The Mystery Pageant
I live in Walworth, New York. Nobody calls it Walworth, because then it sounds like the dingy little town it is. People mostly call it Macedon, because Macedon is nearby and it has some sort of a foreign ring to it. Not just Indian, maybe Roman or Ottoman. Macedonian. Walworth sounds a bit like it was named after its number one center of commerce: the Woolworth’s. Now even the Woolworth’s is closed and the new school district is being called Gananda, which doesn’t ring in the ear very pleasantly, especially with a Western New York twang.
We live in Western New York, in between Rochester and Syracuse, and Rochester is in between Syracuse and Buffalo. We live in Wayne County and the county seat is 30 minutes away in Lyons, New York, in the direction away from the city of Rochester. Our area codes are about to be changed, which is a damned nuisance. I expect all telephone lines to stop on April 20 when no one can remember the new numbers they have to dial. A genuine pain in the ass. You go 15 minutes to the nearest Wegmans (the best supermarket on Earth), which is surrounded by a Target, Blockbuster, Taco Bell, and a Rite Aid (which everyone hates).
The nearest point of interest in our area is the Hill Cumorah in Palmyra, 10 minutes away, where they say an angel named Moroni appeared to a man named Joseph Smith. Moroni presented him with tablets written upon 200 years after Jesus appeared to the descendants of Lehi in America. In Palmyra, New York, Macedon’s neighbor. The tablets were in an unknown language, but Smith translated them by the gift and power of God, and then they, like the Nephites and Lamanites, were taken back…leaving no trace.
The other attraction is the nearby “Maize Maze,” an enormous field of corn cut into a design that can be seen from the air, by airplanes and aliens. By late August the stalks are so high people come from counties around to try navigating the corn. The maze has its own lifeguards, and if you become hopelessly lost, as many do, you are to wave a flag presented to such intrepid explorers above your head to obtain assistance. “Knee high by July” indeed.
To be completely honest, I cannot recall what exactly is on the main street of Walworth. It’s probably called “Main Street.” I must be avoiding it, because I can’t remember driving it for a year or more. I have to admit that I am not indigenous to Walworth, or Macedon, or Rochester. I am Long Island, Beth is Ithaca. We met when I attended Cornell for English; she was a townie. We live on the 9th hole of the aforementioned Gananda development, on a golf course called Wildstone. We are both members of the country club. That is: I, Jacob Camden, am, and my wife Beth is as well. I play the blue tees and she plays the red tees. I must admit that a factor in choosing to live at Wildstone is that they admit Jews. I’ve been playing golf for years and the closest I’ve come to Oak Hill is as a spectator at the PGA. Fair compensation however: our course is beautiful, if becoming a touch overdeveloped. The latest row of houses is being squeezed between two exceptionally narrow fairways. The construction site is mound after mound of dirt, littered with shiny stray golf balls.
Behind our house is a tiny lake or a large pond. I can’t say for sure if it is man-made or natural. Or if the fish are native or planted. I think they are mostly stocked. Needless to say I feel a bit foolish fishing in a pond where they do everything but attach the fish to the end of your line for you, but I never catch anything anyway.
In early winter before the pond freezes over it is spotted with migrating geese. You can hear their tea party, when the windows are open, for four weeks straight. A family of enormous belligerent swans lives in the pond also. Last summer there were three baby swans just learning how to threaten our little rowboat. Then there were two, then there was one; the endangered snapping turtle has found a home at Wildstone.
A small opening in the far side of the pond begins a winding network of creeks, a little Nile that curls around and runs across various fairways. These twists can be followed in one of the little kayaks we hang in the garage. Guests are sent out with the caveat that they may encounter fierce and feathered wildlife, unexpected golf ball ordinance or the dreaded stagnant lanes, thick with a fluorescent green muck that clings to the oars and smells terrible. We encourage them not to row under bridges, as they may emerge with a summer’s collection of cob and spider webs trailing from their barque.
In winter the clubhouse is seldom open and we are greeted by serene snowbound fairways, peace, quiet and a few cold geese. For just such occasions Beth has purchased state of the art snowshoes that weigh 8 ounces each and allow her to float gracefully across the snowdrifts while I huff and puff behind her.
We were given a golf cart with the house and it hums contentedly in the garage as it charges. There is a little garden in our little courtyard and our homeowners association takes care of the surrounding lawn and foliage; although they are using some kind of placebo chemical on the weeds instead of pulling them out, trying to trick them I suppose.
Beth and I work in Rochester, as do many of our neighbors, most of them have left suburbs closer to the city and made peace with the half-hour commute. I found that the evening drive out to Macedon or Walworth or Gananda prepares your mind for the pace you can expect when you get there. You have to patient yourself with traveling the same winding roads in the same order every day; going faster is only a difference of two or three minutes and agitation. Traveling west in the morning and east in the evening, we are just in time to see the sun creep over the open landscape at daybreak and steal away at dusk without ever lowering a visor.
Incidentally, and I kid you not, there is a town that lies not quite in between Rochester-proper and Walworth called Webster, and the sign at its limit states authoritatively: “Welcome to WEBSTER: Where Life Is Worth Living.”
I still feel like a visitor in Walworth and Macedon, despite all. Perhaps it’s that I’ve never lived in a development house before. Perhaps it’s that our children never went to the public schools in Palmyra-Macedon. We moved here from the suburb of Brighton after our youngest left for college and our eldest left Rochester for graduate school. The public school system was far superior in Brighton: test scores, facilities, target colleges, etcetera. My daughter stayed in Rochester to study religion and miscellaneous at the University of Rochester, then Columbia for Social Work. My son left for Evanston, IL, to study drama at Northwestern.
The townships of Evanston, IL, and Palmyra, NY, share the distinction of being among the few in the United States to feature a crossroads with a church at each corner. My son tells me there are about 18 churches in Evanston, a small northern suburb of Chicago, and that they are none of them half full; which, it can be said, raises property taxes.
As the point of origin for the Mormon religion (the actual organization The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is in Fayette, NY, in between the Cayuga and Seneca Finger Lakes, 40 miles away), Palmyra also has one of the few full Mormon Temples in the country. Once I tried to visit it with my son, but you must be of the faith to be admitted. Actually, I don’t believe a devout Mormon can walk into the Temple on caprice either; it may well be a place for only the most important of occasions: weddings and births. Some consider funerals on par with the previous two, and it may be because of my Jewish background (albeit predominantly secular) that I don’t agree. Remembrance and grieving have their place and it is a high place. On the other hand, a recently departed body is a sad thing that is best cremated or placed under six feet of earth to await a possible awakening some day, if you’re optimistic.
I have yet to detail the chief attraction of the region, surpassing far the delights of the great (and it is quite impressive) “Maize Maze.” I am speaking of the famed Hill Cumorah Pageant. The hill itself is impressive, even by day. A bare stretch of smooth grass cut steeply down the high hillside. At its top there is an angel pointing upwards, visible from the road. The bottom of the hillside opens into a bowl-shaped basin. A massive multi-layered stage is built on to the hillside, full of staircases and plateaus, colored to look like cut stone. Surrounding the plateaus are powerful jets that shoot walls of water, lit in purple and red, behind the action, an instant cyclorama. The folding chairs cover nearly three football fields and the edges of the basin are populated with concession vendors and informational booths offering home instruction with a free copy of the Book of Mormon.
The performers come from all over the country, but mainly Western New York and Utah. They are lodged with host families through June while they rehearse the pageant. All told, there can be as many as 200 men, women and children performing on stage in full costume, with 50 or more black outfitted people-herders, water-jet operators and technical assistants out of sight.
The actual text of the pageant is pre-recorded. The stage is so massive and distant that facial expressions are impossible to see without a high-powered spyglass. The recorded tape, performed by Mormon actors and backed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, is played over the sound system while the performers mouth the words and gesture so that they can be seen by a family audience made up mainly of children and senior citizens, many hundreds of yards away. Each time the playing area changes the surrounding jets of water spring up an instant before the lights. Not fun on windy nights.
The textual subject is various events recorded in the Book of Mormon presented episodically as a short history that resembles the Jewish Haggadah condensing the events of Exodus. Perhaps more exactly it resembles the Christmas Pageant staged by many a church and youth group in the holiday season. Maybe a Purimspiel would be closer; it’s not an exact religion, Judaism.
In the nearly 30 years I have lived in Rochester, I have visited the pageant maybe 4 or 5 times. The spoken play has in the past been a bit precious, which can be forgiven to any family event, even more a religious event, but at some point in the last three to six years a new recording has eclipsed the old stalwart of sixteen or so years. The new recording is more in step with the tenor of the times, albeit the traditional side of the tenor.
During this last pageant I attended, the sky darkened above us and thunder could be heard far off but growing nearer. Being a family event intended for small children, the pageant is a reasonable 80 minutes in length, so one and all held their seats without much anxiety, even the small children. Thankfully, it did not rain until most of the audience, and hopefully the performers, were safe in their own cars, or their rental cars, or their cars with Utah plates a long, long way from home.
The storm did not spring on us without warning. The distant thunder continued through the pageant after the intermission. Sometimes it could not be heard but you could feel the rumbling in the hills beneath your feet. Sometimes in the distance, perhaps twenty miles away across the fields and tree-covered rolling hills, you could see a flash of light out of the corner of your eye. As the rumblings grew they sometimes garbled the words of the pageant recording. When I turned around to see if anyone was leaving to escape the rain (my wife and I were wrapped tightly up in fleece blankets, feeling more than a little sympathy for the tunic clad performers on the sheer hillside), I saw that the weather in the West was the weather in the North and the East as well. Many of the cloud clusters were a slightly glowing pink and you could see charges of lightning firing off within, not yet striking down to the ground.
They approached, rumbling the ground beneath our folding chairs, charging the air and light. It was around the time where Jesus Christ (a performer clad all in white robes, flying on wires 50 feet above the already high stage like Ben Franklin’s kite), during the three days before he rose again in Jerusalem, appeared in America to unite the Nephites and Lamanites and train another set of 12 apostles, that a giant and distinct bolt of lightning, clear enough that it looked like what a child might draw in the hand of Zeus, smote the opposing face of Hill Cumorah. Some gasped, and those like me unfortunate enough to be looking straight at it rubbed our eyes.
The electric clouds drifted away from overhead as the Nephites and Lamanites resumed their strife; as God prepared to wipe them from the face of North America leaving no trace; as Mormon inscribed the tablets in 400BC and gave them to his son Moroni to conceal on the hillside as the only artifact attesting to the history and existence of the descendants of Lehi who settled in Palmyra, New York, in 589BC. When Moroni visited Joseph Smith in 1823 and returned in 1827 to guide him to the tablets the clouds above were opaque and heavy with rain. They had sidled wearily into place above us like somnolent cattle. Moroni retrieved the tablets and vanished. Smith struck out for Utah. We waded through the sea of folding chairs to our waiting cars.