The Believer, page 17
The rows face a low platform where an extremely tall blond man stands at a lectern before a red velvet backdrop and under a sign that says: Miranda con esperanza hacia una nueva vision. Look with hope towards a new vision. Under his black blazer he wears a round-collared white shirt. His pleasant face is stretched in an expression of concern as he speaks about God’s command to Moses to remove his sandals when he approached the burning bush for he walked on holy ground. His theme this morning is the importance of knowing whose house we are in. Obedience. Respect.
This is a missionary church and I was invited to attend today. So it is easy enough for me to walk in, however I do feel the consideration of every pair of eyes upon me. Not that many pairs, though, the congregation being relatively small. Its members appear as if they could belong to the same family and they are mostly from Myerstown, Pennsylvania, not the Bronx.
Mennonites are named after Menno Simons, a Dutch Catholic priest who aligned himself with the Anabaptists in the 1530s. Unlike Catholics, who baptize babies, Anabaptists believe that the decision to be baptized can only be made consciously. Persecuted for their differences, Mennonites began arriving in America in the late 1600s and the majority settled in Pennsylvania. There has been a certain amount of theological ferment since then and these days it is easy to get lost in what they laughingly call “the Mennonite maze”—the many differences between churches and between the conferences under which groups of churches are united. But to simplify: Old Order Mennonites physically resemble, but are not, Amish. (The Amish are in fact an eighteenth-century breakaway sect.) Liberal Mennonites look like anyone else walking down the street. The Conservative Mennonites at The Light of Truth are not in-between; they are closer to Old Order Mennonites, and even to the Amish, in significant ways.
Though they drive cars and, generally, use cell phones and filtered internet, Conservative Mennonites separate themselves from mainstream society in many areas of their lives, the most visible being their preference for “plain dress” that to outsiders resembles that worn by the Amish. As a general rule: no TV, no movies, no radio, no secular music. They operate their own schools or rely on homeschooling. They believe in a binary reality. First, there is the earthly kingdom where “a heathen culture” predominates and in which they have little interest and minimal involvement. (For example, they do not vote or take disputes “to law.”) Then there is the kingdom of Heaven, where they hope to eventually go and which is ruled by “a holy, just God who you’re going to have to answer to some day for your actions.”
I sit beside Becky Kreider, who has a preschooler beside her and a toddler on her lap—two of her six sons. She wears a pink dress, a pink cardigan, pink glasses and black Nikes. Her little boy hands me a hymnal. Her toddler stays quiet for the next hour and a half. For an astonishing length of time, he looks attentively at a worn board book about tractors while she softly points things out in the pictures.
The sermon continues, and a different sound hums around us as another tall blond man—Pastor Tim Kreider, Becky’s husband—simultaneously translates the service for two elderly Latina women, his Spanish like the bassline to another song. Rachel, a white woman who looks very thin and very tired, sits next to the women, stroking the shoulder of the one closest. When the sermon ends a young man steps up to the lectern. Becky extracts a notebook and a pen from a worn leather case, poised to take notes.
It was explained to me earlier that their preachers do not have formal training, that there’s been “a very strong backlash reaction to higher education to train them.” The young man at the lectern looks to be in his early twenties. His blond hair is cut short, Caesar-style. His beard, still coming in over his acne, is in the shape worn by the other men: squarish; no mustache. Stumbling on the name, he begins with a quote on environmental destruction from David Attenborough, with whose work he is proudly unfamiliar.
“Is man behind the problems on earth?” he asks, one side of his mouth lifting into a knowing smile.
Heads shake. Someone calls out, “No, Satan is.”
“Satan of course was the one who created the whole mess,” he continues. “We have to understand that’s the doctrine of the Devil, to think of man as a type of pestilence.”
I ponder the likelihood that Sir David ever spread the doctrine of the Devil, intentionally or otherwise, as the sermon abruptly ends and the Sunday school portion of the service begins. A few teenagers lead the children into a room off the hallway behind us and the adults take out, or are handed, booklets consisting of three photocopied pages. The young man at the lectern launches into a lesson on “The Creation of Man” while I page through the booklet:
· Man’s Creation: God gave man moral understanding and the ability to discern . . .
· Man’s Commission: efforts of population control stand in opposition to God’s design . . .
· Man’s Companion: the marriage union is between only one man and one woman, for life. When individuals and nations disregard God’s design, chaos and confusion result . . .
From the lectern, the young man quizzes the congregation on the booklet’s study questions and I try to keep a record of the dialogue that follows but there is a disjunction between the questions and answers; like an awkward high-five, they never quite match up. I swiftly lose the thread of the discussion. When the time allocated for adult Sunday school ends, we have not got through most of the questions.
The children file back in and recite memorized verses. Then everyone sings one last hymn, this time in Spanish, and the service concludes with some housekeeping announcements. A man in the hospital has requested to hear some hymns; they’ll be running a van up there. People volunteer to go sing. I am invited to stay for lunch, which is being laid out on card tables at the back of the room. There are roast chickens, wide bowls of salad, jumbo bottles of ranch dressing and platters heavy with pineapple and watermelon. The kids descend on the food as Becky and I wander over to the tables. We are joined by a woman who made the three-hour drive from Myerstown with her own six children for today’s service. She has bright pink cheeks and intensely blue eyes.
“Are you a Christian?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “I am Jewish.”
“What do you think about Jesus?” she asks.
“I don’t usually think about Jesus,” I reply. “But to the extent that I do think about Jesus, I think about him as a historical figure.”
She nods. Becky says, with perplexity, that she is sometimes mistaken for an Orthodox Jew. So I explain to them the similarities in modest dress and then about the upcoming Jewish New Year and Day of Atonement and how I will be required to fast although I always think that I could concentrate better on my sins if I was allowed a little snack of pizza, and this makes them laugh loudly. And when they laugh my heart surges for one moment and I want to read aloud the last line in today’s booklet, which I circled: Marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. I want to tell them how the lines of scripture in this booklet made me think, yes, we are actually “formed from the earth” given the borrowed nature of our corporeal atoms, once star stuff, now holding forks loaded with iceberg lettuce and ranch dressing. I want to marvel with them at that intuitive sense of Oneness. And how artificial the distance is between us, given our like atoms and the fact that we are each women, each mothers, tiny and enormous, fleeting and enduring, on this grain briefly populated in time everlasting.
But such a conversation will not be possible. Because they believe I am going to Hell and I believe they may already be living in one, and it is 1:00 PM, which means it is time for us to return to our homes.
29
Theories of Flight
Fred & Rhonda
If Fred had left on time he would have returned around dusk for his date with Rhonda. But he didn’t turn up and he didn’t call. So she waited by the phone, smoothing down her blow-dried hair as it got later and later, and then went to bed in her clothes. Lay looking through her window until 6:00 AM when her father snapped on the radio in his bedroom like always, the opening music to ABC news marching down the hallway ahead of the announcer’s voice reporting that a pilot had gone missing over Bass Strait.
She rings Moorabbin Airport, says she thinks she knows who the pilot is, her boyfriend, Frederick Valentich.
Hold the line, comes the reply.
Mounds of dead moths are washing up on the shore from an inundation in the area as the first morning of the air, land and sea search begins around Cape Otway, the margin of the mainland. It goes for four days; finds no trace of Fred.
The Air Safety Incident Report states that no wreckage was sighted. But also: “Two major problems were found during the course of the search: (a) much search time was lost by the optimum aircraft, the Orion, in directing a surface vessel to the position of possible oil slick and debris for retrieval. (b) When light aircraft, without internal navigation systems, found possible debris when out of sight of land they had to climb to fix position and in doing so lost sight of debris.”
Three and a half years later, the Bureau of Air Safety Investigation will release its finding that, while the reason for the disappearance of the aircraft has not been determined, it was presumed fatal.
Like its subject, the government’s accident investigation file also went missing. It was found in 2012 by researcher Keith Basterfield while searching an online National Archives index on a different subject. Shortly after, Basterfield stated that he didn’t believe the file was deliberately covered up. “Put simply,” he stated, “many people within a department will have no idea how their filing system works and where files end up.” Frequently, the most astounding discovery of all is that it’s more mundane, more banal than we ever would have thought.
The parallel narratives of the Valentich story all converge at a vanishing point—Fred in his airplane over Cape Otway. They share little else. As with any perspective sketch, the character of Frederick Valentich is scaled relative to the viewer. What seems accurate to some appears grossly foreshortened to others.
In the idiom of air crash investigation, “human factors” refers to explanations related to the pilot and not the plane. Three days after Fred disappears, Rhonda attends the Department of Transport’s Melbourne office where she is interviewed by three men, bright lights shining in her eyes. She can only vaguely see the faces of her interlocutors. One of them is air safety inspector Jim Sandercock, a former Royal Australian Air Force squadron leader from South Australia who, twenty years prior, commanded Antarctic rescue and expeditionary flights.
Jim Sandercock’s been busy lately, his work difficult. Three months ago he was investigating an incident near Essendon Airport where a plane crashed into a house, killing the family inside—a thirty-year-old woman, her four children aged twelve years to four weeks, and her mother. That was in July, a four-week stretch in which twenty people died in light aircraft crashes around the country.
Jim is a man who grew plants in a beam of Antarctic sunshine. Earned his OBE flying into a blizzard. This is a person who is not just undeterred by uncertainty but who is capable of ascending in a void, landing on ice. “Occasionally a little pedantic with regard to detail,” one of his early promotion summaries stated. I imagine such a person imagining Fred. What does he think as he pieces through his piles of undifferentiated information, now all that is left of a passionate young man whose aspirations appear to have swiftly outpaced his abilities? How does Sandercock speak with—and listen to—Rhonda?
“They asked the most personal questions,” Rhonda remembers. “And other questions. But very, very personal questions as well. So it was—horrifying.”
Sandercock’s report states that Rhonda last saw Fred on Friday night, after he finished work. That she said he hadn’t been himself. Usually he is cheerful, and outwardly very happy, but that night he was not quite in the spirit of things. Quiet, a bit down. Perhaps a bad day at work. The job wasn’t quite what he expected; instead of being trained to be manager he’s made to clean the shop. It could have been the upcoming flight—he told her he was scared of the water. Mentioned how he was not a strong swimmer. Sandercock reports that it became clear to Rhonda that Fred had forgotten they’d made plans for Saturday night. But that they planned to keep their date anyway, Fred saying he would pick Rhonda up when he returned from King Island, would take his good clothes along in the car so he could go straight to her place. Sandercock notes that she was aware that no good clothes had been found in the car, still parked at Moorabbin Airport. No mention is made of a plan for her to have accompanied Fred.
She tells the investigators that Fred always thought before he acted, never acted intuitively. That he becomes nervous dealing with the unexpected. That he held problems in the back of his mind, and that he held them as a list, mentally crossing them off when he had worked out a solution. That he had lied to her very soon after their first meeting, about passing his meteorology subject for his commercial license. But that he’d admitted to it four months later and told her he was repeating the subject.
In his report on the interview, days after Fred’s disappearance, Sandercock finds Rhonda honest, dependable, “a stable person for her years.”
Writing from the superficially impressive altitude of the third person, he states: “The investigator gained the impression that Valentich had chosen Miss Rushton carefully, as someone to discuss his problems with, she being receptive, perhaps more so than a girl of 18–20 years, who might have rejected his problems and ideas and pushed him aside.
“The impression was gained that Miss Rushton was becoming aware that Valentich was ‘different’ from her other male acquaintances and that she was being used as a ‘prop,’ based on the odd phrase used and the time of some of her comments.”
“They made up stuff,” Rhonda will say when I ask her about this report. She wouldn’t have told Fred to remember good clothes, they weren’t going anywhere fancy. She has no idea about the “prop” comment; does not remember saying it, nor that he was different from other men, and does not believe she ever would have. It was upsetting to read, she says. “We were truly in love.”
They write in from the Melbourne suburbs, from down the coast, from South Australia. From Penguin, Tasmania and San Diego, California and J. Allen Hynek’s Center for UFO Studies in Chicago, Illinois. They write on behalf of their children and their wives and themselves. They describe a bright white light with colored rays. An oval object, gray-silver in color, encircled by a ring of light and traveling very slowly out to sea. A green-white flash moving extremely quickly across the sky. Metallic scintillations, thirty bright centers, at an angle of forty-five degrees from the horizon. A large triangular yellow-white light surrounded by colored lights. They preface their information with the fact that they are a responsible person, do not want to create the opinion that they are a nut. They write to help or to be helped; Fred’s story, in some strange way, is now their story.
At the investigator’s request, Fred’s tutor, Air Force reservist Barnes, provides his impressions of his pupil in a two-page letter written nine days after the plane disappears. Blue pen on unlined white paper. Barnes is thorough, frank. Exacting with what he knows and what he doesn’t about the “sober” young man, in a record that is meticulous and humane. (I imagine him finishing this letter, removing a single sheet of lined paper from beneath its painstaking pages. Switching off the desk lamp with a click: the only sound in the house where his wife lies above him, sleeping. He pads into the dining room where he sat on Sundays with the tall young man in whom he saw not himself, but someone familiar, passionate about the things he, too, loved. Stands motionless before the front window, one dry hand extended behind him resting on the chair where Fred used to sit. The air is cold through the clean pane as he looks up at the blackness he knows conceals the new moon but tonight makes him feel only that everything is moving and that nothing he has known can be relied upon for the useful ordering of a human life.)
“In summary,” Barnes wrote, “I would say that he was impressionable, a ‘battler’, and that he had the determination and stability to achieve his goal of commercial pilot.” He admitted his extreme disappointment on learning from investigators that Fred had not, in fact, passed his exams the second time around, noted that Fred’s apparent dishonesty on that account was completely out of character. “I now wonder,” he continued, “if he was ashamed for not having passed the exams, possibly realizing that he would never get his [commercial pilot’s license]. Because everyone had forged the same high opinion of him, was he a good actor? Did he have a split personality? Could he have really been unstable?”
“The balancing of a flyer may seem, at first thought, to be a very simple matter,” Orville and Wilbur Wright wrote in the September 1908 edition of Century Magazine, “yet almost every experimenter had found in this the one point which he could not satisfactorily master.”
It makes no sense; his towel is still hanging in his bathroom at home. There’s no plane, no message. Rhonda doesn’t know what to feel. No one knows what to say to her. She tells the reporters that she thinks he’s alive somewhere, hopes he is alive. She goes to stay with a friend for a few days to avoid the reporters swarming her street. They are still there when she returns home; they are parked outside all day, all night, one pulling up with a toot to relieve the other. When she tries to return to work at the chemist, the reporters hound her so badly her boss lets her go. She is constantly crying. No friends come to visit as she lies long in her room. As she sits blinking on the couch.
Gravity causing all bodies to fall at the same rate, two weeks after Fred goes missing Rhonda swallows seventy-five of the pills that were given to help her sleep after she heard the news.
