On Prairie Chapel
Road, Part 2
By Leigh Saavedra
26 August, 2005
Crisispapers.org
Read
Part 1
Sunday
night in Crawford was dazzling magic for anyone who was seriously around
in the sixties, when so many of us were marching FOR civil rights and
AGAINST the Vietnam War. The salient reason: Joan Baez, or Joanie as
many still call her.
I had been in Crawford
the week before, but this time, the minute my 13-year old son and I
pulled up to the Peace House, from which the activities around Cindy
Sheehan's vigil all begin, we could see the difference. In just seven
days, everything had become bigger, noticeably so, and all this despite
Cindy's temporary absence. In the yard of the Peace House were two large
U-Haul trailers, providing backdrops for all the signs related to Cindy's
insistence that Bush speak with her. Posters saying "For What Noble
Cause?" remind the first-time visitor that Cindy began this history-making
encampment by hearing Bush say that our soldiers who are dying in Iraq
are doing so for a noble cause. She has asked Mr. Bush to explain truthfully
the noble cause that took her son Casey's life last year.
The volunteers are
now able to park cars on a vacant lot next door and across the street
from the Peace Center, something unavailable to them a week ago. Still,
the good luck fairies must have been with me, as we pulled into literally
the last parking space anywhere near the House.
Several people have
brought vans to use as shuttles between the Peace House and Camp Casey
I, of which I wrote last week, and the new second camp, Casey II. They
go back and forth from the house to the camps every few minutes.
We brought the people
at the house a fifty-quart Coleman chest filled with ice and bottled
water, a never-ending need in this hot, humid spot that must have produced
enough sweat by now to fill a dozen dry Texas gulches. The services
of the medic volunteers have been required several times for heat-related
problems.
Soon after our signing
in at the Peace House, I was ready to board a shuttle and head for the
new camp, Casey II, where there would be speakers and entertainers,
featuring Joan Baez, a lifelong peace activist herself. I'd never met
Joan Baez, but her music had been wound thoroughly through my life in
the not-so-long-ago past. For years all it took to make me want to leave
all possessions behind and go lose myself in California's Big Sur were
a few lines from "Don't Think Twice" or "Babe, I'm Gonna
Leave You." My young husband from back then had joined her on stage
once in Chicago to provide a second guitar. The story was our trophy.
To say I had made the drive up to Crawford this time with a strictly
altruistic motive would have added a full two inches to my nose.
Bryndan, my 13-year
old son, opted to stay at the house and do badly needed grunt work,
picking up empty cups and wrappers from the ground and cleaning whatever
needed to be cleaned. He also helped out at a table with tee-shirts,
bumper stickers, etc. They were there for a "donation." Bryndan
told me later that night that they had found a hundred-dollar bill in
the jar.
The first things
I saw as we pulled up to the new camp were large, rather formidable
signs on the road to George Bush's place. It they weren't successful
in letting us know that we couldn't set foot behind them without "proper"
ID, the police cars up the road to the ranch were.
Standing there in
the unmoving air as I looked down the road toward the go-no-further
warning signs gave me one of those inexpressible moments, the feel of
history rumbling beneath my feet. On one side of me was a huge tent
beginning to fill with people eager for a world famous singer who had
traveled to an inhospitable town to do her part, as she had thirty years
ago, to end another war. On the other side of me was the dirt road that
turned off Prairie Chapel Road toward an air-conditioned house where
decisions that determine the fate of the world are made. Somewhere in
Iraq, I thought darkly, there is a child who will have or not have a
little sister next month, depending upon what the people who meet in
that house decide. Somewhere in America, I continued, there is a child
who will have or not have a father next month, but may instead come
with his mother to Camp Casey to look for the small white cross listing
death number 1891.
The very thought of being within shouting distance of so much power
was chilling. Tonight, I dared to think, I could spit and my DNA would
find root in soil that belongs to a man who could either transform the
Mideast into a democratic paradise or lead the world into irreparable
destruction.
I don't know if
the Bush people at the ranch can hear the cries and songs and chants,
but the proximity to this decision-maker in whose hands lie so many
life v death choices reminded me, for the hundredth time, of the power
of people. It's simply a matter of peeling back the comfort of complacency
and putting one foot in front of the other, then finding that you're
marching. And when the march is loud enough, people can move things
that dwarf mountains.
Especially knowing
that I would be hearing Joanie in a few minutes, I reminded myself,
again for the hundredth time, that if we took Vietnam into the American
living rooms, we could do it with Iraq. If we stopped the killing in
Indochina thirty years ago, we might stop the killing in the Mideast
this time.
Yes, everything
was clearly bigger. There were at least fifteen clean, new portable
outhouses, medical facilities, things that probably never entered Cindy
Sheehan's mind as she landed in Texas a couple of weeks ago.
Back inside the
tent, there was a buffet -- salads, lasagna, vegetables, deserts, many
choices. This was my second buffet in Crawford and I still don't know
who prepares the food, but it's very good. I looked around as I fought
the heat by eating cold melon and mango and noticed the absence of piled-up
food, abandoned on tables in so many buffet restaurants. Another way
that this was different.
There were other
entertainers and speakers besides Joan Baez, too many to mention here.
Happily, I was able to hear Austin songwriter and folksinger Steve Brooks,
known for, among other things, writing an original topical song based
on the news for the nationally-syndicated Jim Hightower show throughout
1998, a new one every week. When Steve broke into the Woody Guthrie
classic, "This Land is Your Land..." it was not just the more
seasoned music lovers come to hear Joanie who got to their feet. The
tent was electric with youth.
Among several people
contributing to the program was 85-year old Liz Carpenter, who paved
the way for Helen Thomas by going to Washington DC in 1943 and staying
as a member of the White House Press Corps through the tenure of Jimmy
Carter. She brought down the tent when she told us, "I knew the
Dead Sea when it first got sick."
I would happily
have listened to Ms Carpenter for hours. Her wit and wisdom alone would
have been worth a long drive to Crawford. Best anecdote of her speech:
When she worked for Lyndon Johnson, she once heard him tell his speechwriters,
"I want SHORT sentences. I want sentences that EVERYBODY will understand."
Later, when a speechwriter gave him a speech with a quote by Aristotle,
Johnson apparently shouted, "No. There are people who won't even
know who Aristotle is. This is NOT what I want." Ms Carpenter listened
carefully to Johnson's next speech, when he told the audience, "As
me old Pappy used to say..." and there were Aristotle's words,
straight out of old Pappy's mouth.
In the end, of course,
she was dead serious. She reminded us that we've been getting in and
out of wars for as long as she could remember, that she'd been through
it all from FDR to Carter and that "this is the worst shape we
have EVER been in." She concluded with a simple thought. "What
is diplomacy?" she had once asked an unnamed senator. His answer
should have been given a lot of thought in 2003. "Keeping the conversation
going."
In time came the
star, Joan Baez. Rarely have I felt so happily back in "the old
days." She asked us what we wanted, and we called out for "Joe
Hill," then "Diamonds and Rust" and others. Before one
song she made a dedication. "This is for those who are -- I love
the euphemism 'in harm's way,'" she said, bending her head as she
tuned her guitar, "'harm's way' meaning nothing more than sitting
ducks."
There were an estimated
600 to a thousand people in and around the tent, and when Joan concluded
with "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," the young woman sitting
next to me, too young to have watched many wars, even on TV, unabashedly
let tears stream down her face.
When it was time
to go, to return to the Peace House, I was still trying to separate
an amalgam of people, looking for a few words to describe what KIND
of people were there. In a nation where having any views to the left
of John Birch allows your opponent to dismiss anything you do or say
as being "liberal," (meaning too often that you have no morals,
that your hair is long, that you secretly hate God, and that you probably
are not anguishing over the fact that Clinton, for God's sake, told
a LIE), it becomes relevant to answer the question, "Who ARE these
people?"
Except for noticing
an extremely high percentage of Caucasians, I couldn't get anywhere
with it. There were middle-aged ladies who look like those our Republican
mothers play bridge with. There were young men with long ponytails.
There were people on the other side of seventy-five, and there were
many, many more people who appeared to be in their twenties than I've
seen in recent demonstrations. But as for who they are, I can't give
a pictorial answer. I saw people who didn't look as if they would come
to any kind of rally, but on the other hand there were old familiar
faces. The guy driving the van I rode in back to the Peace Center was
active in Veterans for Peace. It turned out that he was in a convoy
taking supplies to Nicaragua in the winter of 1989, the same time when
I first took medicines down to Managua. Ships in the night; it's always
fun to blink with the inexorable thrills of happenstance.
Later this week
I hope to get a more concrete handle on the people who are sleeping
in tents up there, night after night. I get so hot while I'm there that
I can't hold all the water I need; I get so itchy that it takes three
showers to stop suspecting that some new breed of viperous paramecium
has been unleashed on us and that it is crawling around just beneath
the skin.
When the Veteran
for Peace let me off at the Peace House I was focused on that, just
WHO these people are who would be willing to give up every comfort to
breathe in air that is over a hundred degrees, to forego electricity,
to constantly be smiling and upbeat. I knew only that they were saints
and that I wasn't.
Inside the Peace
House to retrieve Bryndan, I was tossed a doozy of a question: "Hey,
can I spend the night? I already asked, and they said fine, it's up
to you, and there's a lot of work to be done in the morning." Guilt
hit me like a hot, sticky syrup. Deep in my heart I was salivating over
a nice gin and tonic in a quiet, air-conditioned place with soft music.
Who ARE these people?
I wondered again.
"Can I?"
"No. You have
to go to school tomorrow."
"Well, are
we coming back?"
Who ARE these people?
Has my son become one of them? Has he forgotten his cushy bed with the
large air-conditioning vent over to one side?
"Are we?"
And then there was
a woman beside me, thanking us, thanking me for bringing HIM. He'd been
an IMMENSE help to them, she told me adamantly.
Yeah, we'll be back
again in a few days. That will be the day I figure out who these people
ARE. Meanwhile, heading south again, I had the lyrics of one of Joan
Baez' sweetest songs doing waltzes in my mind.
"May your hands
always be busy,
May your feet always be swift,
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift.
May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young."
Thanks, Joanie.
Leigh Saavedra has
written poetry, short fiction, and political essays for thirty years
under the name Lisa Walsh Thomas. In 1989 she became aware of the irresponsibility
marking our mainstream media when reports over both broadcast news and
print media portrayed the young revolutionaries of Nicaragua as communists.
She went to Managua and spent that winter and the next in Nicaragua,
finding the value of "being there." She is the author of an
award-winning book of fiction ("So Narrow the Bridge and Deep the
Water", Seal Press, out of print) and a book of political essays
("The Girl with Yellow Flowers in her Hair", Pitchfork Publishing).
She appreciates comments at saavedra1979 yahoo.com.