musings from the edge of Saturna

Repo Man

2010-09-28T10:12:00.000-07:00

Later, on sober reflection, I couldn’t believe that I’d had the nerve to go through with it and keep a straight face in the aftermath. At the time, I didn’t really think about it. I just did it. I’m sure you can understand that young men – and I was young then - do things that a sane person would never consider, that seem improbable and sometimes downright dumb-ass. This incident could easily have ended up in the latter category, but that day my karma was good and all went well.

Let me back up a bit here. I received an excellent and very thorough education at the University of Southeast Asia back in the 60’s. In addition to the many distasteful things I majored in, I also picked up some very useful skills, like adding a little starch when laundering your shorts, because that made them look sharp and square during the endless inspections of your footlocker. Of course, wearing starched shorts was another, less pleasant, matter, particularly in hot and humid climates. In addition to being really uncomfortable, it also speeds the onset of jungle rut. On the upside, starch in your shorts discouraged crabs. They didn’t like it and stayed away. On the other hand, starched shorts do not stave off the clap, which always seemed to accompany the crabs. They had this symbiotic relationship, where if one was in attendance the other wasn’t far behind. Or maybe it was just the place or the company we were keeping. Anyway, this is a subject you don’t want to discuss with your mama. She just wouldn’t understand.

Another useful skill I came away with was the art of spit-shining your boots. For those unfamiliar with this technique, you need cotton balls, black shoe polish, elbow grease and ample gobs of spit. The end result should allow you to see the warts on your pecker reflected in the shine of your boots, as my old drill sergeant used to say. I know. Why would anyone want to see that? It seems sort of unhygienic and there certainly isn’t a need to know. It just was very important at the time.

As well and more to the point of this story, Uncle Sam taught me to fly an airplane. I took to that like my dog to otter scat. I couldn’t get enough of it. I loved it.

The next logical step, of course, was to acquire an airplane and in the 70’s when I lived in Miami, I could finally afford to own one, that is the bank and I could. I my case, it was a 1974 single-engine Piper Cherokee 180. It had about 3,300 TT on the airframe and 1,300 hours on its Lycoming engine SMOH. It cruised at 124 knots and had a range of 510 nautical miles, with a ceiling of 15,700 ft. What made it particularly attractive to me was the short ground roll on take-off (720ft) and landing (600ft) and the low stall speed. You could land and take off on a beach or a field without much of a problem. On the flat topography of Florida and the Bahamas this was a definite plus. I mean, the highest point in South Florida is a place called Shark Pass, elevation 3ft.

To help with the payments, I leased it back to the seller, a flight school at Tamiami General Aviation Airport, southwest of downtown Miami. During the week the flight school used the plane to train future pilots and on weekends I used it to fly all over Florida and the Keys, the Bahamas, the Yucatan or wherever. This arrangement seemed to work pretty well until sometime in late June of 1976. I should have known better than to trust someone else to look after my toy.

A friend of mine at the flight school called to tell me that the company was about to go belly-up and that they planned to declare my plane as part of their assets to satisfy the bank. He said, I’d better get my butt out there and repo my plane, before the bank took over, which was set to happen in the morning. Needless to say, I did just that. I waited ‘til dark, had one of my buddies drive me to Tamiami Airport, untied my plane and flew it out to Homestead General Airport, about a 15 minute flight south along Dixie Highway. Unlike in Canada, in the U.S. you were only required to file a flight plan if you planned to cross the Air Defense Identification Zone (A.D.I.Z.) line off shore, otherwise it was entirely voluntary. The next day I rented a hangar to keep my toy out of sight. No one tried to stop me. Nothing to it. The lesson I learned from this episode was to always and thoroughly do my due diligence.

The next weekend, on June 27- I remember the day, because it is my father’s birthday - late in the afternoon, I was flying back from Chubb Key, a small island south of the Berry chain in the Bahamas. I’d been scuba diving on a sunken DC6, a drug plane that had missed the runway and sank in 80 feet of water. I was about 20 miles off-shore cruising along at 9,500 feet, and had just passed the A.D.I.Z. line, my plane’s engine started to sound rough and after a few minutes suddenly started sputtering and then died on me. I thought that the engine had sounded a bit different from the start, but I had paid no attention to it. I tried to restart it, but no such luck. It was dead. The problem is that unlike with a car, you can’t pull over to the shoulder and fix the problem or call CAA. With a single-engine plane you only have one option – get it down on the ground as safely as possible.

I knew that at that altitude my glide path was about 25 miles, enough to reach land. I radioed Opalocka, the official general aviation Customs Port of Entry and told them that I had had an engine failure and had lost power and was forced to glide in for a landing. The tower said that they had me on radar and cleared me for runway 27 W. They advised that if I couldn’t make Opalocka, I should try Homestead AFB, which was located right next to the shore and much closer.

To be on the safe side, I switched to the military frequency and radioed Homestead AFB tower and informed them of my predicament and asked for permission to land. Permission was refused. It was restricted to military flights only. By that time I was getting pretty low and my choice was to crash land in the mangroves, put down in the water or land at Homestead. I called Homestead AFB tower again and told them I was coming in for a landing; that I had no choice other than to land in the drink. I turned the radio off and barely made it over the perimeter fence and put my plane down on the restricted runway.

By the time I got out of my plane, it was surrounded by several air policemen who told me that I was under arrest and my plane was impounded. They were all over it with their dog. I guess they were looking for drugs and other contraband. They found nothing but my dive gear. They pushed the plane to a parking area next to the end of their north-south runway, confiscated the keys and I was off to the base guard house, where they charged me with criminal trespass and locked me up. After a couple of hours, they allowed me to call my lawyer, who persuaded the APs to let me go, with my plane as bond until they figured out what to do about me. Before we left, I asked them for permission to bring my mechanic down to see what had caused the engine failure.

The next morning, I returned with my mechanic to take a look at the engine under the suspicious eyes of the APs. It didn’t take long to realize that one of the pistons had seized up. We removed it and it was pretty badly corroded. My mechanic told me that he couldn’t fix the problem there; that the engine needed to be in the shop for a major overhaul. On our way out of the base, he did let on that with any luck he could probably fix it that the plane could be flown for a limited distance on three cylinders.

It turned out later that the flight school had used regular gas, instead of aviation fuel. They did this to save a couple of dollars on gas and the plane wasn’t theirs, so who cared. The leaded gas had corroded one of the plane’s four pistons and caused the engine to seize. I would deal with them later. First I had to get my toy back.

I racked my brain for a solution to this dilemma. This was the U.S. Air Force. They had guns and very fast planes and helicopters. I also realized that this was still the military, which on the surface was the picture of efficiency and order, but I had been a member of that same military and I knew that under the surface the right hand often didn’t know what the left hand was doing. This was still the place of the big snafu – situation normal all f…ed up, or so I hoped. Then the answer came to me. The next weekend was the 4th of July and this was the country’s 200th birthday and the Air Force had planned a major celebration at Homestead, including an open house, a fly-by, a big parade, speeches by the brass and local politicians. I figured no one would pay attention to a couple of guys working on an airplane amid all the hubbub all over the base. Most importantly the Air Police would be busy being important at the gate and all the festivities. All eyes would be on the parade.

Long story short, my mechanic and I entered the base with the crowd of visitors and made our way to my plane with a spare set of keys. He did whatever it was that needed to be done to make the engine turn over, gave me the thumbs up and I hopped in and taxied down the taxiway, as if I was simply taking the plane to a new parking area. The engine sounded rough, but it generated power. No one tried to stop me. After about 1,000ft I turned the plane around, trimmed it to take-off configuration, put on full flaps and put the power lever to the wall.

I knew right away that the take-off roll would be quite a bit more than 720ft, but at that point I was committed and didn’t think about failure, only about topping the 8ft high fence at the end of the taxi way. Lift-off speed was 70 knots and it seemed to take forever to get there, but finally about 100ft short of the perimeter fence, the plane lifted and I jerked it over the fence. The engine was coughing and straining pretty hard, but I was able to slowly urge it up to about 100ft above the ground and headed for Homestead General, about 10 minutes north. Again, no one tried to stop me or raise any kind of alarm. Piece of cake.

I landed without a problem, taxied to my hangar, secured the plane, locked the door and went home. The next morning I drove back to the base and asked the APs if it was alright to go and work on my plane. They were ok with that, which meant that they had not noticed that the plane was missing. They even offered me a ride. When we got to the parking area, of course there was no plane. The APs had no idea where it might have disappeared to.

Back at the guard house, it turned out that they had not recorded the plane’s ID number and hadn’t removed the plane’s registration from the plane. As I said before – snafu still reigned. I went into overdrive and put on a pretty good show of anger, disbelief and blame over their incompetence, lack of security and procedure. I threatened lawsuits, negative publicity and damages. It was one of my better performances. My B.A. in Speech & Drama was paying off. They were at a loss as to what possibly could have happened to the aircraft under their very noses. The Officer of the Guard promised to start a search of the base right away and assured me that there would be disciplinary action over the negligent handling of this matter. I told them that my attorney would be in touch later and went home.

I called my lawyer and told him what had happened. He thought it was hilarious. He wanted to sue the Air Force for the value of the plane. We settled on getting the trespass charges dropped in return for our silence on the disappearance of my plane. We told them that my insurance would take care of the loss. The Air Force seemed relieved.

A Fish Story

2009-11-22T20:22:00.000-08:00

What if we switched blind people to brooms? Wouldn’t it make the world a much cleaner place? Don’t answer that. It was just a random thought that flashed across my mind, a sign of my German fascination with cleanliness. Or is it a sign of my advancing dementia? It has nothing to do with what I want to talk about. But the idea does seem to have some merit, doesn’t it?

What I really want to tell you about is a fishing trip this past summer off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Fishing seems to be a guy thing, even though my wife has the uncanny knack of reeling in fish after fish, when no one else has any luck at all. Anyway, a bunch of us, 12 in all, got on the ferry to Swartz Bay, convoyed up to Port Renfrew and chartered three fishing boats and off we went looking for salmon and halibut. Our motley group consisted of my friend John and his four sons and one prospective son-in-law, three geezers, including myself, from Old Point Farm, my son, who flew up from Los Angeles to hook a big one, my niece’s husband, Dave, who winged it over from Germany and my cousin Tim, who is not really my cousin and who jetted in from Toronto.

My nephew-in-law is an ex-pat Brit and retired Royal Artillery Sergeant Major. He happily lives in the land of the Hun, but suffers from an acute case of aviophobia and hadn’t been on an airplane in years. He is an avid North Sea cod fisherman. So the prospect of visiting with the colonials and hooking into some sizeable salmon persuaded him to overcome his dread of aviation and get on an airplane. Let me clarify, he does not dread flying as such. He just doesn’t want to be on the same airplane with some loony-tunes mid-eastern terrorist who has picked that particular plane to blow himself and everyone else to kingdom come. Dave has spent time in the military serving in places like Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Cyprus and the Middle East and he is not fond of crazies, especially not the Muslim kind, looking for frolicking virgins in paradise. In any case, it took some courage for him to fly.

It turned out, there were no terrorists on his overnight Berlin Air flight from Düsseldorf, only a group of drunken Austrians in the row behind him, who were off to a holiday in the Yukon. They spent the entire flight drinking and playing hearts, a card game that seems to demand that each trump be played with as forceful a thump as possible of the trays in front of them and, of course, attached to the back of Dave’s seat. They spent the night arguing at the top of their voices with each other and continuously played musical chairs, using Dave’s seatback to rigorously pull themselves up when switching seats. Sleep was impossible. As he tells it, those Austrians were pretty close to getting severely biffed by the time their plane landed in Vancouver. And if you had seen the size of Dave’s wrists, this would not have been an idle threat. But to his credit he restrained himself. It must be that proverbial British restraint. Stiff upper lip and all that. Or maybe it was the fear of being tackled by air marshals and being led off the plane in handcuffs for disturbing the peace.

Dave was fretting about his return flight, because besides the threat of unhinged jihadists, he was afraid those Austrians might be back on his flight as well and he might do damage to them. They were not, but by a stroke of bad luck, there was an unruly Austrian child seated behind him, who vigorously kicked Dave’s seatback for fun during entire flight back to the fatherland. I got to say that I admire Dave’s resistance to violence, because I probably would have lost it and smacked that kid upside the head. I don’t know what it is about Austrians, but ever since Adolf, I look askew at them, expecting them to break into patriotic song, throwing out a stiff-arm salute or claiming to be victims of their erstwhile landsman.

My cousin Tim and I are old hunting buddies from Toronto, going back to the early 80’s. Here is how we got to be cousins. He and I were both in the advertising business there. He still is. Every year in July about 10 or 12 guys from varying advertising and rep shops around Toronto got together for a boy’s weekend at Tonch South on Beausoleil Island in Georgian Bay. We’d motor up to Honey Harbour, rent a boat and towed one or two canoes behind us, loaded to the gunwales with beer – one of our group was the account manager for Labatt’s – and head out to our camping spot in Georgian Bay National Park for a weekend of drinking and carousing in the bush and doing stupid guy stuff.

We shared this spot with numerous Eastern Diamondback rattlesnakes, who considered our campsite their favorite hang-out. The solution to this potentially precarious dilemma was beer. It turned out the rattlers loved Labatt’s as much as we did. We shared our stash with them in the lid of one of our plastic containers. They left us alone as long as their supply was sufficient. I call that elegant solution a case of Canadian ingenuity.

Everyone in the group seemed to have cousins and uncles with cottages scattered around the area. They were always talking about visiting cousin so-and-so or stopping by uncle whatever to try some of his home-made cider or relieve him of his stash of whiskey. This was particularly true of one of our group, a loud-mouthed Lugan named Eugene, who seemed to have a horde of cousins with cottages nearby. It made me feel somewhat of an outsider, since I had no cousins within 5,000 miles of the place. That’s when the McEachren brothers, Tim and Steve, came to my rescue and took pity on me. They decided to adopt me as their honorary cousin. We sealed the adoption with a two-four of Labatt’s Blue. Ever since, I am Cousin Bernie and they Cousin Tim and Cousin Steve. We’ve been friends for close to 30 years.

Oh, yah, the fishing trip. It was great. Everyone maxed out on Halibut, Coho and Springs, except for our boat which was one short. Our captain was not very good at basic arithmetic. He couldn’t count to eight, which was the allowed limit for springs for our party of four fishermen. He insisted on heading back prematurely because he was sure we were over our limit, but when we got back to the dock, we discovered that we had only seven Chinook on board. We decided to spring for an abacus for our captain, if we couldn’t get rid of him next year.

The Coho were at the height of their run and we caught some substantial hatchery-raised ones, including one the captain estimated at 20 lbs. The rule off southern Vancouver Island is that only Coho reared in a hatchery can be kept, wild ones must be released. We released some very respectable wild ones. When I reeled in that 20 pounder I was sure no one else could have hooked into anything bigger, but the captain, in his infinite wisdom, decided to tie up to a floating dock which didn’t have any scales, instead of the main government dock where we could have weighed our fish. One of John’s sons claimed the prize with a weighed 17 ½ lb hatchery Coho.

On the second day the seas got pretty rough. 10 to 15 foot breakers pitched the boat this way and that, hitting each trough between swells with a whack that jarred your spine. And on top of that the salmon wouldn’t bite. Everybody pretty much held his own and didn’t get seasick. Then the captain decided he had to have a smoke and the fumes from his vile cigarettes did in Cousin Tim. A reformed smoker, Tim can’t stand the stench of tobacco. He turned green around the gills, when the captain’s cigarette smoke enveloped him, and hurled over the side of the boat, chumming the waters. And like a miracle the fish started hitting our bait. Of course, we invited Cousin Tim back on the spot for next year. When you’re fishing and you find something that works, you hang on to it

The highlight of our outing was John reeling in a beast of a 43 lb Tyee, which beat anything on the dock. In fact, it was the third largest Chinook caught this summer at Port Renfrew. He crowed about his monster catch all the way back to Saturna. Not that I can fault him, I would have done no less. We all had a great time, despite the weather and the doofus of a captain. Next year we will switch boats. In addition to the captain’s smoking habit and his lack of counting skills, he deprived us of bragging rights at the end of the day. That was unacceptable and was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Three strikes and you’re out.

A Half-Baked Story

2009-08-16T15:51:00.000-07:00

Somebody asks me, what I do with myself all day, I’ll say, I’m writing a book, sort of a memoir, an autobiography of the twists and turns my life has taken. I was looking for a name for this book and this is what I came up with: The Autobiography of a Half-Baked American. Now, you and I both know that I am not clever enough to come up with such a grand phrase for my work in progress. To put it as tactful as I can, I stole it from Aravind Adiga, the author of White Tiger, a book that’s an excellent read, by the way. I highly recommend it.

Before that I was toying with Non-Native Son as a title, but I dropped that, because it came across as a bit presumptuous. My opus really isn’t on the same plateau as Richard Wright’s disturbing story of a black man living in utter poverty in Chicago’s South Side in the 1930’s. Think about it: I’m neither black nor utterly poor nor have I ever lived in Chicago. How could I juxtapose my rather meek effort with the tragedy of Bigger Thomas’ life?

People have pointed out to me on occasion that I am not a real American, more an adopted one. I wasn’t born in America. My fellow countrymen, when I discussed this with them, would say, well, sure you are an American, but a naturalized one, which I guess, in their eyes makes me something less than a real citizen, a step below them, more a denizen of second class, of steerage, rather than the promenade deck reserved for native-born Americans. Such a small and insignificant word that “but”, yet it has the power to separate me from my betters.

In Canada, this dilemma doesn’t really exist. Here, if you believe what you read in the West Coast newspapers, the majority of citizens are immigrants, except for those who speak French or come from deepest Ontario or Newfoundland and the aboriginals, of course, but they have been pretty well marginalized. They don’t seem to count here. Citizens here usually identify themselves as hyphenated Canadians, as in French-Canadian or Irish-Canadian or Indo-Canadian or German-Canadian. There seem to be no real Canadians, so no second-class Canadians. That’s logical.

In the USA, even the constitution singles me out for special treatment. I am not eligible to be President. I couldn’t realize every American child’s dream to become the leader of the free world. Not that I ever had such a dream, but all the same. I’ve studied this document and I know that the founding fathers weren’t thinking about me or my man Arnold, when they put that restriction in there. They were trying to keep foreigners, meaning Brits, from sneaking in under the radar and retaking the country again. That makes sense to me. But the fact that I wasn’t born here, singles me out and puts me into a special category, one filled with people to keep an eye on, just in case. People not to be quite trusted for the big job. To be honest, I can live with that stigma.

In the States, when someone asks you: “Where are you from?” I can’t say, I’m from Gypsum, Kansas, Paducah, Kentucky, El Portal, Florida or Intercourse, Utah. I say, “I’m from deepest Bavaria” and they look at me as if I had just stepped off a UFO, because most Americans are not up on their geography and have no idea where deepest Bavaria might be. They only know it can’t be in the lower 48. Before I became a citizen, I was officially categorized as a resident alien. It can be difficult to lose that “alien” moniker. It cost me four years of service with Uncle Sam’s army.

In my mind, I always considered myself a real American. I served my country and did my duty here and in far away places without complaint. I swore an oath to protect the constitution, obey the orders of my commander in chief and keep my mouth shut about some of the more unsavory happenings I witnessed or was part of in Uncle Sam’s service. I pay my taxes without too much bitching. I’ve served on jury duty, voted in every election since 1964. I think I am a good citizen of my adopted country. I am comfortable with who I am.

Yet, I can pick up the vibe that there is something amiss. With most immigrants you can tell right away, because they haven’t mastered the idiosyncrasies and the flow and rhythm of American English. Their pronunciations and their unfamiliarity with the local idiom will give them away. When I arrived here, I decided to disappear into the melting pot and become indistinguishable from the natives. None of that multicultural crap for me. I’ve mastered that hurdle pretty well. When I talk to Canadians, they think I’m from Alberta. When I’m talking to Americans, they’ll regard me with a knowing look and say: “You’re from New Jersey, aren’t you. I can detect a definite Jersey accent buried there somewhere.” That’s funny, because I’ve only driven through Alberta maybe once or twice in my life and I only spent two days in New Jersey ever and I spoke not a word of English then. What’s even funnier is that when I go back to deepest Bavaria and speak what I believe is my mother tongue, the locals there think I’m a foreigner, pretending to be one of them and no amount of persuasion will change their mind.

This makes me a man without roots and that’s not a good thing. Without roots, you have to cast about for other anchors, otherwise you drift and eventually you will sink and perish. It is very important for one’s sanity to belong someplace, to be part of a group, to be from such and such a place. I pulled up my roots when I stepped on that boat 50 years ago and headed for points unfamiliar. Well, Hoboken isn't all that odd. I mean it’s Frank Sinatra’s home town. But it is not mine. Of course, when you’re young, you don’t think about things like that. You are looking forward to the adventure ahead, particularly, if you are coming from a place where you didn’t fit in to begin with, as it was the case with me.

I was a reject who wouldn’t conform to the expected norms in Germany. I asked too many questions, wasn’t satisfied with the answers, pointed out shortcomings and failures and was told by my teachers, that if I continued to rock the boat, my future there would be questionable at best. I drew the consequences and headed for the Promised Land, never once thinking about lost roots. I still think that decision made all those years ago was a good one. I did not feel like a steerage citizen in the military, at university, in business. I was engaged. I excelled. People patted me on the back and told me that I had the "stuff", whatever that means. What’s more, I took my experience in deepest Bavaria to heart and stopped rocking the boat. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have, but I was driven to get ahead. I didn’t take the time to ask questions. I was too busy chasing after success.

The problem with the roots only surfaced once I retired and had time on my hands to reflect about who I was, where I had been and what I had done. My mother used to say: “Busy hands keep the devil at bay.” She was right. I have too much time on my hands on this island on the edge of the world. I’ve been tempted to reach for the vodka bottle, but I think I can resist that siren’s call. Maybe I’ll go and chop some wood or entice a feral goat to slip over the edge of the cliff in front of my house. The eagles and the ravens need to eat too. Or I’ll get back to my desktop and continue writing my half-baked yarn. It’s a great exercise for my diminishing grey cells.

An Unprovoked Attack

2009-07-07T14:58:00.000-07:00

You’d think it’d be a fair assumption that you learn to do some things over a lifetime of coping with the surprises the gods spring on you, like walking in a straight line and looking cool, so you don’t stumble or slip and break your bones, like drinking liquor without making a total fool of yourself and falling off your chair in front of all and sundry or like eating in moderation, so that you don’t embarrass your kids by belching or passing wind at the table, particularly if guests are present. I just turned 70 last month and I must say that for the most part that is so, but then come the relapses that remind you that you are far from perfect.

Case in point, the other morning, still wrapped in a corner of the blanket of my uneasy dreams, I got up and stumbled into the bathroom to do my morning ablutions. I should have known something was amiss, when I couldn’t find my glasses, which I usually leave on the night table next to my bed. I must have put them down somewhere else the night before. You don’t know how handy your specs can be in target acquisition, until they go AWOL. As I concentrated on improving my aim, I happened to glance into the mirror and I was shocked by what my diminished vision dished up. What the hell had happened to me? My face was a mess of scratches and clotted blood. My arms were covered with abrasions and cuts and blood. I looked like I had been in a cat fight and come out on the short end of the stick. As consciousness fought for the upper hand, I realized that my body ached all over as well, particularly my new hip and my legs. I was a sorry sight to behold.

It took me a while to get my bearings and then my memory slowly faded into focus. I had been at my neighbor’s for a friendly game of Texas Hold’em poker. There were six of us and we’d smoked some fine Cohibas, consumed a great steak dinner, drank a fair amount of good French wine from my neighbor’s well stocked wine cellar and pretty much solved the world’s problems among us. A good time was had by all. Everything was as well as could be at that point. Around 11, I decided it was time to go home and that’s when things began to come unstuck.

I, of course, refused the offered ride home. After all, a man’s a man and assistance is for the weak, besides I was in total control of all my senses. All I had to do was walk up my neighbor’s driveway, turn left and walk down my driveway. Piece of cake. It was pretty dark out and, of course, I didn’t bring a flashlight. That would have been unmanly, effete even. I could see the edge of the woods on either side of the path quite well and I picked up my pace, thinking about getting home and into bed. I was happy.

And just at that moment, without any warning and totally unprovoked, the trees decided to launch their attack. I should have known. I’d been in such situations before, but I didn’t count on trees being so deceitful. In retrospect, I guess they were exacting retribution for my chain sawing some of them in the past. And they did not give a hoot about the rules of war or the Geneva Convention. You think trees are harmless. They have a certain presence, magnificence even. They are stately and imposing, but you don’t think of them as malevolent, blood thirsty, conniving or evil. Here’s a news flash for you, trees can be a nasty piece of work. Their first move was to hit me in the face and snatch my glasses. Momentarily blinded, I countered by grabbing the closest one in a bear hug and squeezing. But trees can be uncanny. They somehow managed to get my legs entangled in the underbrush and the next thing I know I’m down flat on my face. Now, I’m not a quitter, so I staggered to my feet and as I was trying to get my balance back and go on the attack, one of them lays down behind me and causes me to do a backward salto mortale, to use the old circus parlance of my youth, and I land sprawled on my butt with my legs up in the air.

Now I am mad, but my old platoon sergeant’s reminder about keeping your butt below the horizon blinked on in my mind and I figured it would be best to stay on my hands and knees. By this time the trees have managed to lay down a solid smoke screen and I had no idea where I was. They closed in from all sides as I’m crawling around in circles. I tell you it was not a fair fight, but being German, I don’t believe in surrender. I flailed away at my assailants, but they seemed to be getting the better of me. The salal undergrowth is now joining the fray. I ended up draped over an old Douglas fir stump trying to get my bearings and get away from my crazed attackers. I sensed more than saw a lighter area in front of me and I headed towards it. I figured it’s my driveway. In my eagerness to escape, I stood up. Bad mistake, because the moment I think I have my two feet under me and start to move forward, something smacks me in the head and I went down cold.

It took a while to get the cobwebs out of the way and it wasn't until some 30 minutes later that I finally crawled out of the salal onto my driveway. I swear I will be back with my chainsaw to take revenge for this cowardly attack. The seizure of my specs will not go unpunished. And, on reflection and to hell with the perception of effeteness, the next time I enter the trees’ territory I will have a flashlight. I might even get one of those nerdy strap-on head lamps and there will be a pocket saw in my arsenal. This was the last ambush I’ll stumble into unprotected. Live and learn. Or is it learn and live?

Gluttony and the Good Life during the Time of the Apocalypse

2009-06-12T23:20:00.000-07:00

You’re asking, what is this guy talking about - the apocalypse? I’m referring to the five years between 1943 and 1948, a time of total war and total defeat, when the four horsemen – conquest, war, famine and death – reigned supreme where I lived. And yes there was gluttony, even then. Excess is not a phenomenon of good times and abundance only, as you might think when you watch North-American TV these days. It’s not dependent on the circumstances of the day. Gluttons exist even in Spartan times, amid chaos, death and famine.

Voracity doesn’t require fancy gourmet foods, fine china or expensive wines. In fact, the first thing many Germans did after 1948, once they could get their hands on some real money again, was to gorge on food, because they’d gone without for such a long time. Stoutness and consumption of large quantities of food became a sign of status, of middle class well being. I know I mentioned this before, but the world record in dumpling eating my brother holds (42), stems from this period in German history. This was the age before diets, fitness and the whole health craze. I have been known to revel in the odd bit of overindulgence at times, but I wouldn’t consider myself a gourmand. Of course, some people, who had the means to stuff themselves when everyone else was starving, took the ideal of plumpness to the extreme. Let me introduce you to my late godfather, my uncle, Franz.

My uncle, Franz, was married to my mother’s sister, Anna. I take my middle name from him. He worked at SKF (Schwedische Kugellager Fabrik), one of Schweinfurt’s three ball-bearing plants, during the war. These factories ensured that the city was flattened by allied bombs. The heavy air raids between August 1943 and March 1945 – there were a total of seven major ones, with a combined total of 1,113 B-17 bombers -, remarkably, never caused a fatal disruption of the ball-bearing war production. It was simply moved underground. The factories were hit numerous times, but the damage was soon repaired and production continued until the end of the war. Ditto for the railroad switching yards. The city’s two stations were wrecked, but the tracks were quickly restored and service resumed.

SKF was a Swedish company, owned by the Wallenberg family. You may have heard of Raoul Wallenberg. He was a Swedish diplomat who in the last year of the war saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from being shipped to the gas chambers. He was arrested by the Soviets after the fall of Budapest and disappeared into the Gulag, never to be heard from again.

My uncle thought that he was safe from the bombing raids. The Swedes, after all, were neutral. He was a bookkeeper. But during the first major daylight raid on Schweinfurt on August 17, 1943, when 230 American B-17s dumped their bomb-load on the city, including 80 high-explosive direct hits on the city’s ball-bearing plants, he’d been buried in the rubble for two days before he’d been dug out. He’d spent over a month in the hospital. His left hip had been smashed by a chunk of concrete. He now walked with the help of a cane and with a pronounced limp. Hip replacement surgery was not on the agenda in those days of total war and the immediate years after it.

He hated Americans with a passion for the rest of his life. He blamed them for ending his soccer career. It was an imaginary career. He was too fat to play anymore, but he did enjoy going to soccer games and cheering on the local side, so much so that he usually wore out the toes of his shoes from relentlessly kicking the seats in front of him with every attack of his team. His cane and his lame leg now made that difficult. He was a fierce fan and went to every home game of the local team, FC 05 Schweinfurt. He needed a scapegoat for his shortcomings. The Americans were it.

To compensate for his inability to move around unimpeded, he became a great gourmand. He would eat at all hours of the day and night. His favorite respite was rye bread slathered thick with goose fat, seasoned with pepper and hot Hungarian paprika. And he swore by the curative values of green beans and gherkins. He devoured them in large quantities. Maybe his corpulence was predestined, what with a last name of Rahm, which means cream in German. It was a good thing that he and his wife owned a corner grocery store; otherwise his gluttony wouldn’t have been possible.

Food, of course, was strictly rationed during and after the war. My uncle, though, had access to extra coupons, acquired during his daily trips to various suppliers and farmers around the city and the surrounding countryside. I can still see him get into his grey three-wheeler truck. I believe it was called a Tempo, but I’m not sure anymore. What I remember is that I always thought that the truck would tip over onto its side when he heaved his bulk behind the wheel. This truck had one wheel in the front and two in the back. You’d see them everywhere in the years after the war, when gasoline was scarce.

I remember sitting in his living room behind the store and watching him gorge himself, while everybody was pasting ration coupons into coupon books, a nightly chore in those days. He’d jam a bib into the neck of his shirt. It acted like a table supported by his huge gut and held his rations. He had this special little saying he cited in his low-Frankish dialect, while he was stuffing his face. It went “Kloess un Faserli mache de besten Toenli.” A rough translation – “dumplings and beans generate the best tunes.” The beans, gherkins and rye bread, washed down by copious amounts of beer, were a lethal combination which triggered a volatile mixture of foul-smelling gas. He broke wind in tumultuous explosions that rolled like thunder and rocked you back into your chair, but nobody was allowed to comment or applaud, for that matter. His putrid eruptions were ignored. We couldn’t even laugh. My aunt never paused in whatever she was doing, just kept on licking and pasting as if nothing had happened.

My uncle had a very low opinion of me and told me on numerous occasions that I would end up a criminal and would end my days in prison. The reason he felt that way was that I regularly raided the cigarette supply in his store, when I stayed with them for a year after the war to attend high school in the city. He never caught me in the act, but I used to smoke in the upstairs washroom, standing on the commode with the window open and left the butts on the outside sill of the window high up on the wall, never thinking that my aunt would clean outside the window, – she’d have to stand on the toilet to reach it - but she did and, of course, found the evidence. Why I didn’t simply flush them, I don’t remember, but I must have had a good reason to come up with such a stupid solution.

My uncle took care of himself. He lived to the age of 67, when he finally took his clogged arteries to that All-U-Can-Eat buffet in the sky. My aunt, who was equally huge, outlived him by 30 years. She died at age 98.

A Pilgrimage to St. Gangolf's Shrine

2009-05-16T11:46:00.000-07:00

Maybe my dislike for guys in long skirts is genetic. My mother sure had little use for men of the cloth. She thought of them as seducers of the gullible. Perhaps that had more to do with the fact that my brother is a Lutheran minister and she was very disappointed in him. Be that as it may, my own distaste for cassocked priests, howling monks, chanting Krishnas, whirling dervishes or grim mullahs of whatever persuasion can be traced back to my early school days in Germany. In grammar school, it was always the Lutheran minister who was quick to smack you on the head with the ruler or to whack the back of your hand with it, if your recital of the 23rd Psalm or of excerpts from Dr. Melanchthon’s catechism were not up to par or if your hymn singing was off key. Those smacks really hurt.

Ours was not a madrassah, but the Taliban would have felt right at home as far as the discipline was concerned. I learned early to stay out of their reach. I lived in the Rhoen Mountains on the eastern edge of the state of Hessen in Germany near Fulda and close to the erstwhile Iron Curtain. This was a very Catholic region, once ruled by the prince bishop of Fulda. We were one of the very few Lutheran families in the area. It was the home of St. Boniface, the patron saint of Fulda. St. Boniface was an English monk from Exeter named Wynfrid, who had come to convert the heathen Germanic tribes to Christianity some twelve hundred and fifty years ago. He was the one who anointed Pepin the Short as king of the Franks in 751, confirming the union of the church with the monarchy and apparently making it acceptable that being a midget was no barrier to becoming king. On a mission to Friesland on the coast of the North Sea, the Friesians whacked him for his efforts in 754. He is buried in the Benedictine abbey in Fulda.

The people in this area were very devout Catholics and on Sundays I used to sneak into their church to watch the show. I was intrigued by the seductive show the priest put on, the aroma of the smoke wafting about, the spritzing of the holy water, the Latin liturgy. But I had to be careful, because if the priest spotted me, he’d have me turfed out, because I was a heretic in his eyes and not allowed inside the church. In retrospect, that probably was a good thing. I might have gotten hooked by their spiel.

The highlight of the religious calendar in that region was May 11th, the name day of St. Gangolf, the patron saint of tanners, cobblers, children and horses. Every year on that day, the locals made a pilgrimage to a small chapel, built in 1493 and dedicated to this saint on the top of the Milseburg, an extinct volcano which rose behind my house. I used to watch the procession, led by their priest in flowing white robes, followed by altar boys, also in white robes, carrying crosses, buckets of holy water and strange smelling smoking pots, which they swung back and forth, praying and singing, make their way past our house and up the steep path to the top of the mountain to the St. Gangolf chapel. He had been an 8th century Burgundian knight and owner of an abbey in the employ of Pepin. He was murdered by his wife’s lover, a priest. His relics are kept in a church in the Franconian city of Bamberg. Some of the real fervent pilgrims did the ascent on their knees. That must have really hurt because the path was steep and rough and strewn with rocks. They didn't believe in knee pads.

This pilgrimage up the mountain was a fine show and I would have loved to join them, but my friend Richard, one of the altar boys, told me that was impossible, because I was a heretic. He wasn’t too sure what that meant, but he was certain I was one, because his priest had told him I was a Lutheran and thus condemned to purgatory. Not to be totally left out, I used to stalk the procession from the bushes on either side of the path, making my way up the mountain parallel to the line of believers on my secret hunting trails, cursing my misfortune of being a pagan. I would lay in wait in some thicket and pepper the priest with my pea-shooter. I hated that curate for making me a heathen and not letting me be part of the show.

I was a pretty good shot and didn’t miss often. To make it count, I aimed for the back of his head and neck, which soon looked like he had come down with a case of German measles. The priest had no idea who was tormenting him. The altar boys, who marched right behind him, started sniggering and laughing, when they saw what was happening. The priest was fuming and glanced around to try to spot the miscreant who was harassing him, but couldn’t really do anything because he was leading the procession and the prayers. He endured. Maybe he identified with St. Boniface and his martyrdom at the hands of those pagan Friesians.

When the procession got to the top of the mountain, everyone tried to crowd in behind the priest and the altar boys into the little church, which stood beneath three massive stone crosses on the summit of the mountain. But it held no more than maybe 25 people and most of the crowd had to stand outside and try to listen to what the priest had to say. There were no loudspeakers, so it was hard to hear what went on inside. Soon the men started to drift off towards a stone hut a few feet lower down the mountain, a pub and way station for mountain climbers and hikers. They served food and liquor there. Beer and schnapps flowed. The smell of sausages and sauerkraut wafted across the mountaintop and I felt even lonelier and excluded. To be seen in the pub was out of the question. Everyone would soon figure out who had tormented their priest on the way up.

By the time the service was over, most of the men and older boys were fairly drunk. The priest joined them for beer and sausages. He could hold his own when it came to booze. Quite soon, though, the more pious women insisted that they started back down the mountain. The descent was not an orderly procession like the ascent. The men stumbled and fell and it was a miracle no one tumbled down the steep ravines and crevasses next to the path and killed himself. That had never happened, as far as I know. Some of the villagers did sport bandages and limped pretty badly the next day.

I paralleled their descent in the bushes above their path and I wished that I could have been a part of their show, particularly the beer and sausage part. The priest, who was feeling no pain after his stop at the pub, nevertheless was nervous and kept looking around for his erstwhile tormentor. I would have loved to make his day for him, but I was out of peas. He should have paid more attention to where he was going, because he slipped and crashed down into the rubble and boulders below the path. The men scrambled down after him and dragged him back up to the path. He looked pretty banged up and his robes were ripped, but he was able to walk. He was yelling and gesticulating wildly, cussing and swearing that he would soon find the devil responsible for his misery and he set off into the bushes to look for the culprit. I high-tailed it out of there and made my way home.

My friend Richard told me the next day that their pilgrimage had kind of disintegrated into a scramble through the bushes, with the priest leading the way and invoking the assistance of St. Gangolf to help catch the devil who had caused him to crash down the ravine. My friend thought that it was the liquor not the devil that was at fault. I didn’t enlighten him.

A Year to Remember

2009-03-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

No, I’m not talking about a great year for Cahors wines or a memorable vintage from the local vineyard. I’m referring to the fact that the year 2009 holds some significance for me. It marks the anniversaries of three important way stations in my life and the reasons for some major partying to come. Let me explain.

First and most surprising of all from my vantage point, I turn 70 years old in June of this year. I’m joining the ranks of the geezers. Sorry, Ian, no offense. Who’d‘ve thought it possible? In my book, that’s a pretty good achievement for a guy who was told by a gypsy fortuneteller that he would not see 30 and as a callow youth was pretty much a wastrel and did things of which his Mama vehemently disapproved. I know I have been looking over my shoulder for the past 40 years to see if anyone was gaining on me, to paraphrase Satchel Paige. My friends thought I was paranoid, but I think my caution kept me alive. I guess the moral of this story is, don’t buy into the spiel of people who claim to know what’s in store for you down the road. You will live longer.

Secondly, this September marks the 50th anniversary of my arrival on the shores of the great state of New Jersey and my introduction to the nasty business of war. I was, of course, familiar with war, having lived through one as a child. But I was a passive participant then, trying to duck the bullets and bombs raining down from the sky. What I’m talking about here, is becoming an active contributor to death and mayhem. I’m not going to get into that now. One: because you cannot personalize war, if you want to stay sane and two: because I put that episode of my life into deep freeze and out of my consciousness. As “they” say, it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.

Had I known then that New Jersey is more or less the armpit of America and not a beacon of Yankee ingenuity, I probably wouldn’t have been so excited about stepping on the docks of Hoboken, the North American port of entry for the German Hapag-Lloyd shipping line. Other than being the birthplace of Frank Sinatra and Willem de Kooning, there seems not much else that speaks for this city and evokes fond memories. No, I take that back, Hoboken is also the city were the zipper was invented, in case that little tidbit slipped your mind. But to give the place its due, I only stayed for a couple of hours. In any case, it was an inauspicious beginning to my life in the land of the free.

I thought I’d share with you how it was that I ended up in what’s known as “the city with a bar on every corner” and on the same day entered the employ of Uncle Sam.

When I was a teenager, all I ever wanted was to come to America, the land of plenty. My father despaired of me, my teachers shook their heads in disappointment, but I didn’t care. I wanted to live in what I perceived as paradise, the land of rock ‘n’ roll, jazz and white bread. I had no idea how to make this happen, but when you’re young, you don’t worry about details. You simply dream and hope for the best, if you can think that far ahead.

I had known an American Army officer who had come to my father’s house in Germany to hunt ever since shortly after the end of the war. His name was Robert Lofton. He spoke German very well and I often guided him on his hunts over the years. By the time I told him about my dream to go to America, he was a colonel and he worked in military intelligence. I know you think that that is an oxymoron and my experience since then tends to support that argument, but this guy was alright and what’s more, he was a man of his word, more or less.

This colonel explained to me that to be allowed to immigrate to the U.S., you needed a sponsor, a person or organization that would be responsible for you in case you became a burden to the state. He also told me that if I was serious about going to America, he would see to it that I would have a sponsor. He said the US Army would be glad to have me. In return for greasing my path, all I had to do is give them a minimum of four years of my life and, hopefully, more. He was sure that with my background, I would fit in without a problem. The fact that I could not speak English didn’t bother him. “The Army wants your body,” he said. “They’ll make you understand what they want.” He turned out to be right.

I didn’t realize that this four-year commitment was a bit of a trick proposal, because the official enlistment term in the US Army is for three years; so four years meant a minimum of two tours or six years. You couldn’t re-enlist for just one year. I was able to overcome that dilemma eventually, but it cost me dearly. I’ll deal with that in a later installment of this saga.

Back to my friend, the colonel. The next weekend, the colonel invited me to the officers’ mess at Ledward Barracks in Schweinfurt for dinner. This was the headquarters of the 3rd Infantry Division. When I showed up, he introduced me to a group of four Americans, all in civilian clothes, all very polite. Everyone spoke German. We talked about hunting and hunting customs here and in the U.S., my family background, political leanings, had a nice dinner, drank whiskey. The colonel talked about his long friendship with my father. He sang my praises as a hunter and stalker and related how I’d hidden his downed bucks in the early days and made him look like a fool. Everyone laughed. Good joke. I was sure that I was being appraised, assessed, graded. At the end of the evening, the colonel drove me home and told me that I was on my way, that he had major plans for me. I said nothing. I had the feeling that I’d just passed some kind of test.

A week later, he introduced me to a young Specialist 4th Class, a chaplain’s assistant, who proposed to sponsor me for immigration to the U.S. This soldier’s name was Peter Barnaby and he was from somewhere in Ohio. He spoke German well, but seemed to be very nervous. He assured me that he’d be very happy to take care of all the red tape to get things moving along. I asked him why he would do such a thing, particularly, since he didn’t know me, had, in fact, never met me before. “Don’t worry about that, son,” the colonel interjected, “I’ll explain everything to you in due time. Leave the details to me.” I never saw the kid again, but my immigration papers arrived from the American embassy in Frankfurt a month later.

The colonel later told me that the Specialist was in love with and wanted to marry a German girl from Schweinfurt. The problem was that her father had been a high profile Nazi official, a Kreisleiter – county leader – in Schweinfurt, who had been jailed as a war criminal by the Americans after the war. The Army frowned on their relationship and refused them permission to marry. The colonel arranged for that permission to materialize, in return for the soldier’s agreement to sponsor me.

My aunt knew the family of that girl well. Their name was Hoffmann. They lived only a couple of blocks from my aunt’s house and had been shopping at her corner grocery store since the end of the war. “During the Nazi time, those people were too grand for us,” my aunt told me. “They lived in a huge villa on Adolf-Hitler-Strasse, which they had confiscated from a Jew. They were much too important then to shop in my little store. They were living the high life then. Nothing but the best for Frau Hoffmann,” she said. “But after the war, the Amis kicked them out of their mansion and turned it into some kind of a club.” My aunt didn’t like the Hoffmanns. It’s funny how things in life sometimes work out. The Hoffman’s daughter became my ticket to America.

I was excited when I stepped off the MS “Berlin” in the early morning hours of a fine September day in 1959. Here I was in the land of my dreams. I didn’t know what to expect and, to be honest, I didn’t care. I thought I could smell the adventures that lay ahead, but what I probably inhaled were the rank odors of the polluted waters of the Hudson River, an environment totally alien to me. Until I boarded my ship seven days earlier, the closest I’d been to the ocean was the equivalent of an eight-hour train ride away.

After I’d cleared customs, I was met by a Lt. Connor, who was expecting me and who spoke fairly flawless German. He drove me to the U.S. Army Recruiting Station in Trenton, where he told me that the Army did things by the book and that I had to pass an aptitude test, to see if I was mentally fit to join the military. He explained that this was a necessary step for anyone wanting to join. We went into his office and he administered the US Army Aptitude Test. This test was designed to weed out the undesirables and retards. It was a multiple-choice test, consisting of two parts, basic math and mechanical questions, followed by essay and language skills questions. I had no problem with the first part, but had absolutely no clue about the second. Of course, I flunked the test. The lieutenant knew that I couldn’t speak English and would fail the test. He explained to me that he had to follow the rules and then he gave me a sheet with the correct answers, told me to memorize them and handed me a Greyhound bus ticket to Morrisville, a small town a few miles down US 1, just across the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. He explained that the Army Recruiting Sergeant in Morrisville would expect me later that afternoon and would give me the test again. Everything would be alright.

True enough, when I presented myself in Morrisville, I was handed the very same test I’d flunked earlier. Only this time I aced it. Along with a dozen other volunteers, I took the oath to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States of America or rather, I mumbled along because I had no idea what was going on, was given a folder that contained my file and train tickets to Columbus, Georgia, and Ft. Benning to start my basic infantry training. No one seemed to care that I was not a citizen, didn’t have a clue what the oath I had just taken was all about and, in fact, couldn’t understand a word that was said to me. I wonder if in this case ignorance was bliss. Well, it was too late for second thoughts. As far as the Army was concerned a fresh body was a fresh body, everything else was a detail.

All this happened on the day I stepped off the boat, my big day. So here I am 50 years later and I have to tell you, I don’t regret any of it. I did ok here. It turned out that Americans, and Canadians for that matter, are pretty good people. What impressed me most was that no one wanted to see my papers qualifying me for a particular job. And, of course, I didn’t have any. All they wanted to see was if I could do the job, the rest, which in Europe is the most important, was but a detail here, a bagatelle. True, your father’s name is equally important here as it was in the old country. How else did George W. get into Yale? But unlike in Europe, here there are alternatives, if your old man doesn’t have enough clout. I was able to immerse myself in the melting pot and prosper. The thing about dreams is that one: they are free, two: no one can take them away from you, so you might as well dream big, and three: if you single-mindedly apply yourself to the task at hand, with a little luck, dreams can and will become reality.

This brings me to the final important marker for 2009. This August, my wife and I will have been married to each other for 30 years. You’re right, I should have put this event at the top of my list, but apparently I’m a glutton for punishment. So, here’s my problem. On the day of my 30th wedding anniversary I’m booked to go fishing for salmon off the west coast of Vancouver Island with my son and a group of my friends. There’s going to be 12 guys on three boats trying to hook a big one. The conversation will be about fishing and guy stuff, not wedded bliss. I know I’m in the dog house, but I’m thinking perhaps there is a way to at least salvage a tie. I haven’t come up with a plan yet. Maybe I could try the advice one of my neighbors here gave me, who explained that any problem can be made to go away by whipping out your checkbook. I don’t know. Somehow I have the feeling this would not work here, given the circumstances.

Of course, the obvious solution would be to cancel the fishing adventure, but that would signify a total lack of subtlety on my part. Exit strategies used to be my strong point in an earlier life, but I seem to be stumped. I guess my mind is not as agile as it used to be. Help me out here. If you have any brilliant ideas, share them with me, otherwise the outlook for calm waters come August may be dim.

Nut Bars and Loony Tunes

2009-02-24T16:07:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wondered what it is about end-of-the-road spots, that they seem to attract a disproportionate share of the lunatic fringe? I’m talking about places like Key West or Provincetown or deepest Idaho, communities where the road ends, where you have to stop and can’t run any farther and where your warped imagination can take root and find like-minded adherents. They seem to be full of folks who are convinced the end of the world is near. They draw conspiracy buffs of every hue; people who see the big bad wolf of some government or another behind every negative headline. People who hear voices, who refuse to go to the dentist for fear they will end up with a radio receiver in their choppers, who are convinced that their telephone is bugged by the CIA; men, as well as women, I suppose, who live totally off the grid, because they are afraid the agents of darkness are lurking everywhere and are ready to pounce on them, if they raise their heads above the horizon. Some act as if they are in the Witness Protection Program. They see enemies behind every telephone pole. Mum’s the word with them.

I live in such a place. This is an island in the Georgia Straits, about a 20-minute seaplane ride or a two-hour ferry trip southwest of Vancouver in British Columbia. It’s a beautiful, small and unspoiled island, about 38 square miles in size. Half of it is part of the Gulf Islands National Park. Some 350 permanent residents call it home, give or take a few. This total goes up substantially in the summer due to cottagers and visitors, who come to enjoy the natural beauty of the place. The island is called Saturna.

Among the people who live here are quite a few Americans, like myself, and ex-Americans, mainly people who fled the Vietnam-era draft and found this remote island welcoming. Most settled to earn a living as tradesmen and blended into the local society. Some of them came wrapped in the security blanket of a trust fund and didn’t have to work too hard to make a living here. Some are outright fruitcakes. I should be familiar with this set-up, since I spent a lot of time in Key West and observed that scene up close or maybe I am the fruit cake and they are the real deal. Who knows?

It’s tough to stay sane on this island. The nut bars and loony tunes have taken hold here. To give you an example, there are some who are convinced that many influential Jews in Germany were high-ranking members of the SS and in cahoots with Hitler. According to their theory, it was the Zionists on both sides who pulled the strings and who pushed the war for their own profit, that Hitler was but a puppet.

There are quite a few islanders who believe that the CIA, together with the Mossad, was behind the 9/11 attack, that it was done to justify the war on terror to benefit the military-industrial complex, whatever that is. Some of them believe that their enemies, whoever they are, are all around them and spying on them. They have pretty much isolated themselves from the rest of the community. Perhaps they enjoy living outside society. They did it once, why not twice.

There are some on this island, who believe that the world will come to a cataclysmic end
around December 21, 2012, when the Mayan Long Count Calendar comes to a close. They are preparing for Armageddon. I’m planning a big party that day, an end-of-the-world bash. Bring your own poison.

I haven’t run across any religious nuts here yet, but maybe they are just keeping a low profile. I wouldn’t be at all surprised, though, if they were getting the Kool-Aid ready.

When you’re talking to some people here, it’s important that you know whether they are on their meds and in control of themselves or whether they are hallucinating. The political views of many of them teeter on the extreme left wing of the spectrum. Many of them seem very unhappy folks, who feel the need to change the world to conform to their view on things.

You might say that this is not all that different from where you live. The difference is that if you live in the city, the few knobs here and there disappear in the crowd. They are not in your face day after day with their paranoia, as they are here in this small community.

On top of that, this island is divided pretty much down the middle into two mutually exclusive groups, the “us” and “them” camps. Depending on which side you are on, the “us” faction are the good guys and the “them” bloc are the devil incarnate. They avoid social contact with each other, don’t go to the others’ functions and don’t talk to each other, unless absolutely necessary. Both camps are the source of wild rumors, whispers and innuendos about each other.

On one side of this imaginary fault line are many of those who settled here in the 1970s, mainly Americans on the run from the draft. Many of them are against change, because any change will disrupt paradise as they define it. They have forgotten that their arrival on this island caused major disruption. They consider those who settled here after them as interlopers and fat cats, who’re trying to ruin paradise. Most of the unhinged fall into this category.

On the other side of the chasm are many whose families have lived here since the 1940s and 50s and those who came here in the last 15 to 20 years. Some of the former are major landowners here, whose parents came and worked the land, made it habitable and who eked out a living from farming and logging. Some of the latter are well-off retirees, who’ve built themselves summer homes along the rugged shores of this island. Because they don’t reside here year-around, they are often referred to as tourists, in other words people who don’t contribute anything substantial to life on this island, just pollute the place and cause congestion on the island’s few roads and strain scarce facilities. Others are perceived as the filthy rich or as one woman here put it, “the fascists on the hill.”

I don’t know where she got that idea, but I have not met any fascists on this island, ok, maybe one, and I would know one if I saw one. I grew up among them. I also don’t know what filthy rich is anymore. Most of the seemingly really well-off I knew in my previous life were mortgaged to the hilt and beyond. Their life resembled a Potemkin village, a fake façade that any hiccup in the economy could knock over. So who are these “rich” people on this island? They are mostly people who have worked very hard all their lives and have retired here to enjoy some of the fruits of their labors.

At least in places like Key West, the unstable fringe provides the color. Every evening at sunset on Mallory Square, there are guys with iguanas draped around their necks, fire eaters, wire acts, fortune tellers, vendors of exotic cookies and herbs, jugglers, bare-chested couples chained together by their nipples or noses, acrobats and raving madmen who preach about fire and brimstone. In other words, they are the entertainment that keeps the tourists coming, when the brilliant sunsets get monotonous. Not so on Saturna. Here the crazed are anything but entertaining. In fact, they are tedious as hell. They are suspicious of their own shadow and their paranoia only lets them open up among the like-minded and behind closed doors. They are no fun at all.

I’m looking for inspiration to get the nutters to contribute to the entertainment, to create a buzz about Saturna. Any ideas?

Humor In The Good Old Days

2009-02-07T17:21:00.000-08:00

I came across a photograph of my grandfather the other day. It was one of those sepia prints and it shows him sitting in a straight-backed chair, sporting a white moustache and a van Dyke. He doesn’t smile and he looks like a man with whom one wouldn’t want to trifle. I never knew my father’s father. He died at age 72 the year before I was born. He was a forester and game warden like his father before him and he had a reputation as a man who could shoot straight, drink hard and didn’t suffer fools lightly. He managed the forests of the largest landowner in the area for the sum of 100 gold marks a year. According to my father, that was a fabulous salary in the years before World War I. The locals considered him a rich man.

In the photograph he didn’t look like a man with a sense of humor. Nevertheless, my father insisted that he did have one, of sorts. You be the judge. My father told me the story of the hunting guest my grandfather’s employer asked him to guide on a deer hunt. He was a banker from Frankfurt and the baron owed him a favor. Either the patron indicated to my grandfather to get rid of this banker or my grandfather didn’t think much of this city slicker and decided to short-circuit his hunting adventure. Anyway, the reasons for what followed remain unclear. What is clear is that the banker had an unforgettable hunting adventure.

Here’s what happened. Apparently in the years around the turn of the last century French eucalyptus lozenges were a very popular cough medicine. They were sold in small flat tins. These bonbons, as they were called, were oval and about ½ of an inch long, brown-green in color and bore an uncanny resemblance to weathered deer droppings. Unless you looked closely, these cough drops were indistinguishable from the real thing. You pretty much had to touch and handle them to know one from the other.

The evening before he was supposed to take this banker hunting, my grandfather sent his gamekeeper out into the woods on the trail they were to take the next morning. It led through some birch and willow thickets, home to a number of old does, who had frequented this particular grove for years. These are not the deer we see here. These were roebucks, much smaller than North American deer and found throughout central Europe. They topped maybe 60 pounds, if that. They are about the size of key deer found on Pine Key in the Florida Keys. They’d left their droppings along this path in large and small piles, wherever they’d bedded down. The gamekeeper added two each of the French cough drops to the edge of the first two piles about a hundred yards apart and marked their locations with sticks laid out in an X, so that he could find them again the next day.

Early the next morning, my grandfather and his gamekeeper led the banker into the bush to stalk deer. When they got close to the first marked pile of deer scat, the gamekeeper, who was in the lead, faked a coughing fit, uttered a quiet curse, bent down, picked up the first two cough drops and slipped them into his mouth. When he saw this, the banker’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. He turned to my grandfather, who brought up the rear, and burst out excitedly: “Did you see that?”
“What?” my grandfather asked quietly.
“He’s eating deer shit!”
“Yes,” my grandfather answered, “he wants to cure his cough.”
“With deer shit? Good God, man, I never heard of such a thing in all my life. That’s disgusting. I can’t believe what I saw.”
“What,” my grandfather asked surprised, “you don’t know about this remedy, sir? Three or four-day-old deer shit is one of the oldest and best cough remedies in the world. Everyone around here knows that it’s the best tuberculosis-doctor.”
“Ah, you’re pulling my leg! That man’s only pretending,” parried the banker.
“Anton,” called my grandfather in answer, “our guest doesn’t believe that you chew a little deer shit as an antidote for your cough. He knows nothing about the curative qualities of this natural cough medicine!”
The gamekeeper turned around without a word and stuck out his green tongue, complete with two throat lozenges attached. The banker was dumbfounded. He sputtered and muttered under his breath and couldn’t calm himself. He had never seen anything like it. In the meantime, they were approaching the second pile. To reassure the banker, my grandfather bent down right in front of his hunting guest, also picked up what seemed to be two droppings and put them into his mouth as if it was the most commonplace thing to do.

The banker could not contain himself any longer. He spat in all directions and hollered: “I don’t believe what I’m seeing! They are really chewing and sucking on deer shit!”
My grandfather told him to calm himself and to keep quiet or they’d spook the deer. The banker continued to shake his head in disbelief. They had to show him their tongues again before he was finally convinced. No more was said and they continued the hunt.

The next morning, my grandfather went to pick up the banker, who had spent the night at a hunting cabin in the woods, with the gamekeeper in attendance to take care of his needs. When he got to the cabin, the gamekeeper opened the door and said:”Thank God you’re here, boss. Something terrible has happened. Your banker is lying inside and is in the throes of death! He won’t last another ten minutes!”
“Why? What’s his problem?” my grandfather asked in a loud voice.
“His gall bladder must have spilled over! He’s writhing in agony like a worm; he’s groaning and has green foam coming out of his mouth! You don’t know how glad I am to see you,” the gamekeeper unburdened himself.

They entered the cabin. The banker lay squirming and whimpering on his bed. “What’s going on? What is wrong with you?” my grandfather asked, pretending pity, in a quavering tone.
“I’m spilling over! I’m puking my guts out! I can’t hold it front or back! My navel is coming out of my mouth. God damned deer shit! I’ll never suck any again!” moaned the banker in agony.
“You poor man! How many did you take?” inquired my grandfather.
“About six or seven, I think. They must have been a bit too fresh,” he groaned.
“How could you take so many at once and un-aged ones at that? That’s a regular horse cure! No wonder your body protests,” my grandfather reproached. “Here drink some coffee. I’m sure you’ll feel better in a bit. We’ll leave you alone for half an hour.”

They needed the half hour as much as the banker, as they exploded with laughter once they got back outside. An hour later the banker emerged, dim-eyed and bent over, ready to hit the latrine. Without a word he packed his gear and made his way to the railroad station. They were rid of him for good.

They later learned that the banker claimed to his friends that the deer shit had cured his tapeworm. I guess those were the good old days.

No Exit?

2009-01-20T21:05:00.000-08:00

It must be the endless weeks of rain and fog and cold on this coast. Or maybe it’s just that we’ve grown into geezers and see everything through the screen of our disappointments. What happened? Where’s the vitality of our youth? It used to be when you woke up in the morning you were excited about the day ahead. Stuff had to be done. People needed to be seen. It felt good to be alive. We looked forward to the day’s action. But then a slow- down started, a kind of malaise set in. First this expressed itself physically. The aches and pains, which we used to be able to ignore, took longer and longer to disappear. Some stuck around for ever, it seemed. Your back, your shoulders, your knees began to hurt. Your hands didn’t seem to be as steady as they used to be. Your skin got thinner and you bled every time you came even close to a sharp object. Then your mind began to decelerate. Your short term memory faded and you can’t remember anything, have to write everything down. With me, it’s gotten so bad that in the middle of a telephone conversation I suddenly realize that I haven’t got a clue to whom I’m talking. It’s embarrassing.

And it’s not just the tedium of physical decline that gets you down; it’s the knowledge of waking up in the morning and being unable to think of anything at all ahead to brighten your day, to get you excited, to put some lead in your pencil. You’ve been there, done that and it’s just going to be another humdrum day. You’ve simply lost interest in what lies ahead. You’ve turned into a bore.

Bleakness seems to engulf everything. It’s depressing to live with the realization that your hair has turned grey, your muscle strength has begun to desert you, your eyesight isn’t what it used to be. We’ve grown accustomed to living with our ceramic hips. You learn to be careful about how you use your body. No more high impact action. No more running. No more jumping or lifting heavy loads. You worry about falling and breaking your bones. And if you do, as I have done, the healing process is prolonged and miserable. And speaking of lead in your pencil, my pencil has been leadless for years. You know you’re in trouble, when you don’t even miss it any more.

Even food is no longer a source of enjoyment, because you’ve weaned yourself off all the good stuff that’s supposedly bad for you. Come on, tofu burgers, chicken sausages or veggie dogs? That stuff makes you gag, but it’s good for you, they say. For me this is particularly galling. Gone are the raw bacon sandwiches. The savory taste of blood sausages is a dim memory. No more sow belly, pig maws or tripe or all the other good eats that used to make me salivate. I miss Bavarian haute cuisine. What used to get me drooling sometimes in my dreams was the prospect of a real Bavarian breakfast – Weisswurst (white veal sausage), fresh Radi (fiery hot horse radish) and a Mass (liter) of Weiss-Bier (wheat beer). Can’t you just taste it? Alas, I abstain.

I’ve given up all the things that used to make life enjoyable, because my betters told me they were bad for me. I stopped taking chances. I quit smoking. I’ve given up brawling. I don’t imbibe to excess anymore. The vodka bottle stands untouched in my cupboard. I no longer covet my neighbor’s or anyone else’s wife, for that matter. I’ve learned to rein in and control my impulses, to smile and back off instead of losing my cool. I’ve become domesticated and insipid.

‘Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?’

There’s a larger rut. It’s all around us, in our schools, our courts, society in general. The place is falling apart, but everyone pretends nothing is wrong. T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock had it right when he lamented: ‘In the room the women come and go talking about Michelangelo.’ The idle chatter of the demimonde, of the wannabe cognoscenti, who surround us, bore me. They put on a front of living happily in their manors, but in reality they only co-habit the same space. They exist in a parallel universe. They pass each other occasionally, like two ships in the night, with the odd bilious remark cutting through the darkness. One spends his or her days in one part of the house, on the computer or with whatever else occupies their time; the other hangs out in a different room doing whatever. They walk their dog together and silently wonder where they took the wrong turn. The feeling is not unlike being in Sartre’s version of hell, there to torture one another, by probing the other’s sins and unpleasant memories. They pick at each other’s scabs. No one takes responsibility for their actions. “L’enfer, c’est les autres.”

All that loss and in exchange for what? Serenity? Respectability? Longevity? I’m convinced we’d gladly exchange all that in a heartbeat for not having to worry about our damn blood pressure, drooping hemorrhoids or cholesterol level, to be young once more, to experience the adrenalin rush of danger, of being in love, of being a winner. Alas, that’s not going to happen. We clearly suffer from existential angst.

Where do they find the cheerful seniors in those commercials pitching Viagra and Cialis and God knows what else? Maybe they live on another planet. What’s there to be happy about, if you have to ingest chemicals to get your what’s-its functioning again?

Obliging souls keep trying to sign me up with some geezer organization that arranges “fun” trips for “golden agers”, as they like to style themselves. I can just see myself joining a group of sprightly old ladies in their serviceable shoes, sturdy walking canes and their drug-induced liveliness on some eco-tour or museum trip and listening to their blather about making the world a better place. I’d probably end up in some foreign dungeon for strangling one of them in desperation. There is no hope for dinosaurs. People say you can change, you can adapt. All it takes is will power. Fiddle sticks.

I don’t know, maybe the jihadist have it right – go out in a blaze of glory. Forget about the mirage of paradise and virgins. I’ll stick with the maggots. They are real. I used to be pretty good at blowing things up. I have the commendations to prove it. But, God, that makes a mess. I’ve grown into a tidy person in my dotage. So what to do. To be or not to be that is the question.

Is there an exit? Do I have the guts to step through the door? Can I handle the heat on the other side of that door which Sartre’s protagonists feared? Do I dare? Maybe I’ll test the waters by firing up and enjoying a fat Cohiba and uncorking a good 20-year old port, that’s been wasting away in my liquor cabinet. After all, does it really matter if you die from cancer of the lung or liver or from a bullet through your eye or a heart attack? Perhaps warmer climes are the answer. I wonder if they have lead in Hawaii or Mexico. I never found any on my previous visits, but I also didn’t look very hard, didn’t realize I needed some.

Of Work, Boredom and Demons

2008-12-29T15:40:00.000-08:00

When my GI Bill money finally came through, I had already gotten my undergraduate degree. I took the money and enrolled in night classes at the University of Missouri at Kansas City Law School. I was a married man now. I had a day job as well, in the promotion department of Hallmark Cards. I edited a weekly in-house newsletter and contributed to a monthly magazine, Cards, which was distributed to all Hallmark Card dealers in the US and Canada. I wrote how-to articles on laying out display windows, attracting new customers to stores, displaying merchandise in the store to maximize sales and I did occasional features on Hallmark Card artists and new products like paper dresses, pop-up greeting cards and paper designs. The job was more boring than watching paint dry. But it paid the then princely sum of $12,000 a year. My wife was a designer in their art department.

I should have had a clue about the place, when in my second week there a crew of five white-suited storm troopers carried out one of the design artists in a strait jacket after he’d gone berserk in his cubicle, had ripped all his clothes off and had set about to trash the joint, tossing ink wells and paint pots against the walls. He also tried to crash through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls surrounding the ninth floor, but had only succeeded in bouncing off the reinforced glass and knocking himself out. Everyone just stood by silently and watched. No one lifted a finger. No one discussed the incident afterwards. It was as if it had never happened.

My boss, a fellow named Gus Johnson and in his late forties, showed up one day after I had suffered through several months of tedium, wearing a flashy, double-breasted navy-blue zoot-suit with wide white vertical stripes over a light blue silk shirt with French cuffs and a flowery Ascot. It was an extraordinary statement to show up in such a suit, because the Hallmark Cards white-collar uniform was a plain black suit, white shirt and a narrow subdued tie. Nothing else was acceptable.

No one looked at him or paid any attention to him. He strolled through the department, stopping a various cubicles to shoot his cuffs or adjust his tie, trying to show off his new suit in the best light. When he didn’t get a reaction, he retreated to this office and soon reappeared in shirtsleeves. At Hallmark that was considered out of uniform and cause for reprimand. Again no reaction. The tie went next. He flung it over his shoulder into the aisle between the open waist-high cubicles. Soon the shirt followed, than the shoes, socks, trousers and, finally, his yellow polka-dotted boxer shorts. He was now stark naked. Still no one reacted. Everyone pretended it was business as usual, discussed his or her assignment with him, asked about his kids, talked about the weather.

I made the mistake of asking him, if he wanted to try one of the new A-line paper dresses that had just been added to the Hallmark line and of which I had several samples hanging in my cubicle. He looked at me as if I had just stepped off a UFO, turned beet-red and commenced to scream at me: “How dare you speak to me like that? Why would I want to wear one of your paper rags? I am wearing a brand new Zegna suit.” I tried to point out that he was bare-assed naked, but he would have none of it. “You are toast here,” he yelled and stormed down the hall toward the corner office of the VP Marketing to finalize my demise. But nothing happened.

We never saw him again. And again, no one talked about Mr. Johnson’s bizarre flame-out. I decided it was time to look for other employment.

My wife’s father had been a crooner on the radio in Kansas City in the 30’s and 40’s. He’d had his own show. He knew the General Manager of one of the city’s radio stations, who was a friend and a fellow member of the Kansas City Country Club. Membership to this club was restricted to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Jews, Catholics and other exotics, never mind blacks, didn’t need to apply. Anyway, he got me an interview and I talked myself into a job in the station’s promotion department. Money-wise it was a lateral move, but at least I could relate to the people working there. They seemed normal.

Mike McCurdy was my new boss. He always wore a jaunty bow tie, spoke softly and drank gin like a fish water. He liked dry Martinis. His Martinis were made up of a generous helping of Bombay Gin, what my brother would have called a three-finger shot, followed by a close pass past the glass with an open bottle of vermouth. He believed that the vermouth fumes gave his drink that special je-ne-sais-quoi. He never appeared drunk, but I know that five of those gin-only Martinis had to have an effect. Mike never showed it. Only his speech became even softer and slower.

When he had to fly, he always carried a large thermos filled with gin. He feared flying above all. By departure time he had to be pushed onto the plane in a wheelchair. He explained to the stewardess that he had a lower intestinal problem which sometimes weakened his system, but that he would be ok, since he carried his prescribed medicinal fluids with him in his thermos.

The station carried the games of the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. Those were the Hank Stram glory days, when the Chiefs won Super Bowl III. I got to know most of the players. I helped them cut commercials and promos at the station, guys like Len Dawson, Buck Buchanan, Ernie Ladd, Otis Taylor, Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, Mike Garrett, Jan Stenerud and Fred Arbanas, a one-eyed wide receiver.

My job was to write copy for station promos, retail ads and to schedule placement of radio spots. I did voice-overs and handled special sales events for the retail sales guys. There were no women in this or any other sales department in town then, nor were there any other minorities selling advertising in those days before affirmative action. I also made sure that my boss made it back to the station after his five-Martini lunches. He had a tendency to wander when he got loaded and needed tending.

About six months into this job, I decided to quit smoking. By then I had a 2- to 3-pack-a-day habit. Pall Mall non-filters were my brand of choice and they began to affect my health. I was 29 years old and could not climb a flight of stairs without huffing and hacking my lungs out. I decided to quit cold turkey and I did. Everyone was impressed. The problem was that I compensated for the Nicotine-urge with stuffing my face with chocolate. I blimped up to 230 pounds.

My wife suggested amphetamines – speed – to help me lose weight. She knew a doctor who prescribed them freely as part of a weight-loss program. They worked in getting my weight back down to 190, but they made me totally paranoid and brought to the surface all my suppressed memories, which I had banished from my conscience as a matter of survival. My nights were wracked by nightmares.

The faces of the dead I had left behind in my years in the employ of Uncle Sam swam up out the mists of my drugged and paranoid mind. Dismembered body parts and scenes of destruction flashed before my eyes. It all came flooding back. I thought I had buried my nightmares deep enough to be rid of them forever. I was wrong.

I went to work in the mornings totally exhausted, tense. I was a bundle of nerves. I didn’t eat and reverted to my old stand-by – vodka – to take the edge off. I was a mess. My job performance suffered. I skipped Law School classes regularly and ultimately had to resign. My home life suffered. Finally, one of my co-workers suggested I join a gym and work out. I took his advice. I put a stop to the speed, the vodka and the chocolate binging and began to feel better. I worked out every day. My body improved. Sleep returned and I re-buried my nightmares. I also increased my neck size to 17 inches and noticed that most of the serious guys in the gym were taking steroids. They kept after me to try some of their concoctions, which helped them bulk up and give their muscles definition. They looked great, but I had had it with chemicals in my system and refused. I quit the gym and took up golf.

I Don't See A Reason For Belgium

2008-12-28T21:53:00.000-08:00

I know, you’re thinking what’s the big deal about Belgium. They seem like nice enough people. They haven’t hurt anybody, except maybe the Congolese. Call me a bigot, but I have my reasons for being blinkered about them. Let me try to lay out for you where I am coming from (and damn the dangling participle).

When I was a kid, we had a parlor game, called: Can you name one famous Belgian whose name isn’t Leopold? Of course, you can’t, because they don’t exist. Perhaps there is a list of famous Belgians somewhere. I never saw it and wouldn’t know where to find it. I don’t think I am going to search for it either.

Belgians aren’t a people like say the Brits, the French or even the Poles. They don’t identify themselves as Belgians, but as either Flemish or Walloon. Most Belgians are Flemings, protestant and speak Dutch. They are settled in Flanders, in the northern part of the country. The rest are French-speaking Walloons and Catholic and they populate the area bordering France. Only around Brussels do they mix to any extent. Another 10% are German, who live in the east along the German border and they all hate each other. It is an extremely dull place. The only reason that there is a country called Belgium is religion and European power politics.

Here’s a brief history lesson: The region known as the Southern Netherlands was ruled by the Catholic Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs. In 1795 the French Republic invaded and annexed what is now known as Belgium. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 it became part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands as a buffer against French aggression and was ruled by a protestant Dutch king. In 1830, aided by the French, the Catholics staged a revolution against protestant domination and the place became independent under the first Leopold, a German from the house of Saxe-Coburg, which is still in charge there today. Today, the French don’t understand why anyone would want to annex Belgium.

If you ask a Belgian the question about famous Belgians, he or she will at first get very upset at being asked such a condescending question and then, after calming down, will name The Singing Nun, Hercule Poirot, Jean Claude Van Damme, Tin Tin and a number of other names you’ll never have heard of. It’s tough to be known for the reputed nutritional values of Brussels sprouts, Belgian waffles, chocolate and beer. And keep in mind that Tin Tin’s first adventure took him to the Soviet Union (Knifje in de Sovietunie, 1929). Are the communists behind Belgium’s existence? And the Swiss would heatedly contest the notion that Belgian chocolate is any good. Ditto for the Bavarians and Belgian beer. Belgians are the European version of Newfies. They are the butt of jokes. They are thought of as unsophisticated rubes, a bit dim witted and phlegmatic, sort of like their beer – heavy.

If you ask a Frenchman his opinion of the Belgians, he’ll shrug and point out to you that you can’t expect much from people who favor horsemeat as their national repast. He’ll add that eating horse dulls your senses, because, as everyone knows, Belgian horses are plough horses, huge, heavy and hairy.

I know a little bit about Belgians, besides the fact that I grew up next door to them. My oldest son married one. I had made the mistake of inviting him on a tour of the beer halls of Bavaria, when he graduated from university. I had ignored the fact that he was not a connoisseur of outstanding beer. On our first stop in a small city along the Rhine, we invited ourselves to a stranger’s wedding reception. We had to drink many toasts to the bride and groom and all the relatives in attendance. I had a very good time. My son got sick, threw up and plugged up the toilet, flooding the joint. He was embarrassed and didn’t believe me when I tried to tell him that this was nothing out of the ordinary. Instead of hair of the dog, he decided to head south to Venice to soak up some culture. There he met this Belgian girl, who was camping on the steps of the Venice railroad station. And being a naïve American from Kansas City, he fell for her. I can’t blame her for trying to escape the tedium that is Belgium.

I tried to warn him off, endeavored to point out some of the Belgian shortcomings, but to no avail. He didn’t want to understand my peculiar predilection. He didn’t see the point about being rude to Belgians.

But my bias runs deeper than ethnicity. Consider this: Belgian women don’t shave their underarms or anywhere else, for that matter. Well, it’s not really a Belgian-only thing. Lots of European women don’t, but among Belgians it seems a pervasive custom. Now I know that some guys think that bushy pits are an olfactory Garden of Eden. I can relate to that. I have a very sensitive nose and can appreciate a fragrant whiff of funk firing up my brain’s pleasure centers, but it can get overwhelming. For example, if you’re in a car with a hairy woman, the wafting bouquet of smells can get pretty funky. I’m speaking from experience here. It’s an odd thing, but women with furry pits always seem to also have a thing about not opening the car’s windows, lest they catch a draft. They seem inured to stink. To be honest, before I arrived in North America, b.o. never bothered me, but it sure does now. Would you call that cultural assimilation or delayed bias? I blame the Belgians.

Like many Europeans, especially those from deepest Bavaria, Belgians also seem to have an adverse relationship with their orthodontists or, more likely, none at all. They have terrible looking teeth. Maybe they don’t have orthodontists in Belgium. I have never seen anyone there sporting braces. The combination of buck-toothed choppers, shaggy armpits and funky odors has put me off Belgian women. I imagine Belgian men are no different, though I haven’t had any personal relations with any.

Perhaps Belgians have redeeming features, but their country doesn’t serve a purpose. They are lousy at war. They are not good at peace either. They are unable to agree on anything among themselves, including forming a government. The various ethnic factions simply hate each other. The specter of the country’s break-up is never far from the surface. Call me jaundiced, if you must; but I say: Who cares?

Lessons Learned from Love, Beer and Brawling

2008-12-14T11:53:00.000-08:00

I was 16 when I fell in love for the first time. Her name was Lorelei Kuehn. She and her family lived in a huge apartment in the Plassenburg, the medieval fortress overlooking my high school in Kulmbach, in the northeastern corner of Bavaria. Her father was a portrait painter and a bomb victim from Berlin and a died-in-the-wool Nazi. All his kids had Germanic names that started with the letter L. Her brothers’ names were Lohengrin, Leberecht and Liebhart. Lorelei was blond and she was hot. I was besotted with her. She flirted with everyone. I couldn’t really compete with some of my classmates. Most came from well-to-do families and they were city kids. I was a country bumpkin who was only a mediocre student and on top of that I had broken the code by asking uncomfortable questions about the recent past and my teachers’ involvement with the Nazis. Many had been ardent believers and had a difficult time reconciling current realities with their past. Questions about recent history were not welcome. In short, I was not one of the gang.

Lorelei allowed me to become her personal bag wallah. She let me carry her books from the Lyceum, the girls’ high school across town next to the city park, through the center of the old city with its cobblestone streets and ancient framework houses and up the steep approach road to the castle. I am sure all the other kids in my class were snickering about me behind my back. I never got past first base with her. I was too innocent and timid. I didn’t believe all the dirt my friend, Helmut, told me about her. My infatuation with her lasted a year, before I grew tired of her. She told me I was not advancement material. Her ambition was to become a translator in the Foreign Office in Bonn. She obviously had plans for bigger and better things. I don’t know whether she ever reached her goal. I lost track of her.

The result of my unrequited crush on Lorelei was that I shut myself off from further pain and stayed away from girls for the duration. I shut down emotionally or, rather, I channeled my feelings into aggressive behavior. Here I was, 17 years old, a frustrated virgin, determined not to get hurt again by opening up to another person. Not a very bright decision, but 17-year-olds are not known for thinking things through. At least not this one. In case you’re wondering, I did not lose my virginity until I was 21 years old and that momentous event took place in a cathouse in Phenix City, Alabama. More on that at some other time.

To compensate, I developed a taste for beer, basically because that’s all I could afford at the time, and for brawling. Keep in mind that in that part of the country beer was considered one of the basic food groups, part of the grain family. After all, it was made from barley or wheat. You’ll find it in the lunch buckets of most workers for consumption in the office or on the work site or in the factory in Bavaria. It is normal.

In those days, a bottle of beer cost the equivalent of two bits. But one of my classmates was the scion of the Reichel brewing family, who owned one of the four major breweries in Kulmbach, which called itself the "Beer Capital of the World." Through him we gained access to what was called “green” beer, beer that hadn’t fully fermented and thus had not been inventoried yet. This brew was quite turbid and had bits of all sorts of matter floating in it. It also had a tendency to clean out your system. We didn’t care. We called this condition “der schnelle Fritz” – the speedy Fritz. The refugees among us called it “der flotte Otto” – the nimble Otto. Fritz, Otto – the result was the same.

Sometimes when I was flush with cash, I invested in a bottle of “Kulminator Eis Bock”, a strong local beer with a 13% alcohol content. It came in a short stubby brown bottle and had an almost cloyingly sweet taste. One bottle was all you needed to put you out of your misery.

Fridays after school was beer day, when we’d meet Karl Reichel behind his brewery and he’d let us have however many bottles we could handle. There usually were five or six of us. I remember riding my bike home after those sessions, a 15 km trip, and being so out of it that I crashed into the ditch and passed out, waking up soaking wet and freezing in the dark. The offshoot of those occasions was that my mother, who always waited up for me, berated me when I got home and threatened to slap me about severely.

If I didn’t fall off my bike on the road home, I usually was able to get the booze out of my system by the time I reached my house. The road, a two-lane highway, was fairly level for the first 13 klicks, but the last two were a real bugger. The two-lane road turned into a gravel country lane and became steep and twisty. You had to stand on your pedals the whole way. This was in the days when 3-speed bikes were the latest. They gave you a real workout. Getting off and pushing the bike was not an option. It was a sign of weakness and all the kids’d be on your case.

Sometimes I took the train for the first 12 km and rode my bike the last stretch from the depot up the mountain to my house. In winter I skied down the mountain to the railroad station in the morning and back up in the afternoon. It made for strong legs and healthy lungs.

To make matters worse, I joined a fraternity, R.A.V. Absolvia, were the raison d’être was the consumption of large quantities of beer, which had to be drunk standing up, from a tall five-liter glass boot without spilling a drop while the rest of the gang sang Latin student drinking songs. "Gaudeamus igitur juvenes dum sumus" (let us rejoice therefore while we are young) was our favorite. You had to hold the glass boot with the toe down or it would create an air bubble when you reached the foot and your face would be sloshed in beer. After a couple of these, it was hard to tell whether the boot pointed up or down. The older members of the group, the “Philisters,” were university students and, even though it was outlawed, some of them secretly practiced dueling with sabers. It was a sign of esteem and honor to sport a dueling scar. Fortunately, I never advanced up the ranks that far.

The offshoot of my frequent encounters with beer was not always oblivion. More times then not I got into fights and usually got my butt kicked. I’d come home with bloody knuckles and bruises and gashes on my face and torn clothes. And my mother would berate me.

Saturday night was usually fight night in the beer halls my friends and I frequented. The slightest perceived insult or affront could result in a wild melee with chairs and beer steins flying and blood and vomit everywhere. The favorite trick was to smash your stein on the table’s edge, so it broke from the handle and to start whaling away. This ceramic or glass handle was our version of a knuckleduster. It was very effective and persuasive. Drinking and brawling went hand in glove. That’s what you did in a small town for entertainment. Everyone participated, including the ladies. No one ever got injured seriously. I think my mother enjoyed applying her iodine tinctures and tonics to my cuts and bruises, listening to my howls.

I had joined the local soccer club, which played in the lowest level of the county league and game day, Sunday, was the highlight of the town’s social scene. The day usually started with church services at 10, followed by a gathering of the players, their families and followers at the Goldene Rose pub. Fortified by several liters of beer each, this mob then moved to the soccer pitch. By game time at 2 o’clock, the home crowd and the visitors, who had invigorated themselves at the town’s other pub, “zur Linde”- to the Lime Tree – were in fine form, with insults flying and the odd scuffle breaking out.

Visitors never showed their faces at the Goldene Rose. That was the rule. Even though they came from nearby villages, they were considered foreigners, to be distrusted. You had to keep an eye on them. It didn’t matter which side won the game. Whatever the outcome, it was the poor referee’s fault. The fans of the losing side would chase him with sticks, walking canes and umbrellas, rocks, anything that was handy to zur Linde, where he had to change into his civvies and where his moped was parked. Sometimes he’d have to lay low for hours before it was safe for him to mount his moped and head home.

After one particularly galling loss of the home team, the three Braunersreuter brothers, all star players on our team, and some of their friends waylaid the referee on his way home, beat the hell out of him and tossed him into the creek that paralleled the road, for good measure. He filed charges and half the town had to appear in court as witnesses against the Braunersreuters, but all the witnesses turned out to have been blind, no one had seen anything and the charges were dismissed. The league, however, declared our home field off limits and we had to play all our games away for a year. We lost every match. One of the reasons was that the opposing teams and their fans didn’t have to worry about retaliation when they visited our village. But we kept score and when the suspension was finally lifted, it was payback time with a vengeance, but not on the soccer pitch. We didn’t want to get suspended again

It was a tradition that on the evening of the game there was a dance at the zur Linde for players and fans of both teams. These Sunday night dances were considered neutral territory. Disputes were settled outside. As long as none of the foreigners, that is the visitors from the next village over, tried to make out with any of the local girls, things remained fairly civilized.

The dance following the first game after the lifting of the home-field suspension made the front page of the local weekly newspaper, the Stadtsteinacher Nachrichten. The visiting team that Sunday was the F.C. Tannenwirtshaus, a village about three miles up the road. Most of the inhabitants of this town were either named Turbanisch or Buss and were the descendants of gypsies who were force-settled there after the Napoleonic Wars. They were basically tinkers, poachers and fruit and vegetable traders, whose gaily-painted trucks could be seen all over northeastern Bavaria buying and selling local produce.

One of the visiting players, a fellow named Bartl (short for Bartholomew) Buss, worked for my father as custodian of his fish farm, located in Tannenwirtshaus. He had learned somehow that there was going to be trouble after the game. He instructed his teammates and fans to bring ax handles and to hide them behind the zur Linde for use that evening.

The Braunersreuters expected nothing less and had directed their youngest brother, Albin, who at 15 was so short that he could easily have passed for a midget, to hide in the bushes behind the pub to keep an eye on the guests’ activities and to report back to the Goldene Rose with his findings. Needless to say, the home side appropriated the ax handles while the visitors were dancing inside. Everyone waited in the shadows outside for the show to begin. When all was set, Guenther Schwappacher, the mayor’s son, tossed two stink bombs onto the dance floor, emptying the hall in no time. We set upon the hapless dancers with our borrowed ax handles and beat the crap out of them. Several ended up in the hospital with broken bones and other lesser injuries.

The upshot was a major trial with 43 defendants from both villages and with jail sentences and fines handed out to the combatants. This time there were plenty of witnesses pointing the finger at each other. Revenge was sworn. It was the beginning of a vendetta that lasted for years, maybe not as deadly as those in Sicily or the Balkans, but certainly as deeply felt.

I learned a valuable lesson from this incident, several actually. One, never step into harm’s way sloshed, two, always have a solid exit strategy and three, you got to have deniability, in case there are repercussions. It’s not enough to have a sound plan of attack; you also need a way out, if things go sour, to stay below the horizon in the aftermath and you need an alibi. And you need a clear mind to see what’s going on around you. I didn’t have any of the above in the incident following the opening of the soccer season. I was arrested along with everybody else and it was only my father’s standing and influence, which got me out of this mess. He was not very happy with me. My mother, of course, berated me to no end.

The other lessons I came away with from this incident were never to trust somebody else to look out for your best interests and it’s best not to have any partners, who can later rat you out to save their own skin. Of course, the downside of this is that you can’t blame anybody else for your blunders.

Remembering My Mother

2008-12-09T16:37:00.000-08:00

I was leafing through an old photo album of mine the other day and I came across some black and white pictures of my grandparents on my mother’s side. My grandfather was Swiss and a cheese-maker by trade. He came from the Canton of Thurgau in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. He was a large and extremely strong man. He used to shave his head with a straight razor every Saturday morning and when he was done he’d polish it with a smoked pork rind. He didn’t care that this attracted flies to his head. He’d convinced himself that the medicinal benefits outweighed the nuisance of the flies buzzing around his shiny dome and that the rank smell emanating from his head protected him from disease.

My grandfather had other strange routines as well, such as his eating habits. Watching him eat was not everyone’s cup of tea. He’d mix his salad and dessert together with the main course, cut everything up into bite sizes, then pour gravy over the whole mess and eat it with a spoon. He felt it all ended up together in his stomach anyway, so why bother with separate courses or table manners.

He rolled his own cigars from tobacco plants he grew in his garden and he always had two 100-liter barrels of potent apple cider in his cellar for his fortification. The cider came from trees in his orchard. He also raised rabbits and chickens and turkeys. My grandparents lived off their land in the middle of the city in the lean years during and after the war.

His arms and hands were huge. His skin was as tough as leather. One time he showed my brother and me how he could bounce a pointy kitchen knife off his biceps by flexing at the moment of impact. He didn’t even bleed. He was a tough man and not very nice. He spoke Switzer-deutsch, the guttural German dialect spoken by the people from the northern part of Switzerland. It was sometimes very difficult to understand him. But you never dared to tell him that, because he assumed everyone spoke like him and should be able to understand him. If you didn’t, you were stupid. Perhaps his hearing was impaired. I was scared to death of him when I was a child.

In his youth, he had been the Swiss “Hoseluepfle” champion, a form of wrestling popular in Switzerland in which you tried to upend your opponent by picking him up by his shorts, which ended in heavy cloth rolls around the waist and thighs and tossing him unto his back or off the mat. It literally means “lift by the pants,” sort of like a Swiss version of Sumo. His strength came from manipulating the 200 lb. wheels of Swiss cheese every day of his life since he was a boy.

My grandparents lived in Schweinfurt. During the war and the countless bombing raids on Schweinfurt’s ball bearing plants and extensive marshalling yards, my grandfather believed that because he was a Swiss citizen and thus a neutral, he should not have to suffer any bomb damage. When the bombs did hit his place, he was outraged. My grandmother told him that the airmen who dropped the bombs probably hadn’t seen his Swiss passport, which he always carried with him, and so mistook him for a Nazi. He didn’t think that was funny, but he never had a sense of humor, least of all about himself.

He also hated the Americans because they arrested him after the city fell and took him, along with all males over 16 years old in Schweinfurt, to an internment camp near the airport, where they were trying to ferret out the Nazis among them. The soldiers who arrested him, weren’t impressed with his Swiss papers. It didn’t matter, that they sent him home the next day with his passport. My grandfather held a grudge.

They should have arrested my grandmother instead. Unlike the rest of my family, my grandmother was a true believer before the war, a Nazi party member. On formal occasions, she liked to be addressed as “Partei Genossin” - party comrade. She had been turfed out of Switzerland before the war for insisting on flying swastika pennants on her car while visiting my grandfather’s family. They said it violated Swiss neutrality. She said it was the future. My grandmother was a nurse-midwife, who during her long career brought more than 5,000 babies into the world. My grandmother was also a speed demon who believed haste was of the essence when driving her car. She drove a 1936 DKW convertible, with which she and my grandfather toured all over Europe, until the Nazis confiscated it for the war effort in 1941.

The car’s seizure by the Nazis in the second year of the war forced her to use a bicycle to go to work until she retired in 1949. She believed in Germany’s destiny, as she put it, that is, until Allied bombs flattened the city around her. After that happened, she withdrew into her work and began to age fast. She died soon after the end of the war.

This fascination with speed seemed to run in the family. Maybe it was something in the genes. My mother was a motor-racing fan. In fact, she named me after Bernd Rosemeyer, the greatest Grand Prix driver of his day. Rosemeyer drove for Auto Union and was known as the “Nebelmeister” – the master of the fog. He excelled in wet driving conditions and his races against and victories over Rudolf Caracciola of Mercedes Benz and Tazio Nuvolari of Alfa Romeo made him a hero in Germany and abroad. His career was meteoric and lasted only three years. “Bernd literally did not know fear,” Caracciola said of his great rival. My mother never missed any of his races and would be glued to the radio at race time to follow the exploits of her hero Rosemeyer was killed in an Auto Union Streamliner during a land speed record attempt on the Frankfurt-Darmstadt-Heidelberg Autobahn on January 28, 1938. My mother was heartbroken when he crashed and died.

My mother, who got her driver’s license at age 50, followed in her hero's footsteps. She drove a 1955 Lloyd 400S, a tiny four-seater of a car with a 2-cylinder, 2-cycle engine which generated 13 HP, with the power of a souped-up lawn mower and a top speed of 80 kph. It cost DM3,780, about $900 in those days. The car sounded like a hoarse and hungry wolf, when it got up to speed. People called it a “Leukoplast-Bomber” even though its body was no longer made from Bakelite, plywood and imitation leather, as the earlier models. Leukoplast was the name of a then-popular form of Band-Aid. This model was the first with a steel body. I sported two rear-hinged doors, a trunk, which, for the first time, could be opened from the outside and, another first, windows that could be cranked open by hand.

My mother didn’t care what people thought of her. To her, the Lloyd was a racecar. She was, what you might call, daring, maybe even reckless, behind the wheel. She passed other traffic on principle and knew only one speed, petal to the metal. She was a good driver, never hit another car, never got a ticket. Of course, this was before speed limits were posted on highways in Germany.

There was one incident my father always brought up when my mother’s driving was discussed. My father hated riding in that car, because he barely fit in. He was too tall and his head was jammed against the roof. But he had never gotten a license to drive, so he had to ride in what he called the death seat next to my mother. This particular incident happened on a winter day on an icy road in northeastern Bavaria. The Lloyd, going full out, failed to negotiate a curve, rolled over and ended up upside down in a snow bank. This was in the days before mandatory seatbelts. Anyway, they were lucky. Nobody got hurt. They climbed out of the car, turned it right side up, popped out the dent in the roof. Got back in and drove off at speed. This car was my mother’s ticket to freedom.

My mother died while I was working for Uncle Sam on the other side of the world and my uncle’s needs prevailed. She died from cancer caused by secondary smoke at age 59. She only got to enjoy life for a short time. Thinking about her still makes me sad, particularly this time of year.

My mother’s birthday is on the 23rd of December. She would be 104 years old this year, if she were still alive. My father, who had a somewhat droll sense of humor, used to give her one shoe for her birthday and the other for Christmas the next day. My mother didn’t think it was funny at all.

My mother has been dead a long time, 45 years, in fact. She and I were close. I was her baby, born when she was 35 years old, ten years after my older brother, an afterthought or an accident. I had a sort of love/hate relationship with her. When I was a kid, my mother was the enforcer in our house. My father wasn’t into punishment. He never touched me, but deferred to her. She had a very fast, vicious and accurate back hand. This went on until I grew too tall for her and she’d have to jump or use a stool to smack me in the mouth. By then I didn’t stand still for that anymore. After that she berated me with sermons on the pratfalls of alcohol and the deadly sin of sloth and how they were going to ruin my life. I didn’t listen. Perhaps I should have.

She could be intimidating. She stood barely 5’and weighed at most 100 pounds. She had a voice that could do a drill sergeant proud. She also had a broken nose, where one of her classmates had whacked her with a medicine ball when she was a teenager. She’d never seen the need to have her nose straightened. When she got angry, you didn’t want to mess with her.

She was my protector. For example, when I had problems in high school my mother stepped front and center. I had asked my teachers, who all had been fervent believers in the man with the funny mustache in their previous incarnations, to explain Auschwitz and Dachau, a taboo subject in those early days after the war. You don’t rock the boat in Germany. Instead of answers I got bad grades. My teachers told my mother that I was not classic education material and would never make it to university. My mother didn’t help matters when she called my teachers Nazi swine and warned them that she would make a major public stink about their past, if her son didn’t graduate.

At least she didn’t kick them in the balls and throw them down the stairs, as she had done with the Reverend Krenkel, our Lutheran minister, who made the mistake of coming to our house to tell my mother that her son would not be confirmed, because I had laced the reverend’s New Testament with sneezing powder during confirmation classes and had embarrassed him in front of his students. My mother made short shrift of the good pastor and threw him bodily down the stairs into the entry hall. She followed him downstairs and asked him if he thought his superiors would appreciate his well-known taste in little girls. Needless to say, I was confirmed on schedule.

I don’t know what it is about this mother-son relationship, but even nearly half a century after her death, I can feel the tug of the umbilical cord. I know that I am who I am because of my mother. She believed in never giving up, in seeing things through to the end, in standing up for what was right and damn the consequences. I can feel her presence. Following her lead was not always easy and I have learned to compromise, something she would never do. But then she wasn’t a salesman like I. Her success or failure wasn’t measured in dollars and cents. She was a mother.

The Cobbler's Coup d'etat or the "Schuster-Putsch"

2008-12-07T21:20:00.000-08:00

In 1949, I lived in a village on the extreme eastern edge of what was then called West Germany, in the Rhoen Mountains. It was a dead-end place within walking distance of the “Iron Curtain”, the divide between east and west. This was a fortified border with minefields, machine gun emplacements and armed watchtowers, manned by East German guards with shoot-to-kill orders should anyone try to get too close to the barbed wire. Gunfire from that border was a common, nightly occurrence. It was aimed at desperate people trying to escape to the West. Some made it across, most didn’t. We got used to it. It was like background traffic noises.

About a mile and half east, along the main road out of our village toward the boundary line, lay the little hamlet of Maierhof. The frontier ran along the edge of the fields surrounding this place. A Meier in medieval times was an estate manager or leaseholder, Hof means farmstead. This hamlet belonged to a baron, for whom my father worked as a forest manager. The main buildings of this place used to be part of a fortified farm, one of three this titled gentleman owned. There were no stores of any kind in Maierhof, no pub, only the farm, a smithy, a barbershop and a cobbler’s workshop. The rest of the inhabitants were pensioners, peasants and day laborers, who mostly worked for my father as loggers and handymen. The farm was run by a German refugee, who’d been kicked out of the ethnic German region of the Banat in Romania in 1945.

The barbershop was the main draw in this hamlet. The barber’s name was Willi Albus. He was not a real licensed barber, but had learned his trade in the army and his haircuts showed it, but he had a monopoly. There were no other barbers around. His shop was open only on Saturdays. Herr Albus was on the road Monday to Friday plying his other trade - black marketeering and smuggling. He was a veteran of the recent war and had rescued a German army motorcycle with sidecar, which he used on his scavenger hunts, as he called them. Herr Albus had great organizational skills. He was a man who could get you pretty much anything your heart desired, if you had the cash or something worthwhile to barter.

Once a month, early on a Saturday morning, my father and I would trek to Maierhof to visit the barber. In those days a haircut cost the equivalent of two bits and a brick of coal to help heat the shop. I liked going to the barber, because it was gossip central, even though the haircuts were pretty much below par. Anything and everything that went on in the surrounding villages was discussed in depth. My father usually went under the scissors and hand-held clippers first and then he would visit Albus Sr., who worked for him as a foreman on one of my father’s logging crews.

Once my father was out of the room and I had been sworn to total silence about what was about to be revealed – the villagers feared my father and didn’t want him to know what went on after his departure -, the conversation in the barbershop switched to sex and the barber would open the top drawer in his desk and pass around the latest sex magazines and pictures he had picked up in his weekly travels and he’d let everyone look at – never touch – his collection of “Parisers,” French condoms, which were his pride and joy. He had them in all colors of the rainbow, with and without warts and protuberances, made from vulcanized rubber or sheep gut. We were fascinated. We couldn’t think of anyone who’d possibly use these things. “Nur die Franzosen” - “only the French,” was the common conclusion. They were much too exotic for our remote neck of the woods. It was sort of a glimpse at a totally foreign and forbidden outside world about which we knew next to nothing. Obviously, we were rubes.

These Saturday mornings were for men and boys only. Women were not allowed and when someone’s wife, mother or girlfriend had the audacity to knock on the door and demand entry or, God forbid, barged in unannounced, the barber would tell her in no uncertain terms to leave “our sanctum” at once and get lost. As odd as this may seem today, his rule prevailed. There was no bra-burning in front of the barbershop, no outraged women waving placards or throwing eggs.

On one of those Saturday mornings in the fall of that year, a man named Alfred Bittermann, who lived next door to Herr Albus’ hair-cutting emporium, was part of the barbershop crowd. He was a cobbler and a bitter old man and a bit of a drunk. He was bitter, because until the end of the war he had been the local Nazi party boss in Maierhof. He had been important and he’d got to wear a fancy brown uniform with its swastika armband and he’d had an official title and he could tell people what to do. He told the barber that he was disgusted with his French trash, “Franzosendreck”, he called it, and that in Adolf’s time smut like that would have been burned in the village square and the purveyors of such un-German vulgarities would have been shipped to the Eastern Front forthwith or to the nearest “KZ” (concentration camp) for re-education. Everyone laughed and ignored him.

You may not know this, but titles and uniforms are big in Germany, always were and probably always will be. To give you an idea of how absurd things are over there when it comes to titles, consider this: I have a friend who was a colonel in the Bundeswehr, the new Germany army. His wife, who was not in the army, was and is addressed as Frau Oberst, Mrs. Colonel. If you have a PhD in, say, botany, you are addressed as Herr Doktor and your spouse is Frau Doktor. If you were a department head in your business or with the local government, you were the Herr Direktor and, of course, your wife was the Frau Direktor. It’s that Prussian thing about one’s place on the social ladder and the need to let everyone know that you are better than the next guy.

Now Herr Bittermann was a nobody. His lofty position, his fancy uniform and his fear-inspiring title were gone. To compensate for this loss of status and change in fortune, he’d turned to booze to drown his disappointments and sorrows. He was a tiny man. If he topped five feet he was tall and I doubt that he broke 100 pounds. He also had the disgusting habit of taking snuff up his nose. He didn’t believe in using a handkerchief in purging his schnozz, but used his fingers to empty both nostrils at the same time in a noisy explosion of snot into the coal bucket by the stove. This created a bit of awkwardness, because no one wanted to volunteer to root around in that bucket to feed coal into the stove to keep the place warm. It took an order from the barber, who, of course, was the boss of his little empire there, for someone to gingerly fish a lump of coal out of the bucket and into the stove. Nevertheless, Herr Bittermann was a very good shoemaker. Every year around Christmas, as long as I can remember, my father had him cobble a new pair of boots for him.

Anyway, Herr Bittermann and his son Christof, who was a couple of years older than I, were both into their cups already that Saturday morning. You’re probably wondering how an under-aged teenager could be drunk in public. That was nothing special. In those days there was no minimum drinking age. If you had the cash and were tall enough to reach the counter, you could buy beer in any pub, no questions asked. It’s probably still that way.

The elder Bittermann announced to the assembled patrons that he had enough of this new government in Germany and that he, Alfred Bittermann, former “Ortsleiter” (village leader) of Maierhof, was going to do something about this deplorable situation. He was going to lead a “Staatsstreich,” a coup d’état, against the incompetents who were running things these days to restore the proper order to things “wie zu Adolf’s Zeiten” - as during Adolf’s time. The men laughed at him and told him he was a drunken fool and to go sober up somewhere. This really infuriated the would-be putschist. He staggered to his feet and told one and all: “You are all traitors and should be shot out of hand,” he yelled, as he made for the door. “Tomorrow is the day of reckoning. You watch me.” We laughed and thought no more of it.

Maierhof’s main connection to the outside world was the bus line, operated by the Postal Service, like all bus lines at that time in Germany. The bus stopped twice a day in Maierhof, at 8:00 in the morning and at 6:30 in the evening. The way I heard it, the next morning, a Sunday, Herr Bittermann, dressed in the full Nazi regalia of his former position and armed with a handgun, hijacked the bus, attached a large swastika flag to the front of it and forced the driver, who didn’t know whether he should laugh or be afraid, to drive the bus back and forth through the village and the surrounding farm country along the border. Herr Bittermann, waving his pistol wildly in the air and taking long pulls from a schnapps bottle, exhorted passengers and the gaping villagers and border guards to take up arms and follow him to the county seat to topple the enemies of the people who were running things into the ground these days. He was going to restore proper order in the Reich. Not surprisingly, no one took up his call to arms. No one followed him. Maybe he should have brought a megaphone to spread his message.

The East German VoPos (People’s Police) on the other side of the border didn’t know what to make of this farce and thought it best to get prepared for an attack. Maybe they saw the threat as real. In any case, they set up machine gun and mortar emplacements and their officers were running back and forth yelling out orders. Some among the onlookers on our side got nervous and there was talk of getting their guns out of hiding and prepare for combat. Most farmers in those days had military hardware stashed in their hay piles. I knew one, who had a functioning “Tiger” tank hidden under his hay in his barn. People were looking for our border police. But, of course, there were no border guards on our side of the line. No one was trying to escape to the East, so there was no need for guards. After a while, when the VoPos didn’t see anyone else armed on our side, calm was restored in their ranks and they started digging foxholes and watched the drama play out. Peace prevailed.

In any case, after about an hour of this, the schnapps got the better of him and Herr Bittermann ingloriously passed out in the front of the bus. A gendarme – that’s what the rural policemen were called -, who’d at last made an appearance on his bicycle and had been pedaling in pursuit the bus, disarmed him and tried to arrest him. But how do you arrest a passed-out drunk, if all you’ve got is a bicycle for transport? This cop had obviously been in similar situations before. He got some bystanders to help him lift the unconscious and sagging would-be putschist onto the handlebars of his bike facing backwards, then got on himself, placed the drunk’s head and arms over his shoulders and started zigzagging down the road to the police station in the valley. When last seen, the former Ortsleiter Bittermann was draped over the policeman, with his head and arms dangling over the constable’s back, disappearing down the road.

Nothing much came of the “Schuster-Putsch”, as the local paper called it. After a couple of days, the court released Herr Bittermann from the county jail due to his age and booze-related problems, but without his uniform and shooting iron, which pissed him off to no end. He became known as the “Putschist” and a minor celebrity in Maierhof and surrounding towns and villages. His new found notoriety helped his cobbling business pick up too.

Drifting Together, Drifting Apart

2008-11-14T15:36:00.000-08:00

It is odd how things sometimes happen in life. It’s as if you are watching a movie, as if someone else was responsible for your deeds, your Doppelgänger, perhaps, or that your actions were due to some shift in time or dimension. When I look back on some aspects of my life, I’m sure that I must have lived in some parallel universe. If the theories of quantum mechanics have value, it is entirely possible to be in different places at the same time. I have been trying to explain to myself some of the choices I’ve made in my life that were not in my best interest and that ran counter to my better judgment. It wasn’t me; it was my apparition. My first marriage is a case in point.

I met my first wife at an off-campus party in Rosie Hayder’s trailer. Rosie was a fallen Amish girl from southeast Kansas, who was working on her MFA in painting. She was a girl who, as they say in Texas, could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch. She was shacked up with my friend Hannes DeBruyn. Hannes was a Dutchman from Rotterdam, whose main ambition in life was to ingest as much booze as possible without having to pay for any of it. He used to stage poetry readings in his digs, which sported a life-size porcelain urinal attached to the front door. He called his place Le Pissoir. To be admitted to his readings you had to bring a bag of doobers or a gallon jug of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, what today you’d call two buck chuck, for the “Intendant,” as he styled himself. Most of the poetry at these do’s was phallic in nature and pretty gross.

Hannes was a slob who looked as if he’d just gotten out of a gypsy caravan. Hygiene was not his strong suit. But he was built like a rugby player with a low center of gravity and he loved to fight. His problem was that he was usually high on something or another. As a result, he mostly lost those dust-ups and his face looked the part. He made up for this shortcoming with his popularity with the girls, who for reasons I couldn’t fathom were all over him. He was on a tight budget, because his father back in Holland had cut him off due to this refusal to graduate. Hannes paid for his tuition and room and board by harvesting the funny weed, which grew wild all over eastern Kansas and selling it to students who didn’t yet know you could just go out into the countryside and pick it along most roads around Lawrence. There were garbage bags full of the stuff under his bed. His place reeked of it.

Hannes was an anarchist at heart. When the campus of the University of Kansas erupted in riots over the Vietnam War in 1965, it was he who led the charge to firebomb the ROTC building. He and his band of agitators occupied the chancellor’s office for four days, before Kansas state troopers rousted them with tear gas. The next year the Student Union building was gutted by fire. Again Hannes was front and center. I don’t know how he did it, but he was never fingered as the instigator. He always tried to get me involved. “We need your military expertise,” he’d urged, “somebody who knows how to shoot straight.” I declined.

Hannes majored in cinematography. He wanted to produce “significant” documentaries. His senior project was called American Apocalypse. It included a scene where two of his pals carried a 6’by 12’canvas backdrop that featured a giant, full-color blow-up of a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. They waited outside the Religious Studies Hall for some of the nuns who taught there to take their daily lunchtime stroll and then walked with the upright backdrop next to the unsuspecting sisters, while Hannes, sitting side-saddle on the backseat of a friend’s motorcycle, filmed the scene while keeping pace with them. “I want to juxtapose the Pope and the nuclear holocaust,” he explained to me later when I viewed his chef-d’oeuvre in the editing room and didn’t quite get the connection.

Another one of his masterpieces contained a scene that was set in the dug-out basement of a house construction site. Three of Hannes’ cronies sat around a fire skinning a road-kill cat and roasting it on a spit, while Hannes hung suspended from the top of the basement wall filming and I held a Klieg light, illuminating the macabre scene. He called it Life after the Apocalypse. I don’t know if he ever finished these projects. He was still working on them four years after I graduated. When it came to his work, he considered himself an artiste, a man of nuance.

Hannes liked my writing. My problem was that I had learned English in the Army, in other words in the gutter. I knew precious little about grammar and syntax and compound sentences or prepositional phrases and gerunds. My vocabulary was basic and lacked the big words being bandied about by the serious English majors. I wrote about my experiences working for Uncle Sam and I shocked my classmates, who thought I was crass.

I read one of my compositions at one of Hannes’ poetry extravaganzas. He’d rigged a stage by placing a sheet of ½ inch plywood on top of his bed. It was a pretty rickety and unstable set-up, particularly after a few slugs of red wine and a couple of fat spliffs. My contribution was a short story I called The Dance of the Greedy Maggots and the gist of it had maggots feasting on the remains of a VC soldier who had been sprayed with Agent Orange. The toxic chemicals caused the white grubs to grow into super-sized marauding man-eaters, which had turned fluorescent orange and sprouted a double set of large green chitinous wings, three pairs of comely legs and massive blue mandibles. It also gave them an urge to dance a la the Rockettes as they marched through the jungle, devouring everything in their path. It was a very bizarre story. Hannes loved it and told me later that it inspired his apocalyptic documentaries.

Anyway, Hannes asked me to come along to this party at Rosie’s trailer. There were three or four others, among them my future wife. Her name was Ann and she was a graduate student working on her MFA in Printmaking and Rosie had dragged her along because she thought this girl needed to get laid.

A little more than a month later, Ann and I decided to get married, even though I knew in my heart of hearts that this was a major mistake. She and I had precious little in common, except loneliness. She didn’t trust men and I can’t say I blamed her. She was divorced. Her first husband had dumped her for his secretary while she was pregnant with their second child. On top of that, he gave her a vaginal infection that led to a miscarriage and rendered her sterile, unable to have any more children. Not surprisingly, she wasn’t very high on men after that, but she wanted a father for her four-year-old son. She was an artist and she cared about little else. She was tall and good looking, extremely intelligent and a talented painter and printmaker. She had an adversarial relationship with English grammar and structured education in general, even though she had been the beneficiary of the best schools money could buy.

We misunderstood each other from the get-go. I was on my best behavior and tried to come across as European, urbane, civilized. She saw someone malleable in me, who would give her what she needed. But I was not some nice American boy fresh off the farm. I had survived the cauldron of war, death and destruction. I had built a wall around my emotions so thick, I didn’t have a clue how to penetrate it. My objective at the time was to finish university as rapidly as possible. I didn’t want to get sidetracked. I didn’t want to lose sight of my immediate goal – graduation and a job. She was absorbed by her art and I by a drive to succeed at university, to get a job, to make a living. I was also lonely and tired of being an outsider and I hated it. So we drifted together.

The clues for eventual failure of this union were everywhere from the start; I just failed to see them. Take our marriage ceremony, for example. We got married by a justice of the peace, whose office was in the atrium of the Douglas County jail. Two jailhouse deputies were our witnesses. The hoots and whistles of the inmates looking down on us from the cell blocks above cheered us on our way. There was no party, no honeymoon. The fact that no one from Ann’s family showed up for the rite should have given me pause, but I wanted to belong, to be accepted, to be part of a family.

Except, this family turned out to be rather dysfunctional. Her parents lived in the past. Both traced their lineage back to the Mayflower and never let you forget that fact. Her father was a direct descendant of John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Her maternal grandfather had been a circuit judge in Kansas City. Her mother was a hypochondriac who was always down with some ailment and whose family owned large chunks of downtown Kansas City. Hallmark Cards was built on their land. Her father was the only straight one in this clan, a gentleman. He ran a hardwood lumberyard for his step-brother. His family came from Virginia after the Civil War or, as they called it, the War of Northern Aggression. They had lost everything and were forced to move west.

One of her uncles was a Missouri state representative, courtesy of the old Prendergast Machine in North Kansas City, which had him in their pocket. Her other uncle was a real estate broker, who profited from his political connection in Jefferson City through his brother and his mob friends. One of her aunts was a drunk; another was married to a well-known Hollywood writer, who drank himself to death. Another had been married to a successful surgeon, who shot himself in despair.

Everyone in this family hated each other, but they all pretended to be close, with weekly dinner parties at the grandmother’s fully staffed mansion on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River. They weren’t about to accept an immigrant.

I knew this marriage was not going to work, but I went ahead anyway. It lasted 13 mostly miserable years, before I decided enough was enough and I pulled the plug. We had drifted apart, lived in separate dimensions. As Woody Allen once put it: “There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is how far is it from midtown and how late is it open.” Quantum physicists theorize that there is not just one, but many universes, worlds which exist side-by-side along with our own. My quandary is which universe is which and who was that other guy? Was he a phantom or was he real?

A Primer on Education and Survival in the New World

2008-10-30T13:22:00.000-07:00

Should you ever wake up clueless and alone, after a night of indulging your baser instincts, in a foreign country, where no one speaks your language and, what’s more, doesn’t give a hoot about your condition, here is a primer on how to deal with this predicament.

The thing to do is to pick yourself up out of whatever gutter you find yourself and head for the nearest bar. Bartenders the world over have a knack for understanding folks with speech impediments due either to too much booze or lack of mastery of the local idiom. This road to recovery is called the “hair of the dog” cure. I have tested this therapy more than once over the years and found it not wanting. I only wish that I had been familiar with it when I first stumbled off the boat onto the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey; but I was a rookie, an innocent.

Looking back on my own experience, perhaps I should have taken the above route. It probably would have saved me from a lot of grief. But the phrase “hair of the dog” meant nothing to me at the time, so, alas, I took a different road, when I found myself without the faintest in a foreign country. I must warn you that before you try to emulate the path I chose: it is not for everybody. I joined that country’s military service. I figured being in an environment that was extremely structured as well as goal-oriented, would level the playing field a bit and afford me a chance to learn how to cope in this strange place called America. This army’s recruiting slogan was “Join the Army and See the World.” I didn’t join to see the world. I had seen it already and was trying to get away from it. But misconceptions prevail when you don’t understand what they’re saying to you. I thought the army would be a great place to learn English.

And in retrospect it was. Obviously, the first step in mastering English under those circumstances was an intimate acquaintance with military commands and your response to them. The drill sergeants corrected you promptly and loudly, if your pronunciation, elocution or execution of the command left something to be desired. The incentive to learn quickly was that you didn’t want to get their full attention too often, because their corrective steps invariably included push-ups or running in place with your rifle at port-arms or some other chicanery.

The second vocabulary group added to my repertoire early on was cuss words. I have become somewhat of a scholar of this subject over the years and I must say that Army drill sergeants have a vast and original supply of expletive-laden profanities at their disposal. The f-word became my favorite English adjective, verb and noun. It seemed to be used in odd and curious combinations with various prepositions and gerunds that mystified my mind. There was f-off, f-up, f-over, f-with, f-around, f-ing this and f-ing that. The combinations seemed endless and at first I was truly baffled. But no one could say that I was slow on the uptake. I always considered myself a quick study and soon mastered that chapter of my educational curriculum. I moved on to food, military gear, pieces of the uniform, components of the M-1 rifle, the chain of command, contents of your footlocker display drawer and sex, all fleshed out and made transparent to me by the f-word.

Necessity improved my pronunciation to acceptable levels, because you didn’t want to be ridiculed in front of your peers. It took me no time at all to figure out that “fuckinkraut” wasn’t one word and didn’t mean recruit. It took me roughly six months to get a handle on the rudiments of the English language, albeit with a very limited and, you might say, not salon-rife, vocabulary.

It may not come as a complete surprise to some of you, but most of the Army training cadre believed that all Germans made excellent soldiers. They didn’t elaborate, so I took their word for it. In any case, after about a month into basic training, they decided to make me acting corporal and a squad leader, which seemed a big mistake to me, because my nearly non-existent English made it very difficult for me to communicate with my squad. The Army believed in loud communication. You were not allowed to mumble. Commands had to be enunciated clearly and at the top of your voice. By then, I had command of maybe a hundred English words, most of which were accompanied by the f-word and are unfit for print. My drill sergeants didn’t care. They told me that I needed the practice. My fellow recruits thought it was hilarious. My struggles gave them some levity, which otherwise was in short supply during basic training.

The problem with learning a language from scratch in the enlisted ranks of the military is that you really never move out of the gutter and onto the next plateau. This became clear to me when I got to university some years later and was required to write endless essays on subjects that didn’t call for the f-word to explain my thoughts. My lack of language skills turned out to be a major handicap which held me back for some time and clearly highlighted my shortcomings. In fact, it was a disaster.

I had arrived at the University of Kansas in Lawrence in the last week of January 1964, after a two-day Greyhound ride from Philadelphia. It was bitter cold. The university sits on a hill about 300 feet above sea level, with nothing between it and the North Pole, it seemed, to hold back the icy winds that swept down over the wide open prairies. All my gear was still in transit on a US Army troop ship somewhere on the Pacific. Not that any of my stuff in my errant footlocker would have done me much good in Kansas. This was not the tropics. I did not own an overcoat or a pair of gloves. I was frozen and I was pretty much broke.

A classmate turned me on to a gig as a waiter at the Fire Pit, a steak house just off campus. I should never have taken a job as a server in a fancy restaurant. Here I was fresh out of the abattoir of Vietnam, where my job had been death and mayhem and now I was supposed to be polite and kowtow to some asshole whose steak wasn’t done just right. I had to restrain myself from shoving a steak-knife up their nose. The f-word returned from its exile and took center stage. I lasted three days before the owner suggested that I probably would be better suited for work in construction or some other outdoor job that required rigorous activity.

My salvation arrived in the form of English for Foreign Students. Even though I was not classified as a foreign student, I was able to talk the professor teaching this course into letting me transfer to his group. All the students in that class were graduate students from abroad, mostly Taiwan. They spoke English worse than I did. To teach these foreign kids to get a handle on the King’s English, the professor used the writings of the ancient Greeks, like Homer, Aristotle and Xenophon, translated into English, of course. I loved it. I had spent six years in high school reading this stuff in the original. I wrote essays that were the envy of my classmates. I drew on my memory and quoted freely in Greek and I learned to love the English language and banish the f-word from sober speech.

One of the graduate students, a girl from Greece, stood up in class after I had quoted a passage from Homer’s Odyssey in the original and said: “I don’t understand a word you are saying, but the Greek, she sounds beautiful.” She had tears in her eyes. I thought I was pretty cool.

She told me about an outfit called People-to-People, which, among other things, arranged summer jobs for foreign students. This group was run by co-eds who wanted to broaden their horizons. I wasn’t a foreign student, but one of the girls there liked me anyway and promised to find me a job, if I taught her German. She wanted to visit Germany that summer. She was a large and healthy farm girl from around Salina, Kansas, and she had this slightly sour aroma of milk about her. I agreed to tutor her in the finer aspects of the German language and culture. I figured what the hell, it’s only two months and then she’ll be off to the fatherland. How bad could it be? She turned out to be extremely energetic and nearly wore me out, but she was true to her word and found me a summer job with a construction company in Gypsum, Kansas, which repaired grain elevators in small towns all over Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska.

This construction job turned out to be the final chapter in my education in and my understanding of how things worked in America. The day I arrived in Gypsum the skies opened and dumped more than 18 inches of rain on the area in the space of two days. The local creek broke its banks and the town found itself under about three feet of water. All basements were flooded, including the basement of Mr. Frisbie’s house, where I was billeted. All roads in and out of town were cut. The first thing I learned was that the people didn’t sit around and wait for the authorities to arrive to organize assistance, as would have been the case in Europe, but they went to work pumping out basements and clearing debris to allow the water to drain away. Everybody simply rolled up their sleeves and helped each other to rectify the mess nature had created. It was an eye opener for me. I liked it.

This deluge also gave me my first taste of snapping turtle, which popped up everywhere in the floodwaters. I shot them with Mr. Frisbie’s .22 and Mrs. Frisbie deep-fried the meat from their legs, neck and tail. It tasted great, a bit like young crow. The trick was to shoot them in the head, so that they’d float. If you shot them anywhere else, they’d dive to the bottom and you’d never find them. My skills came in handy.

I didn’t realize how dangerous work in those old wooden grain elevators could be. There always seemed to be some clown who had to have a smoke as he dumped his truckload of grain and a spark would ignite the grain dust and the place would blow up. I remember one occasion in Yoder, Kansas, which is down near Wichita, where a guy lit up and got blown off his tractor and through the boards of the wall. Other than a broken collarbone and scorched hair, he was OK. These were tough people. Welding jobs in the metal grain bins were the worst. If you weren't careful, the ensuing dust explosion, contained in the metal bin, would blow everything above it, including the welder, to kingdom come.

There was always work for our crew. We’d go in and repair the damage after some mishap. This usually meant climbing up in the rickety and damaged wooden tower that held the grain conveyor belts and trying to re-attach the wooden timbers that held the structure together. If you were lucky the old paternoster elevator still functioned and you could ride it to the top. They ran in a continuous loop and you had to jump off and on, a skill quickly acquired, if you didn’t want to crash to the ground below. I also learned how to weld and how to cut metal with a blowtorch. This was hot work. The temperature outside would reach 110 Fahrenheit and inside it’d be 20 to 30 degrees hotter. You drank a lot of water and after a day’s work you smelled pretty raunchy. But the money was good.

My work crew consisted of four guys. Two of them were my age. They had been shipmates in the U.S. Navy. One was a local boy, the other a very large Hawaiian named Todd Kakuakane. He easily stood 6’5” and weighed 285 pounds, none of it fat. Even though I was an ex-Army guy – and they never let me forget – these two ex-sailors took me under their wings. We understood each other. We were kindred spirits.

Saturday nights the three of us would go out to party. This was not an easy thing in those small mid-western towns. Many were dry or didn’t serve liquor by the drink. The beer was a pathetic 3.2%. But there usually were roadhouses outside the town limits, where you’d bring your own bottle and you could dance to live music. My new Hawaiian friend was the star wherever we showed up, at least with the ladies. The guys didn’t like him much and more times than not we got into brawls, but we tended to prevail. The three of us stuck together and had each other’s backs. We’d been in worse.

My Hawaiian mate would do what he called the Tahitian hula, a Polynesian version of the haka, the Maori war dance, in which every muscle of his huge body shook in rhythm to the music while he performed. He had unbelievable control. He could twitch his muscles all at once or in sequence or only some and not others. He was a sight to behold, particularly, when he stripped to his waist and got down into a squat to show the action of his massive gluteus maximus. The ladies went wild. The three of us did all right and never lacked for company. My education was complete.

.

My Brother Willi

2008-10-24T12:32:00.000-07:00

My first memory of my brother is when I was three years old and he grabbed me and made tracks on his skis down the hill from our house to get away from my mother who was unhappy with something I had done. He was 13 years older than me and he was my protector. Soon after, he was drafted into the army. He was 16 at the time and we didn’t see him until after the war ended 3 years later. We didn't know whether he was dead or alive, whether he’d survived or given his life for “Fuehrer und Vaterland.” He returned on my birthday in 1945. He was 19 years old and he was a wreck.

I’ve been thinking about him lately. His name was Wilhelm, Willi for short, and he’s been dead for two years. I loved him. He was named after my father’s oldest brother, who fell in Russia during World War I. He was my friend. He was a forester and game warden like our father and his father before him. He was the last to choose that profession in our family and he was an original.

But before I get into the story of my brother, a little background might be in order. I’ve already discussed his dexterity in rolling cigarettes with one hand and his willingness to flout authority in providing food for our table after the war in other stories touching on my brother’s life. I knew him for 67 of his 80 years here and I can’t recall ever seeing him in a suit and tie. He felt most comfortable in jeans or in his green forester’s uniform. He had the chance for advancement to the upper levels of his profession, but he chose not to, because that meant giving up his outdoor job and moving into some office in the city. My brother was one of the most unpretentious people I have known. Some might say he was naïve. He cared little about world affairs or politics or the size of people’s bank accounts. All he ever wanted to talk about was his dog, hunting, his job and his family, in that order. He was happiest out in the bush and was very good at what he was doing. He was an accomplished woodcarver and turner and an expert designer of high-quality hunting knives, which he built from scratch. And he was a fine shot. I know none better.

My parents were not overly religious. They went to church once or twice a year, usually on Christmas and at Easter. Non-Catholic churches were far and between in this very Catholic part of Germany where we lived. It took an hour and a half to two-hour walk each way from our house to the closest Lutheran church, on the road to Fulda down in the valley.

This routine changed after my brother came back from the war. What happened was that as the war drew to a close and the Russians were about to overrun Berlin and we had not heard from my brother in months, my father made a solemn promise to his Lutheran God that he would go to church every Sunday for the rest of his life and be a true believer, if God would see fit to bring his first-born son home safely from the war. He kept his promise. He became an elder of the church and insisted that I had to accompany him to church every Sunday.

I had no choice. Every Sunday morning after my brother’s safe return home, rain or shine, my father and I would walk to church down the mountain and then back up the mountain. My mother stayed home to cook the Sunday dinner, which was the most important meal of the week. It was the only day of the week we ate meat, except during Lent, when my mother substituted fish, usually carp, sometimes eel.

My mother was an excellent cook and she outdid herself on Sundays. Sunday was dumpling day. It followed a strict routine. First thing Sunday morning, my father and I had to prepare the potatoes. A sizeable number of them had to be peeled and grated. The shredded spuds were then stuffed into a white linen pillowcase and, with the help of a wooden stool stood on its front legs to slant the seat, kneaded, squeezed and pummeled on the slanted stool surface to extract all juices as well as the starch into a bowl. The liquid was discarded; the remaining starch became one of the components of the dumplings. This prep job took about an hour of intensive labor. After my father and I were off to church, my mother took over the cooking. In Germany, the main meal is served at noon and in our house Sunday dinner was at 1:00 o’clock sharp and usually consisted of venison roast, red cabbage and gravy, to go with the homemade raw potato dumplings. After walking ten kilometers to and from church, my father and I were starving and ready for this feast. It wasn’t unusual for us to devour 10 to 15 fist-sized dumplings at one of those meals.

Now let me tell you a few things about my brother. One of the things you need to know to form a mental picture of him is that he held the world record, if there was such a thing, of dumpling eating. He once ate 42 of them. You wouldn’t know from looking at him. He was one of those tough, sinewy, lean guys who can eat all day and never gain a pound. True, those world-record dumplings were not Bavarian raw potato dumplings. They were Prussian dumplings, called “Dampfknoedel” (steam dumplings), much smaller and oval shaped and made with yeast and flour, not potatoes. These dumplings were the staple in the house in which my brother took room and board after the war to make up his high school finals. The landlord was a Lutheran minister, but from the north of Germany, ergo the very un-Bavarian flour dumplings. You could knock somebody out cold with Bavarian dumplings, like my mother made. They were substantial and required a knife and fork to subdue. Leaven dumplings, on the other hand, were soft and could be attacked with only a fork. Still, 42 is not bad, even if they were not real dumplings. It was a number that called for respect. The best I ever did was 12 of my mother’s dumplings, about the equivalent of 24 Prussian ones.

Another thing you need to know about my brother is that he never went to church. He thought of preachers as charlatans. His church was the woods in which he spent most of his days and many nights. He was totally in tune with nature.

His other hang-up was that he hated officers as much as he did parsons. He thought of them as cancers which ought to be excised. He based this low opinion on his experiences during the war. I learned about his proclivities when I found out about the four German General Staff officers, who were hiding in one of my father’s hunting cabins in the woods near our house. This was toward the end of September 1945, five months after the end of the war. I told my brother about them. He was furious and went to investigate. He found that these officers, two major generals and two staff colonels, had stocked the cabin with food and wine and other delicacies the rest of us could only dream about. They were waiting for an opportune time to surrender to the Americans. In the meantime, they were living the life of Riley in that log cabin.

This cabin was about a mile from our village, 150 yards off the main road, well hidden in a little clearing. Every day, between four and five in the afternoon, an American patrol, consisting of two jeeps led by an armored personnel carrier would drive along the road through our village and into the woods beyond. When they got to the edge of the forest, they would speed up and open up with their mounted .30 cal machine-guns. They’d go at full tilt without stopping and spray the woods to the left and right of the road with bullets. They never hit anything. They were afraid of the “Werwolf”, a non-existent clandestine resistance force of Nazi die-hards, which was supposed to carry out guerilla attacks against the Allies, along the lines of the Russian partisans. The Americans never found any "Werwoelfe" or the generals’ hide-away.

My brother decided to end their vacation. He asked me to help him. His weapons of choice were Molotov cocktails to roust the generals and their flunkies. Of course, in those days we, as Germans, had no access to gasoline to make those projectiles. My brother had a plan. We would simply liberate the gasoline from the Americans who came to our village every week to re-educate us kids and to teach us about democracy by showing Disney cartoons. That was to be my job.

It was a major sacrifice for me to skip Mickey Mouse the next time the Americans came and sneak out of class and siphon gasoline out of their ¾ ton truck parked behind my school. My brother had given me a length of rubber garden hose and a liter milk bottle and told me to fill it. It took me a while to get the suction going, but after gagging and spitting gasoline a couple of times, I was able fill my milk bottle. I corked it and hid hose and bottle in the bushes behind the schoolhouse and snuck back into the darkened classroom. Mickey Mouse was in full stride. No one noticed my absence.

That evening, after retrieving the milk bottle and hose, my brother and I emptied the gasoline into green half-liter beer bottles. There was enough for four bottles, each about half full. He then ripped an old shirt of his into strips and jammed them into the beer bottles with one end hanging out. Molotov cocktails can be tricky. The rag has to be soaked in gasoline to ignite and if you’re not careful, they can blow up in your hand. My brother explained to me how to do it right. He’d learned how to from the Russians. I thought I could handle the bottles. His strategy was simple. We would sneak into the woods about a half-hour before the Americans’ daily sprint-through. When we heard their guns open up, we would toss our Molotov cocktails into the cabin and drive the officers out and into the arms of the passing American soldiers.

It was a good plan. When we heard the Americans start to blast away with their machine guns, we lit the fuse on a bottle each and tossed them through the window into the cabin. There was an explosion of fire inside. We tossed the other two bottles in for good measure and hid in the bushes to see what would go down. Nothing happened. The officers didn’t come out, the Americans raced past, blasting away wildly, but apparently saw nothing or if they saw, didn’t want to take a chance and stop and investigate. The cabin burned to the ground. We didn’t stick around, but went home and my brother told my father that he thought he’d seen a fire in the general direction of his hunting cabin. They went to investigate. I was not allowed to come. They were gone a long time.

My brother told me later that they’d found nothing in the rubble of the burned-down cabin. My father opined that the officers had probably been drinking and accidentally set their beds on fire and burned the place down and then fled in a panic. Neither one of them mentioned finding any bodies. The Americans came back the next day to investigate with reinforcements. They had seen the fire, but had thought it better not to stop, afraid of imaginary Nazi partisans. My father told them that he had no idea who had lived in the cabin. He assumed they were DPs (displaced persons), who had used the cabin as a hideout. I thought I knew what had happened in that cabin, but I wasn’t asked for my opinion. The officers had vanished into thin air.

Soon after, our paths parted. My brother went away to forestry school and we lost contact. I eventually moved across the Atlantic and disappeared into the U.S. Army. When I finally re-emerged, we started corresponding again. He helped me survive. If it hadn’t been for him, I would have been totally broke in my first semester at university. He sent me $20 each month in his letters. He didn’t have much money himself. He had a family now. But he sent me what he could afford. He came to my graduation and later, after he retired, he traveled to North America almost every summer. We hunted together in the mountains of Idaho above the Snake River, the hill country of the Ozarks in Missouri, the swamps of southern Florida and in the Valley of 10,000 Smokes on the Alaska Peninsula. We spent weeks together most summers at my cottage on Kennisis Lake in the Haliburton Highlands north of Toronto. He was happy here.

I miss him.

Booze and its Consequences

2008-10-16T21:09:00.000-07:00

When I arrived in America nearly fifty years ago it became clear to me at once that maybe I’d made a big mistake by coming here. Here I was totally alone, without the safety net of family or friends, no backup of any kind. The people here didn’t speak my language and I didn’t speak theirs. My choices were stark. Turn around and go home with my tail between my legs or tough it out. Thank God for Uncle Sam’s Army. It became my family. It wanted me. Without the Army, I surely would have dissipated and failed utterly.

Today, I am of two minds about my time in the service of my Uncle Sam. On the one hand, it turned the boy fresh off the boat into a man, able to handle himself in pretty much any situation. On the other hand, the military made me do things no civilized human being should have to do. I now believe firmly that they picked me because they knew I was alone, had no one to turn to, complain to. I was just an immigrant, not a citizen, expendable, without the risk of anything coming back later and biting them in the ass. Send the kraut, he doesn’t have an option.

There is no denying that service in Uncle Sam’s army caused unbelievable stress in many of his soldiers. Some of those with whom I served, dealt with their emotional problems by suffering breakdowns, wracked by nightmares and ghosts. Others turned to drugs, which were readily available everywhere. Still others turned into homicidal maniacs or offed themselves in despair. Many suffer to this day.

I indulged in – let’s say – reckless behavior and mostly it involved the use of my old standby, booze. By then, of course, I had graduated from beer. My libation of choice became vodka. Vodka takes the edge of pain, dulls the senses and numbs the mind, kills your inhibitions. Vodka erases all taboos. It's also not detectable on your breath, when you're dealing with your betters. It made me a star in the eyes of those who required my particular skills and who sent me out to do their dirty work. More often than not, vodka caused total embarrassment and the odd time, pain.

I remember an occasion on my tour in Europe at a NATO tank gunnery range in northern Germany run by the Brits. Our division was there as part of annual NATO gunnery practice. My military police company was detailed to keep the peace and maintain order. Our British hosts and counterparts invited us to their sergeants’ mess for drinks one night. The Brits discouraged their soldiers from fraternizing with the locals. Each company had their own bar in their barracks, run by the company sergeant major, where soldiers could buy drinks and sandwiches and relax.

There were four of us who showed up at their mess and in less than two hours we had drunk their whole month’ supply of booze. Keep in mind that pay in the British Army was lousy. They made maybe 10% of what we got paid. They couldn’t keep up with us and ran out of money very quickly. At first they were too polite and then too annoyed to accept our offers to pay for them. In any case, we proceeded to clean off their shelves and cupboards. To add insult to injury, I went in search of a washroom and in my stupor stumbled into one of their billets instead and thinking it was the latrine, opened a sergeant’s wall locker and relieved myself on his neatly squared-away dress uniform and hat in the bottom center of his locker, while singing “I wish I were in Dixie.” Needless to say, our hosts got nasty and tried to throw us out. We objected. One thing led to another and a melee erupted. We wrecked the sergeants’ mess before they finally tossed us out on our butts, bloody and black and blue.

We went back the next day to apologize and pay for the damage. But by then word had got around that one of the bloody Yanks had dishonored their queen by urinating on her emblem worn on the front of their dress head cover. We were not invited in.

A few days later, about 50 of us were in the base movie theater. I forget the name of the movie showing that night, but before the film started, the queen appeared on screen riding a horse and the sound system played “God Save The Queen.” Everyone stood at attention, except the Americans, some because they didn’t know any better, some because they were too drunk to stand and some because they “wouldn’t stand for no goddamn' foreigner.”

My friend, Dwayne Klopfenstein, of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was on his second bottle of scotch by then, yelled: “Fuck the queen!” and caused a riot. We trashed the theater, but being outnumbered at least 5 to 1, we got our butts kicked. Our division commander offered an official apology for us and we were banned from fraternizing with the Brits for the duration of the exercise.

Dwayne, by the way, slept with a bottle of whiskey under his pillow and couldn’t dress himself in the morning unless he had swig or two first. Without that, he had the shakes so bad that he couldn’t function. He was a lifer and an excellent MP, as long as he had a slug to calm his shakes.

The Army, of course, knew what was going on, but didn’t step in as long as everyone did his job. It was a fact that many senior NCOs had drinking problems. I remember one sergeant in our outfit. His name escapes me now, but he was a cook and he had a retention problem. Every time he got drunk, which was every Saturday night, he shat himself and soiled his uniform. We made sure to avoid Sunday breakfast, if he was on duty in the mess hall, because he wasn’t too concerned with hygiene.

One time, my drunken buddies and I decided to milk a cow on the way home from a country bar in Germany in the early morning hours. We were passing a pasture with a lonely cow in it and I bragged about the fact that I had grown up in the country and knew how to milk a cow. So we stopped the car and jumped over the fence, marched up to the cow and I proceeded to demonstrate my expertise. The only problem was that the cow turned out to be a bull and he did not take kindly to being milked. He saw red at having his pizzle manipulated and kicked me flat on my butt and then took off after the others, chasing them all over the pasture. I was in pain and had trouble getting up. I crawled back to the car as fast as circumstances allowed while the bull was busy with my pals and just made it back before the beast remembered his erstwhile milkmaid and came after me in a rage. I was in pain for a week.

Another time, my buddy, Cpl. Williams, who was the old man’s driver, and I bought a case of Seagram’s Canadian Mist in the Army Class VI store and headed to a pub we used to frequent in a place called Jebenhausen, a small village about 10 miles from our base. We put the whisky bottles on the table and invited the locals to help themselves. The Germans were used to schnapps that burned your throat as it went down and thought this smooth whisky was not very strong and gulped down the bottles as if they were filled with water. Everyone got pretty wasted. One of the locals present was Fritz Flederwisch, the renowned painter of Mercedes cars, who believed cars should be painted any color, as long as it was black. He had stopped in only for a quick beer and was on his way home to deliver a freshly plucked chicken to his wife for dinner. When he remembered his neglected task after a bottle of rye, he decided he’d better get the chicken home. He tied a string around the carcass, stumbled outside into the rain and, cheered on by the patrons of the pub, walked it home, dragging it on his string through the mud all the way to his house on the outskirts of the village. His wife was not very happy with him and beat him about the head and shoulders with the muddy chicken in front of his pals. She also got together with the other women and they put the pub and the “verdammte Amis” – damned Americans – off limits to their men. It cost us a dozen butterball turkeys from the base PX to undo the ladies’ fatwa.

On rue Pasteur, during my tour in Saigon, I routinely swigged back a jar of Stoli before I went out on my close encounter jobs. It calmed my nerves and my conscience and it gave me the ability to act without fear. I associated vodka with success. Instead of being embarrassed by my boozing, it earned me slaps on the back and status. I couldn’t let anyone know how I really felt, so I drank more.

By the time I returned and left Uncle Sam’s employ at age 24, I couldn’t function without my comforter – vodka. This caused real problems at university, both in the classroom, where I was a total failure and in my dormitory. After a night of particularly heavy boozing, I and a couple of other losers decided to turn on the fire hoses on the second floor of the dormitory and flood the place. When the cops showed up, we jumped out of the second story windows. Luckily, we landed in a huge lilac bush and were able to escape. The police couldn't’t prove who had done the deed, but nevertheless I was told not to come back, that university housing would not be available to me. Someone had ratted me out.

I decided it was time to wean myself off booze. Not that I stopped drinking altogether, I still had the odd beer now and then, but I managed to lose the urge for and dependency on hard liquor. I realized that succeeding at university and being drunk most of the time did not compute very well. I have to thank my English Literature professor for that revelation. He convinced me that I had the potential to make it.

Politics on the Edge of Canada

2008-09-26T16:33:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what it is about B.C. politics, but politicians out here seem to have a propensity to expose their privates in public. Maybe it’s something in the water or the air or maybe it’s the potent weed they’re growing out here. More likely, there are just more loony-tunes attracted to politics here than in other parts of the country.

Case in point: the other night I went to an all-candidates meeting on Saturna Island. Most of the candidates standing for the upcoming federal election were expected to be there. There were supposed to be five of them. Only four showed up, because Julian West, the nominee for the NDP had resigned that day, because he had brandished his woody at a group of teenage girls some years back. He was outed by a posse of Google sniffers. You can check it out at therunagatesclub.blogspot.com.

When I heard this, I thought it auspicious for the rest of the evening. I was hoping for some excitement, some flash. I was thinking that Briony Penn, the candidate for the Liberal Party, who had ridden a horse bare-breasted down the streets of Vancouver in January 2001 in an anti-logging protest, might pull a similar stunt here. But she disappointed and didn’t even have a wardrobe malfunction. No one thought naked horseback riding at all odd here. And I can see that. Doing a Lady Godiva and startling passers-by with your exposed hooters is not in the same league as “wagging your noodle in public.” (see same blog above)

That night, she only waved “my leader Dion’s white book” about at every opportunity. It annoyed me, because I was expecting a bit of a spectacle and all she could do was to parrot from Stephane Dion’s bleached green book. She had no ideas of her own. She could have done with some acting- and voice-coaching as well. Hectoring your audience may work in the classroom, but here it made her look like the rookie she is. The scene reminded me a bit of the days of Chairman Mao’s Red Book. At least he and his disciples knew what to do with power once they got it. I doubt that either Briony or her leader Dion know what to do, should they get elected. Thankfully, the federal Liberals are tanking in B.C.

Then there was the nut bar from the Canadian Action Party. His name is Jeremy Arney and he is a heavy equipment operator and a transplanted Brit, who believes the U.S. is ready to send its army up here any day to occupy Canada, that the Canadian dollar is about to disappear and Canada is on the verge of vanishing from the map. He’s also convinced that aspirins cause strokes. He didn’t have clue about reality or what the issues were on Saturna. I don’t know what it is with these Brits. They don’t seem to get it. I felt like pointing out to him that the vanguard of the American invasion is already here, because I and a number of others in the room were Americans. But I was too polite; I guess I lived in Canada too long. Maybe he’d think we were all part of the American 5th Column and have us arrested for subversive activities. Doing the Chicken Little thing is not a very good party platform. People at the meeting took him for a clown.

To be honest, there were two level-headed wannabe’s at the head table. One was Gary Lunn, who is the incumbent and a Conservative. He was in a no-win situation, since his and his governing party’s record was there for all to see and the audience proceeded to pick him apart on issues on which he was weak or had failed to act to the satisfaction of some in the audience, while the other three had never done anything and had no record, only promises. The socialist fringe, which has quite a following on Saturna, was well represented in the crowd. They tried very hard to paint him into a corner. He kept his cool and came across as pretty level-headed and, boring as it is, nobody has accused him of exposing himself in public or some other perversion.

The other was the chap representing the Greens, Andrew Lewis, another transplanted Brit. This is his third try at getting elected. He came across as pretty coherent and sensible. I say this, even though tree-huggers bring on the urge in me to grab my chainsaw and wreak some havoc. With no one representing the NDP this time around and the Liberals fading fast, he has a chance to get elected this time. On the other hand, I don’t know why anyone would waste their vote on someone who will have no influence whatsoever in Ottawa, should he get there.

All in all, it was a tame and unsatisfactory evening. Nothing even vaguely exotic happened. No perverts burst from the closet. No pyrotechnics erupted. No fisticuffs. No beer mugs flying. No one did a full frontal in support of his or her platform. Boring, boring, boring.

Maybe that’s the Canadian thing.

Are Hunters White Trash?

2008-09-09T16:26:00.000-07:00

Hunting is a matter of survival in places like Africa and large parts of Asia. In Europe it is an activity reserved for the elites and those who want to be. In North America, and Australia for that matter, hunters are thought of as rednecks by the urban elite, as blood-thirsty Bambi-killers or, as the anointed liberal fringe sees it, “white trash, who cling to their guns and religion.” I take exception to that. I like to hunt and I may be white trash, though I’ve never lived in a trailer, took the wife and kids to the Redneck Riviera and trashed the beach nor do I go to family reunions to pick up dates and I’ve not seen the inside of a church in years. Yes, I feel comfortable with guns. I was taught to treat your rifle like you would your bride. Yes, I believe beer is one of the basic food groups. No, I’m not a registered Republican and no, my wife’s hairdo does not get tangled in the ceiling fan nor do I have an old Chevy engine suspended from a tree in my front yard.

I believe real hunters are true keepers of the environment and in tune with nature. The problem is that some who call themselves hunters would be better off if they stayed out of the bush. They think it’s macho to go into the woods and blast away at anything that moves. Armed and dangerous. They ignore the rules and ethics of hunting. They are not the norm. My experience has been that sooner or later these guys get what they deserve. I’ve known all kinds and I’d like to introduce you to a few who stand out, my version of the good, the bad and the ugly.

My first exposure to hunting came when I was a child. My father was a professional hunter and he loved the chase. He managed the game and forests of a baron, who owned all the land where we lived in southern Germany. I was six years old, when I first started to accompany him on his hunting excursions.

His hunting parties usually consisted of his employer and several of his blue-blooded friends, plus a number of doctors, lawyers, judges, senior bureaucrats and hangers-on from the surrounding towns and villages, and three or four American Army officers from the nearby garrison. One of the hunters was a fellow named Kramer. He was the baron’s butler. Herr Kramer was from deepest Silesia and his heavy regional accent sounded hilarious to our Franconian ears. I had an ear for languages and could imitate his accent rather well. My father used to call on me to entertain his hunting buddies, pretending being Herr Kramer in his function as the baron’s butler. My father didn’t like him.

Herr Kramer had tried desperately to get a hunting license. To him, this was the ultimate status symbol. To get a hunting license to this day is an expensive and difficult undertaking there. In those days, the cost of a license was the equivalent of a new car and to get one could take up to a year. You needed to take extensive classes and pass written and oral exams on hunting rules, applicable statutes, regulations and rites, game identification, which included every possible mammal or bird from squirrels to seals, from doves and upland birds to the many types of ducks and geese, most of which you’d never encounter in the wild in Germany, plus gun safety and weapon and ammunition identification. The idea was – and still is – to keep the number of hunters to a minimum, namely the upper classes.

My father was the senior hunting examiner for our region. He didn’t believe a butler should be licensed to hunt. He flunked Herr Kramer three times for cause. This meant Herr Kramer had to go through the whole circus and expense three times. But he was nothing if not persistent. He finally complained to the baron, who suggested to my father that he pass him, since Herr Kramer was sure not to hit anything anyway and, what’s more, he was tired of his constant whining. So Herr Kramer became a licensed hunter. He promptly bought himself a chic green hunting uniform, complete with a hat sporting a “Saubart” - the neck hair of a wild boar - and a brand new semi-automatic hunting rifle, and was front and center at every hunt thereafter.

The baron proved to be right. Herr Kramer never downed anything, but he kept coming. To him the most important thing was to be seen as part of the hunting party. Killing anything was totally immaterial. No one wanted to hunt near him, because no sooner had the signal to start the hunt been given, he would let loose with his repeating rifle and wouldn’t stop until he ran out of bullets. He seldom ran out. He always claimed that numerous bucks and wild boar tried to sneak by his stand. He was always sure to have hit something and insisted the dogs look for his downed game. The dogs never found anything. The other hunters called him “full clip.” My father, whose job it was to allocate the hunting stands, usually put him on the one farthest away from any possible action and out of harm’s way. He called him the “Schlesische Hanswurst” - the Silesian buffoon. The pushers made a wide circle around his stand.

Another nimrod was the baron’s estate manager, Friedebald Baerwolf. He had been a professional soldier, what they called a 12-pointer in Germany. After 12 years service, a soldier in the German Army was entitled to a full pension. Herr Baerwolf had been a supply master sergeant who possessed great organizational skills. He could get you anything, if the price was right. The Baerwolfs were refugees from the city of Plauen, in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, not too far from our village, on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He was a stout fellow and had trouble walking for any length of time. He always parked himself on a stand close to the road. As an ex-soldier, he was an excellent shot and rarely missed. He could also drink most men under the table and was the life of the obligatory post-hunt parties, held at the pub on the evening of the hunt.

He acted as the master of ceremonies and usually started off the festivities with a toast to Herr Kramer and his hunting prowess with a pint crock of potato schnapps. That was the end of Herr Kramer, who felt obliged to empty his stein in response to this salute. Then he sat down and slowly slid from his chair under the table, accompanied by the cheers from around the room. At the end of the evening, a couple of my father’s pushers would toss him into a wheelbarrow, push him home and dump him and his rifle at his doorstep. The Americans loved these quaint rituals, even though they didn’t understand a word that was said. The Germans liked their company, because they always insisted on paying everyone’s tab. These parties were the highlight of the village social scene. The food was good. The beer flowed. Everybody was happy. And that was the point of the exercise.

My father was the only one who didn’t drink on those or any other occasions. He’d sworn off booze as part of his compact with his Lutheran God to get his eldest son, my brother, home safe from the war. He believed in keeping his word.

I have hunted on both sides of the pond. On this side, in Canada, I met a man named Danny Buhl, who ran a rustic lodge in the Haliburton Highlands, north of Toronto. I owned a cottage on the same lake and went on some of his moose hunts over the years. He was originally from eastern Germany and he gave himself the title of master of the hunt. He told everyone that he had been an interpreter for General Vlasov, whose Cossacks fought on the side of the Germans against the Bolsheviks during the war. That probably was unlikely, since he was only 14 years old in 1945. Besides, I don’t think he spoke Russian, at least not the Russian I learned in high school. He had an Ontario outfitter’s license, which allowed him to guide hunts in a 5,000 acre area adjacent to Algonquin Park – prime moose country. He liked to boast of his many hunting successes. Some of his German friends who came to hunt with him, called him “Buhl-shitter” behind his back. His moose-kill rate was zero.

There were maybe ten guys in this hunting party, mostly older Germans. None of them would have been allowed to hunt in Germany. Everybody was ready to go before daylight, except for the Master of the Hunt. Herr Buhl preferred to take his breakfast at 9:00 a.m. No amount of persuasion could change his mind. While we all milled around in the yard eager to get going, he’d be at the breakfast table in his pajamas, savoring his eggs and sausages. No one dared to leave without him. I guess that was a German thing.

Of course, by the time we got into the bush, the moose had settled down for the day and had stopped moving. Herr Buhl’s preferred mode of hunting moose was to assign everyone a stand and then he would ride around in his truck on the various logging trails and look for tracks and chat with hunters from other camps, who were on the move in the bush and who were laughing at him behind his back. They tried to acquaint him with the old Ojibwa saying: “Tracks - moose gone, no tracks – moose come.” He laughed and took them all for rubes. But at the end of the day, they usually had several moose hanging in their camp and we did not.

One of the Germans in that hunting party was named Guenther. I have forgotten his last name. He was a short man, with a big head, a full beard, no neck and a sizeable beer belly hanging over short and very spindly legs. His legs were totally out of proportion to the rest of his body. He always wore pants that buckled below the knees and knee socks. He invariably carried a walking stick that converted into a one-legged leather seat.

One evening we were sitting around in camp talking about hunting raccoon. Guenther let on that he trapped them at his house in the city, then put them in an air-tight box, specially designed and constructed by himself so that it could be hooked to his car’s exhaust pipe, and gassed them. He was proud of his invention and, as a German in particular, didn’t see anything bizarre or unfortunate with this method of killing. The Canadians present shook their head in disbelief, when they heard this German talking proudly about his gas chamber. But he didn’t stop there, but told us he also ate the meat of those gassed raccoons and had the skins tanned and then sewed them into a cozy quilt for his bed.

Another in this hunting party was a German fellow we called “Wolf Lake Willi,” because he rented a trailer on Wolf Lake in our hunting area. His trailer stood next to a groomed bike trail. He had a problem with sharing. To discourage anyone stopping at his place and asking for water or directions, he had mounted a wrecked bicycle over his “No Trespassing” sign. He never had more than one bottle of beer in his fridge, so he didn’t have to offer you one as a courtesy.

One year during our hunt, he lucked into three moose, which made the mistake of passing by his stand. He promptly shot all three, even though he only had a tag for one. This happened around 11 o’clock in the morning. They found two of the moose right away, but the third, a calf, proved elusive, since Willi pointed the search party in the wrong direction. He himself didn’t bother to look for his kill. We came upon the remains accidentally the next day, but by then the wolves had eaten most of it.

Traditionally, the shooter takes care of the basic chores of field dressing the game he kills. Willi, however, was averse to blood and decided instead to go back to the lodge and have lunch. All the Germans decided to vamoose with him and left the two carcasses lying untended in the sun. When my Canadian hunting buddy and one of the less squeamish Germans came upon the dead moose, they were bloated with gas and ready to blow. They gutted and quartered them before the meat spoiled in the heat and got them ready for transport out of the bush. Willi and his pals showed up later in the afternoon in high spirits. He didn’t bother to thank anybody for doing his job for him. Nor did he show any concern about leaving the moose unattended in the field. Needless to say, my friends and I stopped hunting with these clowns.

For nearly twenty years, I have hunted with a group of guys from the Windsor area, in southwestern Ontario. Most of them worked on the line at the Chrysler plant there. You could call them rednecks. We hunted in an area about two hours northwest of Toronto near Walkerton in the Greenock Swamp, one of the last and largest undrained swamps in Ontario. It wasn’t unusual to spot a 10- or 12-point swamp-buck in there. The hunters in this group were mainly Franco-Ontarians, who spoke English with a French syntax, but none of them could speak French anymore. One of them was a fellow named Bobby Lapierre. Bobby was a dry-waller by trade and didn’t think anything of draining a 2/4 of Labatt Blue in an evening. He was an excellent hunter and shot. He lived near the swamp and spent every free hour in the summer scouting for deer and their patterns, building tree-stands and clearing shooting lanes in preparation for opening day on the first Monday in November. He was very proprietary about our hunting area and did not suffer trespassers lightly.

Opening day comes around and Bobby is headed for his favorite deer stand well before daybreak. When he gets there, he finds a fellow from a nearby camp of Portuguese guys from Toronto sitting in his stand. The Portuguese pretended ignorance and refused to leave. Bobby didn’t want to spook the deer unnecessarily and moved on to another stand. That evening, as we were getting ready to head back to camp, Bobby was nowhere to be seen. We waited around ‘til well after dark when he finally appeared. He was limping a bit and explained that he had lost one of his socks in the bush and his boot was chafing his foot. We didn’t ask what had happened to his sock and headed home.

The next day we heard that one of the Portuguese hunters had returned to his stand before daybreak and had settled into his seat, only to find that he had sat in a pile of excrement that someone had thoughtfully left there for him, accompanied by a wool sock in lieu of toilet paper. Needless to say no one thought of trespassing on Bobby’s stand again.

Finally, I want to tell you about a guy from Saturna Island, where I live now. His name is John and he has lived on this island all his life. He invited me to go white tail hunting in the interior of British Columbia, up near the headwaters of the Fraser and Columbia rivers. Beautiful country. We were driving up and down logging roads winding their way along the mountainsides glassing the countryside for deer, when we spotted some grouse working the sides of the road ahead. John stopped the truck, grabbed his .22 rifle and prepared to get out of the cab when his cell phone started ringing. It was his wife. John never lost a beat. He stepped down onto the road and started walking toward the grouse, held the phone to his ear with his left hand and while talking on the telephone, he aimed his rifle with his right hand and shot the grouse. Head shot, of course, because he didn’t want to spoil the edible meat. I was impressed. To him, it was nothing special. Try that trick some time, if you think that’s easy. You’d have to be a multi-tasker extraordinaire.

During the war in Germany, people used to say: “Watch out for those crazy colonials from Canada.” I say, by all means watch them, you might learn something. Hunters are like everyone else. Some are bad, some are good and some are indifferent. To paint them all with the same brush only highlights one’s ignorance and, of course, one’s political leanings. Here’s a question: Is there “black trash”? I’ve not seen it written anywhere. Perhaps that term is too politically incorrect or maybe black guys don’t hunt. But they sure do own guns and they have religion. It’s an enigma.

Ruminations of a Bored Mind

2008-09-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

I am sitting on my deck and I’m looking out over Plumper Sound, sail boats in the breeze, seagulls squawking. The wasps must feel the imminent arrival of cooler weather and the end of their days, because they are getting stupid. A bald eagle perches in the dead top of a fir tree by the cliff below, scanning the water for prey. I have one ear perked for the bleating of the goats on their regular trek through the meadow below my house and the other tuned to B.B. King riffing on his guitar on my CD player. I’m sipping on a cool wheat beer, sucking on a stogy and working on my tan. The world looks good, as if it was made just for me. I’m thinking you got it made, boy.

And then that little but very persistent voice in the back of my head mouthes off, telling me: “What do you mean life is good? You’re bored out of your mind. You should be thinking about a change, some excitement, some mayhem.” I have to agree. My mother used to say that busy fingers kept the mind at ease. My mind is not at ease. Since I sold my business and retired here, I have pretty much done nothing of consequence.

That was not how I spent my life before retirement. I was one of those guys driven to earn. For the last 20 years of my working life I was a media salesman, selling TV advertising and that is really a job for the young and energetic. To be successful in that business, you had to hustle. I’ve never been idle for long in my life, ‘til now.

At one time or another before I settled on the advertising business, I’ve held down some strange jobs in my life. I worked as an obituary writer with a major metropolitan newspaper, the jump-off point for most newspaper flacks back in the day before the internet, with great aspirations for my bi-line on page one above the fold. I lasted six months, lured away by money and the enticement of writing sentiments for Hallmark Cards. That move turned out to be major mistake. Once you’ve been through the grinder of Hallmark’s OK Committee, which vetted every word written and every design before it saw the light of publication, you knew that this was not going to be a lifetime career. I’ve been a waiter (albeit only for three days, before the restaurant’s owner suggested that it’d be a good thing if I looked for more suitable employment).

Have you ever run the Money Machine at the Dade County Fair in Florida, with a gun-toting state trooper keeping an eye on you and all that cash? Or staged a Julio Iglesias concert? I have and I don’t recommend either as a career choice. I’ve worked as check-canceller at a bank (again for a brief period due to my unsuitability to rote), an assembly-line quality control inspector at a ball-bearing plant, a grain elevator repairman, a faculty club house boy, a whorehouse bouncer (a job that paid very little, but at least offered some collateral benefits), a house painter, grain-truck driver, construction worker and as a pilot for a funeral home in South Florida. (Don’t ask. You really don’t want to know what possible use a funeral parlor had for a pilot.) And I whiled away considerable time in the employ of my Uncle Sam, upholding the law and wreaking havoc. I almost forgot, I also was a Fuller Brush salesman once. Remember them?

The early experiences in my life, the war and its aftermath, taught me that life is iffy. All my life, I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone had a bead on me, was gaining on me, as Satchel Paige so deftly put it. It taught me to never let down my guard, to stay focused. And that seems to be the problem, because now that I am comfortable, I have let down my guard and I feel lost. During my indenture to Uncle Sam, I reached for the vodka bottle to shut up my conscience. I set great trust in its calming qualities. But now that doesn’t work anymore. Overexposure, I guess. My old handler in Uncle Sam’s service, who was from deepest Arkansas, used to say: ”When in doubt, kill the sumbitch.” But that was then, this is now.

Sometimes I wonder, if my father, who’s been dead for over 30 years, is watching me, judging my every move, as he did when I lived in his house. My father had high hopes for me and I disappointed him deeply when I sailed for America. Would he approve of what I’ve done since?

I have started and run businesses and I was pretty good at schmoozing. I never was very good at sitting on my butt and idling. But none of the activities I’ve participated in, turn my crank anymore. I just can’t see myself being involved in any of that again. Been there, done that. So what should I turn my attention to?

I’m thinking about all the things I haven’t tried. Maybe I should try the undertaking business, a trade with a secure future or start an oyster farm. Maybe write my memoirs or become a highwayman. Your money or your life. But the thing is, what you do doesn’t matter. What you do and how you live in your head are two totally different things. My mind flashes back and drags up bogeymen that I have kept locked away, I thought securely and forever. Boredom does that to you. All the dead, friends and those who were not, lined up like body bags on a faraway tarmac. So many. There’s only one lesson to be drawn from that picture and that is I survived. Get over it.

So, here’s my plan: I’m going fishing.

Give Me A Wardrobe Malfunction, Please

2008-08-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

I’m fed up with perfection which assaults you anytime you turn on your TV, starting with the blond vacuous female talking heads and news readers that fill the screen of every channel and pass for news anchors. They all look like clones of Paris Hilton. Every blond hair is in place just so, their make-up is flawless and they’re holding forth on world events. They look mint. Never mind that they are incapable of an original thought and haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about. I’m always hoping that their teleprompter go berserk. Where are the Walter Cronkites, the Peter Jennings, the Chet Huntleys? Where are the warts, the blemishes, the things that make us human? It’s depressing. I’m tempted to reach for the vodka bottle in despair.

I was watching the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies from Beijing and the picture you saw was everyone doing their thing in unison. No one stepped out of line, nobody moved right when everyone else moved left. And those soldiers who hoisted the Chinese flag up the pole. The old Prussian generals must have turned over in their graves in envy. The staging of all the hundreds of sporting events went without one flaw.

I was looking for at least one wardrobe malfunction or some other screw-up. I have to admit, I was poised to see my hopes fulfilled, when one of the Jamaican women sprinters in her enthusiasm at winning almost let one of her nipples peek out from under her skimpy track suit, but no, the camera cut away before my prurient desires could be satisfied. I was hoping for one of those Chinese sky-walkers to come crashing down or at least trip and stumble. But I was foiled. Just more clones. I confess I’m attracted to bedlam.

And what is it about those sports like race walking, rhythmic gymnastics and synchronized swimming and diving? I mean, true, some of these race walkers had pretty agile butt cheeks, but what’s the point of walking when you could reach the finish line much faster by running? I can maybe see the attraction, if you watch these guys from the back, but from the front, they look ridiculous. If I want to see that kind of hip and butt action, I can watch Fashion TV. Those models are just as anemic looking, but they don’t have hairy arms and legs.

And waving a red ribbon through the air or doing the hula-hoop doesn’t strike me as sport. At least they should have used one of those giant foam hands with the extended finger and do some variation of the tomahawk chop while skipping rope and swiveling their hips. I could get into that. And what about those women with the clamp on their noses? That’s a very unattractive accessory. I’m sure Martha Stewart would have some suggestion for them. What’s next for Olympic sports? Juggling, hopscotch, synchronized chess?

I was drawn to the contact sports. I was thinking that boxing, wrestling and all those Asian martial arts would surly generate some havoc. I don’t know what the judges were looking for, but these guys were whaling on each other and no points were ever scored. The outcome seemed orchestrated. The closest they came to anything resembling chaos and the only bright moment for me was the Cuban taekwondo fighter, who finally lost it and did what they all should have done – kick the referee in the head and cold-cock him. That Cuban should have been up on the podium for doing what needed to be done. He’s on my and Fidel’s highlight reel. I cheered for him.

In disgust, I switched to coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Denver. I thought, surely politicians south of the border are not perfect. I was looking for mayhem a la Chicago 1968. But I was thwarted again. True, the various media tried their best to conjure up some perceived controversy with the dames who interpret body language and voice inflection, but that was pretty lame stuff. I was hoping for a brawl or at least some nasty sound bites, some cat fights. What I got was bland political correctness. Yada-yada-yada.

There was Hillary – again with the peach pant suit, which makes her look like she should audition for a clown gig with the Cirque du Soleil – freshly coiffed, with a determined smile pasted on her face and regretful eyes, exhorting her followers to forget about the past and vote for the guy she had derided as a lightweight only weeks earlier. Everyone seemed overjoyed and cheered and waived their blue UNITY and CHANGE signs in unison. There is an Olympic sport in the making – synchronized sign waving. The Chinese would probably win that event too.

Hand me the bottle. I'm in pain.

Why I Stay Away From Cruises

2008-08-27T20:40:00.000-07:00

My friends keep telling me how much fun their last cruise was, leisurely travel, fabulous weather, excellent food, luxurious service, exotic ports, interesting sights, fun activities and side trips, new friends. I will not be caught dead on a cruise. I base that assessment on experience.

I took a seven-day cruise once, back in 1959. We left on the 23rd of August, the height of the summer (and hurricane) season. This was before the time of widespread jet travel and ocean liners were the common and preferred mode of travel between Europe and North America. Leisure cruises were not the norm that they are today. I took this cruise on the MS “Berlin,” built in 1925 at Newcastle-on-Tyne, as the Gripsholm for the Swedish American Line, refitted and refurbished in 1954 and sold to North German Lloyd for the North Atlantic run between Bremerhaven and New York, with stops at LeHavre and Southampton. By today’s standards, she was a modest 18,000-ton passenger liner, 590 feet long, 74 feet wide, with a 29 foot draw and a cruising speed of 16 knots. She was able to accommodate 976 passengers, 80 in 1st class, 302 in 2nd and 594 in 3rd class.

My cabin was # 207, bed K, in 3rd class, just above the waterline, among the unwashed. I shared this space with a retired German baker from Chicago, who was returning from his annual pilgrimage to the beer halls of Bavaria, and a red-headed black man from Raleigh, North Carolina, who spoke perfect German with a strong Berlin accent. This was a bit disconcerting to me. I didn’t expect a black man to speak my language as well or better than I did. He had earned a doctorate in philosophy from the Free University in Berlin and was on his way home after two years in Germany. He was apprehensive about going home and tried to explain to me what segregation meant. This was a concept to which I simply could not relate. I had no idea what he was talking about.

Let’s look at the positive aspects of cruising, about which my friends wax so lyrical, one at a time. Let’s take leisurely travel and fabulous weather first. My crossing lasted seven days and was very rough once we left Southampton. The captain chose the northern route to avoid the hurricane zone. It didn’t seem to make a bit of difference. The weather was atrocious. The second day out, we ran into a north Atlantic storm with waves that dwarfed the ship’s superstructure and sent huge walls of water crashing over the bow. Obviously, the deck was off limits. This storm lasted for three days.

As for fun activities, they were restricted to trying to stay upright and not to crash down the stairs, as the ship heaved and bucked. Sleeping was impossible, because you had to concentrate on not falling out of bed each time the ship rolled. Entertainment consisted of the John Wayne oater “Rio Bravo.” I saw it six times. The shipboard orchestra tried valiantly, but to no avail. They kept crashing out of their chairs. Dancing was impossible. Some tried, but it turned out to be more of a wrestling match than a dance. The final day of the trip, the ship spent heaved to in thick fog off New York.

I would rate my experience with excellent food and luxurious service as mediocre at best down on the C Deck. I’m sure it probably was better up among the washed and groomed on the top decks. Most of the passengers were seasick the whole time. I and my cabin mates were among the few who were unaffected by this malady. The weather confined everyone but the crew indoors. The old baker and I spent most of our time eating the meals served in the nearly empty 3rd class dining room and at the bar drinking Cognac, which the old man firmly believed prevented seasickness. He seemed to be right.

On several occasions, we snuck up to the 2nd class dining room and helped ourselves to the uneaten meals there. Seasickness was an equal opportunity malaise. The old baker introduced me to lobster and caviar and prime rib. We were in hog heaven. We also tried to get access to the 1st class deck, but it was barred to the unwashed from the lower decks. The ever-watchful stewards on the top deck, who had no sense of humor or equality whatsoever, foiled us. They’d obviously rather throw the uneaten food over the side before allowing the peasants to taste it. Our only satisfaction was that the swells on the top deck were as seasick as most everyone else.

On the morning of the seventh day, the fog finally lifted and the “Berlin” sailed into New York harbor, past the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and docked at its pier in Hoboken, New Jersey, not exactly an exotic port. I swore to myself that I would never step on another cruise ship again, if I could at all help it.

Alas, this was not to be. I have to tell you about my second experience cruising the North Atlantic. This took place in early December 1962. I admit that December is probably not the best month for a balmy crossing, but I had little choice. This cruise was on the U.S. Military Sea Transport Ship “General Simon B. (for Bolivar) Buckner,” on its regular run again between Bremerhaven and New York, without stops in between. She had been commissioned in January 1945, built by Bethlehem-Alameda Shipyards of Alameda, California, with a 9,676 ton displacement, and had a civilian crew. I was on my way back from service in Europe to a stop-over at historic Fort Hamilton, New York, en route to beautiful downtown Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City, as the natives now call it. And it was even less fun the second time around.

It started out pretty good. When I arrived at the ship’s berth at Columbus Quay in Bremerhaven for embarkation, I was late and nearly missed out on this adventure, due to the fact that my exit immunization record was deemed to be unsatisfactory. I had faked the records to avoid getting the required injections. The medics insisted on giving me all six obligatory shots, before they would let me board and escape their jurisdiction. As a result, I missed all duty assignments on board, because this was a working cruise. All the enlisted personnel had to pull guard and mess duty and the NCOs’ had to supervise those duties.

My lateness and the resulting lack of assigned duties proved to be a major bonus, because the minute we reached the open Atlantic, again on the northern route, we were battered by a fierce winter storm and all doors and hatches were battened down tight. I withdrew to my bunk and consulted my old standby – Cognac. I had planned ahead and carried ten days’ supply in my foot locker. Once again, it worked like magic. It didn’t take long before most in our compartment were seasick. The floor of the troop deck in our quarters, which held 120 men on triple-decker bunks, was soon awash in vomit which slopped back and forth with the motion of the waves and the place stunk to high heaven. There was no ventilation.

It became very difficult to maintain the Army’s standards of cleanliness and organization. The ship was a WWII Liberty ship and the comfort level was basic to begin with. She had seen better days. The ship shuddered, moaned and creaked as it was tossed around by wind and waves. You had the feeling she was going to break up at any time and head for Davy Jones’ locker.

To give you an example of the ship’s amenities, let me give you a tour of the head in our quarters. It was a square open room, divided into sinks along one wall, showers along another and the other two held the toilets. There were no partitions or doors. There was no fresh water, only salt water. The toilets flushed straight into the ocean, which was fine in calm weather, but with a storm raging outside, the waves shot straight up through the pipes and onto the floor. The upside was that you saved on toilet paper, if you could take the water pressure. You had to be able to multi-task. You had to avoid cutting your throat while shaving in a wildly pitching ship, while simultaneously making sure you avoided the shit and vomit ricocheting back and forth between your feet in the sea water, all this while clinging desperately to the sink to avoid falling headlong into the mess on the slick floor. Needless to say, discipline soon flagged on our deck.

The poor slobs, who thought they had caught a break from the funk below by being posted on deck for guard duty, found themselves on duty cold and wet, huddling in the exhaust fumes from the galley to keep warm and were puking their guts out. I have no idea what they were guarding against, since no one dared or was allowed to step out on deck and no one was trying to board this rust bucket.

The mess itself was a challenge too. All food was served in large compartmentalized metal trays. You ate at tables fitted with a two inch high metal rim, designed to catch the food before it splashed on the floor. The storm made it difficult to find your mouth with your fork and everything on your tray tended to end up together in one big pile. There always was someone at your table who lost control of his tray and let it crash into everyone else’s, causing even more chaos. Soon everyone turned green and started hurling. There was the odd fist fight. Those unfortunate ones who got picked for KP had to clean up the mess in addition to scouring pots and pans, trays and utensils in the galley. The air in there got pretty thick and hot and funky. I stayed away from the mess hall and instead I lived on Cognac, white bread and Camel cigarettes for the duration of the storm and survived unscathed.

This cruise lasted ten days and ended on the 20th of December in a blinding snowstorm. I again swore never again. This time I’ve been able to stick to my convictions. I haven’t set foot on a cruise ship since. And I don’t plan to, no matter how rosy the descriptions. I have been to the dark side.

My First Car

2008-08-22T17:13:00.000-07:00

Most guys remember every detail of their first car. It’s right up there with the first time you got to second base with your girlfriend. It’s a huge step. It means you’ve left childhood behind and you’re now operating on a more exalted level. The old bicycle that used to get you around, sits forgotten in the garage. You knew you were grown up, even if your parents tried to put a damper on your enthusiasm with their cautionary tales of speeding and drinking and driving. I can see my first car as clearly as if it were parked in my driveway today..

With most guys in North America my age, this momentous event happened the day they turned 16. And without fail, it involved an American car, usually an Impala or Bonneville or a Mustang. Nobody drove a Japanese make then and European cars were out of reach for most kids. I was a late bloomer. When I joined the US Army at age 20, I didn’t know how to drive. My father was always chauffeured everywhere and there was no need to learn how to drive. When I got posted to a Military Police Company in Germany, I spent my first four months overseas riding around the German countryside with a staff captain from 4th Armored Division Headquarters, talking to the mayors of the various villages through which we had driven our tank division on the way to Grafenwoehr, a vast military training area east of Nuremburg, which had been used for maneuvers since the Kaiser’s time.

Because I spoke German, it was my job to negotiate payment of damages caused by our passage through their lovely villages. They all seemed to be in need of new roads, bridges and fences. If the price of potatoes or rye or sugar beets was below expectations, our tanks seemed to be the answer to their prayers. The US Army paid top dollar for damages, much better than what they could get selling their crops on the open market. Our division’s tank drivers must have had the worst driving record in the Army, if you looked at the supposed havoc they left behind in the many villages on route to the maneuvers.

My captain, who was the official Maneuver Damage Control Officer, didn’t speak German, so it became my job to negotiate. Besides, he liked Bavarian beer too much to care. I did pretty well. The Germans didn’t mind paying me a commission for my efforts to get them just compensation for the damages they claimed. The Army didn’t care either, because at the end of the day the German government covered the cost of the US Army’s presence in Germany in those days.

After three months of this duty, I had earned enough to get my hands on a 1954 Mercedes 300d. The Germans called this car the “Adenauer,” because this was the car their chancellor rode around in. It demanded respect.

This car was a real pimpmobile for that time. I was a four-door sedan with rosewood paneling all around, cloth curtains, which could be opened and closed electrically, on all the windows and, best of all, fully reclining front seats that turned the interior of this car into a very comfortable bed. The car was black with a beige cloth interior and weighed close to two tons. It was built on a pre-war chassis and had a modern 3-liter straight-6 engine that produced 175 horses. It had a standard 4-speed manual transmission, with the gear shift lever mounted on the steering column.

This is significant, because if you shifted gears too vigorously the lever would come off in your hand and you were stuck in whatever gear you happened to be driving in at the time. If you were in fourth gear when the gear shift lever disconnected, it became very difficult to slow the car down. It had no power brakes. You’d think the emergency brake would come in handy at a time like that. But it was dicey as well. It was activated by means of a handle connected to a rather dainty chain under the dashboard. This chain had a tendency to snap, if you jerked the brake handle too forcefully.

The car also was equipped with a supercharger that could be engaged manually once you were in fourth gear and past 100 kph. It pushed the car’s top speed to over 180 kph and reduced its fuel efficiency to less than 8 miles per gallon. This meant you had to travel main roads only, since there were no filling stations on country roads. Keep in mind, in those days there were no speed limits on German roads. One of this car’s other interesting features was a hydraulic load leveling suspension, operated by a switch on the dash, which allowed you to raise or lower the car’s rear end, depending on what load you had in the back. It was a beauty. The only problem was that I didn’t have a driver’s license and didn’t know how to drive stick. As well, the car didn’t have valid plates. I couldn’t register it. For that you needed a valid driver’s license.

To remedy that, I got my roommate, who was the old man’s driver, to teach me. We took my car onto the back roads around our garrison and I learned how to drive or, to put it more truthfully, to terrorize the dogs, geese, chickens and people in the many small villages around the city. To obscure the fact that the car lacked registration, I packed mud over the expired date stamp on the plates. No need to worry about police, because as a member of the MPs, I was immune from arrest by the Germans.

I soon mastered the complexities of the clutch and was fortunate enough not to hit anything or anybody. I did find out that once the supercharger was engaged, it became very hard to slow this beast down. The brakes didn’t grab very well. The car also didn’t have power steering. It required maximum effort to muscle it around corners. Parking was a real struggle. Driving this car was not for the faint-hearted. But I persevered and after four weeks of scattering chickens and dogs and the odd group of panicked Germans, I went to our motor pool and took the Army’s driving test. The test vehicle was a deuce- and-a-half truck. To shift gears in this monster required you to double clutch. I passed.

To me that Benz was a means to an end. To the Germans it was a symbol of respect. This was the top of the line. It was a symbol of the 1950’s in Germany. You couldn’t tell from the outside that it was six years old and had 150,000 kilometers on its odometer. Only people with real money or influence could afford to drive a car such as this. The fact that I was only a Private in the US Army became irrelevant. In the eyes of the locals I was somebody to be reckoned with. It immediately improved my odds with the local ladies. They loved to ride in it and be seen in it. They invited me to their homes, introduced me to their parents, who were not adverse to the perceived importance of that Mercedes parked in front of their door. The reclining seats turned out to be real handy and a major bonus.

About a month after I got my driver’s license, I was driving with a German fellow, whose daughter I was dating at the time and who was the mayor of Jebenhausen, a small village about 10 km from base, on the main highway between Ulm and Goeppingen. I had the supercharger engaged and was doing about 160, when I came over the top of a hill and up behind a slow-moving produce truck with oncoming traffic. I tried to down-shift and brake hard, but not in time to avoid crashing into the back of the truck. Its trailer hitch buried itself in my radiator. Screeching metal and hissing steam, but we came to a stop. Nobody was hurt. The car’s engine was still ticking over. We both got out. There wasn’t a scratch on the truck. My grill and radiator were a mess. I got back into the car, put it in reverse and floored it. The car broke lose, the grill didn’t. The radiator was pretty much a total loss.

After a brief conversation with the mayor, the truck continued on its way and the two of us walked up to the closest farmhouse about half a mile down the road, where we asked the farmer, if he could give us a tow to Jebenhausen, where there was supposed to be an excellent garage. The farmer thought he could. Going back to base was out of the question, because an accident meant the automatic suspension of your driving privileges. The farmer hitched up two oxen and led them to our car, where he hooked a chain around the front bumper and proceeded slowly down the road with the sorry looking Mercedes in tow.

We were a sight to behold. In any case we made it to the garage, where soon half the town showed up to gawk. The mechanic told me it would take a couple of weeks to get the parts, but that he could fix it and make it look good as new. Then he introduced me to his brother. His name was Fritz Flederwisch and he was a house painter. He told me that he would be happy to re-paint my car and make it look like new. I asked him to paint the car fire-engine red, while he was at it. He thought I was out of my mind and told me that he would paint it any color I wanted as long as it was black. Only black would do. End of story.

I didn’t feel like arguing with him about the positive qualities of other colors, particularly their attraction to women. But I did mention to him that I needed to show some change in the look of the car, otherwise no one on base would believe me that I had a paint job done and they would start to ask questions and then my accident would come to light and my drivers license would be in jeopardy. It would mean the end of our beautiful relationship and all those maneuver-damage payments. Mr. Flederwisch pondered this dilemma for a long while and then he said that he could see white as an alternative to black, but that was as far astray as he was willing to go. So white it was going to be.

After this momentous decision we all proceeded to the Golden Hind pub and got drunk on Baerwurz, a nasty licorice-flavored concoction made from the roots of various herbs that was supposed to be good for you and tasted god-awful.

Three weeks later, I had my car back. It looked weird, gleaming white with a beige interior. I’m sure I owned the only white Mercedes Benz in Germany. Nobody on the base was any the wiser, but the Germans all stared wherever I went with that car. I couldn’t hide. They had never seen a white Mercedes before. It just wasn’t done. That is, ‘til they saw my GI license plate. Then they nodded. They understood – a crazed Ami. That explained everything. The ladies didn’t seem to mind.

What's Up With The Lack Of Peasants Here?

2008-08-13T11:51:00.000-07:00

Some call hunting a vile blood sport and think it should be banned. I think that’s an ignorant argument, which shows that those opposed to hunting haven’t spent much time in the woods and they’ve probably never been hungry. I wonder, as they are chowing down on their New York sirloin, what they think happens in a slaughterhouse. Perhaps they should visit one sometimes, if they think hunting is barbaric.

Let’s get this straight, hunting is not a sport. If you want sport, try skeet or trap shooting. Hunting is about putting food on the table. If you can’t eat it, don’t shoot it, unless it’s a fox or coyote skulking around your chicken coop. Then, by all means, let ‘em have it. Hunting is pretty much the same the world over. The only major difference I’ve found is that there is a total absence of peasants in North America. I don’t know why this is so. I was brought up to believe that for a successful hunt, you needed peasants. And the peasants needed the money this job paid.

The closest thing to peasants I’ve seen here are migrant workers. But they never seem to be around when you need them. Maybe this is a matter of timing. Hunting season is usually in late fall and by then the itinerant workers have returned home. Maybe there’s a lack of trust and they’re not comfortable with a bunch of white guys blasting away at anything that moves in the bush. Or it may be a language problem, a lack of understanding. I’m stumped.

The job of the peasants was to push whatever game there was before them through the bush towards the hunters, by whistling and yelling and beating on trees with sticks. The hunters were posted on the edge of the woods blocking egress. The trick was to shoot the rabbits and stags and, sometimes, wild boar, without hitting the peasants. My father, who organized countless hunts in Germany over the years, never lost a peasant to gunfire or any other hunting mishap. In Germany, a hunting party consisted of hunters and peasants. The peasants got paid for this job and got to partake of the feast served on the evening of the hunt in the local pub, paid for by the hunters. You never had a hunting drive without peasants.

I tried to persuade my friends here to try this system of division of labor, but they felt it wouldn’t work here due to the total dearth of peasants and they also brought up the issue of liability. Peasants seem to be a European phenomenon and I never heard of a peasant suing. That was just not done.

Here, half the hunters act as pushers, while the other half blocks. Unlike in Europe, the pushers here carry guns and can blast away at game in the bush. This can lead to disoriented wildlife running in all directions rather than straight at the blockers and bullets flying everywhere. You have to be careful out there. To me that’s an inefficient use of manpower and it can be hazardous to your health.

During and after the war we pretty much lived off what we grew in our garden and what my father brought home from his hunting excursions. You have to keep in mind that our money was worthless and the store shelves were empty. If you wanted to eat, you had to go out and find food. Nevertheless, we lived fairly well. Our routine changed for a while after the end of the war, because Germans weren’t allowed to possess firearms. The Americans would shoot you on sight, if they caught you with a gun. This meant that my father couldn’t hunt anymore. My father went by the rules and if the rules prohibited him from hunting, so be it.

My older brother, Willi, had no such scruples. He was 19 and a veteran of three years of war. Starting in the summer of 1945, once he was back on his feet from his ordeal as a POW of the Americans, he went out every night to hunt – or to poach, if you want to put a fine point to his activities. He hunted at night, because it was safe, since the Americans didn’t come out after dark. They stayed in their barracks and waited for daylight, before they ventured out into the countryside. My brother supplied our house with meat, usually venison or rabbit, sometimes wild boar and the odd time a calf that he claimed was a stray that had crossed the border from the East. We lived within walking distance of the border between the American and Soviet zones of occupation.

The American occupiers also liked to hunt. Several army officers came to my father’s place in the fall of 1945 and asked him to organize a hunt for them. He, of course, didn’t have any choice in the matter. Their interpreter explained to him that accommodating the Americans could be advantageous for us. My father obliged. Organized hunting is much the same everywhere. There was lots of game, including deer, and the Americans shot a number of them or at least they thought they did. They were sure of it. Yet the downed deer could never be located.

What happened was that my father had instructed my brother and me to find whatever the Americans shot and spirit it away, so it would end up later on our table. This could get hairy sometimes, what with bullets whizzing about and the necessity to remain invisible. It helped that the Americans were leery of crawling around the bush. They saw crazed Nazis behind every tree. We were pretty good at this job. We hid the game under water, in fox and badger dens, in old tree stands. Even my father’s dogs couldn’t find them, but that’s not saying much, because those dogs only listened to my father. The Americans were vexed. They couldn’t understand what was happening with their downed game. Maybe they knew what was going on, but they couldn’t prove anything. They just kept coming back and trying. We gave them an “A” for effort.

Finally, after several weeks of this, their interpreter suggested that their success rate might improve, if the Germans had weapons and were allowed to hunt with them. Of course that was highly illegal at the time, but the interpreter, who had been a police constable and was a friend of my father’s, assured them that my father was trustworthy and wouldn’t rat them out to the MPs. Their desire to bag a stag prevailed. The next time they came, they showed up with boxes full of food, real coffee, chocolate and American cigarettes, all goodies we hadn’t seen in years and more valuable than cash. They also brought Army-issue M-1 carbines for my father and his friends and invited them to hunt along with them. My father wasn’t too impressed by a carbine, but it had a 30-round magazine to compensate for its lack of accuracy. He gave them credit for trying. As of that day, the Americans’ hunting success improved dramatically. No more missing deer.

Besides the hunting, they liked the hunting customs and the parties that followed in the evening, where hunters and peasants would get together in the local pub for ragout of rabbit with dumplings, washed down with lots of beer. The Americans always picked up the tab. Until my father’s changed status from observer to participant, the ragout for the Americans consisted of what we called “Dach-hasen,” literally roof rabbits – cats. Everyone was in on the joke, except, of course, the Americans. They loved it all, nevertheless. This continued until my father was allowed to carry a rifle and to hunt again. After that, the local cats were once again safe from persecution and it was rabbits for everyone.

The Americans were impressed with the German hunting traditions, like the bugle calls before and after the hunt, the green hunting uniforms and hats with their whipping stag beards, the discipline of the shooters and the pushers and the camaraderie at post-hunt get-togethers. Keep in mind that this all happened at a time when fraternization with Germans was strictly forbidden by order of General Eisenhower. These guys were taking major chances. They continued to come to our house for years to hunt. One of them, a colonel in Military Intelligence – an oxymoron, if ever there is one, I later found out – became my friend and later sponsored my move to the U.S. He thought I had potential and I was too impressed to question his motives.

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On the Sour Taste of Fear and the Sweet Smell of Death

2008-07-25T13:18:00.000-07:00

If you ask someone whether they’ve ever felt fear and they say they have never been afraid, you know right away that you’re either dealing with a liar or a psychopath. Fear is one of those primal emotions that grips you at your core. There is nothing shameful in being fearful. In fact, it is healthy to feel fear, because it clears your mind of everything nonessential and forces you to focus on solving the problem at hand. Fear is something you can taste and smell. It’s the dank smell of cold sweat and mold and shit. It loiters on your tongue and creeps into your nose. There’s nothing else like it. I have known fear. What stands out in my mind is the time in my life when fear was the gourmet flavor of the day. You never forget. Let me give you three examples of what I’m talking about.

When I was six years old, American fighter pilots occasionally used us kids for target practice with their planes, if they caught us out in the open on our way home from school. In the early spring of 1945, Field Marshal Kesselring, the commander of what was left of the German Army West, had his headquarters in a special train in the valley below our house. He used the adjacent railroad tunnel to hide from Allied planes. The planes came in low over the hills from the west, hoping to surprise that train out in the open. They never did catch him. To compensate for their lack of success in doing the field marshal, they’d open up on us with their 20mm on-board cannons. It probably was a game for them to terrorize children. Maybe they thought they were ridding the world of little Nazis. Maybe that’s how they calmed their conscience, if they had one.

For us it was sheer terror. We dove into the ditch and dug our faces into the muck and willed ourselves to be invisible. You don’t know what terror is until you had a P-51 Mustang strafe you from up close. The sudden explosive roar of the 12-cylinder Merlin engines as the planes swooped down on us, the rattle of the machine guns and board cannons, the whine and thumps of the bullets churning up the road next to us and ricocheting over our heads, the clatter of shell casings raining down around us, the stench of cordite, the stink of shit, all froze us in place in utter panic. Every time this happened, we knew we were dead. We just waited for the inevitable. Yet we lived. But the terror we experienced stayed with us to this day. I can still taste it. It scarred us.

After the planes disappeared over the hills, we picked ourselves up out of the dirt, beat the dust out of our clothes, picked the mud out of our hair, laughed and pretended that we had not been scared shitless and we collected spent 20mm shell casings to bring home as souvenirs.

In the previous year, in September of 1944, my mother and I were visiting my grandparents and my aunt in Schweinfurt, home of the famous ball-bearing plants, which were an essential cog in Hitler’s war machine. Their output insured that the Tiger tanks kept rolling and the Messerschmitts continued flying. They also ensured that Schweinfurt was the repeated main bombing target of the Allies. My mother and I got caught in a daylight bombing raid and had to seek shelter in a high-rise air-raid bunker near my grandmother’s house. The shelter was jammed with frightened people and when the bombs started dropping and exploding all around outside, the building, hit by the bombs’ pressure waves, started swaying back and forth and clouds of mortar and cement dust rained down on us, together with the odd chunk of concrete. Women and children were screaming and crying and moaning. The lights flickered off and on.

My mother and I found a seat on a bench along a wall and my mother made me crawl under the bench. She cowered over me and prayed. Someone kept babbling on about the fact that the shelter was perfectly safe, what with the concrete being six feet thick and steel-reinforced to withstand the pressure waves and the bombs could only penetrate if two hit exactly the same spot, one after the other, from the same angle. The asshole was trying to work out the odds of that happening when the inferno outside subsided.

We were lucky, because in some of those terror raids the firestorm got so intense that it sucked the oxygen right out of these sanctuaries and everyone in those shelters asphyxiated.

When we got outside after the all clear, the city was in flames. You could hear the roar of the fires. The odd dog was barking out of sight somewhere. There were no voices. The bells of the ambulances and fire engines – they didn’t have sirens then – sounded in the distance. The incendiary bombs had set off a firestorm that had gutted the insides of most of the buildings and melted the asphalt in the streets. The carbonated remains of people, some seemingly in full stride, who had not made it to shelter and had got stuck in the burning tar, stood here and there in the street like apocalyptic groupings, caught trying to flee from the heavenly onslaught.

They had shrunk to maybe four to four and a half feet in height with their arms raised to chest level and bent like a boxer advancing in the ring. They looked like charred pieces of wood, with their bloated innards spilled out, blood red and exposed. Their guts had boiled and popped out through what used to be their skin.

What I remember most, though, is the smell. It was almost like a taste on your tongue, a sweet, sickly perfume wafting along the burning streets. I had no idea what it was then. The answer came to me years later in the humid jungles of Vietnam – the sweet smell of the decomposing dead. It is always with me. That day, 329 American B-17 Flying Fortresses, escorted by 338 P-51 Mustang fighters had tried to wipe out the ball-bearing plants and the railroad yards again. They had missed their target. It was the heaviest raid on Schweinfurt of the war.

The city itself was another matter. The city center, with its medieval framework buildings was pretty much flattened and what remained standing after the high explosive bombs got through with it was burned to the ground in the firestorms caused by the phosphor bombs which always concluded an Allied air-raid. The idea behind this sequence was the high explosive bombs and air-mines would destroy the roofs of buildings giving the phosphor bombs access to the flammable insides of the buildings. This plan worked extremely well, except with the ball-bearing plants. Their production pretty much survived unscathed.

Another time, in the summer of 1944, my mother and I were in Hilders, a town of about 1,000 inhabitants about two hours walk from our house on the road to Fulda, to visit our dentist. I had a terrible toothache. I was in the dentist chair and trying to explain to him which tooth was hurting, when the air-raid sirens went off. Everyone was supposed to rush off to his or her assigned air-raid shelter, but I was in so much pain and the dentist was in a hurry and couldn’t tell which tooth needed attention. He decided to pull all four of my upper front teeth at once, sure that the culprit was among them. He pulled them with a pair of pliers and it hurt worse than my erstwhile toothache. There were no painkillers. I bled like stuck pig.

The dentist jammed a wad of gauze into my mouth and we were off to the air-raid shelter, which was a culvert under the railroad tracks open at both ends, the bottom covered in filth and slime and jammed with terrified women and children and old men. My mother and I and the goddamn ogre of a dentist cowered against the damp stonewalls of the underpass. I was scared to death, listening to the moans and sobs and whimpers of the crowd around me. We strained to hear the sound of the approaching bombers, willing the bombs to drop elsewhere, wipe out some other neighborhood, kill someone other than us. My fear was mixed with hate. I hated the Americans because they had deprived me of my moment of glory with their untimely attack, my place at the center of attention, of my starring role as the recipient of pity, of being a bloody hero, who had withstood the barbaric assault of the dentist. Instead I was just one scared child among many, my own pain just another detail, surrounded by the dank smell of fear emanating from the packed crowd around me.

But, as it transpired, we were lucky. It turned out to be a false alarm. The American bombers spared us. Instead a group of 18 B-24 Liberators had wiped out the synthetic rubber plant and the marshalling yards in Fulda. My mouth hurt like hell for hours and I ended up with a huge gap in my front teeth, a junior version of Bobby Clark without his choppers. Luckily they were baby teeth and the gap filled again, eventually.

One consequence of the terror that bracketed my childhood and the fact that I had escaped unscathed was that I began to believe that I was on borrowed time, that the bogeyman would catch up with me sooner or later. It also sharpened my sense of smell and taste. Above all, it made me extremely cautious. It probably saved my life later in another hell.

What Is It With Women Who Never Wear Skirts?

2008-07-09T16:26:00.000-07:00

I’ve been following the political debates and sound bytes from south of the border and I’m struck by the fact that I have never seen Hillary Clinton wear anything but pants. This gives me pause. Don’t get me wrong, I think a suit can look flattering on a woman, as long as she is fairly slim. But, if you are short with a fat ass it looks awful. I’m thinking, what is she trying to hide? Is she afraid to wear a skirt, because she is bow-legged, knock-kneed or pigeon-toed? Is it varicose veins? Flabby thighs? Too skinny? Does she want to be seen as macho? In charge? To circumscribe Tony Soprano, I gotta say, short people with big butts simply don’t look good in pants, like they’re trying to be a grown-up, but instead they look like a dork. So what’s the deal here?

My guess is, they had a focus group on what her image should be and they decided on pants. Not that that should matter when deciding who’s going to answer that all important 3:00 am phone call.

And what’s the matter with a skirt. Margaret Thatcher didn’t have a problem with a skirt, or a purse, for that matter, and she kicked plenty of butt. Ditto for Golda Meir. But then Hillary is about image, not substance. She isn’t in their league.

And another thing, what’s this with the photo-op slugging back shots of rye? Canadian rye, no less. And here she is berating NAFTA. My guess is the message is: “Look at me, I’m just like you.” Would drinking rye wearing a dress send a mixed message? Would it make her seem less one of the boys? Not that she would ever be mistaken for one of the boys. Is she going to light up a cigar next? I hope it’s not a Cohiba. Her wearing the pants in the Clinton household didn’t stop old Bill from dunking his cigar into places no real smoker would ever think of sticking his stogy. She couldn’t control the big Bubbah, how can we expect her to control those conspiring Republicans, never mind terrorists.

It's a good thing she lost.

On Hunting Badgers

2008-07-07T10:24:00.000-07:00

I don’t know how they hunt badgers in your neck of the woods or whether they do at all, but where I come from badger hunting was big. There are basically three ways to bag a badger. One, you can use dynamite, two, you can dig them out and three, you can use dogs to dislodge them from their den. Badgers, like foxes, were considered a nuisance, because they raided people’s chicken coops. They were hunted indiscriminately, partly because there was a price on their head. If I remember right, I believe it was 10 marks in those days, roughly 2 dollars. And partly, because their pelt made a very attractive throw rug with its white V-shaped stripe down the sides.

I believe my father mostly hunted badgers, because my grandmother and my mother, for that matter, swore by the alleged curative properties of badger fat, which they applied liberally in poultices to boils, open sores or to your chest to draw out the fever, if you were laid low with the flu. My mother also used badger fat as shortening in her cakes and pies.

Badger dens can have as many as ten or fifteen exits and the dens can be more than six feet deep. If you use dynamite to dislodge a badger from its den, it’s best to proceed with some caution. The idea is to get the stick of dynamite as close to the center of the den as possible, before setting it off. There are two ways of doing this. One is to make sure you have a long fuse and to push the stick as deep as possible down one of the badgers’ tunnels before lighting it, the other is to dig down from the top in the center of the den as far as you can go and then set off the charge. And then you’ve got to dig to get down to the center of the den and retrieve the bits and pieces that are left. This is a labor-intensive way of getting at the badgers, unless the badger had the good sense to dig his den in sandy soil. Obviously, you only use dynamite if dogs are unavailable for one reason or another. Otherwise, this method does not make much sense, because dynamite tends to scatter stuff everywhere and you have to hit the deck to avoid the flying debris.

The most efficient and the preferred way to hunt badgers is with dogs. To hunt badgers with dogs you need dachshunds. They are unbelievable. I’m not talking about the cute pets you see waddling around today. My father loved to hunt badgers and foxes. And he used dachshunds, which were bred for this task. They were usually rough hairs, named “Purzl” or “Waldi” and they never seemed to last very long. They were ferocious. I’ve seen them drag a badger nearly twice their size out if its lair. Once they had their teeth into something, they would never let go or at least not until my father told them to let go. They only listened to him. They also were pretty sneaky. In our house, if a visitor entered, they’d greet him or her – they did not discriminate - with wagging tails, but the minute you turned your back to them, they’d have you by the ankles and only my father could get them to let go. You can see how this created problems for us at times. People didn’t want to visit, if they knew my father was away without his dogs.

A badger, “Dachs” in German, is much larger than a dachshund. Badgers are also pretty wily and they are fierce when cornered or attacked. Their lairs are deep, some six to ten feet with many exits. The way you hunted them with dogs was you blocked all but two of the exit tunnels with fire, usually burning grass and leaves, so that the smoke drifted down into the passage. The dogs – you needed at least two - would go down one smoke-free shaft and my father would post himself near the remaining unblocked burrow entrance with his shotgun. The dogs worked as a team. One would attack from the front, the other would try to sneak around the back. Between them, they always got the upper hand. My job was to lie face down over the center of the den, listen to the sounds of the combatants below and point out the direction of the progression of the battle. Normally the badger would try to escape through the unblocked smoke-free exit, chased by the dogs. You had to be careful not to shoot the dogs. You also had to hope that you’d found and plugged all the badger den’s exits. If you missed one, you were out of luck. Badgers move surprisingly swift for an animal that looks so deceivingly placid.

My father was very good at badger hunting. He never missed his shot, never hit any of his dogs or me, for that matter. I felt nervous sometimes lying on top of the center of the den during these hunts, because the badgers didn’t always launch themselves straight out of their lair. Sometimes they turned and came straight at you. This made it obligatory to roll out of the way fast. I wasn’t so much worried about getting shot, but of getting bit by a crazed badger, a very unpleasant and disagreeable thought.

Sometimes the dogs would drag their prey out backwards. If that happened, my father didn’t interfere but let the dogs do their thing. Some of the badger’s tunnels were traps and led nowhere. Sometimes they’d get a dog into one of those fake shafts and with their powerful hind legs try to bury it in there alive. Those passages were hard to locate from above. You listened to the dogs’ barks and tried to dig down to rescue it. If you couldn’t locate it, the dog would suffocate. That happened occasionally.

If jamming a stick of dynamite down a badger hole seems a bit risky to you or if you don’t want to jeopardize your dogs unnecessarily in a badger den, you could, of course, post yourself near a chicken coop and wait for the badger to come. This, however, is an iffy proposition, since you don’t know their schedule and, of course, they are nocturnal in their food-gathering habits and you depend on moonlight for visibility. You could waste hours waiting for them to make an appearance or cloud cover could make the raiders invisible or you could nod off and miss them altogether. The other downside to this method of badger hunting is that you have to discharge your shotgun in close proximity to the chickens as well as houses and out-buildings and there was the distinct possibility of collateral damage.

On Stout Hearts

2008-06-25T16:16:00.000-07:00

I hope you enjoyed the little snapshots of life in another time and place that I’ve tried to share with you over the past several months. If you didn’t, I apologize for wasting your time. But sometimes it is educational to realize that we are not all that different from one another, no matter what our background, our religion or lack of it, our politics.

What was special about that particular time, apart from the fact that we were still alive after six years of total war, was the necessity to adjust, to make do with whatever was at hand to survive. It wasn’t so much every man for himself, because we were all in the same boat, it was the collective will to pick yourself up and go on. This was not a time to be faint of heart. True, there were many who gave up and if you did that, you were done for, because there was no safety net, no safe haven, no time out. Our money was useless, worth less than the paper it was printed on. The store shelves were empty. There were no government or social agencies to turn to for help. The only way to make it was to 1: live off the land; 2: barter for food and shelter, either your skills or your possessions, if you were lucky enough to have any left; to 3: work for the occupiers or to 4: steal, rob or kill. That was it.

In this kind of an environment, apart from the black marketers, the farmers were the best off, because they had food – eggs, butter, meat, potatoes, grain – for themselves and to trade. The roads and trains were jammed with people from the cities, schlepping whatever possession they had left, headed for the countryside to swap for the necessities of life. Farmers did not starve. Many a farmhouse sported fancy oriental carpets, grand pianos, rare paintings, expensive furniture, which people had bartered away for food. As long as you had something to trade, you lived.

And then there were the refugees from the East. They had nothing. Many didn’t even speak the language. They were not welcome. They were seen as annoying additional costs of the lost war. There was little solidarity with these outcasts of society among the locals, mainly due to the lack of food and the sorry state of the war-ravaged, bombed-out homes and apartments. Their presence stretched minimal resources to the breaking point. There was nowhere for them to live. The cities were bombed out and the countryside was jammed with the bombed-out residents of the cities.

By 1950, more than 8,000,000 Germans from the ethnically cleansed, lost provinces behind the Oder-Neisse line had flooded into war-ravaged West Germany, another 3.3 million into communist East Germany. In some villages, they accounted for a third of the population. Most arrived with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They spoke dialects that sounded alien to the locals. Their cultural background was totally different from that of the natives. They came from urban centers like Danzig (Gdansk) and Koenigsberg (Kaliningrad) and Breslau (Wroclaw) and Tilsit (Sovietsk) and were dumped into farm villages, were their skills were useless. Most were Protestants and here they were tossed into totally Catholic hamlets and towns in southern Germany, where they were looked on as heretics. They upset what little equilibrium was left in towns and villages across the allied occupation zones. If you were a refugee, you were near the bottom of the food chain. You had to be resourceful, strong and tenacious. Many turned to the booming black market. Some traded their skills for food and shelter. Some thrived.

At the very bottom were the DPs – Displaced Persons. These were the survivors of Nazi concentration camps, forced laborers from every corner of Europe, the victims of the Nazi terror regime and those eastern Europeans who had sided with the Nazis during the war and were now stateless drifters. All sorts of people were roaming the countryside, some looking for help, some looking to help themselves to anything they could find. Some to seek revenge, to rape, to kill.

To survive you had to be strong. I’d like to introduce you to a couple of survivors I’ve known. The first was Abel Haselmann. He was vague about his past. He’d only say that he was from somewhere in the East. He spoke with a distinct Saxon accent. He was a runt of a man and a jack-of-all-trades. He had survived the war and the Nazis and had hot-footed it across the Iron Curtain in the summer of 1945 with only his shirt on his back, wandered into our village and decided to stay. At first, no one wanted to take him in, because he was Jewish and he refused to kowtow to the burghers. He went to the Americans, who ordered the village mayor to find room for him. He soon made himself indispensable.

If your electric coil for heating your beer was busted, you took it to Herr Haselmann to fix. If you are wondering why in the world you’d need to heat your beer, the reason for that bizarre custom was that in those days few practiced dental hygiene and most everyone’s teeth were in dire need of repair and couldn’t tolerate cold or hot. Everything had to be lukewarm – ergo the beer heater.

If your radio was on the fritz, your bicycle broken or a piece of jewelry needed fixing, Abel Haselmann was your man. He was an artist. He also believed that you never knew who might be sneaking up on you at any time and you always had to be prepared to make tracks fast. He never was without his identity papers and a wad of American cash in his pocket. He said that a person without a passport was like a corpse on leave. He never slept or so it seemed. No matter what time of night you passed his house, there always was a light on in his room. He liked to quote Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote: “To live without roots takes a stout heart.” Herr Haselmann definitely had one of those.

He once asked the headmaster of the elementary school in our village and my older brother’s future father-in-law and a true Nazi in his earlier incarnation, why it was that he felt the Germans were such a superior race, when in reality the Jews were much tougher, having endured and survived 2,000 years of persecution, pogroms and even the holocaust and were still here. He got no answer.

Abel Haselmann was a heavy smoker. Like everyone else in those days, he rolled his own. He always had a cigarette dangling from his lips, the smoke causing him to squint and his voice to rasp. His fingertips were burned black. He grew his own tobacco plants, his ”lovely Virginias”, he called them, in the garden behind his house. In those early years after the war, there was a luxury tax on tobacco plants. Once a month in the summer, the tax inspector from the county finance department would bicycle the eight kilometers up the valley from the county seat and go from house to house to look for tobacco plants and to collect taxes on them.

Herr Haselmann had an early warning system in place. The first kid who spotted the taxman pushing his bike up the road of the lower village and warned Herr Haselmann got five cigarettes. Cigarettes were better than cash. You could trade them for just about anything. With such ample warning, Herr Haselmann moved his potted tobacco plants into the back of the garden, behind a fence, where he raised bantam roosters. These roosters were fierce. If anyone, other than Herr Haselmann, came close to their coop, they would attack, hitting the fence at eye level with their talons extended. Herr Haselmann never paid tobacco taxes.

The second survivor I’d like you to meet was Hans Dressel. He was from Upper Silesia, in present-day Poland. He’d limped into our village in late 1945 and offered his expertise as a grave digger. He also suggested that he should handle the chores of town crier. Our town didn’t have either, so they hired him for room and board. Besides laboring in the town’s graveyard, his other job was to announce the weekly village council decisions, upcoming soccer matches, important meetings and happenings throughout the village.

Herr Dressel was well into his seventies and had been a day laborer all his life and was barely literate. He was, what you’d call today, developmentally challenged. He had great difficulties reading the weekly dispatches. He carried a large hand-bell to announce his presence and then he’d try to read his bulletin. No one understood him, but he was a hit with all the kids in the village, who followed his every step and taunted him mercilessly.

He was just a step above the village idiot and he was hung like a horse. His Johnson reached easily to his knees. You could see it swinging inside his pants when he walked. It was huge. The kids were fascinated and at the same time abhorred by it and egged him on to show them what he was hiding in his pants. When Herr Dressel got fed up with them, he’d whip it out and shake it at them and chase them, sending them screaming in all directions.

The town council threatened him numerous times with dismissal, but they needed a grave digger, a job no one wanted to do, and he needed the work, because he had no pension, never having worked at a steady job in his life. He had found a nook in village life, by becoming part of the village entertainment and except for some of the more substantial matrons in the village and the Lutheran minister, no one took Herr Dressel’s behavior too seriously.

The third of these survivors was the Catholic priest, the Herr Curatus, who lived across the yard from our house. This curate was a short and very sturdy man who always carried cotton balls in his ears. He had appeared one day in the late fall of 1944. He came from the Banat, a formerly German region in Rumania.

This curate loved to drink and eat and could cuss better than most and he could do it in several Slavic languages. He also loved to play cards and he mostly won. Every evening, around 6 o’clock he appeared at the Golden Rose pub, down the hill from our house, to play euchre – to augment the measly take from the collection plate, he said – and to drink beer until, so some asserted, the cotton balls in his ears lifted and started to float off. That was the signal that he had reached his quantum and he got up and stumbled back up the hill to his house. Sometimes he passed out before he made it up the steps to his front door and his housekeeper, an old maid, who had a room upstairs in his attic, had to drag him inside and put him to bed.

The women in the parish didn’t like him very much and called him an “Unflat.” Literally, that means filth in the local dialect. If he had particular bad luck at euchre, the curate would swear worse than a Turk, as the saying went in those days. “Crucifix sacrament, another mass in the ass!” was his favorite (translated) saying. But the men more than made up for the local women's disdain. All the Catholic men in the surrounding villages, who had something special on their conscience, went to him for confession. He roared and hissed like an old tiger in his confessional, but gave everyone his absolution. This was important in those days, because without dispensation you couldn’t get communion on Sunday morning and everyone knew right away that you were a hard core sinner and the women shunned you and discussed your case from one end of the county to the other. It was worse than a communicable disease.

If one of his parishioners confessed to something which was too much even for him, he turned vulgar. “If you do that again, you dumb f…k, I’ll ban you from drinking beer for six months. Then you can swill water like your cows and you’ll end up with blue guts, you dumb ass!” he’d yell. An alcohol ban, according to his codex, was the worst punishment he could mete out and, to him, was much worse than eons of purgatory.

When the curate died, one of his parishioners, who had been threatened with frequent water cures, opined, that the Herr Curatus should be made a saint, since he’d performed the miracle of turning beer into water so many times.

We didn’t learn ‘til after his death that he wasn’t a priest at all. Apparently he had been a coachman in his earlier live in the Balkans and had decided to upgrade to a less arduous profession. All this came to light when his housekeeper went through his papers after his funeral. No one had questioned him, including his superiors. They were short of priests and he was ready to step in. He obviously knew his way around the Catholic rituals. The church after all was one of the pillars of rural society in those days and no one dared to question its decisions.

There is no limit to the imagination, when it comes to survival. You do what you have to do. I guess the closest you’d come in this country in comparing this spirit of survival is the hardships the early settlers here and elsewhere in North America had to overcome to survive. They had to live off the meager resources the land offered. They did not give up. They had stout hearts and iron wills.

The Sisters Baerenklau

2008-06-11T15:44:00.000-07:00

In previous exposés, I tried to introduce you to recycling cigarette butts and bath water and to give you some alternatives to the wasteful use of toilet paper. Today, I’d like you to meet the sisters Baerenklau, who were way ahead of their time when it came to recycling or reducing their carbon footprint, terms that didn’t enter our popular vocabulary until half a century later. They were experts in the art of substituting birch sap for those expensive and politically incorrect shampoos which take up so much shelf space in our stores today. And they were pros at creating gourmet meals out of animal innards.

The sisters Baerenklau, whose secrets I am about to reveal to you, lived on the third floor of our house, back in 1946, in the room to the right, as you stepped off the narrow wooden spiral staircase. There were three of them and they were refugees from Upper Silesia, now part of Poland. They told us that their father had been a game warden and forester, who’d been murdered by the Poles in the turbulent last days of the war. They also said that they’d been gang-raped by Russian soldiers as they tried to flee their father’s house and make their way west.

I know this will be viewed as extremely politically incorrect by some, but those Russkies must have been a pretty desperate bunch to go after the Baerenklau sisters. They were in their late 50’s and early 60’s and they were spinsters and very homely, ill-favored even. The youngest, Dora, was one burrito short of a combination plate, as Robin Williams used to say and she was very short and stout. She also had a large growth protruding from her left shoulder blade, which forced her head forward and twisted to the right. She looked like she was about to topple over unto her ear at any moment. She always pumped her elbows vigorously when she walked. She wore her sisters’ hand-me-downs, shortened to fit – sort of. Her two siblings, Rosa, the oldest, and Marta, on the other hand, were very tall, close to six feet, and extremely angular, almost scraggy.

Dora did all the work, constantly bossed around by her two sisters, who never lifted a finger to help. They always walked in lockstep when they went out together, Rosa and Marta in front, Dora behind. Dora only got to go out when they went shopping, because she had to lug their purchases in two nets slung crisscross, like a bandolier, over her shoulders. Otherwise the nets would have dragged on the ground. Dora did not talk. The other two never stopped talking. They were Lutherans and attended church every Sunday morning without fail, sitting in the front row with the older two singing loudly and off-key, while short Dora sat between them holding up the hymnal for them. She had to hold it over her head for her sisters to see properly. Dora did not sing. She did, however, pass wind quite frequently and loudly, much to the amusement of the confirmants, who also sat in the front row.

The sisters Baerenklau truly believed in the old adage “Waste not, want not.” Every spring, when the snow had melted and the first puss willows started to sprout, the sisters could be seen marching into the surrounding woods, searching for birch trees. They believed in the division of labor. When they found a suitable birch, Rosa would produce a small metal tap, about six inches long and sharpened on one end. She and Marta would hold it in place against the tree trunk and Dora would whack it into the tree with a mason’s hammer, which she carried on a rope around her waist. The older two would then step back and Dora, who had been schlepping a wooden pail, would move up and hold this receptacle under the tap and catch the birch sap dripping out of the pipe. It took a lot of birches to fill that bucket. They never came home without a full pail.

When they got home, they bottled this sap in old half-liter beer bottles and used it undiluted to wash their hair. They swore by this concoction and wouldn’t think of switching to something a bit more acceptable. They called it their Silesian shampoo. We called it Silesian “Jauche”, meaning liquid manure. The stuff made them smell odd, kind of musty and dank, like compost or wet rotting leaves. They always tried to get my mother to use it, but she steadfastly refused.

This reminds me of a story I read recently about someone, whose idea of recycling and conservation was to carefully clean their used paper towels by soaking them in their dish water, squeeze out the water and hang them up to dry on the clothesline in their back yard. The person crowed that she got an extra month out of each roll. Now that is an example of conservation truly worth imitating. The sisters Baerenklau certainly would have approved, but unfortunately paper towels were not the staple of civilization then that they have become since.

My father was a forester and during and after the war we pretty much lived off what he shot on his hunting excursions, usually venison or rabbit, occasionally wild boar. We lived off the land and managed pretty well, certainly a lot better than the vast majority of people in the bombed-out cities of Germany, who for the most part were starving and homeless.

The sisters Baerenklau were always after my father for deer entrails or the leftover innards of jackrabbits. There were persistent rumors making the rounds that dogs had mysteriously disappeared after the Baerenklau sisters had been seen high-stepping through the village. They were big fans of boiled cabbage and potatoes, which they served with wild game offal, like sliced heart, boiled spleen or steamed kidneys and tripe. Their room reeked of it. They were happiest when lung pie was the main course on their menu.

Here are the ingredients for lung pie, should you have the inclination to try some. You need the well-drained lungs of an adult deer or other substantial animal, carefully cleaned of all shotgun pellets, a pound of boiled barley, a sizeable dollop of uncooked badger suet or if that cannot be found in your larder, fresh deer lard, diced, three diced onions, thyme, coriander, ground mace and cayenne pepper. If you saved some of the deer’s blood, that would be a major bonus. You need about two liters.

The thing about badger fat is that it is said to have proven medicinal as well as culinary qualities, if you were to believe the Frauleins Baerenklau. They not only used it as shortening in preparing cakes and pies and, of course, as the main addition to lung pie, but also swore by it as a sure-fire remedy for the flu and other common ailments. If you came down with a fever, they’d tell you to slather the stuff on your chest, pack you into blankets and then make you sweat. If you had an open sore or a boil, a liberal helping of badger fat would draw out overnight whatever caused you discomfort. It seemed to work.

Next you mince the lungs into tiny pieces, add egg batter, and a bit of gelatin, beat and blend this mess with a whisk until almost liquid and foamy. Pour this concoction into a cast-iron pot, add the blood, the diced suet and onion, spices, salt and pepper to taste. Stir and mix everything thoroughly, cover and let it rise over low heat for at least two and half hours, chill until firm, then cut the lung pie into servings. Lung pie done to perfection should be firm and be able to stand on its own on your plate without too much seepage. This savory delicacy is best with boiled cabbage or steamed rutabagas and, of course, cooked potatoes, washed down by a large bottle of Bavarian beer.

In the next issue, I was going to talk about how wool socks, used properly, can deter trespassers, but my wife, Andree, dissuaded me. She feels that particular subject is not well suited for dissemination in a community publication. My ramblings on the recycling of beer steins must also await further research. Andree thinks this tale might induce some readers to indulge in violent behavior. Perhaps, I just shouldn’t run these stories by her first.

So instead I will try to explain how you can substitute and mix other readily available fluids to overcome a lack of alcoholic beverages in a time of need, how to use your neighbor’s chicken coop to add variety to an otherwise bland breakfast and how to make ersatz coffee from readily available stand-ins.

At Grandma's House

2008-06-10T10:34:00.000-07:00

I remember my grandmother on my father’s side, who lived to be 96 years old and who died in the late 1950’s, as a very tall and lean women, who always wore black or dark blue. My father told me that she had worn only dark colors since the day her oldest son, my uncle Willi, was killed in Russia in 1915. She had bright gray eyes, a large aquiline nose and a high forehead and wore her hair pulled tight into a bun at the back of her head. She did not suffer fools lightly and never set foot inside a church, even though she was a Lutheran and in that day and age and in that place everyone went to church on Sunday. If you didn’t, you were a hot topic of discussion among the upstanding ladies of the village. My grandmother didn’t care, she thought them all charlatans.

Her name was Karolina. We called her Oma. Among other things that may seem odd today, she believed that the bites of red ants could cure rheumatism and relieve the pain of sciatica. She was said to demonstrate that conviction by sitting bare-assed on a live anthill, with her wide black skirt spread demurely around herself. I never witnessed this spectacle personally, but my mother swore to me she saw it with her own eyes.

Her shelves and cupboards were full of all sorts of home remedies she concocted from various wildflowers and animal parts. There were always large green or brown bottles full of ants or arnica blossoms soaking and steeping in alcohol on the window sills. Mysterious small packages, wrapped in grease-stained brown oil paper, lay stacked in her larder. They were marked in precise German script that said badger, fox, goose, crow, rabbit, hedgehog and each was a remedy for a particular ailment. She did not own an icebox or a refrigerator. She prided herself in never in her life having sought the advice of a medical doctor, whom she called quacks and alchemists. Well, very few people consulted a doctor in those days in that place.

I dreaded going to her house, because her remedies stank to high heaven or stung like hell. You didn’t want to scrape your knees in her house or come down with a cold or an upset stomach. If you think iodine stings, you should try my grandmother’s arnica. Also called leopard’s bane, she kept the yellow daisy-like flowering heads in bottles with 45% alcohol to extract whatever it was that was supposed to be good for you. She’d pour this concoction over your wound and tut-tut your screams. You’d regret if for days afterwards. The alcohol-soaked ants were a remedy to ease muscle pains. She’d slather this gross-looking smelly gunk on her neck and shoulders and swore that it rejuvenated her and eased all pains. I never got to experience that ordeal. She believed that burning nettles were good for you, because they opened the pores of your skin. You should try that particular power cure sometime, if you feel adventurous.

And her teas, which were supposed to be good for everything from the flu, bellyaches and constipation, tasted God awful. You could complain all you wanted; she made you drink the stuff regardless. She had tinctures to put on warts, lotions against hair loss, ointments for eczema, all manner of creams, salves, infusions and elixirs. They all had one thing in common. They looked, smelled and tasted vile and revolting.
She also strongly believed that walking barefoot in wet grass or submerging your feet in ice cold water for hours at a time was good for your circulation and improved your general health.

I remember one time I’d gone for an afternoon swim in one of my father’s eel ponds. Unbeknownst to me, some of the local farmers had used that pond to get rid of their dead and deceased animals to feed the eels. Anyway, a couple of days later my body was pretty much covered in open sores. Today you’d call that a severe staph infection. My grandmother took charge of my case. She taped poultices of badger and rabbit fat on those sores and in a couple of days they were gone. So maybe she knew what she was doing. The eels didn’t seem to be affected by the bacteria in the water. My father sold them to hotels and hospitals in the area and never got a complaint.

My grandmother’s house was a large two-story stone house. My grandfather had been a forester and game warden. He had build that house with money earned from his real job, for shooting roebucks, small members of the deer family, considered a nuisance by the farmers in the area. He received one gold mark for each deer shot from the owners of the land. He’d shot thousands over the years before the First World War. The house had cost him 4,000 gold marks to build in 1902. The locals considered him a man of substance. I never knew my grandfather. He passed on a year before I was born.

The house had a major downside. It stood right next to the neighbor’s pigsty. In the summer the stink was unbearable. The pigs also attracted huge armadas of flies. As you may or may not know, Germans don’t believe in window screens. They seem to interfere with the enjoyment of their view. Maybe they have adapted a more modern outlook these days, I don’t know.

I can remember my summer visits to my grandmother’s house, with all the windows open, the curtains and walls of all rooms darkened by year’s of my grandfather’s cigar and pipe smoke and speckled with fly shit, every ceiling adorned with five or six dangling, dark brown sticky fly traps and flies buzzing everywhere. My grandmother didn’t seem to notice. I couldn’t stand it there. When my mother moved into that house after my grandmother passed away, the first thing she did after the painters left was to install screens on all the windows. The locals thought she was crazy.

Of Shared Baths And Frozen Crappers

2008-06-09T13:02:00.000-07:00

In my last foray into recycling in the old days, I reminisced about the second life of cigarette butts. This time around, I want to reflect on how you can reduce your carbon footprint by re-using your bath water and address alternatives to toilet paper that were the norm in post-war Germany and which you might want to consider, should the need arise. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.

We lived in a house that had been built in 1349 and it showed its age. This was a massive three-story stone affair with walls six feet thick and one toilet that emptied unto the steep hill behind the house and down into the creek in the valley below. There was no septic tank, no drainage field, no formal sewage system at all. Over the centuries, the back wall had sprung deep cracks, some of them big enough for birds to nest in them. My parents and I shared this house with four refugee families. There were 15 people in all, including the three of us.

We occupied half of the second floor. Our bathroom was not a bathroom in the North American sense of the word. It lacked a toilet, only contained a washstand with running cold water and an old-fashioned claw-footed metal bathtub connected to a wood-heated hot water tank. This meant that if you wanted to take a hot bath, you had to lug up armloads of firewood from the shed in the yard downstairs, light and tend a wood fire underneath the tank to heat the water and wait for at least two hours for that water to be hot enough to use.

There was no shower. Showers were not a German thing then. Real men didn’t use deodorant. Most women didn’t either. Women also didn’t shave their armpits or their legs. B.O. also was not a bad thing. Everyone stank equally, which cancelled out the discomfort of objectionable smells. You simply didn’t realize that you reeked. I discovered this secret only when I stepped off the boat in Hoboken, New Jersey, and suddenly found myself isolated with my peculiar, and I‘d say, dank bouquet.

Naturally, baths were a luxury reserved for every other Saturday evening, whether you needed one or not. The first one in, usually my mother, had the luxury of clean hot water. My father came next, using the same slightly less-hot bath water and, finally, it was my turn in the by now lukewarm, twice pre-used, grey water. The refugees, who shared this house with us, did not have access to our bathroom. I don’t know where or whether they bathed.

You might want to consider this method of saving and reusing water in view of the rising cost of water and our recurring water shortages on Saturna. Try it. I can truly recommend it, if you’re not the squeamish type. It’s cozy. It brings the family closer together. It also creates an urgency to get on with it, before the water turns cold, with the result that you waste less soap. And, in case you’re worried about the effects on your general health, nobody came down with boils, suffered excessive hair loss or broke out in a debilitating rash.

And speaking of the importance of water, let me acquaint you with a German invention with which you may not be familiar. This was at a time when there were few of the amenities we now take for granted and those that existed were rather basic. And yet, the idea of recycling and re-using was front and center, even under those dire circumstances.

One of the doorways off the hall on the second floor of our abode opened to the only washroom in the house. This was a tiny tiled space, maybe five feet square. It had a 12-foot ceiling and a tall, very narrow opaque-painted window. None of the windows in the house had storm windows. In the winter, the wind usually whistled right through, causing the curtains to ghost out into the room. It was freezing in there. This comfort station contained one of those truly German crappers, which sports a presentation shelf inside, so that you could inspect and admire your creation before flushing it down the drain. About seven feet above this contraption hung a white enameled metal cistern, which held about a gallon of water and a chain pulley. A pipe connected it to the toilet bowl below. You pulled the chain and the water would rush down through the pipe, hit your production – patiently waiting on its ledge – with full force, splatter everything against the inside front of the bowl and on down the chute and out the wall in back and down the hill. There was no water faucet or washbasin to wash your hands. Obviously, the back of the house was not a good place to be at any time, but especially not in the summer when it got hot and putrid back there.

If you wanted to use the toilet in winter, you’d better bring a large pot of boiling water to thaw out the ice in the cistern and pipes. Even then the process was iffy and the water could be slow making its way down the frozen pipes. Sometimes, on very cold days, you could pull all you wanted on the chain and nothing happened. I used to forget the hot water on purpose sometimes, just to listen to the pleas and, more likely, multi-lingual maledictions of the refugees, who were left to clean up the mess, if they didn’t want the bowl to overflow.

Keep in mind, the water had to be brought to a boil on the kitchen stove, before you could take it to the toilet. The refugees, other than Frau Smetma, who lived downstairs in the old feudal kitchen, did not have kitchen stoves, only electric cooking coils. In other words, going to the bathroom in our house in winter had to be, by necessity, a thoughtful and well-planned process, never spur of the moment. It required timing to avoid the queue outside the door.

The other thing about this john was that we’re talking about a time that was pre-toilet paper. Maybe there was toilet paper available elsewhere, but not in our village. There was no such thing as Charmin or soft 4-ply paper available in our stores. The tool of choice was the weekly newspaper, with each page meticulously cut into eight equal pieces, each about six inches square and stuck on a nail in the wall. You had to crumple it before use. I don’t get nostalgic about that, because newsprint is rough on your behind, it tears easy and the ink comes off. It also tends to smear and could be painful, even distressing, if God forbid, you suffered from piles or hemorrhoids. It also doesn’t clean very well.

Then there was the German hang-up about wastefulness. The use of multiple squares of paper was frowned upon as a waste of scarce resources. There was after all only one newspaper per week for the 15 people in the house. Our local broadsheet was a thin affair, sixteen pages at most or 128 squares for the paper spike per week. That meant 18 squares per day for 15 people. That also meant that you were pretty much restricted to at most one visit per day. How German is that! Not much room for error either. God help you, if you were afflicted by “the dreaded diarrhee,” as some of the refugees used to call it.

The refugees never contributed paper to the communal toilet. Their only involvement in this process, other than the actual use, was that the sisters Baerenklau, three spinsters who lived on the third floor, collected the paper from my father each Monday, read it and then cut it up into appropriate squares for spiking. They were also the ones who supervised the daily count of the spiked paper squares to make sure no one took more than their share for their ablutions – one per visit. They’d confront and berate the miscreant who didn’t stick to the prescribed number. That usually was me.

I did like the educational aspect of using newspapers on the crapper. I loved to read. Sometimes I got so engrossed in trying to read a particular story and piecing it back together from the squares spiked on the wall – they were never in the right sequence - that I forgot about the time and would be rudely interrupted by pounding on the door. This cozy arrangement led to line-ups and to sometimes-loud arguments that only ended when my father shouted from his office that if they didn’t shut up, he’d shoot them all.

Think about all the trees that could be saved and the impact that would have on global warming, if we forsook toilet paper and re-used the Times Colonist, for example. It would probably delay the catastrophe everyone is predicting by at least a year or two and give that particular newspaper a use it deserves. Food for thought. I’m hoping, though, that for hygienic reasons we’d be able to agree on more than one square per person per use.

In future issues, I will endeavor to teach you how to make shampoo out of undiluted birch sap, how to re-use paper towels, thus doubling their lifespan and how to use a wool sock to drive off trespassers. I plan also to let you in on the secret of how to raid your neighbor’s chicken coop, without getting fingered as the culprit, share a recipe for the use of deer innards in a gourmet meal and give you some well-tested pointers on ways to re-use a beer stein, once you emptied it of its contents.

Kilroy Was Here

2008-06-07T13:31:00.000-07:00

Most six- or ten-year-olds in my day had heroes, mostly cartoon or comic book heroes like Spiderman or Superman. My hero was Kilroy. You may not remember Kilroy or even know who he was. Let me give you a quick primer. Kilroy was our liberator, who freed us from the yoke of the Nazis, after bombing the crap out of the place first, of course. Kilroy was our Simon Bolivar, our George Washington. He morphed into my Svengali, subtlely and unnoticeably, at first, but soon had me under his complete influence and sway.

There was nothing sinister in this conversion. I was a willing acolyte. I bought into his spiel with an open heart and without coercion. I loved the attention. My infatuation with Kilroy grew when I became a teenager. Jazz and rock’n’roll replaced Hershey bars and hot chocolate. Kilroy became Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Bill Haley, Chubby Checkers and, of course, Elvis Presley. I had all their singles. My father despaired over my playing be-bop and jitterbug and rock-a-billy. He called it “Neger-Musik” and couldn’t understand why his youngest son would possibly listen to something so foreign and unstructured and “un-deutsch.”

This is the story of my relationship with Kilroy. It opens in the year zero, the year the war and our old life ended and our new life began. The year of the apocalypse. 1945. This is the year in which I first betrayed the country of my birth for a couple of Hershey bars, a few sticks of chewing gum, some slices of white bread and a few mugs of hot chocolate. You might say that I was bought off cheap. I look at it as a kind of religious conversion, as one of Kilroy’s unmitigated success stories.

It begins when the American graffiti ‘Kilroy was here’ replaced the swastikas and Nazi slogans on the busted walls and toppled columns of German cities. The war was over and ‘Hitler kaput’, like the cities, the Jews and Germany (what the hell was that anyway?). Instead Kilroy came to teach us about chewing gum and baseball and jitterbug and jazz and Coca Cola and words like democracy and the pursuit of happiness, whatever that was. ‘Kilroy was here’ were three words as splendid to us as those famous three words from the French revolution, on which Kilroy lectured us. Kilroy de-nazified us, re-educated us, became our best friend. All this, while I slept on red sheets, from which my mother had cut and burned the white circle with the four times broken black cross.

Here’s how Kilroy achieved this feat. Every week on Wednesday, the U.S. Military Government dispatched a ¾ ton truck with two soldiers to our village, whose job it was to re-educate us kids. To teach us about democracy, the triumph of good over evil, how bad the Nazis were.

Their plan was simple. They set up a movie projector and screen in our classroom and showed Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons and U.S. newsreels. The cartoons were in black and white and in English and we couldn’t understand a word, but they were still pretty funny. The best part was that if we watched the cartoons, we received a mug of hot chocolate and a bun. We loved that hot chocolate. It tasted delicious. We had never tasted chocolate before. And white bread was something we’d never seen before either. It was exotic. White bread and chocolate was what America was all about to us. And sometimes, when we clapped really loud at the end of the show, the Americans would give us Hershey bars and chewing gum. They had to explain to us that you didn’t eat gum or we would have swallowed it whole. We all wanted to go to America and drink hot chocolate and eat white bread and chew gum every day, all day. For me it was an epiphany.

Let me put into perspective why those Hershey bars were such a big deal. During the war and the first three or four years after, not even Christmas was an occasion for special gifts. Typical Christmas presents for me and, I imagine, for most kids in that part of the world, were a handful of Filberts or walnuts, a bag of apples and, after the war, perhaps an orange (singular). There were no toys, no candy, nothing as exotic as chocolate. And we looked forward to those gifts. They were a big deal. We were happy with what we got, because the alternative was nothing.

Most of the kids I grew up with received no gifts at all. If they were lucky, they had a Christmas tree, with real candles, by the way. Birthdays were not celebrated – no birthday gifts. To receive a chocolate bar was a memorable occasion. To receive it from foreigners, who we’d been told were bloody killers of women and children, who were savages, whom we were told to fear and hate, was quite extraordinary.

It wasn’t that our bread tasted bad. It was just that it was made with rye flour, which sometimes was mixed with wood fiber (speak: sawdust) to stretch it. It came in six-pound round loaves, which my mother baked every other Saturday in the communal bread oven. Before I knew about white bread, I thought my mother’s bread tasted pretty good. But once I discovered Kilroy’s buns, it was all over for me with the rye bread. Rye bread was heavy and dark and it sat in your belly like a rock and made you feel stuffed. Since butter was hard to come by, I used to spread the cooled thick scum from boiled whole milk on a slice of rye bread to make it go down easier and to take the taste of sawdust away. Sometimes, for a special treat, my mother let me spread a little brown sugar on top of the scum. This scum tasted pretty good on rye, but it couldn’t compete with the flavor of those buns. You didn’t need anything with them, no milk scum, no sugar. They were soft and tasty. The hot chocolate was a bonus. Of course, you had to be there for the head count prior to the showing of the cartoons. If you missed that, no hot chocolate, no white bun.

We didn’t care about their rationale behind their gifts. We were happy. This is how Kilroy first corrupted us. From then on, we believed America and Americans were number one and our true friends. The misery of our past as forgotten, replaced by our longing for the next Wednesday morning.

Kilroy did such a terrific selling job that he coaxed me to live in his land of milk and honey and Hershey bars and Disneyland. Kilroy’s land became mine. He shared his magnificent home with me. He made me his brother. My past disappeared, replaced by the American dream, Camelot, the Promised Land. Kilroy offered me freedom and safety, a place in the sun. Kilroy and I became one and the same. Bound together by identical hopes and goals. Kilroy came to represent the white knight in shining armor, who rode forth to slay the wicked dragons of, first, fascism and then bolshevism. Kilroy’s hard work had paid off, at least for this ignorant kraut.

This unabashed enthusiasm for all things American dimmed only when Kilroy strapped himself into his B-52, loaded it with napalm and disappeared into the setting sun to write ‘Kilroy was here’ on the broken walls of pagodas and the ruins of other ancient cities.

This really tested our friendship and for several years I was adrift. I felt betrayed. Then I realized that there is no such thing as Camelot, that my American dream was no more than that, a dream, a veneer that hid some ugly truths. I understood that America was really no different from Europe. Only the context was different. It was a bit of a rude awakening for me. But I came to terms with my disappointment. I decided that I had to look out for myself and couldn’t afford to mope around. I had to concentrate on getting ahead with my own life and forget about the fake ideals Kilroy had imbued in me all those years ago. I guess I had graduated from the enthusiasm for and wonderment about the America of my youth to the reality of life on the ground, with all its pimples and boils. Our friendship fizzled.

On The Necessities Of Life

2008-06-06T17:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Waste Not, Want Not

2008-05-28T14:31:00.001-07:00

Recycling, refreshing and re-using are very popular subjects on Saturna and are taken very seriously by some, if recent issues of the Scribbler can be trusted. You sometimes get the feeling that this is some dark religious cult or that we are headed for some cataclysmic event, if we don’t re-use those tiny bits of left-over soap or, God forbid, toss out an old sock that has seen better days. Though, come to think of it, there are very practical and beneficial uses for old socks. I will try to address that topic in a later issue.

A more light-hearted look at recycling in another time and place might be a good idea. Recycling is, of course, not new to our age today. I remember a time some 60 years ago when people had to be resourceful and find new applications for things that had outlived their original usefulness. This was part of our common survival strategy. This was long before I crossed to the enlightened shores of North America. This was when I still lived on the dark side, in post-war Germany.

The year was 1946 and refugees from the lost eastern German territories were flooding across the border between east and west. One of those refugees lived on the second floor of our house in one of our guest rooms. His name was Hans Spiess (pronounced shpees) and he came from some place in Czechoslovakia or as he called it, the Protectorate. He was a heavy smoker and he was suffering, because cigarettes were a luxury and he didn’t have any. This was also in the days before filters were the norm. His fingers were nicotine-stained and he held his cigarettes in a very peculiar way between his thumb and forefinger of his right hand, with the burning end up. To take a puff, this meant that he had to twist his hand awkwardly, palm up. It looked odd, foreign, to us. He spent his days crouched behind his second floor window, watching the proceedings in the street below, a pair of army-issue binoculars at his side, particularly when there were American soldiers about, who were known as great wastrels as well as benefactors. They would light a cigarette, take a couple of hits and toss it on the ground.

When that happened, Herr Spiess would rush downstairs and out into the street to where the treasure had been carelessly flicked. He didn’t like Americans and thought of them as slackers. He didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing that he was after their half-smoked stubs. He also didn’t want to let those butts burn uselessly down to the end on the ground. Speed was of the essence. So, to camouflage his true intentions, he had worked a short darning needle into the heel of his boot with its pointed end protruding in back. He would quick-march over to where the errant smoke lay in the dirt, surreptitiously spike it with his boot-heel needle as he walked past, bring his heel up to where he could reach it with his hands without bending over too much, palm the butt, put out the embers and return to his lair. You had to give him credit; he was pretty good at this maneuver. However, his hands were always covered with plasters, where he’d stuck himself with his cigarette-butt-retrieval-needle. In the evening, he would sit down with his stash of half-smoked cigarette butts, meticulously strip them and roll them into thin new cigarettes. Sometimes, there was enough for quite a few of his recycled hand-rolled smokes. He figured five normal sized American butts equaled one new cigarette. He never shared with anyone and guarded his stash jealously.

My older brother, also a heavy smoker, had a different method of recycling cigarettes. He persuaded me to be his gofer in his battle with Herr Spiess over supremacy in the cigarette-butt-retrieval war. Whenever anyone showed up who smoked, it was my job to hover unobtrusively nearby and retrieve their leftovers. I was very good at this task, picking up butts, emptying ashtrays and shadowing the Americans to beat Herr Spiess to the prize. Several times Herr Spiess threatened me with severe consequences, if I didn’t cease and desist. I laughed at him, because I knew he was afraid of my brother, who had told him that if he so much as laid a finger on me, he would put a large hole in him.

On rare occasions, some GI would carelessly leave a half smoked pack of Lucky Strikes or Camels laying around, giving me the opportunity to sneak in under the radar and swipe them. These were like gold to my brother, because you could trade them for whatever you needed, whether it was food or booze or gasoline or nylons. American cigarettes were the unofficial currency of Germany in the years after the end of the war and would buy you just about anything.

My brother stretched these pickings I brought him with an assorted mix of boysenberry leaves and elephant ear, also called hoof lettuce, a giant-leafed, horseshoe-shaped, hairy weed which grew in moist ditches along roadways all around our village. These leaves were carefully spread out to dry on the floor of our attic and then meticulously cut and mixed with the stripped tobacco I had collected and rolled into new cigarettes. My brother used whatever paper was handy, including newsprint, for rolling papers.

My brother could roll cigarettes with one hand. He could also light matches with one hand. Obviously, his three-year war experience had been good for something. He always carried a handful of cigarettes loose in his pocket. He never threw a cigarette away, but smoked it down to the last crumb of tobacco. His fingertips and the cup of his right hand were stained dark brown. He had the soldier’s habit of cupping his smokes in his hand to avoid giving himself away to the enemy or superiors.

He told me that this mixture of his tasted better than the cheap Russian makhorkas he had smoked during the war. And, he added, you didn’t have to hold them up vertically to keep the tobacco from falling out, as you apparently had to with the Russian smokes, because that tobacco was dry and stale, loosely packed and full of sweepings. As any real smoker knows, dried out tobacco can be a bitch and can interfere with the enjoyment of the act of smoking. You had to hold them awkwardly and if you weren’t careful, you burned your fingers.

By relating this story, I don’t want to entice anybody to pick up smoking or praise the filthy habit in any way. It is simply an example of re-use, driven by necessity, in another time entirely. But all the same, the next time you espy an abandoned cigarette butt under foot, you’ll know what to do. Waste not, want not. Nowadays, the problem, of course, is what to do with the filters. I’m working on that.

In future issues, I will endeavor to familiarize you with ways to overcome a total lack of toilet paper, how to extend the lifespan of paper towels and give you an example of how the creative use of a wool sock can dissuade trespassers from your property.

Alpo And Other Savory Delicacies

2008-05-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

I sincerely hope that you tried and enjoyed my lung pie recipe featured in last month’s installment. I realize that savory treat may not be high on some folks’ list of favorites, but I also know that once you gagged it down, you’ll never forget its taste. I am equally sure that you’ll think twice now before discarding deer innards or tossing sheep and goat guts or road kill to the eagles or the ravens.

Thinking about lung pie brings to mind another mouth-watering dish that I’d like to share with you, this one from my university days. Five of us - two Costa Rican exchange students from San Jose, a pre-med student from Salina, Kansas, a freshman from the south side of Chicago and me, a veteran with limited language skills - were living in Mrs. Lynch’s basement on Vermont Street in Lawrence, Kansas, a block off campus. The two Costa Ricans were on scholarship, the rest of us had to work to go to school. Needless to say, we had limited resources.

Mrs. Lynch, a widow in her sixties, lived on the first floor and guarded with a zealot’s zeal the approaches to the second floor, which was shared by eight co-eds. The only way up there without being spotted by Mrs. Lynch was up a rickety pear trellis against the back wall of the house. This was a dangerous climb, because the house was built into the side of Mt. Oread, a steep flat-topped hill, 191 feet above the surrounding city of Lawrence, with the campus of the University of Kansas taking up the top. Mrs. Lynch’s backyard fell away steeply from the back of the house. If you tumbled off the trellis, you had a ways to go before you came to a stop.

If you’re into trivia, here are a couple of tidbits about Mt Oread. Originally called Hogback Ridge, Mt. Oread was named after Oread Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts, and was the staging area for William Quantrill’s infamous raid into Lawrence on August 21, 1863. It sits on the water divide between the Kaw and Wakarusa Rivers and offers one of the finest views in Kansas.

Living in that basement was an adventure. For one, we had a bit of a rodent problem. Our pre-med roommate – his name was Carleton Wedell – believed in sanitation and each night he’d lay out mouse poison in the kitchen. The poison didn’t turn out to be fatal, because the next morning there always seemed to be three or four dazed mice running in circles around the legs of the kitchen table. Carleton had a BB-gun, but he was a lousy shot and he could never hit the groggy mice, so it fell to me to take over the daily task of shooting the vermin before breakfast. I’d put a chair in the doorway between the kitchen and our common room to block the little buggers’ obvious escape route, sat down on it and picked them off, one by one. Even in their impaired condition, these mice were pretty skittish and BBs ricocheted off the kitchen surfaces. Mrs. Lynch kept complaining about the dings in her appliances, but we didn’t tell her about the kitchen’s alternate use as a rifle range.

Another thing I learned in Mrs. Lynch’s basement was the fact that Alpo could be considered comfort food, if you’re hungry. It didn’t taste bad, as long as you put lots of pepper and ketchup on it and washed it down with plenty of fluids of your choosing. The trick was to put the can of Alpo in the fridge overnight. This led to a slight contraction of the can’s contents, so that you could extract the mess the next morning in one cylindrical piece. This overnight cooling made it cohesive and gave it the consistency of aspic, kind of jiggly. You then sliced it into slabs about an inch thick and fried them. The slices looked like hamburger patties. We all ate them, except pre-med Carleton. He thought eating dog food was disgusting. But I don’t think he had ever been truly famished in his life. Besides sharing is a good thing, just don’t let your dog know you’re gagging down his food. He or she might take exception.

To pay for Mrs. Lynch’s basement and my university tuition, I got a summer job as a house painter with the university works department. I spent a hot Kansas summer painting married student quarters. I was the tallest in the crew, so I got the chore of painting ceilings. I discovered new muscles in my neck, shoulders and back that I didn’t realize I had.

One of my co-workers was a black guy named Earl Ladd. He lived on the edge of Lawrence along the Kaw River. He invited me to a barbecue at his house one Saturday in July. When I showed up, I was the only white face in sight. I didn’t care and they treated me like one of theirs. Most of them were veterans like me and I spoke their language. Fried catfish and ‘coon were the highlights of the menu. The raccoon was roasted whole on a spit and was dripping with grease. You ate it with mashed sweet potatoes and corn on the cob. I think they were trying to see how the white boy handled a leg of ‘coon. If they thought I would balk at chowing down on their offering, they got the wrong guy. I gagged it down. We washed it down with home brew that came in great big metal buckets. Everyone just dipped their glass or cup in there for refills. The beer had quite a kick. I think they tried to get me drunk, but my long and intimate experience with Bavarian beer helped me persevere. It was a party.

They say raccoon tastes like chicken. I don’t know if I’d go along with that assessment. To me it tasted more like badger. Or perhaps porcupine, without the bitter hemlock or cedar aftertaste. I’ve tried both, though not barbecued badger. That always came in a stew. I remember some years ago at my cottage in the Haliburton Highlands, north of Toronto, my friends and I were barbecuing a porcupine. It had made the mistake of chewing through the brake-line of my wife’s Toyota Tercel. When that happened, I received orders to shoot and kill the miscreant, which I did. But I thought it wasteful to just toss the remains aside and leave them for the wolves.

To barbecue a porcupine, you first have to skin it – very carefully. Porcupine quills are not fun to remove, as anyone who’s ever had to pull them out of their dog’s muzzle can attest. My friends and I were pretty much into the beer and in the bag by then and we were busy basting the porcupine with President’s Choice Memories of Saigon barbecue sauce, when my neighbor, Mrs. Griffin, walked over, asking if we had seen her dog, a miniature Schnauzer. My friend Tim lifted the lid of the barbecue and asked her: “Was it grey?” Needless to say, Mrs. Griffin was not impressed. She was aghast and didn’t think the gag was at all funny. Maybe not.

I should have known that talking about food would get me sidetracked. I guess we’ll have to tackle the recipe for making tasty alcoholic beverages out of Coca Cola and common household fluids, like aftershave lotion, lighter fluid and gasoline in a later installment. Here is a hint: the trick is the proper proportion.

Stuff My Uncle Sam Taught Me

2008-05-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

I joined my Uncle Sam’s Army when I was 20 years old and fresh off the boat from the fatherland. I could not speak English. Well, I did know four words – yes, no, thank you and f—k off. So it may not come as a surprise to you, that I encountered some problems communicating with my betters in the early days of my indenture.

The first thing my Uncle Sam taught me is that every action or inaction has a consequence. I was familiar with the physics axiom that every action generates a reaction, but I didn’t realize that this rule also applied to the military. My Uncle Sam’s Army was very high on cleanliness, neatness and, of course, order and he believed in issuing demerit points, gigs, we called them, if you didn’t measure up to his high standards. If your boots were not spit-shined or your belt buckle polished to your platoon sergeant’s high expectation, you could look forward to policing the parade ground for cigarette butts or cleaning the barracks latrine after everyone else had gone off duty. If you overlooked some dust particles on the mantel over the door during an inspection of your quarters, you could expect to spend hours in the mess cleaning pots and pans and being the cooks’ flunky. If, God forbid, there was dirt or rust on your rifle, you were guaranteed hours of extra drill on the parade ground with full field pack and your rifle at port arms, while your buddies slept.

The second thing my Uncle Sam taught me is that it is beneficial to obey orders, no matter how stupid they may seem to you. When a superior in those early days called me to attention and gave me an order, my lack of understanding and vocabulary sometimes was quite a nuisance. I learned quickly that f—k off was not a good answer, even though it entertained my fellow recruits greatly. It took me about six months to get a bit of a handle on the King’s English. Then I saw the light. I learned that the best response to an order, no matter what, was “Yes, sir” and then make sure your butt was below the horizon, to avoid getting it shot off. This insight served me well.

The third thing my Uncle Sam taught me was to never volunteer. If you volunteered, the chances of getting your butt shot off increased exponentially while your buddies were back in camp relaxing and sucking back Budweisers.

My Uncle Sam taught me how to shoot neat stuff – rifles, pistols, machine guns, BARs, bazookas, 120mm tank guns. And, if you were good at it, this earned you privileges. Like, if you were good with a machine gun – and I was pretty good – you got to go out by yourself to an exposed position and become the target of all the guys on the other side, who were trying to kill you, before you did them in.

My Uncle Sam taught me how to drive stick, how to drive a deuce-and-a-half and a Sherman tank. He taught me how to fly an airplane. All pretty useful skills. But he also taught me how to blow up stuff and I haven’t found a good use for that skill yet.

My Uncle Sam taught me that vodka is a great soother of both mental and physical pain and that Aqua Velva filtered through your gasmask charcoal filter and mixed with Coke will give you a pretty good jolt. The consumption of alcohol sometimes had bizarre repercussions, like the time two of my buddies and I tried to milk a cow, but hit on a bull instead, due to our blurred vision. Bulls don’t like to be milked.

My Uncle Sam taught me to avoid the company of bible thumpers and square-headed butt clenchers at all cost, because they had a tendency to be heroes and get you involved in their foolish quests for glory. If you wanted to survive, it was better to be invisible then to charge headlong into disaster.

My Uncle Sam taught me to treat my rifle like my bride, to love her, clean her, even sleep with her. I never had a bride, so this was new to me. He also insisted that you treat this bride vigorously, like in closed order drills, where you had to slap her and jerk her this way and that, to twirl her in the air, to thump her onto the ground with resolve, in unison with your mates. Perhaps that explains my initial awkwardness and difficulties when I did find a real bride later.

My Uncle Sam taught me that everything is done better in a group, like marching, eating, sleeping, tending to your bodily functions. If you did not adhere to this policy, there were always ramifications, none of them pleasant. Those of you who have ever dug a regulation latrine trench know whereof I’m speaking.

My Uncle Sam taught me how to kill. He taught me to do this without a second thought, without remorse. He taught me that the only thing that mattered was the man standing at the end. He didn’t teach me how to deal with the aftermath, the nightmares.

On Political Correctness

2008-05-05T15:26:00.000-07:00

My man, Charlton Heston, called it the “tyranny of manners.” He was talking about the obsession with political correctness of the self-anointed, morally superior, sensitive and compassionate elite, a type of censorship that is only applied to subjects near and dear to this vociferous left-leaning fringe.

Interestingly, the idea of political correctness is a German invention, developed in the 1920’s by the “Frankfurt School,” a group of progressive thinkers, who were trying to help to spread the Bolshevik Revolution into the rest of Europe. The obstacle, as they saw it, was Western Civilization and its belief in the primacy of the individual and not the group. To achieve their goal of advancing the revolution, they decided that western society’s speech and thought patterns had to be changed by putting about the idea that vocalizing your beliefs was disrespectful to others and must be avoided, in order to make up for past inequities. And it was important to call it something that sounded positive: ”Political Correctness.” George Orwell grasped this concept perfectly.

This infatuation with sensitivity has spread everywhere, particularly the media and post-modern literature. Advocates of political correctness try to homogenize our language, make it easy to be a victim. Terms like “culturally deprived” or “developmentally challenged” come to mind. If you aren’t successful in life, then it must be the fault of your race or gender. Truth is no longer absolute, but simply one perspective offered by a particular group to promote its own interest.

It is a language that leaves common sense at the door. It speaks in platitudes and feel-good euphemisms. It uses words which obfuscate, cloak and obliterate reality. If you do not fall in line, you are marginalized as a died-in-the-wool reactionary, bigot or redneck. I sometimes feel we have returned to the days of the Spanish Inquisition or the star chamber.

I recently wrote a story that touched on the subject of rape of countless German women by Red Army soldiers in 1945. It is a documented fact of history and it was part of the price of the Germans’ defeat. I happened to live there at the time. Rape and death and destruction were a normal part of our everyday life. I tried to put a light-hearted spin on a terrible story. I was told that this was offensive, that rape was a subject that must not be treated lightly. I agree, but back then it was part of the booty of victory. Rape occurred every day and no one in the West objected, because they were afraid of Uncle Joe’s displeasure. Would they object today? I doubt it. If the soldiers were American, perhaps. After all, they are today’s evil empire.

I admit that I am politically incorrect. Mea maxima culpa. Maybe it’s my age. I simply don’t care if anyone thinks I’m a reactionary or a dinosaur. Whatever. This is a free country and everyone is entitled to their truths. It is ok, if you don’t agree with me. That’s your right. Just don’t tell me what I should do or think. If I am factually wrong, show me the error of my ways. I will admit my shortcomings. It is human to err.

Let's Hear It For The Wasps

2008-04-24T13:52:00.000-07:00

I've been pondering over a lengthy treatise I recently saw in an issue of the Saturna Sunset Scribbler, a community publication on Saturna Island in the Georgia Straits off Vancouver, B.C., entitled Message from the Bees and Gaia, by D. Wood & P. Lewis. What particularly annoys me, is the shabby treatment wasps receive in this article. I thought I'd better take a look at these oft-maligned creatures, which "represent the illusion of selfishness or those who serve the lower self," as the writers would have us believe.

What is the this "lower self?" The urge to survive? I see nothing wrong with the will to live. What's illusionary about that? I guess in some quarters the desire to survive is looked at as being selfish. So be it. I am selfish. Without that desire, we wouldn't exist as a species. If you have the time or inclination, read Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. This book debunks some of the favorite illusions of amateur social biologists about the evolution of behavioral altruism, among other things, in the context of the genetical theory of natural selection.

True, wasps do not produce honey, but anyone who has ever closely examined one of their nests, can only be amazed by the intricate beauty and utter efficiency of its design. Wasps are beneficial to us and our environment. They are one of the major natural scavengers. They easily eat their weight in flies, caterpillars and other insect pests found in our gardens, as well as devouring any and all carrion littering the ground. I've watched them dissect a piece of smoked salmon on my deck and I was fascinated to see that they cut their food in a straight line and carry off perfectly square pieces. What's that all about? Some lay their eggs in the bodies of those white grubs that destroy our lawns and those of the tent caterpillars that periodically devastate our trees, some even pollinate plants and crops.

Wasps will sting and repeatedly, if they feel threatened. That's called self-defense. But to say, "the wasp is caught in its own illusion and cannot help but sting even those who come to free it," is claptrap. Free them from what? Their illusion? How presumptuous of us. Haven't we been taught that all living beings fulfill a role in the greater scheme of things? All but wasps, ticks, horseflies or head lice? Should we also exclude Southern Baptists, Shiites or paleontologists? Let's get a life here.

Nothing in life is totally black and white. There are always nuances. Let's give the wasps the credit that is due them as one of nature's creatures that fulfills a purpose in real life. Just don't get too neighborly with them. Like most wild creatures, they are always hungry.