The Church of Archery

The Church of Archery

How the brotherhood of the bow coalesced to save a spiritual community based on shooting arrows in Berkeley’s La Loma Park.

Michael Lang projects his voice across La Loma Park to a Lululemon-clad cadre of 30 middle-aged hiker-women and two families lined up in a row along the edge of the field. “This is the gentle art of drawing the bow,” he says on a sunny Sunday afternoon in February 2015 high in the Berkeley hills. Lang, a tall, barefoot, humble, and well-proportioned man of 65 with an aquiline nose, makes teaching archery to a crowd look easy. Children, parents, and the group of women pay careful attention.

“The bow is a stringed instrument, not unlike a violin or guitar,” he says. “Now, without even picking up the bow, standing comfortably straight—not ramrod straight—the first thing we do is take our stance to address the target. I’m laying the arrow on the ground. Now, observe the placement of my feet. This is the open stance.”

This is the beginning of the first of nine essential lessons that Lang teaches newcomers to his archery program, offered in conjunction with the city of Berkeley. Attendees pay $15 per person per visit and all are welcome to stay beyond the hour as long as a bow and some arrows are available. Lang is always vigilant to give advice and make suggestions to archers of all levels of experience.

“Now this is a delicate procedure,” says Lang’s co-instructor, Dan Winheld, at the end of the line of new archers. “If the two of us are managing one group of people, they can’t be shifting their attention. So he is sensei, and I can’t be giving conflicting advice, or even the same advice from two mouths at different times. So he’ll show them something on his end, and I’ll just quietly mimic it on my end. That’s sort of fun, teaching in tandem.”

A compatriot and old friend of Lang’s, Winheld has helped with the archery program for three years and has been integral in its success. Lang teaches the newbies, while Winheld handles what they refer to as “the far end of the field” where the more-practiced archers shoot at a paper plate placed 40 yards away at the base of the cliff.

La Loma Park, where Lang holds this archers congregation, is an Edenic nook of lush grass skirted around the edge of a baseball diamond and tucked up against the base of a 100-foot cliff face. Harmonies of bird songs trickle out from the encircling trees. Beyond the oak, redwood, eucalyptus, and California buckeye is an incredible view of the Bay Area, something that passersby might stare at but that the archers seem instantly to disregard.

Yet as wonderful as La Loma can be on Sundays, and as powerful of a connection as Lang has formed with the community, his two-plus decades of running the program independently started to catch up with him in early 2015. The stresses of managing the program, combined with his age, physical condition, and years of continuous instruction made the act of teaching in his own style—the very reason he started an archery community—quite hard to enjoy.

And so in September, after almost a year of careful consideration, Lang retired from his senior position at the archery program.

“Well, not quite,” Winheld said in late December. “While it’s been two months since Michael officially retired, it’s been more of a gradual transition, because he kept showing up for full days. . . . He’s been relieved of a lot of the burdens and tasks that made it an onerous thing for him.”

“There’s a momentum to it,” Lang said when asked about his continued involvement. “I feel a responsibility there.”

The burdens and tasks have been dispersed among four fathers who have been regulars over the years. Winheld is now the lead instructor and official business owner, maintaining the business license, paying taxes, and keeping up the relationship with the city of Berkeley for Berkeley Archery at La Loma Park. Geoffrey Lomax handles the insurance contract, corrals the group, and sets up meetings with the city. Evan Nailor created a new website, www.BerkeleyArchery.com, and has rebuilt some of the target supports. And Tom Beal helps with instruction, opening up the field and tearing it down at the end of the day.

It is a testament to Lang’s patience, perseverance, and passion for the archery program that it takes four people to do what he did alone for so long.

“He really was doing everything,” Winheld said. “He was the administrator, the coordinator, the field crew, and staff, and even with me on board, it was still getting a bit old for him. But it’s been a lot easier for him. He doesn’t have to worry about things other than coming up and instructing.”

Together Lang and Winheld have created a hub of community recreation, learning, and spirituality that at face value is just an archery instruction program. But it has become more than that, uniquely touching the lives of students whose lessons come with remarkable consistency. It is a program, however, that came very close to ending when Lang decided to quit.

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The roots of Lang’s archery program reach back to the 1980s when Lang settled on becoming a high school history teacher. He enrolled at U.C. Berkeley but halfway through the teaching credential program realized he couldn’t spend that much time indoors and found himself in “fundamental disagreement with the system as it is.”

“If I could wave a wand, there would be one teacher for every six students, kindergarten through high school,” he said.

Lang began teaching archery in 1990 at California Blue Camp, a U.C.-affiliated camp program for children. While teaching at Blue Camp, Lang met his long-term partner, Michelle Straka, and Winheld, whose children Lang taught archery.

Blue Camp let Lang apply his skills as a teacher and archer, but Lang felt at odds with the camp. He noticed that many of the campers’ parents loved archery and suggested parents be included, but adults were never brought in.

“In the end, I simply wanted to teach archery better than I could at Blue Camp,” he said.

Lang designed an archery program and went to Berkeley Parks & Recreation proposing to use a community park as the class setting, found La Loma Park for the location, and got the go-ahead.

“When I first started, I thought this could fall flat on its face,” Lang said, “but it clicked. The parents, who said they wanted to do it, came to it with their kids, and the attendance was strong from the start.”

A big reason why the program caught on initially could have been how Lang promoted it, sending more than 100 handwritten letters to former attendees of Blue Camp informing them about the new alternative. Then every Sunday, weather permitting, Lang would be at La Loma and open to all willing to learn the art of the bow, building a reputation as a master archer and teacher.

He established his teaching formula in his first year. A primary tenet is that regardless of age, nationality, or gender, he addresses students in precisely the same way with the same lessons, analogies, and tones. He also uses formal training mixed with a relaxed approach to instruction and take-your-time pacing. One student characterized the result as something akin to a “church of archery.”

Beyond the lesson plan, Lang lets attendees shoot as they please. As Lang explained, “Archery is better learned than taught. The first nine lessons I can give someone will only get them up and off of plateaus.”

Attendees, the majority of them families, come from many places. “Parents come up, bringing kids, uncles, grandparents; they get sucked into it. For three weeks in a row, three generations of a Swedish family came. Michael and I taught all three generations. It was amazing,” Winheld said.

There have been times when attendance was lean, but there has never been a Sunday when the archery class failed to attract participants, who usually learn about the lessons by word of mouth.

Aaron Fry and his family are regulars who found out about the program on the Berkeley Parents’ Network, the online parents forum. “Michael’s a great teacher,” Fry said four months into his archery program. “He’s really patient, and he teaches you the traditional way of doing things, which is unique these days with all of the technology going on.”

Fry and his family have tried archery ranges at Redwood Regional Park and Briones Regional Park, but Fry said neither compares to La Loma. “It’s just so nice here,” said Fry. “It’s my one Zen moment during the week. I feel so much better when I leave. Everything’s kind of in place, and I’m ready for the rest of my week. Plus, my kids just love it. They can’t get enough. Gives my wife a break, too.”

Didi Miller, a younger regular who has been coming for more than a year, echoed Fry’s sentiment: “There’s nothing like this. I know for a fact that my skills would fall off if it ended. There’s just nothing that comes close to what you get with Michael and this place.”

Lang’s feelings about ending the program started in summer 2014. During some slow weeks, he noticed his enchantment with teaching was waning, a feeling that grew in the fall when his body required three days’ recovery from a 15-mile walk that wouldn’t have bothered him in younger days. In addition to the physical toll of setting up the targets and equipment, there were other niggling details, such as maintaining liability insurance with the city, that were annoying to him.

“There isn’t carte-blanche use of the knees from here on out. Now I’ve got to be considerate. I’m really lucky to be able to carry all my bows and the targets still and then walk down to Michelle’s afterwards. There are 64-year-olds that can’t do that,” Lang said.

Aging, Lang admitted, “that’s just one thing” that played into his decision to put up his bow and arrow. What primarily mattered was his lack of excitement for teaching. “I’ve been teaching it for 23 years,” he said. “I’ve run flat on it. It’s smooth. It’s like water running over rocks—the rocks are very smooth now. Before when they had corners on them, ‘Yeah, this is great!’ Now it’s smooth. Things have a life, a life span.”

“I know that he says that sometimes he’s not feeling it, and then he’ll have a good day, and he’s really happy, because he meets wonderful people,” Straka said. “It’s a special group of people who are there with Michael, and I know he really loves them. But there is also just the year-after-year of teaching the same thing. Sometimes I think that what was once initially so exciting and wonderful does begin to dissipate a little bit. Things do change.”

Cleaning up his gear after a busy Sunday in late June at La Loma, Lang stopped suddenly and said, “I’ll tell you, the first 20 minutes today, I did not want to be here. I thought, ‘I’ve got to quit this now.’ But two people showed up, and I talked to them, and I was all right.”

When Winheld and Lang started discussing the end of the program in 2014, “I’ve told him I completely support him in anything he wants,” Winheld said, “and that we’re gonna’ end it sometime at the end of this year. Or we’re gonna go one more year, after which he’s pretty sure he’ll have had it by then. And I said ‘if you wanna hang it up, I won’t tell you not to.’ “

The end, however, put Winheld in “a strange place,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed the hell out of it, but I’ve only been a serious, every-weekend teacher for about three years,” he said as a kernel of assuming a greater role to keep it going sprouted. “So, in theory, I could carry it on, but, you know, it’s been easy. He’s sensei; I’m the assistant to him. And for me to take it all on by myself, for me to be the boss of archery . . . I don’t know. I know I certainly couldn’t do it alone.

Without Lang, Winheld wondered whether archers would continue to come. As Winheld put it, “He’s the man, of course. He’s the one that’s been doing it. It’s the Michael Lang show all the way.”

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On the last Sunday of August, Lang pauses at La Loma to look over the empty field at day’s end and says, “I just sent the current commission check to the city, and a note that I included said I’m going to let the insurance expire. It expires September 15th. That’ll make Sunday, September 13th, the final day at La Loma. It’s been a good run for 23 years.”

“It comes down to a feeling. I just feel done. I could intellectualize, analyze, but it comes down to a feeling. It’s visceral. There isn’t the elating joy of doing it anymore. I have to be honest with myself. It would be a mechanical exercise to go on doing it. It would not be because I want to. I’d be going through the motions, painting by numbers. And I’m OK with doing lessons every once in a while—that’s fine.”

“It’s a really good program, and we’ve been lucky to have it,” Lang says. “I just wish there was somebody who could pick it up. Young people—it would be perfect for somebody in their 20s, their 30s, even their early 40s, like I was when I started, who likes kids and likes archery, likes teaching.”

A week after word got around about Lang decision to leave, about half a dozen regular archers began discussing how to keep the program alive.

“It’d be such a shame to have someone, maybe someone’s child, who’s been thinking about it for so long finally come up and have it not be here,” Lomax said.

Winheld and Lang were surprised by the reaction. “What they’re talking about gave me a positive kick in the pants,” Winheld said then. “People really care. We can’t just shut this down. ‘OK, folks that’s all; goodbye. That’s all there is.’ No, we kind of owe it to our archery folks.”

They began working on the next iteration, the supportive effort convincing Winheld to take on Lang’s role as lead instructor if necessary. “I’ll be more than glad to sort of step into Michael’s shoes to the extent that I can,” he said. “That is, I can teach beginners. I know Michael’s teaching rap; I’ve heard it a million times.”

The collective effort reflected the near-spiritual bond among the archers that Lang had brought together. Winheld, on his way out of the park one day, pointed out, “Archery is this big, incredible network. There’s maybe one degree of separation between any of us in the brotherhood of the bow.”

On Sept. 13, 2015, Lang made his way up to La Loma for his final day as the head teacher. Winheld and his wife, Rachel, and many familiar faces from Lang’s long tenure were there to see and thank him.

“It’s such a great thing you did here,” said an old friend. “It’s touched a lot of people’s lives.”

While Lang was showered with praise and thanks, he remained quiet and humble. As the day ended and the waves of his last newcomers subsided, his closest friends gathered around as he packed up his bows and arrows. For the first time that day, he spoke directly about the end of his involvement with the program: “It sounds strange not to say, ‘I’ll see you next Sunday.’ That’s weird,” he said. “It’s unreal to me that I won’t be here next week. I guess it’ll get more real as time goes by.”

“Maybe we can actually go shooting sometime. We’ll give you lessons at a discount price,” Winheld joked, breaking the contemplative pause that followed.

A moment later, as everyone said goodbye and headed home, Winheld gave Lang one final handshake. “It’s been a wonderful 23 years, Michael,” he said. “Thank you.”

There was a palpable energy in the air there on Lang’s last official day, a sensation that the archery program had become so much more than what Lang initially set out to create and that it would continue to thrive in his absence.

As it turns out, Lang hasn’t disappeared at all. He has only partially relinquished his position as head instructor for the newcomers but is free of the other responsibilities. “I like the lightness and the freedom of being able to go up to La Loma or not. I don’t have to be there, and so there’s a freedom when I am,” he said recently.

Attendance has been up and down since the transition with overall dips attributable to the El Niño rains and storms. “A week ago, while the field was officially open, it really was much too cold for most normal people to subject themselves to three hours of archery, but we did show up. By 11 the three kids we were teaching had frozen fingers, and their concentration and my own were gone, so we called it a day,” Winheld said.

He has complete confidence in the others helping run the program and trusts in the program and the group’s resolve to keep it going. “Their commitment is first-rate,” he said. “Their circumstances don’t allow them to be on-board all the time, but I know their hearts are in it. Because when something really had to be done, they were all there for it. When something comes up, our communication is first-rate.”

When the inevitable day comes that Lang stops teaching altogether, Winheld said he’s more than ready to assume the position of head teacher. “I know his rap, and I’m used to teaching in general. When I was studying karate, I would be the senior instructor at the dojo if the sensei was absent. The same goes with my music instruction. I know how to get inside a beginner’s mind.

“So long as I’m physically able to maintain it and want to do it, I’ll be attempting to fill Michael’s very big shoes. And I think he will continue to show up for a long time to come, because now he gets to just do what he really does best. He’ll be like the professor emeritus who shows up to help out and keep the spirit up.”

“It continues; it’s still going,” Lang said, “and anyone who wants to come up, and learn how to shoot a bow, they can.”

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James Shrieve is a writer and editor in Berkeley. You can reach him at OrindaJim@gmail.com and follow him on twitter at @Yamdeev.

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