mi Camino (part one)

July 6: Jan Hus, Martyr

2:45 pm – Chenea, Illinois. I am in the town park, which shares its twelve-space parking lot with the Chenea Public Library, a cute little white frame building with black trim which might have been a two-room school or small church back in the day, now well-kept and neat – and on this day, busy. A steady traffic of teenagers and children come and go as I write, all of them on foot in this small town where one can easily walk from one end to the other.

Around here it it flat as far as the eye can see. I am headed due east on US 24, which makes a straight line from the Mississippi River at Burlington, Iowa across Illinois and most of Indiana, almost all the way to Fort Wayne. Often, the two-lane road stretches to the horizon with its utility poles alongside. Straight ahead.

On this, the first day of my vacation, I must let go.

Too much lies on my desk back in Iowa, where I “have left undone those things which [I] ought to have done” (BCP p. 41). “And there is no health in us,” as the old Prayerbook continues. I feel that, for sure.

Through May and June, I worked hard, alongside my dear fellow-laborers in Christ – choristers, staff colleagues. Student recitals, the chamber music festival, Vacation Bible School, to say nothing of the ongoing round of Sunday music, including three Principal Feasts. And now, a governing committee wants a daily accounting of our work for July, itemized in fifteen-minute segments and pigeonholed into assigned categories. Not May, not June. July – when I am taking my first extended vacation in two years, when there are no choral rehearsals (other than RSCM, where I am a chorister and not a director) – and most of all, when I am so worn out that I am not working efficiently. I do not know what the Powers that Be intend with this, but I am certain it is Not Good. I do not fear for myself: I am old, and they are welcome to fire me and see how things go in the aftermath. I do worry about the others, my friends who pour themselves out as an oblation to the LORD and are underpaid for their work as it is.

But I must let go.

One of my friends walked the Camino pilgrimage in France and Spain a few months ago; this is my Camino, this drive through the tidy little Midwestern towns and the vast fields of corn and beans. I breathe my prayer: “Deo... gratias...” mile after mile, the windows of the Toyota rolled down, watching the thunderclouds build in the hot afternoon.

9:15 (now Eastern Time, having left the Central Time Zone a while back). I sing Evensong in the parking lot of a Marathon gas station and truck stop, still on US 24, outside of Wabash, Indiana, standing by the Toyota and watching the sun set into the towering dark clouds to the west.

As the road crosses the Hoosier State, the terrain begins to be not so flat. At least in places, it is now rolling countryside. No genuine hills yet; they are still several hundred miles to the east. But there are now Trees, many more of them, green and beautiful. There are stretches of the road where it is entirely among them, no corn or beans in sight. The towns are closer together, too.

I had thought to stay the night here, but as darkness falls, the lot fills with pickup trucks, most of them old and rusty and all carrying tough-looking young men in their teens and twenties, gathering to hang out and drink.

One of them notices me quietly singing my prayers and reading Scripture, and comes over, asking about my Iowa plates. He proves to be a fine young man, and tells me about places to fish in the area, especially the local state park with its reservoir. Later, I recall camping there, perhaps ten or twelve years ago. I remember the sun rising in a clear sky over the lake, the birds singing.

But I move on.


July 7 – Tuesday

I landed at another Marathon station, this one in Markle, Indiana on US 224. I parked in the back corner of the lot and rested well.

Time was when I carried my tent and camping supplies. But I have learned that I am equally comfortable sleeping in the car, and it is much easier. No campground to find (often well off from the highway, and sometimes with excessive fees), no tent to set up and strike the next day – and carry in the car, often wet and dirty. Just park the car, move to the passenger seat, lean it back all the way, and sleep. There have been two occasions where I felt unsafe and moved on – but there have been campgrounds where I have felt equally unsafe.

At first light, I pray the little Office, get out of the car, and stretch. Behind the lot is a residential neighborhood, so I walk, needing the exercise. In a few blocks I am in the two-block downtown. The old buildings are still mostly well-kept, but many of the storefronts are vacant. A church, a post office, the library tucked into one of the storefronts, a couple of restaurants, a few shops.

At one end of town is the Veteran's Park, on a quarter-acre lot. I salute the flag and say a prayer, thinking of the Indiana farm boys from this and the neighboring township who died far from home, fighting foreign wars that were not of their making.

I honor the Stars and Stripes for the same reason that I honor the Stars and Bars of the Confederate States of America – I remember the men and women who fought under these banners.

By the time I return to the Marathon station, the lot is filling, and I am not a paying customer. I want to sing Matins, but it is clear that I should move on.

Through most of Ohio, US 30 is a fine four-lane divided highway, much less travelled than the busy I-70 which parallels it some ways further south. About 9 am, I stop at one of the full-scale rest areas on this road, near Lima. It proves to be a much better place to wash up and pray Matins, which I do in the back of the little park under a grove of buckeye trees, mixed with oaks. Buckeyes grow in West Virginia – there are some of them on my farm – but I don't recall seeing them further South or West. I am glad to be in their company, and that of an eagle who floats overhead for much of the time, riding the gusty winds of what looks to be an unsettled and possibly stormy day.

I am here for an hour and a half. This is why I travel – the long silences, the wind blowing in my ears, the wide flat fields in the early morning wet with dew, the Offices prayed outdoors for the most part, the times when I sit at a picnic table and write, as I am doing now.

There is a wholesome strength to these farm states of the upper Midwest that has not altogether disappeared. Compared to the South, the farmsteads are tidier, the houses and small towns are not so run down, the people seem to take pride in their communities and their work in a different way than what one sees in the South, or the cities of the Atlantic seaboard. When the United States falls apart someday, this region might be the seed for a new beginning.

It is time to move on.