Susan Feathers

CANNED PEACHES AND WHITE FLOUR © Coming of Age in America By Susan Feathers For Tom and Heather 2 Table of Contents Introduction Gypsy Girl Prologue Chapter 1 Air Force Fly-By American girl in Kansas Chapter 2 Journey to the North I meet myself on the tennis court Chapter 3 We Take to the Mother Road Again Westward into the sunset Chapter 4 Faulkner’s Muse Hold-up in the hollers of East Tennessee Chapter 5 White Blizzard, Green Jungle From the Smoky Mountains to Chu Lai Chapter 6 Harry Chapin’s Legacy From Julia Child to Frances Moore Lappé Chapter 7 A Dark Blue Canvas Laguna Beach 1985 Chapter 8 Canned Peaches and White Flour What I learned from Earth and Sky Chapter 9 White Swan My children and I are reunited Chapter 10 Albert Schweitzer, Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi Following the trail of the Existential Moment Chapter 11 The Intrepid Intuitives Following a moral compass in Bear Country Chapter 12 Rain of Justice Gestalt Epilogue 3 The Road Not Taken Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that, the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. ~ Robert Lee Frost 4 Introduction Gypsy Girl I grew up on Route 66. For all practical purposes I was a gypsy girl traveling with my clan: parents, sisters, dogs and cats. Daughter of a career military officer in the United States Air Force, my gyroscope was set to travel over hill and dale. Before I graduated from high school, I had moved 21 times. What kind of person can live in motion, on the road, always knowing each place is just for now, not knowing where the road turns until my Dad walks into the kitchen one night and announces, “Take down the wallpaper! We’ve got orders!” Breathless, petrified, happy and sad, my sisters and I rush to the bookcase for the maps. Plattsburgh? Near the Canadian border, wow! Lake Placid and the Olympic village, skiing and skating! Subzero winters…far from Kansas…and my new found friends…hmmm. You either go with it or you resist fiercely - no in between. I went with it transforming like a chameleon, blending in wherever I went. Try on the cultural mores, see how they fit! Somewhere on those dark winding roads, with my arms propped up on the dashboard while all the clan snored, hacked, and wheezed through the cool night, listening to my father drone about his boyhood in rural Tennessee - a theater of stars, 5 hum of the tires on the asphalt, dad’s low pitched voice and gift of story telling - I fell in love with America. This big land over which we continued to crisscross became my homeland. And, it included everybody – Southerners, Yankees, Midwesterners, Californians, Hawaiians, Native Americans, hicks and sophisticated New Yorkers, hillbillies and coalminers, and many religions, sects, and points of view. Places on Rt. 66 became points of navigation on my life’s map. In my first 18 years on Earth I came to know the people we call Americans. And they all influenced me in some way, truly the melting pot. Yet it left me in search of myself. I was a gypsy girl who knew a lot about other people and little about my self. How did I feel, what was my way, my rhythm? I hardly knew. So, I began to search for “me.” That, in part, is what this book is about. It required that I sort out what I cared deeply about and to do so in the life I was living and would lead. I started out in life as Susan Lee Feathers, a surname that requires a certain kind of steeliness in character as I was called chicken feathers , turkey feathers , and bed feathers in grade school, and when I finally contemplated returning to my maiden name after my divorce, I risked being called a Native American “wannabe”! The Feathers name derives from Scotch-Irish ancestry. My father’s people came here to farm in the green, rolling hills of Tennessee and Virginia in places that resemble much of rural Ireland today. On my mother’s side of the family, we hail from German farmers and Cherokees who escaped the Trail of Tears- still strong and vibrant in our 6 family’s homeland today. Ironically, we actually may have Mungeon blood mixed in – European gypsy ancestry. Here then is one citizen’s story cast in the larger American odyssey - offered to the reader as a unique reflection of the great diversity and sometimes hilarious incongruities of American life. I did not always appreciate the great gift of being an American. As much as people say they hate us, still people flood our shores. Yes, it’s to get a better paying job, no doubt. Or, it is to be able to expand into the open space of freedom to pursue happiness. But for me it is about the landscape. This is Turtle Island of the First Americans, imbued with spirit and liberty. Even with the huge impacts of our consumer driven society, it is still a country that takes your breath away. Come with me on a sweeping journey from coast to coast, a journey that took me into unseen realities behind the foreground of contemporary life. There, I found the America that drew me to her breast as a child. It was in a dusty western town in an American desert that I learned the true nature of Liberty when I reached back in history to the arrival of the first Europeans on the North American continent. 7 Prologue “Do you want the truth or a pretty picture?” His face showed no emotion but I thought I caught a gleam of humor in his eyes. The Trickster… I sat across the table from a Mojave medicine man and an Iroquois artist and teacher. Denny’s was packed with families that Sunday. Outside the desert sweltered in the hot, dry fore-summer: 112° that May day. A sea of brown faces under straw fedoras in Yuma contrasted with my hometown of San Diego, the gentle ocean breezes, moderate temperatures, and blond-haired surfer-dudes. I’d traveled in the cool of night up into the Laguna Mountains east of San Diego. At the Continental Divide I parked my car and stood in the clear night aghast at the millions of stars overhead. The scent of purple sage permeated the air and entered my nostrils, sending me into a trance-like state. The sacred plant of spiritual teachers and healers had become a familiar sensation in my own daily prayer ceremonies. Then I began the descent into the Imperial Valley and a great American desert. Knowledge of what lay ahead for me might have prevented my taking that plunge. It’s a good thing, then, because the experiences I would have in the desert would change me forever and strengthen my inner core—though not how I might have imagined. But I am getting ahead of my story. The first real memories of my life began in the heartland of America: the Prairie. 8 Chapter 1 Air Force Fly-By An American Girl in Kansas I bicycled my way down our street in suburban Wichita, Kansas on a sky-blue Schwinn. 1953. Eight years old and the world spanned before me as undiscovered territory! The sound of popping cards, pinned tightly against the spokes. I was a real tomboy. I was free and life was full of adventure. Snapping Bazooka bubblegum, a bag of marbles in my jean pocket, I felt the cool wind course through my blond hair. I felt safe in my cocoon of endless bounty and a life full of promise. I was a middle-class American girl at a time of my country’s economic expansion and national optimism. Feeling the warm morning sun on my neck, a tanned happy girl, I sped along with no worries at all. At my family’s ranch-style home, surrounded by Mom’s rose gardens, resplendent with big, fragrant blooms, my sisters and parents were busy preparing to attend another Air Force Day when the power and pomp of military life would be celebrated. Like a punctuated rhythm, this day fused the spirit of people in the United States Air Force. At McConnell Air Force Base, the Thunderbird precision jet team roared a deep, resonant claim to the skies, soaring in perfect synchrony overhead. One year, when the new B-52 bomber was on display, I recall standing under a massive wing that towered above me. I felt like an ant in the shadow of King Kong or the largest dinosaur I could imagine. Yet I was not the least bit afraid, only thrilled. So 9 familiar were the aircraft, missiles, vehicles and artillery dotting my childhood landscape that I felt no fear, but oddly comfort and joy, because in my young mind this was the armature that protected me.

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