My toddler has not been sleeping well lately, and I think it’s because he has not been getting to play outside very much. It has been murderously hot and humid where we live in the St. Louis Metro East and many of his usual activities have been closed for the summer or are just too much heat for his mother and me to deal with. Today is still pretty awful, but so is sitting up with him at two in the morning. So I decide to take him to the neighborhood splash pad.
We arrive about 11 am, greeted by inviting water features shaped like frogs, bears, and birds. There are a set of water guns shaped like animal heads that spin on poles, perfect for catching adults unawares. There is an enormous stork carrying a bucket that spills over at random onto passersby. And there are tiny bugs and fish that are just the right size for my kid to sit on.
I don’t remember having these kinds of places when I was a kid, but I like them, and I especially like that they are run by the local parks and recreation department. I get embarrassingly proud of stuff like this, of the idea that we should spend some of our shared wealth on colorful places to bring our children.
Water Kingdom at Paultons Park [Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0]
My kid is standing at a small water slide. He is only two, and though he is unusually brave most of the time, he keeps climbing up to the top of the slide, pausing as if to evaluate the risks, and then climbing back down. There is another child behind him, a few years older, trying to encourage him – “come on, baby! You can do it!” After a few tries I lift my kid up so the other kids, who are better about efficient use of the slide, can get a turn.
The older kid’s father approaches us. “It just takes so long to teach them how to wait for a minute,” he says to me, in the tone of shared parental commiseration. I agree and set my kid back down to see if he wants to try the slide again. “Oh, uh – by the way,” says the other parent. “I saw your Thor’s Hammer.” He points to my necklace, and then to his forearm, which has a Mjöllnir tattoo in black ink, along with many, many other tattoos.
It’s always a fraught moment when somebody recognizes my necklace, which I realize is strange – the point of wearing a Thor’s Hammer is to publicly identify oneself as a Heathen, after all – but I’m still caught off-guard every time it happens. I’m forced to make a swift reevaluation of my surroundings and my social context. Who is this person? What assumptions are they making about me? What assumptions do they think I will make of them?
I take a split-second scan of him. He’s a tall white man, trimmed beard and tan brown hair, sunglasses. Black sleeveless t-shirt with the name of a tattoo parlor on the back and red NBA shorts; not much to go off, there. But his arms are full of ink. I clock several more Heathen tattoos beyond the Thor’s Hammer, and none of them make me feel great. There’s an Othala rune, frequently associated with racist Heathenry, but the tattoo doesn’t have the wings that would unquestionably tie it to white supremacy. There’s a sun wheel. My gut says this is Nazi symbolism, but then, my friends in Ásatruárfélagið use a version of the sun wheel as their symbol. I notice a Tiwaz rune and a raven, and a bunch of other symbols that I don’t get a long enough look at to try to decipher. Nothing I see is absolute proof that I’m talking to a white supremacist – but there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence.
One nice thing about having a two-year-old is that there’s always a reason to break away from a conversation. My kid runs away toward the giant stork and I run away from the exchange.
The author’s current Thor’s hammer pendant, created by Odyssey Craftworks [E. Scott]
His kid seems to take a shine to me and my child. He follows us around, asks questions about my toddler, and tells us about his brother, who is the same age. I learn this kid is five, which I tell him is a good age to be. My kid falls and scrapes his knees, and while I am comforting him, I see the five-year-old’s father come and lift him on his shoulders so they can stand together under the giant stork’s bucket and catch the full drench when it tips over. He seems like a good dad. I can’t decide whether I want him to be that, or if I want him to be a jerk to his kid so I have more reasons to dislike him.
I hate this. The gods know there are few enough Heathens around – it would be nice to meet another one with kids the same age as mine who lives close enough that we go to the same park. It’s supposed to be a pleasant thing for religious people to meet a fellow member of the faith out in public, isn’t it? Especially those of us in minority religions like ours. We ought to find some occasion for solidarity here, discovering one of the few other people who might understand something of the worldview that undergirds our lives.
But instead, for all that we tell ourselves that the racists are a minority of a minority, it’s still hard not to see another Mjöllnir in the wild without alarm. It’s the same instinct that lead every Heathen I know to curse under their breath when they saw the Vegvísir tattoo enter the frame in the awful video of Sonya Massey’s murder, even though that deputy was not the one who shot her. And I know that everyone who spots my hammer has to make the same calculations about me, and given that I am a big white guy with long hair and a beard who wears a bunch of Viking jewelry, I know at least sometimes I’m going to get clocked as a white supremacist too. If they get to know me, they would learn otherwise – but they would have to get to know me first.
My kid stretches out our towel on a bench and curls up on it, ready to take a nap right there, so I pack up our things. As I’m walking out, I decide I have to at least get a second look. I walk over to the five-year-old’s father and extend my hand. “Hey, just to ask – you’re Heathen, right?”
He shakes my hand. “Yeah, I’m Heathen. Actually,” he says, and I brace myself, knowing there’s nothing good that can come after that ‘actually,’ “I’m an Odinist.” He tells me he runs a tattoo parlor in town, if I’m ever looking to get any ink.
When we get to the car, I sigh out loud to my child. “At least we know, I guess,” I say to him. He’s too young to understand any of it. I’m not looking forward to explaining it to him when he’s older.
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