Day-Maker #26

The food for the Encounter Retreat send-off dinner was finished at exactly 6:00, the time dinner was scheduled to start. It took 15 minutes to prepare (with some helping hands), the exact amount of time between Mass and dinner.

The Trip Home

I should tell about it. It was safe with no snow on the road and lots of quick and easy highway driving. We made excellent time, and then I decided to keep going. I ended up in northern Virginia at my home parish just in time for Stations of the Cross. Literally exactly as they were starting.

New Toys and Snow

My new favorite toy : a nail gun. It makes life so much easier, gives you an adrenaline rush the first time you pick one up, and just makes you feel hardcore. I got to play with one our last day of work in Hurley. Once more it rained, so once more we worked inside on the addition. We mostly did our best not to mess up unskilled labor, such as nailing boards to the wall to allow room for insulation, moving two-b’fours, and putting up insulation.

Sonny’s son and the carpenter put beams in the roof, ran wire to the light switches and lights (they worked!), and build some more walls. Even more than using the nail gun, I enjoyed watching them work, seeing what they were doing. At first, I tried to do this discretely, because I thought it might be awkward. However, after Phil made enough comments about how they’d “learn y’uns real good” and after they didn’t care, I realized that everyone else saw it as a learning process, and it was okay for me to watch.

Equally as awesome, it was okay for me to listen. When Sonny came out, we had three men who worked or had worked the mines. Sonny was in poor health because of it; his son still worked in the mines. They exchanged stories that I only half-understood for the jargon. Some of what I did understand amazed me. They told about working hours on end in mine shafts not tall enough to stand in, and how hard it was to eat lunch laying down. They told about moving from one company to another for better conditions – and how this had ended disastrously for some men they knew. They made jokes about “scabs” who broke picket lines in Kentucky. My favorite was about a scab who drove past 20 men picketing. Those men told him he could go through – but they didn’t say anything about the hundred men further in. Those men picked up the man’s truck and flipped it!

We left an unfinished project, but some good friends. Which, overall, is what I’d rather do.

When we got back to the community center after our final day of work, we received some frightening news. Snow was coming! It brought us into Hurley and it was going to bring us out. After much discussion and some time spent on Weather Underground, we decided to stick out the night so as to avoid driving in the dark and the snow, and pray for wet (but not icy) roads the next morning. We found highway driving that wasn’t as direct as our route in had been, but it seemed a wiser idea.

Then we headed downstairs for the community cookout. It always includes live bluegrass music from the family of an active and wonderful member of the community center. Cecil had brought his mandolin for the express purpose of playing with them, and they got excited when he told them he wanted to join for the night. They played for an hour and a half and we joined in for as many songs as we knew and enjoyed those we didn’t.

Wednesday

Wednesday something awful happened: it rained. I had been looking forward to being up on the roof all week – as I mentioned in a previous post, I love heights. Sadly, not only are roofs dangerous in the rain, but also, you want the felt dry when you put the waterproof shingles on. Just common sense.

So Wednesday was a day of waiting. It was also Ash Wednesday, and, for me, fasting and waiting at the same time is a challenge. We waited for the rain to slack, then we moved some two-by-fours. (The Hurley men almost eliminated the preposition, calling them “two-b’fours.” I want to adopt this term.) Then we waited for Sonny’s son and the carpenter to come to tell us what to do. When we realized they wouldn’t be in until the afternoon, Phil gave us another task.

Remember how the house is on the side of the mountain, with a “ravine” on one side? Well, when Phil and co. took the tar paper off the ravine side, they used the same strategy we did – they dumped it into the yard. So the side of the mountain was littered with scraps of tar paper. Our job was to throw it across the road and then down the mountainside toward the creek. That would “clean up” the yard.

I scrambled up and down the nearly vertical wall of wet grass and rocks, using a rake to grab bits of tar paper. Marie, Bebe, and Cecil helped from various angles, and they were more diligent than I was about making sure the trash made it across the road. I just enjoyed playing on the mountain. After we had “cleaned,” we found more scraps of thing to burn, more to keep us warm in the dribble than to serve a real purpose.

However, on Wednesday, we spent a good deal of time talking with Phil and Sonny. I love hearing people talk about their lives. We’d chatted some on Tuesday afternoon as the “experts” worked on the roof, and now we had the chance to get to know them even better.

At last, however, Sonny’s son came without the carpenter. We worked with him to figure out how to place beams in the roof of the addition to make hanging insulation and dry wall easier. We proved our collective incompetence with a hammer, but also our enthusiasm, and Sonny’s son very kindly did not judge us.

Amazing Grace

Tuesday night, we went to Crissy church with her. With 30-40 college students joining them (there were groups from Holy Cross and Boston College), we swelled the congregation to four or five times its normal size. The people of the church welcomed us enthusiastically. They had acquired a screen and projector since the last time I was in Hurley, which made singing with the choir a lot easier.

When I came to Hurley as a sophomore, it was one of my first real experiences in a non-Catholic church. By now, I realize that format-wise, it holds fairly true to a non-denominational church, or even some denominations, especially for a non-Sunday service. Content-wise, however, the church is always uniquely and beautifully Hurley. After a brief prayer, we began in song -- hymns that I didn't know, sung with a bluegrass twang. Since the words tended to repeat and the tunes were fairly simple, I could sing along pretty quickly (especially now that someone was projecting the words!). "Amazing Grace" made an appearance, as well as "This Little Light," which helped as well.

Then the pastor stood up. He thanked us all for coming, both to the church and to Hurley. He then introduced the pastor, assistant pastor, and youth pastor from a church in a neighboring town. They were hosting an evangelism event that involved bringing in some wrestlers I didn't know, who would give their testimony of how they came to Christ. It was directed at people who normally wouldn't set foot in a church. He asked for our prayers and help spreading the word.

Next, the pastor introduced a visiting pastor, who would be preaching tonight. If you came up with the stereotype of a Southern preacher, you would end up with something close to this man. He didn't say much on hellfire and brimstone, and his topics were more on love and acceptance (although he touched on the evils of evolution) and the saving power of Jesus. He spoke at a furious rate with passion and dynamics and a myriad of Scripture references, some direct quotes, some paraphrases, and some that I couldn't tell, because he was quoting neither the NAB nor the NRSV. To be honest, he went on so many tangents that I found his points hard to follow, although I know he said a lot of valuable things that other members of CCM picked up on.

At the end of the preaching, the visiting pastor asked if there was anyone who was unsure of their faith, who wanted our prayers to give their life to Christ. One boy from one of the other schools raised his hand. He agreed to come up to the front and pray with the pastor. I don't know if he was more stoic or less serious than other people I have seen answer such calls, but his face didn't match his answer. Even though it is none of my business, I want to know his story.

After the preaching, we prayed for members of the congregation who needed healing. Anyone who wanted healing of any sort was encouraged to come forward. Then the congregation stretched out their hands toward the person in need of healing, while the pastor prayed over him or her, calling on God, His Son, and His Holy Spirit to come down upon this person and bring healing. It seemed very Biblical : most Christians I know (self included) have a tendency to relegate miracles of healing to the New Testament and forget that we can ask God for such things ourselves. And the confidence that God would provide blew me away. Maybe it's just my weakness, but I have a modicum of doubt -- not in God's love or His ability to heal, but that He will simply because I asked. This man praying had no doubt of His God's power or His listening ear or His outstretched hand.

He then opened the floor for prayer requests from the congregation. People offered petitions for relatives, and the pastor lifted them up in prayer. The members of the church backed him up with soft prayers and quietly enthusiastic "amens" from all around us, so that they formed a back-up chorus to his loud voice. Finally, the pastor thanked us again, and church was over.

Will It Burn?

Tuesday was the warmest day of the week, and therefore, the day when we were told to make fire. Sonny's son and a few other Hurley-ites spent the day on the roof, replacing rotting plywood and laying roofing felt. However, on Monday, we had dumped all the tar paper over the edge of the roof. It now layered the ground beneath the roof. So Phil charged us with gathering all the tar paper and burning it in the backyard. We stirred yesterday's fire until we found a tiny flame, and then fed it small pieces of tar paper. By the time Cecil had been summoned as a gopher for the men -- the vestiges of gender roles clung to our job -- we had a raging fire, sending foul-smelling black smoke into the clear mountain air.

We spent most of the day gather tar paper to feed the fire and playing with the cat that hung around the house because Sonny and Donna fed it. At the end of the day, we clambered back up to the roof and gave a small hand with the shingling. However, we took off a little early, because we wanted time to get into the mountains behind the community center before it started raining the next day.

A "road" quickly becomes a "path" and alternates between "path" and "creek" behind the community center as it leads up to the side of the mountain. I knew where we could find old mines sunk into the mountain sides and I led the charge up the paths. Half an hour up the mountain, we found Cair Paravel : an abandoned building, overgrown by ivy. The roof was completely gone; only one wall and some bits of grey brick and wood remained. We could tell by the broken pulley systems and rusted propellers that it had once served some sort of a function for the mine, but its purpose is lost. Past the building, we found old rail tracks. And then, we found round tunnels sunk into the side of the mountain. It looked like someone had found coal and just kept digging. We could peer into them but not very far, before darkness took over.

Later on in the week, we found out that the mine came from the 1960s. I was shocked. I had expected that it was at least 40 years older than that.