Mary Rowlandson; or, Nicknames Part 3

Mary Rowlandson; or, Nicknames Part 3

Each life is a grand narrative compressed into two or three words.

Each life will come down to a few words etched into a slab of marble or engraved on the base of an urn.

Each life is a drama, interspersed with comic interludes, of the highest order. We have little free will, less time. In pursuing dreams and fulfilling ambitions, we train ourselves to appreciate and learn from the examples set by others. In this way will and time are well spent.

In this post I blur the line between nickname (trivial) and name (dignified). Here the nickname and the name are the same.

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On 21 and 26 November, respectively, I profiled Silver Blaze (a Bob Jackson) and Lestat (a Specialized Stumpjumper). Now let’s look at a GT Avalanche I referred to as Mary Rowlandson. I hear some of you ask:

Who was Mary Rowlandson?

Where did she live?

When?

What, if anything, is significant about her life?

Why did you name your mountain bike after her?

Let’s find out.

I’ll use the historical present tense.

During adolescence Mary Rowlandson (1637-1711), born in England (as Mary White), settles with her family in Lancaster, Massachusetts. Twenty years pass, during which time this community north of Boston thrives—and then disaster strikes. Early in King Philip’s War, a particularly bloody conflict that rages in the colonies of New England between 1675 and 1678, Mary and her three young children are captured, along with dozens of other townspeople, in a pre-dawn winter raid on the village by Narragansett and Wampanoag warriors. Whoops of the marauders, mingling with the cries of victims of their death-dealing tomahawks, pierce the February air. Mary and her children, the youngest one (Sarah) badly wounded and soon to die in her mother’s arms, are dragged into the wilderness with nothing but the clothes on their backs. For the next eleven weeks Mary trudges with her captors through the woods, fording ice-cold rivers, laboring up hills, suffering filth, cold, verbal abuse, near starvation, the death of her daughter, and anxiety about her other two children (Mary and Joseph), from whom she has been separated. . . .

How would a typical Puritan (such as Mary) of this era interpret these events? Thus: that captivity and hardship were God’s way of punishing this woman and the raid’s other victims for sins that manifest the depravity in all human hearts. No one was safe from damnation; no one, not even the most devout churchgoer, could say for sure that she had been “unconditionally elected” for salvation. By placing Mary in the wilderness, God meant to test her spiritual fortitude: could this good Christian woman, wife of a minister no less, stand firm against the Devil? Would she curse God for abandoning her? Or would she prove superior to physical and emotional trauma, acknowledging God’s grace and submitting to His plan for her even though it seemed He had forsaken her for no apparent reason?

Mary did stand firm. She was impervious to doubt. She didn’t curse God. Inspired by a Bible in her possession and from the conviction that with faith she could surmount each obstacle presented by either the “savages” or nature, Mrs. Mary Rowlandson survived the three-month ordeal. In May 1676, ransom negotiations secured her release. She had been redeemed.

Six years after her delivery, she published the classic A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682). This thin volume inaugurated a genre that, with variations of it finding their way into fiction, memoir, and film, would captivate readers for the next 332 years and counting.

Captivity narratives abound in our culture. They’re ideologically loaded. (In the past they were also racially and ethnically loaded.) Audiences and readers want to see how the hero or heroine (1) bears up under duress and, being an exemplar of his or her culture’s best values, (2) outwits and/or outlasts the diabolical ministrations of the Other. Members of these audiences project themselves onto the hero or heroine as he or she draws upon moral, physical, and spiritual resources that they, the audiences, consider a cultural birthright. In other words, we plunge into the realm of myth.

All “representative” men and women (I borrow the term from Emerson) shed their humanity once they assume, almost always posthumously, the mantle of myth. We can never know them again, if we ever did at all. We can only know what the forces of history, over which the individual has no control, say they mean.

Puritan purpose in action:

“And now made Publick at the earnest Desire of some Friends, for the Benefit of the Afflicted.”

So this is how my GT Avalanche got its handle. I looked at it and said, “Okay, bicycle, be as tough as Mary Rowlandson.”

The Avalanche was a good solid simple middle-of-the-road hardtail that like Mary Rowlandson would be expected to go up and down hills, mountains, valleys, and technical trails, sometimes in bad weather, performing well the while. The sobriquet was my vote of confidence in the bike, but it should be obvious that I was actually telling myself, “If Mary could make it through unimaginable conditions, then you can make it through much easier ones, and without hostile Indians breathing down your neck. How lucky you are with that saddlebag full of Whole Foods trail mix, those waterbottles full of clean water, a pickup truck waiting at trailhead, a warm dry bed not far away. Try to measure up, and be thankful too.”

I used her name, and the story behind it, to boost my own fortitude when venturing into the wilds of Pisgah or Francis Marion National Forests. I wanted to honor the author of a narrative that even postmodern literary theory couldn’t taint with trace elements of irony. Mary’s is a text whose motivations are transparent. It’s a text whose narrator and author are one and the same. It’s a text by a Christian whose struggle is universal and as such has the power to save an atheist or infidel. It’s a text in which both a myth and a genre are born.

Although suffering and grief are on full display in The Captivity and Restoration, my favorite vignette amounts almost to comic relief. When Mary meets King Philip himself (real name = Metacomet—a dashing, undaunted Indian fighting to the death [he died young] to protect his lands from colonial expansion and its accompanying violence), he offers his prize captive a puff on the “peace pipe.” Mary declines: “It seems to be a Bait the Devil layes to make men lose their precious time: I remember with shame, how formerly, when I had taken two or three Pipes, I was presently ready for another, such a bewitching thing it is: But I thank God, he has now given me power over it; surely there are many who may be better imployed, than to lye sucking a stinking Tobacco-pipe.”

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I can’t resist eliciting a yet larger lesson about bicycling from Mary Rowlandson. I did the same with Eddy Merckx in October 31’s post. That was a no-brainer—Eddy Merckx was a bicycle racer! Mary was nothing of the sort. Bikes wouldn’t be invented for another two hundred years. So I ask you to bear with me.

In my mind, Eddy speaks for pavement, Mary for dirt. Those of us who have bicycled on both surfaces know they present different challenges. Consequently, Mary’s message is different from Eddy’s as he grinds it out on the teeth-loosening surfaces of Paris-Roubaix. Mary:

Often on the pathway of life—when routine existence turns into impassable singletrack and where giving in to self-pity and despair would be easier than trying to balance on a rain-drenched, root-slick, rock-strewn, winding technical trail with plunging drops and steep climbs requiring portages that break one’s back, the forest floor falling off hundreds of feet on either side, one slip leading to certain destruction—often enough at such times, who hasn’t been tempted to close her eyes and let gravity decide her fate—in short, to succumb? But in the eleventh hour, something draws her back from such folly.

Sometimes the bicycle is the means of delivery—the same bicycle on which you and I, in danger of becoming lost for good, have learned to navigate the technical trials of washed-out dirt and godforsaken loneliness. The idea is not that far-fetched. Mary Rowlandson passed on to us the lessons she learned in her battle against annihilation.

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Strange, isn’t it, to think that mountain bikers in northern Massachusetts are shredding trails blazed by Wampanoags escaping, captives in tow, from colonial militia hell-bent on retaliation. Strange, isn’t it, how the same trails have been used in such opposite ways—from revenge to recreation. Mary Rowlandson toiled on singletrack over which we, fully suspended, whisk without giving a thought to the blood spilled and the tears cried in a colonial housewife’s long march to redemption.

Source: http://www.maryrowlandson.com/maryscaptivityjourneymappage.html

Eventually I gave my Avalanche, a lime-green aluminum rig with red Manitou fork, to my elder daughter. I don’t believe I ever told her my name for it.

A later printing of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson’s colonial bestseller.

Roadysseus

20 December 2014