Here, we are far from trouble. No one would have said so during the wildfires last summer, but that was before what happened last week in the East. Now we know very well how safe we are. All of the rural foothills fire departments have spent the weekend at checkpoints along the road, passing the boot to collect money for emergency relief in New York. It's hard to get this across to someone in a moving automobile, but I think one of the signs for the Indian Hills Volunteer Fire Department nails the message:
HELP
NEW YORK
FIRE
FAMILYit says, and my eleven-year-old daughter wrote it. I watch her standing in the road with two grown-up firefighters, both of whom have been with the department twenty years. They told her it was okay to put on my husband's bunker gear, as it looks like rain. All decked out, my daughter is now desperately hoping that someone she knows will drive by the checkpoint and mistake her for Jefferson County's youngest firewoman.
I go back into the firehouse with two boots full of cash. All weekend long it has been my assignment to sort and count the greenbacks. Talk about instant gratification -- the boots are stuffed to the toes, with lots of ones and fives, but several hundreds, too, and the cash has been coming not just from the Porsches and Audis, but from the ancient Chevys held together with baling twine. My daughter comes in with another pile of cash.
"Are you helping Dave Weeks out there?" I ask. "Is he in a good mood?"
"Mom. Do zebras have stripes?"
In the four years we've lived on his road, we've never known Weeks, the president of the fire department, to be in anything other than a Zenlike state of good humor. "But it's raining pretty hard out there," my daughter says. "Dave Weeks keeps saying it's going to be a long winter."
In August I reread all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, something I have done periodically since I was thirteen. I take them more seriously each time. When I was a girl growing up in New York City, I didn't find signs of meaning and portent in these pioneer stories, but I see them now. And I wonder if Laura, who was in her sixties when she started writing, put them there on purpose, or if life itself is full of meaning and portent the longer you live it -- and if you are as good a writer as she was, all you have to do is set it down.
In this passage from The Long Winter, Laura and her Pa have just discovered a muskrat house in the field where they have been gathering hay:
Pa was shaking his head. "We're going to have a hard winter," he said, not liking the prospect.
"Why, how do you know?" Laura asked in surprise.
"The colder the winter will be, the thicker the muskrats build the walls of their houses," Pa told her. "I never saw a heavier-built muskrats' house than this one."
Laura looked at it again. It was very solid and big. But the sun was blazing, burning on her shoulders through the faded, thin calico, and the hot wind was blowing, and stronger than the damp-mud smell of the slough was the ripening smell of grasses parching in the heat. Laura could hardly think of ice and snow and cruel cold.
"Pa, how can the muskrats know?" she asked.
"I don't know how they know," Pa said, "but they do. God tells them, somehow, I suppose."
"Then why doesn't God tell us?" Laura wanted to know.
"Because," said Pa, "we're not animals. We're humans, and, like it says in the Declaration of Independence, God created us free. That means we got to take care of ourselves."
Laura said faintly, "I thought God takes care of us."
"He does," Pa said, "so far as we do what's right. And he gives us a conscience and brains to know what's right. But he leaves it to us to do as we please. That's the difference between us and everything else in creation."
"Can't muskrats do what they please?" Laura asked, amazed.
"No," said Pa. "I don't know why they can't, but you can see they can't. Look at that muskrat house. Muskrats have to build that kind of house. They always have and they always will. It's plain they can't build any other kind. But folks build all kinds of houses. A man can build any kind of house he can think of. So if his house don't keep out the weather, that's his look-out."
Of course, what comes next is the worst winter in decades. The family barely survives by burning hay and eating half-cupfuls of ground-up wheat, while neighbors disappear for good into howling blizzards, and the supply train from the East can't seem to get through. The blizzards keep coming, and the men keep going outside in subzero weather to dig out. The job of digging out continues until spring, which doesn't come until June.
I was raised a proud agnostic, and over the past three years, my extended family has begun to think, charitably, that I've lost my mind. With little advance warning and even less of the skepticism known as healthy, my small household suddenly began to act like a religious Jewish one as opposed to a culturally Jewish one. We still claim Mel Brooks and the bagel, in other words, but now we are concerned with God as well.
"I don't understand this," my father says. "You don't really think there's an old man up in the sky, do you?"
"No," I say.
"Then what is it?"
"Well, it's what you always told me," I explain. "Some people can't handle life without the crutch of religion. Because they're weak. That's all it is. I'm weak."
So my father thinks I haven't lost my sense of humor, and he's relieved. I'm not. I'd known my extremely sketchy theology would be challenged; I just didn't realize how soon -- and how much. Last Tuesday, the question changed from "How can you believe in God?" to "How can you believe in a God that would allow such things to happen?"
I sit at my desk trying to write an answer in time for the High Holy Days, set to begin on September 17 at sundown. By the time I finish a paragraph, the radio has generated another horrible statistic that makes it obsolete. I write and write about God, feeling like a cheap vicar in a Jane Austen novel. A Laura Ingalls Wilder book works much better. At last, here is the best I can do:
We still live in the wilderness. Every forty winters or so, we're slammed by an evil so unthinkable that it takes unthinkable fortitude just to survive it, and some of us don't. (Permit me to say "we" and "us" when I personally have survived nothing but petty mishegoss.) Evil is a fact, an equation that can result whenever men of free will begin to calculate. Anyone, certainly any group of people, may be cornered by this force, as powerful as any act of nature. In the right frame of mind, you can see terrible events moving toward you, even though they may only look like an uninhabited muskrat house on a hot August day.
And I am comfortable believing that God has nothing to do with this; as Pa Ingalls might say, evil is our look-out. But evil also has an opposite, which is what must be divine. I am thinking of the innate instinct some people have to dig out. Evil was still reverberating on the East Coast when the digging out began. Even as everyone else was going down in the Twin Towers, the firefighters were going up.
I have recently been reminded that not all winters can be handled by four-wheel drive and central heating. I think the one ahead of us is going to be bad. So today, I want very much to see God. And I do: There is plenty of God in a firefighter.
By the end of the weekend, the Indian Hills Volunteer Fire Department has collected more than $9,000. I am not so rattled that I don't enjoy handling big sums of cash money. Even better are the checks: the handwriting, the personal scrawl, the filled-in memo lines reading "help F.D."
Someone always comes to dig us out.
