In September of 1986, I was sitting on a wooden deck on a scenic overlook in a deserted camp outside a tiny mountain town in South Carolina. I had a pack of Salem 100s alongside my deck chair, and I was smoking one. Next to me, a cold thermos of sweet tea stood like a tall white bride next to the short, square groom of a transistor radio.

Preacher Johnny “the Diesel” Wesley was thundering away on authority: “And listen to me you young person, the preacher is the man of God. What these libruls and God-denying, panty-waisted evangelicals hate is the simple clain of God-given authority! You owe respect and loyalty to the Man of God, young people. You owe him your allegiance---”

I rotated the dial, and Johnny the Diesel, whom we had called “Diesel the Weasel back in Bible college, slipped into the radio ether. In a moment, as I turned the dial, Steppenwolfe came pounding through the thin grill: Get your motor runnin', head out on that highway…. I stopped there. The guitar and drums beat through the stillness with a wild beauty of their own.

The overlook faced a broad and lovely view below: the ribbon of narrow highway crisscrossed back and forth on its winding way up the mountain, and tiny glimpses of bright red, sky blue, or canary yellow walls of tiny cottages peeked out from the dense foliage along the ledges of the mountain side below. They looked like they had been built right into it, or rather, like they had grown out of it.

The hot sun beat down on my bare legs. For this occasion, in honor of freedom, I had cut a pair of jeans off at the thigh, and my exposed legs, stark white, were getting their first ever exposure to sun bathing. I actually didn't like it. Flies kept settling on my bare skin. Also, I don’t like sun burn, and I knew I would be sunburned, but I had no sun screen with me. And I wasn't going to put on real jeans in this heat.

I took another drag on the cigarette and turned my gaze over to where the line of highway disappeared around a ledge lower down. The very corner of the town was visible, a tiny settlement made up of three gas stations, a McDonald's, a hardware store, and a small, inconsequential grocery that even the local citizens ignored.

In the opposite direction, though I could not see it from my perch, was the larger town of Black Mountain. Most people took the trouble to drive there if they wanted to shop or eat out. And there, come Monday morning, I would be working as a manager trainee for Simpsons Department Store. I was now, officially, on my own: a grown woman.

Fire all of your guns at once, and explode into space…. The radio howled.

I took another drag and sipped the cold, sweet tea from the sweating glass. Solitude at last. All my life, I had been put into situations, moved about, herded along with my evangelist father, part of the grand "Dad is a man of God" show. I'd graduated with straight A's from an unaccredited Baptist school up in Indiana, and I had spent the summer at home, looking for work. But this was all that I'd found. Apparently, straight A students from unknown Bible schools with inadequate academics did not have their pick of all the best jobs. So, against my father's wishes, I had chosen to accept the one offer I'd received: Manager trainee at a large department store, a hundred miles away from my parents.

Dad took the decision as an act of direct disobedience. He still had the power to surprise me. But I had not counted on his extreme disappointment that I had not found a husband in college. The "Dad is a man of God" show relied upon a certain progression, and now the time had come for me to be married, raising children, and reflecting through my life what a fine father he had been.

So my choice to leave home, take the job, work full time, and take advantage of the benefits program to attend night school, was a rejection of what he had planned for me. He took it like a slap in the face. And Dad was never one to turn the other cheek. He had promised me a car upon graduation, but now he said I had not earned it because I had disappointed him so badly.

For a few days, his reneg on the car appeared to end all hopes for me for the new job, but when I called the HR manager at Simpsons, she told me that many of the people car pooled, and she could get me rides into work with no difficulty, so long as I didn’t mind a few extra hours here and there waiting for everybody to get off shift. I told her no, I didn’t mind at all.

And my mother, in a rare move, finally took my side. The year before, she had caught Dad in an affair with a secretary from a distant church. They hardly spoke to each other unless I was at home, and even then it was only polite. Neither was in the least interested in what the other did or what the other thought. But for the moment, Mom held the high card. If she divorced him, she would ruin him. In Fundamentalist circles, at least back hen, preachers could not be divorced. So he blustered to her only as much as he dared.

He still wouldn’t give me a car, but two weeks before I was scheduled to start work, he grudgingly told me he had arranged free rooming for me at a care takers cottage for this small, bankrupt camp and RV park. A man who attended one of the churches where Dad preached every year owned the land and had made the offer. It took me another few days to realize that the man had only heard of my need for a place to stay because my mother had called around to people in the churches up here.

I had a recent letter from Cinn. It gave more details on a rumor I had heard about Rush Pole, a preacher and the son of the newly appointed President of Greater Independent Baptist College:

The newspaper in Indianapolis listed Rush Pole on its crime page. He's been busted for domestic violence. I heard from Pixie at GIBC, and she told me that Rush has been living with a woman off and on. He beat her year-old son so badly the boy was rushed to the hospital. Six of his bones are broken. But Rush is out on bail. He's scheduled to preach at the Youth Rally in Texas in two weeks. The church in Texas is already saying that the charges against Rush are more of the left wing, liberal conspiracy to close down Preacher's Mack's school and college.

Rush Pole had been held up to the student body for years as the example of what everybody should try to be. He had been ordained into the ministry at age 20. But he'd already been arrested once for sex with a minor. The college had covered up the incident. I didn’t want to be anything like Rush Pole.

Somebody, somewhere along the line, had told powerful lies that I had believed for years. So here I was, smoking my first cigarette, listening to Steppenwolfe for the first time (15 years late), wearing my first shorts, and greeting the sunlight, the fresh breeze, the distant echoes of life from the scenic valley below, with a mixture of hurt feelings and anger at God.