I'm finding it hard to place the Chronicles in the proper context for introductory purposes, mainly because the proper context seems to keep receding like the horizon, deeper into the past, as I try to chase it down. Therefore, adequate or not, I feel the thing to do is to force myself to start at the near-ending, just as the writings themselves were coming into existence, and allow the rest to remain, as they say, pre-history. Unwritten, like all the best stories....
It was late May 2004. Earlier in the month I had been fired from a dead-end delivery job where I spent my mornings running packages up and down Interstate 5 between Medford, Ore. and Eugene --but far more significantly, also writing The Peasant and the King in a notebook propped on my lap (as far as I know, this had no bearing on my dismissal, though the boss had the courtesy to wait until the very day I completed the first draft before he did the deed). After a few weeks of trying to make good on my promise to my wife, Aubray, to stay employed locally and forego long-haul driving, and with our meager cash reserves dwindling to nothing, I started gingerly bringing up the idea that another tour of duty over the road might be in the cards for me.
Much to my surprise, Aubray was in agreement this time; she actually wanted me to go. This would turn out to be the end of our long, twisted, and ultimately fruitless efforts to Live Happily Ever After together....and the beginning of something... better? (A few chapters of the Chronicles touch on this important paradigm shift in our shared lives, though usually not to an extent that indicates its importance to me even at the time, mostly because I never wanted my life to take center stage in the writings. Suffice it to say, the tone of the Chronicles should suggest that, in between short periods of despondence, my prevailing mood during the Camerado era was Ecstatic.)
At the time, Aubray and I had become involved in the community at the Ashland Christian Fellowship, an evangelical church based in the Calvary Chapel network. The Calvary churches grew from the so-called "back to Jesus" movement of the late '60s-early '70s, seeking to offer a home for Christians alienated by the rigid traditionalism and conservative politics of mainstream Christianity in America. While maintaining a refreshing political neutrality and a fairly liberal stance on freedom of thought within the sphere of Christian faith, ACF is still an adamantly Bible-believing fellowship. The Bible --or should I say, a literal reading of the Bible as God-ordained history and absolute fact-- is the final arbiter of truth in all spiritual matters, and familiarity with the Bible, from this perspective, is considered of utmost importance to the Christian life.
But there were no Thought Police at ACF, and the fact that Aubray and I were never Bible-believers seemed to escape most people's scrutiny. Most people there just wanted to be our friends, brothers- and sisters-in-Christ. I loved that about the fellowship. It was a very fun and fulfilling place to be. Our social lives began to center around ACF's Upper Room Coffee House and Bookstore, one of the finest atmospheres for gathering of souls I've ever found. I still have very fond memories of the bonds and friendships that were forged through our time spent at the Upper Room.
As May was coming to a close, however, and my applications to local trucking firms were going strangely unanswered (and with Aubray's uncharacteristic encouragement), it was becoming more clear that I would soon be leaving Ashland. When a former long-haul trucking employer, U.S. Xpress, showed immediate interest in bringing me back to the fleet, I knew that some major changes were being orchestrated. At very least, USX would have me out on the road for 14 days, send me back to Ashland for two or three, then out for another fourteen. I was about to become far more of a stranger around the Upper Room, in other words.
And it was in this atmosphere of eminent and unavoidable change that Aubray and I decided to be baptized together by our pastors at ACF.
Being baptized is a huge deal at a Bible-believing church, even ones like ACF that are inclined to see the ceremony as symbolic of one's acceptance of Jesus Christ as savior and subsequent salvation, rather than as the moment that this actually happens (one of the great debates among Christian denominations). Not something that is to be entered into lightly anyway. Since a baptism is often seen as a public declaration of intent to include oneself in the fellowship that performs the ceremony, one would be apt to question the decision to be baptised just before leaving said fellowship (which, by then, I knew was inevitable). And what if these brothers and sisters could read our minds? Would we be true Christians in their eyes? Were we true Christians in God's eyes? Does God have eyes???
Putting all questions aside, on the last Sunday in May 2004, Aubray and I were simultaneously dunked into the frigid mountain spring waters of Ashland Creek by Pastors Mark and P.K. of Ashland Christian Fellowship. It just felt like the right thing to do. Aubray's mom flew out from Pennsylvania, and her sister drove up from Sacramento; it was a celebration of life and love and faith, everything a baptism is intended to be.
And let me tell you, brothers and sisters: I felt washed. Was Jesus Christ accepted as my personal savior at that moment? No --I don't believe in personal salvation, and I doubt I ever will in the literal sense. But I was washed. Was Christ present then in a way that He hadn't been before? No --He who is ever-present never goes away! But I was washed. Something very real happened that day, something cleansing. Maybe it was all the mistakes that would soon culminate in the decision to end our marriage. Maybe it was deeper --every mistake I'd made that ever hurt anyone....and surely there have been many. All I know is that, like the average person, I carry a ton of weight when I remember all these things, and when I allowed myself to be dunked under water as part of a ceremony that signifies the forgiveness of all of our sins, the question of whether that forgiveness is temporal or eternal, mutable or immutable, whether it was brand new or it was there all along unbeknown to me....all these questions go out the window for that moment. All you know is the water flows, and you become it, and you never again want to be what you thought you were before....
But the questions come back in due time. That's why we have theology --to answer with words what is already wordlessly determined in our hearts. We forget that we never leave the water.
Six days after the baptism, I was on a Greyhound bus heading for Southern California to pick up my U.S. Xpress truck, leaving Aubray in the custody of her close friends (who would quickly become closer, helping her recover from her third laser eye surgery). I had to spend three days being re-oriented to company procedures and policies at their terminal in the city of Colton, near San Bernardino. Times like these are a very slow turn of the page, and I remember struggling deeply to comprehend this new turn in life, walking through the dreary, sprawl-choked streets around the hotel in the evenings, just because I didn't want to sit still. Whatever had come alive in me the week before was surely dormant again. On the night before I moved into the rig, Aubray seemed to have some of the same questions on her mind as we talked. She was just as confused about the life-changes as I was, and I'm sure the typical chatter that accompanies all odd decisions within certain social circles was feeding her confusion. So that night, Aubray put the question to me point blank, as she was so adept at doing: "Why did you decide to get baptized?"
I don't even remember what I told her, but I know the answers were bland, and mostly bogus. There was no way to answer that question in one or two sentences, and certainly not on the phone. But I wanted her to know; I needed her to understand that it wasn't a snap decision or one I had made lightly, and why it was important to me to experience it with her, in spite of the growing distance between us. No one had ever gotten me so thoroughly on the spiritual level as Aubray, and vice versa. Theologically, we "grokked" each other (to borrow the Stranger In a Strange Land term) in a way that no one else did, nor perhaps ever will. For all the trouble and anguish we caused each other trying to work out the terms of our personal cross-bearing together, no one was more deserving of a full answer to that question, in my eyes, than Aubray. I wanted her to know that I meant it when my actions told the fellowship that Sunday that "I believe in Christ."
And perhaps, I wanted myself to know too....
The next day, as I was moving into my '01 Frieghtliner Century tractor, getting cozy in the new-familiar space and excited about the road leading ahead, it came to me, in one sentence: "I do not believe in the Bible, but I believe in Christ." Every Christian church I had ever attended, without exception --even in passing, just for a day-- had driven home the notion that if one accepts the reality of Christ, and if one invests his/her faith in the belief that Christ is true and real and present and meaningful in our lives, then one must also accept every part of the account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, aka Jesus Christ, in the Bible, as well as everything written about Him by the earliest Christian theologians in the Bible as fact --and furthermore, as the direct and literal Word of God. If you have doubts about the Bible, it follows, you have doubts about Christ; if you reject the Bible as God's Word, you reject Christ. ACF was different from the other churches in many regards, but not in this one.
And this was the one aspect of the Christian life I knew I could never surrender to with any sincerity --not when the Bible is held out as Truth, to the exclusion of all other scriptures that must now be viewed as half-True, or False. I felt too much of the presence of Christ in my reading of the Upanishads, for instance, or the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Tao Teh Ching, or the Qu'ran, to ever be able to give those scriptures an inferior status to the equally-inspiring Christian Bible. To place my Christian faith in the Bible, and the Bible alone, was actually to cut myself off from the very wellspring of the faith itself! It brings me back to what seems like a very anti-Christian, political mindset in which my perspective must be argued at the expense of my neighbor's: far from the imperative to "love thy neighbor as thyself." Wherefore should I place the understanding that came from the Upanishads that my neighbor is myself? Is that not the greatest validation of the scriptural imperative we accept as Christians? Yet the Christian Bible is silent on this most sublime Truth...and 1600 years of Christian imperialism cannot be far from a direct result.
But that one sentence, put down on paper --"I don't believe in the Bible, but I believe in Christ"-- it liberated me, no less surely than the baptism. I no longer felt bound by the little-t "truth" the churches were selling. I was free to love Christ, and seek the Truth of Christ wherever it was to be found. Christ came alive, in ways the churches always hinted at but rarely made me experience. It proved to me, once and for all, that I will never leave the baptismal water of God's infinite loving embrace, that I had always been in it and always will be, no matter how much I torment myself with the hell of feeling trapped in a dying body, and that this is the universal Truth that belongs to EVERYONE. Did Jesus bring this about by dying on the cross, or did he simply come to report and demonstrate that which has always been True? Or is He a literary archetype for the Messiah who appears again and again and again throughout human history to remind us of who we really are? Once again: these questions go out the window. And all you know is the water flows, and you become it, and you never again want to be what you thought you were before....
But I wanted to share the answers I was experiencing, with everyone now, for I know the questions will never cease to be asked, so long as there is one being in the world that feels separate from God. The single sentence became the opening line for the Camerado Chronicles. (Camerado, as the Introduction explains in greater detail, is the name I gave the truck; I had been reading a lot of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass during my final weeks as an Ashland resident,and I was particularly taken by the final stanzas of his "Song of the Open Road," from which the name comes.)
They were written over a period of approximately five months, mostly while I was literally behind-the-wheel (and yes, with every due thought placed toward the safety of the motoring public, ie. never in traffic etc), and emailed to a small group of family and friends, all as an unrevised "monodraft". This five-month period pretty much coincides with the duration I spent doing 48-state long-haul driving, for by November U.S. Xpress had regionalized its operations to the point where I had to make a choice as to where I was going to work and rest, and I chose to take a position in my northeastern homeland; I thought the Chronicles would continue, but the different road motif lent itself to a different character of writing, and I later decided to draw a line between The Camerado Chronicles, which are complete, and the Indefinite Articles, which are ongoing and more disjointed.
For the most part, the Chronicles are a Christian-based response to Christian issues, and therefore less universally-oriented than other current aspects of the Fish Out Of Water project, ie. the Articles and further drafts of P & K. I would not discourage readers of any faith or non-faith from tackling them, but just with the knowledge that the agenda was to speak to a primarily Christian audience in this case. What universality there is in the Chronicles is hopefully to be found in its conclusions and the perspective of the author, not in his words per se. I have left myself plenty of theological room to draw the lines out to infinity and embrace the non-Christian aspects of our shared belief in a God Who Is Love, and the whole of FOOW will certainly do this.
For those of you who would prefer to skim through the Chronicles and sift out its gems from the dross of road journal and dashboard confessional that it sometimes becomes (and I would advise this for almost everyone), I am constructing a Synopsis page that will help guide you through the rather imposing Table of Contents (we're talking 40-plus chapters here after all, by the time it's all published). Not that the other stuff is totally uninteresting --some of the original folks who received the Chronicles by email said they preferred the "local flavor " of the travelogue portions-- but its contribution to the FOOW project is often minimal.
Above all, enjoy, and may you rest peacefully in the Love of God in the Highest, the Lowest, and Everywhere In Between. Remember, the fish never leaves the water....
Namaste, Hermit Crab 15 September 2005 Collingswood, NJ
