Ineffectual Torture
Something had begun to niggle at me about Jim. "I feel your churning beside me; your ineffectual torture," I wrote. Was I projecting? I wondered. It was possible, but I wasn't completely off base because I had come to realize that he was lost without his work, which he had largely turned over to his sons, and the mission field, which I had been so happy to leave behind, all the while realizing it was incredibly selfish of me to feel this way.
He was ever on the lookout for ways to assuage his loss from letting go of the lion's share of his power in the business he had worked his entire adult life to build and I cringed when he announced that he wanted to be behind the controls of the plane more often as we traveled the southeast U.S. He renewed his pilot's license and decided the perfect time to get back in the cockpit was a trip to the beach. I dared not say aloud that the prospect made me want to faint, because he would have seen it as weakness on my part. He banked the plane hard to steer us on course as we left Chattanooga's airspace and we found ourselves butting heads with a cold front that had screamed through town during the early morning hours. I trusted him in most things, of course, but my veins were coursing with fear as he flipped buttons and pulled knobs, the dropping and rising motion that happened almost simultaneously making me feel oddly giddy and absolutely terrified.
We skirted the weather system until we'd cleared south Alabama, and it looked as though God had been doing some deep spring-cleaning, using foamy carpet cleaner on the sky as far as the eye could see. I was running metaphors through my mind to take the focus off my queasy stomach, which Jim—seeing the panic on my face—assured me was unwarranted nerves. I calmed myself by deciding then and there that I had nothing to lose but my life, and if it came to that it was likely to happen fairly quickly so prolonging the torture by imagining what would come to pass if we were pitched onto the land, broken and burning, was an exercise in stupidity.
We made it to Panama City just fine, and the ocean, as it always had, lulled me into peace. I agreed wholeheartedly with the notion that the sound and the motion was womblike. A gull careened overhead as I lounged on the deck, looking as if it had absolutely no control from its internal cockpit. Trust is a funny thing for a bird in brisk winds! I thought as I sat there wondering how many of them actually crashed—to think that none of them ever did was silly, wasn't it?
A massive fire was burning miles away down the beach and the winds were turning it into a Hades-sized blowtorch. The smoke was being carried away by the upper-level winds, creating a shelf atop the billowing plume that intercepted the sun during the early afternoon, masking its power. By early evening, the smoke stretched far out to sea as we sat at the water's edge, our chairs sinking into the sand with each wave that lapped beneath us. I admired the metallic sheen of the ocean, which was mirror-like until a rolling crest foamed and tumbled ashore, washing its own image out to sea.
During my morning journaling sessions, I was working on descriptions of experiences I'd had in Costa Rica. I was trying to describe a scene I saw in Limon in which a harelip and an elderly man sat on a dark porch talking. There were no chairs under their behinds—just bare concrete, the hardness of which did little to dampen their merriment. It was as if they had no clue their accommodations were spare; the old man must have been particularly witty because he continually drew laughter from the gaping mouth of the other man. I wanted to study his deformity but I didn't dare stare at him because it would have been beyond rude. I made do with a few furtive glances, marveling at the fact that he could so unselfconsciously express glee. I wanted to capture the animated beauty of his face, which completely negated the imperfection of his crimped lip. There was something about his dignity that felt almost holy to me.
Early on in our Limon days, I'd met the sweetest man named Mr. Green at St. Mark's. I thought about how there were so many people I'd come to know only by their last names, as decorum didn't permit being on a first-name basis for quite some time. He had tutored me on my diet as we sat in the parish hall in Limon at a dinner held by the local Episcopal Church Women during our last trip to Limon. "It is best to eat only hard foods," he said, just about the time I took the first bite of my sandwich, "they cause less wind in the belly." I thanked him and told him I would definitely remember that as he pushed his chair back, already canvassing the long row of tables to see who was nearby.
I watched as he visited with most of the other people in the room, flirting ever-so-slightly with the women who would giggle like they were teenagers when he'd tell a joke or inquire after their well being. The sun was filtering through the window as he leaned over the table to chat with another man I'd seen at church functions, though we'd never been introduced. The light striking his dark skin created a silvery gray glow on the backs of his hands, which looked as tough as tanned leather.
On our way back to San Jose the next day, I had studied the landscape to see if I could push myself to better descriptions than I had been recording. It was the time of year when certain giant trees were blooming orange, their lost petals creating a smattering of confetti on the ground. Some fields that would normally have been a lush grassy green were speckled with resplendent orange light, the sun infusing the fallen blossoms with effervescing color as they lived their last decaying hours so exuberantly. What a paradox of life and death irrevocably intertwined! I thought.fields as And how lucky were the cattle grazing in those fields as they nibbled beauty! Many of the stocky animals had guardian angels on their backs—regal white birds holding vigil to nab the errant insects attempting to light on their burly mobile kitchens.
As we drew closer to the mountains, I noticed a number of trees carrying dense vines on their beefy outstretched arms, which made them appear as if they were draped in cloaks of velvety green. They towered over the other trees as if holding court—telling their charges how to behave with their grand, sweeping gestures that were dripping with finery. One particularly statuesque tree wore vines across its very top in an umbrella shape. It was almost as if it had been crowned the king of the copse it found itself gazing down upon. It brought to mind how the strongest, tallest specimen in any given situation could quickly turn into the most vulnerable when mighty winds blew through.
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