You see, that’s Amos. He’s out there. Weird and fearless. Because one time I said to him something about incurring the wrath of God and he said, “To hell with God.” See what I mean? He’s fearless. He doesn’t fear the power of the Almighty. I still like Amos but I can’t say for sure why that is. Something about his peculiarity—he’s just plain different and that makes him interesting. He’s a loose cannon loaded with rusty nails.
So I said to Amos … what about evil, what about the devil? He gave me a stiff look, the same look Mr. Spock used to give Doctor McCoy in the old Star Trek series. The raised eyebrow over the skeptical and somewhat condescending expression.
“The devil?” Amos said. “So you think the allegorical devil is a free agent or what? Or is he under contract with God?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“For chrissake, Bill, you think like a stone-eyed Spanish inquisitor from the dark ages. I mean even semi-enlightened Christians are bothered by the philosophical problem of God allowing evil. God is the maker and master of the universe. So if he’s pissed off at the devil, he can obliterate the sonofabitch and be done with it. God can do anything God wants. God’s all powerful and unlimited. Right?”
“God allows the devil to exist in order to tempt man, to posit the issue of free will in black and white terms.”
“You’re a smart fellow, Bill. You really are, but when it comes to religious discussions you’re an unqualified, unlettered and unbearable idiot. Let’s consider for a moment, let’s shed some light. God, the absolute creator and foundation of all there is, of everything everywhere, the unmoved mover of all potentials past, present, and future, finds it necessary to create a pathetic creature called Man, put him in a hostile world where every fanged and hairy creature wants to eat his sorry ass, where carnivorous bacteria and deadly viruses are ready to decimate his body, and where killer asteroids hurdle through space, then if that’s not bad enough, well, shit, let’s throw a monster named Satan into the mix whose unbending enterprise it is to tempt these poor losers—who are barely able to survive to begin with—and then burn and torture them in eternal fire when they fuck up. Talk about schizophrenic.”
That was the beginning to the end. Amos, despite his odd charm and probing wittiness, had pushed me too far. I mean, it was a matter of lack of reverence; and not that I am an uptight true believer—no, it was more than that, it was an issue of personal unease.
In any case, I stopped calling Amos and never returned his calls. We went our separate ways. No ugly scene, no hurt or hard feelings. Just a parting of the ways.
A year or so later I went up to Wyoming for a kayaking adventure with two of my good friends from church, Wayne and Andy. It was summertime—July to be exact. Andy was a world-class outdoor adventurer, and for ten years we’d been members of the same church, and he had all the maps, experience, and expertise necessary for arranging river trips. We had planned a foray down the Yellowstone River, covering a couple twenty-mile stretches where there were, as best we could tell. No life-threatening rapids or waterfalls.
At the time I was sharing a house with Wayne, who was recently divorced and also a world-class river man who had once worked for the park service up in southern Alaska. Between the three of us, we had plenty of experience and first-rate equipment, and the trip promised to be one of those highlights you look back on fondly for years to come.
Amos was just a memory. He was someone I’d let go from my life.
Just before we left Orange County for the great north country, I had an odd premonition. I had also grown a beard, and I thought it made me look a little like Jesus, which of course seems vain but was curiously irresistible. I don’t know how to explain it; it just felt good to look at myself in the mirror and run my fingers over my beard. Maybe it because I had just turned thirty-three and the beard was a symbolic thing, if you understand what I mean. The premonition was about someone dying, although in the hazy illogic of the dreamscape it wasn’t clear who that person was—yet the awareness of impending death was very clear. Some sort of transformation from one realm to another.
Now when you think about it, that sort of revelation prior to a whitewater kayak adventure might have served as a warning, or at least a wake-up call. But it didn’t. Because the other part of the dream involved Amos, and I don’t really remember in what capacity he appeared in the dream. Except that it was one of those dream-scenes that has no reason or sensible foundation from a real-world perspective and only makes sense within its own coded structure. But maybe you’ll get this.
Amos was monkey wrenching a big engine, although in the dream I thought we were supposed to be fixing the brakes. I had on a parachute that I had packed it myself and we were waiting to finish a race. It was dry and hot and my nose started bleeding and dripped into the palm of my hand, but then from that point on the dream got so weird and nutsy I can’t explain it in any normal terms. In the final scene Amos’ face is above me in a massive swirling cloud, in multicolored refracted light, and he’s trying hard to pull me up but I don’t understand why. He says something about how death purifies everyone and religion is just a giant scam to keep the poor from killing the rich. Then the dream ended and I woke up and my T-shirt was damp with perspiration and then I was feeling uneasy. Vivid dreams! Real weird is what they are.
So next we’re actually on the river, me, Wayne, and Andy. It’s a long tranquil stretch and we’ve paddled close together for an opportunity to talk about the rapids we’d just run. Andy was an expert at coming right out with what was on his mind and he tended toward colorful descriptions. “I almost peed my pants when the suction around that big boulder started pulling me in,” he said. “I figured I was going under.”
“I haven’t been through anything that exciting in five years,” Wayne offered, still half out of breath. “I thought I was in control until that boulder changed the current. Praise Jesus! That was one black and white situation where fear seemed totally justified.”
“I could go for a cup of coffee,” I said.
“How many did you have this morning?” Wayne asked. He ran his fingers back through his mop of hair in order to get a wet hank out of his eye.
“Just two.”
“More like six,” he chortled, tilting his head in amusement.
“Billy boy recently bought a condo on the river denial,” Andy chimed in.
“We’re only talking about coffee for Christ’s sake,” I retorted.
“Doctors say caffeine is okay but only up to a point,” Wayne said. “And the same for wine and beer. Cigarettes are just plain bad news, they’re killers.”
“Doctors are the weirdest bunch in the world,” I said. “Behind their bulwark of false authority, behind their self-indoctrinated sense of superiority and their white coats and cunning intelligence, they’re too often unrighteous and perhaps even incompetent.”
I felt suddenly very peculiar, because for a moment I sounded like Amos sounding off, yet that certainly wasn’t my intention.
Wayne made a serious face, leaned forward and said to Andy, “Don’t worry, it’s only the fear talking. The residual fear of that last awesome run.” They both laughed.
“Yeah, right, boys, but what’s coming will dismiss your flip hilarity in a big hurry. Have either of you jokers checked the map? If memory serves—and I believe it does—we’re coming up on Arbuckle’s Canyon. And with the deep snow pack that’s melting on the mountaintops it’s going to be rougher than anything we’ve hit so far. Much rougher.”
“Yeah, sure,” Andy said arrogantly. “It’s an ever-circulating network of challenge and success. And I am a man of perfect faith and therefore completely fearless in the face of danger.” He crossed his arms in triumph.
Wayne leaned forward with his forearms balanced on the lip of the kayak’s cockpit, resting the twin-bladed paddle in the palms of his hands. He grunted and lifted his hands into the air. “Fear in the face of true faith is a metaphor for weakness and disbelief.”
I fingered my beard, which was thicker now. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“With all due respect, Bill, I’m not sure you have enough insight. Emotions are the place cards of the soul. Don’t be so touchy.”
“I wish Amos was here,” I said. Like a reflex that happened of its own volition.
“Great idea. From what I hear, he’s collecting unemployment. Hangs out in his garage all day and drinks beer and smokes pot.”
“Who the heck told you that?”
“It’s true,” Wayne said. “But the world needs atheists and losers—it’s part of the psychosis of modern life. It shows the devil at work. Amos is an atheist who thinks he’s a philosopher. He probably supports abortion and gay marriage.”
“Well, as far as I can tell, sin, adultery, booze, drugs … all of it, it’s all against the word of God. I mean those people are pariahs,” Andy said, assured of his own clarity.
I remembered something Amos had once said, about Thomas Jefferson and how he had remarked that ‘Christianity was the most perverted system that had ever shone on man’. I glanced over at Wayne and Andy, framed in their auras of self-appointed righteousness, and suddenly it dawned on me. Like a revelation from a cut-glass prism refracting a great bouquet of brilliant light.
“Could omniscient God who knows the future ever find the omnipotence to change his own future mind?” I asked.
They both seemed puzzled, worried perhaps. Wondering if I was losing my wits.
All three of us turned our eyes to the river. The water was transforming before us, from a glassy sheen of soft indifference to the boiling rage of white rapids. But that was okay with me, because as far as I could tell, Amos was right, and the truth of the river would purify all three of us. The fathers and the sons and the unholy ghosts. All busy with the business of perpendicular survival. The rest is frosting on the cake. The sort of stuff church ladies talk about when everything is easy and good and when there are sunny days and laughter and picnics with apple and raisin salads. Not so much like in the dawn of time when a saber-toothed cat grabs your precious child and takes her screaming into the shadows of the forest. To a place where wailing ceases and flesh consumes flesh; where God turns the other cheek, embarrassed by the falsity of promises and proclamations of grace, and Heaven’s tacit agreement with the merriment of the beast and all guilt-ridden notions of original sin.
So tell me boys … saved? Saved from what?
End
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G. D. McFetridge, iconoclast and philosopher, writes from his wilderness home in Montana’s majestic Sapphire Mountains. His fiction and essays are published in academic journals and reviews as well as commercial literary magazines, across America, in Canada and Australia, India, Ireland, Germany and the UK.
