All Hands Stand By to Repel Boarders. Cordell Strug
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parka feel like a windbreaker. At forty below, that same parka will feel like a light shirt, and you had better respect how deadly the temperature has become. People that knew more than I knew, or wanted to know, said there was a corresponding impact at sixty below.
All the cars had engine-block heaters, and we plugged them in if we wanted the motor to turn over in the morning. We never left the driveway without sleeping bags and a survival kit in the trunk. In the worst cold, you had to put a cover over your radiator grille so your engine wouldn’t freeze. The car heater could barely keep the frost off the inside windows.
I remember the sensation of going in and out: having that first cold breath scorch your lungs and feeling the chill come right through your clothes; then, after being numbed and pushed inside yourself outside, having the heat blast over you when you entered a building, getting groggy from the warmth.
I remember lingering in gas stations, enjoying that instant camaraderie of all the poor souls that had to be on the road, laughing at how bad it was, asking about road conditions.
Because it wasn’t just the cold that hung on: the snow might cover the ground for six months, from the beginning of October to the end of March. Of course, before and after those dates, there might be snowfalls and ice storms that would linger for a few days.
Late one evening, I was coming back from a hospital visit. I stopped for gas and ran into one of the men who worked for the town, plowing the streets, mowing city property, doing general maintenance. He had moved to the area to manage the hardware store before it went out of business and ended up being stranded. It had been an unusually bad year for snow, even by our standards, and we were, a bit hysterically, joking about how bad it might get and where we would put the snow if it was still coming in June.
“Don’t laugh,” he said. “I’ve seen it snow in June. In fact, one year we had such miserable weather, I was standing right here—right here pumping gas—on the Fourth of July. We’d been out watching the fireworks. I looked up and there was snow coming down. Not much, melted right away, but there they were: snowflakes on the Fourth of July. So I’ve seen snow in this country every damned month of the year.”
But you could laugh about that; it was the deep winter that was frightening. Driving home late, ice on the roads, snow falling through your headlights, no other cars in sight, miles between one town and the next, and—in the early years—no cell phones, no car navigation systems, none of the connections we cling to now, you appreciated what a tiny, vulnerable organism you were, how much your small spark of life was up against.
And above you, in that clear, frigid air, was the dark beauty of the universe, with hardly any ground lights to blind you to it. Before those nights in Minnesota, I had never seen so many stars so clearly. Especially after a long drive, or after a long walk in the summer, your night vision would get better and you could see the clusters and clumps of the galaxies as you never can in the city. And it was one of the better places on earth to see the light shows of the northern lights. I had read about them but, seeing them through the windshield for the first time, I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
That was where I learned to identify the constellations. I got the book on the stars written by H. A. Rey, who wrote the Curious George books our kids loved, and I had a great time running in and out, trying to match diagrams to reality.
At our bigger church, which we lived next to, there was a path on the west side, going from the parsonage to the parking lot and the main entrance. I tried to keep it clear in the winter, and one of my indelible memories is walking to night meetings between piles of snow four feet high, looking right at the North Star, and, coming home a couple of hours later, looking up at Orion.
But, obviously, it was easier to stay out and stare up at the sky in the summer. I felt triumphant one night when I could finally pick out Hercules and the Serpent Holder. I would lie on our front lawn, with its gentle slope down to the highway, and lose myself in the vast beauty of those long-travelling beams of light that still look like points on a dome. The universe became my friend. A cold and distant friend, but a peaceful and undemanding one, ever present, ever welcoming. Lying on my back, looking up happily, losing myself, I could feel the deep kinship of matter that we’ve taught ourselves: the stars, the earth and my breathing flesh all made of the same stuff.
On my worst days, those would be good moments.
Beating the Bounds
I had, at seminary, an eccentric church history professor who never came to class without his copy of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. He loved finding a pretext to consult this thick tome—some obscure ceremony or odd breakaway sect—and would read the entire entry aloud, giggling delightedly. He thought all pastors of the church should have a copy on their desks, so I bought one. It’s still sitting in front of me, still regularly consulted.
One Saturday, I was looking for an odd detail to spice up my sermon and, for some reason I can no longer remember, looked up the article on “Beards, Clerical.”
A bound reference work, like the physical stacks of a library, offers a pleasure not to be had from those pinpoint internet searches: stumbling across an utterly unrelated, but fascinating, entry. In the column across from “Beards, Clerical,” I saw an entry titled “Beating the Bounds,” so I read that instead.
Beating the bounds was an old early summer ceremony in medieval England, when prayers would be offered for the harvest. The annual procession would trace the boundaries of the parish, beating them with willow rods or—and this is the fun part—bumping the boys of the parish on the ground at the boundary. (The article says the boys were “also beaten.” Intriguingly, it ends by noting a modern—I have the 1978 edition—revival. I thought this was a typical religious blend of reasonable purpose and thinly disguised sadism, so familiar to me from my Roman Catholic youth.)
In our time and place, religious division and variety make the idea of firm parish boundaries impossible. The automobile has also done its part in scrambling them. Driving from one of the small churches we served to the other on Sunday morning, we would pass several other churches and many other drivers traveling past our churches to reach theirs.
Still, in a small town, it’s easy to think of that town as the rough, if porous, boundary of the parish. I reflected, after reading that article, that in any given week I did my own version of the ceremony.
Looking back on my service, I consider this one of the greatest pieces of luck I had: that I could do so much of what I had to do on foot, some of it on dirt roads leading to the grassy paths of small cottages hidden by trees. On quiet days, I could imagine I might bump into Thomas Hardy or Anthony Trollope. I had acquired, over the years, a collection of stout, gnarled walking sticks, which helped complete my fantasy.
I couldn’t exactly circumnavigate the towns we lived in, because they were bounded by rivers, planted fields, thick woods, and barbed wire. But, in both of them, I could walk out to the edge and back in every direction, all in an easy half-day.
Our first town was smaller and dropped off quickly into farms. The land was flat there and a lot of my walking was on gravel roads. Our second town was in a deep valley and you had to go up a fairly steep grade whichever side you walked out. It was also more built-up and had sidewalks as well as paved roads. To both the east and west, there were cemeteries. (In our first parish, the cemetery was across the street from the parsonage. It was the first thing I saw when I looked out the window in the morning.)
I would typically do my visiting in the afternoons. I loved walking along with my home communion kit and my Occasional Services book in my shoulder bag, whistling and twirling my walking stick. People would always ask me where I left my car. But once an old fellow I met said, “Doing your parish rounds, eh?” and I was ridiculously pleased to be able to say, “I am.”
But my most frequent walk was in the morning, to the post office to get the mail. There was a rural mail carrier for the farms, but most people in town rented a box. This was a great meeting place, somewhere to hear the news and take