On Prairie Chapel Road, Part 2
By Leigh Saavedra
26 August, 2005
Crisispapers.orgSunday 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.
