In a Rocket Made of Ice

by Gail Gutradt

  It is one thing to consider such perils in the abstract, quite another to clear the disciplined order of the barricades and find ourselves at last on the narrow beach at the Sangam, with the energy around us changed. Some of us were moving toward the water, while others, who had finished their immersion, were climbing the banks from the river, pushing with equal vigor in the opposite direction. Chaos reigned as the great crowd congealed and moved at odds with itself. Beneath our feet lay gelatinous seaweed, ropy and wet and ready to trip us. Many might have slipped and fallen, to be trampled by the crowd, but there was no room to fall. From time to time I felt myself lifted entirely off the ground and carried, forward and backward, or spun like a leaf on the ocean, a legion of damp bodies pressing onto mine. Finally, there was no choice but to surrender to the dance of limbs and torsos, to trust this multimillipede of which I had become a tiny part. And in truth, when I forgot about the numbers and focused on the eyes of the people closest to me, there seemed no threat at all, only supreme goodwill, for we were all here with the same intention. It seemed there could be neither malice nor fear.

  Under my feet I felt the earth and seaweed give way to water, and suddenly the world opened up and I found myself standing alone, in silent privacy, breast deep in the meeting rivers. I felt a warm breeze blowing gently over my bare shoulders. Then a garland of marigolds floated by, and I became aware that I was standing in a sea of drifting gold, offerings from the innumerable pilgrims with whom I shared this moment, and I relaxed completely into gratitude, stillness and love.

  Somehow we friends found each other, climbed the slippery embankment and made our way back toward the ashram in the pale predawn light. A cold wind picked up, and groups of pilgrims, drawn together tight as lotus buds, waved us over to warm ourselves at their fires. Just ahead of us a young father held his small son by the hand, and as they walked they chanted, “Ram Ram Hare Ram.”

  And somewhere in this multitude wandered a tall American photographer named Bennett “Buck” Stevens, whom I had never met. Plagued by an acute case of Delhi belly, he was trying to photograph the Naga Babas as they bathed, the same Naga Babas who notoriously do not like their pictures taken. And it was through the intervention of this same Buck Stevens, whom to this day I have never met in person, that I would arrive at last in Cambodia.

  Returning to the States after months of travel in Asia, life seemed to quicken, and destiny spilled out like grain from a torn sack. My mother had lived for many years with cancer, but suddenly an ominous new tumor near her spine required surgery. And so I found myself moving again, this time from Bar Harbor, a pretty tourist town on the Maine coast, to my mother’s apartment in New York City. It was mid-September of 2001, only a week after the attack on the World Trade Center.

  My mother was in the hospital for several weeks, and every day, after visiting hours were over, I wandered around Manhattan. The familiar streets of the city where I had lived as a child were muffled now by a pall of sadness. Hundreds of little shrines appeared along the sidewalks. Xeroxed photographs of confident executives or hopeful young restaurant workers, immigrants with foreign names, were taped to walls and hurricane fences, along with pleas for information on their whereabouts, as if they had simply wandered off, briefly distracted, and might at any moment reappear, happy to be home again among the living.

  Burning candles guttered before small memorials on street corners. They reminded me of the roadside shrines I’d seen in India: a statue of a god, a photograph of a saint, sometimes just a rock painted red with kumkum and given piercing glass eyes, so its resident spirit might bestow on a passing believer the precious gift of darshan. Here in New York City people left the same flowers and burned incense, but there also were teddy bears and photographs of children and purple and black buntings on firehouses and police stations. Yet the eyes of the missing drew you in, staring out from the tattered handbills, riveting as the eyes of the gods of India.

  Uptown, in my mother’s neighborhood, people still dined outdoors at sidewalk cafés, but the sense of normalcy seemed forced, like lipstick on a corpse. But as one went farther downtown, nearer to Ground Zero, the atmosphere changed. You might ask a policeman for directions, and while his mouth spoke the names of streets, his eyes told of sights he could never speak of. And on a still Yom Kippur evening, approaching the ruins of the Twin Towers for the first time, I thought I heard the bellowing of multitudes of souls, those who had died in fear.

  Sometime in all this I Googled the Kumbh Mela. I longed for my friends, and for the spiritual optimism I had felt during my time in India. On Bennett Stevens’s website I discovered a story he had written about his experiences, and some of his photographs of the Naga Babas. His writing was cheeky and irreverent, yet at the same time deeply respectful. I wrote him a fan letter and sent him a short piece I had composed at the ashram right after my own dip in the Sangam. He wrote me back, and now and then we exchanged emails, a quip, a photograph, a squib of writing.

  Meanwhile, my mother grew weaker. Our time together was fraught. In our differences of temperament we seemed always to love past each other. I marveled at her bravery in the face of excruciating pain, the birthday parties and Seders she presided over from the bed where she lay half paralyzed, holding court for the many friends who gathered by her bedside. Every day for months they came, young and old, drawn by her skill at making each feel as if he or she were her best beloved. I watched as one by one impending death stripped her of the last remnants of the worldly image she had so keenly cultivated: the rugged independence she had insisted upon since my father’s death, her vanity and stunning sense of style that allowed her to make grand entrances but always keep people waiting. These were replaced by fierce determination and deep gratitude, and ultimately by a kind of spiritual translucence, an inner radiance, as if all the illusions that had sustained her in this life were finally dropping away, leaving only a momentary flash of what is pure and true about us all. Even so, when the end came I was aware that part of my mourning was for the relationship we both wished we could have shared, but never did.

  A hundred people attended my mother’s funeral. And even here there was a sense of the surreal. Her rabbi, a close personal friend, began the service by announcing to the congregation that we were gathered to celebrate the life and mourn the death of … and here he pronounced my name instead of hers. The audience gasped, and he was mortified and flustered, but I smiled at him, knowing how he had loved her, and excused him, saying, “It’s all right, Rabbi. I know you still can’t let her go.”

  Yet there was something oddly fitting in this. Like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn imagining their own funerals, I felt that a part of myself was being buried that day. And as Laurence told me when he heard about it, in every spiritual journey there comes a moment when one’s soul must pass through the shadow of death.

  After my mother’s funeral, after dismantling the apartment where I was born, there was nothing left for me in New York City. I returned to Bar Harbor.

  Winter was coming in my small Maine town. There was record cold: twenty below zero for most of January. The foundation of my hundred-year-old house heaved. Doors would not open. I watched mesmerized as cracks marched across the plaster of my living room wall, a few inches farther every day. I sunk into depression, but even more chillingly into a sense of uselessness. Sad memories of the hard times with my mother, the futile attempts at real contact between us, were deepened by the grief we all shared after September 11. I don’t drink, but I entered the sort of state I imagine brings longtime drinkers to join Alcoholics Anonymous. It was perhaps that same sense that one has done everything one can do, and is fresh out of ideas, and can only offer oneself and one’s problems to the universe. So I prayed for seva, as the Hindus call selfless service, for something outside of myself and my problems, some way I might do something for someone else, even a very small something. Mine was not a particularly generous or high-minded surrender. I needed to save my life.

  It took the u
niverse exactly twelve hours to concoct a solution and offer it to me through the agency of Buck Stevens. His email began, “You know how you are always looking for a service project?” Buck was now in Cambodia, photographing an orphanage for children with AIDS, and they needed volunteers. One did not have to be a doctor or have any special skills. The only requirement was that you like kids. I was stunned by the efficiency of this generous universe. I wrote a letter to the director, Wayne Dale Matthysse, listing anything that might lead him to think I would be a good catch. I needn’t have bothered. Little did I know that Wayne has a soft spot for people on a journey.

  Wayne’s reply was simple. “Come.”

  19

  Wayne

  Wayne traces the beginning of his own spiritual journey to an incident in his childhood, in a small town in Michigan. Most of the families in his neighborhood were conservative Christians of Dutch descent, except for one Polish family who lived across the street. They had a son named Gordy, some years older than Wayne, who was mentally handicapped. Wayne did not know nor did he care about any of that. At four years old all he knew was that this large, lumbering boy was willing to play with him. It felt to Wayne as if he had his own pet Goliath, benign and protective.

  Maybe Wayne was thinking of the biblical story of David and Goliath the day he threw a stone at Gordy. Gordy threw one back; it’s the sort of thing kids do all the time, only Gordy’s stone opened a small artery in Wayne’s forehead and there was a lot of blood. Someone called the police. A crowd of neighbors gathered, and amid mutterings about “Polacks” and “retards,” the grown-ups decided that Wayne should not mention that it was he who had cast the first stone. He knew it was wrong to lie, but he was just a little boy who felt powerless to go against the crowd of adults feeding him what to say. He barely managed a nod when the police asked him to verify the story and then retreated in shame to his room, hoping it would all go away. The very next morning Wayne watched as a chain-link fence was installed around his friend’s house. From that day forward Gordy lived under house arrest, and at eighteen years old he was sent to an institution. Wayne walked past that fence every day, and sixty years later he still speaks of bearing the weight of Gordy’s imprisonment, the links of that fence as palpable to him as the chains forged in life by Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol.

  After high school Wayne took a job in a psychiatric hospital. He decided to enroll in a one-year psychiatric nursing course to see whether he wanted to pursue a college degree in the field.

  Meanwhile, the Vietnam War had begun to escalate. Wayne joined the Navy in 1966, so anxious for a tour of duty that he managed to swap orders with another medic who did not want to go. At twenty-one he shipped out, convinced that God was on America’s side.

  Wayne wrote of leaving for Vietnam:

  I was given a White Bible and a Congregational Prayer Book when I left my protected world of Christendom to join my fellow compatriots in battle against those Heathen Asian Communists. I was told, it was GOD’S Will that we fight them so that they could not spread their Atheistic views to others around the world.

  But once in Vietnam he began to see things that disturbed him deeply. He wound up stationed near Da Nang in 1968, shortly after the calamitous Tet Offensive. This was in South Vietnam, and the local villagers were the same people we were supposed to have been saving from communism. But in the midst of battle it was never clear who was friend and who was foe, and it was said that some of these villagers had helped the North Vietnamese inflict stunning casualties on American soldiers and their allies. Threats now came from all directions, and for the thousands of U.S. soldiers who had seen their friends slaughtered during Tet, it was payback time. Wayne felt these sentiments mounting around him:

  And when we burned what was left standing of South Vietnamese villages that were bombed just moments before our arrival by US heavy artillery, and I questioned my Commanding Officer “Why?” he said, “Because the Mother Fuckers were suspected of helping the GOD Damned Viet Cong during the TET Offensive and therefore deserve it …”

  And when the mother of a severely wounded child came pleading for me to help stop the bleeding, I was told by my CO not to do it because it was not my responsibility; someone else would be there in a moment to help them. But no one came in an hour and the child died, and when I asked him “Why?” he said, “It’s none of your fucking business…!”

  And when the lush green rice fields suddenly turned brown overnight from Agent Orange and the people were in tears because they had lost all their crops and I asked my CO “Why?” he said, “Because they might use some of it to feed the Fucking Viet Cong and so we had to do it …”

  And when we captured a 14-year-old boy who was wearing a green colored shirt which he said he took off of a dead soldier because he had no clothes of his own, and the Captain ordered the Sergeant to take him away, which he did and returned a few minutes later without him, and I asked him “Why?” he said, “Because the little shithead could be a spy and if we let him go he could give away our position.” And I said, “But, Sir, we marched in here with six tanks firing heavy ammunition and flame throwers shot hot gas on the homes that left smoke billowing hundreds of feet into the air. Do you really think they don’t know WHERE we are?” And he said, “Shut your fucking mouth, Doc!”

  Through it all, Wayne tried to maintain a sense of himself apart from the others, that he was there as a medic, a healer, not a killer, and that this justified his taking part. But one day that illusion too was shattered.

  As we were leaving the village, a woman with a small child in her arms stood defiantly on the dike in front of us. She was forced to one side to wait in the knee-deep water until we passed. As I came close to her I smiled compassionately and I sensed that she understood that I was not the same as the others. She fixed her eyes directly on mine and then spat in my face.

  As I was wiping the spit and tears from my eyes I became nauseated, not because of what she had just done, but because I realized that I had gone over to the enemy, without even changing sides.

  Two incidents that happened on the same day back in 1968 changed my life forever and set in motion a conflict that has been raging inside of me ever since. It hit me harder than any bullet ever could have and caused more internal damage than all of the bombs and mortars that were dropped around me. It ripped the innocence from my soul and forced me on an endless journey of recompense, for a debt that cannot be repaid. I witnessed the murder of two children. And I did nothing to stop it.

  Wayne’s tour of duty in Vietnam ended abruptly on a battlefield near Da Nang. Crossing a field of tall grass, his company came under fire and one of the men was wounded in both legs. Wayne ran out to help him; his men set off some smoke bombs for cover. But as Wayne and two other soldiers struggled to move the wounded man, a mortar shell struck close to them and hurled shrapnel and glass into Wayne’s face and eye. The sergeant called for a medevac. Wayne protested that the helicopter would give their position away, but the sergeant insisted that he would not let them die. Later, Wayne learned that the rest of his company had been overrun and that no one had survived. The medevac had, in fact, drawn fire to their location. Wayne’s rescue had cost everyone else their lives.

  From that day on Wayne would ask himself the question, For what was I saved?

  After some time in a Veterans Administration hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, where an attempted cornea transplant failed, Wayne was released from the military with a partial disability. He was virtually blind in one eye. He returned to Michigan, but like many Vietnam War veterans Wayne found he could no longer fit into the family and job and community he had left.

  In Vietnam, Wayne had been the only white soldier in an all-black company, a dramatic departure from his parochial upbringing, and it was these soldiers who had died in battle after he was airlifted to safety. He owed his life to their sacrifice, and when he came home he continued to associate with people he would never have known before.

  It was
during this time I met up with people who were every bit as much American heroes as any I knew in the military. They were draft dodgers, deserters and people willing to risk their lives and their futures because of their beliefs, but very few of them were Christians, and I began to realize that the world was made up of many kinds of people who saw things from different perspectives than I did.… What confused me most was the fact that I could see more Christlike behavior in many of them than in most of my previous friends, who called themselves Christians.

  In 1972, Wayne used his savings to buy a used Thunderbird and drove to the Southwest. He was twenty-seven years old. Still hoping to find an authentic expression of his faith, he joined a Christian commune in Arizona but became disillusioned with the leaders. He wandered, knowing he was lost. He picked up a hitchhiker in Arizona and, as a favor, drove him to Iowa. Then he drove to Minneapolis to look up a fellow medic whom he had known briefly in the war; the man barely remembered him. Along the way, and more and more often, Wayne would perform some small kindness for a stranger. After a while, he recalls, his wanderings took on the quality and feeling of a guided journey, with each new encounter preparing his heart for the ultimate realization: that the love he needed could only come to him if he offered his own heart to all he met.