One Truth or Another... Feature story

May 19th, 2006

Profile 2nd Draft, J203

One Truth or Another…

Walter Barker, nearly drowned, emerged from the cool brown river into the hundred degree summer afternoon coughing water. He noticed an unopened, sun-bleached can of beer in the sand and guzzled half before going to find the rest of his group.

When Barker was 16, he went to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s Camp Hancock, a science camp near the small town of Fossil. He and 9 others made up the crew of “Archies,” or “archeology research team kids.” They were taking a break in the midst of a long afternoon excavating a Native American cliff dwelling site to run rubber rafts down the south fork of the river when they encountered unfamiliar rapids.

Barker’s raft tipped up, dumping its passengers into the churning water. There were five in the raft, but only he and fellow Archie Nancy Cotrell landed “squarely in the center of the sucker,” he remembers. “[She] cycled a time or two, then was spit out. I went around several times.” The swirl of currents offered no chance for swimming or fighting back. “I flailed about as the trough sucked me down into the blackness, then allowed me to rise up to the upstream side and back into the bright bubbles – but not to the surface.”

The experience changed his perspective on life and philosophy. “When you land in and go under you miraculously shed your ego and join the rest of the animal kingdom in the struggle to survive. This goes on as long as sufficient oxygen remains in blood and brain.”

In the rapids, Barker faced his fear of mortality. “After two or three cycles, something inside decided I was dead, and that’s when the ‘revelation’ occurred,” Barker says. “I became more calm and content than ever before or since… and I sensed a brightness and ineffable peace – then I was at the surface, again flailing about, coughing out water!”

Realizing this mortality imbued him with the desire to truly live, to go out and see for himself how things were. After studying at Reed College in Portland, Barker went to Japan knowing almost no Japanese to teach English. He stayed for nearly 10 years. Since then he’s returned to earth science and taught at a high school level, and now works as a nurse.

His reluctance to call what happened in the water a ‘revelation’ is due to the religious connotations of the word. While raised Mormon, he no longer invests himself in organized religion. Nearly drowning, in fact, put some important “nails into the coffin of religion.”

Up until the moment of the ineffable peace, he was going through his “own little hell of doubt and fear of divine retribution,” worried about the real possibility of going to hell for things like adolescent lust, picking up a 10 dollar bill in the aisle of a store, or “day-dreaming of offing my tremendously obnoxious sister.”

After that moment, the winds had changed; his life from that point on, just as before it had been defined by religion, could now perhaps be characterized as a sort of search. “All the earthly trappings of bureaucratic religion were erased and supplanted with, simply, a conviction that the ‘world’ was unbelievably stupendous and no religion, however invested in ritual and iconography, really had a clue.”

Perhaps due to the centuries long debate of overlap between science and religion, one might first think that the change was one from a faith in religion to a faith in science, especially with the OMSI camp context. Barker’s change is about seeing each for human phenomena, rooted in our minds and hearts. While he calls science “the best, most democratic theory of knowledge,” which “all can, in theory, participate in,” he is quick to add that “like religion, it can’t really explain anything.”

This is an idea which is very uncomfortable for people used to being sure of their ideas. If neither science nor religion can offer an explanation for the way things are, what are we left with? “There’s always some piece we’ll be missing, that we can never know for sure, either by religion or science,” Barker admits. However, for him this isn’t a source of worry, but hope. “Given [that] we’re limited genetically, existentially, and mortally,” he says, “life is practically infinite – we have room to move!”

This kind of thinking subdues the common tendency for a person to reject those things they encounter which don’t fit within their schema. He calls this a sort of “scientist/empirical arrogance” carried around by “many [of the] well educated, but insufficiently drowned.”

Barker gives the example of a world famous hydrologist at the University of Arizona who disparaged water witchers, who use forked sticks used to find groundwater. “I had experience with water witchers in Washington State, doing geophysical field work,” he says, “and though I can’t explain why the witchers’ results occurred, I can’t discount their accuracy.”

Instead of accepting any schema such as religion or science, and then working to prove it, Barker advocates a search for truth that starts at the beginning, though it won’t ever come to an end. Drowning “transformed [the truth] from the more rigid, crystalline edifice of beliefs, rules, [and] sanctions to a nameless, fluid ‘moving target.’ We must approach it “as much by letting go as steering towards.”

Liberated from this need to fit the more rigid version of truth, such as the codes of Mormonism, he recalls, he stumbled up the shore to find that sun-bleached, unopened can of beer in the sand. “I remember opening it, guzzling half, [and being] disgusted by the stale taste of hot, mummified suds,” he says. Things as they are might not taste very good, but they are ours to taste. And Barker quips,“life is always bigger than we can imagine.”