January Dawn

Friday, January 22, 2010

Chapter 11. The Principal

Ninth and tenth grade in the Adventist school in Memphis were not that different from seventh and eighth grade. One teacher for all the classes. In addition, our teacher also served as principal, which meant he frequently was out of the classroom to handle administrative responsibilities. At least the subjects were more interesting. Algebra, biology, history.

In tenth grade, our old class was back together which did not bode well for our teacher. That summer the school had expanded a small room that had previously served as a library. The new addition was our classroom. One unfortunate feature of the room was the heating. Even though construction had added square feet, it had not added any heating capacity. On really cold days, the radiators did not keep up and it was uncomfortably cold.

One morning Mt. Williams stepped into the room just as the bell rang. We were all sitting on the window sill with our feet on the heater registers which were barely warm. He ordered us to our seats. Said he would be just a few more minutes in his office, directed us to get our Bible textbooks out, then stepped back into his office.

We didn't sit.

When he came in again, he got really huffy and demanded that we get to our seats immediately. “Mr. Williams,” I said. “It’s too cold to sit in our seats. We are on strike. We’re going to stay by the heaters until we have more heat.”

Mr. Williams stared at us, speechless. He had ordered us to our seats–twice. He threatened us. We said nothing. We didn’t move. His face turned red. He had this funny thing that happened in his throat when he got upset. Suddenly, he turned and stalked back into his office. We finally tired of sitting on the window sill and returned to our seats. Eventually, he came back to classroom. He said nothing. We said nothing. But class was never quite the same again. He was no longer the undisputed boss.

Then came the great Bible class debate. Based on his interpretation of a passage in the most famous book by the Adventist prophet, Ellen White, he told us that Jesus would return to earth precisely at midnight. I raised my hand.

“Mr. Williams, how can you say that when Jesus himself said, ‘No man knows the day or the hour of his return’”?

“Well Johnny, it’s like this. In Jesus’ day, no one knew. But God has revealed it to us, here in these last days. Notice the words of the prophet, ‘It is at midnight that God acts for the deliverance of His people.’ You can’t get any clearer than that.”

“But the deliverance she is talking about doesn’t have to mean the second coming. It could refer to God saving people who are about to be executed. It could be an earthquake or an angel. There are all sorts of ways that God could act at midnight to save his people. Mrs. White’s words do not pinpoint the hour of Christ’s return.”

“Johnny, we are not to question the prophet. She says in this passage, which is about the end of time and the return of Jesus, that ‘It is at midnight that God acts for the deliverance of His people.’ That’s good enough for me. It should be good enough for all of us.”

At home that night Jeannie and I consulted Mother. Mother always supported our teachers. She never took our side, at least that’s the way we felt. But this time she agreed to help us find evidence to rebut Mr. Williams’ midnight second coming theory.

The next day in Bible class we resumed the debate. I brought out my quotations.

“No one knows the day or hour. . .
“No one should say they know the day or hour . . .
“Time is not a test. . .

Mr. Williams sputtered arguments in response, but he wasn’t prepared for the battle. Eventually, he conceded. I was another step away from trust in the competence of church authority.

Chapter 10. National Geographic

Dad may have been anchored in Memphis by his call to serve the blue collar people of his home town, but he had a restless fascination with the whole world. Maps from National Geographic covered the wall of his ham radio room (his “shack” in ham jargon). Sabbath dinner conversations included reports about his regular conversations with Adventist missionaries. We heard about emergencies in which Dad put Catholic and Lutheran missionaries in touch with their headquarters back here in the States and about phone patches (radio to telephone hookups) that allowed lonely scientists at the South Pole or McMurdo Sound talk with girlfriends and wives back home.

We never threw away a National Geographic Magazine and during my teen years, I devoured every issue, both current and those stored in boxes in Dad’s shack. Through fifth, sixth and seventh grades, articles about Africa fueled my dreams of going to Africa as a doctor. Pictures of dirty villages, of dark women in outlandish jewelry that stretched their necks or earlobes, of people squatting in the dirt to cook, make weapons or groom each other. If anyone needed the benefit of enlightened Western civilization and medical care these folk did.

But somewhere along the way, the magazine became subversive. I wasn’t swayed by the reports of the Leakeys about their findings of ancient hominids in Kenya and Ethiopia. They were obviously benighted evolutionists hopelessly committed to an erroneous understanding of earth history. But the description of their outdoor life and their place in the local society undermined the neat separation between America as the land of plenty and Africa as a world of need.

Africa was not just a place of service. It could also be a place of wonderful, sweet adventure. Their son, Richard, grew up camping with his parents on their digs, thoroughly immersed in the natural and native environments where his parents worked. I still vividly remember a photo of Richard in a muddy lake. Just his head was out of the water draped with moss and algae. The caption explained he had learned from Africans the trick of camouflaging himself as a floating stump to sneak up on ducks. It required great patience, but he could walk slowly, neck-deep, across a pond until he was close enough to grab a duck by its feet.

The lakes of northern Mississippi where we swam and skied were muddy, but the lake Richard was pictured in was more like an algae-covered, late summer pond. I could never bring myself to drape my head with gooey, slimy algae. And grabbing a duck by its feet required a boldness and force of will I didn’t have. But I imagined it. And longed for the unconstrained adventure of a life in the wild.

I read with skeptical fascination the Leakey’s reports of their discoveries of bones and tools and dreamed of doing my own field work to find irrefutable evidence to disprove their theories of ancient evolution and establish the reliability of the Bible. I began to imagine a life that combined high religious purpose with outdoor adventure.

As I moved into my high school years, the magazine continued its subversion. It did not alter my explicit beliefs about earth history or God. Instead I was seduced by the back story of the writers and photographers. They told of exotic customs and strange foods. They reported on elements of culture, climate and biology different from anything I had ever seen. But these reports could be ordered into pre-existing categories in my head. The most subversive thing about these writers was what they revealed of themselves.

When they were in Fiji, National Geographic writers dined with the local king not the villagers. On the Mongolian steppes they were guests of the chief. It was not too difficult to imagine stepping into their culture–not the culture of the people in the pictures, but the culture of the people taking the pictures–urbane, educated, sophisticated, cool. They were a secret aristocracy with privileged access anywhere in the world, the very opposite of the effete dullness I associated with the fat, rich people of upper class Memphis. And certainly very different from the ordered, boring world of conventional Adventist church life.

While I was immune to the science in articles about evolution, I was enchanted by the reports on balloon flights to explore the troposphere, expeditions to the poles and the work of Jacques Cousteau and Jane Goodall. The science reporting that most fascinated me concerned Edward Link’s work on extended periods of living in undersea environments, the story of a midwinter traverse of the Arctic Ocean by the nuclear submarine, Nautilus, and the work of Alvin, a deep-sea submersible used to explore seven miles down in the Marianna’s trench.

In all these expeditions there were doctors. Not missionary doctors, but still doctors. I found my place in the stories in the references to the medical challenges of sustaining human life in a submarine environment.

At school, I was an outsider. I wasn’t picked on. I was just different. I was different at home, too. I was different everywhere. This was unmistakably clear to me by third grade. At recess, I wasn’t the worst ball player, but usually I was no better than the top of the bottom twenty percent. Not infrequently I spent recess inside with Kenny Brooks doing late homework. My parents and teachers talked to me constantly about what I could do if I would just apply myself. I tried sporadically, but the tedium of homework always defeated me. By sixth grade I was aware the cutest girls would never be interested in me. I just didn’t have whatever it was that got their attention. In addition to being clumsy, socially inept, and hopelessly defeated by homework, I was separated from most of my classmates by my intense (fanatical) piety. While the kids were not mean, it was clear I could never fit in with the school crowd.

The world of science was different. It was an exotic, enchanting culture in which the price of admission was intellect not social coolness. Scientists were like missionaries in their ability to flout social conventions and in their intense, life-forming commitments to their tasks. They were an elite I could imagine being part of. At least that’s what I learned reading National Geographic.

Chapter 9. Lawful Rebellion

Mr. Wood taught seventh and eight grade at our Adventist School. He was conscientious and boring. I remember thinking how sad it was that some people doing their very best could only be mediocre. Not every kid could be an A student. School work didn’t come easily to everyone, especially math. But still they had to go to school and accept their “C’s” and “B minuses.” It must be like that for adults who became preachers and teachers. They worked as hard as they could, but their best deserved a “C.”

Mr. Wood didn’t try to make us play Patty Cake. He was just plodding. He had spent years building the band program, with a beginners band for the lower grades and the concert band for the upper grades. Even a teenager had to respect his indefatigable commitment. But I couldn’t help overhearing conversations between my mother and my older sister, both musicians, about the pedestrian nature of Mr. Wood’s music. He was sincere, devoted, hard-working, but didn’t have a sharp ear or a gift for conducting.

In class I was required to respect him for his position and his dutifulness. But he failed when measured by the ruthless meritocratic scale my parents constantly held up, a scale with intellectual acumen at the top. Probably second in that ranking was, curiously, skinniness. A fat preacher or teacher was ranked far lower than a dull one. At least Mr. Wood wasn’t fat.

He combed his straight back. It had these amazing waves in it. I had curly hair, but I didn’t have waves like he did–precise, parallel lines of peaks and valleys from his forehead back, neatly held in place by Vaseline hair tonic. (I assumed it was Vaseline. That’s what my dad made me put on my curls to keep them in place.)

I survived seventh grade. The next year, Mr. Wood became the principal and the ninth and tenth grade teacher. I was thrilled we had a new teacher for seventh and eighth grade–Mr. Streeter. He seemed like a really nice man. After the first week I knew this school year was going to be a lot more interesting than seventh grade.

But then came the “peninsula incident.” It was geography class and we were talking about land forms. Mr. Streeter wrote “peninsula” on the board and asked for examples of a peninsula.

I raised my hand.

“Johnny.”

“Florida.”

“No, Florida is an isthmus.”

I raised my hand again. “Yes, Johnny, what is it?

“Mr. Streeter, Don’t you mean Panama is a isthmus?”

“No. Florida is an isthmus.”

“But I thought Panama was an isthmus.”

“No, Panama is a peninsula. Florida is an isthmus.”

I couldn’t believe a teacher could be so dumb. I waited until the lecture was over. Once Mr. Streeter finished and released us to work on the assigned exercises, I got up and brought a dictionary from the shelf back to my desk.

I raised my hand and waited to be recognized. Finally Mr. Streeter looked up from his desk.

“Yes, Johnny, what do you want?”

“Mr. Streeter, I know you said a peninsula is a narrow strip of land that connects two larger land masses. But this dictionary says a peninsula is a strip of land sticking out into a body of water. It lists Panama as an example of an isthmus. Which are we supposed to believe, you or the dictionary?”

He asked me to bring the dictionary to his desk. I did. He read the entries as I stood there.

“Well, I guess you’re right.”

It was only the first time.



We were studying compound interest. He told us he was going to show us a short cut. He took the simple annual interest based on the initial amount, divided it by 365 and multiplied it times the number of days the money was on deposit. “That’s your total interest for the year compounded daily.”

I raised my hand.

We argued round and round.

At home that afternoon, I recounted my argument to Mom. She always supported
teachers when I complained about them, but I could see her surprise as I described Mr. Streeter explanation of compound interest. I showed her my work and she agreed I had it right.

The next day, to his credit, Mr. Streeter said he had done some more study. He went over compound interest again and did it correctly. But the class remembered yesterday.

Blood was in the water, and we were sharks.

One assignment in language arts class was to create our own vocabulary list each week. Each of us chose twenty-five words to write with their definitions. Naturally, I looked for interesting words. The third or fourth paper was returned to me with the word “aardvark.” marked wrong. I couldn’t believe it. I raised my hand. (I only asked questions in private when I didn’t already know the answer.)

“Mr. Streeter, I have the word aardvark on my vocab list. But it’s marked wrong. Can you tell me why it’s marked wrong?”

“Bring it up to my desk.”

I did. I laid my notebook on his desk and pointed to the word.

“What’s wrong with this word?”

“Johnny, your vocab words have to be actual words. You can’t just make up words.”

“But it is a word. I found it in the dictionary.”

“No, it can’t be. There is no such word.”

“Yes, there is. Let me show you.”

I fetched the dictionary, laid it on top my notebook and opened it to the first page of entries. “See. It says right here, aardvark. A-A-R-D-V-A-R-K.” The entire class was listening, delighted.



Late in the fall, I was summoned to a meeting with Mr. Streeter and Mr. Wood, the principal. They talked to me about my attitude. If I wanted to, they said, I could be an influence for good. But my attitude was affecting the other students and making learning difficult. If I couldn’t make some changes, perhaps they would have to expel me.

It was a curious meeting. They were pleading with me to change. But they had nothing definite to pin on me. I hadn’t broken any rules. I never corrected Mr. Streeter without first raising my hand and waiting to be recognized. And Mr. Streeter was always wrong.

Mr. Streeter left after the first semester. I stayed. I felt sorry for him but felt he had earned everything we gave him. I found out later he became a preacher. That suited him–he was a nice guy, just not too bright.

Mr. Johnson took his place. He was a fiery, aggressive teacher. He pushed us hard and we thrived under his pushing. He left half way through the middle of the next year. Kids whispered rumors about something dirty going on at his apartment with some of the boys.

Chapter 8. Anomalies in Eden

My parents and uncles, aunts and cousins were Adventist. I went to an Adventist school, read Adventist books, went to Adventist campmeeting and Adventist summer camp. We ate Adventist food (vegetarian), did Adventist entertainment (no movies) and Adventist fundraising (door-to-door solicitation for cash donations “for the poor, sick and needy”). Adventism was a complete system, nearly an entire world.

The only exception to this complete social system was our neighborhood. No other Adventists lived in the area, so our playmates were Baptists or Catholics or people who did not go to church. We played and fought with them in typical city neighborhood fashion, and never worked too hard at figuring out how they could be such good friends and at the same time be candidates for the Mark of the Beast. In the neighborhood, friendship counted for more than theology.

But with the one exception of our neighborhood, the rest of my world was Adventist. Everything that was necessary–truth, God, adventure, meaning, guidance for life, theories of earth history and political science, romance, professional education–could be found inside the Edenic ecosystem of our church.

But there were anomalies in the Garden.



Like many Adventist elementary schools, our ten-grade school, Memphis Junior Academy, had two grades in each classroom. So every other year I was in the same classroom with my sister, Jeannie, who was a year behind me. When I was in sixth grade we had a dreadful teacher. She must have thought we were second graders. One recess, she required us to sit in a circle. Then she tried to force us to play Patty Cake. In front of students from other grades who were also on the playground at the same time.

We sat in a circle like she said. And some of the kids cooperated in clapping their hands with her. But the guys were appalled at the very idea of playing a little kids’ game. We hooted and jeered each other. We were careful not to make fun of our teacher directly, but we loudly ridiculed the game.

Mrs. Larson finally cut recess short and made us return to the classroom. She was still in charge. But that day we declared war. We put a tack in her chair. She didn’t sit on it, but we felt brave for our effort. We slammed our books in unison. We drew comical pictures of her on the board when she was out of the classroom. We threw paper planes when her back was turned.

Nearly every day, my sister and I would come home to recount to our mother some fresh indignity we had suffered at the hand of Mrs. Larson. How could the church employ someone so utterly unfit for the job? We occasionally reported on our own guerilla tactics, but always in the context of extreme provocation by Mrs. Larson. Mom counseled obedience and courtesy and forbearance. But I thought I detected in her some amazement at the loony actions of our teacher.

When we returned to school after Christmas break, Mrs. Larson was gone. Mrs. Crowson took her place. Mrs. Crowson was pretty, young, and tough as nails. She was my third cousin. I quickly fell in love with her. We had a great rest of the year. I think I even did a little school work, though that’s probably just wishful memory in honor of a favorite teacher.



The following year I returned to campmeeting. I took with me my most prized fossil, a gift from one of the old men at church. It was some kind of plant, the piece I had ten inches long, two or three inches in diameter and branched. My first thought was petrified wood, but it didn’t look quite like wood. I asked all the men at church who might know about rocks. But none of them knew what it was. I was eager to show it to Pastor McLean. He would know.

Sure enough, when I showed it to him, he immediately identified it.

“No question about it. You’ve got a nice piece of petrified wood.”

I protested slightly. “Well, I asked several other people and they weren’t sure it was petrified wood.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt about it. It’s petrified wood.”

“But what about these lines that run length-wise on it and even appear to run lengthwise inside it. Shouldn’t petrified wood have rings inside instead of these little stringy things?”

“No, it’s really quite simple. What you have is a nice piece of petrified wood.”

I was a Southerner. While I might have been a social misfit, I did have manners. And a young person does not prolong an argument with an adult. Especially one you admire. But I wasn’t sure what to do with my admiration. It appeared to me the coolest preacher I had ever known had just made a fool of himself. He was certain when he should have been tentative. He had made an authoritative statement, and I suspected he was wrong. I didn’t know he was wrong. I didn’t know where to find a better identification, but I trusted my own eyes as much as I trusted a preacher when it came to rocks. And this fossil did not look like wood to me.

Chapter 7. Geodes

Campmeeting was not just meetings. One boy I met lived near the campground. On Monday, he showed me a soft-ball sized gray rock he had broken open. The inside was lined with white crystals. I was mesmerized.

“Where did you get it?” I asked.

“Down by the creek.”

“Where? Which creek? I haven’t seen any of these down at the creek.”

“I’ll show you this afternoon, if you want.”

“Really? Today?”

“Sure, you want to go now?”

We clambered down a faint path that took off down the steep hill just beyond the old bathhouse. At the bottom was a larger creek than the one that ran along the lower campground where I was used to building dams. We bushwhacked downstream a ways until we reached a place where the creek had eaten into a bank comprised of a dark gray rock that broke off in layers. After searching for ten or fifteen minutes I found a round, knobbly rock. I worked it out, then stepped down to the creek where I cracked it open with a larger rock. Sure enough. The inside was lined with white crystals. It had broken into too many pieces, so I went back to look for more. I collected six before we quit.

I could hardly wait to show Pastor McLean at the afternoon meeting. He showed interest. That warmed my heart. But then he blew me away. He told us what they were. These were geodes. He even explained how they formed.

When Noah’s flood covered the earth, it laid down layers of mud. The mud had hollow spaces in it. Over time, water with dissolved silica in it moved through the mud and filled up the hollow spaces. Then the water somehow escaped and left behind the crystals.

But I couldn’t see how water could be inside a solid rock and then leave. There wasn’t any hole the water could escape through. And how did the water get in there to start with? Where did the water find the chemicals that turned into white crystals inside the geodes? I didn’t have any better idea, but neither was I prepared to fully accept Pastor McLean’s explanation, even though I was sure it was scientific.

The most impressive thing about all this was that Pastor McLean knew about rocks! After that I brought my best geodes to show him. He was always properly impressed with our finds. Then I found a fossil, an entire leaf, perfectly preserved.

Pastor McLean explained how Noah’s flood had rapidly buried then intensely pressurized the mud with this leaf in it, preserving it for four thousand years until I dug it out of the shale bank. Pastor McLean even came with us once to check out our geode and fossil-hunting sites. It seemed that maybe this cool pastor liked me. It didn’t get any better than that–especially for a hyper-religious kid who was something of a social misfit.

Chapter 6. Junior Tent

The next year at campmeeting, I graduated to Juniors. It was everything I had imagined and more. The Junior tent looked like an Army tent, a dark green square with a massive center mast. Two sections of white picket fence flanked the entrance. The center aisle bright with fresh sawdust aimed straight at the stage and backdrop. And no kiddy chairs. These were real, adult seats, folding metal chairs.

It was all by itself right across from the old bathhouse at the bend in the road at top of the hill coming up from the lower campground.

The music was fantastic. We sang our lungs out. Boys competing with the girls. Standing up. Sitting. The preacher in charge was a cool, guitar-playing young pastor named Terry McLean. He taught us a new song, he said came from South Africa.

I’m happy today
I’m happy today
In Jesus Christ, I’m happy today.
He’s taken all my sins away.
And that’s why I’m happy today.

I’m singing today . . .

I’m laughing today . . .

I’m smiling today . . .

The verses could be multiplied endlessly.

We had meetings at 10:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. The evening meetings were down at the hill at a campfire bowl set into a hillside. Again there was music. And there was a continued story. One year it was Corbett’s tales of the Man-eating tiger of ????

Another year, a woman told a continuing story about life at the end of time. An Adventist family–Mom and Dad, three kids–struggled to stay alive while maintaining their faithfulness to God. Probation had closed–that is God had already closed the books of the heavenly judgment. The eternal fate of all humanity had already been determined.

Just a few months remained before the return of Christ and the end of the world. But during those few months, the true people of God had to perfectly resist all the temptations of the Devil. They were to be God’s final demonstration to the world of the validity and value of God’s holy Ten Commandment law.

Of course, no one could know for sure what God’s decision had been. So the members of this good family were constantly reviewing their lives, wondering if they had confessed all their sins before it was too late. They lived with a crushing sense of unworthiness and doom. Still they were heroically faithful.

They were hiding in the mountains, eating weird plants and food they found in unlocked hunter’s cabins. They lived in constant fear of the police and vigilantes who were searching for them.

The family’s crime? They were Saturday keepers (that is they observed Sabbath in the Jewish pattern from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday). In a time of national emergency (never quite precisely defined) the president of the United States had declared the United States to be a Christian nation and persuaded Congress to pass a law requiring Sunday church attendance by all Americans. The law had specifically prohibited the practice of Saturday- keeping (the observance of Saturday as the holy day). The penalty for keeping Saturday was death.

The reason for this unAmerican turn of events was national desperation in the face of overwhelming catastrophe. People became convinced that the reason for the catastrophes was God’s anger. If only American’s would return to the proper worship of God, then God would reverse our national fortunes. The most obvious expression of America’s Christian identity was Sunday church services.

Saturday keepers were the most flagrant transgressors of this Christian rite, so they were the special target of punitive legislation and negative public sentiment.

Nothing about the story seemed strange to me. It was fiction, true. But it sounded like the theology I heard at the Adventist school and in evangelistic meetings and around the dinner table on Sabbath after church.

I had heard my father remark with pleased wonder about our prophet’s prediction that at the end of time, people would attack us with swords and the swords “would break like straw.” In Bible class at school teachers talked about the Close of Probation, The Time of Trouble and the persecution of God’s people at the end of time. Evangelists preached fantastic sermons about the National Sunday Law and the Seven Last Plagues and the Mark of the Beast.

This stuff was as normal to me as Memphis accents, massive elm trees that formed green arches over the street or having a Colored maid. This was just reality. It was the world I lived in.

The story connected with my profound, ineradicable sense of unworthiness and guilt while at the same time giving my personal struggles cosmic significance. My church was part of a movement called by God to resist the creeping forces of spiritual corruption. My own calling was to make sure I was ready for the close of probation and the last- day contest between true religion and a world seduced by a false Christianity. I was often miserable with guilt and vague self-reproach, but the endtime stories taught me that my current misery was, at worst, a mild training for the spiritual and personal agony of the Last Days which were just ahead.

Chapter 5. Crinoids!

Beth’s father and mother were doctors. They moved to Memphis to work at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and began attending our church. They had kids the age of my older brother and sister and maybe one or two older than that, and Beth. She was just a year older than I was, so she was in my Sabbath School class at church and in my classroom at school.

I didn’t play with Beth at recess, but at least she was friendly. One day she brought a rock to school. It was a small cylinder about three-eights of an inch long and a quarter inch across. It looked like a stack of flat rings with a hole through the center. I was enthralled. A real fossil. In my own hands! Then, as I was admiring it, Beth told me I could have it.

“What? Really?”

“Sure. I can find more of them in my driveway at home.”

I couldn’t believe it. She had fossils in her driveway. What an exotic house! I could hardly wait for the next time we were invited for Sabbath lunch. As soon as we could be excused from the table, Beth took me outside to mine the driveway. In less than five minutes we found another fossil. We found six that afternoon. In addition to the kind of fossil she had brought to school, we found another one, horn-shaped with longitudinal ridges. This was marvelous beyond words. After sundown worship, when the kids played hide-and-seek, Beth and I hid together. I hated to go home.

I wanted to know what kind of fossils we had found. I looked in the encyclopedia but didn’t find anything that looked just like what we had found. I asked adults, but no one knew anything about fossils. Then Mr. Holmes told me it was a crinoid. He showed me a picture in a book. No wonder I didn’t recognize it. The books all showed crinoids as long stalks with what looked like a flower on top and a broad base. It was a sea creature related to sea anemones. The pieces I had were very short sections of the stem. I was thrilled. I had a fossil that actually had a name.

Searching Beth’s driveway for fossils did lead to one major disappointment. When she first brought the fossil to school, I had hoped that after seeing them in her driveway and knowing what to look for, I might be able to find fossils in the gravel in the alley behind our house or at the Holmes’ house in the country south of town. But when we searched her driveway, I realized right away that something was different about this gravel. It didn’t look like any other gravel I had seen around Memphis.

I already knew any large rocks in Memphis had to have been transported in by truck or train or barge. I had visited a gravel pit near my cousin Ricky’s house. The largest rocks were smaller than my fist and the color was the same as the red gravel roads that ran through the Mississippi countryside south of town. Even along the banks of the Mississippi River which I explored when we went skiing with my Uncle Alex, there were no large rocks and no fossils. And there was a lot of reddish color.

The gravel in Beth’s driveway was tan to white. The pieces had a different shape from anything I had seen anywhere else in Memphis. Maybe it came from over near Little Rock, Arkansas or from up toward Nashville where I had seen gray and white rocks. For sure Beth’s gravel did not come from Memphis.

I had been collecting rocks since I was old enough to pick them up. This was perhaps the first time I gave much thought to rocks as part of a system instead of as individual specimens.

Chapter 1. Geology 101

When I left seminary in 1978, I thought I was through with school. Finally, out of the classroom and into the real world. Instead of professors grading my sermons and Bible studies, real audiences and real students would do the evaluations. Three years later, I found myself wishing for the structure of learning, the well-defined beginnings and regular markers of completion that came with a school program. And I felt the old siren song of rocks. I wanted to know more.

I had read Clark and Coffin and Gentry. I had read articles in church magazines and attended lectures and discussions. I could impress church people with my knowledge of the scientific evidence for a young earth. But I knew the only reason they were impressed was they had never studied the subject. I wanted to know more.

Suffolk County Community College was just off Crooked Hill Road. I saw the sign every time I drove to the south shore of Long Island. We had lived in New York long enough to qualify for resident tuition and the late morning schedule for the Geology 101 would not be too difficult to manage.
My guard was up. I knew the teacher would be teaching millions of years and evolution. He would assume the accuracy of radiometric dating and the geologic column, but at least I would be handling actual rocks instead of just reading religiously-based arguments.

Tom showed up in classic science professor attire, jeans and sweatshirt. He appeared to be only a couple of years older than I was. Everyone else in class was under twenty. They wore standard student uniforms–blue jeans and sweat shirts at beginning of the term in January, shorts and T-shirts come May. I wore my ministerial uniform–wool tweed jacket, dress slacks, knitted wool tie.

The first few weeks of class, there was nothing new. We were expected to memorize the major periods of geologic column–Cambrian, Permian, Jurassic, Pleistocene, etc.–with their putative dates. I read again about the basic rock types–igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. It was elementary, pedestrian stuff, but since it was geology, I loved it.

We had our first quiz. I got ten out of ten. I wondered how anyone could have missed anything on it. I began wondering what could be so dangerous about geology. In lab we examined actual rocks. You could pick them up in your hand, break them with your hammer, analyze them with chemicals. There was not a lot of room for “opinions” or bias or prejudice. We were dealing with down-to-earth, concrete stuff.

Then there were the field trips. On south shore beaches we observed wave cut terraces. We saw how winter storms eroded the beach and moved sand “down” the coast. We examined the sand with hand lenses, noting the black and red grains mixed with the white silica. An obvious question: where did all this sand come from? Here on Long Island the answer was glaciers. Huge glaciers. Continental glaciers. Ice age glaciers.

It seemed preposterous. It was hard to imagine the entire states of Massachusetts and Connecticut covered a mile deep with flowing ice. But evidence of glacier action was evident all over Long Island. We visited the high point of Long Island. Near there in a construction site Tom pointed out in the side of an excavation the mix of large cobbles and the occasional boulder in a matrix of sand and gravel. This kind of deposit was typical of moraines–the rocky deposits at the foot and along the sides of glaciers. I saw the same thing in my backyard when I dug it up for a garden. This was definitely not what I had seen in the sides of gravel pits back in Memphis where I grew up.

The Greater New York Conference office was on Shelter Rock Road in Manhasset. Shelter Rock, was a huge, irregular boulder forty feet long, twenty feet wide and fifteen feet high weighing about 1800 tons. Its mineralogy matched bedrock in Connecticut, a hundred miles north across Long Island Sound. It is called a glacial erratic. The only plausible method of transport for Shelter Rock and other large boulders imbedded in the sand and gravels of Long Island was the movement of massive ice sheets across New England. The position, shape and composition of Long Island made perfect sense if you accepted continental glaciers. It made no sense at all, if you tried to explain it using Noah’s flood.

I kept waiting for Tom to start talking about evolution, about millions of years and the ability of “time” to make up for improbability in the evolutionary story. Instead he kept focusing our attention on things we could see and measure. Geology, in his classroom, was not primarily theoretical or historical. It was concrete and practical.

Long Island is a 120-mile long sand and gravel pile. All the water for human consumption was drawn from wells drilled into this gravel pile. Everything that landed on the surface of this gravel pile migrated downward–rainwater, industrial chemicals, septic system effluent, gasoline from leaking tanks, petroleum, run off from land fills. The only barrier between all this stuff and the aquifers holding Long Island’s drinking water were layers of clay. Whenever any of those clay layers were disturbed the risk of contamination dramatically increased.

We learned that already all the shallow aquifers on the island were contaminated. Suffolk county wanted to locate a landfill on the central ridge of the island. This was precisely the location with maximum potential for contaminating ground water.

The geology of water showed up in another major political/social issue. For decades people on Long Island had used septic systems. The island was perfect for septic systems. The sandy, gravelly loam always perked. You never had trouble getting rid of the water. Problem was the ground was so porous that along creeks and canals sewage seeped into the water. The sewage made its way in the Great South Bay, home of Long Island’s iconic clam fishery.

The intersection of sewage and clams let to occasional incidents of hepatitis. Some inshore areas were permanently closed to clamming because of the dangers of contamination. Clamming was a distinctive and prized part of local culture. Even people like me who had never eaten a clam valued the rugged, colorful character of the clammers, people who wrestled their livelihood from the shallow waters of the Great South Bay.

How to fix the problem? Suffolk County was building a sewer treatment facility and everyone on the south shore would be required to hook up to it. This would keep the sewage out of the Great South Bay. However, it would create another problem, potentially even more devastating to the clammers. With septic systems, all the water people flushed down their toilets and ran down their drains eventually percolated through the ground and ended up in the bay. This steady flow of fresh water reduced the salinity of the bay creating the perfect brackish conditions needed by the clams. With the installation of the sewers all this water would instead be contained in pipes and transported to the sewage treatment plant. After treatment, the effluent would be piped across the bay and out into the Atlantic Ocean, completely bypassing the bay. This loss of fresh water inflow would cause the salinity of the bay to rise endangering the existence of the clams.

In Tom’s class, geology was not theoretical speculation about the distant past, it was a description of the world I lived in. It offered guidance about garbage dumps and sewers and wells. It explained the behavior of the soil in my garden and the reason for special excavation devices at construction sites.

Over the years, in church I heard all kinds of mocking criticism of the silly notion of ice ages and great glaciers scouring the continent. But I was living on a 120-mile long moraine. There were no mountains in the neighborhood for glaciers to slide down. The only explanation for the hill I lived on and the dirt in my garden and the beaches I swam from was continental glaciers that plowed across New England.

I didn’t know how fast glaciers formed and moved, but I found it very difficult to compress all the obvious geologic history of Long Island–the formation and see-saw movement of continental glaciers–plus all the associated changes across North America–the appearance and disappearance of saber toothed tigers, camels, mammoths, long-horned bison, giant sloths–into the putative one thousand years between Noah and Abraham.

Since climate change is global, the ice in North America would have had to coincide with the Ice Age in Mesopotamia, and the continental glaciers were gone by the time Abraham was hiking from Haran to Canaan.

In church, I was used to mocking references to the de facto philosophy masquerading as science which undergirded geologists claims about billions of years. Geologists were characterized as men searching for a "scientific" excuse for their atheism. But the science we studied in geology class at Suffolk Community College did not focus on theory that mattered only in debates about geochronology and origins. Geology 101 was firmly connected to the gravel pile that was my home. Flood geology offered no helpful guidance for siting dumps, digging wells or placing the outfall pipe from a sewage plant. Geology 101 at Suffolk County Community College did not change my mind about the age of the earth or the mechanisms of creation. It did make it impossible for me to dismiss geologists as theoretical rebels against “the truth of the Bible.” It compelled me to honor geology as a science firmly anchored in reality. Which turns out to be the ultimate challenge to 6000 years.

Chapter 2. Missionary to Arkansas . . . No, Make That Africa

It wasn’t my idea to be a minister. Blame that on God. I planned to go to Arkansas as a missionary doctor. At least that’s the way Miss Dennison remembered it.

At church, on my visits back to Memphis, she’d find me in the lobby or in a hallway when I wasn’t talking with someone else. Shyly, she’d ask about my work in New York, then nearly always, especially if I had preached that Sabbath, at some point she’d ask, “Johnny, do you know what you told me when you were in my kindergarten class? You said you were going to be a missionary doctor to Arkansas. Whenever you preach, I think of that.” This was our secret, her special claim on the hometown boy now preaching in New York City.

It made perfect sense–being a missionary doctor to Arkansas. Dad was a doctor. And missionaries were a regular part of our life. Visiting missionaries stayed in our home. Bedtime stories featured tales by Eric B. Hare, missionary to Burma, Josephine Cunnington Edwards, whose accounts of African missionary adventure could inspire a stone, or Norma Youngberg, whose writing was good enough that I enjoyed reading her books to my own children thirty years later. And Arkansas? When I was three or four, Arkansas and Africa were equally foreign and equally close. Arkansas was just across the river from Memphis. We went there occasionally. Africa was across the ocean, but we went there every week through books and missionary visits. By the time my own memory began forming I had sorted them out. So, as far as I can remember, I was always going to be a missionary doctor to Africa.

I know I had firm plans for a missionary career by the time I kissed Marcia Marley. That was in the car when I was six years old. Marcia’s dad was president of the Adventist Church in Kentucky and Tennessee. Along with a number of other church dignitaries, he was in town for some big occasion. The Marley family had driven to Memphis from the church headquarters in Nashville. As usual, they stayed the weekend at our house.

Sabbath morning we were headed to church, the car packed with kids from both families, too many for everyone to sit properly. At some point the pr oximity of the lovely Marcia was too much to resist, so I kissed her. I have vague memories of embarrassment at hearing my mother regale everyone within earshot all with the story of her son and the conference president’s daughter.

One of the featured speakers at church that afternoon was a returned missionary from Africa. He told stories and showed slides of his mission work. Elephants and rhinos. Thatched huts and natives wearing red mud and astonishing jewelry. He showed pictures of babies with flies in their eyes and pictures of people being carried piggyback to a clinic. He included a few shots of his family surrounded by smiling natives.

On the way home, I asked Dad why we couldn’t go as missionaries to Africa. It was so exciting, so right. He said something about being called to serve the people of Memphis, but I didn’t get it.

Chapter 3. Born Again

I was born again even before I kissed the conference president’s daughter and begged Dad to take us to Africa as missionaries. It happened at the Smith brother’s Bible Prophecy Crusade. We attended nearly every night. Not that my folks needed to be evangelized. They knew Adventist doctrine and Bible prophecy inside out, upside down and backwards. They could have given the lectures themselves. We attended every Adventist evangelistic meeting in town, whether it was sponsored by our congregation, Memphis First Seventh-day Adventist Church, or by the Raleigh Church where Uncle Alex’s and Uncle Charlie’s families attended. We even went a time or two to meetings sponsored by the Longview Heights Adventist Church–the Black church.

Elder Chalmers’ meetings a couple of years before had been held in a huge tent on a vacant lot out on the southeast edge of town. The billboard out front featured pictures of dragons, horses and angels from Revelation. That was classic Adventist evangelistic strategy, dramatic, colorful, scary. The Smith brothers’ meetings, however, were held in Ellis Auditorium downtown. My dad liked that. Ellis Auditorium was the largest meeting hall in town. It was respectable. He always hoped some of his patients would attend the meetings and become members of the Remnant Church.

Each evening, after the singing, the lights dimmed and Elder Smith began his lecture, illustrated by slides projected on the huge screen. Over the course of a couple of weeks, the evangelist preached about prayer and baptism and being born again. He preached three nights on the Sabbath, giving the history of early Roman Christianity and a sharply critical analysis of the switch from the Jewish practice of Sabbath-keeping to the Catholic practice of Sunday observance. But the most memorable presentations were about animals–not literal animals but visionary creatures. The preacher explained the meaning of the four beasts of Daniel–a lion, a misshapen bear with three ribs in its mouth, a leopard with four heads and four wings, a monster with iron teeth and iron claws, and a little horn that had a mouth and talked like a person. He proved that the “lamb-like beast” of Revelation was actually a prophecy about the United States.

The evangelist’s pictures of heaven featured vast expanses of lawn where lions, bears and tigers gamboled with children. Jesus was portrayed in conversation with a circle of attentive friends. In heaven we would play with animals. We would be able to fly like the birds. There would be no more anger, no older brothers, no bullies, no temptations. I could hardly wait to get there.

One night when the evangelist invited people to come forward and give their hearts to Jesus, I felt the call. The auditorium was dark. On the screen was a picture of heaven. I listened to his appeal and felt a terrible pressure to act. I wanted to go forward. But it was scary. I felt the eyes of all nine hundred people in the auditorium. (Never mind that it was dark.) No one else was going forward, at least not in our section of the auditorium. And to go forward I would have to climb over family members, including my older brother. But the evangelist was still appealing, and the inner call was unbearably strong. I didn’t want to miss heaven. I didn’t want to disappoint God. I wanted to do right.

I wanted to be free from my sense of guilt, but what ugly wickedness would all those watching people imagine I was guilty of if I went forward? Probably going forward was supposed to be for adults, not little kids.

But I couldn’t escape the terrible inner pressure. The tug of war became unbearable. The evangelist continued his appeal. God was calling everyone, young and old, rich and poor, no matter what evil was in our past. We shouldn’t worry about what other people thought. It was erroneous to think that we could improve ourselves before we came. There would be no better time.

I was on my feet, crawling over my brother headed for the aisle. Scared to death, I made the interminable journey to the front. By myself. In the dark. Hopeful. Hungry for the magic of a personal connection with God. Glad finally to be doing the right thing. Knowing I wanted God more than anything else in the world. Knowing this decision placed me squarely in the center of the ideals of my family and my church.

I was the only one who came forward that night. After the closing prayer, as the crowd streamed out of the auditorium, the evangelist and his assistant sat down with me on the front row and talked about spiritual life.

“When the Children of Israel were in the desert at Mt. Sinai,” the evangelist said, “God told them to sew borders of blue fabric on their robes as a symbol of their loyalty to him. Every time they looked at that border they remembered that God had rescued them from slavery in Egypt and that they were to live for him. You are not old enough yet to be baptized, but I want to give you something that will help you remember your decision tonight to follow Jesus.”

He handed me a blue ribbon with gold lettering on it.

“Every time you look at this ribbon, I want you to remember that God has called you to be his child. I want you to remember tonight. Some day when you are a bit older, you will want to be baptized. And this blue ribbon will help you remember that.

“There’s something else I want you to do. I want you to learn your memory verse every week. The way we get closer to Jesus is through the Bible, and even if you can’t read, by learning your memory verses, you can store God’s word in your mind. Do you think you can do that?”

I nodded.

He invited me to kneel, then he and his assistant knelt beside me. He placed his hand on my shoulder and prayed, “Our Father in heaven, thank you for Johnny’s decision to follow you. Thank you for his parents’ example of godliness. We ask you to continue to draw Johnny to yourself. Help him to be obedient, to learn his Sabbath School lessons and memory verses. Keep him faithful by your Holy Spirit. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

We stood. I walked back up the aisle light as a kite. I had been born again. I knew my parents would be happy. God was happy. I was happy and free and clean. It was very good.

Chapter 4. Campmeeting

The trip from Memphis to Portland, Tennessee took seven and a half hours. The highway was concrete with a dashed line of white paint down the center. Sometimes there was a solid yellow line on one side or the other of the dashed line. We weren’t supposed to pass the slow cars in front of us when the solid line was on our side of the dashed line. But if the solid line was on the other side, passing was okay.

The expansion joints in the concrete thumped rhythmically under the wheels. A crazy network of black tar-filled cracks skittered across the gray concrete in every direction adding their own syncopation. Sometimes we got stuck in long lines of cars massed behind slow moving truck or a car pulling a trailer through the curves and hills of middle Tennessee. Every few minutes, Dad would pull slightly into the other lane to see if he could pass.

Occasionally, Mother would be terrified as Dad pulled out to pass another car. I can still hear the indignation, fear and remonstrance in her voice. “Bonnie! Don’t you see that car?”

Sometimes he answered. Usually not.



When we first began making the annual trip, our car didn’t have air conditioning. June in Tennessee can be hot. I never got a window seat. Marilynn usually sat in front with Mom and Dad because she got car sick in the back. Arthur always got one of the back seat windows. There was no way I could win that fight. That left the other back seat window, but Jeannie would beg me to let her have it, and I could never tell her no.

After an eternity we pulled into the campground located on several acres behind an Adventist boarding high school. People were everywhere. Off to our right was the huge campmeeting tent ringed with ropes anchored to long steel stakes. A giant sign board out front announced BEHOLD THE BRIDEGROOM COMETH. Out the front window I could see a stand selling snow-cones.

To the left of the entrance was a long, white, wood-framed building with several doors. When Dad got out, I followed him up the rough, wooden steps into center door. We stood in a short line in the dark, narrow lobby waiting our turn to register. Strangers greeted Dad. Everyone knew Dad. Finally, it was our turn at the window. Dad filled out some papers. The man behind the counter handed him some keys and we headed back to the car. Dad eased the car through the crowds. On the right were rows and rows of canvas tents pitched under scattered trees. On the left, after the large building where we had registered, the road was lined with small white buildings. The first several had signs on them like they were offices or shops. After that, you could see they were family cabins. Through the open doors you could see bunk beds, Groceries piled on tables. Clothes hanging. Kids. Just after the bathhouse the road turned right and headed down the hill.

In previous years, we had stayed in one of the conference tents, but this year we had cabin. It was perched on the side of the hill three cabins down from the turn.

Dad unlocked the padlock on the single-room, frame building, and we began unloading. Inside was dark and slightly musty. There were four stacks of bunk beds, a table and a couple of chairs. One light bulb hung from a wire in the middle of the room. The cabin was perched on concrete blocks, one corner right at ground level on a block that was almost entirely buried. The ground sloped steeply down from the road, so the back right corner of the cabin was perched on a stack of six blocks. The stack leaned at a slight angle as did other shorter stacks under the cabin. It seemed a bit precarious to me, but there were other cabins similarly perched on the downhill side of the road. The best thing about these stacks of blocks was the dark scary space they created under the cabins, places where black widows, snakes and insects could hide.

The hill, covered with hickories, tulip poplars, oaks and a few cedar trees, dropped steeply all the way to the creek that ran along the edge of the lower campground. You could catch crawdads in the creek and build dams. I preferred building dams.

That year I was still in the Primary department. Primary and Kindergarten meetings were in adjacent tents in the lower campground near the new bathhouse. I could hardly wait to escape from Primaries. They had too many lady teachers who treated you like you were a little kid. And they expected you to do crafts–which sometimes were fun, but mostly seemed like little kids stuff.

The crowds at campmeeting were amazing. Where did all these Adventists come from? In Memphis, there were three churches–two White churches and one Colored church. We only went to the colored church a couple of times. But I was very familiar with both White churches. In fact, I knew almost everyone in both churches–well maybe not their names, but their faces were familiar. In fact, I was related to half the kids in the Raleigh Church, the one my uncles attended.

But at campmeeting there were all these people. The adult meetings were in a huge tent. In the primary tent alone, there were so many kids I could not possibly learn their names.

It was a week of heaven. Playing in the creek every day with new kids. Building dams. Running around the campground, exploring the woods, listening to continuing stories in the evening meeting, hearing missionaries talk about Africa.

I didn’t enjoy the bullies. There was always some kid who was trying to throw his weight around. And I didn’t take too kindly to it. I wasn’t much of a fighter, but life with my older brother had made me hyper sensitive to anyone trying to order me around or cut in on my space or my fun. So when some bigger stronger kid tried to mess with a dam I had started the previous day, I made a fuss. If someone picked on one of my littler friends, I felt a responsibility to intervene. But I was never skilled enough to put a bully in his place. The bully usually won any encounter, but I couldn’t help myself. Injustice had to be confronted. Once, when I was on the ground getting pummeled by some slightly larger kid, a teenager I didn’t know stepped in and rescued me. Once I was on my feet, I proposed to him that we form a partnership to keep the bullies in check. He politely declined.

Dad stayed only the weekends at campmeeting. He returned to Memphis on Saturday night so he could be at the office Sunday morning. Sunday was his busiest day. He’d return the following Friday for the concluding weekend.

The first weekend featured radio preacher and evangelist, H. M. S. Richards, Adventism’s most famous personality at the time. There was no Primary meeting that night so I went to the adult meeting with Mom and Dad. The sermon was beyond me. I was wearing shorts and flip flops and the evening grew cold. Dad wrapped his suit jacket around me and I dozed. Content. Happy.