Community

©2017 by John LaTorre

Last weekend, I went to a Volkswagen bus show in Antioch, California, about seventy miles away from home. On the way back, I passed a VW split-windshield bus with its engine compartment lid open, usually a sign of automotive distress, like the open hood of a conventional car.

I made a U-turn and put my flashers on. The driver of the bus said that the engine was stumbling, and thought that it might be related to some bubbles he was seeing in the plastic fuel filter. We sat there for a while, as he tried various things to solve the problem. I noticed that the engine was hot, and he told me that he’d had similar problems, which turned out to be vapor lock.  There wasn’t much I could do apart from offering him water, tools, and such spare parts as I carried. After about a half an hour, he decided to press on for home, using back roads to avoid the freeways. I followed him for about twenty miles, parting company with him when I reached Interstate 5, where I veered off to meet an appointment I had in downtown Sacramento.

The striking thing about this episode wasn’t that it happened. In fact, it happens all the time to vehicles that are upwards of fifty years of age. It was that, while we were on the side of the road, a half a dozen buses passed us by, all coming back from the show. Some of them honked or waved, but none of them stopped to see if they could help. The fact that I had already stopped may have persuaded them that their help wasn’t necessary, of course. But it made me wonder if the community ties weren’t as strong as I thought they were.

I’ve traveled all over the country in these buses, and often found myself on the side of the road dealing with some problem or another. If a VW bus passed by, it could almost certainly be counted on to stop. The owner would get out, ask what the problem was, and offer tools or a beer or a ride to get help. As these cars became more rare, I thought that the community would become stronger over time. It apparently isn’t so.

Or, maybe, the community has different assumptions now. In an age where everybody is carrying a cell phone (I was, and the other driver was, too), the people who passed us were confident that we didn’t need their help. After all, we weren’t that far from the city, cell phone coverage was good, and tow trucks were a call away.

Humans are communal animals, by and large. We crave associations with people who have things in common with us. When my family moved to a military base in Germany in the 1950s, my mother was quick to make connections with other military wives. There was such a club on nearly every military base, because it provided a ready-made community that transients could plug into. It was a lifesaver for her.

Society has communities galore. Some are based on geography: neighborhood clubs and political groups. Some are religious, Some are cultural, allowing immigrants to our country to preserve something of their native culture in an alien environment.  Some are charitable, some are educational. Some are purely social. And some of these organizations combine these elements in novel ways, like the historical re-creation groups that blend history education and socializing, or the National Rifle Association, which combines firearm safety training with Second Amendment political action. (This blending doesn’t always sit well with some of the members of these groups, since there is a fear that overly stressing one aspect leads to the weakening of another.)

Kurt Vonnegut didn’t think much of many of these organizations. His targets were institutions like the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and “…the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows – and any nation, any time, anywhere.” He called them “granfalloons” in the calypso cosmology he invented for his novel Cat’s Cradle. They are artificial communities, he said, that have outlived whatever unifying principle they may have had, and now are only useful for those who feel that they must have something to belong to. His calypso prophet Bokonon wrote:

“If you wish to study a granfalloon

Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.”

Despite his distaste for granfalloons, Vonnegut recognized the need for community. In his book Slapstick, his main character proposed a novel way to combat the fragmentation of the traditional family. A citizen would be randomly assigned to an artificial clan. Membership in this clan would make it certain that wherever you went, you’d have some family to take you in, laugh at your jokes, loan you a few dollars, and do other things that you might expect from a family member but not from a stranger. You didn’t have to like your new relative, any more than you like all of your natural ones, but there would be some kind of bond that you’d have to recognize.

I currently belong to three active “communities” with whom I share a common interest. For over thirty years, I’ve belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronism, a non-profit group comprising some thirty thousand people around the world. They study medieval history and attempt to recreate the arts, crafts, and martial arts of the European Middle Ages, with varying degrees of authenticity. They also party a lot. The attraction is that the authenticity is enforced not mainly by rules and strict guidelines but by peer pressure; the longer you hang around with them, the more you want to emulate the ones who do it best. The local group I play with is very big on camping, with the aim being to create a semblance of a medieval village where we can forget for a while that we’re in the twenty-first century.

The second group, as I’ve mentioned above, is the community of Volkswagen bus aficionados. There are specific local interest groups that cater to this strange attraction to old cars, but I don’t formally belong to any of them. (The one I’m most involved with is one that simply consists of an Internet presence. As its founder explains, “We have no membership, no officers, no dues, and precious little common sense.”) But we all tend to know each other, and form bonds based on our common interests. We also camp out a lot together, but in VW campers rather than in medieval-style tents.

The third group consists of about a half a dozen people who meet twice a month to play music. None of us is a full-time musician, although some of us play gigs in local venues. Our musical tastes run mainly to the folk and folk-rock of the sixties and seventies, with some later stuff and a few originals thrown into the mix. It’s amazing how quickly the four hours pass, particularly when we seem to have fallen into some groove. Until I started playing with them, I never felt comfortable performing in front of other people, but now I find it refreshing in a way I cannot explain. I can only thank my stars that I have found some people who get the same sort of reward and make it an important part of their lives, too.

I used to belong to another community for a while: those who make and fly hang gliders. For a long time, they were really my only community, and nearly all my friends of the period belonged to it, too. I have never been a natural athlete and, to be really good at the sport, I had to devote insane amounts of time, energy, and money into it. Most of my social life came from the same source, possibly because only they could understand the particular spell this activity cast on me. I had to quit flying about twenty years ago for health reasons, and my old community has for the most part eroded away. I miss them.

I haven’t mentioned one last community I used to associate with a lot, and its loss has been the hardest to bear. I’m speaking of the extended family I have in upstate New York. For years, they were part of my life. I watched my cousins grow up, took part in the family gatherings, bought ice cream with them from the local stands, and vacationed with them on Otisco Lake, the easternmost of New York’s Finger Lakes. But I haven’t been back there since my father died in 2004. True, there’s Facebook and phone calls, but they don’t really take the place of face-to-face contact.

Two of these communities have something else in common. When you interact with them, there are times when you’re putting your life into their hands. For example, when I get advice from somebody on how to do a brake job, I’m trusting that they’ll let me do the job properly, rather than having my brakes fail at a critical moment. At the urging of the community, I replace the fuel lines every five years and safety-wire them to the carburetor, since not doing those simple tasks has resulted in scores of fires in which the buses were destroyed.

There’s even more of this in the hang gliding community. You rely on experienced service technicians to keep your wing airworthy, or course, and if you’re spotted doing something wrong or possibly going beyond the limits of your experience, somebody can usually be counted on to point it out to you. And then there’s a rather tricky maneuver called a “wire launch” that is practiced when you’re launching off a cliff or down a steep ramp into turbulent air. Other people will guide you into position holding on to your nose and wing wires to steady the glider. They’re constantly telling you what pressures they’re feeling on the wing – up, down, or neutral. Your job is to position the glider so that all the forces are balanced evenly, with no inclination to change position. When everybody says “Neutral” or “Nothing” or whatever the pre-arranged code is, you yell “Clear!” Everybody lets go at once, and you launch. If any of them releases too soon, or too late, you are likely to be blown back onto the cliff, to your glider’s ruin and possibly yours as well. So these people, too, are holding your life in their hands in the most literal sense of the word.

Which brings us finally to the quintessential human community, a community of shared need. We’ve seen this in hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural catastrophes. Suddenly a community pops up where there were only strangers before. The common bond, and there’s only membership requirement: they need you, and you need them. You help each other out. Bonds form.

These ad-hoc communities, based on mutual need, are also things that Kurt Vonnegut knew about. In The Sirens of Titan, that old sage has one character summing up everything that she’s learned in a tumultuous life:  “‘The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody,’ she said, ‘would be to not be used for anything by anybody.’”  She wasn’t talking about abuse, although she’d suffered reams of it over her long life. She was speaking of a human’s need to make a difference to somebody else, to find a purpose in an otherwise purposeless life.

Most of these ad-hoc bonds won’t last, but they are none the less real for that, at least while the crisis continues. We see reunions of survivors all the time. They smile at each other, enjoying each other’s company, but they will not readily speak of the events that brought them such horror. And when they do, it’s because only their fellow survivors can know the depth of that horror. They would prefer to let those memories fade, but treasure the companionship they’ve found. They’re the combat veterans sitting quietly at a table in the local pub or at the Veteran’s Hall. The community that saved their mutual lives once is still sustaining them now, in a way that few onlookers will realize.

So find your community, in whatever form you find it. Put something into it, and take something from it, and leave some of yourself there. It’s the human thing to do.