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Dangerous Dirt

I know where I began to go wrong!  It was dirt.

After high school in Eatonville, Washington--where I did nothing to enhance the value of education--I did what lucky kids got to do:  I got a job doing what my Dad did.  I went halibut fishing in Alaska.

I was a kid from nowhere, on a boat going somewhere:  to Alaska!  Seattle, Prince Rupert, B.C., Petersburg, Ketchikan, Juneau, Sitka, Cordova, Kodiak!

We came into those harbors, those first years, and I climbed the ladders and stood on the docks, and looked for dirt.  I wanted to know that I had touched, not just planks and paving, but the real earth in those places. I wanted to say that I had been in British Columbia, and Alaska; that I had stood on those places on earth; that I had actually been there!

Much later--a generation later--in our family, we often remember when Daniel, on our walks up to Phelps Park, suddenly tamed down and became quiet as we neared First Lutheran church, and carefully avoided stepping on the grass alongside the sidewalk.

Why?  He told us that the Devil lived under the ground.  His Sunday School teacher had told him so.

Rick Santorum said recently that "The last, best enemy of Satan, for the last 200 years, is the United States."



Once you begin to stand in dirt, there may be hell to pay.

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