ancestry – Page 3

Tribes and tribulations

May 15, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I can’t remember the name of the tribe, which is mildly ironic given the nature of their story. And it’s quite a story.It amazes me that regardless of how smart we are and how much we can do, we still know so little about the world.

Only 2 percent of the ocean floor has been explored. Species thought long extinct still turn up every once in a while. And just last year, scientists stumbled upon a valley in New Guinea that had gone untouched by man since the dawn of time. There were plants and insects never seen before. And the animals never bothered hiding or running from the explorers. They didn’t have the experience to tell them humans were a potential threat.

But of course it’s not just plants and animals and hidden valleys that are being discovered. People are, too. And that can lead to all sorts of things.

Take, for instance, the tribe I mentioned above.

They were discovered in 1943 in one of the remotest parts of the Amazon jungle. Contact was carefully arranged. Easy at first, nothing too rash. That seems to be rule number one in those situations–don’t overwhelm the tribe.

It didn’t work. Here’s why.

The difference between these particular people and the others that pop up every few years was that their uniqueness was foundational to their belief system. They’d been so cut off from civilization for so long that they were convinced they were the only humans in the world. No one outside of their small tribe existed. And they liked that idea.

Finding out that not only were there other people in the world, there were billions of them, was too much. The trauma of learning they were not unique was so debilitating that the entire tribe almost died out. Even now, sixty-nine years later, only a few remain.

Sad, isn’t it?

I’ll admit the temptation was there for me to think of that tribe as backward and primitive for thinking such a thing. But then I realized they weren’t. When you get right down to it, their beliefs and the truth they couldn’t carry made them more human than a lot of people I know.

Because we all want to be unique.

We all want to think we’re special, needed by God and man for some purpose that will outlast us. We want to be known and remembered. We all know on a certain level that we will pass this way but once, and so we want whatever time we have in this world to matter.

That’s not a primitive notion. That’s a universal one.

I think at some point we’re all like members of that tribe. We have notions of greatness, of doing at most the impossible and at least the improbable. Of blazing a new trail for others to follow. It’s a fire that burns and propels our lives forward.

I will make a difference, we say. People will know I was here.

But then we have a moment like that tribe had, when we realize there are a lot of other people out there who are more talented and just as hungry. People who seem to catch the breaks we don’t and have the success that eludes us. And that notion that we were different and special fades as we’re pulled into the crowd of humanity and told to take our rightful place among the masses.

It’s tough, hanging on to a dream. Tough having to talk yourself into holding the course rather than turning back. Tough having to summon faith amidst all the doubt.

But I know this:

That tribe was right.

We are all unique.

We are all here for a purpose, and it’s a holy purpose. One that cannot be fulfilled by anyone else and depends upon us.

We are more than flesh and blood. More than DNA and RNA and genes and neurons. And this world is more than air and water and earth. Whether we know it or not, whether we accept it or not, our hearts are a battleground between the two opposing forces of light and dark.

One side claims we are extraordinary. The other claims we’re common.

It’s up to us to decide the victor.

The heartbeat of this world

January 14, 2014 by Billy Coffey 16 Comments

My uncle has passed. The cancer took him.

He left the world at five o’clock this morning. Saturday morning, it is. January 11. As I write this I glance up to a cold rain falling through the fog that rolls down from the mountains. It seems right that death should be greeted by such weather. We know where he is, and we know that place is fine and beautiful and has no cancer in it, but that does not mean there is no grief. There is grief for my family. And there is heartache for my aunt and two cousins.

He was a simple man who lived a simple life. A farmer who spent much of his time tending to land that has been his kin’s for generations. A devout man, a hard worker, a provider for his family. When you are from my part of the country, such qualities lead people to call you Good. He was a Good man.

The cancer had been in his family, felling several. I suppose the thought that he could meet a similar end was in my uncle’s mind. He abhorred doctors. He chose to ignore the pain that began months ago rather than have it investigated. He knew, I think. I think in some way he always knew. By the time there was no choice but to seek help, it was too late. The cancer was everywhere by then.

To the end, he rose each morning to feed the animals with a strength none of us can fully fathom. The land was his life, all he knew. Several days ago, as the cancer spread into his brain, he wandered outside without a shirt in below-zero temperatures. My aunt and cousins let him, too wearied by their long fight against the death that stalked him. He stared out over the hills and fields and came inside when he finally grew too cold. So far as I know, it was the last time he gazed upon his tiny part of the world.

The pain was too great for him last night. No amount of medicine could ease it. Death saved him from more life. That’s how I’m trying to see it.

Upon his death, my cousins washed his body and dressed him in a suit. The simple cherry box he will lie in was handmade by a local Amish man. He will go into the ground today in a family plot that overlooks his home, watched over by a preacher, my aunt, and her children and grandchildren. It is the way my uncle wanted it, and how the country and mountain folk have buried their loved ones for hundreds of years. You may think that strange, backward almost and excruciatingly difficult. That’s fine.

We do not choose how we are born into this world and we do not choose how we leave it. It’s the wide spaces in between that are ours to live and do—to craft something of worth, something that will last, something that will honor the God who blesses us all.

My uncle did that in his own quiet way, and that is why I write of him now. Because on this and every day, there are many more like him in the hills and hollows of our country. They grow the food you eat and the cows that give you milk and beef. They live by the whims of weather and the grace of God. They are the heartbeat of this world, and they should be remembered.

In praise of the inbred hick

July 25, 2013 by Billy Coffey 6 Comments

There are better things to be called than “an inbred hick,” and I had been called worse by many, but I had to admire the originality. And I wasn’t mad. The phrase was uttered with a sense of good-natured mockery common among friends in general and mine specifically. Especially the one who was not only a liberal, but also a Red Sox fan. I never said my friends were perfect.

This friend’s name? Dan. A truly brilliant man despite the fact I would never admit it to his face. Chair of the Asian Studies department at the college. Prolific author and lecturer. World traveler. Highbrow. All of which paints a pretty stark contrast to me. My only chair is the one in the living room, I am prolific only at spitting and shooting a bow, most of my travels are on dirt roads, and I am the very definition of lowbrow.

We have our differences, to be sure. And whenever we happen to bump into each other, we spend most of our time arguing over whose differences are right.

Like yesterday, for instance.

Dan brought me a souvenir from his latest trip to Japan—a fan with “Hanshin Tigers” printed on the front, along with a pretty ferocious looking cat.

“You should go with me one time,” he said after recapping his adventures. “Japanese baseball is great, and the Tigers have a good team this year. You need to see the world. You’re stuck here in this valley missing everything.”

“You’re only stuck if you can’t move,” I said, “I just don’t want to. And I’m not missing much. The world’s a crazy place. At least around here the crazy’s familiar.”

“There’s nothing here,” he said. “It’s all out there. The world’s passing you by. Your family’s been here how long?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think we came with the Valley.”

“Exactly. Generations. As long as people can remember.”

“And that’s bad how?”

“You’re the product of centuries of people who refused to better themselves. Your life is no different than your great-grandfather’s and his great-grandfather’s.”

“So?” I asked.

“So you’re just an inbred hick. You could make yourself into a lot better person.”

The thought of making myself into a better person had never really crossed my mind, mostly because I’d always been pretty content with who I was. Then again, I’d never considered myself an inbred hick.

But my family has occupied this valley and the mountains surrounding it for centuries. Staying put in one place for so long tends to give you a sense of belonging. Of home. And though I would trade my mountains for the ocean any day, this place would always be home. There are a lot of my kin buried here in the Blue Ridge. I could wander away from those bones, but not for very long and not for very far.

So the inbred thing? True.

As for the “hick” part of that little insult, I’d have to say that was something Dan and his fellow urbanites just couldn’t understand. They’d never lived in the sticks, never spent much time with country folk, and so allowed their stereotypes to rule them.

Then again, all stereotypes are grounded in some semblance of truth.

It’s true, for instance, that one of my best Christmas presents last year was a bag of deer jerky and a jar of peach moonshine. And yes, some country folk live in trailers. By and large, “dressing up” means trading our faded jeans for dark ones. We are not generally well-educated. We do hunt and fish and ride four-wheelers. We live vicariously through Ric Flair and consider “Freebird” the real national anthem.

True. All true.

But there is more beneath the surface to life in the country. A lot.

Because to us, a trailer full of love is better than a castle full of discord.

And we’re not nearly as impressed with the clothes a person wears as we are with the person wearing the clothes.

We might not be able to split the atom, but we know what means much in life and what doesn’t.

We hunt and fish and grow our own groceries because food straight out of the dirt and the woods, sweetened with sweat and labor, tastes a lot better than what you can get at the store.

Our churches aren’t big, but they’re full. Our words are few, but they’re meaningful. We don’t want more of this world. We want less.

We are plain and simple people. People who will go hungry before letting our neighbors starve, drop whatever we’re doing to help a friend, and roam among the wild places to get a better glimpse of God.

The best people. My people.

Inbred hicks? Absolutely. Who could possibly want to be more?

Amish family reunion

July 1, 2013 by Billy Coffey 8 Comments

I spent much of this past weekend at the Amish church along the edge of town, attending a family reunion that turned out to be larger than anything I could have imagined. Uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, and more second cousins than I can remember. All descending upon that quiet little church with the softball field and the see-saw, and an ancient blooming oak that looked down upon us all.

My mother’s maiden name is Kanagy—a proper Amish name if you’ll ever hear one, right up there with the Yoders and Schrocks and Zooks. The family center is still in Lancaster County, though the years have flung the Kanagys to all corners of the country. It was a strange thing, hearing that. The Coffeys have always been in these mountains. We always will. I suppose it’s an unwritten rule that we should never roam far from our family’s bones. And yet Saturday we parked near vehicles from Kansas, Colorado, and Delaware. Sunday, it was mostly Ohio.

Many of them I’d never seen (though many remembered me as a child, one even commenting on numerous occasions that I smelled very good as a baby—a tidbit of information that never failed to make my son giggle). Others I’d seen only in passing and only years before. And yet all of them looked familiar in the way family always does, whether it was the way all of their faces had the same shape or the way everyone’s laugh seemed to lilt at the end. We all shared something important. We wandered and mingled and introduced ourselves, and we all felt that tugging of a thin cord wound around us all, placed there by some long-ago kin.

Not that things always went so smoothly. My mother’s Amish heritage gave way to the Mennonite faith when she was a child. The Mennonite in her fell away (at least in practice) not long after she married my father. I was raised more conservative country than conservative Mennonite, which was why my family showed up in jeans and capris rather than the accustomed plain blue pants and white shirts, or the plain blue dresses and white bonnets.

(Also this rather important point: If you should ever find yourself in the company of a hundred Amish and Mennonite people and you yourself are neither Amish nor Mennonite, take care to cover the ginormous tattoo running from your shoulder to your elbow. This, I found out the hard way.)

So yes, there was some getting used to things. But the vast majority of my distant relatives were more than happy to put our outward differences aside, eager to use the opportunity as a chance to see how the other half lives.

I was pleased to find many of them had kept up with my wife and children and had read my books. Just because you’re Amish doesn’t mean you’re dim. Indeed, the Kanagy’s are an intellectual lot; in my wanderings around the reunion, I met several preachers and one college professor. Reading is considered not only necessary, but pleasurable. The classics are most encouraged. Dickens is widely read.

(Which brings another rather important point: Amish people do not read Amish fiction. In fact, many of them had never heard of such a thing— its mere mention brought the very same shock and laughter my son offered when he heard I’d smelled excellent as a baby.)

I imagine much like most families, what truly brought us together was the food. Your typical Amish fare—bean soup, moon pies, barbequed chicken, fresh bread, and spearmint tea made to such perfection that I could not help but drink it and think of my own grandmother. We stood in that gathering hall to pray and we said our amens, and when we sat to eat we found that despite all of our differences, we were still all the same. Because that’s when the tales began.

One after another, each fired in succession. Tales of days gone by and times when the world seemed a better, fresher place. The hardships endured. The ones who have gone on. The ones who have come to take their place. And when we shared each of these things we shared not only our memory, we shared ourselves.

I won’t see many of them again until the next reunion. Though from what I hear, this one may be the last. Too many of my relatives have grown too old. The distance is too great between us for the traveling. Its wearying to the bones.

If that’s the case, I can rest knowing I spent my time wisely this past weekend. I learned much of my past. And I learned this as well: what binds a family together is a thing deeper than blood and body, it is story. And that is the story of us all.

There still be dragons

January 24, 2013 by Billy Coffey 6 Comments

My maternal grandparents were Amish/Mennonite. To this day I don’t exactly know how to write those two words, if they should be separated by a slash or a dash or some other form of punctuation. I suppose it doesn’t matter so long as you understand this one important point—when I stayed there, I had to entertain myself.

No television. No radio. No electronic games. Nothing.

It wasn’t all bad. Strip away all those technological whiz-bangs we surround ourselves with, and what’s left is real life. Sunshine and sweet breezes and garden dirt. That’s what became my childhood. And books. Lots and lots of books.

My grandfather’s den was where I’d mostly hole up when the weather was cold or wet. An old recliner, a massive roll top desk, and shelves of books. One in particular was always the first I’d reach for—a giant volume of ancient maps. Europe, Asia, the Americas, darkest Africa. I loved poring over those old things. To this day, I believe that’s where my love of all things mysterious began.

I have my own collection of books now, complete with my own volume of old maps. Replicas of those drawn by explorers and seafarers from a time when the world was wider and deeper. I still take that book down from time to time, just to think and imagine. That’s what the best books do.

My daughter was wondering about the Pacific the other day. Something about school. I came up here to my office and brought out my book of old maps, she reached for the Google Earth app on my iPad. Sometimes the space between generations seems more a chasm than a span.

We sat together on the sofa, she swiping and pinching the screen, me turning the pages and tilting the spine. She saw detailed photos of remote and uninhabited islands surrounded by clear waters. I saw vast stretches of faded emptiness pockmarked with mermaids and swelling waves.

She leaned on my shoulder and pointed to a spot in the bottom corner of the page. Coiled there was a serpent, mouth open to devour. “What’s that, Daddy?”

“That’s where nobody’d gone yet. They used to mark those places with pictures like that. Sometimes, they’d just write ‘Here There Be Dragons.’”

“Why?”

“Because it was a mystery. Something had to be there, I guess. Why not a dragon?”

My daughter went back to her screen. She couldn’t find any dragons on Google Earth. I figured she wouldn’t. We don’t think there are any mysteries in the world anymore. Everything’s been mapped and plotted by satellites whizzing above our heads. We think we have all the answers, know exactly where we are. There was a time when the center of the world was Jerusalem or Rome or London. No more. Thanks to GPS and Google Maps, the center of the world is wherever we happen to be. I suppose that’s pretty empowering in a way. And sad.

It’s worth mentioning that there are still plenty of dragons in the world. Only 2 percent of the ocean floor has been explored. Thousands of new plants and animals are discovered every year. Just recently, a group of scientists stumbled into a hidden valley in New Guinea that had never been seen before. The animals didn’t even run and hide from them. They had no reason to. They’d never seen a human before.

If there is anything I want my kids to know, it’s that there’s still plenty out there for us to find. I want them to love the mystery of life just as much as their father does. I want them to bask in the unknown. I want them to ponder it and find their places in its midst.

The heart of this land

November 8, 2012 by Billy Coffey 14 Comments

I don’t know how you spent the day after the election. Chances are you were either celebrating or in mourning, depending upon whether you call yourself blue or red. In either case, this one seemed more emotional than usual, didn’t it? We’ve either gained so much or lost so much, brightened our future or darkened it. There seems to be little middle ground, and there are a great many among us who believe our country close to some fundamental unraveling by the zealots on the right or the liberals on the left. Strange as it may be, this seems to be the one thing we can all agree on.

Me, I neither cheered nor mourned. I instead spent the day after the election at a funeral for my grandmother in-law. She closed her eyes to one world and opened them to another last Sunday at the age of 95.

We gathered along the mountain slopes at a small Baptist church with a graveyard pocked by tiny Confederate flags that marked the resting places of the Civil War’s fallen.

A hundred of us, more or less, half of which were family and the other half friends, all of us united in celebrating that one life. One life that you may believe was wholly insignificant, given the fact that she spent most of it on a 200-acre farm at the base of the mountain.

She was a quiet soul, my grandmother in-law. Born at the beginning of World War I, married during the Great Depression and married still sixty-four years later, when her husband passed. In between she’d given birth to ten children, was a grandmother to more than I can count, great-grandmother to my own children, and great-great grandmother to more. At her service, five generations were in attendance.

Think about that.

Her life was built upon three guiding principles: faith, family, and farm. She loved her God, loved her husband and children, and loved the tiny plot of Earth she’d been given. Of all the accolades I heard in her name yesterday, my favorite were her hands. They weren’t smoothed or polished or wrinkle-free, but calloused and scarred from years of labor, most of which was spent near the woodstove upon which she cooked her family’s meals. That was her thing. Neither electricity or gas would do when it came to supper. Food tastes better when it’s cooked over a fire. I know this for a fact.

The picture you see to the right is the view from her graveside. My faith and hers says she is in a far better place just this moment, but I expect there is also no small measure of comfort in knowing her earthly body rests in view of the mountains by her farm. The very ones she would watch from the porch swing on all those calm, silent days.

I share her with you because sometimes I listen to the buzzing too much. I watch the pundits and read the columnists and hear their screaming, telling me all is lost and everything has changed and we are all heading toward an end from which we cannot turn away.

Hear me plain: Don’t listen to them.

Because the heart of this country does not beat in Washington, DC, nor does its soul lie in a seat of power, nor does its destiny lie in which party occupies which section of government.

No, those things all lie with people like my grandmother in-law, people like you and me, people who get up and go to work and love their tiny plot of Earth and whose hands are rough and hardened by loving and giving.

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