ESSAY:

Photo by Joy E. Stocke

Oh, they were swingin'
Down at the Kingdom Hall
Oh, bells were ringin'
Down at the Kingdom Hall
A choir was singin'
Down at the Kingdom Hall

Van Morrison            

Saturday. 4:45 a.m. San Diego, California.

On a starlit morning, the airport shuttle van turns onto a street of neat, one-story houses, each with patches of front lawn and wide driveways leading to attached two-car garages; a neighborhood not unlike the one occupied by Jim Carrey in the movie, Pleasantville.

When the van stops in front of one of those pleasant houses, a garage door opens and a man in his mid-fifties steps out rolling his suitcase behind him.  He wears a gray suit, white shirt and firmly knotted rep tie. His hair is side-parted and slicked down.  Slightly old fashioned, horned-rimmed glasses perch on his nose.

We are the only two passengers on the shuttle. I’m groggy, having been up for an hour with no coffee, but he is awake and very alert and asks me where I’m going.

“The southern tip of the Baja peninsula,” I say, and return the question.

“New York,” he says.  “Newark Airport.”

My home airport, I think. And now I’m curious.

“What are you going there for?” I ask. But what I’m wondering is why would anyone choose to wear an uncomfortable suit for a five-hour flight to New Jersey on a Saturday?

“I have a meeting,” he says. “Actually it’s in Patterson. A sales meeting starting tonight at 6:00."

A long day. He must be in manufacturing, I think. Or maybe he’s a post beat generation poet making a pilgrimage to the home of Allen Ginsberg. Then again, maybe he’s part of a revitalization committee working to restore one of New Jersey’s decayed factory towns.

“I’m a Jehovah’s Witness,” he says.

Bells, whistles, red flags, adrenaline jolt me, but I remain outwardly calm.

“Oh,” I say. “There's a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall in our community. I have an acquaintance who brings The Watchtower to me every month.” 

He perks up, leans forward.

I realize that my Watchtower friend also wears a similar gray suit. In his case, he is in his mid sixties and retired, and he doesn’t come alone.  Another man drives him and waits in my driveway in a green Buick.

“Each month I tell my  aquaintance the same thing,” I say. “I was raised a Roman Catholic and I can’t abide by any belief system that holds no place for women, especially Mary, Jesus’s mom.”

My van companion dodges my comment completely. “Do you think he is a good salesman?”

It’s not the question I was expecting, and so I have to ask myself, who is trying to sell whom?

I’ve spent more than half my life traveling through much of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East trying to understand how texts written down thousands of years ago have become hardwired into our culture.

“Well, he is persistent,” I say. “He comes every month, whether I answer the door or not, and leaves the Watchtower.”

The man smiles and leans back in his seat.  “I was raised Roman Catholic, too,” he says. “You will find it is a cult if you look carefully.”

“But they say the same about Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

The words come out of my mouth one step ahead of my semi-conscious brain. The sound of a low-flying plane breaks the stillness and we enter the boulevard that leads to the airport.

“I have been a Witness since I turned 25, “ he says. “The older I get, the more I understand the Book of Revelation. The signs of the End Time are here. We must wake up before it is too late. I will do my best to save those who will be saved.”

The van stops in front of the American Airlines Terminal. When the man gets out, he smiles a genuinely friendly smile.

My Watchtower friend in New Jersey has been interested in my travels. One of the places I’ve visited is the island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea very close to the coast of Turkey, where the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, came into being in the mind of the Apostle John.

In a cave with a handhewn stone ledge upon which to rest his head and a mythic of view of sky and sea, John had his visions of the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse. What struck me as I stood in his sanctum and saw my own chimera of light and cloud and sunlit dust is this: if one chose to have a vision there, it wouldn’t be that difficult, especially if you were alone and depriving yourself of food and drink.

Here is the first line of Revelation. Chapter 4, Verse 1 of the New Testament:

"After these things, I looked and saw a door standing open in heaven. And the first voice which I heard was like a trumpet speaking with me, saying, 'Come up here, and I will show you things which must take place after this."

Photo by Joy E. Stocke

The following Saturday, after learning of the earthquake in Chile and threat of Tsunami in Hawaii, I thought of the man I had met a week earlier. Was he home using new sales skills to talk about End Times?

I drove through heat and dust and mountain and light to the organic market in San Jose del Cabo. There, among the stalls selling heirloom tomatoes in magenta and burgundy and lime; and carrots so deeply red and yellow one might believe they were fake, and after buying a handmade cornsopa holding creamy refried beans and queso fresco, I felt as if I had entered paradise.

To make sure I knew I had landed in a Garden of Eden, I ate my sopa at a table near a group of kids in their early twenties - Mexican, American, and European - with dreadlocks and long skirts and a fat, naked baby; and pan pipes and didgery-doos and drums filling the air with the song El Condor Pasa.

When I returned to my town on the Sea of Cortez, I learned that much of it had been evacuated because the earthquake in Chile had threatened the entire Pacific basin with a Tsunami.

“Nobody has ever seen anything like it,” said a neighbor.  “We watched the sea come up three feet over the breakers and then quickly recede, up again and back, and again like water sloshing over the edge of a giant bowl. If  there’s an earthquake in the Mexican mainland, the water will pour over the Peninsula straight to the other side.”

Another sign of End Times, I thought, at least for my San Diego van campanion.

And while the rest of us grab what we can and run, my Witnesses friend will be celebrating the End of Days as we know it. He'll be singing down at his Kingdom Hall:

Hey, liley, liley, liley,

Hey, liley, liley lo…

Photo by Joy E. Stocke 

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