Tailings

by Kaethe Schwehn

Overview

In August of 2001, Kaethe Schwehn needed her own, personal Eden. She was a twenty-two-year-old trying to come to terms with a failed romance, the dissolution of her parents' marriage, and her own floundering faith. At first, Holden Village, a Lutheran retreat center nestled in the Cascade Mountains, seemed like a utopian locale: communal meals, consensus decision-making, and eco-friendly practices. But as the months wore on, the idyll faded and Kaethe was left with 354 inches of snow, one prowling cougar, sixty-five disgruntled villagers, and a pile of copper mine tailings 150 feet high. Her Eden was a toxic Superfund site. How do we navigate the space between who we are and who we would like to become, between the world as it is and world as we imagine it could be? Tailings is a lyrical memoir of intentional community told from the front lines, a passionate and awkward journey about embracing the ""in-between"" times of our lives with grace and hope. ""Kaethe Schwehn's poignant memoir explores longing, both spiritual and physical, community and faith, in prose that is calm, lovely, and filled with clear-eyed honesty and grace. Tailings is simply an exquisite book."" --Dinty W. Moore, author of The Mindful Writer ""Schwehn's Tailings, is, like all of my favorite contemporary nonfiction, uncategorizable--part memoir, part spiritual reflection, part reportage. Brilliant in all of its guises, Tailings only makes me want to read more by Kaethe Schwehn. She writes with fierce intelligence and luminous clarity on all of her subjects: loss, grace, this very particular village, and the hard work of renewal. Tailings is a beautiful and original book by a remarkable writer."" --Rene Steinke, author of Friendswood ""Already by the second chapter, this is a book hard to lay aside. Schwehn's prose is liquid and intelligent. It catches your interest immediately and swings you from paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter. Her observations never stand still but sweep you forward into her story/memoir. She is a genuine artist."" --Walter Wangerin Jr., author of Ragman--and Other Cries of Faith Kaethe Schwehn holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is the coeditor of Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts (2014). Schwehn has been the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant and a Loft Mentor Series award. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. She teaches at St. Olaf College and lives in Northfield, Minnesota, with her husband and two children.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625645623
Publisher:	Cascade Books
Publication date:	10/08/2014
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Kaethe Schwehn holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is the coeditor of Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts (2014). Schwehn has been the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant and a Loft Mentor Series award. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. She teaches at St. Olaf College and lives in Northfield, Minnesota, with her husband and two children.

Read an Excerpt

Tailings

A Memoir

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By Kaethe Schwehn

Wipf and Stock Publishers

Copyright © 2014 Kaethe Schwehn
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62564-562-3

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CHAPTER 1

SEPTEMBER

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Nine Switchbacks

There is only one road to the village. The road begins at a lake whose cold is a firecracker to the chest. The road doesn't linger at the lake, the road goes groping up the mountain. Nine switchbacks and the road gets dizzy with the sway, needs to catch a breath, goes straight and narrow for eight miles, past a few halfhearted waterfalls, past alumroot and chicory, past lodgepole pine and silver fir. When the road comes to the village it stutters for three hundred yards, between chalets and lodges, between mess hall and gymnasium. Just past the village the forest begins to encroach on the road, pine needles underfoot instead of dust and rock until, one mile later, the road sputters out in a field of grass and ground squirrel dens. The village used to be a mining village; now it is a Lutheran retreat center.

In the summertime retired pastors and young families come to this village in central Washington to attend classes and weave rugs and hike to waterfalls and sip coffee in adirondack chairs. They gulp deep breaths of mountain air and celebrate the lack of phones and television reception and Internet access. In the winter the village is kept alive by sixty-five people who are in some state of transition in their lives; they are between jobs or relationships or identities. They are vehemently Christian or vehemently not. Over the course of the upcoming winter these villagers will laugh and fight and eat and screw. They will discuss Bonhoeffer and brew beer and paint silk scarves. They will make earrings out of mine debris and toboggan down Chalet Hill with whiskey still slick on their tongues. One villager will come out of the closet. One will take a vow of silence and one will contemplate statutory rape. One will break her pelvis and one will crack his wrist. One will fear her child is being molested and one will miscarry twice. Some villagers will fall in love and some will fall out of love and a handful will contemplate suicide. Over the course of the winter, 354 inches of snow will fall. The people will pray for transformation while the copper tailings stain the creek.

I am the teaching assistant at the school in the village. But I didn't come to the village to teach, I came because I was a teacher and I want to be a writer and the village is a place to live when you are between two parts of your life. I left my teaching but I also left behind a man, a lover, a paramour, a partner, an Intended. I am between the part of my life that included my Intended and the part that will not. Generally the world divides time into before and after, this job and then that one. The village provides a liminal space, a way of dwelling deliberately in the unknown.

My parents didn't know this when they came to the village for the first time in 1980. They thought they were coming to enjoy the adventure of the wilderness, the fellowship of Christian community. They didn't realize they were inhabiting the tender space between eleven years of marriage and thirty-plus years of divorce.

J. H. Holden didn't know this when he arrived in 1896, before the village was a village, when it was just valley and mountain. Holden wanted a quick before and after: rock to copper, mountain to mine, rags to riches. But although he discovered the vein of copper, he lived through twenty-two years of leases and assessments. Holden never saw the mine become operational, didn't live to see the place named Holden Village in honor of his discovery. He spent two decades of his life waiting for the future he intended.

I spend my days in the three-room schoolhouse, completed in 1938, twenty years after Holden died. This year, the school consists of twelve students: seven high school students and five elementary students. On this particular morning, the third day of school, I am sitting on a couch in the high school room, watching the teacher draw two vertical rectangles on the chalkboard. "They were like this," he says. Then he erases the upper edge of one of the rectangles and the sides until it is only an eighth of the height of the rectangle beside it. He redraws the upper edge. "Now the tower is like this."

It is September 11, 2001 and we have no television reception. There is the world before September 11 and the world after September 11th. We will spend the next year living somewhere in between.

There are three ways out of the village. The first is via helicopter. If you break your neck in an avalanche (2000) or fall off a cliff and into a raging creek (1996) or suffer a severe allergic reaction after eating a bite of not-actually-dairy-free lasagna (1997), you can be airlifted out. If there isn't fog in the valley, if there is enough light and the winds are relatively still, the helicopter will land on a pile of copper tailings on the other side of Railroad Creek.

Most people leave the village by the taking the road down the valley to Lake Chelan. Once you reach Lake Chelan you have to wait for a boat to take you down lake. In the summer the boat ride will take three hours. In the winter a faster boat is used but you have to catch it on its way up lake and then ride it all the way back down. In December, the time from the village to a store that sells tortillas and peanut butter and sponges is approximately six hours.

The third way out is to hike in the other direction, up valley instead of down. After two miles you'll come to a series of footbridges so carefully built into the trail that you might not notice them until you hear the hollow sound under your feet. In another mile you'll come to a trailhead. If you go right you'll climb the switchbacks to Holden Lake. If you stay to the left you can go to Hart Lake. Lyman Lake. Cloudy Pass. From the pass you can see three valleys if you can see at all. If the wind is moving fast enough, the clouds will roll directly over the spine of the pass and you will pull your Gortex hood up and turn your face to the right so your lover can see how the wind is burning your cheeks. If there is no wind, you can be socked in for hours or days. From Cloudy Pass, you can wend your way to Stehekin, the town at the furthest tip of Lake Chelan, via Agnes Creek. Or you can follow the sloping mountain meadow to Image Lake, eat hummus and pita at a fire lookout tower, and then amble the next twenty miles to a civilized town.

This is a lie. There are a million ways out of the mountains.

CHAPTER 2

OCTOBER

* * *

Fortune Teller Fish

My Intended is supposed to return in October. Is supposed to bring my stereo and my snowshoes, partly because I need these things and partly because, though we have decided to take a break, a separation never sticks until one of the parties falls in love with someone else. So a part of me has an eye on the mailboxes, on the bus arrivals. A part of me is always looking for a sign of his return.

Today is Transition Day, the day we transform the village from a large summer retreat center to a small winter community. In the summer we house over 450 people on any given day; in the winter, even when the village swells beyond its usual number with January-term college students or weekend retreaters, our numbers rarely exceed one hundred. So we have to prepare the buildings for hibernation, need to clean and flip and store, need to gird ourselves for the onslaught of snow and the impending darkness. It's the day we hunker down and truly examine who it is we'll be living beside for the next nine months.

We're scheduled to break up into work crews at 8:30 so by 8:00 the dining hall is filled with most of the villagers. My family, one side of my family, is in the village too. I spot my mother over by the oversized coffee urns and my stepfather, Peter, ladling oatmeal out of a silver tureen. My brother, Michael, is standing by the industrial sized toaster, hypnotically transfixed by the sight of the bread slowly moving down the grated conveyor belt. I poke my mom in the butt and she swats at my hand. I love my family but I don't love the fact that I'm twenty-two years old and living in a remote mountain village with them. The original plan was to spend the year here with the Intended. When my parents expressed interest in coming along too, it somehow seemed not-too-weird; I would have my life with the Intended and they could live their lives beside us. But now that I'm here by myself, the whole arrangement feels mildly humiliating.

I skip the coffee urns and head directly to the silver counter. The counter lines the north end of the dining hall; the work of the kitchen goes on behind it. Lucas stirs oatmeal in a huge silver bowl while Miriam kneads bread on the counter.

"Press pot?" I say.

Lucas peels off his white latex gloves and hands me the pot. "Second one of the morning. Still warm."

Lucas is one of the few volunteer cooks who actually has experience cooking. Before coming to Holden, Lucas was the cook at a men's homeless shelter in Seattle. Unlike the other cooks in the village (trained in Holden's mostly vegetarian oeuvre), Lucas knows meat. How to baste and slice, how to grill and fry. How to cut a pork loin so it will be tender, how to cook roast beef so that it turns dark brown with a pale rose in the center instead of chalky gray. His dairy allergy is so severe that he has to leave the dining hall when the other cooks mix the powdered milk. Blue eyes, blond hair, a frame thinned by cigarettes, he wears a bandana to cook, always, and his wire-rimmed glasses. He has a professional, almost brusque manner when he's in the kitchen but when we're alone his gaze, usually rooted in the back of his skull moves outward, becomes intimate and penetrating. I take the press pot.

"We put out half and half today," adds Miriam.

Usually, my only option for softening the bitterness of the coffee is the half-powdered, half-regular milk combination that the cooks pour into silver pitchers every morning. Half and half is a luxury.

"We pull out all the stops on Transition," says Lucas, "we just go crazy."

"I might even put out whipping cream later," says Miriam.

"Things could get insane," says Lucas.

Miriam smiles, sprinkles a little more flour on the silver counter, and rips a small chunk of dough off a hulking mass that reminds me vaguely of Jabba the Hutt. She sets the dough on a scale, peers over her glasses to study the shuddering needle, and then puts the dough on the counter and digs the heels of her hands into it. The cooks bake fresh bread daily and this is what Miriam loves: not just the weighing of the dough or the kneading, not just the sprinkling of flour over the clean counter or the brushing of egg yolk on browning loaves, but talking about what it means. Ritual and practice, how coming together over food changes the lives of those involved. Last Sunday, as the assisting minister at Eucharist, Miriam's outstretched hands were graceful, the gesture of lifting prayers to God as natural as pulling a strand of hair behind her ear or pinching the bridge of her nose.

Maybe I like Miriam for how different she seems. She's a New Yorker at heart; she usually wears black, sometimes coupled with a fleece in a dim earthy tone. She has short, spiky black hair and tortoiseshell glasses. She lived the last three years in Taos, New Mexico, with a woman whose name she pronounces delicately, like tissue paper. When I'm with her I think it would be nice to have a woman float my name into space with that kind of care.

I dump half and half in my coffee, grab a piece of toast, and settle myself in a chair just as Gregory, the operations manager, arrives at the small podium in the middle of the south end of the dining hall and turns on the microphone. He explains that we'll be breaking up into different work crews, reminds us to wear close-toed shoes and to lift from the legs, and then steps back so that the crew leaders can summon their forces.

I'm on Kent's crew. Kent is actually a cook but he's tall and strong with a brooding and authoritative look that makes him an appealing team captain. In the kitchen, Kent chooses bluegrass or blues for the stereo because it's what he loves to play. Kent's voice is raspy; he sings songs about trains disappearing, about the old wheel turning, about the time not being long. He was in Palestine a few years ago, he was playing music with Palestinian and Israeli children when his friend, a Palestinian, was killed. During the summer Kent fell in love with a big-boned German woman who was volunteering in the kitchen; he's spent the weeks since her departure writing her furiously scribbled letters, sometimes in German, sometimes in English. Our job, he explains, is to tend to the objects that might be harmed or destroyed by the 300-plus inches of snow we'll likely receive over the course of the winter.

We head outside and begin by flipping the huge oak picnic table on its side; we nestle the benches close to the table's haunches. Then we collect the adirondack chairs and place them in the dingy basement of Lodge Two. We take down chalet flowerboxes and scour the rest of the village for random tools and implements; snow is predicted tomorrow and we want to salvage what we can before it goes missing for the next six months. Then Kent gives me the task of dismantling the Tree of Life.

The Tree of Life stands at the heart of the village, just to the left of a wooden platform called the Ark. Above the Ark is the bell, a remnant of the mining days, attached to a rope whose other end is slung around the railing of the dining hall. Someone pulls the rope to summon everyone to meals, Vespers, and meetings. In the summertime, kids clamor around the rope in the minutes leading up to mealtimes, hoping for the honor of getting to tip the clapper into song.

Constructed in 1999 by Sister Paula Mary Turnbull, the Tree is constructed out of pipes from the mine itself and copper manufactured out of the concentrate pulled from the mountain. In the Bible the Tree of Life appears as one of the few benevolent figures in the book of Revelation. The Tree bears twelve kinds of fruit and its leaves are intended for the healing of the nations. To a Lutheran, the idea of a Tree of Life formed out of salvaged parts feels powerful. The mine and its tailings are responsible for polluting Railroad Creek and the valley around it; how lovely to connect devastation with healing, pollution with new life. While I, too, love the idea theoretically, I don't much care for the idea in practice. The trunk and arms of the tree are formed mostly from the rusted copper piping; the dangling leaves and fruit have been pounded out of the salvaged copper and their healing potential isn't promising. The pieces are cold and make my hands smell like blood; I'm not exactly sad to be dismantling the tree. I wrap each item in a piece of newspaper and place them in a cardboard box that I seal and label "Tree of Life" in red permanent marker. When I'm finished, the trunk still stands, cemented into the ground, looking very much like it's waiting to impale someone.

I hear a grating sound and some cursing. My stepfather, Peter, and Aaron, Finn, and John are pushing a large ice cream freezer up the brick path from the road to the dining hall. In the summer the dining hall is simply used for eating. Orange rectangular tables from the mining days (as their weight and general tendency toward immobility remind us) line the south wall. More modern, less stable circular tables run down the middle of the room. Today half of the tables will be removed and replaced with a small pool table, a ping-pong table, and a foosball table. The freezer, usually housed in the Snack Bar, will be positioned between the bulk cereal dispenser and the glass tea jars so that we can enjoy scoops of rocky road and mint chocolate chip on Wednesday and Friday nights throughout the winter.

"This is going to give me a hernia," says Peter, readjusting his grip on the slick side of the freezer.

"This freezer is going to give me a hard on," says Finn, gyrating his hips into the side of perhaps the least sexual object in the entire village.

"Save it for the dining hall," says John. "You can make all the freezer babies you want when we get this up there."

"Care to give us a hand?" says Aaron.

"Nah," I say, lifting the box in my hands a little higher. "I'm already carrying the Tree of Life."

Aaron rolls his eyes.

Aaron and Peter are Operations Floaters. Basically, this means they do most of the manual labor in the village that doesn't involve shoveling snow, cutting firewood, or moving heavy objects from one place to another. Those jobs are reserved for the head Mavericks, Finn and John. The main job of the operations crew this year is to remodel Lodge One. Because Holden Village is an historic site, we have to get special permission from the Forest Service before altering the outsides of the buildings in any way. Even a fresh coat of paint in the same color requires a pile of paperwork. The insides of the buildings, however, are free game.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Tailings by Kaethe Schwehn. Copyright © 2014 Kaethe Schwehn. Excerpted by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

Acknowledgements xi

September: Nine Switchbacks 1

October: Fortune Teller Fish 4

November: Scrapbooking After Eden 14

December: Coming to Consensus 27

January: Reflection and Refraction 38

February: Litany of the Middle 51

March: Vigil with Cougar and Sackbut 64

April: A Cut, a Climb, and a Café in California 82

May: The Cost of Hospitality 95

June: The View from the Second Level 113

Works Cited 123

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Kaethe Schwehn's poignant memoir explores longing, both spiritual and physical, community and faith, in prose that is calm, lovely, and filled with clear-eyed honesty and grace. Tailings is simply an exquisite book."
—Dinty W. Moore, author of The Mindful Writer

"Schwehn's Tailings, is, like all of my favorite contemporary nonfiction, uncategorizable—part memoir, part spiritual reflection, part reportage. Brilliant in all of its guises, Tailings only makes me want to read more by Kaethe Schwehn. She writes with fierce intelligence and luminous clarity on all of her subjects: loss, grace, this very particular village, and the hard work of renewal. Tailings is a beautiful and original book by a remarkable writer."
—Rene Steinke, author ofFriendswood

"Already by the second chapter, this is a book hard to lay aside. Schwehn's prose is liquid and intelligent. It catches your interest immediately and swings you from paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter. Her observations never stand still but sweep you forward into her story/memoir. She is a genuine artist."
—Walter Wangerin Jr., author of Ragman—and Other Cries of Faith

Editorial Reviews

Kaethe Schwehn's poignant memoir explores longing, both spiritual and physical, community and faith, in prose that is calm, lovely, and filled with clear-eyed honesty and grace. Tailings is simply an exquisite book.
--Dinty W. Moore, author of The Mindful Writer

Schwehn's Tailings, is, like all of my favorite contemporary nonfiction, uncategorizable--part memoir, part spiritual reflection, part reportage. Brilliant in all of its guises, Tailings only makes me want to read more by Kaethe Schwehn. She writes with fierce intelligence and luminous clarity on all of her subjects: loss, grace, this very particular village, and the hard work of renewal. Tailings is a beautiful and original book by a remarkable writer.
--Rene Steinke, author ofFriendswood

Already by the second chapter, this is a book hard to lay aside. Schwehn's prose is liquid and intelligent. It catches your interest immediately and swings you from paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter. Her observations never stand still but sweep you forward into her story/memoir. She is a genuine artist.
--Walter Wangerin Jr., author of Ragman--and Other Cries of Faith

From the Publisher