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Down from the Mountaintop
From Belief to Belonging
By JOSHUA DOLEZAL UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Joshua Dolezal
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-239-1
CHAPTER 1
The Sweet Spot
When I suited up for Little League at age ten, shrugging into a maroon nylon top and pulling on my gleaming white pants rimmed with elastic, I distinguished myself by carrying a wooden bat to the plate. It was a thirty-two-inch Worth cut from a blonde ash tree, and with its thick handle and barrel it likely weighed at least two or three pounds. It was an odd choice for a Little Leaguer, since lightweight metal bats had more pop and far more durability. But I was a purist. Wood was what the pros used, the kind of bat that met the ball with a gut-tingling crack, unlike the ping of aluminum, which sounded more like a sound effect on a video game than a good, honest hit. I knew my bat could break, and every time I caught a pitch off the tip or close to the handle, the vibration stung my hands. But when I found the sweet spot, when a pitch came in at belt level and I got good wood on it, the shock washed over my body like I'd jumped into a lake.
I needed that feeling for more reasons than I could express, and I gave it my whole attention, the way I forgot everything else while eating cherry cheesecake. It was a form of love, that sweet contact, like the bliss I'd seen on other people's faces in church, hands raised skyward, tears streaming down their upturned cheeks. And when I knew the ball would clear the fence, when I saw the pitch fly from the barrel and felt the echo in my chest and knew, it was a form of truth.
Baseball was my father's game, one of the few things we had in common and the only exception he made to banning television from our home. Every fall when the World Series began, he borrowed an old black-and-white set from my grandfather, and we propped it on a chair in the living room, where we fussed with the antennae until the grainy picture snapped into focus. It was there on the brown braided rug, lying on my belly with my chin in my hands, that I watched my team, the Mets, win the 1986 World Series. And two years later on the same tiny screen I saw Kirk Gibson hobble to the plate for the Dodgers, my father's team, and launch a game-winning home run against the Oakland Athletics despite a pulled hamstring and aching knees. For a few moments as Gibson limped around the bases and we jumped on the dining room linoleum to high-five each other, dishes rattling in the cupboard, my father and I were one. He coached each of my teams from the pee wee league through Babe Ruth, managing even the All-Star squads. Every time I stepped to the plate, I could feel him watching from the third-base coach's box, and I wanted to get that feeling back, knowing if I hit a line drive or a long ball, all my errors would be forgiven and he'd give my shoulder a squeeze.
There was no way for me to know when we first began playing catch on our lawn around my fourth birthday that my father was trying to recover something he'd lost. But in the next few years, as I started tee ball and he began grooming me for Little League, I knew he expected more than I could give. He often urged me to throw harder, frustrated by my noodle arm. But arm strength is one of the raw talents only nature bestows, so my earliest memories of catch are laced with a sense of struggle against my body, against myself. Our yard was a steep slope overlooking the Kootenai River Valley west of Troy. An apple orchard and a vegetable garden flanked the lawn, an excellent sledding hill in winter but a poor stand-in for a baseball diamond with its uneven footing. More often than not, I tripped over my own feet while trying to get under a pop fly that my father tossed overhead, losing my bearings while running uphill. The grounders he threw came at me like curveballs, angling downslope as they bounced my way. My errant throws, which increased the more he hollered for me to put some heart into it, usually landed in a bank of tall grass behind the raspberry canes. My father was not a patient man, and the longer it took to hunt for a lost ball the sharper his return throw would be, upping the odds I'd miss it on a short hop and have to chase it down the hill into the ditch, where the birch and aspen trees fronted our country road. No matter how angry we'd get or how many minutes we wasted wading through the grass, we kept at it until dusk, calling it quits when the air began to pulse with crickets and we could no longer see.
I knew these marathon games of catch, though they often felt like failure, were my father's best attempts at love. I would later suit up for football and basketball and even dabble in tennis, but there was never any question that my first loyalty lay with my father's game. It was a gift he wanted to pass on, like his hope of heaven. And when I learned, years later, how my father came to faith as a young man, how he heard the voice of the Holy Spirit and began speaking in angelic tongues, I understood why oiling my glove and lifting my wooden bat from the closet always felt like more than a summer pastime.
* * *
When my father was a boy, his world revolved around baseball and his grandfather Adolph, his biggest fan. Adolph was a rough, jolly man who often ate an entire half gallon of Neapolitan ice cream while watching the Dodgers on television and smelled of strawberry, chocolate, vanilla, and Copenhagen snuff when my father kissed him goodnight. They roamed the woods around Libby fishing and hunting, dragging their bounty home to my great-grandmother Sophie, who pressed a nickel into my father's palm for every fish he claimed to have caught and every grouse he said he'd dropped with his grandfather's shotgun. Adolph was also a drinker, sometimes driving home from the fishing hole on the wrong side of the highway, laughing as the oncoming drivers laid on their horns and swerved around him. Even though Adolph didn't make it to many ballgames, when it was summertime and my father ran out to his position at second base, dropping into his infielder's crouch, he hoped to make his grandfather proud.
On the winter day when Adolph died after falling from a ladder in the backyard, my father was far away, struggling to finish his first semester at a junior college in Arizona. He'd followed a high school teammate there to try out for the baseball squad and then maybe find his way to the big leagues, but he did not survive the final cut, and he was still reeling from it when he heard of his grandfather's death. The desert sun baked his face as he walked among blue palm trees in shirtsleeves and sandals, hot tears streaking his cheeks, his chest aching for the emerald water of the Kootenai River and the craggy rim of the Cabinet Mountains overlooking his home.
When my father came back to Libby that winter, he drifted, working for a spell at the lumber mill, transferring to the community college in Kalispell for a few courses in civil engineering, wandering back to the mill. One evening after work he dropped by a hamburger joint, a place with a pinball arcade where young people gathered to smoke and laugh and nurse milkshakes. The bells on the front door clanked against the glass as he took a seat at the counter, glad for the warmth and the smell of pickles and grease. He recognized a classmate he'd lost touch with, a guy named Kevin who had brought home some friends from Seattle to fix up a van they planned to drive back to the city. They were handsome young men with long hair and beards, and a crowd had gathered around their booth. My father inched closer to listen in. Kevin was talking about the Holy Spirit, reading from a leather Bible lying open on the table. Once he even turned straight to the verse he was looking for, as if the Spirit were guiding his hand.
A few nights later my father sat in Kevin's garage watching the Seattle guys paint the van, an old dairy bus with no side windows. Kevin had invited him to join their commune in the city where they devoted their days to street ministry, but my father wasn't sure. He was making good money at the mill. It seemed reckless to just walk away from a job. He watched Kevin dip a brush in a can of purple paint, scrawling "Jesus Christ" in a giant script over the side of the van. As Kevin stood back to admire it, arms crossed over his chest, my father pointed out that he'd written "Crist" instead of "Christ." The van looked even more hip after Kevin dabbed the missing letter into the curve of the giant C, but my father began to think it might have been a sign. As he sat alone that night praying about whether to go, he felt God speak to him for the first time. Just like the missing "h," he felt a small voice say, the Holy Spirit is missing from your understanding of me.
So he hugged his parents goodbye, my grandmother weeping on the front step, and set off for Seattle, where he took an upstairs bunk in the ramshackle commune. During the day my father paced through the city, stopping passersby to ask if he could say a word about Jesus, sometimes jogging alongside them as they tried to hurry away. At night he read the Bible and prayed alone while the others strummed their guitars, dancing to worship songs in the living room. One evening he was meditating in his bunk upstairs, trying to block out the ruckus below when he felt a peace steal over him, just like the night when he had heard God speak, and suddenly his lips were moving, and he could hear himself whispering in words he did not understand. Then he knew what it was, and he heard a voice again saying I'm filling you with my Holy Spirit now, and then I will teach you about it in the days ahead. Now when he opened the Bible the words came alive. He had a testimony, a story to tell. It no longer mattered if he couldn't answer the questions he faced every day on the street. He didn't care if people mocked him for a fool or just lowered their heads and shouldered by. He believed. He had been to the mountaintop, and he had looked over. And he was never again the same.
* * *
It took more than thirty years for my father to tell me all this, long after my own journey away from faith was complete. As a boy I knew only that my father wanted me to believe in God the way he wanted me to throw straight and true, firing the ball toward his chest in a tight arc until it snapped in the pocket of his glove. It was something he demanded, a standard I strained to meet. As far as I knew then, he had always been clearheaded and firm. Schooled in the science of land surveying, he seemed more at home with a stack of maps and a calculator than the novels I curled up with under my mother's quilt. I struggled to reconcile my meticulous father, the man who triple-checked his calculations after packing his yellow tripod around the perimeter of a property boundary, with the man who could surrender control of his own tongue and speak in a stream of what sounded like gibberish to me.
Our church was the kind with loud preaching and tambourines jingle-jangling through the worship service. We gathered in an abandoned Forest Service building on a hill overlooking Troy, a space we shared with the Catholic church, which met early in the morning and dispersed an hour before we arrived to set up a hundred metal folding chairs facing a piano and a screen where the words to our worship songs appeared, magnified and bathed in light. It was there I learned about revival meetings where a woman with the gift of tongues might speak in Chinese, not understanding a word coming out of her own mouth, learning after the service that a man from the Sichuan Province had heard God speaking directly to him, in his native dialect, in her voice. It was frightening to imagine the voice of God rumbling through my own vocal chords. It seemed like a superpower, a way for the body to feel proof of what the soul believed. I clapped and sang along with the others, waiting for the Spirit to take possession of me, but this seemed beyond my strength, like the games of catch in the backyard, where I could never quite throw hard enough.
The sermons at the Troy Christian Fellowship were much like my father's coaching, impatient with mediocrity, constantly calling me to higher living. One morning the preacher worked himself into a sweat, pacing before us as if the church were a giant dugout, our buttocks clenched against the hard chairs. There was no stage, and he was not a tall man, but he seemed to tower above us. His text was the book of Exodus, where God delivers the Israelites from bondage in Egypt and calls Moses up Mount Sinai to receive the commandments the people are to live by. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," the preacher quoted from memory, his voice rising to a shout as he finished the verse, "for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God." He stopped to let the words sink in, a vein bulging from his shiny forehead as he stared us down. He went on to tell how even as Moses stood on the mountain receiving the bedrock of Hebrew law directly from the mouth of God, the people grew impatient and melted their own earrings and made a golden calf, which they worshiped as their liberator.
"Imagine," the preacher hissed, his voice fallen into a whisper. "Imagine yourself as a father who has brought up his child in the truth, only to watch him turn away, only to watch him destroy his life at the card table or cast all his passion into gathering riches or grow so proud with learning that he says, 'There is no God.'" The preacher clutched his Bible to his chest and crouched as if he'd caught a hard grounder in the groin.
"You would not give up on that child," the preacher went on, his voice building once more into crescendo, "because the love of a father is a jealous love, jealous for its own flesh and blood the way God is jealous for his chosen ones, ready to let loose his wrath on them if they waver in what they know is the truth."
I looked at the faces around me on Sunday mornings—women weeping with what seemed to be joy, arms raised as they stood swaying to the music, men shouting amens to the other men who marched before us possessed by the Word and the Spirit and the great urgency of sharing the bad news of human nature and the good news of God's chastising rod—and I could not consider myself one of their number, even though I lived in fear for my soul. My father sang with his eyes closed, rocking in his cowboy boots with his hands cupped at his sides as if he were waiting for rain, and my mother pounded out chords on the chipped piano keys. I believed they had a grip on something real, a sensual spirit force that slipped through my fingers and left me feeling empty and cold as I sang the words on the gleaming screen, watching the tambourine player shake her whole body, breasts bobbing beneath her blue paisley dress.
But when I wrapped my hands around the handle of my wooden bat and ripped a pitch into the outfield, the crack echoing down the barrel into my chest, it was like the voice of God in my throat, and my body and spirit flew together down the baseline.
* * *
When I was old enough for Little League, my father drove me to Libby for that year's draft. Libby sat twenty miles east of Troy, which meant an hour round-trip most weeknights through the summer, but it was worth it because the Libby All-Stars could go all the way to the Little League World Series if they were good enough. Troy had an unsanctioned league where the uniforms featured business names like Acco Cable and ASARCO, the local silver mine. In Libby the teams were named for professional clubs, and the draft for rookies—that year's pool of ten-year-olds—mimicked a major league tryout.
On the day of the draft, all of the coaches gathered at the Libby baseball complex, two adjacent fields sandwiched between the Kootenai River and the railroad tracks. My father and I drove the twenty miles from Troy mostly in silence, my belly awash with excitement when we crunched into the gravel parking lot behind the backstop and joined the crowd. The coaches ran us through the drills, fielding grounders, shagging flies. Then we each got ten swings to show what we could do at the plate. I performed well enough to rate as a top pick, rattling several pitches against the sheet-metal fence in the outfield. As in the major leagues, the worst team had first dibs in the draft, and I was dismayed to learn by the end of the evening that I'd been chosen by the Mets. But once I met my teammates for practice, a group of scrawny boys nearly all smaller than me, I accepted my fate. Though my father played for the Dodgers in Little League and had rooted for them ever since, I searched the box scores every day for Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry and Ray Knight, counting the days to the postseason, when my grandfather would lend us the little black-and-white box and I'd get to watch the pros at home.
My mother grew up without a television, and when she and my father married, living in a tipi for a year before building a house on the land they purchased on a mountain overlooking Troy, they shared a vision of home as a refuge from the outside world. My sister was born there, delivered by my father, as I had been. In our living room the couch and the wooden rocking chair faced the piano, an upright in the German style with braces beneath the keyboard, a thick back panel, and a heavy lid made for holding flowers or clocks or lamps for reading sheet music. The hallway on the main floor featured an inset bookcase, which held the Encyclopedia Britannica Great Books collection and my mother's eclectic library, Chaim Potok's The Chosen, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small. My father read the newspaper and the Bible and considered other reading frivolous, rousting me from my bedroom to pull weeds when I lounged there too long with a book. Baseball was the one crack in the fortress, the one out from garden chores, the only excuse for television to invade the protective bubble of faith and homegrown food and music my parents had created for us.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Down from the Mountaintop by JOSHUA DOLEZAL. Copyright © 2014 Joshua Dolezal. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS.
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