s perspective on the kids they were targeting. The involvement of businessmen for capital was essential and with this Rayburn was soon pressured to go national. Why would business become involved? Because conservative corporatists were against New Deal values and saw Young Life as a way of preserving America for the free market by molding the future minds of America. There were a lot of people like Rhonda who were on the cusp of confronting the hard questions of life, were from mainstream conservative-inclined suburbia, but had so adopted counterculture that they could blend with it seamlessly at least in appearance, attired in jeans and jean jackets, and had a solid counterculture alliance in that they didn’t want their boyfriends and brothers and friends being sent off to die in Vietnam. Even my stoner friends had been to Young Life meetings. How to channel them from the left or
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prospective left to the right? Young Life’s method was plush camps, love bombing, and singing folk songs as a means to access the adolescent brain that was starting to crush on facts and needed to be redirected back to the traditional values of youth, when they had faith in their parents and what they believed, by shifting faith to a personal decision and the turning over of one’s belief system to this rather shapeless thing being sold that was God’s Will. It was an old-time revival camp strategy but with a lot less talk and a lot more singing that released feel-good endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, and primed one for believing John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” was indeed the path to God and bliss. I don’t know if the current Young Life song strategy was employed in the 1970s, but drawing on popular mainstream music the Young Life five song rule is to begin with an upbeat familiar song, follow with an upbeat song, then a classic song, move to a “transition” song, and finish off the cycle with a spiritual song.
Even standard dance bands have a set-list structure—cycles of two fast songs and one slow.
My going to the retreat somehow just kind of happened in a last minute way, and if my parents allowed me to go I must have caught them in the sweet spot between not enough drinks and one too many. I wonder if I may have actually gone on two retreats and bombed out on the second one, sticking in the dorm room, annoyed with everything or sick? No, I’m positive I went on only one Young Life retreat. I don’t remember the ride up. Or the ride down. I don’t remember anything much about it except for the incident I’m about to relate. I don’t remember eating there. What I do remember is a lot of wood. It was in the woods, at a place with a lot of lodge-style natural wood on display in the architecture, but was modern rather than old school, a good deal more upscale than summer camp for kids in wood shacks with a communal outhouse shed with porcelain toilets. I remember meeting my bunk bed but I don’t recollect sleeping in it. I remember singing, and glancing around and examining the faces of the others in attendance as I tried to grasp their experience of this. They sang endlessly and everyone would get happy and by the end of whatever song cycle was being employed they would be soulful as well.
As a teenager, my life was like a black cavern of a nightmare with a little porthole of light through which I might view the world. Like being always in shadowy Hades and there’s a pinpoint of tunnel vision through which you can see the world the people around you appear to be living in, but you’re not there, you’re always in Hades. That and the prescribed psychotropics I was then on, whatever they were, that I was begging to be on so I could forget I existed, make for a hard time remembering many things about those years except for what stuck hard in my mind and was always readily accessible. So while I was at the Young Life retreat I was also distanced from it, viewing it from inside my Hades bubble.
My parents wouldn’t have paid for me to spend a weekend in the mountains, I didn’t have much money, whatever I forked out for this would have been a nominal barely-there sum, and after my time in the meager cabins of Brevard Music Camp the
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summer I turned fourteen, a place dedicated to serious study, I was surprised how upscale was this play camp. I wondered about where the money came from that built this nice place. I also knew we weren’t supposed to think about that, we were just supposed to have a big good time with friends and all these new people we were thrown in with that weekend and accept everything as it came at us. But to what end? As in what was the real plot of the story. I would compare my confusion to being handed a nice painting but there’s no provenance for it, there should be provenance, provenance is important, but questions about it are brushed aside. “Don’t you like the painting? Well, if you like it then just enjoy it.” How many camps Young Life then had I don’t know, but Wikipedia states it now has twenty-six, with locations not only in the U.S. but in Canada, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Scotland, Armenia, and France, where Young Life made its international debut in 1953. The Young Life website has a page that displays a clickable map of the camps, showing thirty-two sites rather than twenty-six (the Nicaragua camp is also a coffee farm) with links to the subdomain for each, the intro for virtually every camp describing it as “resort-quality” (this is the big selling point of Young Life camps), and while a brief video is usually provided there is no gallery section of photos that would give a quick, comprehensive idea of each camp’s buildings, accommodations, and activity areas, instead the few photos included are presented in a brochure arrangement, non-interactive, much like one might see on paper. Detailed maps of the camps are sometimes provided, but one not only has to look for them, they are more happened upon than openly offered, which doesn’t make sense considering the conveniences and perks that make them competitive “resort-quality”. Looking around to see if information is available on how many camps Young Life had in the 1970s, I find a 1971 promotional video for Young Life, directed by Dave Vik and Ed Winkle, and it suggests there were seven camps: Castaway (Detroit Lakes, opened in 1971), Windy Gap (Smoky Mountains, opened 1969), Silver Cliff (a ranch at Mount Princeton, Colorado, opened 1949), Saranac (Adirondacks, opened 1969), Frontier (an “original old Wild West camp” south of Denver, opened 1951), Malibu (“one of Young Life’s original camping properties”, opened 1954 in what was once a resort “for the Hollywood elite”), and Woodleaf (Sierra Nevada Mountains, opened 1966). During an opening that oddly, feebly, obviously mimics what is often called the Stargate sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—when Bowman draws near the monolith at Jupiter and travels through a portal in space and time, beyond the infinite, his experience expressed by his pod traveling through a psychedelic light show—the names of the camps appear one by one on the screen (the special effects courtesy Dan Slater, I find a website that says in the 1970s and 1980s he worked in Hollywood under the tutelage of Douglas Trumbull who gave us the Stargate in 2001: A Space Odyssey). The special effects intro ends on the words “Time for Living”. Then the film launches into teens reveling in physical activities, by way of a couple of seconds of animation styled after Heinz Edelmann’s Yellow Submarine. The film informs it’s all about meeting new friends, Young Life the exchange where “it all starts with a smile”. Camp Saranac has “lots of speed boats, twenty-four canoes and rowboats…” At Camp Malibu you can waterski all day. Shots from another camp of teens playing pool and square-dancing. Footage of Woodleaf promises a fleet of sailing dinghies and racing minibikes. “Time for living.” The Malibu Club in British
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Columbia can only be reached via an eight-hour voyage by Young Life’s very own ship, the Malibu Princess. Go to footage of teens hiking up glaciers on the surrounding mountains. Another camp promises backpacking in the Adirondacks. After fifteen minutes of non-stop physical fun and sports in wonderful settings distant from cities and suburbs, the film moves into footage of the singalongs, everyone exuberantly clapping to the music. “The singing’s really a big thing…” Kids bring their own guitars. “Glory, hallelujah!” During the music section, the first suggestion of religion enters and expands to reveal Young Life’s purpose is to bring the message of Christ to Youth, communicated in an exciting but “simple” way. The promise is you’ll have the greatest week of your life while being introduced to Jesus. In high school it’s easy to follow the crowd (which is bad), and Young Life camps whisk one away from the home environment to where you have the opportunity to see “the whole scope”. It’s touted that the kids who work at the camps don’t get paid anything, they’re just there for you, to spread the message of the Good News during an action-packed experience in an exceptional environment. “Good News is the Young Life way!” Finish with a circling helicopter shot of a couple, a young woman and young man, standing high on a rocky mountain peak above the clouds, the man takes off his watch, and the couple half-embrace one another while also stretching out their arms to the world, so they together form a cross, as is sung, “I open my arms so I can hold life like a beautiful girl.” The credits begin with a medium close-up of a teen girl in a bikini diving into a swimming pool, filmed in slow-motion from the front so we are given a luxurious amount of time to appreciate her slender physique, followed by teen boys leaping down a steep hill, then more montage of hectic, joyful physicality. And out. Music by the Addrisi brothers, known for writing “Never My Love”, which is a great song. I find a 1994 article on Camp Malibu that reveals the cost for an individual was a modest $315 a week but one could only go as a guest once, if you wanted to return you needed to bring five recruits, or volunteer to be one of the 100-member crew who “work the camp up to 10 hours a day for several weeks in exchange for room and board”.
The work crews (high school age) and staff (college age or older) are volunteers. Jobs for volunteers, on the Young Life website, include housekeeping, dishwashers, servers, bakers, cooks, laundry, retail snack bar and store and coffee shop, crafts, outdoor crew, landscape, lifeguards, boat drivers, troop carriers, ropes course, program tech etcetera. Some camps are available during the non-summer months for conferences, training events, retreats, but because Young Life is non-profit they can’t accomodate corporate events, wedding events or family reunions, yet family retreats are all right. I wonder what if you have a family retreat with members of your family you haven’t seen for a while, why that would be okay but not a family reunion. Each camp typically has multiple styles of lodging, dorm-style, communal house style with kitchens, hotel-style (the Elk Lodge at Crooked Creek in Colorado promises adult guests superb accommodations, each room having queen-sized beds, its own bathroom, and a private balcony with stunning mountain views), and the ability to house dozens to several hundred people. Young Life’s net assets are given as near half-a-billion dollars, and as Young Life is a non-profit, public charity, this is all tax exempt. The Young Life president was paid $535,802 in 2023, which doesn’t begin to
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compare with the millions paid health-care non-profit presidents, but dwarfs the average compensation for a non-profit president which in 2025 was a little over $101,000.
Jim Rayburn, who had begun Young Life, died in 1970. The organization that started with Jim Rayburn wanting to save young souls is now in the hands of others, and was before the single retreat I experienced. The Young Life president is selected by Young Life’s Board of Directors, who are named on the website, as is the Board of Trustees, but the page on them is coded so poorly that it keeps sticking and won’t scroll down to allow me to easily check out who these individuals are, so I reference a page on them at the Center for Media and Democracy Wiki that was last updated in 2008. Young Life, through the corporate work experience of these individuals, shows linkages with Marine Midland Bank, the Triad Energy Corporation (oil and gas exploration), JDMD Investments, Aramark (food services), W. R. Grace Company (specialty chemicals), Wells Fargo, InterWest Partners (venture capital), Mrs. Stratton’s Salads, Andesa Strategies (life insurance), The Parnell-Martin Companies (plumbing and hydronic heating), Goldman Sachs, MetLife, Avanzar Interior Technologies (automotive), Hosford Ventures, AIS Futures and Capital Management, the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, Sydmor Finance, Lawlor Wood (property management), CNL Real Estate Advisors, Andersen Consulting, Baylor Healthcare, R and S Mexican Food Products, Omni Hotels, The Stover Foundation (funds evangelical outreach), Christopher Newport University, Maison Felice (European antiques), and others. There’s also the Young Life Foundation with its own Directors and Officers. I wonder who is manning the spiritual helm. Jim Rayburn had children, are either of them involved? Pursuing this question I find a biography on Jim Rayburn written by his son, which reveals that Jim Rayburn, for what were ultimately problems of illness that were interfering with his abilities, and because of diverging visions between Jim and his board, in 1964 was ejected from Young Life by a minority of board members who hadn’t consulted with the others, was given twenty-four hours to vacate the newly-constructed Trail West Camp where he was then living, and was prohibited from stepping foot on Young Life property from that time on. He was refused even a token desk at the Young Life headquarters, while his “original statements of policy, language and ideas…quotes from speeches” were being plagiarized for Young Life mailings. The corporation had taken over.
The structure of the 1971 Time for Living film reveals how Young Life retreats work structurally. Take a teenager who is fueled by a havoc of hormones, action-charged more by emotion than reason as the brain is still sorting itself out, remove them from their environment, drop them in an idyllic wilderness where they are love bombed and can play to their heart’s content, over-stimulate them like crazy while they are forming new bonds, reinforce those bonds with cathartic talk sessions that escalate over the course of the week to the revelation of how they are not worthy, by virtue of sin, of the great love of God and the crucified Christ they’ve been experiencing, give them silent time to think this over and the promise of a sense of purpose within these new love bomb bonds that have been formed, play music that sets the mood for their
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restoration to their new community in Christ, and some are bound to have an emotional Come-to-Jesus moment which integrates them to their newfound family. These “resort-quality” facilities can thus be viewed as stages for instigating a crisis in the life of the guest. It’s a well-tooled formula that is mapped out, step-by-step, for the camp talk leaders. But emotional manipulation is nothing new. Not all Christians are expected to have their Paul on the Road to Damascus moment in which they confront Christ and step over the threshold from non-believer to believer, or dedicate themselves afresh to the inculcations of childhood, it’s fine if one coasts as a quiet Ameri-culture Christian whose main purpose in the church is to keep it alive with regular donations and tithes, but if revivals typically coincide with social, political and economic turbulence, what is a teenager’s life but a great upheaval which makes a segment of the population ever ripe for a spiritual reckoning and a harvest from their ranks. If the “why” of this market for youths evades the outsider, it can’t be denied that the market exists, and if it exists it exists for a reason.
Certainty is nice, but the little I gather about Young Life has only left me with questions rather than certainties. Glancing through the biography on Jim Rayburn, I know what is written that he said, but what he said doesn’t tell me much. What was the compulsion to win teens to Christ? As for the resorts, I know Jim was adamant that the key to a successful camp was quality, and he didn’t know why Christian camps had to be meager tent camps, instead with Christ, the King of Kings in charge, they should have the classiest camps in the country. Many evangelists have had a similar message, that rather than taking vows of poverty, Christians should have the best of things, but that angle often targets those experiencing hardship, while Jim’s stated determination was to reach a privileged class of teen who would have otherwise scorned Young Life, that insight partially provided by his realization that boys involved in varsity letter athletics were entirely outside the demographic of the born-again revival Christian. He wanted the attention of these teens, and said it was a sin to bore them. Perhaps most illuminating is that his father had been a Presbyterian minister, beginning as a Sunday School missionary to Montana, and becoming a nationally-known evangelist for which Jim Jr. had served as an assistant. Jim’s father’s obituary counts up the souls he saved as being 60,000, as if there had been someone recording each “Hallelujah” with a ticker as part of a contest. He held large revivals, traveling place to place, “union revivals” which hadn’t to do with labor unions but the support of multiple churches in a town. Said to be a no-nonsense minister who preached Christianity wasn’t for cowards or sloths, a popular sermon of his was “Big Business”, on churches and encouraging big business philanthropy. He understood the power of a choir and music to help the message along, and newspapers noted in the headlines that music was a big feature. One can imagine a little of the psychology of the preacher’s son who did earnestly believe in what he was doing, who knew all the behind-the-scenes mechanics, the performance aspect, whose father had expected self-sacrifice, and had set a high standard with which to compete for his respect, while Jim Junior also become critical of some of what he saw as old-school legalisms and wanted to forge his own dynamic path to winning souls. He did feel called by God and expected others to accept God’s vision for his ministry rather than retool it. I can
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also imagine the ways in which he would have been naive, being the son of a revival minister rather than the progeny of a businessman, and his diary entries reveal how bewildered he was when he was ejected by businessmen from the ministry he’d built, how he pleaded with God for help, for answers, but in his crisis heard nothing in return.
Though Young Life had shoved Jim out, which was counted as having killed him, when it was learned he was near death he was invited to speak at an international Young Life staff conference, which he did, and was greeted with a standing ovation, once again before “his people”, then it’s said Young Life returned to its corporate, institutionalized business as usual. And though his wife, Maxine, felt this trauma confirmed the feelings she’d long had that “a lot of wolves in sheep’s clothing” were about, after Jim’s death she still sometimes visited Young Life camps while living out her years in the “humble circumstances” of a mobile home. Young Life was, after all, an organization to which they’d devoted their lives. This is as far as I can delve into the situation, the relationship of Jim Rayburn to Young Life and vice versa. I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at Young Life, so one would expect it has deep meaning for me, and yet Jim Rayburn and Young Life had almost no impact on my life. I went to a retreat and didn’t return. I didn’t go to meetings. I never went to a camp. When I was seventeen and realized people I knew, who had been involved when I was fifteen, were still involved, I was surprised because I’d never heard anything else about it and assumed it had minimal impact in the area. I have explored Young Life here because I was looking back at a thing that happened, attempting to reconstitute the environment, and because Young Life was part of a broad evangelical outreach to adolescents. Young Life would target and cater to popular students in order to use their popularity to attract others, and my friend, Rhonda, was a reasonably popular and well-rounded teen who might have attracted their attention. The only reason I was there that weekend was because of Rhonda, she had invited me and didn’t reveal anything else about the retreat other than to say it would be great fun. Now that I know how Young Life worked, the possibility is raised she may have been well-acquainted with how Young Life worked, and if that’s the case it means I didn’t know Rhonda as well as I’d thought, but I also held back knowledge of parts of my life from Rhonda.
It may also well be that, for Rhonda, Young Life was only a place where she had some great times, and she was only peripherally involved. She was into sports and was acquainted with what were, for the era, nice resorts that catered to the upper middle-class.
What I now know is Young Life was already huge when I made my brief acquaintance in the autumn of 1972 and I had no idea about any of it.
Fight or flight.
Night. My friend, Rhonda, and I and a mutual friend who I’ll call Donna (the individual who was so close to Rhonda’s mother) took a break from the activity of the retreat
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with a walk down a mountain road that led up to the buildings. Despite there being a number of people at the retreat, as far as we could tell, we were the only ones on the road. There was either no moon out or it was completely hidden by clouds, and there were no street lamps on the road where we were. It wasn’t a public road so we had no concerns about cars or how we couldn’t be seen in the dark. I remember forest on my right and a pasture-like field on the left. We were chatting away, and had just rounded a curve so the retreat center was out of sight when two figures leaped out of the woods at us, I briefly saw Rhonda begin to drop to the ground, and then that's all I knew until I began to come to, hearing maybe a voice far in the distance. The voice reached into the profound dark that had wholly encapsulated me and I started to pay attention to it. Was it calling my name? I realized I was running and I began to get my vision back, coming out of whatever zone I'd been in, during which I heard nothing and could see nothing, I had just been running. What had happened? Two friends of ours, a boyfriend and girlfriend, had been out walking and were coming back up the mountain. They had heard us, recognized our voices, and stepped into the woods to play their trick. When we rounded the bend they leaped out in the dark into the road and surprised us. Rhonda had thrown herself on the ground because she said she was thinking that if she did that no one would notice her. Donna had stayed still as she said she had reasoned there was nothing she could do. Me? My conscious mind had entirely gone offline as I immediately took off into the woods at a full run, and had run and run and run, unconscious as to what I was doing or anything around me. I was pursued, but one by one they had begun to give up as I was too fast, they couldn't catch up with me and they had become afraid of being lost in the woods. They were close to giving up altogether, and had been calling to me from a distance for a while when I finally came to, began to wake up to their voices, and stopped. First, upon fully waking up, I pondered for a moment, hearing my name, was this a trick? Was I going to return to a dangerous situation if I responded to these voices? Then, becoming convinced things were all right, that these were the voices of friends, as I made my return, following them, I was amazed at what an entirely unconscious human could do in total dark, running through the thick woods, because on the way back I was slowed by having to climb over felled branches, tangled erupting tree roots, and stoop under limbs. How had I managed to run through all this without tripping and falling? When I'd come to, I'd felt like I was almost sailing through the air, as if nothing was touching me, as if my feet were barely on the ground. Physically, I felt nothing, just flight. When I finally made it back through the woods to the road and learned what had happened, I was baffled to find they were upset with me. Donna had been crying and refused to talk to me at first. I told them I hadn't heard them, that I had been unaware I was even running. They didn't see how it was possible I could run through the woods without any conscious awareness of my doing so. They didn't see how it was possible I'd not heard them as they'd been screaming themselves hoarse. Donna said she thought it was my way of getting back at them for the trick, an attention-grabbing ploy, and that she had even decided I’d snuck back and had been watching their distress from the woods. Though Rhonda didn’t know how it was possible I’d not heard them yelling, her attitude was to not let this ruin things, but as we trudged back up the mountain to the retreat I could feel this was not resolved, a prevailing mood of anger directed at me.
That’s an example of the flight part of the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop response.
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I wasn’t mad about the trick. But to not be believed that I had blacked out and had torn through the woods without any conscious knowledge injured me. It also meant that no one else could appreciate how remarkable the body in the flight part of flight or fight was. They eventually grew less dubious, or said they did, but they remained mad because my taking off through the woods had scared them. The couple who had pulled the prank hadn’t ruined the weekend, their action had been eclipsed by the alarm I’d caused by my disappearing into the woods. Many years removed, I grasp how the fear I could have been lost in the woods, the guilt that might cause, made it more favorable to decide I might have pranked them in turn and wouldn’t admit it. Plus, there was the matter of their inability to believe I had not heard them calling for me, realized there was no danger, and immediately returned.
When one is in fight or flight, their vision changes, short-range vision is decreased, the eyes point slightly outward, peripheral vision narrows, and the pupils dilate to let more light in, which is how I was able to see where I was going in the dark woods. The supposition is that all these things combined likely helped with our hunter and gatherer ancestors (and their animal ancestors) better seeing threats and scoping out escape routes. What happened with me is that the amygdala initiated the fight-or-flight response before the neocortex could kick in and become involved in the decision-making. The amygdala triggered the hypothalamus which triggered the sympathetic nervous system which triggered my adrenal glands and flooded me with epinephrine and cortisol, all of this occurring in a split second.
When I returned, perhaps I should have been mad about the couple leaping out and scaring us. Perhaps I should have been furious about it and berated them, maybe then it would have been easier for everyone to believe me. But as far as I was concerned it was an innocent teenage prank gone wrong.
Now that I’ve looked it up and found the physical place of the retreat, that it has a name, Windy Gap, not a figment of my imagination, it exists outside of my memory, I feel a familiar edge of surprise with how much of my memory was on target, though my acquaintance with the camp was when it was much smaller in scale, in its infancy. Images on the internet show those are definitely the mountains we were surrounded by. And there’s the open pasture land or grassy fields on the left of the road we were walking down that night, which would have been on the right of the road as we drove in. I remembered the camp as being upscale and I was right about that, and that there was a lot of singing that was used to emotionally generate a feeling of community, which was not the same as I had experienced rehearsing in the choir at Brevard. To be part of a choir or orchestra, in which you make music together, could be elevating and create a transpersonal experience, but it was not the same as the bonding high constellated by their large group singalongs, because the kids weren’t musicians tasked with the responsibility of getting their part right, they didn’t have the anchor of intellectual involvement. Did we arrive by bus? Probably, a trip of four hours. The happy campers were probably singing the whole way. I bet someone was playing an acoustic guitar.
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2
The boy, two years older, who had leaped out, was one with whom I had history. He had been my boyfriend when I went into the hospital when I was fourteen, at which point I told him we were over. I was in a bad place and had done him a favor when I refused to see him again, not only was he not equipped to deal with a girlfriend with my kind of problems when he was sixteen, he would have soon enough realized he didn’t want to try to cope. I know he sustained some ill feelings and resentment toward me afterward, but I didn’t toward him, he’d done nothing wrong. I know he sustained some resentment because the summer after I broke up with him he called and asked me to go boating out on a lake with him and a few others. I’d agreed because enough time had passed that I felt we could be friends now, and I was even happy about this, and a little excited because I’d never been boating, then he hadn’t shown up and hadn’t called. It was how he got back at me, and I was hurt but understood. I didn’t call to berate him, instead I pretended it hadn’t happened and we had no further communication for months. Later, when he had another girlfriend, I was glad, and was in no way jealous. About the time of that incident at the Young Life retreat, I’d learned he was strongly into evangelical Christianity, which I thought was a phase, but it became his life path, and his views became profoundly conservative. When I was seventeen, we somehow bumped into one another again, I don’t recall what the circumstances were, it was after I’d left home but was still in high school. He knew I was dating MK and he invited us to his house for dinner, which surprised me. I would have declined but he said his mother was a great Italian cook (he was second generation Italian-American). Also, I’d heard his family had moved into a new place they’d constructed and people were talking about how it had special touches like a bocce court in the basement. But when we arrived, he was holding a Young Life meeting, and dinner wasn’t mentioned. We were invited to join the meeting, which we didn’t do, nor did we bring up dinner, I spent an uncomfortable few minutes exchanging hellos with people we knew who were there, it felt very awkward, then we left.
The weekend of the retreat, when he and his girlfriend leaped out and surprised us on the dark road, it may have been the first night as I don’t know if I was even yet aware they were there, until that weekend I didn’t even know he was going to Young Life. It may be, if we rode up on a bus, he and his girlfriend were also on it, but I don’t remember. Afterward, the only thing I walked away feeling a little bitter about was I was the one faulted with spoiling a good time, no one understanding how I had blacked out when I ran and couldn’t hear them calling after me. And I was less bitter than ultimately shamed and ashamed I wasn’t believed. But when I had backtracked through the woods, after walking a while I had come upon the boy who hadn’t returned to the road, he had stayed part of the way in the woods calling for me, afraid to go any deeper. He would have heard my slow return, and been aware I’d run a good distance. He was pretty quiet about it all when I appeared, even sheepish as we made
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our way back to the road.
I was reminded that between us was the gulf created by my history of physical and emotional trauma. My friends didn’t get how the thinking part of one’s brain could go offline as the body acted to save itself. I did.
Fight or flight. That was my non-harrowing example of a fight-or-flight event. No real danger but my unconscious perceived the situation as dangerous and sent me running. Yet, looking at the environment of the incident online, because I wanted to solidly fix it in place and time, surprised to find I’m able to identify the retreat complex and that it’s still there, I end up writing about Young Life and evangelism focusing on adolescents because they are vulnerable creatures at a critical point in their lives. While I may not have been involved in Young Life, my teen years ran the gauntlet of evangelical outreach from a number of sources, and it did have a confusing impact. My first such experience was at Brevard Music Camp when I had just turned fourteen. An invitation had been extended to hear a surprise chamber concert, under the direction of the famed Atlanta Symphony conductor Robert Shaw, at either a church or another camp. A few of us, eager to go somewhere anywhere, better still to see Robert Shaw conduct, excitedly accepted. To understand how privileged junior high and early high school girls would feel to be in the presence of Robert Shaw would mean perhaps grasping how deeply saturated we were in classical music and would have likely leaped to see him over any popular bands of the time. I expected that after the performance Shaw might share some of his experiences as a conductor. Bait for evangelical sermonizing was what it turned out to be. After the concert, Robert Shaw took the stage and gave a talk on the devil and modern music (not contemporary orchestral) and how its rhythmic repetition, imported from heathen cultures, hypnotized young audiences and made them susceptible to satanic influences. This was unexpected, incredible, disconcerting, even jaw-dropping. I believed none of it. But for weeks I’d been terrified by my realization of how a lifetime of daily trauma had impacted me, and that when I wasn’t even at home it didn’t get physically, psychically, and emotionally better for me, in fact it got worse because I was no longer solely directed toward fighting to survive, I was in a safe situation at Brevard and everything that had been repressed started to boil up in the form of anxieties and dissociative episodes and a determined rebelliousness (which I saw as harmless) that earned me the daily punishment of cleaning duties. Horrifying (or profoundly embarrassing) to me now, by the end of evening, and I’ve no idea how it happened except that following Robert Shaw was love bombing coupled with the promise of rescue from all life’s ills, when there was the semblance of an altar call I responded and went to the back of the room to talk to a teen evangelist, maybe college age, who had themselves been brainwashed into believing that this was their mission to help people, and numbers were what mattered, another soul scalp for the evangelical belt, how many had been reached and saved that night. I didn’t believe in it, I didn’t know I was being “saved”, what I needed was someone I didn’t know and would never see again to sit with me in the dark at the rear of the room while I cried. I had never done such a thing before, knew nothing about evangelism, and could only compare what was happening to a Roman Catholic confessional in which one said, “I’ve been bad”,
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and received absolution. We were even seated behind some kind of screen. What had I to confess? Pain and alienation. One doesn’t have to be a murderer to want absolution, pain and alienation are sins enough. Plus I confused people and disappointed them with the things I did. I had caused trouble at Brevard. They didn’t understand me, I didn’t understand me, I was therefore a bad-wrong person, however unintentionally, I will cry and confess I’m confused and have confused and disappointed others with my behavior during my time at Brevard, absolve me.
Some might be surprised to read Robert Shaw would be involved in an enterprise like this, and I was, and am because I find that in 1960, while associate director of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, he was also acting, for no salary, as the minister of music at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Cleveland, and in my experience UUs don’t go around evangelizing or having go-to-God altar calls. But I also read his father was a Disciples of Christ evangelical minister, which is where he got his start in conducting choirs, and when he first went to college it was with the intention of going into the ministry.
Obviously, as this was what the 55-year-old Shaw preached that night, under the cloak of a music performance and lecture, to young musicians from Brevard, he had it in his constitution, at least in 1971, I don’t know about 1970 or 1972.
I search online for anything to support my story, as Shaw is nowhere connected with this brand of anti-rock evangelizing. It takes a while but finally I come across Frank Garlock’s The Big Beat - A Rock Blast, a double LP recording, released 1971, the back cover of which reads, “Frank Garlock, one of America’s best-known authorities on the dangers of rock music, has been heard by thousands of young people as well as adults thoughout the nation as he has emphatically stated, ‘Christ is the answer’. His popular message has been given as often as six times a week to high school assemblies, youth rallies, summer camps, colleges, music clubs, civic clubs, and other groups…(he is) a regular speaker at The Wilds, a Christian youth camp…His lecture has produced lasting results, with as many as 100 decisions for Christ being made in single services. After hearing him speak, young people have broken their records of rock music and youth groups have been transformed…After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Bob Jones University, he earned the master’s degree from the Eastman School of Music and has done further postgraduate work, including study with the famed Robert Shaw.”
Well, hello there, a Bob Jones Christian musician who’s against rock music and had studied with Robert Shaw. He released his album in 1971 and I heard Robert Shaw speak in 1971. The headquarters of The Wilds, where Garlock often spoke, founded in 1969, is in Brevard, North Carolina, and The Wilds camp, close to the South Carolina border, is located about forty minutes, by car, from the Brevard music camp. I realize this is where we were driven to that night to hear Robert Shaw. Is that why older students at Brevard weren’t interested in going to the concert as
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they perhaps knew about The Wilds and that it was a camp established by Bob Jones University people? Just because a concert is at a church isn’t going to make a musician suspicious as church buildings are so often used for hosting concerts with no spiritual strings attached. You show up, get or give music, and that’s all. But perhaps The Wilds had a reputation among the older students that demanded a firm, “No,” if they were invited to a concert there.
I’m listening now to Frank Garlock’s sermons from the double LP, available online, and after saying he can tell what kind of person you are by what music you listen to, he’s going on about all musical instruments being built on the principle of “sympathetic vibrations”. Based on music’s “sympathetic vibrations” and the reciprocity of the human ear, he can tell, by what music you make and respond to, the kind of who that you are. Plants are attracted to devotional music while if you play acid rock music to plants they die. Play the right music to mental health patients and they’ll get better, play the wrong music and they get worse. The Beatles are bad. Bob Dylan is bad. James Taylor is bad. They’re all anti-Christian. Rock culture is anti-God. Teens listening to this music thus naturally rebel. The bad hippies and counterculture are the result of the influence of rock music. Then, by way of having brought up the subject of audio-analgesia, and how music (he claims) alleviates pain for most individuals during dental procedures through a process called nerve jamming, he speaks on heathen music in Africa and a village given over to marijuana and how the rhythms and tunes they use in their “heathen rituals” can be heard in rock music. A missionary he knows secretly watched villagers make human sacrifice to those tunes, people cut themselves and feel no pain and don’t bleed. He says it’s demonology and that the music anesthetizes them. Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Frank Zappa, and Jim Morrison are all of the devil. That’s the focus of Garlock’s first album. On the second album he first plays non-rock music and describes how the composer uses doublets and triplets and sixteenth notes and thirty-second notes building tension toward a climax, then drops back. Tension and relaxation both make good music. Music that is all tension he says is “sick”. Music that is all relaxation he says is “sick”. The key to rock music he says is repetition, repetitive rhythm and chordal patterns, and that it will make you literally crazy. Even just a little exposure to rock music and it’ll hook you and get you on drugs. The repetition hypnotizes you, you become a zombie, and you’re wide open to any power to take you over. The 4/4 time of rock music he says is backwards and the beat makes it what it is. It’s all beat-beat-beat-beat over and over again and that it naturally arouses sensual, suggestive motions. Sex, violence and revolution are the result. Kids are using rock music to escape from reality, as well their sense of guilt from delinquency, for rock music takes over the brain and drowns out God-given guilt. He says music replaces the dominance missing at home when men are weak and that fathers need to take the lace off their pants and be the men they’re supposed to be. (Much appreciative clapping from the recorded audience to whom he was speaking.) He says children who argue with their parents actually want their parents to assert their dominance and tell them what’s right. As for his own children, he quips they’re patriotic, “I’ll apply the stripes and they’ll see the stars.” (His audience very appreciatively claps for that.) He says fathers who don’t do this are sissies and that this domination is also missing in school and church. You
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are to thank the Lord for the father, church, and school who will dominate and tell you how to behave and dress like a Christian and make you obey.
Shaw’s focus was on the hypnotic badness of repetition, which he compared to heathen “tribal” music, and how it would open one to possession by demonic forces, rock wasn’t what he conceived of as Godly music, Bach was Godly music, rock music was bad. Shaw made the same arguments as Garlock concerning repetition in rhythm, chordal patterns and beat, and there are other similarities between Garlock’s LPs and Shaw’s talk, but I don’t remember Shaw complaining of the need for parents and schools to dominate, make children obey and “apply stripes” so they “see the stars”. I felt like Shaw treated us like a bunch of classical music kids that he wanted to ensure stayed with classical music, perhaps fearful that other genres of music would drain away talent. He did, however, make it very apparent that he considered rock music to be evil. I find online a quote from Kurt Woetzel, who co-authored with Frank Garlock, that is taken from an interview he had with Robert Shaw in which he asked him if he thought rock music was sensual, to which he said Shaw quickly replied, “It’s perverse.”
In 1922, the editor, Arthur Brisbane, wrote, “Psychologists and psychiatrists have joined clergymen, denouncing modern dancing and ‘jazz’ music. ‘Devil music,’ they call it. It is worse than that, it is ugly music. But there is nothing dangerous in dancing.” African American churches protested jazz as the Devil’s music, the father of W. C. Handy, who in 1914 wrote “St. Louis Blues”, fought with him over his composing jazz and when he went blind father Handy said it was punishment from God for W. C.’s “devil’s music”. Jelly Roll Morton said his grandmother called jazz the devil’s music. In 1921, Ann Faulkner, the national chairman of music in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, described “barbarous negroes” as responsible for jazz, which had a bad effect on the nerves, atrophying the brain cells it acted as a narcotic that paralyzed will power, destroying the finer sense of right and wrong, she said if it was literature it “ninety per cent of it wouldn’t be allowed to go through the mails.”.Arthur Brisbane seems simply to have not liked jazz, rather than imagining it as profane, but for as long as there has been a devil or satan there has probably been “devil’s music”, perhaps as long as there has been music there has been music imagined to be chaotic and licentious and against all that is good. The medieval term, diabolus in musica, referred to the interval also known as the perverse triad in the diatonic scale, which was the augmented fourth, or diminished fifth, and was simply perceived as dissonant, also now known as the Tristan chord through Wagner’s use of it in the prelude to the opera Tristan and Isolde. Plato said the Lydian and Ionian modes should be restricted or forbidden, that out of the seven modes actually only the Phrygian and Dorian modes would be allowed in his Republic, the “beautiful city” of Kallipolis, the Dorian being the mode of the warrior, and the Phrygian being the mode of peace. Both promoted order and temperance. Harmony is good and godly. Rock was the music of the bacchanalia. Record burnings were held, not only those few that made the news but those which dosed all involved with toxic burning vinyl fumes, but no one was talking about how that literally poisoned their bodies and if they did talk about it someone might have said it was better to poison the body than the spirit. I don’t know what Garlock thought of atonal music (a loose grouping of) or
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Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music (who is also thought of as the father of atonality but his twelve-tone music has rules). In context of Kubrick’s The Shining, audiences heard the diabolic in Penderecki’s The Dream of Jacob when it instead concerns a confrontation with God. The Nazis propagandized the music of Beethoven, and Wagner, Anton Bruckner, Herbert von Karajan, and Richard Strauss. Beethoven was long dead and couldn’t say no, as was Bruckner, as was Wagner, but Wagner was an antisemite, but Karajan joined the Nazi party, and by 1935 Strauss had fallen out with the Nazis and his music was censored after that.
While I had wholly rejected all of Shaw’s ideas regarding music and evil rhythms and Satan, and I don’t remember much of anything else that he talked about, I responded to something something whatever it was about the promise of rescue through a loving God. I also knew this was a one-night stand and I would take none of this away with me from that place (I wasn’t even sure where I was) except the shame of having succumbed to what registered with me as the equivalent to the Roman Catholic confessional and healing penance. The message was you’re the one in the wrong and you can change. When you can’t change the world or your situation, the prospect of you being magically changed, throwing in the towel and letting something else take over becomes inviting, like the revival altar calls for alcoholics to come forward and be healed. I knew I wasn’t to blame for my situation at home. But as at home I was always being always told I was the bad wrong one, then the bad wrong one I may somehow be and will this help. I didn’t know anything about evangelicals, I don’t believe words such as “saved” were used that night, and if they were I didn’t know what they meant in respect of Shaw’s odd music lecture. Though I rejected everything Shaw had talked about, I did hear, “If you need help…,” and this is to what I was responding, the idea that anyone loved me was enough to make me cry my heart out.
Though the evangelical confessional was a one-night stand, it was part of a cluster of events that led me to read the entire Bible, but I was also soon pursuing a personal course of comparative religious studies, of a kind that would prompt an ill-equipped tenth-grade me to research too many ancient religions as best I could (three sets of school encyclopedias as primary source), information that I attempted to distill and rethink to be a not-plagiaristic longer than long paper for school, in which I was surprised to give most of the space to Zoroastrianism, which was a new one on me, I’d never heard of it before and yet it was supposed to have influenced the big three dualistic monotheisms. To explore Christianity as built upon not just Judaism but progressing out of other religions, and that Jesus Christ was not a historical individual but echoed earlier hero-gods, was near heresy at the time, even amongst non-evangelicals, even amongst non-religious but culturally Christian Americans, my adolescent interrogation of the subject viewed as exemplary of the same will to antagonize assumed in my interest in the history of Marxism and Communism, the subjects of my big school paper in ninth grade, I even drew portraits of Lenin and Marx for it, I can’t imagine why as I don’t believe a visual component had been expected, but my teacher taped them up on the blackboard though she received the paper with some obvious side-eye. (I liked her, she was a good Southern Baptist but she ignored school protocol as much as she dared in an attempt to keep me from
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being kicked out due my daily going against school rules in my wearing of jeans, which I looked upon as my working class right since I didn’t have the money to purchase myself a dedicated school wardrobe, plus I was in constant crisis which I didn’t talk about, I was silent and moody and would sometimes break down and disappear into the hospital and she tried to make space for me.) After having read the Bible through when I was fourteen, I apparently went on to Marx, and then went on to reading about the origins of religion, and immersed myself in Plato and Socrates and Aristotle as I reasoned I better know them before going on to other things. But what I trusted most was myth and legend. For me, waking up while I was in the middle of flight, when I was fifteen, I now realize was a huge event, a major anchor, something I would never forget, a big development in my process of self-awareness. I had thought I was self-aware but I also knew I wasn’t always.
To question God, if God, and Christianity, was still considered at least anti-social, despite hefty cultural infusions of Zen Buddhism post-WWII, despite John Lennon having declared in March of 1966 The Beatles were more popular than Jesus (which provoked big ire in American Christians), despite Time magazine having published on the cover of its 8 April 1966 issue, in red letters on a black background, “Is God Dead?”—an article that informed on how many in the world who were totalitarians didn’t believe in God so for them there was no God to have died, and how many were born into cultures in which they were unlikely “to be summoned to the knowledge of the one God”, the simple invisibility of God, or the anonymity of God, as well the belief that God had lived and indeed died (a Jesus who rather killed the old God), the author considered the revivals of interest in God (spirituality) rather than religion and in the end settled upon Thomas Aquinas’ definition of God as the prime mover of the universe. America should have been ready for the confrontation with “What is this thing called God?” even though it demanded its political leaders have a church home, even though oaths were still sworn on the Bible in court and by presidents assuming office. But to question God’s existence set off a knee-jerk response of fear of insulting and blaspheming the Top Dog, which makes sense when that God is accepted as having tossed his created-in-the-image-of out of Eden for the crime of disobeying and eating of the Tree of Knowledge.
In 1950, on Easter Sunday, radical left members of the Lettrist movement (pre-Situationist International) staged an action in which, while mass was being performed live on national TV at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, twenty-two year old Michael Mourre, dressed as a Dominican friar, took over the rostrum and delivered a speech penned by co-conspirator Serge Berna. “God is dead,” he declared (here abridged), “…go forth then into the tragic and exalting desert of a world where God is dead…we proclaim the death of the Christ-God so that Man may survive at last.” The church and police decided to aggressively pursue Mourre, who had been a Dominican friar, through bringing in a psychiatrist who would diagnose him as schizomaniacal “(Claude) type), and recommend the institutionalization of Mourre in an asylum, but protesters brought in a second psychiatrist and Mourre was released. He would go on to be awarded, in 1961, the Académie Française's Max-Barthou Prize for his body of work, but he had become a regular contributor to the publication of the
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Action Française which was far-right monarchist and nationalist. So much for that. As for Serge Berna, he was expelled from the Lettrists in 1953 for “suspicion of deviation into literature”, then disappeared in 1961, his last “identifiable trace” being a letter he’d written to André Breton.
What happened is, after the Robert Shaw talk, I realized several of my friends at Brevard were believers. I’d either not previously known or had ignored the fact that they were Bible-reading Christians who held prayer sessions and Bible discussions with one another, novel to me in their intimate devotion. My childhood history of no religious inculcation, then Roman Catholic catechism, then rejecting it at ten in favor of struggling toward a philosophical approach, and despite several years in the Bible Belt and my protesting in grade school against Bible reading and prayer in the classroom, had left me without any experience of individuals who struggled to spiritually incorporate “God” into their daily lives with prayer and scriptural discussion, plus these peers at Brevard were intensively trained musicians who were a little older than me and wore fashionable peasant tops and peasant dresses and sandals and weren’t judgmental against those who didn’t believe. I’d not previously thought of the Bible as a book to be read, of course not, I had been Roman Catholic then Episcopalian, we had our ritual, what else was there, a president who didn’t swear in on the Bible was Lyndon Baines Johnson., after Kennedy’s death he was sworn in on a Roman Catholic missal because Kennedy was Catholic and that’s what was available, what I’d absorbed from my stint in the RC then Episcopalianism was kind of like the situation with Lyndon Baines Johnson, that the missal was a perfectly good book for dealing with anything that called for official God religion occasions plus it had convenient how-to instructions. After Brevard, I reasoned that as the literature and arts of Western civilization are so rooted in the Bible and Greek and Roman mythology that while a decent knowledge of the Bible may not be essential it wasn’t going to hurt and would give me information needed for figuring out what was up with the belief in a paranormal intelligence, which may sound like a peculiar, analytical approach, but wasn’t, for though these were matters of spirit, they were matters of the spirit for which a number of people relied on text for confidence and guidance. Having just turned fourteen, I had already a deep familiarity with mythology, where some people had found it boring I read the myths over and over again (this was middle school, my knowledge was mostly Bulfinch and Edith Hamilton), but for all intents and purposes I knew nothing about the history of Christianity except that Henry VIII formed the Anglican church so that he could divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, I had thought in terms of symbols rather than stories being perceived as factual, I couldn’t make sense of how God was perceived as separate from the Holy Spirit was somehow separate from the Son of God, I believed there was perhaps something greater than us but felt I couldn’t comprehend it, I had seen Bible-Belt signs about how one must be “saved” but had thought of these as cult-like relics of a weird Depression Era phenomena peculiar to the South. Yet here were “intellectual” friends of mine who believed this, one of whom was Roman Catholic—and I know it was a very novel idea for me because I remember not believing in salvation, I didn’t believe in Jesus Christ alone as the sole door to deity, but I still went through a period where I worried about it and wondered, “What if they’re right? What if it’s not enough to believe in something bigger than yourself
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and trying to lead a good life, what if you have to instead be saved?” When presented with Christianity and “salvation” as the only truth and all else as being lies, I always returned to wondering what about everyone who was born before Christianity and everyone who had never heard about Christianity and everyone who heard but didn’t believe because it didn’t make sense but they were good people? I’d never read the Bible, the Old or New Testaments, I only knew them through literature and the ritual of the mass, and for the first time I was hearing about the book of Revelation, and something called the Rapture, and the Apocalypse and fuck if it wasn’t some scary shit designed to rush you into the arms of Christ despite the fact it was in highly symbolic language and how could anyone confidently know what it was talking about, I read around and it seemed that every era and apocalyptic sect had its own interpretation.
Evangelical sci-fi-horror fantasy novels such as Left Behind weren’t then being pushed at adolescents, but what seemed a fantasy predecessor was The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970, written by Hal Lindsey, spawn of the Dallas Theological Seminary, as was Jim Rayburn who founded Young Life, Hal Lindsey having been also a staff member of the Bill Bright Campus Crusade ministry. I wouldn’t hit existentialism proper and surrealism until I was sixteen, and despite counting myself as somewhat intelligent and perceptive, despite my not being a Christian, due the way I’d been brought up there was a big push-pull with the idea I should give my life and will over to something other. It had to do with the mechanics of abuse. I’d been denied self-agency always, and I had chaffed against school and other institutions that denied self-agency, I was always a troublemaker in that respect, yet here I was not believing but wondering at these evangelicals who kept popping up and telling me to give myself up to something higher than me that would do the heavy lifting and help me out. When it seemed like much of the world was built on accepting and enacting this message on some level, if not necessarily on the back of the evangelical church’s God, as a teen I had my moments of wondering if they were right and I was wrong, because nothing was getting any easier for me. One way to view the conundrum is it’s not that different from the struggle of predestination and free will. Giving oneself up, as it was prescribed, was effectively like predestination and it seemed that part of the consequent bliss-filled state promised was to be freed of the personal responsibility of making decisions. The struggle between predestination and free will is in nearly all great literature, and so I was familiar with it from this angle as well. The struggle between predestination and free will was a great philosophical question, and with God removed from the equation was even a matter of science. And that’s what all the evangelizing came down to—trash your personal will and let this God, whatever it was, take control. What was the storied fall of Satan but self-will against God’s will. What was the storied fall of Adam and Eve but self-will against God’s will. Satan, and Adam and Eve, representing self will, were doomed to fail in much the same predestination predeterminism as explored in the great Greek dramas about the tragedy of the illusion of free will and the individual who struggles against the Gods. Oedipus couldn’t fight the oracle no matter how he tried. All of it boils down to the same thing. Without calling it predestination, the conservative approach urged one to abdicate the “throne” of self and place God there instead, because conservatism and traditionalism aren’t
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interested in free will, what’s wanted is a lot of drones taking orders from God, which translates into whoever is over them in the very human realm of social hierarchies. The Lord’s Prayer that is burned into every child has in it the template of resolving oneself to “thy will be done”, innocent enough in the awareness and acceptance that the universe is a superior force of laws beyond one’s control, but can be also a primer for subservience, useful for those who inject themselves as authorities between the individual and the universal, translators of divine will, who interpret how those subject should believe and how they should act. Evangelical Christianity and similar thought systems of abdicating the “throne” of self extend a promise of better days ahead once you stop fighting and go with God’s flow. Somehow, giving oneself up to the predetermination of God’s will ends in canceling predetermination because your (perhaps predetermined) free choice in doing this potentially means all manner of blessings may grace you from on high. Bill Bright was a candy man before he went into evangelism and like many others he was not averse to sweetening the deal to bulk up the numbers of those who receive and respond to the Gospel message, if only for a moment.
Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn does or does not also encompass the state in which one is in such a state of helplessness that one shuts down and seemingly gives up to what seems predestined, all other options of self-defense exhausted. No, it seems to me when the autonomic nervous system is in the driver’s seat then there is no “giving up”, personal choice is as much in play as when one is anesthetized.
At what age does one become a more conscious than unconscious human being, at least as far as one is able? Examining my childhood and teen years, while by the time I was fourteen I had developed an idea of what I wanted to do with my life, that I wanted to write and make art, and while I was struggling to exert personal autonomy where I could, it seems to me that, still waking to the world around me and my relationship to it, I was also still in the partial dream state of childhood. Or maybe this is the level at which one’s consciousness operates as long as one is living within and reasoning out the myths, the stories, the perceptions imposed upon us by family, culture, history, perhaps even as long as we are operating as a cog in the dream world of others who are, even if in a position of authority over one, similarly semi-conscious. We’re not without personal responsibility, however, as our daily lives are second-by-second rigged with the plight of decision, each an opportunity of lucidity, in which even a question mark’s pause is a gesture of lucidity.
A difference between the predeterminism of science and the inability to fight the oracles of the Greek Gods, is that science doesn’t promise anything other than what will be will be while the Greeks promised tragedy. Tragedy wasn’t good, but the Greeks also imparted that in the fight was heroism, that what was learned was valuable, and wasn’t the one who fought predestined to fight anyway.