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?
Friday, November 14, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008
A Primer on Education and Survival in the New World
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.
.
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.
.
Friday, October 24, 2008
My Brother Willi
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.
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.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Booze and its Consequences
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.
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.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Politics on the Edge of Canada
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Are Hunters White Trash?
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.
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.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Ruminations of a Bored Mind
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.
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.
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