In August of 2001, Kaethe Schwehn needed her own, personal Eden. She was a twenty-two-year-old trying to come to terms with a failed romance, the dissolution of her parents' marriage, and her own floundering faith. At first, Holden Village, a Lutheran retreat center nestled in the Cascade Mountains, seemed like a utopian locale: communal meals, consensus decision-making, and eco-friendly practices. But as the months wore on, the idyll faded and Kaethe was left with 354 inches of snow, one prowling cougar, sixty-five disgruntled villagers, and a pile of copper mine tailings 150 feet high. Her Eden was a toxic Superfund site. How do we navigate the space between who we are and who we would like to become, between the world as it is and world as we imagine it could be? Tailings is a lyrical memoir of intentional community told from the front lines, a passionate and awkward journey about embracing the "in-between" times of our lives with grace and hope. ""Kaethe Schwehn's poignant memoir explores longing, both spiritual and physical, community and faith, in prose that is calm, lovely, and filled with clear-eyed honesty and grace. Tailings is simply an exquisite book."" --Dinty W. Moore, author of The Mindful Writer ""Schwehn's Tailings , is, like all of my favorite contemporary nonfiction, uncategorizable--part memoir, part spiritual reflection, part reportage. Brilliant in all of its guises, Tailings only makes me want to read more by Kaethe Schwehn. She writes with fierce intelligence and luminous clarity on all of her subjects: loss, grace, this very particular village, and the hard work of renewal. Tailings is a beautiful and original book by a remarkable writer."" --Rene Steinke, author of Friendswood ""Already by the second chapter, this is a book hard to lay aside. Schwehn's prose is liquid and intelligent. It catches your interest immediately and swings you from paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter. Her observations never stand still but sweep you forward into her story/memoir. She is a genuine artist."" --Walter Wangerin Jr., author of Ragman--and Other Cries of Faith Kaethe Schwehn holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is the coeditor of Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts (2014). Schwehn has been the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant and a Loft Mentor Series award. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. She teaches at St. Olaf College and lives in Northfield, Minnesota, with her husband and two children. Tailings A Memoir By Kaethe Schwehn Wipf and Stock Publishers Copyright © 2014 Kaethe Schwehn All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-62564-562-3 Contents Author's Note, ix, Acknowledgements, xi, September: Nine Switchbacks, 1, October: Fortune Teller Fish, 4, November: Scrapbooking After Eden, 14, December: Coming to Consensus, 27, January: Reflection and Refraction, 38, February: Litany of the Middle, 51, March: Vigil with Cougar and Sackbut, 64, April: A Cut, a Climb, and a Café in California, 82, May: The Cost of Hospitality, 95, June: The View from the Second Level, 113, Works Cited, 123, CHAPTER 1 SEPTEMBER * * * Nine Switchbacks There is only one road to the village. The road begins at a lake whose cold is a firecracker to the chest. The road doesn't linger at the lake, the road goes groping up the mountain. Nine switchbacks and the road gets dizzy with the sway, needs to catch a breath, goes straight and narrow for eight miles, past a few halfhearted waterfalls, past alumroot and chicory, past lodgepole pine and silver fir. When the road comes to the village it stutters for three hundred yards, between chalets and lodges, between mess hall and gymnasium. Just past the village the forest begins to encroach on the road, pine needles underfoot instead of dust and rock until, one mile later, the road sputters out in a field of grass and ground squirrel dens. The village used to be a mining village; now it is a Lutheran retreat center. In the summertime retired pastors and young families come to this village in central Washington to attend classes and weave rugs and hike to waterfalls and sip coffee in adirondack chairs. They gulp deep breaths of mountain air and celebrate the lack of phones and television reception and Internet access. In the winter the village is kept alive by sixty-five people who are in some state of transition in their lives; they are between jobs or relationships or identities. They are vehemently Christian or vehemently not. Over the course of the upcoming winter these villagers will laugh and fight and eat and screw. They will discuss Bonhoeffer and brew beer and paint silk scarves. They will make earrings out of mine debris and toboggan down Chalet Hill with whiskey still slick on their tongues. One villager will come out of the closet. One will take a vow of silence and one will contemplate statutory rape. One will