Deep Home

Dikkon Eberhart

“I left the light on for you. Thank you for coming. There’s new coffee, still hot. Welcome to our home.”

I brought him in and closed the door behind him, against the night. I poked up the fire. I poured him coffee. I sat him down.

“So,” I said, “I got your message. Thank you for asking about it. Thank you for coming to get my answer. You must be a pilgrim, too. Given the question you asked. Let me tell you how it was.”

It was hard to focus on his face. Maybe the light was too low. Somehow, though, there seemed to be a light coming from him. He seemed to smile.

“Once upon a time….”

That's how I began.

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Once upon a time when I was young and the world was green, I dreamed that I—and my family if I ever had one—I dreamed that we would live by the ocean on the coast of Maine. That would be our home.

But I didn’t stay young, and the world didn’t stay green.

I did get a family though. I loved my wife, and she and I loved our four children, and when we were grown-ups, we bought that nineteenth century salt water farmhouse and barn, with its eighteen acres on the coast of Maine—and with its meadow, and with its apple trees, and with its forest, and with its bold rocks instead of a beach, and with its muddy slough where I moored my boat.

In winter, when blizzards stopped the world, and the snow piled itself halfway up the windows, and we slept under twice the blankets, and the air was finally still, we could hear fog horns on the sea. The fog horns were calling us safely home.

Not just us, the everyday us—the fog horns were calling our souls safely home as well.

So, we had our home. I was a salesman, and the sort of salesman who is a dreamer—not about sales but about freedom. We had our home; I thought we had found Innisfree. You know, as in the Yeats poem--

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean rows will I have there, and a hive for the honey bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

You know the rest.

Decades passed. Not just years, but decades.

We made a life, sometimes in quiet desperation, sometimes with a warrior’s mighty shout. Our children grew and went their ways, except for the one of them who stays at home.

The world’s convention was that the one who stays at home was less able—this son who was a stayer at home. Yet his soul was able, at providing unquestioning love.

We were in command of our life! We.

Where was our home?

Was home our old, salt water farmhouse and barn?

Or was our home within that church across the road? Was home somehow or other to be found in that churchly atmosphere, breathed upon by God, whom we did not command?

I met the living Christ in that church, while standing as a stranger stands beside the rear-most pew, being loved upon by congregants who didn’t need to notice me, but who noticed me anyhow. That meeting shook the foundations of my actual home across the road.

It changed the atmosphere inside that home across the road. Christian faith was a fruitful Innisfree, not a dreamy one.

Our children—most of them—were going away. Our farmhouse was emptier. The last two cats and the dog were dead. Even our pastor was leaving our church-home to minister in a new way and from a new location.

Where was our home?

My formerly urgent daily work—once a “home” for my time—was done; I retired. My wife’s formerly urgent daily work was not yet done, but she was scaling back to a slower pace, her “home” becoming easier to maintain.

Where was our home?

Unbidden, I found I had a new variety of work to do. I had pilgrimage work to do. It was work of a different kind from selling. It was a work of being with. It satisfied my soul. I discovered I was reaching out to everyone—to everyone, Christian or not—to everyone who sought a deep home.

I wrote a book about my life and about how I got this way.

Other pilgrims read my book. Perhaps you did, too. Some read my book just for its light-hearted account of my life. But many of the pilgrims, that first type of reader, they wrote me to say, “Hi, pilgrim” back to me.

This idea came into my head. We pilgrims being together, we can seek our deep homes together.

But first, I realized, I needed to live in my own home, first of all.

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“Re-heat this coffee? I see you’ve not drunk any.”

It was hard to focus on him. And he said so little. Nothing really. Just his eyes, which were hard to see but which seemed to watch.

"You know, I lived in this book for ten years before it was done. It was my home. It’s world was my home, my deep home, where I sought to be at peace.” I held the book up.

I reached and poked the fire. “I’m thinking of home,” I mused aloud. “Say, you want to know how that book began?” I chuckled, making a joke. “How that home began?”

He watched.

“Well,” I laughed, “not began began. But began after I finished writing it through for the first time, which caused me to discover what the book had been about all along, while I wrote it through during that first time.”

He watched.

“The book is about how neither my wife nor I was in command of our lives, although we thought we were. That’s what the book is about. We were pilgrims, led toward home by…well, by Someone who demanded allegiance from us in exchange for salvation. You know how that is?”

He seemed to nod.

I lifted a paper from the table beside my chair. “Here’s how the book began. Before my editor and I scrapped this beginning and built the beginning that’s in the book right now. That scrapping and building was like hammering up a house and then stepping back and saying, ‘Nope. Wrong. Guess I wanted a ranch, not a colonial.’

“Here’s how it began. I’ll read it to you. Ready?"

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Chapter One

Homesick Souls

Before our conversion, my wife’s and my souls survived well enough. But they survived as makeshift rafts, cast adrift on a troublesome sea.

We experienced relief from our plight—and we came at last into harbor—when we opened our souls to Christian faith. We were rescued…and we were home.

Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Robert Frost said that, Dad's pal. Heaven is where, when they invite you to come there, only your faith will get you in. Jesus Christ said that…or words to that effect.

How is your soul, reader?

Is your soul homesick? Do you long after relief?

If so, then please read on.

I put the paper back down on the table. I smiled.

“That’s the whole of the first chapter. No Prologue—as there is now—no nothing. I just plunged right on in. I addressed it directly to the reader, in that quaint, slightly twee way, as they used to have in the 19th century: establishing a distance between the now and the then, making me the story-teller, letting you know that I am playing with language, letting you know that I hope you will enjoy the ride.

“Get it?”

He seemed to get it.

“Our home is in the hands of the Lord. Neither my wife nor I is in command of our lives, though we used to think we were. Our home is where the Lord sits us down. He puts us there for his purpose, not for ours.”

I smiled, and he seemed to smile, too.

“Even here, of all places the least expected. Here, in Virginia not Maine—and not even the ocean end, the mountains.”

He stood.

He was still hard to focus on. Maybe it was a trick of the angles—he seemed taller than I remembered from when I let him in. He seemed to glow a pleasant light. He raised his hand for a moment in a gesture almost, it seemed, of blessing.

Then he was gone. He didn’t use the door.

Backwards to the Golden Time

Dikkon Eberhart

Memoir writing is dreaming backwards.

Eleven years ago, my father became one hundred years old.

When Dad turned one hundred, my wife and I had no grandchildren yet. We hoped we might have grandchildren someday—after all, we had produced four children, so the prospect of grandchildren was bright.

However, whenever our grandchildren did come along, they would not be able to sit with this man, my father, the poet, who was one hundred years old. Dad would be gone by then. Our grandchildren could read his poetry, they could view him in pictures, but they would not be able to know him as I knew him.

So I sat down at my desk, and I began writing stories about my dad, and about my mom, and about how it all was. In order to write these stories, I discovered, also I needed to write stories about Dad’s and Mom’s own parents, and about how it all was for them, too.

The more stories I wrote down, the more stories I remembered, and the more stories I remembered, the more dangerous this process became. I was dreaming backwards, with emphasis on the word dreaming.

You see, I am a writing sort of a fellow. In order to understand my life as I live it, I objectify it. This is not a choice of mine; it’s the way I’m wired.

My psyche places me outside my life, while I try to live my life fully as I am able. From outside, I observe the themes of my life, upon which I mull. And as I mull the themes, I order my memories so that they illustrate and they dramatize the themes. It’s a circle—it’s what I mean by dreaming backwards.

When we dream, we are both receiving something from our outside and creating something from our inside at the same time. That’s why dreams fascinate, though they are not real.

As I wrote my stories about my parents and about their parents, I was dreaming backwards. My father, the poet, was called “Dreamy Dick” when he was a boy, and the apple does not fall far from the tree.

Dreaming backwards is dangerous because it may fool the dreamer. It may make the dreamer believe that the created story of the past is the past. However, that is not so. The past is ungraspable—it is past. If you are writing a memoir, the people of the past are unable to tell you, now, if you are wrong in your memory. The people of the past are unable to chide you when you order your memories for the purpose of dramatizing your themes…at their expense.

To the casual observer, writing a memoir probably seems easy enough. After all, you know the stories—just write them down.

But memoir writing is a razor-edged endeavor. The writer of a memoir has a responsibility which is weighty. If the writer fails to balance precisely between self-enhancement and self-abnegation there is a danger of falling and of being cut, cut badly. A memoir—this is what I have concluded—a memoir should be a kind of prayer by which the writer expresses, highest among all things, humility.

As an example of my desire to live in a past which I did not possess myself, here’s a memory. I loved my father partly because of the past he had lived in before me. I could dream my way into his experiences when something of his experience touched mine; I was ten-years-old and a warrior.

Dad had been a naval officer during World War II. His principle responsibility was training young gunners on navy bombers the necessary marksmanship, with their .50-caliber double-barrel machine guns, to survive strafing attacks by Japanese Zeros, and to shoot the Zeros down instead. After the war was won, Dad kept his target kites.

Choose any summer day, when I was ten. Maybe on that day we’d take Dad’s elegant old cabin cruiser out onto the ocean in Maine, and we’d go to Pond Island, along with a swarm of smaller craft, some fifty of our closest friends and us.

We’d have a boatload of clams, lobsters, and cod, also corn, potatoes, salads, pies. (I’d be especially proud if I’d caught the cod the day before while drop-lining near Saddleback Ledge.) The hour would be early, still cool, with a light air from the south, no fog. I’d handle the anchor at the island, following Dad’s directions. Several trips would be needed in the launch to ferry all our equipment to the shore.

Then, on the south side of the island, we’d dig a deep clambake pit in the sand, line it with stones, fill it with drift wood, and set a bonfire ablaze to heat the rocks. We kids would fill a dingy with fresh rockweed, torn from its roots below tide line.

When the fire burned down to glowing coals, we’d layer the pit with the seaweed—instantly bright green on the seething rocks, and popping—and we’d toss on the food, layering it with seaweed and topping the whole bake with a thicker, final layer of seaweed. Finally, we’d cover everything with an old sail and bank the sand up around the sail’s edges to hold in the heat.

Then, finally, there’d be nothing to do but to wait while the bake baked, to stroll, to run, to explore, to lie in the strengthening sun, to philosophize vigorously—or meanderingly, as the mood suited. Perry and Craig would lead us all in singing The Sinking of the Titanic, and we would all take a delicious, ghoulish pleasure in the line “husbands and wives, little children lost their lives….”

Beer and wine for the grown-ups; orange Nehi for us kids.

Then it would be early afternoon, and the breeze would have come up. It would be a good, strong, summer sou’wester—good sailing weather…kite sailing.

Dad and I would rig a kite. It was an act of shared and minute technical specificity that I adored since it was so uncharacteristic of my father; Dad was not a tool guy. But kites, I realized at age ten, were really poems, and therefore they deserved his intensity of attention to their every nuance.

Sometimes Dad would agree to fly the huge 10-foot-high kite, but usually it would be one of the 6s or the 8s, which are plenty big enough when you are yourself about four-and-a-half feet high.

Dad and I would work for half an hour, threading the lines, re-screwing a thimble, guying the rudder straighter. Then it would be time, and I’d carry the kite sixty or seventy feet downwind along the beach, carefully playing out the four lines it took to control these monsters, while Dad made final adjustments to his reels and his control arms and his harness.

He’d attach the controls to his chest, a “front pack” of great drums of line controlled by hurdy-gurdy handles, with arms that stuck out two-and-a-half feet from each shoulder, through which the lines ran before heading for the kite. Distance was controlled by grinding the drums with the handles; yaw and lift and plane were controlled by the rudder, which in turn was controlled by shifting one’s shoulders backwards and forwards, thus pulling the rudder one way or the other.

It was my job to hold the kite upright, buffeted by its weightiness in the wind, and to await Dad’s command to thrust it into the sky.

Before I thrust the kite into the air, knowing the fun we were about to have, I would stare at the silhouette of a Zero that was painted on the kite with the big red target circles over the gas tanks in its wings. So that was where to hit ‘em! And especially I would stare at the carefully stitched .50-caliber bullet holes in the kite that riddled those very wings. How close I was then, dreaming backwards, in that numinous moment, to the howl of the bullets themselves!

“Go!”

As hard as I could, I’d launch the kite up into the wind. In a second the kite would catch the wind and zoom high. In my mind, the stream of bullets would follow it, and the thudding of the guns would buffet me, and the hot brass would rain all around.

In a steady wind, Dad could fly the kite up to three hundred feet, make it hover there for the longest time, and then make it dive straight down into the sea—straight down into the sea!—only to pull back on his controls at the very last instant so that the kite tore through the top of a wave and rose again, streaming shining droplets from its wings and from its lines, like some raptor on a string!

This was jam at a clambake.

The past was mythic. My father was mythic. I was mythic—and ten.

I dreamed backwards to the Golden Time—when lived the Old Ones, who fleeted among the ancient trees, and knew.

Skiing with the Father

Dikkon Eberhart

The man was on top of the world. Or on top of New Hampshire. Or, merely, on top of New Hampshire’s Mount Sunapee.

He sat on the deck of the summit lodge with a 360 degree view, interrupted in a few directions by clumps of trees, and in one direction by the mechanism of the ski lift. The sun was warm, for February. There was little wind; the ski runs were well groomed. It was a Wednesday. School vacation week had brought families to the mountain, the man’s family included. At the moment, though, he was alone.

He was exhausted by the blandishment of the present time.

During vacations, many persons desire to drop out of the present, the man included. In a week, the same public arguments and scandals and breathless excitements will once again nail them all to the—might the man say ‘to the Cross’?—of the present moment. But vacation offers a momentary cessation of the noise.

“I’m looking even more like my father,” the man had said to his wife that morning, after shaving.

“Yes, you are.”

The man’s father had died twenty months before at age one hundred and one. The man’s father had been a poet—highly regarded, internationally lauded—whose fame had then faded before his own demise. But the father had possessed the toughness to hold stubbornly to life.

“You know the critics?” his father, sitting in the sun at age ninety-nine, had asked him.

“Yes?”

“They’re all dead.”

“Yes.”

His father had smiled. “And I’m not.”

After the man’s father reached a high place at age one hundred, he continued to push life’s rock uphill for one more year.

That’s grit!

The man missed his father fiercely. Often, when he was driving alone, he put into the CD player a spiritual which promised that those who are separated by Jordan will one day find each other on the opposite side.

Also, his father had been a skier. In his father’s day, athletes ascended mountains by strapping sealskins to the bottom of their skis and walking there. A day might be occupied by a long climb, stopping now and then for a breather, a swig from a flask, and a refreshing pipe when the view inspired. There would be a picnic in the snow at the top, and then would come the reward at the end of the day—that one, long, delightful schuss back downhill again.

Today, of course, we use a speedy chairlift to carry us through the air to the top of the mountain, and we are able to enjoy a score of downhill runs in the time that the man’s father had experienced one.

Mechanical devises nowadays truly do make life’s uphills easier to master than was the case a mere century ago. But that does not justify chronological snobbery, as C.S. Lewis called it, our unexamined assumption that things of the past ought to remain in the past and ought not to trouble us cleverer moderns.

Our chronological arrogance allows us—or so we think—to dismiss the truth that things of the past had their own integrity in terms of their own time. We are allowed—or so we think—to judge the things of the past in terms of what we believe are our own more enlightened modern insights.

The man was sixty, and he was feeling about his own past a new weightiness. There were now accretions upon him. They were the results of life assumptions, relevant to himself in years before, of the events and philosophies and choices by which he had lived. He was beginning to experience the old person’s anxiety that these important events and possibilities and choices were hidden from young adults of the present.

What must the burden of the past have been on his father at age one hundred? That man could reach back nearly to the Boer War. The Boer War! Scarcely anyone today has even heard of it, but it was a bellwether of its time.

Lounging in the winter sun on his New Hampshire deck, the man thought back through forty of his own years, and he remembered himself on the deck of another summit lodge such as this one, but on the other side of the world. Then, he had been high in the Bernese Alps, enjoying the same mid-winter ambiance as today, except that the mountain scape was limitless—dazzling alpine peaks, stretching all the way into Italy, with the Jungfrau as a magnet to the eye.

On the deck with him were skiers who had taken the train up the valley from Schoenreid to the base of the funicular car. Then the funicular car had carried the merry group to the summit, where they had debouched upon the deck of the summit lodge and now sat in the sun, drinking beer or schnapps, and eating fat sausages with sauerkraut.

As compared with the present day, no ski garment worn by anyone on that long-ago deck was an advertisement.

The man’s father came along the deck and sat down next to him. “Just like the 1920s,” he said, and then he laughed, “Except in those days we needed to climb up, and once we got above the tree line, it was harder.”

“Why?”

“There wasn’t any way to know which route across the snow fields was safe. If you were the first to cross.” He filled and lit his pipe. “And we always wanted to be the first to cross.”

The man had a vision of his father as Nick Adams, from Hemingway’s Cross-County Snow, but as a Nick touched more closely by the muse than Nick the brawler ever was.

“In those days, were you ever here, right here?”

“Above this valley, yes, but lower down,” he gestured down-valley, “by the Diableret Glacier.” His father mused a bit and then said, “You know, if we time our runs right, we could make it there today. It means skiing the snow fields above Saanen and Saanenmoser. Then we could ski back down to Gstaad and take the train back up the valley to Schoenreid for dinner.”

And was there ever anything more romantic sounding than that?

As it happened, the man and his father didn’t make it all the way to the Diableret. His father was more comfortable with a slower series of runs, and they ended by dropping down out of the snow fields and into the trees above Saanenmoser. So the up-valley train ride was shorter, and they were early for dinner, and the man’s mother was pleased.

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The man’s memory up there on top of New Hampshire could take him back only forty years, to the 1960s, to the conflicts he had himself lived through, for good or ill. But when his father had been young and was skiing the Diableret, back in the 1920s, the lessons his father was concerned about came from another great conflict so recently ended—from The Great War.

The French speakers were wounded and vengeful; the German speakers were resentful and truculent; the English speakers (except some of them like Churchill) were hoping conflict itself would go away; the Russian speakers were saying nothing at all because they sagged under the Bolshevik weight and were silenced. And the Americans were ascendant…and talking all the time.

Less and less was privacy valued in society. Taste was for publicity, and human aspiration and salvation was adjusted now in political terms—what can government do about man’s lot, how can government use humankind for its own glory? And Christianity was no longer the one world religion that was generally understood in the West to be true.

But the man’s father had his own father—the man’s grandfather—back in the 19th century. The lessons learned by the adults of that 19th century time concerned what had happened in their own pasts.

Big were colonialism, its pros and cons, and also rationalism’s challenge to religion. Manifest Destiny was, indeed, still manifest. Explosions were occurring in what was later to be called psychology, physics was bending time and finding that light has gravity, and cubism, Dadaism, and other movements of the artistic avant-garde were delighting or affronting, depending.

The big storm that rumbled over the horizon was the fight between capitalism and communism. That would have its hellish impact later…but only after the democracies finally decided to fight back against their own destruction and defeat fascism. Then they could turn to communism.

Yet, as the man mused in his silent space atop that New Hampshire mountain (he had recently re-read a good deal of C. S. Lewis…together with the Gospel of John), there’s a longer perspective as well, and it was there in the man’s father’s day, as well as in the day of his father’s father, too.

There is an even greater Father still, and He saw the universe at its beginning, knows its present, and understands its future. He isn’t compelled by chronological snobbery; he has not our limited human perspective. What all persons struggle with today is no different from what persons struggled with in ages gone by. All persons climbed through life, up their snow fields, and they took their looks from their summits all around.

We today are also comfortable with the sins we have chosen, until we learn to ski with the Father.

***

The man walked down to the snow, stamped into his skis, and pushed off for the long run home.