Befitting our Quaker guests, we sat down to a simple lunch: egg-salad sandwiches and tossed salad. Having visited relatives in Florida, E. P. “Red” and Madeleine Stephenson were working their way up the East Coast en route to Pendle Hill, the Quaker “think tank” near Philadelphia, where members of the Society of Friends retreat to meditate, to mingle with kindred spirits, to take classes and write pamphlets and books. It was late March, and Red and Madeleine would be staying at Pendle Hill as Friends in Residence through May.

Frank had met the Stephensons the year before and had dined with them at their home in a rural intentional community north of San Francisco. These were not communal hippies living in some time warp in the California hills, but retirees, still vigorous in their early seventies. Tall and freckled, with clean-cut reddish hair, Red had looked as middle American in his California home as he did now. Ditto for Madeleine, a short, spunky, gray-haired woman with a gleam in her eyes.

We had invited Sam to join us for lunch.

“I remember thee from Philadelphia!” Madeleine said, reminding Frank’s father of a conference they had attended together forty years ago.

“Why, yes!” Sam replied, his favorite phrase when he is feeling sociable. He turned to Red at his elbow. “And where is thy home?”

Red told him with considerable animation, explaining that he and Madeleine and a group of like-minded, simple-living friends owned most of their property in common.

“And where art thou from originally?” Sam went on, apparently assuming that no one Red’s age could originally be from California.

“North Carolina.”

Getting hardly a word in edgewise, we sat listening for an hour as the three Quakers, speaking the same language, merrily caught up on each other’s lives. It was not just the “thees” and the “thys” and the “art thous”—traditional Quaker-speak since the seventeenth century, locution that Frank’s father reserves for Friends of his own vintage and for Miriam. It was also the language of the Quaker ethic of volunteer service, an ethic that Red, Madeleine, and Sam have long embodied.

The Stephensons met on a ship bound for Europe in 1946, each committed to helping rebuild areas ravaged by World War II. For eighteen months Red built houses and worked on a transport team in Poland—a country targeted by the Quakers because it was more devastated by the war than any other. Working under the auspices of the Anglo-American Quaker Relief Mission, he delivered food, clothing, and building supplies. Food was scarce and had to be distributed selectively, to those who most needed help. Red vividly remembers the anguish of denying rations to hungry women who maintained they were pregnant but who were not yet showing it. Another agony was requiring young children to eat their portions on the premises, lest they run home and share them with parents and older siblings.

In a program sponsored by British Quakers, Madeleine delivered food and medical supplies in southern France and West Germany. Each earned only living expenses for their efforts. Those efforts are well documented, as the sweethearts wrote each other incessantly and now have in their personal archives hundreds of letters and reports from that period. In 1947 they returned to the United States, where they married and moved to California. Both have been active ever since in the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization founded in 1917 to help victims of World War I. In 1947, together with its counterpart, the British Friends Service Council, the AFSC won the Nobel Peace Prize.

That honor acknowledged a tradition of impartial service to human need, based on the theologically egalitarian notion that there is “that of God in every person.” Tracing the history of Quaker relief efforts in the first half of the twentieth century, Gunnar Jahn, chairman of the Nobel Committee in 1947, noted in his address: “The Quakers gained confidence in all quarters through their work. Governments and individuals knew that they had no other aim than to aid. They did not intrude on people in order to convert them to their faith, and they made no difference between friend and foe.”

Not distinguishing between friend and foe has often led Quakers into alien territory. In 1920 and 1921, after the communists had seized power, Quakers delivering food helped save the lives of hundreds of thousands of starving people in southern Russia. Similarly, after World War I the AFSC undertook a massive food relief program for sick and undernourished children in Germany. Twenty years later, in 1938, AFSC leader Rufus Jones journeyed to Berlin with two other Quakers, where he met with members of the Nazi Gestapo, offered relief packages and urged lenience toward Jews.

Growing up, Frank was well versed in the parallel stories in his own family. His uncle Griffith, Sam’s older brother, was a Philadelphia insurance executive when he took a two-year leave of absence from 1947 to 1949 to direct the Friends Ambulance Unit in China during that nation’s civil war. Working without pay with roughly fifty volunteers in central China, Griffith Levering delivered medical supplies and oversaw inoculations for the dreaded south Asian disease kala-azar for partisans on both sides as well as civilians caught in the crossfire. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that in 1962, as spokesman for a Quaker delegation of six that met with the president for thirty minutes in the Oval Office, Sam Levering urged John F. Kennedy to help relieve famine in Red China by sending shipments of surplus American wheat.

“You mean feed your enemy when he’s got his hands on your throat?” Sam remembers Kennedy responding.

“Why, yes,” Sam answered him. “That’s how you make friends of enemies. That is exactly what Jesus taught us to do.”

“There are six of you talking to me,” the president said. “How many people do you have talking to congressmen on the Hill this morning?”

Sam replied that they had seventy-four.

“That’s fine,” the president responded. “Send some more.”

Listening to Sam and the Stephensons talk about past triumphs, we were getting that old, hollow feeling. Once again it was hard for us, especially Frank, not to feel that we weren’t making enough room in our lives to help others or to work on world problems. All their adult lives, Sam and Miriam have volunteered much of their time in organizations working to promote peace and justice. Though twice we had given Wanda’s cousin in Poland what for us were large sums of money, and though we contributed regularly to worthy organizations, we had made no sacrifice comparable to that of the Stephensons, donating eighteen months of their lives to helping victims of war. Giving only dollars seemed paltry by comparison.

On some questions we remained ambivalent. But on that day in which the Stephensons passed through our lives, we knew that we would like to follow their path in getting involved in some form of public service. Despite our physical isolation in Orchard Gap from world hot spots and decision makers, it was clear that major global problems—of war, of starvation and overpopulation, of environmental degradation and destruction—reached us even here, deep in the Blue Ridge. It was time, we knew, to live beyond mere self-interest, to act on the real stake we had in our community and our world.

It wasn’t just the urgency of world problems. It was also the internal urgency of knowing that we were connected to “the main,” in John Donne’s words, and that acting on that connection could help fill the vacuum we felt by devoting so much time to our own concerns. Clearly some deeper satisfaction, deriving from more than token gifts of themselves to the world, was written on the faces of our three guests. In Sam and Miriam we had seen that satisfaction for many years. And it was no coincidence that three of the people to whom we were most drawn in Carroll County were former Peace Corps and Vista volunteers. One of them, a white native of Harlan County, Kentucky, had worked in the sixties helping register black voters in Mississippi. These people had given something back. Now active in local affairs, they were calm, empathetic, generous with their time, positive yet realistic thinkers.

During our twenties and early thirties, with occasional, transitory exceptions, we had not gotten involved. We’d convinced ourselves that we could “make it” first, then have enough time and money to address problems outside our immediate spheres. In the effort to simplify our lives, though, we were beginning to see this line of thinking as a fallacy, albeit a common one. There was never and never would be “enough” time or money. The challenge was to make room in our present lives for volunteer work.

“Sacrificial giving,” Millard Fuller told us in Georgia, “is not all that big in America. But we’re strong on giving a portion.”

To make room for that portion, most adult volunteers who are also working for a living clear their schedules for an evening, a Saturday, a weekend, and occasionally a week or two of volunteer work. With some of the roughly 120,000 American Quakers, it is still not uncommon to push volunteerism even farther—to take a leave of absence from work, as Griffith Levering did, to set sail on a European mission like the Stephensons. But one expects that some semblance of normal life will resume upon one’s return.

With Sam Levering, however, there neither is nor has been a “normal life” for almost fifty years. Sam’s idea of giving a “portion” is half his time or more, every year, to unpaid service. That he is carrying out this notion well into his eighties—not only driving to his destinations, but making the trips in an unreliable old car—is a source of anxiety to his family. But not to Sam. For Sam, it is not a question of fitting his volunteer work into his schedule; rather, it’s a question of organizing the rest of his life around his volunteer work. Since his mid-thirties Sam has enjoyed the remarkable luxury for an unwealthy man of spending roughly half his time as a volunteer.

In his essay “Quakerism and the Simple Life,” Rufus Jones wrote: “Ask almost any young man what he wants to become and he will answer, ‘I don’t know yet.’ He is waiting for somebody, or some occasion, to help him discover himself, to reveal to him what his own life means to him. Strange paradox, that I do not even know what I myself want and that I need outside help to discover the ideal of my own life.”

In 1930, when Sam was twenty-two and a graduate student in pomology at Cornell, he heard a sermon on campus in Sage Chapel. As Millard Fuller told us, quoting an unidentified sage, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” For Millard, that teacher was Clarence Jordan at Koinonia Farm, the Christian community in Georgia. For earnest young Sam Levering, it was Rufus Jones, then a philosophy professor at Haverford College.

In the hands of parents bent on instructing their children, some old family stories, like biblical tales, take on mythic dimensions, oversimplifying the reality of self-revelation and life choices. Yet, like the story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, Sam’s story in its very simplicity—in its blinding flash of light that changes things forever—has always, for Frank, been unquestionably real, so real that he has often yearned for a comparable experience, a revelation “of what his own life means to him.”

As Sam tells the story, he was sitting in the choir that Sunday morning when Jones spread Sam’s life before him. “There are four great issues before our time,” Jones told his listeners. The issues were the relationship between each individual and God; how to recover from the Depression; racial equality around the world; and war and peace. “To make the maximum contribution,” Sam quotes Jones, “one needs to specialize in one of these four critical areas. If I were a young person, I would want to become an expert. I would want to know enough to really be helpful. That will take time. It might very well take ten years in which one would be learning before being able to make a real difference.”

In order to do such work, suggested Jones, a founding father of the American Friends Service Committee, one could divide one’s life into two halves. In one half a person would live simply and provide necessities with a job. In the other half one would be free to make a significant contribution to solving global problems.

Following Jones’s prescription, young Sam had determined “the ideal” of his life. But in which area should he specialize? In the summer of 1930, after running cross-country for Cornell in the Oxford-Cambridge meet in England, Sam had traveled on the Continent and heard Adolf Hitler speak at a Nazi rally in Munich. The experience had chilled him, convinced him that war was coming again in Europe. In his sermons Rufus Jones had said that “war is becoming so destructive that man and war cannot live on the same planet.” Sam decided to devote himself to “the peace field,” as he likes to call it. In time he would return to Virginia to take over his father’s orchard while simultaneously working to end war throughout the world.

Sam met Miriam Lindsey at a student public speaking contest. A Cornell undergraduate majoring in history and government, Miriam chose as her topic “The Farmer and World Peace.” She did not win the contest, but she won Sam’s heart. The daughter of a Methodist minister in Pittsburgh and a member of the state champion debating team in high school, Miriam shared Sam’s interests in peace but—he claims—romanticized American farmers! Sam and Miriam married in Sage Chapel on her graduation day in 1934 and moved to Washington, D.C., where Sam spent five years working for the Farm Credit Administration before moving back to the orchard in 1939.

The rest is family history. From 1943 on, Sam says—once the orchard business was in gear—he began to lead his double life. Sam was a co-founder in 1943 of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker lobby headquartered on Capitol Hill, which continues today to voice Quaker concerns in the halls of Congress. In its statement of purpose, the FCNL shuns pressure-group lobbying and “the manipulation of power,” pledging instead “to work by means of quiet influence through personal contact and persuasion.” As chairman of the executive committee of the FCNL from 1956 to 1972, Sam played a pivotal role in the development of the organization as a respected lobby for peace and social justice.

Garnet Dawson, Sam’s longtime foreman, once offered a vivid image of the boss in his younger days. “Sam, he’d be out in the orchard wearing overalls,” Garnet said, “and the next thing you knew, you’d see him pull off his overalls and underneath he’d be wearing a suit. Then he’d jump in the car and head on down the road.”

Always the most ardent supporter of Sam’s activism, Miriam, in time, joined him out on the stump. Family friends remember Miriam in the late forties packing her brood of young children into the Chevy carry-all and sallying forth to make speeches on behalf of World Federalism and the United Nations. As Frank grew up in the fifties and sixties, the sixth and last of the clan, Miriam seemed every bit as committed to world peace as his father.

Beginning in 1972, all the years of idealistic effort culminated for Sam and Miriam in their effort to promote an international, United Nations—sponsored Law of the Sea treaty and its ratification both in the United States and throughout the world. At stake was nearly three-fourths of the earth’s surface. Who owned all that water, the right to fish in it and navigate through it? Who owned the vast untapped mineral wealth on the ocean floor? Who was to be held accountable for ocean pollution?

This was the real test of Sam and Miriam’s joint decision to specialize in what for them had become the necessary link between peace and international law. Although in 1946 Sam had co-founded the World Federalists of North Carolina—the host organization for the founding convention of the United World Federalists in 1947, which enjoyed the leadership of North Carolina Senator Terry Sanford and the late Norman Cousins and fleeting support from none other than Ronald Reagan—by 1972 he had abandoned the World Federalist dream of a world government as hopelessly Utopian in the real world of national sovereignty. Nor, clearly, was pacifism always the road to peace. As Rufus Jones had suggested, specializing in one problem area was an experience of endless study and growth. With the Law of the Sea negotiations, the senior Leverings saw an opportunity to draft what amounted to a constitution for the governance of the oceans.

Sam and Miriam worked in a top-floor office at the FCNL (for a time sleeping on a makeshift couch there and cooking in the employee kitchen). Their work was funded at a subsistence level by private contributions. Except during harvest times, when Sam had to be home full-time, every Friday evening for eleven years, he and Miriam would drive to Orchard Gap in their 1965 Dodge Dart, spend the weekend putting out fires on the home front, then return the 340 miles to Washington, D.C., on Sunday night. Remarkably, this grueling binary existence continued for eleven years—with interludes in New York, Geneva, Caracas, and Montego Bay, Jamaica, where the international conferences were held. At ages when many Americans were retired or on the verge of retirement, the Leverings were working as hard as or harder than their prime-of-life children.

It was an extraordinary period for Sam and Miriam, a testament to what informed private citizens with modest living demands can accomplish. To broaden their base of support beyond Quakerdom, Sam launched and became executive director of the United States Committee for the Oceans and was also appointed to the United States Public Advisory Committee on the Law of the Sea. In those capacities he worked closely with, among others, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the Law of the Sea, Elliot Richardson. Between Law of the Sea conferences, Sam lobbied and testified frequently on Capitol Hill and worked to prevent passage of domestic legislation harmful to the negotiations.

As founder and executive director of the Ocean Education Project (OEP), Miriam directed an ever-changing cast of volunteers and several paid staffers. OEP’s regular mission was public education on the Law of the Sea negotiations. Together with the United Methodist Law of the Sea Project, OEP organized more than sixty brainstorming seminars in Geneva, New York, and Washington, D.C., where conference delegates and experts from academia, industry, and the UN Secretariat met to discuss issues involving oil, fish, deep-seabed mining, and the continental margin. At these informal sessions, a number of ideas arose that helped break deadlocks at the conferences. Additionally, the two organizations published a conference paper, “Neptune,” that served as a nonpartisan source of conference information for delegates.

Despite the Reagan administration’s refusal to sign the treaty, Sam and Miriam’s labors, along with those of countless others, were not in vain. In December 1982, at Montego Bay, Jamaica, 130 nations did sign a treaty that set limits to national jurisdiction, established navigational rights, provided for additional scientific research and environmental protection, and set forth guidelines for international management of the oceans as “the common heritage of mankind.” It was, wrote The New York Timed, “the greatest achievement in the development of the rule of law since the founding of the United Nations.”

In a photograph they treasure, a radiant Sam and Miriam pose with four fellow organization members and Elliot Richardson under a tree at Montego Bay. It is their ascent of Everest, their marathon runner’s triumph at the finish line. Though the United States has not yet signed that treaty, and the ratification process continues (sixty ratifications are needed for the treaty to come into force), Sam and Miriam closed up their Washington office in 1983 and returned to the orchard to live full-time.

With war and the use of nuclear weapons still a threat to the earth they have inhabited for a combined 161 years, Sam and Miriam’s work is not done. These days they can regularly be seen on the highways of eastern America, traveling to board meetings, conferences, hearings, and lectures, Miriam’s Ford Festiva and Sam’s Escort their small boats in treacherous waters.

Late one winter evening, well past everyone’s bedtime, we were talking with Frank’s parents and a mutual friend, sitting near the woodstove in Sam and Miriam’s cozy living room. Patricia Devoe is a new friend, a fifty-two-year-old minister who had recently assumed the pastorate of the Methodist church in Hillsville. “Preacher Pat,” as her folksy congregants call her, was asking Sam and Miriam how they became so committed to their ideals.

“Well,” Sam said, “George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, put it succinctly. He said, ‘We must become changed men before we go out to change others’ ”

Miriam exhaled sharply. “I don’t believe that,” she said. “I think you change as you do something. If you wait until you are the person of your dreams, it may be too late. Moses had his body in the water before the Red Sea parted. You take the self that you have and you put it in the water.”

The room was silent for a few moments, almost like a Quaker meeting, as if the five of us were groping for that “inner light” Friends prize. Sam and Miriam, it seemed, had sharply divergent views. But for us, we later reflected, the larger truth was with Miriam—not only in our desire to become volunteers, but in our entire lives as they continued to change. As the Catholic theologian Henri Nouwen once put it, “You don’t think your way into a new kind of living; you live your way into a new kind of thinking.” For us, that new kind of living would come sooner than we could have guessed.

We first heard the news one weekday in July 1989. Just across the state line in North Carolina, on a Christmas tree farm at the foot of a hill we can see from our house, was the site of a proposed medical-waste incineration facility. A few days later we attended a public meeting and learned that the company planning to build the for-profit incinerators had grander visions than merely burning medical waste from North Carolina. Slipped into its application for a state air permit—the thing that most angered local residents—was a company request for permission to burn “brokered loads” of industrial and household waste from “the Northeast corridor of the United States.” The company intended to expand its operation to a market predicted to grow at a rate of 300 to 500 percent within five years, with additional incinerators built to accommodate the growth and no apparent limit on the units added.

We were aghast. Would our fresh mountain breezes become laced with acid mist? Would the toxic-ash residue of the incinerators end up in local landfills, leach into the groundwater, and poison our soil? Would our pastoral, dairy-farming, fruit-growing section become the final resting ground for industrial by-products from New York and New Jersey? The answers seemed both obvious and horrifying. How could this nightmare happen so close to home?

In fact, we learned that first night, it could happen with chilling ease. As long as the company met North Carolina’s lax air-quality standards, the state was obligated to issue a permit. With virtually no zoning laws, Surry County had little legal say in the matter. The absentee landowner of the 250-acre site had already agreed to sell his land to the start-up company, founded by three men who lived in a neighboring county to the west, none of whom had any experience operating incinerators. Insiders estimated that any local firm that could get a commercial-waste incinerator in place could turn around and sell the package to a national waste conglomerate for a cool two million. What’s more, the location off a major interstate, in a sparsely populated area just two miles from the state line (where many people who would breathe the emissions had no political clout in the state with jurisdiction), seemed ominously ideal for environmental exploitation.

One dairy farmer at the first meeting said what we were all thinking: “If it was so safe to burn this stuff, why would they want to truck it all the way down here?”

It was peach season at the orchard, but even as we picked and sold peaches, all we could think about was the prospect of looking out our window and seeing incinerator smokestacks spewing toxic emissions seven days a week, twenty hours a day. The hot August days hung heavy and strange with a sense of imminent apocalypse. Expelling toxic dioxins and metals into the air, the incinerators would mar the beauty and threaten the health of our community. Who knew their effect on our fruit and that of our fellow orchardists? And of the substances permitted to be burned, experts said that at least twenty-one would be carcinogenic. But of even greater concern to us was who would monitor each load carefully enough to screen out the no-no’s that might be slipped into the mix. The answer seemed obvious. With a skeletal staff, we feared no one would.

Like countless others before us, we rolled up our sleeves in self-defense. A high school know-it-all, working at the orchard that summer, pronounced us “NIMBYs” (for Not in My Back Yard). The charge was true enough, but we refused to accept its pejorative connotation. If we didn’t fight to protect the environment of our community, who would? Certainly not those who stood to make a quick buck off such a project; certainly not those in urban areas who sought to ship their garbage out of sight and out of mind.

At the public meeting we’d attended, a group called Citizens Against Pollution was founded. We joined what was initially a small, furious, frightened band of rural folk, many of them farmers, and went about trying to slay what looked like Goliath. Working as a peach saleswoman by day, Wanda took to the telephone by night, catching up on the latest developments from other organizers, putting out the word to residents in Virginia. For two months, on into the apple season, Wanda threw herself into the cause, with Frank helping when he could.

A Carroll County chapter of Citizens Against Pollution formed, and Wanda was drafted as chairperson. She testified before the county governing body, the Carroll County Board of Supervisors, urging the supervisors to pass a resolution against the proposed incinerator facility, which they did. She spoke at local meetings and handed out form letters to sign, petitions and sheets with names, addresses, and phone numbers of public officials to call. She wrote our Virginia representatives, asking them to bring pressure to bear on their North Carolina counterparts, urging them to consider our county’s opposition to this facility. Newspaper editors in both states ran Wanda’s letters. In the end, thousands of letters poured into state agencies in Raleigh, evoking bureaucratic amazement at the sheer volume emanating from this rural pocket. We pulled Keith Love, a Los Angeles journalist friend, into the act. Keith contacted an editor at the Greensboro News and Record and proposed an article on the anti-incinerator campaign, which resulted in a long news story.

After all the attempts to influence officials in Raleigh, a simple thing happened. Throughout the campaign the incinerator company remained intractable, its principals refusing even to talk with the opposition. But the owner of the land himself caved in to public pressure. After months of personal appeals, in October he sent a registered letter to the three businessmen, terminating their option to buy his land. And although they threatened legal action to force a sale, nothing has come of it so far.

It was an exhilarating victory. More than that, the experience of uniting with other people in a common cause, of being a factor in a happy outcome, gave us our first real taste of social action. The experience had broadened into some measure of personal revelation. Working with others for the public good was now in our blood. We were eager to volunteer our talents again.

In the anti-incinerator campaign, we worked closely with the then chairman of the Carroll County Board of Supervisors, J. Eddie Vaughan, organizing opposition in the county. It was a lesson in the workings of local politics, at least in our county, where everybody knows everybody else. In December 1989, Eddie Vaughan, a staunch Republican, called Frank to ask if he would accept an appointment to the eight-member Carroll County Planning Commission as the new representative of the Fancy Gap Magisterial District (his and our home district). The county badly needed “public-minded” people, he said. Though the job paid only gas money, it was an opportunity for Frank to play an active role in helping to shape the future of the county. Frank accepted.

Carroll County has changed markedly in Frank’s lifetime from an agrarian society with a distinctly Appalachian flavor to a social polyglot of natives and “outsiders,” many of the latter being retirees or second-homers in developments capitalizing on the scenic beauty of the Blue Ridge. Many of the older mountain people, fiercely independent, esteem private property next to God and view government regulations of any sort with deep hostility. To some natives the word zoning, or the idea of regulating land development in any way remains synonymous with communism.

For Frank, serving on the commission—with its monthly meetings and regular clashes among members—has provided a window into the torturously slow process of public decision making. As we write, the commission is beginning to draft a comprehensive plan for land use in the county, and issues like zoning and farm and rural heritage preservation are at the forefront of intense and often heated discussion. Frank has already found the experience to be an illustration of how one lives ones way into a new way of thinking. Once an armchair critic of local decision making and benighted attitudes, he’s now been forced into the more tolerant and creative role of trying to be a part of the solution.

With new ways of thinking come new priorities, new urgencies we never anticipated. When we left California, the focus of finding ways to simplify was almost exclusively on ourselves, the quality of our own lives. In Virginia we’ve developed a stake in our community. Here, having developed a visceral appreciation for volunteer service, we are asking ourselves how to make more room in our lives for that work.

We do not, however, care to bite off more than we can chew. The problem of overextending ourselves as volunteers—though hardly an imminent one—can be serious, with haunting examples right here in the cove. Sam himself admits that by spending so much of his time on higher concerns, he neglected his business, which in turn racked up a burdensome debt. Equally disquieting, though, was that when growing up, Frank and the other siblings often resented playing second fiddle to their parents’ idealistic concerns.

We did not want to become so swept up by a cause that volunteerism became a surrogate brand of workaholism and intruded on our other goals.

Being a useful volunteer does not necessarily entail saving the world. It does mean making the best use of your opportunities and talents in your own context—in short, finding a need and filling it.

“No day, no hour, comes, but brings in its train work to be performed for some useful end—the suffering to be comforted, the wandering led home, the sinner reclaimed,” wrote the social reformer Dorothea Dix, who in the 1840s led a one-woman crusade to improve the attitudes toward and living conditions of the mentally ill.

Like Sam and Miriam, Sue Rickert, our friend in San Francisco, has made a life of volunteering. When young Sue was teaching English in Tanzania as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1964 to 1966, she “got in the habit of giving my time and making a gift of my profession. I was doing it for the love of it, the excitement of it.”

But service in the Peace Corps does not a lifetime make. Sue married fellow volunteer Steve Jacobs, an affluent young man from San Francisco, and moved with him out of Africa into a house high on a hill overlooking pastel houses and the blue Pacific. While Steve developed shopping centers and made life financially stable and materially comfortable for Sue and their three children, Sue threw herself into what Wendy Kaminer, author of Women Volunteering, calls the long, honorable tradition—especially among well-educated, middle-to upper-class women—of “public housewivery,” or unpaid social service.

Sue chaired an organization based in Haight-Ashbuiy that sheltered runaways and helped to reunite them with family members. She sponsored refugees, helping them find work and places to live, offering herself and her home. A young Vietnamese couple with a small child moved in with Sue and her family for a year. “It was not much from us, just a place to stay and moral support,” she said. “But it meant so much to them.” Today, she told us proudly, the husband is a computer programmer, his wife a unit manager at a bank, and they own their own home.

In the summer of 1980 we, too, were the beneficiaries of Sue’s largesse. With our car loaded down with Wanda’s belongings, we were making our roundabout way from Wanda’s Manhattan apartment on East Forty-first Street to our new home together in Venice Beach, California. Staying with Sue and Steve for almost a week, we never could have guessed that before the decade ended they would be divorced and Sue would be living in the same house with her children and her second husband, Tom Rickert.

With Sue’s new life has come diminished prosperity. Despite the change of circumstances, she continues to find ways to volunteer and—if she resumes teaching—is determined not to eclipse that part of herself with professional obligations. “It may sound strange,” she said, “but I enjoy doing what I want to do for free. It’s voluntary rather than obligatory, even though your commitment to it can be just as strong. It’s more fun to do it for the love of it than to get paid for it.”

Every Tuesday Sue reports to San Francisco General Hospital and makes herself available to nurses, doctors, and social workers for massage therapy. Sue also brings her healing hands to her work as a lay minister at the hospital. San Francisco General is one of the few hospitals in the country with lay chaplains, and she’s one of about twenty there.

Her ministry is unusual. “I’d rather do a nonverbal visit,” Sue said. “When people are in the hospital they are often so sick they don’t want to talk. A lot of them are starved for touch. So I asked the head chaplain if I could do massage. I trained for six months as a massage therapist and went back and said, ‘I want you to know that there is a chaplain who is also a massage therapist.’”

On a typical day Sue usually starts with “a chair massage to seven nurses at Ob-Gyn. We’re having a huge crack epidemic in San Francisco, with women giving birth to crack-addicted babies. So I’ve chosen the nurses who are working with the addicted mothers. They’re with the mothers before, during, and after the labor; they’re stressed to the limit. They will take me to patients who are about to give birth or are in the middle of labor. I am a presence for them.”

For a woman with three children to put through college, working entirely for love may no longer be an affordable option. For many prosperous retirees, however, volunteer service does offer the happy prospect of love’s labor gained.

Over the past few years we’ve come to know many such retirees—we talk with hundreds of them every year at the orchard, where they constitute a significant number of our customers. What strikes us most about these well-to-do retirees is just how many of them seem to be starved for a sense of purpose. Ironically, coming from retirees, this refrain often takes the following form: their lives of leisure are too booked up, too full of distracting activities; there’s no time left for the challenges they crave.

After he retired, Dr. Stefan P. Wilk, a former radiologist and professor at the University of California Los Angeles Medical School, and his wife, Wanda Harasimowicz Wilk, spent much of their time at L.A.’s Lakeview Country Club playing golf and bridge, eating and drinking, passing time with friends. After a few months they could stand the life of leisure no longer. “I felt I was wasting my time,” said Wanda Wilk. All but abandoning these pastimes, they flung themselves into two causes—the advancement of medicine in Poland and the collection of Polish music—which now consume as much as forty hours a week for each of them, sometimes more.

“Medical knowledge and music don’t concern themselves with politics, beliefs, national boundaries,” said Stefan, by way of explaining their focus. “They are deaf to foreign accent, blind to skin color. These are universal languages. Music and health always unite people.”

The Wilks say that becoming full-time volunteers with twin missions was the best decision they could have made: they’ve never felt better. “I’m seventy-one,” Wanda said, “but I don’t feel my age.”

We sat with the Wilks in their Studio City home overlooking the San Fernando Valley, the late afternoon sun flashing on the dark glass towers below at Universal Studios. By Thoreau’s hairshirt standards, the Wilks’ life is hardly simple. Stefan drives a sleek, late-model Cadillac and their home is worth a king’s ransom in Los Angeles.

It has often been argued, as it is by Duane Elgin in his book Voluntary Simplicity, that “living closer to the level of material simplicity” helps one achieve an “awareness of world reality,” breaks down the insulation of wealth, and helps create the empathy for others that is the soul of volunteerism. No doubt this is often true. Talking with the Wilks, though, we immediately became aware that prosperity in itself need be no barrier to active concern for the less privileged. The Wilks are a prime example of how affluent retirees can simplify their lives by focusing their energies as volunteers.

At seventy-four Stefan is a trim, handsome man with a chiseled jawline, a thick shock of gray hair, and hands that carve the air as he speaks in chivalrous, sometimes irreverent tones. Orphaned in rural eastern Poland at age seven, he emigrated to the United States in 1952, a thirty-five-year-old physician—“just another displaced person,” he said. That same year he met and married Wanda, a Polish-American born in Hamtramck, Michigan.

“When I came here, I didn’t speak English,” joked Stefan in a still-noticeable Polish accent. “I said the best way to learn a foreign language is to go to sleep with a dictionary. Consequently, I married a dictionary!”

Having traveled to Poland frequently in recent years and witnessed what by American standards were appalling deficiencies in medical resources and information, the Wilks started the Children’s Medical Care Foundation (CMCF) in 1981 with a $100,000 founding donation. Stefan is now president of the foundation, which includes, among its trustees and officers, the chancellor of UCLA and the dean of the UCLA School of Medicine.

“We don’t know how many lives of children we’ve saved because in Poland they have only seven or eight kidney dialysis machines for the entire country,” said Stefan. These overworked units, he explained, had been able to accommodate only two to three out of every ten children who needed them. Today, thanks to CMCF’s work, an ambulatory dialysis method has been introduced that is taking some of the burden off those few machines.

“In 1984 they did the first kidney transplant in a child because of our program,” said Stefan with pride. “As of a month ago, they’d done eighty. The other major thing, we’ve gone into neonatology. We found that the worst infant mortality rate in Europe, next to Albania, is in Poland.”

In practical terms, what CMCF does is send American doctors to Poland to train Polish doctors, bring Polish doctors to study at UCLA, and sponsor joint research projects. “We limit our medical help to children,” Stefan said. “In World War II, 2.2 million Polish children perished, innocent children, because of neglect, hunger, abandonment, gas chambers, and everything else. We have to focus somewhere. So we concentrate on children.”

Stefan’s days are full: fund-raising and overseeing a range of foundation activities, including organizing an annual charity ball. Often the Wilks play host for weeks, sometimes months, to Polish physicians studying in the United States.

When not cooking for or chauffeuring her houseguests, Wanda Wilk spends most of her volunteer hours as director of the Polish Music Reference Center (PMRC) on the University of Southern California campus. The reference center—housed in an impeccable, densely shelved room decorated in red and white for the Polish flag—was Wanda’s brainchild. In writing her thesis for her master’s degree at USC, the former music teacher was appalled at being unable to find even one book on the history of Polish music printed in the United States. “Poland has much talent,” she declared, “and outside of Chopin, it’s largely unknown in this country.”

Fired by her desire to correct this glaring omission, Wanda has guided the center to its present status as “the largest collection on Polish music outside of Poland. … Students are writing us from all over the world,” says the buoyantly energetic Wanda. “Where can I find this music? Where can I get this recording? It will all just keep growing.”

Following in the tradition of Edmund Urbanski, who faithfully sent packages of food and clothing to his family in Poland during the postwar years and, in 1961, arranged to sponsor his older sister, Janina, here, we have several times played host to Wanda’s Polish cousins at the orchard. In 1988 we found work picking cherries for the sister and new spouse of Wanda’s second cousin’s husband. We wanted them to have a little spare cash with which to tour America and something to take back to Poland to improve their lives.

Wanting to help the Poles has been a consistent impulse of Wanda’s ever since she first toured Poland with her father in 1977, the summer of her junior year in college. The Poles she met were, by American standards, the ultimate simple livers (though not by choice). Most lived in dormitorylike spaces and queued up for scarce food. They traveled on mass transportation and celebrated books and art and music and family. They studied English and other foreign languages in their spare time. And though there was much generosity, intelligence, and abundant pride in their heritage, the Poles rightfully felt they were still living under foreign occupation.

The concomitant sense of impotence, Wanda sensed, was exacerbated by the fact that Poland never had the chance to recover from the devastation of World War II. Even as late as the late seventies, the Poles were subject to the complex that Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz so aptly coined in 1953—the “captive mind”—of performing “mental acrobatics” in order to abide by an ugly political reality. In purely human terms, Wanda’s first trip to Poland brought home to her how rare was the American life-style of abundance in the global community and how great were the needs of other peoples. If Quaker activists pricked Frank’s conscience, Wanda’s ideals were stirred by the work of the Wilks. And although we’d entertained Poles, no humanitarian objective had been attached to our hospitality. Perhaps someday one would be.

In Stefan and Wanda Wilk, as in every other freely giving person we’d encountered, the energy of volunteerism could move mountains. Back on our mountain, we knew from experience with the incinerator battle that people working together toward a common objective could accomplish what individuals could not. What would happen if every able-bodied man, woman, and child on earth released as much white-hot energy as did the Stephensons, the Fullers, Sue Rickert, and the Wilks? The earth would move beneath our feet. Mt. Everest itself would tumble into the sea.

“They’re like kids,” Wanda once said when Sam and Miriam burst in on us late one evening, returning from a trip to Washington, D.C. “Your parents are just like a couple of school kids when they come back from the road.”

They’re on top of the world, in fact. Almost always. Bragging about their latest exploits. Talking excitedly about the people they’ve met. Laughing and carrying on.

We’d gladly settle for that second childhood ourselves.