Religion on the Fly

George Kline is a fixture in his community, and he likes it that way. Every other Monday he brings a message from God to his neighbors, fellow citizens, and everyone who happens to whizz by in their cars.

Sixteen years ago, Kline assembled a large, crude wooden sign below his mailbox on the other side of the street in front of his 60-year-old farmhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The messages on the sign stay up for two weeks at a time. They’re made from large reflective lettering that Kline keeps looking good by replacing the letters at least once a year.

He spends a few hours each month browsing the Bible, or looking through his tattered psalm book, for passages that he can paraphrase neatly or with a rhyme. He keeps track of them in a small notebook that stays in the basket where he also keeps his mail.

His wife of forty years, Margaret, comments on the responses they get from the neighborhood, “People look at him in the grocery store like he’s lost his mind. Most of these people don’t like being preached to.”

In fact, Kline has reassembled his sign dozens of times over the years. It’s been smashed by bat-swinging, speeding teenagers. It’s been shattered by close range shotgun blasts in broad daylight. For George, the best vandalism was when kids would switch the letters around. The worst was the gasoline fire he found in the winter of 1994 that would have burned his fields if it werent for the fact that it had just started snowing.

But he hasn’t given up. He feels his hobby is a calling.

“People don’t like driving 90 miles an hour down an old country road and seeing a sign lettin them know that Christ wants them to slow down and examine their lives,” he said, mostly muttering, over a coffee one morning. Down the driveway and across the street, his latest sign was laying splintered in the grass, waiting for his reliable repair.

“That one was, I think, ‘Faith is Choice, not Chance,’” he said. “It was up for nine days. Anything over a week is fine. That’s enough time to sink in with the locals, the ones right around here.”

The Klines live on a long, hilly pass between routes 434 and 75 in western Lancaster County, alongside the wide Susquehanna River. There is a lot of truck traffic, and during the day the road is frequented by slow-moving tractors working the nearby hay and corn farms. In the morning and late afternoons, hundreds of expensive cars break the speed limit getting to and from work. They tailgate behind the trucks and tractors and swerve around one another at any opportunity. Margaret Kline suggests that the constant speeding immorality that her husband witnesses each day has kept him in the game.

“I see him, every day, standing at the front window there cursing those damn cars,” she said. “It get worse every year. Those cars, and that speeding. It gets worse and worse.”

Kline put on his coat and hat and trudged across his sprawling front lawn with a box full of reflective letters. His notebook was stuffed into the back pocket of his jeans. I watched him as his figure silhouetted against the rising sun over the horizon of spring green fields. I didn’t ask him what new message he was going to install. I realized my mistake when a blurry black BMW rolled over him without slowing. George Kline, his box, his letters, and his tattered notebook lay sprawled in blood along the gravel shoulder, pieces of paper scattering in the car’s backdraft.

Some would say that justice was done this morning. Others, a cause for improved traffic patterns. But the jury is still out on the effect that George Kline truly had on his community, whether he was a beacon of faith and hope or just a preachy old man who should have kept to himself. Either way, Margaret Kline is buying a new dress for bingo on Friday.

- posted by seanmh @ 8:41 AM