A Big Spaghetti Dinner

Notes From the Raid on Rupert, Idaho

Sunrise in Rupert, Idaho

1. Massive Ordinance Penetrators and Job’s Daughters

Maybe, I thought, sitting at a table eating spaghetti amidst an ocean of young crops—sugar beets and potatoes—this is how the world ends. More to the point, this is how Rullman dies—against odds and expectations—in the dining room of a farmhouse in Rupert, Idaho. He is evaporated in a ball of fire and nothing is found but the torched axles of his commando van where it was once parked so innocently, so benignly, next to the tractor barn.

It didn’t happen, of course, not really. No vaporizing fireball rolled through the valley. The moon came up as ever, sand kept sliding through the hourglass, the beet roots kept growing silently underground, and the powdered wigs on the evening news went about their spiraling rituals of hyperventilation.

It was just this: The Tactical Games were over, and a handful of us had gathered by invitation at the home of Justin and Christine Overholt, who moved to Rupert when Justin retired from the Denver Fire Department and where they now live on the family farm, closer to the folks, farther away from the grinding frictions of Big American Suburbia. Christine had grown up in Rupert, on a farm that her grandparents once plowed with teams of horses, and where they now home-schooled their bright and curious son who wore a sword on his belt, built model helicopters, showed us spears he had fashioned, and shook hands like a grown man when he introduced himself.

That, all by itself, was proof of an alternate universe.

This was an invitation I would never pass up, for the promise of fellowship with like-minded folk, for a hearty meal after the battle and a chance to get to know each other beyond a couple of days sweating and shooting our way through a competition meant for people half our age.

One of the guests had come to compete in Rupert from Minnesota. We talked about the wolves that still roam the country once inhabited by the Dakota, and George Floyd, and the evolution of Minneapolis into Mogadishu. Another guest was a 71 year old former Marine who had served in a sister company of my battalion, and had been out there at The Games humping 130 lb sandbags, carrying rucks, and pulling sleds along with the rest of us. Yet another was a contractor from Reno, who once shot a mountain lion with a shotgun at a distance of eight feet. He showed us all the picture of an enormous Tom that had been, to be fair, merely defending a kill.

So, it was while sitting there, my belly full and my bones fatigued, stroking the family cat who had jumped in my lap, that I learned about the B-2 bombing raids over Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow, the Massive Ordinance Penetrators pushing 30k pounds of high explosives into uranium enrichment sites in the ancestral lands of Cyrus and Sargon, of Ayatollahs and the unextinguished fever dreams of the Mahdi’s return.

It felt, I will admit, wildly incongruous to even imagine such a thing after such lovely conversation with my erstwhile competitors, after a plate full of great spaghetti and homemade sourdough—Grandma feeds the mother every couple of days—after a scoop of ice cream and a hot brownie. But it is also a condition of life—all that friction and incongruity—that modern sapiens must embrace, or suffer the very real seductions of total insanity.

And anyway, my weekend had early turned on notions of apocalypse, beginning with my check-in at the Best Western in Burley, just across the Snake River from Rupert in the agricultural sweeps of the Magic Valley. In the lobby I discovered that the hotel was hosting a convention of Job’s Daughters, an organization I had never heard of but formed some rapid opinions about based solely on their 19th century dress and the stern and scalding looks launched my way from some of the more wizened crones gathered at the desk in funereal tones. These were women who can spot a sinner, a reprobate, or a rake—and it’s likely that I am all three—the way an eagle spies a field mouse from exalted altitudes.

What they didn’t know is that I can spot them too, having once had a grandmother who shared their views on the nature of evil, and how it certainly springs from that vile appendage of men that hath cast so much misery so widely among the virgins and ruined the purity of so many true believers. Our disdain was mutual at once, and filled the air like an invisible, noxious gas.

Undeterred, I wedged my way through them with my rifle bag and my backpack, winked at the overwhelmed and under-lovely concierge, and managed to secure a key to my room which was, naturally, in the middle of a bank of rooms let out to Job’s perpetually tormented offspring.

Sha’alu, Shalom, Yerushalayim, I thought, while opening the door to room 262. Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem.

2. Fire in the Horn

Nothing I did in Idaho has earned a mention in dispatches. I melted down in a shooting stage that should have been my wheelhouse. Blowing that stage cost me a goal I had crafted for The Games, a top five finish, but that goal was always subservient to the point of training, of packing my bags and heading into the great unknown to present myself at the feet of the great god of on-going challenges.

First or last, our puppy Jerry will still lick my face and growl at his sisters when they try to take his bone.

The aim of competition is always to find a winner among the contestants, to shower them with laurels as an example to follow, but after a certain age victory is necessarily redefined. This has to do with the recognition of the death that stalks us all. What once mattered doesn’t matter as much anymore. The clock ticks faster. The eyes go to cataracts. Each beat of our hearts can be understood as both a miracle and a gift. And so showing up at all is a kind of victory, but the mind still wants more, something undefined, something that defies our ability to describe it.

At 54, with thousands upon thousands of hard miles on my frame, I’m not competing with those Elite Division athletes who arrive with corporate sponsors and the bodies of Greek statues. And trophies are worthless except as an adornment to pump life back into pride. At this age, I find, nothing that goes on a shelf is of much value at all beyond its utility.

For the old Marine, my brother in arms despite the wide gap in years, victory was simply finishing a stage, an impressive feat for anyone, but at 71 the kind of thing that creates a stir, and then finally a legend. He already knows what we must come to embrace, that after a certain point our only real competition is against ourselves, and the perceptions we inherit and adopt as time rolls on. Against the carefully crafted expectations manufactured in the minds of others. Madison Avenue defines the ideal body of a woman in the pages of a magazine, and industries and mental illness sprout from the mad pursuit of a commercial figment. So what can we hold in our minds and know for certain is a thing of substance? Of lasting value? The old Marine knew that he was able to lift the sandbags over the bar, and put bullets on a target down range. He could see it, could feel the weight and answer the call, and lead the way for everyone watching, and that was a victory against age and gravity and expectation, against the cold draft that is always trying to snuff out the candle. Victory is always found in preserving the continuity, in keeping the fire alive in the horn for those who come behind.

Cormac McCarthy knew that, and it was the central theme of No Country For Old Men. He wrote, in the voice of Sheriff Bell, recalling a dream of his father:

...we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixing to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.     

And so, upon reflection, I think maybe that was the reason I made the raid on Idaho, put in the months of preparation and answered a promise I’d made that was somehow bigger than myself. I wanted to be Sheriff Bell’s father, hunched against the dark and the cold, protecting the fire in a horn. I know this is true because when I’m running in the woods I consciously think of my Marines, the men I served with, how I want to finish strong for them still, to continue fulfilling the expectations they once had of me, to set an example even when they cannot see it, can’t even possibly know it, but to somehow sense that I’m still out here trying desperately to lead from the front, to carry the fire into the dark. That’s honest, and conscious, and maybe it won’t resonate with everyone. But it comes from a place of deep and abiding humility, of wary respect for the cold and the dark and what that finally means for us all.

3. The Bees

On the long drive home from Rupert, back in Oregon and somewhere on the desert highway between the onion fields of Ontario and the secret ranches of Juntura, I came around a bend in the John Day River and encountered a wreck. First, I saw a bearded man in the road waving at me to slow down the way a third base coach waves at a runner to slide. In a long white beard and sunglasses, he wasn’t frantic, but he was clearly under the weight of something serious, and so I obliged— not knowing what came next. And then, slow-coasting around the bend into a straightened stretch of the road, I saw the big-rig pulled to the shoulder, and I began to see the beehives. There were hundreds of them, busted and cracked wide open like golden eggs where they had fallen as a load from a flatbed trailer.

It felt like staring long into a room full of agony and inarticulate despair. The air was full of bees that bounced against my windshield, little black balls of furious hail. A lone man in a dirty bee-suit was out among the splintered hives and the shattered combs, wandering the battlefield like a priest in the aftermath of Agincourt.

There was nothing he could do but comfort the dying.

I raised bees, once, without much success. Their lives are fragile and made more difficult by mites, disease, and pesticides. In the best of circumstances they require constant maintenance and, of course, in the modern world, criminal gangs will steal every beehive out of a farmer’s field overnight. Bees are seductive because they are unknowable beyond a certain point of infatuation, beyond a close study of their known behavior. We can crack open a hive and see what is happening, but only ever on the surface. The soul of the hive they keep to themselves, and will defend that beautiful mystery to death.

Evenings, I used to sit beside the hives and watch the late-comers flying back through the woods from wherever they had gone, their legs thick with pollen of the richest blues and reds and yellows, weighted down and wobbling in clumsy flight. The bees that fly for pollen are in the last stage of their lives, and will burn out their wings in short order. Their wings, thinner than tracing paper, are soon shredded through use, and then they will die, their corpses shoved out of the hive to make room for the brood.

4. Again, the Spaghetti

The challenge, and the goal, for everything it is worth, and in the aftermath of a brutal self-examination through competition, is to make proper use of a spaghetti dinner. To find amusement in the silent condemnation of Job’s Terrible Daughters, or in the costume theater found in the filthy cuts of the Outlaw bikers who replaced them in the lobby of a Best Western on the slow-to-die frontier. To somehow make peace with the sad visage of a raft of geese flying, tattered and somehow missing more than just its usual members, flying south over the industrial gridlock of the I-84 through Boise.

How can it be, against all that, that strangers can come together in a house where fields of beets grow right up to the back porch, where the trees fight back the wind, and sitting together absorb the news of a pending armageddon with only a laugh and a toss of the hand, while covered in dried sweat and aching from exertion with cats purring in our laps? How can we assemble for a fine meal after a hard fight and discuss the proper distribution of priceless treasure taken from the vanquished—when the vanquished was always and only us?

The Japanese poet Basho wrote that before enlightenment there is only chopping wood and carrying water. And after enlightenment, he wrote, there is only chopping wood and carrying water.

He was right about that. As right as a spaghetti dinner at a farmhouse table with an ancient evening breeze blowing in through the screened-in porch, with the call of the long road home whispering in my ears, and while surrounded by the immeasurable gift of unexpected friends—brought together suddenly and without artifice, as if by a long-forgotten and mostly unpracticed magic.