On The Necessities Of Life

Enough about exotic foods, lack of sanitation and filthy habits. You must think that I spent my childhood in the gutter. Perhaps I did, when viewed from these enlightened shores. Today I want to show you that when you’re thirsty, or more correctly, when that demon rum has got you in his grip, necessity becomes the mother of invention. On Saturna, this problem is easily solved. You simply go to the General Store and you stock up on your favorite libation. I, however, have been in places for prolonged periods of time where there was no liquor store or any kind of a store, for that matter. If the urge for a stiff shot of something strong grabbed you by the throat there, you had to make do with what was at hand. This was in the military and if any of you have ever served in Uncle Sam’s army, you know that there are some things you will never be short of, like time, ammunition, gasoline, food, Coca Cola. Liquor, however, was not one of them.

Some of my buddies were convinced that if you strained gasoline through the charcoal of your gas mask filter, it took out most of the toxic ingredients like lead and the red coloring agent added to military gasoline to identify and differentiate it from the civilian version and some of the other unhealthy petroleum by-products you find in gasoline. If you mixed two parts of this charcoal-filtered gas with five parts of Coca Cola and added a dash of pepper, you had a concoction that would give you a pretty good jolt, as did butane, when filtered and mixed with Coca Cola. Some preferred sniffing formaldehyde. I favored charcoal-filtered Aqua Velva and Brut, which also went well with Coke. Of course, our gas masks were useless after that without the filter, but we didn’t think we’d ever need them for protection. Today, I’m surprised no one died from drinking this lethal soup, but, on the other hand, there were plenty of other causes in that place that could send you home in a body bag.

I don’t know why, because it is totally unrelated, but this talk about liquor makes me hungry for the taste of raw eggs. When I was a child, our next-door neighbor on the right was a farmer named Birkenbach. Herr Birkenbach had been in the Nazi’s bad books, because in 1944 he had plowed his fields on May Day, a high Nazi holiday, on which no one was allowed to work and the faithful were expected to goose-step, wave the flag, sing patriotic songs and listen to some Nazi bigwig’s lies. Herr Birkenbach had to pay a hefty fine and he was marked as an enemy of the people. Only the fact that four of his sons were fighting in Russia saved him from being sent to a concentration camp. The Birkenbach’s was a sizeable dairy farm. Their youngest son, Richard, was a year older than I and we were best friends.

Richard taught me how to eat eggs raw. We’d sneak into their chicken coop, liberate a couple of eggs, pierce one end with a needle and suck out the innards. They didn’t taste as bad as it sounds, as long as they weren’t fertilized. To fool his mother, we scattered the broken shells outside the coop and tossed bits of fox or badger hair from my father’s hunting trophies about, so it looked like a fox or badger had had a go at the chickens.

My mother regularly bought fresh eggs and milk from them, that is, until Herr Birkenbach’s May Day problems. After that, they refused to sell to us and Richard was no longer allowed to play with me, because they thought my father had denounced them.

The reason they believed that is that we were not locals. And more importantly, we were Protestants, Lutherans to be exact, and everyone else was Catholic. The villagers thought of us as heretics. My friend Richard confided to me once that their priest had told them that Lutherans were apostates and beset by the devil and that we grew horns and had a forked penis. Richard didn’t believe the line about the horns. He’d obviously checked me out and found none, but insisted on seeing my penis to make sure it wasn’t forked.

Anyone who wasn’t from there was a foreigner and to be mistrusted. So it must have been the foreigners who denounced Herr Birkenbach. They told my mother that there was no more milk for her. This meant that for the last year of the war, we had to buy what passed for milk in the store with ration cards. I remember it well. It was thin and looked blue and tasted like shit.

It was January 1945, before someone in the local Nazi Party office, who saw the end nearing and wanted to cover his ass, told Herr Birkenbach who really had denounced him. My father accepted his apologies. My mother and I never talked to them again.

However, the Birkenbach’s chicken coop became a source of non-rationed food for us after the end of the war. For most people, 4:30 in the morning, that hour before dawn, is a time when the mind is far from its sharpest, when reflexes are slowest, the brain idles in neutral and when the world is at its bleakest. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been at my peak early in the morning. The hour before dawn is a very significant hour. People say that more folks die and more babies start the last stage of their journey into this world at that particular hour than at any other. It’s the witching hour. It’s the best time for an ambush, for a raid.

Most mornings, just before daybreak, I would sneak next door to the Birkenbach’s farm, into their hay barn, lift a loose board and squeeze into the adjacent chicken coop. The chickens, of course, would go berserk. You had to be quick, grab three or four eggs, strew some bits of carnivore hair about and get the hell out before one of the Birkenbachs, usually the missus, showed up to catch the thief. My father’s fox and badger pelts began to look pretty ratty. They never caught me. They did complain to my father about the foxes and badgers that regularly seemed to raid their chicken coop and asked him to shoot them. He told them that he was not allowed to carry a gun by order of the allied military government and couldn’t help them.

We ate eggs for breakfast and no one asked me to explain the origin of those eggs. My father had misgivings and I once overheard him talking to my mother about it and asking her where she got eggs almost every day, since he knew she was not on speaking terms with the Birkenbachs. My mother told him to enjoy his breakfast and not to worry, that God was providing.