Magical Wal-Mart Reindeer On The Soul

A few days before Christmas Cassidy and I walked into Wal-Mart and saw a reindeer.

Well, Cassidy didn’t really walk. She was riding in a shopping cart. And it wasn’t really a reindeer. It was, in fact, a middle-aged minimum-wage greeter wearing an enormous pair of foam antlers (with bells on the ends, no less.) And this particular reindeer didn’t seem to be overflowing with endless amounts of yuletide joy, either. She was plainly exhausted; most likely at the very end of a tedious shift of smiling at shoppers as they came in, and then checking their receipts as they went out. Not a job likely to fill anyone with Christmas spirit seven hours, one half-hour lunch break, and two fifteen-minute state-mandated breaks into their work day.

But Cassidy was convinced that what she was seeing was, in fact, a real reindeer. She oooohed. She pointed. She repeatedly made the sign for reindeer: thumbs pressed against her temples palmed outstretched, with fingers waving. When I seemed insufficiently impressed she repeated the entire process, as if to say “Look Dad! Can’t you see her? A real, live magical reindeer is right in front of us!”

And then…

Cassidy is one of those people. The kind that is capable of walking into Wal-Mart and seeing reindeer. I’m the other kind of person. The kind that is only capable of walking into Wal-Mart and seeing tired, minimum-wage employees. Or so I thought. Lately I have come to the conclusion that, like my daughter, I have a disturbing tendency to look at things that are self-evidently one thing, and see something entirely different. Or, to be more specific, to see things in ways that irrational and self-serving, rather than seeing them for what they are: namely, bleak.

Doubt. It’s a powerful emotion. It’s also why this blog hasn’t been updated in almost six months. I haven’t been writing at all, really. The tiny Wal-Mart reindeer weigh too heavily upon my soul.

X X X

Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve been working a lot. And I actually wrote a couple of posts: long, rambling weird ones. But I ended up scrapping them instead of putting them up on the blog. They were all too angry, too depressing, or too crazy sounding for me to inflict upon my friends and family. A typical example was “The Redneck as Jew,” an angry 4,000 word tirade about how rural Americans are treated by urban Americans in the 21st Century, with historical references, footnoting, and quotes from Napoleon.

So, yeah: you’re not going to get to read those.

But I’m also not going to lie to you. I’ve been having serious misgivings about my life out here. Not that I have any desire – or even ability - to live anywhere else. The dust has been ground too deeply into my personality for that. Midian is who I am. For someone like me, the trip to the desert can only be a one-way trip. Every place else is now and forever someplace else: one that can never be home. That can never really ever be real, even. But the vision I had for my life out here has eroded from the noble down to the grubby. Midian Ranch is a dirty, difficult place to live. Simply put, it’s a huge amount of work to live off-grid in a desert. Nothing you do here is ever easy. Everything is always breaking, freezing, blowing down, or simply disintegrating under the twin pressures of wind and sun (like my greenhouse, thank-you-very-much Mother Nature.) You never really get clean – not in the sense that townies and city dwellers think of clean – and your home never really gets clean either. It’s a never-ending struggle to hold the line at “mildly dingy.”

For a long time this lifestyle felt principled to me. Moral. An adventure. The constant struggle to bend wind, sun, and water to my will. To create my own personal paradise, free from the influences and controls of the outside world. [Solar panels.] To take the meaning from words like Freedom, Self-Reliance, and Independence and craft those meanings into a physical reality. [Wind mills.] To work. To live differently. To let the desert heal me, challenge me, and inspire me. To be a 21s Century frontiersman. [Spring Water.] To be a living roleplaying game character. To be science fiction. To settle Mars, at least in a metaphorical sense.

Now I increasingly feel that I’m see things for the way they really are. Doubt stalks my days, and my dreams are minimum wage Wal-Mart employees with antlers. I’m no visionary, no frontiersman, and no romantic figure. I’m a middle-aged, failed misfit who lives in poverty and obscurity with his unhappy wife, handicapped daughter, and oddball friend in a bunch of old doublewides and shipping containers on worthless land that nobody else wanted. My work and life have had no meaning, nor shall they. My exercises in preparedness and independence are exactly what they appear to me: evidence of a paranoid, deteriorating mind.

Or at least that’s how I feel on some days. Others are better. Those are the days on which I pretend to see the reindeer.

X X X

At its heart, there are three problems for me: or, perhaps, for someone like me. (You know me. You know the type.) Each is unique and horrid in its own special way. Each is a treasured problem, to be polished unceasingly like the barrels of assault weapons in that imaginary, secret basement compartment each of us has constructed in our souls.

(Okay… maybe that’s just me. Though, thankfully, some days involve less obsessive metaphorical barrel cleaning than others.)

The first - and perhaps the most important - is the obvious truth that changing locale doesn’t automatically change who you are. (Not that I saw that.) I wasn’t able to leave Jason Walters Stressed Out Messenger Service Owner behind when I relocated to the Black Rock Desert. I should have. It was part of my goal to kill that bastard as dead as cordwood by moving out here. But he was much, much more a part of me than I had expected. Taking him out of his element didn’t kill him. It just made him stronger, and now I find myself mired in numerous complex business schemes that have little to do with writing, building Midian, being a father, or simply having a good time. It’s like that part of me is a hydra: I chopped off Flash Messenger, and out grew DOJ Logistics, IPR, Hero Games, and Blackwyrm to take its place. All with the best of intentions, of course. Economic independence and whatnot. Puritan work ethic and so forth. Pulling my weight and blah blah blah.

It’s all a bunch of obsessive-compulsive crap. Or fear. A subconscious fear of becoming something other than what I was, even as I consciously strove to do just the opposite. But what’s the point of abandoning a society if you just tie yourself right back to it? It’s like I’m Gulliver and his Lilliputians all at the same time, perpetually binding myself to the ground when I could be flying around on the city of Laputa, throwing rocks at rebellious cities… or something. I might not be remembering Gulliver’s Travels properly.

In any case, the second is that it’s almost impossible for me to be happy for very long. Or, at the very least, I don’t seem to be able to be happy to the same extent or in the same manner that other people are happy. I can only catch fleeting glimpses of a happiness that slips through my fingers like sand when I try to grasp them. (Or maybe I flatter myself in to thinking this unique. Is it like that for you too?) When I was young I tried to inspire those glimpses with drugs. It didn’t work. As I got older, I switched to looking for them with alcohol. No luck there either. Then I came out to the wilderness, still looking for them in the vastness. No luck here either… though I don’t feel the lack quite as much.

Maybe it’s the same thing. Maybe that’s what happiness is: a lack of unhappiness. Or maybe that’s just what most of us settle for. Or maybe that’s just another minimum wage worker in antlers too.

X X X

The first two problems are ones that you, gentle reader, may have already dealt with in your life. The third and final problem is perhaps peculiar just to me. (Or, again, I may be flattering myself). It is this: I’ve grown to distrust pleasure, comfort, and convenience. When I spend time at Casa Azul (my mother’s lovely house in Gerlach), Reno, or in the Bay Area, I feel somehow guilty. Uncomfortable deep within my center; modern society, it seems, has become almost physically repulsive to me. It’s like central heating, nearby grocery stores, good restaurants, unarmed neighbors (okay: that would just be the Bay Area), normal water pressure, “stick houses,” and homes that lack entire packs of animals that consume all possible organic table scraps are somehow sinful, unclean things. It feels like I’ve violated a religious prescription… which seems to suggest that living out here has become my religion.

Or maybe it means I’ve become a genuine desert rat: by definition a one-way trip to nowhere. Or at least to here. But where is that? Somewhere… or nowhere? I’m uncertain. I have doubts.

I have magical Wal-Mart reindeer on the soul.

Which reminds me: I didn’t finish my story, did I? You know: the one actually about magical Wal-Mart reindeer. The one that ended with “And then…?” That one.

And then the lady with the reindeer antlers noticed Cassidy. She smiled, waved back, and said “Aren’t you a little darling? Merry Christmas!” She even looked a little less tired.

Cass waved back a final time as we rolled away, and then turned to me with a smug look, as if to say “See? I told you she was a magical reindeer.”

And of course she wasn’t. She was a tired, middle-aged, vaguely humiliated woman making $8.25 an hour to make certain nobody steals Monster High Dolls from the Sparks Wal-Mart.

And yet maybe - just maybe - for an instant, if you squinted very, very hard, she was.

“Is Winter Finally Over?” and random thoughts on being blessed

[Note: It.Was.Hot.Today! Finally! This posting is a little more “stream of consciousness” than I like for things to be, but it’s time I returned to blogging. So there we are.]

It’s been a strange time out in the Blackrock Desert, but I think that it finally FINALLY won’t snow anymore. Really: it was snowing last week (the final week of May), though not particularly hard. In any case, it’s lovely today and I shouldn’t bitch, what the rest of the country being 90-degrees and riddled with man-eating tornadoes.

Though it’s been a hard winter, things are well here at Midian Ranch. Not easy, of course: these are hard times. But physically well, which counts for a lot. Now comes another frightening fire season. Fortunately our firebreak situation is greatly improved, with 30-foot cleared areas around the (now expanded) warehousing area, greenhouse, and generator shed. The burn areas around the homestead have also been improved, though for various reasons you can’t just drive a front-end loader around them, so there’s a lot of “hand” work involved in that process, not all of which is finished. But very soon it will be.

Cass is doing well: healthy, large, and developing well. She’s trying to walk, can stand a little, and is using her arms in the appropriate manner. She points when she wants something. Cass also speaks a little at this point, though she’s sometimes hard to understand due to the unusual shape of her mouth and tongue - though she says a lot words and phrases clearly enough. These include: mom, dad, hi, hi dad, Hi There(!), water, and what is it (?) ( which comes out sounding kind of like “izit,” but you know what she means.) Her sign language vocabulary is now large enough that I don’t always know what she’s trying to tell me: I’m guessing it’s somewhere between 30 and 40 words.

She also knows most of the Wiggles dances. Really.

I have no standard for comparison, but I would say that she’s 90% pretty much just a normal, terrible two year old (almost) - and that remaining 10% isn’t what I expected. It’s more like eccentricity than impairment, though perhaps I’m subconsciously putting a happy face on her disorder. #Shrug# Doesn’t really matter, does it? Nobody out here at Midian but us chickens… literally.

With my dad’s help I managed to buy an excellent 28-foot shipping container from the Bay Area and get it out here. It’s got an unusual ceiling height of almost 10 feet, making it perfect for a shop. I’ve begun the epic task of moving everything car, motorcycle, and small engine over to it, as well as constructing shelves inside. It’s going to be an enormous amount of work getting it just right, but it will free up a tremendous amount of space for work-related storage. Which, if everything goes according to plan, should prove incredibly important as we expand the operation to include two more specialized retail websites.

The money situation is naturally dreadful. But, then again, it usually is, so I’m worried but not particularly impressed. That’s one of the many advantages to living on land you own outright, working on your land, and having a certain amount of your diet come straight from that land: there’s only so much poverty can do to you. And our poverty is intermittently spiked with plenty, due to our own work, the generosity of others, and occasional good fortune so well timed that it can only be providence. So it isn’t all that bad if you have a certain amount of faith.

In conclusion, the various people, dogs, puppies, cats, and chickens at Midian Ranch are getting along passably well in trying times and under difficult circumstances, which is a great blessing.
Possibly it’s the only blessing you need.

The Angel And The Sage

The Angel And The Sage [a parable about being the parent of a child with Down syndrome]

An Angel tumbled from heaven and struck the ground with such force that she broke her wings. Fortunately, she fell near the cottage of a Sage, who found her and took her home with him. He put her in his bed, tended her wounds, and cared for her until she awoke one day.

“Thank you for your taking care of me Sage,” exclaimed the Angel, “Soon my wings will heal, and I’ll be able to fly back to Heaven where I belong.”

This made the Sage very sad, because he could clearly see that her wings were forever broken and could never, ever heal. However, because he was a sage, he was also wise enough to know that he could never tell her this: for if she lost her hope of returning to Heaven, she would surely perish from sorrow. But he also could not lie to an angel, as she would surely know. So he thought very carefully before he spoke.

“Angel,” he said, “It may be that one day you will fly back to Heaven. But until then you will have to learn to live like a normal person. You shall have to learn to walk, speak, learn, work, and play like the rest of us, so that you can be happy until that day comes.”

The Angel agreed to learn to do these things, and he taught them to her. In time she became a special and loving woman, adored by everyone in the Sage’s community for her good cheer and compassion, and was happy even though her wings never healed.

Then one day to the Sage’s surprise the Angel unfolded her broken wings and flew away, leaving him to wonder: who was really teaching whom?

[Your child is already the Angel. Are you wise enough to be the Sage?]

The Coals, Waiting To Become Ash

Yesterday the United States Gypsum Corporation (or USG) announced the January 31st 2011 closing of its mine and plant in Empire, Nevada. Residents of the Empire – the last company town in the west – will have until June 20th 2011 to leave their homes, at which time the mine, plant, and entire town will be “idled.” One hundred employees and their families will have to leave the area to search for work and housing.

Those are the bare facts of the story. The reality is, of course, far less sterile and far more terrible. What is actually going to happen is that my community is going to die – and, as I predicted in the introduction to An Unforgiving Land, a way of life is going to pass forever from the earth, largely un-mourned save by the few of us that have lived it.



Empire Nevada has been in existence since the 1920s. Many of the people who work for USG there are second or third generation miners and factory workers. I personally have a friend that worked for the company for 42 years. It’s a very small but relatively pleasant place whose roads are lined with shade trees and slightly ramshackle duplexes. It has a community center, a small airport, a swimming pool, a golf course, and two churches (Protestant and Catholic), all backstopping the enormous edifice of concrete and steel that is the board plant. All of this is set back a half mile from the road. The first thing most people see when they approach the town, however, is the Empire Store on 447: the only store in northern Washoe County.

But within a matter of weeks the massive chimneys of that factory, which I have watched billow steam since I first came out here fifteen years ago, will go completely still for the first time in 90 years, and the lights of Empire will wink out one by one until they are no more. All of my friends that live there will be gone, scattered outward into a busy, hostile, and strange world in a slow Diaspora of rural, white, and working-class people who are in many cases unaccustomed to the sheer volume of crap that is 21st century urban life. A way of life – and not the worst one I’ve seen in my 40 years, either – will cease to exist outside of footnotes on Wikipedia and the odd story told to children raised somewhere else.

I suppose I should be angry with the USG Corporation. They would make easy villains, especially to someone who distrusts and dislikes urban America as much as myself. They’re based in Chicago, are a Fortune 500 company, have an annual revenue of 4.61 Billion, and operate 21 gypsum board plants and 14 gypsum mines in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. But, as someone who has operated a business, I find it hard to hate a company for simply trying to survive. A quick glance at the facts show that USG’s been in and out of bankruptcy for years, mostly as the result of a hostile takeover attempt in 1987 and continuing asbestos legislation. It’s stock prices have gone up and down – though mostly down - in an unhealthy manner, and it’s now competing unsuccessfully with cheap imported sheetrock from our BFF (Or is that our master?) China. Simply put: the company as a whole is either not profitable or barely so, and this is a corner they’ve decided to cut in their struggle to meet the conditions of their “Joint Plan of Reorganization,” as their most recent bankruptcy is called.

It’s simple, unpleasant math, administered as is usual in Nevada by faceless men on the other side of a continent.

Of course, the whole “idle” thing is garbage. The factory will never actually reopen, and the town will never repopulate. How could it? Within two years this entire region will be dead, and there will be nothing to attract potential workers to it. USG will wait a year for everything to die down, and then a salvage company will come in and strip everything out of the town right down to the copper piping in the walls. Within 20 years Empire will be little more than foundations, a huge, crumbling industrial structure, a couple of very elderly people who’ve been somehow forgotten about in their little decaying houses, and dying trees.

And, in all likelihood, Gerlach will be a variation on this same, melancholy theme.



Those of you who are familiar with the area know that Gerlach and Empire – technically referred to as the Gerlach-Empire Area – are really the same town. Empire is by-and-large the “neighborhood” with the families, churches, and people who work. Gerlach is the place with the hippies, bars, and retirees. Together they have a population of roughly 400, counting the people who live in the scattering of farms and ranches nearby: just enough people to have 75 school-age children between them and support a restaurant, a store, two gas stations, and three bars.

Now, much as the death of a Siamese twin quickly slays her sister, Gerlach is going to die, because a community without children is dead. 68 of our school-age children are going to have to leave, leaving a total of seven. That’s right: seven. Of the 30 employees of our school system, no more than two or three will be allowed to stay, and those only to teach kindergarten through eighth grade. All older children will have to be home schooled – an outcome which Washoe County has dreamed of for years in its never-ending, epic quest to defund its northern territory.

Oh, I know some of you reading this work for the county, and probably don’t like me saying this sort of thing. And most of you are nice people and mean well enough. But in the interest of complete honesty (And what’s the point of a blog – essentially, a public diary - if it isn’t honesty?), during a recent meeting about the closing of our medical clinic, I had some loud, unpleasant, and unfriendly things to say to county representatives. You know the type: the smiling, condescending facemen and power-helmet-women that governments and corporations send out when they have to actually interact with the local rednecks. The kind of people that, when they get back into their white cars with the symbol on the doors, talk about what an ugly place this is and how all the people are old and how they hate driving all the way up here.

These same people have contacted recently about changing what I had to say “for the final record” of the meeting. So let me say this: I only regret that I didn’t say more, harsher things to you, because Washoe County is the enemy of everyone who lives north of the Pyramid Lake Reservation.

Need proof? Let’s review some facts:

1) We had our own law enforcement under a constable system. Washoe County took that away and replaced it with their deputies. (No offense to our two local deputies: this isn’t directed at you personally.)

2) We had our own judge. Washoe County took that away and replaced it with nothing.

3) Washoe County tried to shut our senior center down over a $13,000 budget shortfall, while at the same time approving 1.5 million for an “open area” for the homeless to camp in downtown Reno. (Because, apparently, they’re more deserving than Gerlach’s elderly.)

4) Washoe County failed to warn us or offer to make up the budget shortfall of $160,000 when Nevada Heath Centers decided to shut down our clinic, while fully knowing they were about to get an additional 3.2 million in tax revenue from our area in 2011 with no outlay, due to the natural gas pipeline being built out here.

(I guess now we know why, don’t we? You knew something we didn’t: namely, that a ghost town doesn’t need a doctor.)

5) Washoe County has always wanted to shut down fully or in part our schools, and has never made any secret of this. After all, we don’t want valuable resources being spent on a few scraggily hillbillies in the north when there are real, civilized people down in Reno, now do we? And now they are going to get to do what they have always wanted to do: collect property and sales taxes from us and give us little or nothing in return.

So Merry Christmas Washoe County! I hope that property values continue to plummet, the Ruby Pipeline Corporation gets a property tax exemption from the Feds, and you go bankrupt anyhow.



I understand that in Judaism there is a weeklong period of mourning when a beloved family member dies called shiva. Not being Jewish I’ve never done this, but it strikes me as a good custom. So in the spirit of sitting Shiva for a loved one, I promise as an author to morn Empire using words, as fickle and fleeting as they are. It is the least I can do under the circumstances.

I will remember you as best as I am able with my often-poisonous pen. I promise.

As a father and a husband I have no idea what I’m going to do as Empire dies, pulling Gerlach down into the grave with it. It’s not economic. As long as the post office doesn’t close and UPS and FedEx don’t cancel their routs, we can go on being exactly the same amount of poor and in debt as always. But most of my wife’s friends are going to leave, leaving her with little in the way of a social life. The store will almost undoubtedly close, depriving her of her few little, but highly deserved, spontaneous comforts. The children who would have been my daughter’s friends are going to be gone, and I know that Washoe County will fight hard to give my child as little support as possible. I can expect to spend the next 15 years suing them to get the minimum that federal law requires for her.

Come to think of it, all of my carefully laid plans for the precious, wing-plucked angel I call “daughter” are now royally fucked. She will now not be raised around children she can be friends with for the rest of her life, and she will not be educated exclusively by men and women who are friends of mine. For all I know there will be no other children her age for her to play with at all.

All of these things fill me with impotent rage. But whom can I point the stark finger of accusation at? Who can I make myself feel better by hating? The Chinese for making cheap drywall and (rather cleverly) buying up my nation’s debt? That’s too big of a topic socially and economically for me to even wrap my head around. USG? That’s like hating the ocean for being wet. Corporations are not - and cannot be - charities. Washoe County? That’s like being angry at the vultures for eating a dead rabbit off the road, even when you’re a rabbit. You’re beloved mate was dead anyhow, and it’s simply the vulture’s nature to dine on corpses.

So nobody, really. Nobody to blame. Maybe things just die sometimes: pets, people, towns. Even 100-year-old ways of life. Sometimes the life of a thing is like a campfire you build on a cold night. It’s starts out promisingly with sparks and little flames. Then it roars into its prime, giving off more light and heat than anyone could reasonably expect. Eventually it dies down into coals, which can smolder on for what seems like an eternity. But in the end there is nothing but ash blowing away into the wind.

We who will remain are but the coals, waiting to become ash.

The Raconteur

It’s been a while since I’ve posted to the Midian Ranch Blog. Things have been busy, and I’ve been working on my new blog Jason S Walters, Raconteur. This new blog is dedicated to my writing, editing, and publisher projects in general, rather than Midian Ranch in particular. Feel free to visit: there are sample stories from my collection An Unforgiving Land, a story from Michael Williams’ excellent upcoming novel Trajan’s Arch, and links to Michael Stackpoles’ excellent project The Chain Story. You can even have a look at my bibliography, if you like.

Speaking of which, An Unforgiving Land has been selling well locally out here in Gerlach, and even picked up a favorable review in the Reno Gazette Journal. If you want to read the “lost” story from the book (meaning the one I didn’t include so I could use it for other purposes), Crucified Coyote is also available for free. (Please forgive the incomplete introduction. It will be filled out as another link in The Chain Story soon.)

I will be putting up my next blog post/essay The Firebreaks shortly, detailing what we went through when the Rock Creek Fire nearly destroyed the Midian, Granite, and Iverson Ranches over a month ago. In the meantime know that Cassidy is cute, Tina is beautiful, and we have way too many dogs.

Gerlach 2010 Graduation Speech

For reasons that both flatter and baffle me, I was asked to be the guest speaker at this year's Gerlach High School graduation. Amusingly, I was introduced by one of the graduates as a "well-traveled, published author and man of many professions."

Sheesh: why not just call me a "dubious person of uncertain profession?" In any case, it was a great honor, and a good time was had by all including the always cheerful Baby Cassidy. For your enjoyment the text of my speech:

Graduation: The Passage Into Adulthood

Good Evening everyone. It’s an honor and a pleasure to be here today to witness the transition from childhood to adulthood of these four outstanding young people: Nick Vanosdal, Stephen Chason, Tyler Rinehart, and Daphne Reynolds. (Especially Nick and Daphne: congratulations you two, you made it.) In commemoration of this occasion, I thought it might be a good time to clarify why the ritual of graduation is important, what it means to step away from one’s childhood and into adult life, and what parts of childhood are important to bring forward into adulthood in the hopes that they will keep you eternally youthful in your hearts.

Every culture has its rituals. In fact, in many ways it is ritual that defines culture, giving it shape and form. Birth, marriage, and even death all have their rituals, as does the transition of a child into an adult. In America high school graduation is one the ways in which we mark this transformation, acknowledging it not only as a rite of passage, but also as an accomplishment achieved by the individual using his or her God given abilities.

In other words: you four have earned this. It wasn’t just given to you.
It would be easy for you graduates to be cynical about the ritual of graduation. You put on a long robe, wear a funny hat, listen to people give speeches, and get an official looking piece of paper suitable for framing. Probably you don’t feel any different today than you did yesterday. But such cynicism would be unwarranted. This graduation is a chapter header in the story of your life, a punctuation mark in the paragraph of your existence. It’s important because you are important and because without punctuation, life becomes a single, unsatisfying, and impossible to understand run on sentence.

In short, we are here to celebrate you, and to celebrate with you on this occasion. Feel free at this time to consider us a supporting cast in the movie of your life, because today we – your parents, teachers, and other adults of your community – are here for you. And because tomorrow… your going to have to go get a job.

This concludes your high school years: that uncertain end of childhood. I remember during my final two, miserable years of high school being told that I should be enjoying myself, because these were “the best years of my life.” I’m going to let the four of you in on your first adult secret: those were not the best years of your life. Now is the time where things start to get really interesting: where opportunity, adventure, and yes responsibility begin the unique and often satisfying commingle that will typify much of your life henceforth. Where you get to go out into the wide world and discover who you were always meant to be. And don’t worry: you were meant to be somebody. Now it’s up to you to find out exactly who that might be.

Don’t be concerned: if you need to come back here for a while, we’ll be here. If, after going out into the world on your voyage of discovery, you wish to return here and join us, we’ll be happy to have you. Know that you have this community as a fixed point on the map of your lives. Of course, don’t expect it to be precisely the same. The people who were your teachers, the people who are your families, and other adults of this town: as of now we’re just people like you, making our way through life as best we can.

And that is another part of the doorway you’ve just stepped through. You just moved from being someone else’s responsibility to being responsible for yourselves. Eventually, ready or not, you will in turn be responsible for others. (Trust me: it’s not as easy as it looks.) One day, if you are very lucky, you may even sit where your parents sit today, feeling the pride in your own child they feel in you.

Finally, what should you bring through that doorway as you take this final step from the world of children into the world of adults? There are many useful things. Innocence, of the thoughtful kind that some people are fortunate to carry throughout their lives. Imagination, which is a profoundly useful part of any profession. A sense of wonder at the world, which will serve to keep you young should you live to be a hundred. And compassion for others, which is the kernel of all wisdom and the wellspring from which grows a family of your own.

In conclusion, congratulations on your graduation Class of 2010: not only from high school onto your further education, but from the final stage of your childhood into the first stage of your adulthood. Say a final goodbye to the life you have known for the last four long years, and prepare to embrace the life that awaits you. For it you do that, that life will embrace you in return.

-Jason Walters, 2010

Geppetto’s Bench

A strange thing happened two or three months ago: I stopped being the father of a Poor Retarded Daughter, and simply became a father. It was a complete transition, like the sudden, shocking passage from desert storm to sunlight one often encounters out here. I’m not completely certain when the transition happened, either - though I can speculate about why. I also won’t pretend that I fully understand my own emotions: my own heart can be as obscure to me as, surely, yours can be to you; filled one minuet with raging waters, another will calm, beautiful sunrises. But I will wade through the foggy murk of my feelings in that hopes that, should anyone reading this find himself or herself in the same situation as me, it might serve as a humble beacon, leading you from ocean to shore.

***

One reason for this transition was almost certainly Cassidy herself. It simply became impossible to feel sorry on a deep, emotional level for such a friendly, good-natured, loving, and quixotic child. Of course, people upon occasion say extremely strange things to me. Recently, while I was at the wake of a well-liked Gerlach resident, a very nice lady came up to me and asked if my daughter was Cassidy. When I responded that she was, the lady said to me “I had six children, the last when I was 40. But she turned out fine – there was nothing wrong with her. If I knew then when I know now, I would have been too scared to have her.” When I replied that Cassidy makes an extremely good Cassidy and that we loved her very much, the lady became embarrassed and excused herself.

She needn’t have. I wasn’t upset with her. It’s no crime to not be able to express yourself well under unfamiliar circumstances - and she really is a very nice lady. And what I told her was no platitude: Cassidy does make a very good Cassidy, and we do love her very much. That is part of the unseen transition that happened when I wasn’t looking. Not the love (I’ve always loved her) but the emotional understanding that having Down syndrome doesn’t somehow make her invalid as an individual, anymore than being blind or deaf makes one less of a person. Though I intellectually understood that early on, the knowledge simply hadn’t made its way to my heart until a few months ago.

The second reason was my beloved (and, at least to me, enigmatic) wife Tina, who has never worried about what Cassidy wasn’t, instead always concerning herself with what our daughter was. Tina’s one and only cryptic comment on the matter: this kid’s alright, and this kid’s going to be all right. So, while I busied myself reading Down syndrome-specific books like Groneberg’s Road Map To Holland and Pueschel’s A Parent’s Guide to Down Syndrome: Toward A Brighter Future (both excellent books), Tina was reading general baby books like Murkoff’s What To Expect: The First Year. While I spent my time looking at the Down syndrome child development chart, Tina was looking at the standard child development chart. And a funny thing happened. It became apparent that, like nearly every other child, Cassidy was ahead on some things, behind on other things, and pretty much the same on most things.

Like nearly every other child. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not deluding myself. Cassidy’s emotional and intellectual development may – no, most likely will – in many ways freeze when she is four, eight, or twelve. They also might not. She may have serious health problems beyond her current heart issues. Or she might not. For months these facts ate away at my soul; the soul of an idealist, a worrier, a preparer obsessed with his family’s complete independence from a society he had personally declared irredeemably corrupt… and that he now desperately needed for his daughter’s sake. Having a child with Down syndrome seemed like an unbearably cruel joke played upon me personally by God, one of those awful “teachable moments” college professors and politicians are always banging on about. Everything was lost. Everything I had worked toward, pointless. My dreams, empty. I was filled with dread at having a child that could never live up to my ideals, and terrible guilt at even conceptualizing such a cruel thought. My idols shattered, I became as I told my friend Elizabeth Jackson, “ideologically up for grabs.” It was for me an extreme admission of hopelessness.

Then, like a quiet voice in the darkness, the transition. Reasons why God had done this that were not at all cruel, but loving (Though not easy. No, never that: it isn’t the desert way.) Was I not raised alongside of a disabled brother? Who better to raise a child with Down syndrome but a father obsessed with personal independence? What better way to the test a man who had always claimed to be a champion of the individual, than by giving him a child whose individuality is predetermined? (As are all men’s, but you surely know what I mean.) What better place for such a child to grow than a small, odd community more accustomed to eccentricity than normalcy?

These things made sense to me. And, by suddenly clicking together, I found myself more at peace.

Finally, two or three months ago, I got over the tragic death of a daughter that never was, but whose non-existence I felt as bitterly as anything I had ever felt in my life. Let us call her Elisa, after my real daughter’s middle name. I had big plans for Elisa. I spent endless hours at the intellectual equivalent of Geppetto’s bench, carving out my imaginary Pinocchio daughter. She would naturally be highly intelligent (as I flatter myself into thinking I am), extremely naturally healthy (as I have fortunately always been), and extremely energetic (as I am annoyingly so). Elisa was going to continue my intellectual legacy after I died, crafting works that celebrated rural self-sufficiently and decried urban duplicity. She was going to get the college degree I never got, and then become the young traveling adventurer that I, perpetually at my small-business workbench, never was. She would continue the epic struggle to build a multigenerational Jerusalem from sand and rock that is Midian Ranch. Only she’d do it better than I ever could have, because she would be better. She would also have all of the children that I, an autumn father, was too foolish to have when I was younger and stronger.

Elisa… no, Cassidy was going to be a cross between Lara Croft, Ayn Rand, and Wonder Woman. I was certain of it; as I’m sure all men who father a beloved child are certain of such things when they hold that child in their arms for the first time. These dreams were all dashed to pieces 30 minuets later with two words: Down syndrome. And so was I.

***

In my defense, I didn’t get even an hour to enjoy being A Father before I became A Father Of A Poor Retarded Child. It was terribly… abrupt. Subsequently discovering that my daydreams were those of a self-centered idiot didn’t help, either. There are only so many unpleasant revelations that a sane, solid, and rational man can have about his own character, life, and worldview in a very brief period of time and remain stable – and I’ve never claimed to be entirely sane, solid, or rational. So, for a time, the traumatic “death” of Elisa hovered in the background of my love of Cassidy, though I did not consciously know it. It took some time for me to sort the whole thing out. To quote Wordsworth:

Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more

Only, unlike poor William, I was quietly mourning the death of a daughter that never was outside of my own mind, rather than a real one (a horror I recoil from conceptualizing). And, in mourning phantasm Elisa, I was doing Cassidy the worst disservice possible. I was discounting the possibility that she actually was Elisa: in her own unique way, better than me. Purer, and less intellectually weighed down with philosophical and ideological baggage. Lighter, freer, and perhaps even continuing a legacy that I haven’t even fully grasped yet.

That was the final part of the transition: grief for what-wasn’t passing away, to be replaced by love and quiet optimism. I’m pretty sure that this a normal experience for thoughtful parents of children with Down syndrome (and I pray that we all are just that about our children: thoughtful). In fact, award-winning Sesame Street writer Emily Perl Kingsley said it much better than I ever could:

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this...

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says ,"Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills… and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say
"Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.