Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

In last week’s column, I wrote about a recent restless night I spent suffering with the fear of imagined consequences for thinking too loudly out loud, using the word genocide in a charged environment — men in black knocking at my door.

Below is Eric Chaet’s response to that column.

I first met Eric in 1976. At the time, we were both on the mythical highway of American road lore, Kerouac’s “rucksack revolution.” I had quit my job as a newspaper reporter and taken off because I thought that that was the main thing writers do, they take off, and I wanted to be a writer, not a newspaper reporter.

I don't know how Eric got there, at least not as well as he does.

We met by chance in a sleepy café in a small town just off a two-lane highway… it might have been in Iowa, or maybe even Texas. The café was in the center of town, next to an abandoned railroad yard.

He was a couple of years older than me. He said he was a writer. I said I wanted to be. I rummaged around in my backpack for my notebook to show him what I was working on. He read some and rubbed his chin. He said I’d be a writer when I said I was. That was the day I became a writer.

Then, like most everybody we meet on the road, he disappeared, for thirty years, while me… after another year or two of bumming around the country, camping out, trash-can fires, working as a logger in the Pacific Northwest, I went back to the newspaper business until I was exiled and became a nurse and then an over-the-road trucker. But I was always a writer. And I never forgot the day I became one, or the stranger who gave me the courage to claim the right to my own personal identity. It was not up to the big New York publishing houses to say who I was. I was empowered to be me. Maybe I’d be a good writer or a bad writer or a lazy writer. At least it would be up to me to decide for myself without excuses.

It was sometime around 2006 when out of the blue I got the idea of trying to contact the stranger I’d met 30 years before. I was parked for the night at a truck stop in Kansas, staring at the computer in the cab of my truck, searching for the next sentence in the book I would publish many years later after I was retired — “Buddhist Trucker.”

I had just recently gotten wireless internet. It blew my mind. I could look up anything.

I had never forgotten his name. I did a Google search for Eric “Chate,” but nothing came up. If he had never quit being a writer, I concluded, he hadn’t become a famous one, maybe living in a refuge mission if living anywhere at all. Lots of unknown writers end up like that.

Driving across Kansas the next day I had what I thought was a brilliant idea! Maybe I’d misspelled his name. That night, parked at a truck stop in Rollo, Missouri, I tried all the ways to spell a name that sounded like Chick or Chat. When I finally tried CHAET, he came right up. There he was! There was the stranger I’d met 30 years before who gave me the courage to go my own way. There he was, pictured on the front cover of a book he’d published in 2001 — “People I Met Hitchhiking on USA Highways.” Would I be in there? I sent him an email. He sent me an email back and we’ve been going back and forth ever since, sharing, encouraging, arguing about style and the rhythm of words, losing faith, finding faith.

A couple years ago, on my way to see family in the U.P., I spent a day visiting with Eric and his wife, Brenda. Although Eric grew up on the tough streets of South Chicago, he and Brenda lived in a house in the country in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin. Like me, Brenda had grown up in the U.P. too. We had pasties and catsup for lunch. We talked about writing and philosophy and the kids and where to get the best pasties in town. It was comfortable. It felt right. It felt like we were cruisin' down the mythical highway of American road lore until genocide suddenly appears around the next curve.

--30--

 To Westphalia's Ace Reporter:

Response to Your fears

It seems to me that fear is what is most to be feared, most awful, most to be avoided or transmuted when it is unavoidable, because of unprecedentedly intense, never-before-experienced (or faced & processed) impinging negative phenomena.

We die and no longer suffer — our agenda may not have been completely fulfilled, but we always knew we would fall short of the goal we set for ourselves in order never to exceed it, &, so, fall off the cliff, into purposelessness, didn’t we?  Death, which is certain, is not to be feared.

Suffering?  We know we will suffer, only not how or how much.  I doubt that any suffering is worse than fear of suffering.  So, can we stop fearing suffering because it is reasonable to do so?  Maybe, gradually, on purpose, per strategy.  As: the Buddhists, the Stoics.  I don’t pretend to be innovating, only organizing available ideas to advantage, I hope.

When we are suffering from fear or for any other reason, we do what we can to alleviate it, wisely or unwisely, in a panic or more deliberately, assisted or not, or interfered with.

So far, you have managed to reach this point in your life.  We’re not just crying for our mother, & that’s just as well, because she is otherwise occupied, or gone. 

We have had great adventures, & even occasionally intentional achievements, however infantile they may seem at the moment, if we have matured beyond them, or imagine we have.

Yes, we have reached this point in life, &, eventually, will die.  Meanwhile, this point is our ship in an uncharted sea in a storm on a voyage of discovery & purpose.

Can others hurt us?  Certainly.  Some probably will.  Are they hurting us already? Yes! 

Since we were born we have gained from other’s contributions to our well-being, & been in trouble as a result of others — others have been taking what we needed more than they did, or at least as much, by force or cunning or carelessness, or by the inertia of the current prevailing paradigms of beliefs & behavior & material & social infrastructure — what we had more need of, what we could have made better use of.  We have probably done the same, sometimes — even now — to others.

It’s worse & more obvious under some circumstances — under Hitler or Stalin, the invading Mongols or conquistadores or Incas or Aztecs or Arab or Turk warriors of the Caliphates or this or that set of barbarians or narcotraficantes or local mafias — or less than utterly genocidal bombardment. 

Plutocrats & mandarins have more control over us than we would enjoy, & exact tribute, whether we realize it or not — & most of our fellow sufferers punish us psychologically if we even mention it, or don’t respond enthusiastically to the flag or to current popular songs or holidays, because it would puncture their normal, neurotic self-esteem 

There’s not enough competent help that we can afford, & too much deluded or pretended “help” not only offered but forced upon us — & then comes the bill!

I hope I’m not one doing such, or, if I am, that I catch myself, & take corrective action!

Others can, are, & probably will be hurting us.  It’s not terribly profitable to fear it, tho.  And probably we’re not number one on the hit list.

All along, we have been becoming more capable of defending & relying on ourselves — tho part of that is realizing how little able we are to defend or rely on our self, right now. 

If only we don’t get stuck in fear.

You have been doing something advantageous, along with making whatever mistakes you have been making or wallowing in. 

Do more of what you have been doing that is advantageous, develop it as wisely as you can.  Are you questioning if it is wise?  Good.  It’s probably not as wise as it might be if you keep questioning & transforming it — goals, priorities, methods — advantageously.

First, tho, of course, comes homeostasis.  Our body, mind, soul can only survive & operate within a certain range of circumstances.  We need air & potable water, nutrition, a certain temperature range, there is just so much physical & psychological abuse we can tolerate

We need a little joy, at least, now & then, some encouragement if we are to survive criticism, withholding of resources, & being treated as a resource to be exploited.

You may even have achieved, & you may even be achieving something of greater value than you are receiving in return.  Good job.

You aspire.  You tend to that.  Sometimes you’re frustrated, sometimes advance.  Sometimes, you become aware that your goal, even if achieved, if not wrong, is insufficient.  That awareness is progress.  So, you adjust your thoughts & efforts.  This is beyond homeostasis, & will be continually interrupted by the necessity of re-establishing & maintaining homeostasis — til death.

You do what you do, whatever others think.  They can’t be aware of what you are creating, until it’s created, & it never will be completely created, at least not for more than a moment.  Also, you must tend to relations with neighbors, however lacking in understanding, sympathy, empathy, usefulness — & especially with useful people, more so to the extent that they are unusually useful — it’s folly & a crime to pretend that they are less extraordinarily useful than they are (tho they are still developing, too) — & especially with potential allies at whatever stage of development they may be.

What you are achieving is a mere drop in the bucket, in the ocean of catastrophes?  So, you develop your drop as best you can, forgiving yourself for what you can’t do, surviving (homeostasis) — & achieve other & better & more — that is, more & more effectively, yet with wisdom, with compassion, tempering your instinctive, passionate reactions to circumstances & your appetites, which know no reason — not per dogma, but strategically — that is, to your greatest advantage.

Succumbing to fear is called cowardice.  We’re all born helpless, & never become completely competent.  The universe is enormous & mysterious, & there are a lot of people with a lot of purposes & not always wise or as capable or useful as they imagine — & not always intending to be of use to you.  Courage is an element of virtue.

Virtue & efficacy — neither ever perfect, always to be developed — only homeostasis takes priority — are required for the success that is becoming who one can be, in the midst of plenty to be feared — without fear.