Driving Toward Yes


By Dawn Downey

The desert wind whispered yes as it blew across Dad’s brow. In the summer of 1964, he and three of his teenagers (my older sister Michelle, younger brother Bill, and me) waited impatiently at the edge of the Mojave. Our road trip interrupted, because our family cat was having kittens in the back of the station wagon.

Five days earlier, at age forty-three, Dad closed up Bill’s Body Shop, his car repair business. He waived goodbye to relatives and friends, and drove away from Des Moines, leading a four-vehicle caravan down Route 66, off to California in pursuit of dreams.

Only a high school graduate himself, Dad insisted his kids would go to college. He had five children, number six on the way, and no means to finance all that education. But he’d read the University of California was tuition-free for the state’s residents. The fact that no job awaited him in the golden state—he’d work that out later.

He drove the station wagon and pulled a U Haul trailer. Michelle, who’d earned her driver’s license two weeks before, drove a second car. She towed a VW Bug, which Dad planned to sell in California. Bill and I rode shotgun.

A water pump or two broke along the way. An eighteen-wheeler mangled the trailer hitch. And Dad and Michelle parted company for a while—he following the arrow on a detour sign, she driving around the sign and heading toward Canada. But the four of us ended up together at the edge of the Mojave. While waiting to cross it in the cool of the night, we watched Cass birth her kittens, while the sun painted the sky pale pink, then navy blue. As we fussed over the cat and complained about the heat, Dad towered over us, as big as the desert.

Early the next morning he delivered his brood—three kids and five cats—to Pasadena. (The kids went on to college; the cats did not.)

Long before our cross-country trek, my father had outgrown his life in Des Moines. Between pounding out fenders, he’d written his first novel on a legal pad. A year after the move to California, the Santa Barbara News Press hired him, on the strength of an article he submitted. He was their first African American reporter. He walked into the interview straight from his job as a mechanic at the local Ford dealership, his muscled six-foot frame stuffed into a pair of blue coveralls.

While working at the paper, he typed his second novel during lunch breaks, in the back of his camper.

He stretched the newspaper job from obituary writer into outdoor columnist. Every week, he expanded Gone Fishin’ beyond the expected descriptions of the best camping spots and the latest model boats. His readers got to know his old Uncle Russell in Ottumwa, and his brother Al, a TV weatherman in Des Moines. When Uncle Russell got sick, he received hundreds of get-well cards from all across the country. I suspected then that Dad might be more than just the guy who grounded me.

After a ten-year stint as newspaper columnist, he transformed himself into freelance writer and then again into published author, with five books to his credit. He supplemented his income by teaching memoir writing through adult education. And that’s how he became a guru. Others taught; Dad cheered, encouraged, cajoled, nudged, nagged, poked and mesmerized. One of his students described the classroom experience as a cross between a quilting bee and a revival meeting.

Repeaters were common. Many took his course five years in a row. One returned fifteen times. On the rare occasions that illness kept him home, Dad learned that his substitutes had been greeted with surly expressions and sarcastic complaints. My father had groupies.

Over the thirty years he taught, he told his students to take more risks and write to their edge. After he died, a group of loyalists continued meeting, reserving an empty chair for him.

Decades later, I feel him pushing me too. Through divorce, lay-offs and career changes, he's challenged me to take a risk. When I’m typing against a deadline in the middle of the night, I catch sight of him standing at the edge of the Mojave. And I remember Dad driving toward yes.


Copyright © Dawn Downey. All rights reserved.

Dawn Downey, an essayist, finds inspiration in everyday situations. She writes about topics ranging from her pursuit of the perfect purse* to her search for the meaning of life--with jealousy, prejudice, guilt and inadequacy thrown in for good measure. She views them through the lens of a spiritual path that has wound through the teachings of the Buddha, around to non-duality, and has stopped for a while at devotion—a kinder, gentler relationship with the sweet goofiness that makes us human. She secretly wants to be a rock star, but since she can't sing, settles for reading her stories at coffee shops, galleries and book stores, anywhere there's a microphone and an audience. She lives in Kansas City with her husband, aka groupie, roadie and driver. He spoils her rotten. She reciprocates. 

Dawn Downey is the author of “Stumbling Toward the Buddha, Tripping Over my Principles on the Road to Transformation. www.dawndowney.com

The Cherokee Word for Water

by Terra Trevor

I grew up within in a large extended Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca family. With grandparents and great-grandparents, with roots in Oklahoma. Great-grandma could fix a meal to feed fifteen of us and I loved to sit beside her coal black stove, listening to her stories. I’m the granddaughter of sharecroppers, and I was born to a teenage mother and father in 1953. When I was young, we were poor—but we had water. 

Having water meant we always had plenty to eat. We had fresh running water to rinse, soak and simmer pots of pinto beans and black-eyed peas.

In the summer when rainfall was not plentiful, since the water table was usually high, we could turn the hose on to soak the apple and peach tree and their fruit fed us in return.

There was water for pie baking, and when the sun seared overhead water to mix with Kool-Aid to freeze into popsicles. Home canned goods must be put up in hot, sterilized jars and we had water for boiling before we used them. We had water to wash our hands before pressing a tortilla on a hot skillet, and it was clean and safe to drink.

 

When no one else believed in them, they believed in each other. 


Set in the early 1980s, the story of The Cherokee Word for Water begins in a small town in rural Oklahoma where many houses lack running water. The film tells the story of a tribal community joining together to build a waterline by using traditional Native values of reciprocity and interdependence and is told from the perspective of Wilma Mankiller and Charlie Soap, who join forces to battle opposition and build a 16-mile waterline system using a community of volunteers. In the process, they inspire the townspeople to trust each other, to trust their way of thinking, and to spark a reawakening of the universal indigenous values of reciprocity and interconnectedness. This project also inspired a self-help movement in Indian Country that continues to this day.

The Cherokee Word for Water” is dedicated to Wilma Mankiller’s vision, compassion and incredible grace, and tells the story of the work that led her to become the Chief of the Cherokee Nation. The film was funded through the Wilma Mankiller Foundation to continue her legacy of social justice and community development in Indian Country.  

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