I don’t wanna cause no fuss…
You can't have it.
You know you’re getting old when minor trespassing gives you a thrill. True, it wasn’t a significant blood-pressure increase but it was enough to begin to shake the weekend ennui out of my head. It was also enough to get me to rethink my resistance to becoming a Delmartian.
Late fall on Delmarva is tough to take. The weather and the lack of bar-related distractions keep you sitting in the house waiting for something to happen. At the time Kelly and I were both sick − me on the way up and she on the way down.
That morning we were overcome with a claustrophobia that feigned cabin fever but was really more existential. The mutual tension of sickness and being bored created a wariness between us. We’d been not so much fighting as disposed to having a fight. The psychological discomfort threatened to ruin the weekend.
Rather than bicker we went out to shoot things. Kelly is a photographer and I’m a budding photographer’s assistant.
She wanted to find something colorful and, despite the rain and the season, it didn’t take too long to find a subject.
Not far past the dirt track on Route 13 we happened across a dilapidated bus. It appeared as if it had been at one time a camper − it had curtains over each of the windows and an electric spotlight, the kind you might find on a home to ward off potential prowlers or squeeze that last 10 minutes out of a barbecue/badminton tournament − mounted on the back right hand corner of the roof.
As Kelly shot the bus, I fantasized about the bus’ history. There was an American Flag painted on the grille and my initial thought was that it was some sort of hippie bus, left over from a protest tour around the country.
But it was last tagged in Tennessee − a place not known for its submission to the counter culture. Also the bus didn’t look that old. It was more likely used to protest the 1976 election than the ‘68 convention.
It was the flag that got me thinking. Before the 1970s wearing a flag or painting a flag was revolutionary, a way of making the Man uncomfortable. Put positively it was a way of taking possession of an allegedly co-opted symbol. Put negatively, it was desecration.
So, depending on when the flag was painted, it was either a sign of super-patriotism or a thumbing of the nose at it. Better, it may have passed from one meaning to another as the bus was sold if the transaction took place at just the right time in history. And that’s what’s amusing.
Like this
The people who now (often) wear the branded American symbol so proudly likely do so because of an ideology they inherited from forbearers the branding was created to offend. Simply put, the same people who complained about the hippies wearing things made from the American Flag now possess “United We Stand” tee-shirts, hats and bumper-stickers.
I’m not taking shots at the patriotically garbed. I just find it interesting. Neither Abbey Hoffman nor Richard Nixon would ever be caught dead in a “United We Stand” tee shirt. Fun.
As I began to write this I was captivated by the idea that the vehicle could have been a make-shift tour bus for a ‘70s band that didn’t quite make it. The lights on the top were used for impromptu outdoor gigs, I’d convinced myself. But as I planned this story it occurred to me that it could have equally been for camp meetings.
Can I get a witness?
Religion is really important here. Across Delmarva are scattered small storefront churches as well as groups of people who meet in school gymnasiums and other rented spaces because they’re still raising money to build a facility of their own. It’s by those lights the notion of a professional camp preacher from Tennessee finding the end of his route and true calling on the outskirts of Delmar appeals to me.
Spending all summer driving through the most rural parts of Virginia, maybe stopping for a few days outside of Washington, D.C. and finally on through Cambridge and Easton, spending a week here and there to save souls and raise enough money for gas, the traveling pastor stopped.
In northern Delmar.
Route 13 would have been a two-lane road at the time and pretty deserted as he approached the Maryland state line and parked. I imagine he spent a week or so getting to know the then-locals, found them to be more “his people” than the good people of Johnson City, Tenn. or Blacksburg, Va. and decided to block up his van and stay awhile.
It’s also possible, and far more likely, the bus stopped here because it couldn’t go any further. The former owner came through on his way to someplace else and, for reasons too convoluted to think about, stayed. Maybe Delmar didn’t turn out to be the place he planned on it being but turned out to be the place he lived.
If that’s the case it makes him one of my ideological forbearers. That is, of course, if coincidence counts as an ideology.
Neither of us inherently belong here or set out hoping to establish roots here, but this is where we ended up and this is where we’ll stay.
I guess that would make us − my fictional camp-preacher and me − a lot like the bus.
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Stalk me
