Hell On Wheels

"GO! Hey, you cheated! No fair!"

We didn't talk about Hell at Resurrection Lutheran, so I had to hear about it from the neighbor girl, who was being raised Baptist and also had information about where babies came from. I didn't pay much attention to the Hell business. All that poking and flames and stuff was way too personal and required way too much imagining of physical distress and we Lutherans didn't like to think about anything that could happen to you without your clothes on.

I had to get my morality tales elsewhere, too, and they didn't do much for me. Oh, you know the ones: in Hell, a sumptuous banquet is served to the residents at a long table and everyone's fork is too long to reach their mouths, so they suffer and starve. In Heaven, same banquet, only everyone feeds each other across the table. Nothing about this holds up. Why couldn't they hold their forks closer to the tines, or use their fingers? That's what I would have done.

Or there's this one, designed to instill a proper appreciation for the risks of signing up with the wrong team in life: a boulder the size of a house is visited by a dove, who scrapes her beak against it once every thousand years; and when the boulder is worn down to nothing, a single day in Eternity has passed. Even when I was eight, this one didn't feel right. I mean, if there is a certain amount of time that can pass, no matter how long, and can be called a "day," it sort of devalues the whole eternity concept. I mean, if it has "days," they could conceivably run out at some point. Being numbered, and all.

I think I might have tried to wrap my head around the idea of eternity for a little while because it seemed important or required or deliciously frightening. But after a bit the only thing that became clear was that it was not possible to imagine eternity, and so I quit trying. It's a form of laziness, I suppose, but I've always had a pretty good grasp of when to work hard for a solution and when to bail. You can't even interest me in a conversation about eternity. Instead I try to keep good track of the present, an activity that looks pretty day-dreamy from a distance and which gets easier and easier as I lose my memory. This also means I don't worry too much. I do worry, but only for so long, and then the whole fret structure just breaks down. So naturally I don't believe in Hell, either.

Just Add Potted Meat Food Product

Until now. Now I read there's a dude what bought 45 acres of limestone caves in Kansas and he's setting it up as a combination resort and end-times sanctuary. For a price--a fine high one--you can buy a slot inside his cave for your RV where you can ride out your natural lifetime in case of asteroid strike or terrorist attack or nuclear bomb, and prepare to blast away anyone who tries to get in without paying for his parking space. Even before the asteroid hits, you can take a vacation in there and learn all about survival skills, which will certainly involve bad food and shooting. And come the big event, you can move in for good and spend the rest of your days in a plastic lawn chair in an RV park with no sunshine next to a bunch of survivalists and their sullen teenagers and someone with yellow hair will be wearing Crocs and stretch Capris and playing Stevie Nicks and the Eagles on a hand-cranked device and if that isn't Hell, I don't know what is.

A Hell Of A Potter

When I met my friend Peg Johnson thirty years ago, people were calling her Peggy Pooh-Potter. Before that, she went by Morningstar. So Peg is her grown-up name. In another ten years or so, she'll have evolved to Mistress Margaret, Princess of Pots.

Peg has made her living at various times as a potter, including now. Now she's into Raku. It's a solitary art, but there are a few odd steps in the making of Raku that go a lot easier if there's a helper. I volunteered to help, inasmuch as I'm five minutes away and interruptible. I was assured that she just needed more hands on deck, that the whole helping operation would take about five or ten minutes and would not be a big deal; just a matter of putting garbage can lids on garbage cans and tossing a few wet towels around, and I've done both of those things before. In fact, I like to think I'm right at the head of the pack for wet-towel-tossing. The main point was to be there at the moment one is needed. I arrived full of confidence in my abilities, because if there's one thing I can do well, it's show up.

So I get there, and it turns out there's an outfit. There's a bright silver asbestos apron, there are welder's gloves, there's a freakin' gas mask, and it occurs to me, as Peg points out the nearby garden hose "in case things get out of hand," that there's more to this operation than just showing up. But time was of the essence, and there was no time for chit-chat. Peg and I lifted the top off the kiln and set it aside, and Peg grabbed some enormous tongs and pulled out her ceramic pieces, placing them one by one into an array of garbage cans filled with shredded paper, and that's when all Hell broke loose.

Literally. Fire, brimstone, smoke, acrid odor and the screams of the wretched. The screams were coming from me, I'm told, and I can't discount that as a possibility. I get jumpy. This is why I don't believe in Heaven and Hell. It's just one more scenario in which I've got a feeling I won't come out well, so I'd rather abstain. On the other hand, if I've missed my guess about this, helping Peg with the Raku is probably going to be good conditioning for me, ultimately.

Still, I'm not that into fire. I grew up outside of Washington, D.C., and I've sought out cool temperatures ever since. As a kid, I didn't give much thought to my future livelihood, but I knew I didn't want to do anything where I was likely to be shot at, or set aflame. Postal work really came pretty close to meeting all my requirements. Oh, sure, there was that time Herbie's Jeep blew up and he ran around in circles screaming "CALL NINE-ELEVEN! CALL NINE-ELEVEN!" and everything went to ashes while people looked for the "eleven" button on their phones. But that's just Herbie, and really, you take enough letter carriers and turn them loose for enough years, one of them is going to set himself on fire. That's just the way it is. As for the business of not getting shot at, the trick is to be a little scarier than the person who might want to shoot you, and with the postal uniform and a slightly unhinged demeanor, you're halfway there.

So here I was, tasked with the job of putting the lids on the garbage cans, which were roaring fire up to the skies, and tossing the wet towels over them, and whereas I do not pretend I did such a good job, I'm pretty sure I'll be better next time. I'll show a little more confidence, and maybe, per Peg's excellent suggestion, I won't fling the lids towards the cans like Frisbees and hope for a good seal. "This is why not many people do Raku," Peg kindly explained in a nasal bleat through the gas mask.

But here's why people do. You get this gorgeous stuff, the more wonderful because there's no particular predicting what is going to come out of those cans. [You can see Peg Johnson's splendid work at the Portland Saturday Market.] Postal work is more placid, but the best you can do is finish up on a given day and then have it all to do over again the next morning. So it's like doing the dishes.

And by the time I've done this Raku business a few more times, I'll have gotten a little more accustomed to the weather in Hell. When the time comes, I'll be better able to cope. As long as it's not humid.