Another Round at the Say When: Sunday Morning Coming Down
A journalist moves to the small town of McDermitt, on the Oregon-Nevada line, to learn about why the high school football team never wins, and about the townsfolk who cheer them on.
One in a series.
We have tortured, out-of-tune voices, Lorraine and I.
We sound like a couple of wounded coyotes in a church choir as we stand in the last pew in the tiny sanctuary on this Sunday morning, holding our Baptist hymnals out straight, reading the lyrics to such standards as “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus,” Praise to the Lord, the Almighty,” and “It is Well with My Soul.”
For years, Lorraine has been one of the volunteer forces behind the chapel. I am a first-timer, here to meet the resident pastor and his family as part of my research into this little border town and its unique brand of residents.
I had warned Lorraine I was coming to services, and had even advised her not to sit next to me, as the Good Lord just might decide to cast down his own lightning bolt as a message to such a wanton sinner.
I don’t want my new friend to become collateral damage to my religious reckoning.
But it is Lorraine who is heaven-sent.
She takes care of me this morning, making sure I have my bible open to the right page and reading. She looks over my shoulder to see that I’m not holding my songbook upside-down, as out-of-place as I am in this little chapel.
Places of worship like this one have woven the cultural fabric of the American West since the first wagon trains jounced through here, full of rugged individualists and their families, en route toward the mighty Pacific and the promise of a better life.
All these years later, Pastor Dave Lewis and his wife, Ashley, are worthy descendants to this tradition of the faithful. Dave is a former Nevada Highway Patrolman who long ago heard God’s call to head up his own church.
He began growing his chest-length beard the moment he took off his uniform, and on this morning gently welcomes us like a gentle shepherd summoning his flock, the vivid stained-glass window behind his pulpit the color of the sky and the clouds.
With her long hair pulled back into a bun, wearing a floral dress, Ashley sits with the couple’s five children — four tousled-haired boys and a blonde-haired daughter, Haley — who perch in the front row and know all the words to the readings, all the lyrics to the hymns, little saints preparing for the trip to heaven.
And then there is me.
Thank God for Lorraine.
She is my guardian angel, bestowed by the very higher-being from whom I flinch, there to make sure I behave.
And I do.
And I sing, and so does Lorraine, the petite gray-haired woman who has looked out for me in McDermitt.
We croon “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and “‘Whoever’ Meaneth me” and our voices get no better.
After services, I stop by her house for a cup of coffee and a plate of eggs and Basque sausage and we agree that our new goal as good Christians is to get Lorraine’s stubborn husband, Junior, to grace the doors of that little chapel.
But Junior is having none of it.
He has his own relationship with that Man Upstairs, he insists, and doesn’t need to howl any holy tunes on a Sunday morning to please his maker.
But Lorraine does.
She loves everything about those services, except her singing voice.
“For the longest while, I was afraid to even open my mouth, I was so out of tune,” she says. “But now I’m not afraid of those songs. I just go in there and belt ’em out.”
