The original Latin word for "community" meant "fellowship, community of relations or feelings." This came to mind last week when I went to a reading at the Church of the Big Wood by author/activist/naturalist Terry Tempest Williams. I sat in a row with my old friend Tina Cole, who has lived on Empty Saddle Trail in Hailey since long before there was a McDonald's at the head of her street; and Chris Lundy, the local avalanche forecaster, just returned with reports from some of my favorite spots in southern Argentina; and Gordon Williams, with whom I worked in the early '70s for Jim Patterson, father of local Olympic skiers and lifelong friends Pete and Susie. Right in front of us sat local sheep rancher/politician/activist John Peavey and his wife, Diane Josephy Peavey, writer, activist and radio commentator. Across the aisle were Mark and Margaret McDonald Stewart, social/environmental activists par excellence and Ketchum's premier Great Old Broad Ginger Harmon. There were many others in a full house, a community.
Terry Tempest Williams, an inspiring, amazing writer, is an astonishing speaker. As expected, she spoke of the land and of the reality that what we do to the land we do to ourselves, and, naturally, vice-versa. She spoke of her native Utah and of speaking in Washington, D.C., on behalf of that land to U.S. Senator Bob Bennett, who told her something about her voice made it difficult for him to hear her. I thought such deafness is to be pitied, but such alarming disability and disconnection in a man so powerful destroys community. She talked about her relationship with the Wood River Valley that started in childhood and of meeting at Chapter One Bookstore the woman who would, at her instigation, become her widowed father's companion. She was deeply moved by the photos currently on display in the Coffee Grinder of people who own local affordable-housing units. Affordable housing is crucial to even the concept of community. How can there be unaffordable community? What does it mean to community when affordable housing costs $240,000?
Tempest Williams spoke with passion, poetry and grace of these familiar subjects and more. Then she moved on to describing her visit last year to Rwanda, shortly after the death of her beloved brother. Rwanda, with its unimaginable reality of the 1994 genocide, when in just 100 days between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutu militias with machetes. The world, including the United States, did nothing, as if Rwanda were not part of our community. She described piles of skulls, many cut open, smashed, grimacing remnants of incomprehensible horror. She wept at the sight, the horror, and turned away. The children, orphans of the genocide of Rwanda, surrounded her dancing and singing until she cheered up, the wisdom of children using joy to replace despair. Some in our Ketchum community wept openly at just her descriptions.
In the few moments between reading and answering questions, she came up the aisle and hugged her friend and confrere Diane Peavey.
The question of Darfur today was raised.
The question of hope was raised. She said hope is tied to desire for a specific outcome and she didn't have much hope. What she does have is faith that continuing to do one's best to do the right thing will result in something good. That, too, is a definition of community.
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Dick Dorworth, a longtime Ketchum resident, is a columnist and reporter for the Idaho Mountain Express.
