James C. Schaap
                   "Buried Strangeness"
 

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Somewhere in the tiny cedar box which holds my mother’s most treasured belongings, there is a three-by-five spiral notepad.  On its blue cover, if I remember correctly, is the title “the Lost Arrow Club.”  Inside that notebook, five or six pages tell the short history of a boyhood club to which I belonged.  It’s the proceedings of the club; but when I was eight years old, I knew nothing about articles or motions, so the proceeding about to a disjointed narrative about a half-dozen sweatshirted boys who claimed allegiance to a scruffy organization head-quartered in a backyard garden shed on the edge of town.      The proceeding explain how these boys would hike out to a deep gulch north of town, a fissure in the earth where some ancient river flowed east to the lake woods, and some blessed privacy for boys exploring themselves and the world.  We called it-everybody did, nobody laughed-the Big Hole, and there wasn’t much there but trees and water and an old dump-sometimes we’d save the farmer’s empty Prince Albert tins because you can never tell when those little things come in handy.  The notebook details the tragic loss of an arrow-all of two bits back then-how Davey Lensink was shooting the wooden 25-pounder his dad let him carry along on our expeditions, how he was shooting at the tree of a starling and how the arrow snuck into the meadow grass and escaped our feet and hands.  Hence, the name, I imagine.  In a ten-year-old’s language that notebook explains how we followed the creeks and built huts from sod and felled tree branches.  The “proceedings” of the Lost Arrow Club glory in a treasured steel trap we hung like a prize from a nail hammered into a stud on the wall of the shack we met in, and it promises how muskrat and mink pelts will make all six of us rich enough to afford more arrows.  There wasn’t a one of us old enough yet for BB guns.      That notebook chronicles boyhood freedom in the middle of the tight protestant righteousness of a Dutch Calvinist village.  That notebook symbolized my own Tom Sawyer boyhood, the adventures growing like thin birch saplings from the woods an sand dunes of a childhood garden.  Those two sources-the lake and the church-form the confluence from which my own identity has flowed.      The lake shore I  remember well. My mother said it was too dangerous for us to cross the busy highway that ran from Milwaukee to Green Bay, so we had to be old enough before we were allowed to escape the village for the woods and the lake shore.  At first we’d get off our bikes and walk across, scared silly of the cars and trucks with the strangers in sunglasses.  But old enough and once across, we’d be in another world altogether.  Entire days we’d spend in the woods, jerking down old logging shacks, plugging creeks like baseball-capped badgers, blowing wet hunks of rotten wood from upturned stumps with M-80s or cherry bombs we had hid for weeks up in our bedrooms.  There was no real world around us at the lake; there were no teachers, no mothers, no playground supervisors to keep our language sweet or our zippers up.  The lake was on vast unlined an unfenced playground.      Sometimes we’d find unimagined things in the ditches: pictures of naked women, remnant discards of a kind or passion we could feel but not name, and vine bottles with little in them but the smell of sin.  For maybe three years I had been old enough to cross the highway, when on day we took along a rookie and found a skin magazine in glorious color.     “Women don’t really look that way, do they?”  He said.  I remember how we laughed, because I remembered-and we all did-thinking the same thing ourselves once.      At ten years old one doesn’t understand being poor, even if one is; neither does one understand the severity of righteousness.  Growing up in a hall of mirrors allows no comparisons, and while today, in retrospect, it is easy for me to talk about repression of Calvinism, a quarter century ago not one of the members of the “Lost Arrow Club” had any sense of the rigors of the tightly religious culture in which we grew.  Every discarded bottle we found on our way to the lake simply smelled slightly like sin.      Growing up in a Dutch Calvinist conclave meant going through a litany of church activities which, at ten, we merely took for granted, because it never struck us that other people might not be running the same gauntlets.  Weekly catechism, weekly Sunday School, devotions at every meal, twice-a-Sabbath worship-plus after-church hymn sings or missions reports-these constituted the altar of our lives.  Some of us went to Christian schools, some did not.  At age ten, few of us could understand the difference.      But it was a tight world.  Few childhood songs ring through my memory as clearly as “Be careful little eyes what you see/....be careful little feet where you walk/....and be careful little hands what you touch.”  And I remember several people-teachers and uncles included-who insisted that Roman Catholics would not be seated next to the rest of us on Heavenly thrones someday.   Dancing was wrong, drinking was skeptically tolerated in those who had not yet settled down to the easy chair of home and family, and divorce was unpardonable.  While the largely German-American towns that surrounded us celebrated themselves in summer rituals of bingo and booze, my own Dutch village, in its annual Fourth of July doings, never served beer and held a raffle that some good burghers (my own father included) wouldn’t patronize.  I will not forget my father’s embarrassment, nor my own, when a relative took home one of the big prizes-maybe it was a concrete mixer.      When the Fourth of July landed on Saturday, village folks were caught in a conflict: empty popcorn boxed, silvery eskimo pie wrappers, and ketchupy napkins flecked the green park grass and turned the whole section of the village into an unholy mess.  But no one dared to pick up on the Sabbath.  Even cleanliness, in my Dutch Calvinist colony, was something less that godliness.      But no one needs to document the repressive nature of Calvinism.  “Puritanism,” said Mencken, “is the suspicion that someone, somewhere is having a good time.”  The caricature is deeply laid in our history, from the English round heads, image-busters and theater-closers, to the American Puritans-Cotton Mather’s devout writhing before the Lord, face down all day long in his closet.  I grew up in a Calvinist world, but twentieth century Dutch Calvinists are not witch-hunting, stocks-slamming zealots, and life in a Dutch Calvinist town is not necessarily a death-in-life sentence.      Each childhood Christmas lives in my memory in rich sepia tones:  the Christmas Eve Sunday School Program-complete with shepherds and angels and forgetful three-year-olds; a free brown bag of candy and peanuts and usually on orange for nutrition; the after-program ritual around the tree in our living room, always begun with a homely on the Greatest of gifts-these memories live in me, for better of worse, as standards of family love and unity.  Some of the heroes of my life were uneducated men whose strength and devotion and love spread over me like some unclimbable ageless pine on the ridge above the shoreline.  My ethnic and religious inheritance includes a childhood of suffering the repression that always attends devout faith, a repression I know nothing of when I was ten.      These two worlds, the open world of the lakes chore and the tight world of the village, shaped my life like a pair of sculptor's hands, so that even at ten I know I lived in two worlds, one righteous-with all the concomitant blessings and curses of enforced righteousness-and the other free and natural, the buttercup world of spring in the lake shore woods.  And so I have always been conscious of two worlds, of being in but not of, of living in a religious subculture in the very center of Emersonian and American individualism.  And that knowledge, that deep perception, colors everything I see even today.