Balancing Act: Living (and Teaching) Through a Plague, Part 3

Wednesday, 25 March 2020

Just one day after the latest snow had melted, always a surprise, those ephemeral beauties – purple crocuses! – popped out of the ground.

Thursday, 26 March 2020

I cleared the garden yesterday, looking to see what might be sprouting this early spring. I pruned the wild raspberry canes that grow around the compost bin so I could access the hatch at the base of the bin. Then, I mined the rich vein of compost, using hand tools to reach as far and as carefully as I could, making sure the tunnel didn’t collapse. This labor yielded a wheelbarrow-load of dark humus littered with brown eggshell fragments, which I strewed over the garden. In the last few years, I’ve neglected to save my kitchen scraps for the compost – one less task to complicate my life – but I’ve vowed to reinstate that practice. 

Saturday, 28 March 2020

Four women are walking down the middle of our quiet street and talking so loudly I can hear them from inside the house, their voices raised because they’re spaced five feet apart, in a neat square shape. As the coronavirus marches on, as the informal quarantine continues, everyday activities look and feel different. Walking through the City High parking lot, I saw three teens sitting on beanbags beside their cars, forming an equilateral triangle whose sides are six feet long, perhaps talking about geometry or sex or both. On Lower Muscatine Road, in the driveway next to their house, a brother and sister play a violin and cello duet. 

Other than a trip to school on Monday morning, when the building was opened for anyone needing to pick up work or equipment, I’m staying close to home. Climbing the stairs to the second floor, I came upon five other teachers spread out in the hallway and lingered there, hungry for conversation and connection. On Wednesday afternoon, Adam started a group text for all the English language arts teachers. The thread went on for four hours as we shared favorite jokes and memes, photos of our pets and spouses. Missing each other, and human contact in general, we realized this is now what’s available to us.

At least once a day, I feel a little frisson of Covid-19, wondering if I’ve contracted it, and what I’ll need to do if I have. Yesterday evening I broke my quarantine by ordering from Wig & Pen, an old Friday tradition to celebrate the end of the workweek (except I’ve been doing little work). Cautiously walking into the shop to pick up one of their mozzarella-laden Flying Tomato pizzas, gingerly handing over my credit card, I feel the weight of my irresponsibility. When I think about what’s happening in Italy and Spain and New York City, I recognize the privilege of my ability to work from home. I want to show respect for my fellow human beings, and don’t want to contribute to the virus’s spread. Even though its impact on Iowa has been minimal, Johnson County is the state’s epicenter, home to over 25 percent of its cases.

I’d almost forgotten that this coming Monday is my wife’s birthday. But Pat’s still in my mind – always will be, I’m sure. Sixteen months after her death, I can still feel her presence – a breeze brushing my arm, a tingling sensation – then I remind myself she’s gone. Well, the thought of her is with me, but I can no longer read an interesting passage to her or rub her back or give her a hug. I often take an afternoon siesta in the red leather recliner, one of the few places where she could sit comfortably in her last year. More than once, I’ve awoken from a dream of her, certain she had been sitting right beside me. A friend has urged me to consider this not as a figment of my imagination, but Pat’s spirit paying a visit. Doing this has become a solace.

Working in the garden this week, I pay attention to the buds on flowers she planted – the orange-and-yellow flames of the early-blooming dwarf tulips, the forget-me-nots preparing to share their blue reminders. Scything down and raking out the waist-tall stalks from the patch of bee balm that grows by the creek, I’m enwrapped in and enrapt by its fragrance, its resilience, its minty balm. The sprouts of this year’s bee balm are emerging, but the flowers won’t bloom until mid-summer, a brilliant swath of scarlet in the back of the garden. Hummingbirds – and bees, of course – can’t get enough of them, their buzz and hum audible from a distance. According to the website Practical Self Reliance, “Bee balm is antimicrobial and soothing, so it’s often used to treat colds and flu.” The petals are not only used in medicinal teas but are also edible. I might try some on my salads this summer.

Tuesday, 31 March 2020

I’ve been thinking about our response to Covid-19, our efforts to open our hearts and stay in the moment. We’re into the third week of sheltering-in-place and social-distancing, with the likelihood that it will now continue through the entire month of April. Maintaining some kind of emotional balance is needed during this quarantine time. It’s important to stay in touch with what is happening in the world around us. A twelve-year-old Belgian girl and a thirteen-year-old British boy have become the youngest victims of the virus; the 4,000-member crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier are now in quarantine after an outbreak; a funeral in Albany, Georgia, has turned into a “super-spreader event.” And yet, following the news, we risk getting caught up in the potential dangers, the number of cases, the pandemic possibilities and what-ifs. That path leads to paranoia, an irrational fear of the world. A more constructive response is a rational fear of the virus.

I want to act responsibly – one way of staying in the present – washing my hands often, disinfecting surfaces regularly, avoiding physical contact as much as possible. I’m also trying to be aware of my habits or patterns of life. Although the district hasn’t yet given us guidelines on possible online learning, I’ve decided to start a daily email to my students, which has helped me focus. Each morning, I send a short message to each of my classes – AP Language & Composition, U.S. Humanities, and African American Humanities – letting them know I’m thinking about them, mentioning school work they might be doing, sharing a short reading and the song of the day. The last of these is a classroom tradition – to play a song during passing periods to get our minds dancing. It could be a new song I’m listening to – Sudan Archives’ “Nont for Sale” or Fiona Apple’s “Fast As You Can” – or a timely song such as Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” or The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” (an obvious choice) or a joyful energetic number such as The B-52’s “Love Shack.”  These daily emails impel me to keep my students in mind as I go through my day, reading books, listening to music or podcasts, watching movies – activities that keep my mind engaged with meaningful work.

Because the weather has been kind, I’ve been able to go for runs and walks, and work in the garden, clearing off the dead leaves and vegetation, getting the garden ready for planting. I visited my neighborhood garden center yesterday afternoon – again, feeling a bit uncomfortable about disregarding the informal restriction – to pick up vegetable and herb seeds, starter mix, topsoil, and a witch alder shrub to replace the burning bush I had cut down and excavated. I appreciate how this is helping me focus on productive solitary activities and staying in the current moment of spring and rebirth.

One silver lining of the pandemic is that I’m getting better at using online communication tools. I set up a Google Meet with Sierra, Emma, and Jesse this past Sunday. I have not been great at staying in touch with them, and decided this would be one way to bring us all together, to strengthen our Roanoke-Iowa City-Austin-Seattle ties. It worked fairly well, and everyone is on-board with doing this on a weekly basis. If I call on Sunday at 4:00 p.m., it will be five o’clock in Roanoke and two o’clock in Seattle. Yesterday, the Washington ELA department met on Zoom for an hour and a half. We had an agenda, which primarily justified our need to chat, catch up, enjoy each other’s company, offer moral support. These online meetings gave me some practice for the Google Hangouts editorial meeting I’ll be holding with my Washington Literary Press kids this afternoon.

Because I live alone now, the lack of physical contact has been a challenge. When I’m working in the yard, I wave to and converse with my neighbors, and I’ve noticed the increased friendliness of our little sidestreet. On walks with my friend Jennifer, we’ve engaged in comforting and affirming exchanges about how we’re learning to rebound from loss. I hope to reach out to other friends – Sharon and John, Mary and Steve, Nancy – to arrange conversational strolls with them.

I’ve definitely noticed some hindrances to staying present since the onset of the pandemic. Becoming anxious or overwhelmed by all the news could send anyone into a tailspin. Because of my physical isolation, I need to get better at staying on task and following a schedule. I sometimes flit from one thing to the next – a butterfly’s focus that doesn’t usually feel productive or satisfying. I don’t want to force myself into a rigid schedule, but I do want to say, “I’m going to read this afternoon,” and then do so for an hour or two without interrupting myself. The night is my most productive writing time, but I was up until four a.m. last night, and those were not productive hours. I don’t want to always be nose-to-the-grindstone, but I do want to be engaged in work, by which I mean “activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.”

Friday, 3 April 2020

We seek out the small signs that we’re still human and whole and hale.

In our Zoom meeting

The birds are singing at Alexia’s home.

She’s sharing her home with us.

We share our homes with each other.

This is how we will learn to love again

After the pandemic.

Balancing Act: Living (and Teaching) Through a Plague, Part 2

The new maroon Converse All-Stars of joy.

Monday, 16 March 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic (and the public response to it) is getting more and more serious. School has been canceled for four weeks – spring break and the following three weeks of scheduled school. Are we going to extend our school year by three weeks? But it’s all for the best. Even though it has barely infected our little inland state, the virus is wreaking widespread and deadly havoc in other parts of the world, and this could potentially go wild everywhere. Shutting everything down is the smartest thing to do to minimize the spread of the virus. 

Nonetheless, I’m feeling the disappointments of canceled events I was involved in organizing – no student-staff basketball fundraiser match-up, no Just Mercy movie field trip and Black Writer guest speakers for my African American Humanities classes, probably no Chicago field trip for my U.S. Humanities students (scheduled for April 28), maybe no Guatemala student service trip (scheduled for June 1-10). I’m trying to resist the impulse to wallow in my anxiety that the rest of the school year will be canceled. The Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919 infected over 25 percent of the world’s population and killed approximately 50 million people. You might think we are more knowledgeable and better prepared a century later, but we don’t seem to be. Our nation’s slow response, in terms of canceling events and gatherings and putting together testing kits, even as the virus was hitting China like a sledgehammer, suggests that this will get much much worse.

Last Wednesday, we were able to squeeze in our African American Humanities field trip to Hancher Auditorium just before everything started shutting down. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performance was amazing. A friend of mine in the marketing department may have played a role in reserving the front row center seats for us. Twenty minutes before the performance began, many of the dancers were on stage warming up, giving us a fascinating peek behind the scenes. The performance combined historical background about Alvin Ailey and the dance troupe with two dance pieces, which included some participatory dancing in our seats. My students loved the experience, and yet, I will feel terrible if any of them contract Covid-19 because they came into contact with the virus at the show.

In the front four rows of Hancher Auditorium, my students and their chaperones await the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater performance.

Saturday night, my friend Jennifer and I watched a stunningly beautiful movie, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, at Film Scene, a day before it closed its doors. The twenty people in the theater all carefully chose “socially distant” seats, but one might argue we were being unnecessarily risky. And last night, six friends came over for what had been planned as a potluck dinner to welcome my daughter Emma and her two sons. Although Emma had to cancel their trip, it felt good to get together with friends and enjoy some delicious food. We cautiously bumped elbows rather than hugged, and our gathering was well under fifty people, so we obeyed that restriction, but again I wonder if we were being foolhardy. I’ve made a list of errands and tasks I don’t have time to do when school is in session, but out of sympathy for store clerks and cashiers, I’m hesitant to enter shops unless I must. 

Tuesday, 17 March 2020

I had a Covid-19 nightmare last night. People with the coronavirus were taking everyone else with them. Once they knew they had the virus, they gathered everyone with whom they had been in contact into a room and then shot them all and then shot themselves. I think this has something to do with the fact that people have not only been stocking up on toilet paper and antiseptic wipes and hand sanitizer but also guns. Why do people feel that they need more guns and ammunition at a time like this?

Thursday, 19 March 2020

Inspired by Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights and determined to cling to some optimism during these dark times, I’m attempting an essay on the joy of pancakes: When my kids were young, I would usually make pancakes on Saturday morning. When Pat was working on her nursing degree, taking classes during the day and working evening shifts at the nursing home, I would sometimes make pancakes for dinner. (The kids made fun of me because they claimed I only knew how to make flat meals – homemade pizzas, pancakes, tacos.) Somewhere along the way, I found a good pancake mix recipe: unbleached white flour, whole wheat flour, cornmeal, a bit of buckwheat or seven-grain flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt. I’d often add blueberries or overripe bananas, and in the summer, leftover sweet corn off the cob. Sometimes I’d make small silver dollar pancakes. The kids liked this tradition. As they slathered the pancakes in butter and syrup and peanut butter, they’d often sing, “she never made me pancakes,” which I somehow assumed was an Ol’ Dirty Bastard song, but it turns out it’s from the song “Pancakes, off The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits album.[1]

Now I make those pancakes for my grandsons. They have come to expect them whenever I visit them. They call them Poppy Pancakes and claim they’re the best. As I cooked some on the griddle this morning, I meditated on the transformation from batter to pancake by the influence of heat, how the batter slowly rises on the griddle, bubbles forming on the surface and then popping, the edges lightly browning, a signal the pancake is ready to be flipped. A sweet and simple way to show my love for my children and my children’s children.

Monday, 23 March 2020

Spring break is over and we should be back in school now, but we’re not, and won’t be for at least another three weeks, probably longer. It’s distinctly possible this school year will be canceled entirely. I worry about my students. Are they safe and sound? Are they following pandemic restrictions? Are they bored? I sent out an email to all my students today just to connect with them, a habit I plan to continue until we are together again.

The snow that fell yesterday outlines the branches of every tree and bush, the sharp contrast of black and white, but the snow is already melting and dropping from the trees as I write. 

On a whim and out of a desire to give myself something to look forward to, I’d ordered a pair of maroon hightop Converse All-Stars on Amazon. Rather, the fifteen-year-old inside of me ordered them. And the fifty-year-old didn’t complain or object, nor did the sixty-five-year-old who is the combination of the other two. These were the tennis shoes I wore all through my teen years. They were the basketball shoe de rigueur at that time – lightweight canvas uppers, high tops whose extra support protected against ankle rolls, rubber soles in a grid pattern that enabled us to make sharp cuts on the hardcourt. We called them Connies or All-Stars, never Chuck Taylors or Chucks. That all came later.

Only two colors were available back in the sixties – white and black – and I always wore white Connies. Now, Chucks are fashionable casual wear rather than athletic shoes, and come in a rainbow of colors. When my maroon hightops arrived on Friday, I immediately laced them up. In a time of coronavirus and sheltering in place, they make my feet feel lighthearted and fancy-free.

Tuesday. 24 March 2020

I love moments when minds intersect, when paths cross, and I get to witness those serendipitous moments. Here’s a “conversation” that took place yesterday between a scientist (Hope Jahren’s memoir Lab Girl) and a poet (Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights) about the symbiotic relationship between fungi and trees. While reading Jahren, I came upon this:

Every toadstool, from the deliciously edible to the deathly poisonous, is merely a sex organ that is attached to something more whole, complex, and hidden. Underneath every mushroom is a web of stringy hyphae that may extend for kilometers, wrapping around countless clumps of soil and holding the landscape together. The ephemeral mushroom appears briefly above the surface while the webbing that anchors it lives for years within a darker and richer world. A very small minority of these fungi – just five thousand species – have strategically entered into a deep and enduring truce with plants. They cast their stringy webbing around and through the roots of trees, sharing the burden of drawing water into the trunk. They also mine the soil for rare metals, such as manganese, copper, and phosphorus, and then present them to the tree as precious gifts of the magi.

Jahren goes on to ask why they are together, but posits no scientific answer, only suggesting that “perhaps the fungus can somehow sense that when it is part of a symbiosis, it is also not alone.” Maybe she’s guilty of anthropomorphizing the fungi. Or maybe she’s suggesting lessons that we can learn from trees and fungi, reminders of what Paradise might feel like. In my reading last night, Gay continued this conversation:

In healthy forests, which we might imagine to exist mostly above ground, and be wrong in our imagining, given as the bulk of the tree, the roots, are reaching through the earth below, there exists a constant communication between those roots and mycelium, where often the ill or weak or stressed are supported by the strong and surplused.

By which I mean a tree over there needs nitrogen, and a nearby tree has extra, so the hyphae (so close to hyphen, the handshake of the punctuation world), the fungal ambulances, ferry it over. Constantly. This tree to that. That to this. And that in a tablespoon of rich fungal duff (a delight: the phrase fungal duff, meaning a healthy forest soil, swirling with the living the dead make) are miles and miles of hyphae, handshakes, who get a little sugar for their work.

Gay is a bit more explicit than Jahren about the allegory: “Joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love.” I’m sure Jahren and Gay are not the only two folks who have made these connections, but that I encountered this profound idea twice in one day is, well, pretty cool.

Footnote:

[1] Marvin Pontiac is a fictional musician created by the musician, painter, actor, and director John Lurie.

Balancing Act: Living (an Teaching) Through a Plague, Part 1

The self-serve coffee bar in my classroom at Washington High School. The decorated mugs were a gift from one of the Washington Literary Press staffs.

Tuesday, 11 February 2020

Last Friday, my decision to retire from teaching went public (on the Cedar Rapids school board agenda). I had already talked with my department chair, Adam, about this, and learned he was in the process of requesting a one-year leave of absence. After school on Thursday, I spoke with Julie, one of our instructional coaches and a close friend. Those conversations reminded me how bittersweet this decision is. I count Adam and Julie as two of my closest colleagues. As is true of so many of the teachers I’ve gotten to know over the last fifteen years, I have tremendous respect and admiration for them. I’ve witnessed teacher after teacher draw upon a seemingly bottomless well of empathy and compassion in order to connect with and support their students.

During my prep period on Thursday, I also stopped by to share my retirement plans with John, our principal. The conversation was as strange as many of our conversations have been. He asked if there was anything he could have done to keep me here, offering me an opening I gently stepped into. Already sixty-five years old, I had planned to teach one more year at most, but yes, his inability to address the everyday needs of his staff played a role in my decision. If he didn’t know that already, he’s even less astute than I had thought he was. At one point, he reminded me that his “laser focus” has been on helping our students to be academically successful. I reminded him that if that focus on students means that he ignores and fails to support his staff, to the point where their low morale affects their work in the classroom or persuades them to leave the profession, well, then he’s a pretty lousy principal. I don’t know if he heard what I had to say, or heard it but is incapable of changing himself.

Adam and I shared our news with the rest of the English department on Monday during lunch. After school, six of us gathered in the hallway and talked through our feelings. I’m trying to offer my colleagues some perspective: even though the two of us are veteran members of the department, they’ll forge on without us. If the school is able to hire someone like Tiphany, a first-year teacher who has been doing amazing work with her LA 10 classes and the Journalism program, they’ll be fine. After I went public with my retirement plans, during separate conversations with John, Julie, and Tiphany, their eyes welled up with tears. This surprised me. I don’t consider myself specially kind or thoughtful, but that reaction tells me I’ve had more of an impact on them than I might suppose.

Thursday, 13 February 2020

For teachers, snow days can be a gift. Yes, I’m annoyed that everything I wanted to do with my students today won’t happen, and my week’s lesson plans have been thrown into disarray. But I can let go of that. I’ve been reading Steven Levine’s book A Year to Live. A poet and teacher working in Buddhist traditions, Levine offers readers guidance in “how to live this year as if it were your last.” This snow day has allowed me to work on what he describes as a Life Review. I’ve started this chapter a couple times but keep setting the book aside. It’s a challenging and difficult step in the process. As I read the chapter, my mind dredged up memories, most of them weighed down by regret.

Levine eases us into this tough work, advising us to start with gratitude. My seventh-hour class knows they can get me off-track by nudging me to tell stories of my youthful adventures, hitchhiking stories about the kindness of strangers who helped me land on my feet when I was tripped up by adversity or my own foolishness. Levine then says we should turn to painful memories and offer forgiveness to those who’ve done us harm. For me, this is a fairly short list. Yes, I’ve experienced small offenses, but few that I’ve nursed over the years. One that stands out is the mistreatment I endured from my neighborhood pal Mark H. That I remember his name says something, since I haven’t seen him since high school, and we stopped hanging out by fifth or sixth grade. He would exploit my trust in order to make me an easier target for his verbal and physical bullying. As I write this, I imagine running into him some day and revealing this harm I’ve harbored. And in that imagined moment, he apologizes, admitting his youthful failings. Levine writes, “Forgiveness finishes unfinished business.”

The last step of the Life Review is the hardest – the litany of regrets. The Brett Kavanaugh hearings this past year caused me to look hard in the mirror. Ten years younger than me, he too attended an all-boys Jesuit college-prep high school. His breezy abuse of women (alleged, but I have no doubt) led me to recall how we talked about and treated women then. As Levine writes, “I discovered a youth full of distrust, self-centered gratification, and emotional dishonesty.” While a girlfriend and I waited in traffic after a concert at Blossom Music Center, my inebriation and blind lust led me to make advances despite her repeated requests that I stop. Something kept me from doing the worst, but the next morning, I was steeped in shame. And yet, I never apologized to her. When a girlfriend from Ohio University came to visit me in Kentucky, I was cold and rude, perhaps because I feared her visit signaled a level of commitment I wasn’t ready for, but that’s all bullshit. I never explained my feelings to her, in part because I barely understood them myself. I’ve searched the internet for her, wondering what she’s doing now, wishing I could reach out and apologize.

I wasn’t always the best father, particularly when the kids were young. I inherited my father’s impatience and anger, aspects of him I abhorred. Levine reminds us, “There are moments in the life review for all of us when the going gets so tough we have to keep remembering to come back to the heart the way a mountain climber returns to an oxygen mask.” In recent years, I’ve apologized to my kids. Their nonchalant responses indicated either their readiness to forgive me or the insignificance of those incidents. 

Over the forty-five years that I knew Pat, I hurt her many times, but she was good at calling me on it and not letting me off the hook. Out of necessity, I learned to own my mistakes and apologize, to wait in the doghouse for however long was needed until she was ready to forgive me. And I became a better man because of those apologies. Levine writes, “It really isn’t the act of contrition that sets the mind at rest but the intention not to repeat actions that cause harm.” I’m grateful that over the last ten years of her life, from her first open-heart surgery to the final two years of her cancer, I was perhaps the best partner I ever was.

Levine quotes the Hindu epic Ramayana as a way to describe the Life Review: “It’s like something I dreamed once, long ago, far away.” This brought to mind the Grateful Dead song “Box of Rain” and Robert Hunter’s lyrics: “It’s all a dream we dreamed/ One afternoon long ago.” As I listened to the song and sang along with Jerry Garcia, I was ambushed by a powerful blend of regret, forgiveness, and joy, and my eyes welled up with tears. “Maybe you’re tired and broken/ Your tongue is twisted with words half spoken/ And thoughts unclear/ What do you want me to do/ To do for you to see you through/ A box of rain will ease the pain/ And love will see you through.”

Saturday, 22 February 2020

There are raccoons in my attic. I’ve been hearing them most of the winter, frequently insisting to myself I need to go up there and ask them to leave. But then I’d forget about that task until the next time I heard them pitter-pattering around. The only official access point is a hatch in the garage ceiling, although I’m guessing the raccoons have gained entry through a rotten board in the eaves I’ve been intending to replace. I envision a showdown. The raccoons are surely nesting, if they haven’t already given birth to a little brood. It’s not easy to be nimble up there because there’s no flooring. I wonder if this is a metaphor for something in terms of my Life Review. Are there memories scratching around in my head I’m not addressing? It can be awfully easy to be untruthful with myself, to admit the easy truths in order to conceal the darker ones.

I climbed up into the attic, expecting to find a raccoon family unwilling to be evicted from their home. Yelling out as I crawled over the rafter beams, hoping to scare off the animals, I discovered no critters. Sometimes, harboring fear or anxiety is worse than facing dark truths. I replaced the rotten board in the eaves, hoping to discourage future uninvited boarders.

Later, I went for a long run. Running is one of my favorite meditative practices. I become conscious of the cadence of my breathing, the alignment of my spine, my hips swiveling, my arms pumping, my hands relaxed in loose fists, my feet hitting the pavement, heel to toe. Sweat drips from my eyebrows, even in 50-degree weather. Eventually I find a rhythm and stop thinking about my body and go into my head. Afterwards my skin tingles. That sense of well-being lingers for hours.

Saturday, 1 March 2020

A beautiful first day of March. While folks stroll together or walk their dogs or bike the trail that connects Court Hill and McPherson parks or play basketball on the new court at McPherson Park, I take a midafternoon run. We know more winter lies ahead, but we want to revel in the warmth while it’s here.

I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s essays. In “Self-Respect,” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she writes: “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.”

Saturday, 14 March 2020

Spring break in a time of pandemic. I’m trying to obey the quarantine, practicing “social distancing.” I just filled the bird feeders, and now I’m watching the nuthatches and chickadees and juncos and purple finches stopping by for snacks. I’ve been reading (and loving) Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, an entry or two each night at bedtime. I admire the book’s concept – a year-long commitment to write a daily essay praising and embracing some small wonder – and I’m charmed by his digressions and veerings. Last night, his “Joy Is Such a Human Madness” piece resonated with me. (The title is a  quote from Zadie Smith’s essay “Joy.”) Gay is drawing a distinction and a connection between pleasure and joy (or delight). He proposes that joy is “being of and without at once.” Working from Smith’s essay, Gay offers this conundrum: “The intolerable makes life worthwhile.” Gay goes on to describe the joy of parenting as “terror and delight sitting next to each other, their feet dangling off the side of the bridge, very high up.” That is, we can’t truly experience joy without having experienced some profound sorrow – suffering or loss or pain or misery. It is the contrast that transforms a pleasurable moment into one of true joy.

I’ve been more aware of this feeling lately. I cultivate it and nurture it. I think it could carry me through most hard times. At school, during these dark days of struggling with the obstacles laid down by an ineffective principal, I’ve tried to spread joy among the students and my fellow teachers. Although High-Five Friday has been temporarily canceled because of the Covid-19 threat, I love joining other teachers at the school entrances to greet our kids and wish them a good day.

Sixteen months ago, my wife, Pat, died. I wonder if this explains my increased awareness of these moments. Losing her, that continued loss, the empty place that had been filled for almost forty years, makes me grateful for all the sweet moments that feel that much sweeter. I’m listening to Joni Mitchell’s album Blue. In the title song, she sings, “Everybody’s saying that hell’s the hippest way to go/ Well I don’t think so,/ But I’m gonna take a look around it though.” Would the joy of paradise mean as much to us without the dark alternative of hell?

Cambiando Futuros en Guatemala[1]

Our crew before heading out on our first day of work.

It was the last day of our service project – to build a home for (and with) a Guatemalan family – but I don’t think any of us were ready for it to end. That morning we were working on the final touches – Byron and Manuel, our two Guatemalan crew leaders, our jefes; the student crew of Miles, Josie, Maddie, and Azul; and Ofni, the young father of the family who would soon move into this house. We installed two sliding glass windows and a solid-core wood door, and grouted the beautiful terracotta floor tiles that had been laid the day before.

Meanwhile, Ofni’s mother-in-law was making lunch on the stove we had installed. A pot of rice and finely diced vegetables was simmering on one burner, while tomates, chiles, and sliced cebollas were roasting on another. In short breaks between tasks, I kept an eye on the progress as she blended the roasted vegetables with cilantro, parsley, and toasted pepitas and sesame seeds to produce a sauce in which chicken pieces would be stewed. As a midday rainstorm moved in, we covered the tools and hauled a makeshift wood plank table into the house. Serenaded by the gentle staccato patter of rain on the sheet metal roof, the ten of us – our work crew plus Ofni, Maria, and their three-month-old baby Arleth Verenice – sat down to a delicious hot lunch of pepián de pollo, a traditional Guatemalan Mayan dish. We ate and smiled and laughed together, dry and comfortable in the warmth of good company.

Lunch in the new home of Ofni, Maria, and their baby daughter.

For the past ten years, my friend and colleague James Burke, a Spanish teacher at Washington High School, has been leading spring break service trips to Antigua, Guatemala. I’ve always been interested in this project, drawn by both my memories of a week spent in Antigua some forty years ago, and the enthusiastically positive demeanor of the students when they returned. James and I had been discussing the possibility of me joining a trip, but I couldn’t commit because of my wife’s health. In the fall of 2019, a year after she passed away, I was finally ready to do so, only to have the Covid pandemic shut down the trip just as we were getting ready to go.

James and I stayed in touch after I retired from Washington in June 2020, and when he told me this past October that a new trip was being organized, I enthusiastically said, “Count me in!” So, in the early hours of Sunday, March 12, I met three other adults and thirteen students at the Eastern Iowa Airport to fly to Guatemala City. By three in the afternoon, we were being greeted at the Aeropuerto Internacional La Aurora by Alexis, Eddie, and Gregorio, the three full-time staff of ImagininGuatemala (IG), the local NGO we’d be working with. We clambered into a 20-seater charter bus, navigated the Guatemala City traffic, stopped for dinner at Pollo Campero, and then headed on through the city and over steep mountains to Antigua, forty kilometers and two hours away. Antigua has all the charm that Guatemala City lacks. The city of 50,000 is a UNESCO World Heritage Site – cobblestone streets and narrow sidewalks border the brightly painted stucco walls of homes and businesses. We were dropped off next to a basketball court in Colonia Candelaria, on the northeast edge of the city, near the crumbling ruins of a church destroyed in the Santa Marta earthquakes in 1773.[2]

We fanned out to our nearby host families. James, Ceci Cornejo (a young paraeducator recently hired at Washington), and I stayed with Dina Cazali, a warm, generous woman who operates a small pension out of her home. Five private rooms open onto a second-floor walkway overlooking a central room on the first floor, all of which is under roof. The second floor reaches out to form a rooftop balcony filled with potted plants and clotheslines. My two companions are far more bilingual than I, but as we chatted with Dina, I realized she thoughtfully adjusts her speech to the needs of her guests, and I was able to easily follow the conversation. 

After an orientation meeting that evening at the IG offices, we returned to our lodgings. On this Third Sunday of Lent, some of the churches were holding processionals. We could hear music in the distance, mostly horns and drums, somehow sounding both festive and mournful. As I walked up the hill, I passed un viejo, hunched over, maybe five feet tall. “Buenas noches,” I offered. He replied in kind, warmly, enthusiastically. Even to the many gringos who intrude upon their city, los Antigüeños son muy amable.

On Monday we were given time to get familiar with the city and its culture. I awoke at dawn to the sound of great-tailed grackles speaking a language different from the one birds speak in Iowa. A tinny church bell was struck, over and over, in no particular pattern, perhaps the repetition making up for the lack of resonance. We spent the morning on a guided walking tour of the city, starting with a hike up nearby Cerro de La Cruz, from whose heights we could admire a vista of the entire city and the ominous Volcán de Agua on its far side, and ending at the beautiful baroque facade of the Iglesia de La Merced, gleaming gold and white in the sun. That afternoon we traveled to nearby San Antonio Aguas Calientes, a Kaqchikel Maya town known for its traditional textiles, where we met the family of IG staffer Eddie and watched his wife demonstrate weaving on a backstrap loom. We bought textile items she and her neighbors had woven and then helped make (and eat) tortillas negras cooked on a portable comal.

View of Antigua and Volcán de Agua from Cerro de la Cruz.

We began our service project on Tuesday. We had been split up into three crews, each one led by two local housebuilders. The goal of each crew was to build a home for a family in need of better housing.[3] We loaded a large water cooler and our lunches into the back of a camioneta, and then clambered aboard, sitting on the sidewalls of its bed, arms wrapped around its rack, and traveled through the city of work. The house site was ten kilometers away on the edge of San Antonio Aguas Calientes. After meeting Ofni, Maria, Arleth, and Maria’s mother and sisters, who lived nearby, we lugged the toolboxes and the first six 50-kilo bags of cement from their porch and got to work.

Byron and Manual gave us instructions in Spanish. Thankfully we had studied our housebuilder vocabulary. Hammer is martillo, nails are clavos, pintura is paint, and the four-by-eight fiberboard sheets are láminas. When Byron said, “Quarenta bloques!” we knew how many cinder blocks to carry from a nearby stack to the 12-by-16-foot trench that was the footprint of the main room. Meanwhile, some of us wheelbarrowed sand to a packed dirt area between the outdoor sink and shower and the chicken coop, under the shade of a carob tree. After shoveling the sand and cement until it was well blended, water was added, and then more shoveling and mixing until it was the proper consistency for mortar. The walls went up, seven courses in front, eight courses in the back, with the second and last courses laid upside down so the cinder blocks could be filled with rebar and mortar for greater stability, and large bolts could be inserted in the wet mortar of the top course. Ofni worked alongside us, always a smile on his face. “David!” he would call out to me, just for fun. Maria, carrying sleeping Arleth in a sling tied over her shoulder, brought us a mid-morning snack – a bowl of freshly sliced pineapple.

On the ride back to Antigua that afternoon, I looked around at our student crew and thought about how much I was enjoying getting to know them, seeing parts of them they usually don’t share with their classroom teachers. Miles and Josie were excitedly comparing their lists of top ten breakup songs. Maddie and Azul called out to dogs lounging beside the road, to dogs assembled on a street corner by the mercado, seemingly living in their own worlds. As we rumbled through the streets of Antigua, we felt exhausted but happy, and somehow changed. We had proved ourselves in the crucible of a hard day’s labor. We smiled and shook our heads at the U.S. tourists wandering around in short pants and skimpy tops, oblivious to or in glaring opposition to the culture of the Guatemalan people.

Our second workday was just as challenging. I noticed that Ofni had carefully tied up some of the low branches of the carob tree. Our heads had been bumping into the large green bean pods as we worked on Tuesday. As we prepared to begin our work, I stopped to look up at the surrounding mountains, where carefully tended campos clung to even the steepest slopes, and directly overhead, where the pale wisp of a crescent moon was dissolving in the morning sun. We cut all the four-by-fours and two-by-fours that would frame the house, and drilled holes for the bottom plates of those walls. We prepared to pour the floor, again mixing the cement by hand – trece carretas de arena spread out ten inches thick, seis sacos de cemento poured over that, and for a top layer, siete carretas de piedrin.[4] We sifted and mixed the dry ingredients by shoveling them into a peak, como un volcán, then shoveling the entire volcano five feet away, then shoveling it back to its original location. We leveled out its peak and created a depression in the middle, adding water, mas agua, mas agua, como un lago, then formed an irrigation ditch around the lake, letting the water soak in until it was ready to be mixed into concrete. 

Our mid-morning snack was a bowlful of sliced papaya. Ah, the taste of a fresh, tree-ripened papaya – the fruit all but melted in our mouths. And there was enough left for a dessert to go with our lunch of sandwiches and chips. Byron was ready to get to it after lunch. Maddie, Josie, Azul, and I formed a bucket brigade from the wet concrete into the house, while Manuel and Miles rapidly filled our three-gallon buckets with wet concrete. As soon as we supplied Byron, he emptied each bucket and troweled the concrete to a smooth level surface. When the interior room was done, we poured a six-by-twelve-foot slab adjoining the house for the outdoor kitchen. We were able to knock off at three o’clock, just as a light rain began to fall.

At the end of day two, with Maria’s mother and nephew Mateo in this photo.

On our third day the workload began to ease up. We framed the rest of the house, nailing the wall studs and top plate and rafter beams, adding frames for the windows and door. We tacked down the sturdy fiberboard láminas we had painted a bright turquoise color, cutting out space for the windows. Ofni brought us 16-ounce glass bottles of Coca-Cola, which we decided to store in the water cooler so they’d be ice-cold at lunchtime. Maria’s mother made us a lunch of spaghetti with vegetables, a kind of pasta primavera. And for an afternoon snack, Maria brought us a Guatemalan treat, rellenitos de plátano – mashed plantains stuffed with sweet frijoles, deep-fried and rolled in sugar. We worked until five o’clock, laying the twelve-by-twelve-inch floor tiles and installing the high-efficiency wood-burning Chispa cookstove.[5]

Friday was our last day at the house. After that wonderful lunch with the family, we wired the house for electricity, putting in three overhead lights and three outlets, and installed a plaque beside the door that announced the owners of the home and our role in constructing it. We gathered inside the house for a formal handing over of the keys. Byron gave a little speech, and Ofni expressed his heartfelt thanks, with bilingual Azul translating so we’d know all that was said. She didn’t need to translate the part when he told us we were now their lifelong friends, and were welcome in their home any time we wanted to visit. When we gave the house keys to Ofni, Maria, and Arleth, there were few dry eyes.[6] I was moved by the gratitude of the family, but also impressed by the students, who are struggling to shape their identity in a world fraught with social media, who at a tender age weathered a pandemic, with its social distancing and sheltering in place. They were fully in the moment. They understood the part they had played in this extraordinary kindness, this most human of acts.

That morning as we were loading up the camionetas, a man who lived next door was standing in his doorway watching us. He said something to the drivers I didn’t catch. Azul smiled as she turned to me, translating, “He said, ‘Take good care of those gems.’”

Footnotes:

[1] Cambiando Futuros (Changing Futures) is a slogan used by ImagininGuatemala, the charitable organization we worked with. I encourage you to visit their website and click on “how you can help.”

[2] After those earthquakes, the capital of the Spanish Kingdom of Guatemala was moved to present-day Guatemala City. The city that was eventually rebuilt became Antigua (as in Old Guatemala).

[3] Ours would be houses #181-183 built by the ImagininGuatemala NGO.

[4] Our concrete formula was 13 wheelbarrows of sand, 6 bags of cement, and 7 wheelbarrows of gravel.

[5] See this website for more information: Chispa Stoves / Clean Cooking Alliance.

Fatherhood & Sonhood

In 1995, at my sister Julie’s wedding - Dad, me, Uncle Dick (Dad’s only sibling).

“How can I try to explain?/ When I do he turns away again/ It’s always been the same/ Same old story/ From the moment I could talk/ I was ordered to listen” –Cat Stevens, “Father and Son”

As is true for many, my relationship with my father was complicated. Starting when I was a high school freshman in 1968, he and I would argue over the path our country was taking. Usually stirred up during dinner, these arguments often became quite heated. The MyLai massacre, anti-war protests on campuses and civil rights protests in cities, the cultural revolution of Woodstock and the Summer of Love, feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights and the Stonewall demonstrations, Chicago police cracking protestors’ heads at the Democratic National Convention, National Guard shooting students at Jackson State and nearby Kent State. All these became the bases for our generational clashes of opinions, him defending the status quo, me demanding change.

Although neither of us ever admitted it, we were stimulated by this long-drawn-out contest of wills. At the same time, we disliked each other for what we became when we argued – obstinate, relentless, self-centered. One of the rules of our supper table was that we had to ask to be excused. I now want to take a moment to apologize to my nine siblings. Unable to get a word in edgewise, they were often forced to bear witness to these protracted altercations fueled by our mutual stubbornness.

One of the first poems I wrote in high school, later published in a pamphlet by Brother Al Behm, a Glenmary friend.

Of course, life with my father wasn’t all contention. In particular, I admired his ability to enjoy his life. I have in mind a picture of him dancing with my youngest sister, Christina, at her wedding reception. It was the last summer before his death. Battling liver cancer and undergoing chemotherapy treatments, he somehow looked robust and vigorous in his tuxedo. Fully in the moment as he guided his daughter around the spotlight of the dance floor, he had a style distilled from the simple pleasure of living in this world.

John David Duer was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1924. His father, Johann Baptiste Duer, had immigrated from Hard, a small Austrian fishing village on the Bodensee. With his brother Adolph, he started a construction company that still exists today. But he died before his younger son had turned one year old.[1] My grandmother moved back home to East Bernstadt, in rural eastern Kentucky, where she raised her two sons with the help of her brother Willie.

When John finished high school, the family moved back to Akron, into a three-story brick duplex my grandmother had inherited from her husband. John started taking classes at the University of Akron and working at the Firestone Tire & Rubber factory,[2] but soon enlisted in the Air Force. By 1943, he was flying missions over Western Europe from England, a tailgunner in a B-24 Liberator bomber. Their plane was shot down once, but he survived unharmed. Like many vets, he never talked about his war experiences.

After the war, John used the GI Bill to earn a business degree from Marquette University in Milwaukee. Soon after he returned to Akron, he landed a job as a liquor salesman for the Seagram Company. It was a good match for my outgoing and voluble father. He took an interest in the people he encountered during his workday. The job entailed visiting restaurants and bars in his Ohio territory, schmoozing the owners and bartenders, and persuading them to put his brands in the well. When he was successful, the martini a person ordered was made with Wolfschmidt Vodka or Burnett’s London Dry Gin, the manhattan was made with Carstairs White Seal Whiskey, and his sales numbers rose.

I sensed that he enjoyed those bachelor years. He had a number of cousins in the Akron area who were lifelong friends. When he hung out with them later in his life, I’d sometimes hear them refer to him as Schwing. I never knew the origins of that nickname, and this was decades before the movie Wayne’s World popularized the word, but I always wondered. In any case, he met and married my mother in 1953, and I was born one year later.

John David Duer and Rose Marie Trares, married in 1953.

My father was a notoriously halfass do-it-yourselfer. He never balked at doing any car or house  repair project himself. In those days before YouTube tutorials, he might’ve asked for advice from a friend or the guy at the hardware store. More often than not, he just figured it out on his own. The results were less than impressive. When he fixed a toilet, it would flush, but only if we jiggled the handle three times beforehand. He built a shower in our basement laundry room that consisted of a two-foot-high cinder block wall, a flimsy shower curtain, and a wood pallet floor that grew slimy over time. Uncomfortably spartan, it taught us to be adaptable to a wide range of living conditions.

He usually expected my help on these projects, an assignment that mostly consisted of me watching him. He thought I’d learn something from that, but I was just bored. It felt like penance for a sin I didn’t remember committing. I hated watching him stumble through these repair projects, and he often ended up yelling at me and banishing me from the work site, which suited me just fine. And yet, in my adulthood, I became an equally determined and even-more-hapless do-it-yourselfer. But every time I change the oil on my car, I tip my cap to Dad. And my daughter, Emma, who has proven to be twice as handy as either of us, claims I showed her how to confidently take the leap into some of the amazing DIY house projects she’s pulled off.

Starting in fourth grade, I became aware of another side of my dad I could appreciate. A scrappy hard-nosed hoopster, he played pickup basketball well into his mid-forties. I often tagged along for those weekday evening games at the grade school gym.[3] He was five-foot-ten, but never hesitated to mix it up in the paint with bigger and younger players. He had a two-handed set shot that was anachronistic even then, but accurate. I was only five-six in my junior year of high school, but played a lot of neighborhood hoops. When I finally grew up, to six-foot-one, I became a decent baller. During the winter, on Wednesday nights, you could find me at the West Branch Elementary School gym, playing pickup games into my mid-forties, often with guys half my age.

Eventually, my father and I began to broker an uneasy truce. When I was seventeen, after reading Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and meeting the character Willy Loman, I began to develop a new sympathy for Dad’s life, and for the incredibly short fuse of his fiery temper. However, distance played a role in that truce – I lived with him only twice after high school, once for two months, another time for five. I gave him credit for not badgering me about my vagabonding and my hippie ways during those years. But we still butted heads. When I was on my way to Europe in the summer of 1981, Pat gave me a ride from Iowa City to my family’s home in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Although she and I were not married, it was clear that Pat, Sierra, and I were a family. My father barely disguised his opinion that she was too brash and outspoken, traits that he felt were “unwomanly.” He pulled me aside during that visit and said, “You should not marry that woman.” I was caught off guard, so surprised I didn’t know how to tell him I wasn’t interested in his opinion or advice. When I proposed to Pat six months later, I promised her I’d be a better husband and father than he was. When we were married in a small ceremony in Iowa City, he wasn’t invited.

Over the years, my dad’s low opinion of Pat never seemed to extend to me; however, he struggled to be a good grandfather to our children. He seemed to think it was his job to parent them, instead of unconditionally loving them. But he did eventually recognize the generous heart that Pat kept protected behind her prickly personality. When he was hospitalized in 1997 with stage-four liver cancer, we drove to West Virginia to visit him over a weekend. The kids needed to be back in school, so I drove them home on Sunday, but Pat (who had become a geriatric nurse by then) stayed to nurse him and advocate for his care. She was by his side when he died that Friday.

Twenty-five years later, as my sisters and I cleaned out our mother’s house, we found boxes of promotional novelties left over from Dad’s liquor salesman days, everything from clocks and highball glasses to beach towels and sponges, the kind of stuff once ubiquitous in our home. We divvied up those treasures, those mementos of our youth, that curiously poignant legacy.

Footnotes

[1] I sometimes wonder about the impact this had on my dad. Among other things, it denied him the benefit of having a model for fatherhood.

[2] The four largest U.S. tire companies were then headquartered in Akron, the Rubber Capital of the World.

[3] By watching him, I learned the unsung value of setting a hard screen, making a crisp pass, getting an offensive rebound and kicking it out.

Vagabonding in Europe: The Kids Hike the Vosges

A view of the Château du Frankenbourg ruins, and the Vosges, from a mountain peak just above it.

21.juli.1981 – I was ready to go, the heavy summer air wrestling with my yearning to move, to dance, to ripple in the sun. At the time, I was reading D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, which may have influenced my mood and how I portrayed it in my journal.

Two weeks earlier, I’d met up with my good friend Jim Prchlik in Kassel, Germany. He was staying at a communal flat with his friend Albert Riesselmann. Since then, I’d been hanging out in that city of art and culture, breaking up my stay with hitchhiking excursions to West Berlin and Amsterdam. Jim and I planned to do some hiking and hitchhiking together, but were awaiting the arrival of the third member of our team, Jim’s friend Nancy Faunce from the University of Michigan. When she joined us that evening, our circle was complete. She and Jim had been romantically involved and were still close friends. They’d worked the vendange together the previous fall and then wintered in the Canary Islands off the Moroccan coast before returning to the European continent. At first glance, Nancy appeared delicate, with fair British features, but she was an excellent hiker, strong and energetic. She had a finely calibrated moral compass, attuned to the value of random acts of kindness, sharing her extra pfennigs with anyone who asked, picking up every small bit of trash she came across.

We began to refer to ourselves in the third person – The Kids – characterizing ourselves as playful, light-hearted compagnons de voyage. Our destination was the Vosges, a low mountain range that defines France’s eastern border with Germany. That evening, with our heads full of hash and Peter Tosh's reggae beats, we scurried around, organizing our belongings, loading up our backpacks, preparing for weeks of hiking and camping. We hit the road the next afternoon, grabbing a bus to the autobahn, and as luck would have it, flagging down the first car to pass by, a nice German couple going to Freiberg, who took us within 30 kilometers of Strasbourg, the starting point for our hike in the Vosges.

We met steady rain that day, but as we were being dropped off at a rest area, the setting sun cast a double rainbow across the sky over the Schwarzwald to our west. Our eyes followed the arc of that rainbow as its colors cascaded down to its foot in the valley below us. We set up our camp in the woods and prepared a hearty soup and sandwich supper enjoyed inside the shelter of our orange polyester polygon tent.

In the morning, after hobo coffee and a few slices of good German Roggenbrot,[1] we found ourselves languishing, one exit short of a straight shot to Strasbourg. We traded stories with other hitchhikers, as one often does when the hitching goes slow. So, when a woman dropped off a hitchhiker while we were taking a lunch break, and the others learned she was going to Strasbourg, they told her about us, hailed us away from our lunch, and away we went.

Located on the French side of the Rhine River in the Alsace region,[2] Strasbourg was a lovely city, what we saw of it. We bought baguettes and camping gaz. We searched for a map of Vosges hiking trails but were unwilling to invest 25 French francs in the one we found. Strasbourg’s Cathédrale Notre-Dame was beautiful – delicate reddish brown sandstone spires piercing the sky. Inside, the stone arches and vaulted ceiling harmonized with the bright intricate colors of stained glass. Above the entryway to the church, a rose window proclaimed the Roman Catholic version of a mandala. In one of the side naves a strange contraption – an astronomical clock – displayed seemingly everything,[3] the product of some Renaissance mind. Alas, the mystical peace of the interior seemed to be lost on the herd of tourists tromping through the sacred space.

We left the city, hiking through a couple of adjoining towns until we reached the open road, the foothills of the Vosges in sight to the west and rays of sunlight boosting our spirits. We caught a lift to Barr from a Moroccan drywall installer, and tried to pick up a trail from there. We hiked another four kilometers to Andlau, a town along the Route des Vins d’Alsace, still hunting for a trail, finally camping in a wooded area near a stream west of town, below the medieval ruins of Château d’Andlau. It was raining again, but we were happy to be camping. We quickly set up our tent and fixed a big batch of spaghetti, which we ate with gusto.

Next morning, we sipped strong coffee while packing up, leaving behind the mysteries of stone ruins, rails, cable lifts, never knowing what it was all for. The Kids finally found a trail with a red blaze and decided it was as good as any. We followed those blazes up into the hills, wild raspberries and strawberries along the way, crossing logging roads, past high meadows filled with purple lupine, to a mountain peak (elev. 1,000 m.) from where we could see the Rhine valley to the east and cloud-shrouded valleys and mountains to the west. But we also encountered more rain, cold winds, clouds flying swiftly past us. We pulled out our rain ponchos and hiked onward, getting soaked as we stumbled down the narrow trail, weighed down by our backpacks, our pant legs drenched by wet brush. Jim slipped and took a hard fall, but we all recovered, setting up our tent as more dark clouds settled in. 

We closed up the tent, lit a couple candles for warmth, and changed into dry clothes. We soothed ourselves with a multi-course meal of green salad with a yogurt dressing, rice with a hot curry sauce, bread and camembert, the orange that had been serving as our hash pipe, and a taste of milk chocolate. Even with all the cold and rain, it felt good to be there with two friends, laughing at our miseries, sharing our pleasures. It was a moment of grace – a simple life that transformed commonplace comforts into exquisite luxuries – companionship, camaraderie, and the vagabond life, carrying our food and shelter on our backs.

We moved slowly the next morning, letting our gear dry out in the sun. Coffee warmed us while we lingered on the edge of a designated “zone de tranquillité.”[4] We ended up staying that day near the top of Mount Ungersberg (elev. 901 m.). The skies cleared by the afternoon, and the sun wrapped us in its warm arms. I wandered off to pick a mess of raspberries to make a stovetop cake that didn’t turn out as I hoped but was still tasty, savored after the lentil stew and mackerel salad we made and the bottle of wine Nancy had cajoled from a local forestier. I could’ve lived this way indefinitely, but soon Nancy would be leaving us for the fog of London and Jim and I would be continuing south toward the sun of Italy. 

The Kids awoke to an early morning rain, but the skies cleared by the time we finished our breakfast of coffee and scrambled eggs, and we were on our way. Down through woods and past vineyards into a valley, we came upon Villé, one in a series of charming Alsatian towns of narrow cobblestone streets and medieval half-timbered homes. We bought camping gaz and foodstuffs and found a good trail map that helped us ascertain our location and route, and then headed for Château du Frankenbourg, located atop a mountain (elev. 750 m.) about 12 kilometers away, a steady uphill hike. As the sun was dipping toward the horizon, we arrived at a 12th-century ruin with a stunning view of surrounding valleys and mountains. We pitched our tent and made a campfire inside the decrepit walls of the château, rewarding ourselves with another of our fine meals – pasta, heavy on the marinara.

Jim and I at our Château du Frankenbourg campsite. Photographs by Nancy.

After a hearty breakfast, we proceeded south out of the hills and then up again towards Haut Koenigsbourg. We stopped for lunch at a convenient picnic table along the trail, the sun pleasantly blazing, and took a bit of a siesta afterward. When we continued our climb, we discovered Haut Koenigsbourg was a hot tourist spot and so made a quick detour. By late afternoon we were back in the woods, heading down the mountain. We came to the town of Thannenkirch and walked about a kilometer beyond to a mountain stream tumbling over rocks. Tired from the heat and the hike, we set up camp there beside the trail. I wandered off to pick the wild cherries – small, sweet, deep red – that abound in the region. They made a delicious fruit salad with yogurt and wild mint, and also spiced up our mushroom and curry rice dish. The night grew chilly as we gazed up at a sky overflowing with a Milky Way of stars.

Wednesday, my 27th birthday, our tent turned bright orange in the morning sun. I received birthday kisses from Jim and Nancy. We sipped our coffee, bathed in the mountain stream – first bath in a week – and lazed in the sun.[5] I stirred up a swarm of bees while picking raspberries, and that woke me up. Off we headed on our trusty red-blaze trail, reaching Château Ribeaupierre an hour later, from whose tower, still standing above ruined walls, we could survey where we’d come from and where we were going. We hiked down into the town of Ribeauvillé, where Jim and Nancy went off to buy groceries and supplies while I reviewed a trail map at the mairie.[6] We decided to head for a refuge a two-hour uphill hike from there.

Sure enough, we found a little hut with a picnic table at Colline du Seerlacken (elev. 633 m.) beside a meadow clearing in the pine forest. While Jim and Nancy gathered firewood, I picked a shirtful of raspberries for dinner. I diced an onion, half a zucchini, and six teeth off a huge head of garlic, stirred that into a flour batter, and pan-fried vegetable fritters over our fire. Nancy made a mushroom sauce, and Jim a hearty salad. Jim pulled from his backpack a bottle of wine they had bought in Ribeauvillé. The next surprise was a box of French waffle crackers and a jar of pâte à tartiner au chocolat noisette.[7] While digesting our dinner and relaxing by the fire, one last marvel was produced – a tall elegant bottle of Gewürtraminer. As this memorable birthday celebration wound down, we sipped the sweet regional favorite, fed the fire, and talked late into the night under a star-speckled sky. 

The front cover and inside page of my lovely two-by-three-inch birthday card.

By the time we awoke Thursday morning, Prince Charles and Lady Diana were married. We could sense the excitement even there in rural France. We set off for Kaysersberg, a brisk six-kilometer hike, luckily catching a quick ride from there to Colmar. We went straight to the gare, where Nancy had just enough time to buy her train ticket and join us for one last lunch together. We saw her off with kisses and hugs. Pared down to two, missing Nancy’s spiritedness already, The Kids prepared to push off for the other side of the Rhine. We would continue south toward Italy, traveling together for another month.

Footnotes:

[1] Hobo coffee is made by boiling loose grounds in a pot of water. Roggenbrot is rye bread.

[2] Alsace was the homeland of my maternal grandfather’s line (Trares).

[3] Not only the time of day, but the date, the current zodiac time, and the relative positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets of the Solar System.

[4] According to a sign posted there.

[5] Or as Whitman might say, we leaned and loafed at our ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

[6] City hall.

[7] Chocolate hazelnut spread. Think Nutella.

Vagabonding in Europe: Le Avventure Italiane di Jim e David

Il Colosseo e l'Arco di Costantino a Roma (the setting of a film festival in the summer of 1981)

11 agosto 1981. That Monday morning Jim and I left Venezia – actually we left Camping Mestre, a short bus ride across the Via della Libertà bridge from Venezia. We’d cooked up a breakfast of scrambled eggs and veggies, scavenged a half-dozen packets of dried soup and a pound of rice from a vacated campsite, packed up our tent and gear, and headed for the Autostrada 57 pedaggio.[1]

Jim Prchlik has made numerous appearances in these stories. We both discovered Jack Kerouac’s writing in high school, and were attracted to his Beat vision of The Road as a venue for ecstatic joy and discovery. The summer after we graduated, before Jim started classes at the University of Michigan, we hitchhiked from Ohio to Cape Cod and back. Over the next nine years, our paths frequently intersected – his Ann Arbor home became my travel hub, a place to reenergize, a springboard to new journeys. Like me, Jim had been sandwiching semesters of school in between trips. Completely fluent in three languages, both adventurous and able to go with the flow, he had covered the entire Western Hemisphere, from the Trans Canadian Railway to Argentina. 

By the time we met up that summer in Kassel, Germany, at the apartment of his friend Albert “Cruiser” Riesselmann, Jim had been vagabonding around Europe for a year and I’d been there for six weeks. We were now three weeks into our first trip together since that summer after high school. Jim had devised various strategies for extending his stay in Europe – the previous fall he’d worked the vendange[2] in France, this summer he was selling leather pouches he’d made from scraps scored for free. In addition, we reaped the benefits of tourists’ wastefulness and the high aesthetic standards of open-air markets by scavenging lots of fresh food.

That morning, we quickly hitched a ride to Bologna. As we climbed into the back of the step-van, we met another hitchhiker, Sergio, a university student from Roma. We immediately hit it off. When the van driver dropped us off at an area di servizio, Jim and I pulled out our food supplies and shared a lunch with Sergio, who in turn bought us espressos at a nearby bar. When we parted, Sergio gave us his phone number and encouraged us to visit him when we came to Roma. He continued southwest and homeward, and we headed southeast toward the Adriatic coast. 

We caught a ride to Rimini from an Italian who spoke excellent English – he was a liaison interpreter between the American military police and Italian carabinieri. On first blush, Rimini was a crowded, boisterous beach resort, an Italian version of some Jersey Shore town. In Italy, everyone takes their vacation in the month of August – all the campgrounds were packed – but it took us a few bus rides and a good bit of walking to learn this. We headed downtown so Jim could try his hand at selling his leatherwork items. Rimini street life was noisy and garish, mostly Italian vacationers, with a sprinkling of French, Germans, and Brits, the kind of outlandish nouveau-riche characters who might appear in the background of a Fellini movie, which was an apt connection because, as I later learned, Fellini was born there.

Jim made no sales that day, but we did meet another street vendor, a young jeweler from Bologna, who offered tips on Italian beach towns farther south more laid-back than Rimini. We found folks camping on the spiaggia libera,[3] so we pitched our tent among them for the night. The beach was free to use but not to camp on, we learned the next morning when the police rousted us, but not before we’d enjoyed a hearty breakfast cooked over our campstove. We spent one more day in Rimini. After a storm blew through that evening, I pitched our tent in a field and waited for Jim to return from his street vending efforts. He came stumbling in, a bit tipsy from a half-bottle of wine he’d found and drank, bummed out by the polyester scene and lack of sales. I cheered him up with a dinner of rice mixed with a can of mushroom ragu found under a bridge while I’d been dodging the storm. We made a good traveling pair – the yang of Jim’s dynamic risk-taking balanced by the yin of my even-keeled care-taking.

Awakened by more rain the next morning, we caught a bus packed with heavy-lidded Italiani to the Rimini train station and then hiked to the autostrada pedaggio. We caught one short ride to the next area di servizio and then a 350-kilometer ride from Rosano, a soft-spoken Veneziano working in München as a fashion model, who was headed to Lecce, near the tip of Italy’s heel. We were tempted to go with him but resisted the impulse, wanting to reach Rome soon, where we hoped mail would be awaiting us. We asked Rosano to drop us off in Lesina, near the Promontorio del Gargano. We hiked ten kilometers out of town, past a couple of campgrounds, along a strand of beach separating the Mare Adriatico from the brackish Lago de Lesinà, on the northeastern edge of the Parco Nazionale del Gargano.[4] Once we found a secluded spot that would serve our need to chill for a few days, we returned to town to buy supplies – bread, wine, candles, matches, cigarettes – and lugged them and four liters of water back to our camp. 

Our cigarette of choice at that time, a nonfilter Italian brand.

The next morning, we enjoyed a breakfast of hotcakes and coffee. Afterward, alone for a few minutes, I felt my body and mind go into one of the brief slow-motion fugue states I’d experienced off and on since I was a kid. I could feel each heartbeat, the blood rushing through my body, both helpless and hyperaware as I stepped out of myself and into the delicious intensity of each passing second.

We were writing, swimming, letting the sun tan our bodies a shade darker and bleach our hair a shade lighter. Reading the first volume of Anaïs Nin’s diaries, I was inspired by her writing to be precise and honest in my own journals. Gathering driftwood on the beach for our fires, I found ouzo bottles imprinted with Greek letters, a good black ink pen, the plastic leg of a babydoll that we mounted atop our tentpole, a kind of amulet. Sitting around our campfire, we watched a storm far out at sea, lightning reflecting off the water, a full moon hanging overhead. A bottle of wine, cigarettes, and good brotherly talk.

We camped four nights on that beach, staying until we had depleted our food supplies. Sunday morning, more good luck hitching the autostrada – north along the coast to Pescara, then west into the Abruzzo region and the dry western slopes of the Apennines. We stopped for lunch in sleepy little Pescina, the midday sun intense but the air comfortably arid as we rested on a stone wall beneath the shade of the piazza’s only tree. We got a ride to the last area di servizio before Rome, where we hoped to call Sergio, but all the phones were out of order, so we camped in an adjacent field.

Early Monday we hustled up a ride to the outskirts of the city, caught a bus al centro and walked to an American Express office near the Piazza di Spagna, where a letter from Pat and three others were awaiting me. We drank espressos at an outdoor cafe, read our mail, felt the rush of connecting with lives back home, and promptly wrote responses. Rome was the first address I’d given Pat to reach me, and her letter was an eight-page outpouring of her and Sierra’s feelings for me: “I find myself becoming selfish sometimes, wanting you to come home. But I want this trip to be special for you. And I want you to want to come home to me when it’s done.”

By two that afternoon, we were ringing Sergio, who responded warmly and gave us directions to his apartment in the Monte Sacro quarter. We arrived in time for the final course of a long leisurely lunch – dolce i caffè. Sergio welcomed us, introducing us to a group of friends snugly gathered around a long table in his kitchen – Gianni, Roberta, Grazia, Gino, Jordi, Valeria, Natalia, Ana, Marco. We filled our stomachs and heads with good things. That evening, refreshed by our first hot shower in weeks, we joined the group to catch a movie at the Maxentius Film Festival, some American western dubbed in Serbian with Arabic subtitles, projected simultaneously onto four screens in the open space between Il Colosseo and the Arco di Costantino. A wondrously jarring experience – watching a movie and then turning to notice the walls of a structure that has withstood two thousand years of history.[5]

Left, Sergio’s friends sitting under La Madonnina in Piazza Sempione, the central square of Mante Sacro (photo taken in the late ‘70s). Right, Sergio hawking the left-wing Rome daily Il Manifesto (photo taken in 1974-75).

We stayed a week with Sergio, who had opened his house to not only us but also Roberta, Jordi, and Gianni during their August break from studies. I grew to appreciate the style of our amici italian – their generosity and natural intimacy, the abundance of kisses and embraces shared every time we met or parted. One evening, a group of us gathered in a quiet bar on the Isola Tiberina, in the middle of il Fiume Tevere in the middle of the city. For hours, we drank beer and discoursed on art and politics, conducting the melodious words with our hands.[6] As Gianni said, “How else to act with that much history resting on your shoulders.” Our group relocated to Massenzio, where films played all night, free after midnight. A spina was fired up and passed around, and we danced loose and crazy to a Bob Marley concert movie. By 3 a.m. Sergio was driving us homeward through the empty streets, the spotlit buildings, monuments, and ruins whizzing past like a dream.

Tuesday afternoon, Roberta took me shopping for a new pair of shoes. I was looking for a pair of espadrilles like the ones worn by many young Italians. They looked so comfortable, just canvas and jute with rubber soles, but I struggled to find a pair that fit my size 45 feet, so I settled on a simple pair of sandals. The best part of the shopping trip, though, was Sergio letting us use his Fiat and Roberta letting me drive it through the streets of Roma. Ah, the thrill of merging into the roundabout encircling the gorgeous fountain-filled Piazza della Repubblica.

On Wednesday, we made dinner for our friends. Gianni took us shopping for supplies. I delighted in the many stops we made at shops and stalls in the open-air market, la lingua del mercato, red and green peppers bursting with dolcezza, aromatic garlands di aglio, black olives swimming in barrels of olio d’oliva, pomodori San Marzano, grown on the volcanic soil of Vesuvius.[7] I made a frijoles con queso casserole with cornbread crust.[8] While Jim and I were out earlier that day, he discovered a sizable chunk of hash in a Piazza Navona trash can – perhaps intercepting a drop or salvaging what some nervous lad fearful of being busted had jettisoned. In any case, he donated it to the communal stash.

Thursday afternoon, Grazia and her sister Analisa took Jim and me to the countryside northeast of Roma. Grazia and Jim had made a good connection and spent the previous night together. She was fun and likable – a vivacious bundle of energy and fiercely held opinions. We went for a swim in Lago di Bracciano, and then lazed in the last hour of sunshine. In nearby Trevignano, we met up with Gianni, Jordi, and Roberta, drank beers, went off to smoke a spina, and reconvened at a trattoria where we were served massive plates of pasta at a long outdoor table. Later, we drove to a villa owned by Roberta’s family, a rustic farmhouse set against a terraced hillside and surrounded by a courtyard garden. Under the stars we shared another joint of hash and talked  feminist and Marxist politics until I wandered off to a bed of straw in a grape arbor, the fruit hanging overhead like the eggs of Bacchus. My thoughts turned to Pat and Sierra. How I missed the rich entanglements of our home life. But oh, how I cherished the constant novelty of this vagabond life.

On Saturday, we bid a heartfelt farewell to Sergio.[9] Grazia hosted us at her house for a last lunch. We met her mother, equally attractive and lively, and then helped Grazia prepare a tasty pasta dish with plum tomatoes, mozzarella, fresh parsley and basil. We enjoyed that with a salad and a bright chilled Tocai from the Veneto region, prolonging our meal and delaying our parting with un bicchiere di vino santo[10] and an espresso. By midafternoon, Grazia was dropping us off at the nearest Autostrada 90 area di servizio. More kisses and hugs goodbye. So we left Rome and, by nightfall, landed in Perugia.

Footnotes:

[1] Highway 57 tollbooth. The Italian national highways are toll roads.

[2] The grape harvest.

[3] Free public beach.

[4] We had entered Puglia, a region in the Mezzogiorno, literally the sunny, sultry “midday” of Southern Italy, the more rural, less industrial, and hence, poorer part of the country.

[5] Thanks to the Roman technique of hot mixing lime, volcanic ash, and sand aggregate, which resulted in an amazingly durable concrete.

[6] We talked about an anti-terrorism conference held two weeks earlier, a gathering of artists, musicians, and poets on the first anniversary of the neo-fascist bombing of a Bologna railway station that left 85 dead and 200 wounded.

[7] The language of the market … bursting with sweetness … garlands of garlic … barrels of olive oil … San Marzano plum tomatoes.

[8] Drawing upon my memory of Mollie Katzen’s recipe from her The Enchanted Broccoli Forest cookbook.

[9] I was fortunate to reconnect recently with Sergio Cesaratto, an author and professor of economics at the Università degli Studi di Siena.

[10] Literally, a glass of holy wine. A sweet dessert wine from Tuscany.

Finding My Place #2: Communal Life

The dogs of Governor Steet House - Sam the Samoyed, Shalom, GD Walker, and me.

In June 1976, I became part of a communal household. My friend Pat had recently moved into a big house at 308 South Governor Street. The other four house members (three of whom were named David) had completed their academic studies and were leaving town or getting ready to do so. I replaced one of those Davids. Despite that, we never called it the House of David; it was always the Governor Street House.

I was following a path blazed by many others in the late sixties and early seventies.[1] We were joining rural and urban communes to build a culture that challenged the superficial and materialistic one of our parents. The house became a learning lab where we explored alternatives to that mainstream culture, and its mindless pursuit of money and status, its increasing isolation into detached nuclear families, its overreliance on technology that denied us the joy of working with our hands, its misguided belief that nature existed merely to serve our needs.

The house itself had been built in the American Foursquare style, with a full-length front porch, a front bay window with patterned glass, a hipped roof with three hipped dormer windows, and Craftsman-style oak woodwork inside. It was laid out in the typically efficient Foursquare style: From front to back on the first floor: foyer, stairway, and kitchen on the left side, living room and dining room on the right side. On the second floor, a bedroom in each corner and a centrally located bathroom and stairway. The attic was unfinished, a single large room with plywood flooring and the dormer windows admitting light.

My first meal in the house was memorable. I’d spent the afternoon getting familiar with the general layout and rules of the house. Pat and one of the Davids made a huge salad, using produce from the garden that filled our small backyard, and another David had baked bread that morning. As the sun was setting and the night insects commenced their chorus, we sat around a small wooden table just outside the kitchen’s back door, on a porch sheltered by a roof and an east-facing trellis thick with vines. I was charmed by it all – the beautiful spring evening, the hearty salad, the fresh-baked bread, the company of like-minded folks who offered the promise of a family.

Over the course of the summer, we recruited two housemates – Bob and Mary – friends we knew through New Pioneer Co-op. We were committed to living communally: sharing the costs of rent and utilities, and the duties of shopping, cooking, cleaning, and gardening. We baked our own bread and made our own yogurt. The refrigerator always contained a gallon jar of alfalfa or mung bean sprouts that we’d grown from seed. We were learning the practices of sustainable living: “If it’s brown, flush it down; if it’s yellow, let it mellow.” Although we had different work or class schedules, we ate together as much as possible and held weekly house meetings where we coordinated the work of housekeeping and addressed the tensions that arose from living together. We’d remind each other to put peanut butter on the shopping list when the jar got emptied and turn down the stereo after eleven o’clock.

Although we saw this as an idealistic exercise in creating a community based on collectivist principles, living together also offered more pragmatic benefits. Depending on how many people lived in the house, each person’s rent obligation was between 50 and 75 dollars. Sharing household duties gave us more free time and sharing expenses allowed us to hold jobs that perhaps offered no more than subsistence wages but were fulfilling and compatible with our politics.

Living in town, however, wasn’t always compatible with our politics. Across the street stood the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. During fall rush, we’d sit on our front porch, loudly deriding the silly recruitment skits and cheers they performed on their lawn. A sorority is definitely not a commune. We also had regular run-ins with our elderly next-door neighbor, Mr. Deming, who’d call animal control because we let our dogs hang out on the front porch unleashed, and the police because we let our babies hang out on the front porch unclothed.

For the next two years, the Governor Street House served as my home base. After returning in April 1977 from six months in Mexico, I moved into the attic. In the summer I sprawled out in the middle of that space, but in the winter, I hunkered down by the south dormer window, in a corner closed off with heavy plastic sheeting and kept above freezing by a space heater. Many people whom I still count as friends were part of the Governor Street House’s revolving door of housemates ‒ Pat, Mary, Bob, Steve, Sharon, Mara, Michael, John, Paul, Patricia, Maggie, Willow, Jim, among others.[2] The ceramicist Jean Graham moved her pottery studio into our basement and pitched in twenty bucks each month to help with rent. When we realized we had to pay a fee whenever we changed the utilities to someone else’s name, we had all the bills permanently put in the name of GD Walker, Pat’s Australian cattle dog.

On a cold night in February 1978, the Governor Street House became multi-generational when Pat gave birth to her son Sierra in her northwest corner bedroom. Four people gathered in that room to assist Pat with her labor – Mary, our housemate; Zap, the father; and Sharon and Amy, trained midwives associated with the Emma Goldman Clinic. Bob and I waited downstairs, hovering on the edge of that excitement.

Pat at Governor Street House one week before giving birth to Sierra.

The previous year, Ina May Gaskin’s book Spiritual Midwifery had been published, encouraging women to regain control of the birthing process and instructing them on the practices of natural childbirth. The book advocated for the end to unnecessary hospital births for the convenience of male doctors – the end to unnecessary general anesthesia, forceps deliveries, and episiotomies. In 1971, Gaskin[3] and her husband Stephen had led a bus caravan from San Francisco, eventually settling in rural Tennessee and starting a commune called The Farm. She established one of the first out-of-hospital birthing centers in the United States. Women traveled there not only to give birth to their children but to learn the skills of midwifery.

Pat’s contractions had started on Wednesday, slowly building in intensity over the next four days, although without causing any cervical dilation. On Friday, to distract herself, she went to a movie and did some shopping. The midwives arrived at 9:30 on Saturday night, and Sierra was born six hours later. I was deeply moved by the experience, which I tried to express in this poem.

We Surround Ourselves with Mysteries

in every window

a lit candle stands

burning the vapors of our vigil

atmosphere soaked in stillness

barely swirls

in a leaden cloud of expectation

the midwives arrive

and their female strength is felt

sure hands and sure hearts

outside a fog distance and

the lights of a parked car

its engine running

holding the bone of drama

we watch from outside the circle

sterilize instruments bring hot compresses

inside woman is a fierce muscle

pain lays its hand on her forehead

warm blood the color of life

the door to the universe slowly opens

enough for us to glimpse its magic

as the babe slips out a first cry

sunday morning two hours till dawn

he sleeps a new life

the center of a ring of adoration

today i swear an allegiance

to be aware of every moment every detail

filling the vessel of my body

The household had a new shared responsibility, and we all did our best to support Pat and help with childcare. We cherished Sierra, even though he was colicky those first few months. He wouldn’t be the only child raised in the house ‒ Patricia and Paul’s Dylan and Willow’s Sienna later lived there.

Governor Street House wasn’t the only communal house in Iowa City at that time. Two houses directly across from each other on the 400 block of South Johnson Street, one on the corner of South Dubuque and East Court streets, one on the corner of North Dubuque and Davenport streets, one at the end of East Washington Street, one at 811 East Market Street, and a house on McLean Street on the west side of the river.[4] A couple of communal farmsteads had also been established within twenty miles of Iowa City. Most of the house members were part of the tight-knit New Pioneer Co-op community, and many worked at either New Pioneer, Blooming Prairie Warehouse, Stone Soup Restaurant, or Morning Glory Bakery. 

In 2009, inspired by memories of communal households they’d lived in during their youth, a group of people began meeting to plan an alternative to traditional housing in Iowa City, based on the Danish cohousing model. They envisioned a socially and economically diverse multi-generational community that makes decisions using the consensus model, and shares jointly owned common space and resources while inhabiting separate living quarters with small carbon footprints. The last of the 37 units of Iowa City Cohousing, settled on 7.3-acre Prairie Hill, just off West Benton Street, are now being completed.

In August 1978, over two years after first moving in, I left the Governor Street House just as Pat and Sierra were also relocating to their own apartment on the southeast edge of town.[5] But in May 1980, after a four-month trip to Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, I rejoined Pat, Sierra, Steve, and Mary in the Market Street House. After finally finishing my undergraduate studies, and then spending another four months traveling around Europe, I returned to Market Street and moved into the attic. Sierra’s bedroom was at the bottom of the attic stairs, and I’d often come down at night to get him up to pee. Two months after I returned, I asked Pat if she’d marry me. And on December 6, 1981, Pat, Sierra, and I bound our lives together at the Market Street House, exchanging vows among a close group of friends, many of whom we’d lived with at one time or another.

Footnotes:

[1] It’s been estimated that in the U.S. as many as 3,000 communes were founded during this time, inhabited primarily by disaffected white, middle-class kids.

[2] The camaraderie and physical intimacy of commune life sometimes led to spontaneous liaisons. So much so that, years later, when six or seven of us were reflecting about those days after a meal together, we suddenly realized that, at one point or another, most of us had slept with nearly everyone else at that table.

[3] Ina May Gaskin grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa, and in the early sixties, earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Iowa.

[4] Formed in 1977, River City Housing Collective carries on this tradition. Three houses offer a cooperative alternative to the tenant-landlord relationship – Bloom County House at 935 E. College St., Summit House at 200 S. Summit St., and Anomy House at 802 E. Washington St.

[5] Meanwhile, Zap was getting ready to move to Santa Cruz to pursue a musical career, and began to play an increasingly smaller role in raising Sierra.

Finding My Place #1: A Response to the Climate Crisis

Washington High School students & staff caring for the star magnolia in the school arboretum.

“Bioregionalism teaches us of emergence, interdependence, and the impossibility of absolute boundaries. As physical beings, we are literally open to the world, suffused every second with air from somewhere else; as social beings, we are equally determined by our contexts. If we can embrace that, then we can begin to appreciate our and others’ identities as the emergent and fluid wonder that they are.” – Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

In the early 1960s – I would’ve been eight or nine – the city of Stow, Ohio, installed storm sewers on our street. Six feet long and three feet in diameter, the concrete sewer sections sprawled in our front yards along the street for the better part of a summer, and all of us neighbor kids climbed atop and through them, honing our acrobatic skills. When the road crew buried the storm sewers and repaved the road, they installed a curbside sewer drain directly across from our driveway. I can’t tell you how many baseballs got away from us and were sucked down that drain, but we’d pry up the manhole cover and climb down to retrieve the balls. 

This might involve chasing a ball that had begun to roll down the sewer’s slope. A few times, either on a dare or for the sake of adventure, I stayed down there and crawled through the 600 feet of storm sewer to the end of the block, blind in the subterranean pitch darkness until I reached the creek in Wetmore Park, a two-block-long greenspace bordering Kent Road (State Route 59) that influenced my expanding awareness of the natural world.

My grandsons Oscar & Linus hiking Mud Lick Creek in Roanoke, VA.

Going with the Flow

Perhaps I was eleven. This is what kids did in the summer. For my next-door neighbor Pat Flowers and me, the creek that ran through Wetmore Park at the bottom of the street we lived on became a splash pad and field lab. We learned its little pools and rocky cascades. We walked its grassy banks and splashed through its shallows. When there was a downpour, we’d race the half-block to watch the creek flex its muscles. It turned into a rushing torrent on which we raced makeshift rafts piloted by spiders.

One day we decided to follow the creek out of the park, through the culvert under Kent Road. We carried nothing with us, not even sandwiches or candy bars. The creek quickly took us out of town and into wilder places, where it grew more tangled, more complicated, as it widened. We waded in the water, gathering lumber scraps caught in branches along the banks of the creek, lashing together a raft the two of us drifted on, poling with the current. We followed the breadcrumbs of that creek until we felt far from home, on a great adventure, facing the demands of nature.

Back when we were kids, the river introduced us to a world that seemed unfamiliar and fascinating. Looking at a map now, I know we’d gone not much more than a mile. But there, we discovered, the creek fed into the Cuyahoga, a Mohawk word meaning “crooked river,” which five miles on would sweep over a series of falls and then a few miles farther would take a sharp right turn north. 

Thus I began to learn about watersheds and my place in them. I lived in the Great Lakes Watershed. If I didn’t retrieve that baseball, it would roll into the Wetmore Park creek and follow a riverine trail that eventually meandered past the steel mills of Cleveland, which turned it into an industrial drainage ditch, and emptied into Lake Erie, where I swam every summer on our family vacations to Marblehead Peninsula. When a spark from a passing rail car set the river ablaze in 1969, I felt a communal responsibility for the pollution that caused it.

Here was the bioregion of my childhood. I became friends with the trees in our yard – the prickly seed pods of the sweet gums, the greenish yellow blooms of the tulip poplar, the sticky resin of the Eastern white pines, the sweet icicles dripping from the sugar maples’ broken branches. My friends and I knew when to raid the gardens and trees of the neighborhood for rhubarb, cherries, tomatoes, red raspberries, apples, pears, plums, chestnuts. Pat and I would walk or bike the five blocks to the eastern shore of Silver Lake, where we fished for perch, bluegill, and smallmouth bass. In winter I’d meet up with classmates to skate that frozen lake, a quarter mile wide and a mile long, out to the postage-stamp isle in the middle, where bonfires blazed at night to warm us.

Our one-third-acre yard was an adaptable playground. The site of many impromptu kickball and tetherball tournaments. My friends and I made one log cabin after another, using the long splintery rails left after a zigzagging split-rail fence marking our yard’s boundary had been dismantled. In our imaginations, the undeveloped lot behind our house became a patch of wilderness where we reenacted scenes from Davy Crockett, a Disney mini-series about the pioneer, congressman, and folk hero. I had my own coonskin cap. When I sang the catchy “Ballad of Davy Crockett,” I’d change the words: “Davy, Davy Crockett, king of his own backyard!”

Since 1975, I’ve lived in or near Iowa City, in the Upper Mississippi Watershed. I’ve resided in my present home since 1998. One of the two branches of Ralston Creek runs through my backyard, as it does through seemingly half the yards of Iowa City’s east side before emptying into the Iowa River near the U.S. Highway 6 bridge. Deer browse along the creek. A doe and her two fawns kept my garden’s hot pepper plants pruned all summer. An eight-point buck was seen heading upstream this morning; other days a red fox might scamper along that trace, bushy tail flat out behind him. The busywork of beavers – saplings gnawed down to their stumps – can often be spotted. Fat lumbering woodchucks used to lived under my garden shed; now our neighborhood’s two feral cats make their home there. A few years back, I sighted a mountain lion sunning himself in a backyard across the creek before he stole out of town. In winter, red-tailed hawks and bald eagles perch prominently in the top branches of bare trees. When I open my windows in spring, I welcome the nightly calls and caterwauls of the barred owls.

And I still love to forage. Serviceberry trees next to Mercy Hospital’s emergency room parking lot. Mulberry trees everywhere one turns. For a potluck this spring, I made a cheesecake topped with a sauce using tiny Nanking cherries harvested from a neighbor’s bush, as much pit as fruit but deliciously tart. I’ve foraged for black raspberries, blackberries, and gooseberries in Hickory Hill Park and the woods around the ACT campus. I now welcome the spread of wild raspberry canes around my compost bin, freezing two quarts of berries this summer. An apple tree in the First Avenue Walgreens parking lot yielded a tasty batch of apple butter. When the pawpaws hanging from a stand of trees along the creek in Court Hill Park ripened this fall, I shared that rare treat – the most tropical of Midwestern fruit, custardy with hints of mango and banana, sometimes called Quaker Delight.

Pawpaw tree in Court Hill Park, pawpaw fruit, chestnut harvest, monarch on a Mexican sunflower in my backyard.

September Foragers

I’ve been gathering chestnuts from four trees that occupy a quiet corner of the college campus. I scour the ground beneath the trees for the dark brown nuts. With a few gentle shakes of the limbs, I petition them to let go of their prizes. I cautiously pry open the spiky green husks that have yet to give up their clutch of two or three nuts. My only competition in this foraging of free food seems to be the deer. Have others never tasted the sweet, buttery goodness of chestnuts roasted over a fire?

My bag full, I hop on my bike and head home, stopping downtown to sip a latte in the late afternoon sun. Next to the cafe patio, a calamint filled with small pale purple flowers is being worshiped by a dozen honeybees. Burnished by the sun, these drunken bees buzz the plant, flitting from blossom to blossom, gathering nectar, distributing pollen. They are shot through with sunlight and streaked with a gold like that used to mend and emblazon cracks in pottery.

The rights of bees and the rights of flowers. The rights of chestnut trees and the rights of deer. The rights of all men and the rights of all women. The symbiotic dance that repairs us, that makes us whole, that makes us familiar rather than exceptional. This, perhaps, is what love can be.

Although I take comfort in the possibility of an Anthropocene epoch – that the extinction of humanity is imminent, and the planet will prosper from that loss – I also refuse to give up hope that we can address our climate crisis. Though it can be easy to read headlines and despair, Rebecca Solnit’s Not Too Late project offers many great ideas for taking individual action. Like most folks, I take small steps to shrink my carbon footprint: recycling and reusing, bicycling rather than driving, cloth instead of plastic. When an August 2020 derecho destroyed 65 percent of the tree canopy in Cedar Rapids, I began working with the Washington High School Green Team to plant and care for a 29-tree arboretum on campus. 

This year I got to work with some great people and organizations – co-teaching the class Creating in Nature at Scattergood Friends School and Farm, co-leading the workshop retreat Writing from Nature: Practices in Ecopoetics and Slow Seeing at Prairiewoods Franciscan Spirituality Center, fostering a crate of pawpaw seedlings for Bur Oak Land Trust. All these local organizations do important work to model sustainable practices and ways of living in respectful communion with nature.

Through all this, I can trace a line of inspiration back to that creek of my childhood, and the joy of exploring it, that has helped me find my place in the natural world.

Baker (Jobs of My Youth #5)

“When I cook, another body comes alive. Not the body of walking or typing, not the body of sitting or talking, certainly not the body of driving or TV-watching, but the body of cooking: a body alive to flavors and fragrance, a body ready to touch and be touched, a body which eats with eyes and nose as well as mouth….. Hands awaken, boundless with their own knowledge, picking up, handling, putting down.”  –Edward Espe Brown, The Tassajara Bread Book

When I moved to Iowa City in the fall of 1975 to start classes at the University of Iowa, I immediately discovered I could stop by Stone Soup Restaurant at lunch time, wash dishes for an hour, and get paid with a hot lunch. Stone Soup was a cooperative natural foods vegetarian restaurant located in the basement of Center East, a square three-story brick building on the corner of Clinton and Jefferson streets.

I was drawn to the idealism and activism of the people involved in the food co-op movement. Stone Soup had become a gathering place for vegetarians, artists of all stripes, hippies and nonconformists, feminists and left-wing politicos. One could get a “home-cooked” meal for a couple dollars and stick around to meet and talk with interesting folks. As a regular volunteer, I was invited to a staff meeting where a proposal to add a night baking shift was on the agenda. When the staff agreed to do this, I expressed interest in one of the baker jobs and was hired on the spot. The easiest job application and interview ever.

I did have some baking experience. I started baking bread when I was in high school, often giving away my loaves to friends or bringing them to parties. My girlfriend at the time still fondly remembers the loaf I left on her front porch with a romantic note. And when I started hitchhiking, I cultivated the habit of baking bread to thank the people whose home I was crashing at.

Of course, the Stone Soup bakery operated on a larger scale, but it retained that sense of reciprocity. We were baking for not only the restaurant but also New Pioneer Co-op, then located less than a mile away on the corner of Gilbert and Prentiss streets. Our shift would usually start at ten o’clock, just as the dinner crew was finishing their cleanup, and wrap up at five in the morning. The two or three staff signed up for each shift would bake up to 100 one-pound loaves of bread, ten or fifteen pounds of our two types of granola (regular and deluxe), a batch or two of cookies, and on some nights, ten dozen beanburgers, made from a recipe featuring cooked and mashed soybeans.

The core of the bakery staff were hired in short order. We each worked three or four shifts a week. Pat had just blown in from the Santa Cruz Mountain community of Mount Hermon (population 715 hippies, less one).[1] Cheryl grew up in a Mennonite family just south of Iowa City, raised to value practices that support environmental sustainability. Edith, a university student majoring in science and minoring in studio art, had an array of kitchen skills learned from her Italian American mother. Michael was a jazz clarinetist studying composition in the university’s School of Music. Nancy was a native Iowa Citian and an avid organic gardener. I had a crush on all the women I worked with, and six years later, I married one of them – that woman from Santa Cruz.[2]

Center East was the former home of St. Mary’s School, which served grades one through twelve from 1893 to 1968 and then was sold to the Newman Catholic Student Center in 1975. The Newman Center staff was repurposing the building as a community space. Stone Soup Restaurant rented the cafeteria kitchen and a small adjoining dining room for a nominal fee. The large basement cafeteria was occasionally transformed into a space for benefit dances[3] featuring the Magic Goat Band, which was mostly composed of New Pioneer and Blooming Prairie Cooperative Warehouse staff. Upstairs was the Free Store, where one could address their clothing needs or grab a sweater on an unexpectedly cold day. Clemens Erdahl and Sue Futrell helped set up an office for United Tenants for Action, offering free legal aid to oppose predatory and deadbeat landlords. Barbara Welch, working on a doctorate in Communication Studies, had converted a classroom, with its tall windows and dark woodwork, into the Iowa City Yoga Center.

The restaurant had inherited the school cafeteria’s large gas stoves and acquired a used industrial  bread dough mixer. We religiously followed the recipes in The Tassajara Bread Book,[4] written in the late 1960s by Edward Brown, a student at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Retreat tucked away in central California’s Los Padres National Forest. We’d mix lukewarm water, yeast, honey or molasses, milk powder, and whole wheat flour, forming a sponge the consistency of a thick slurry. We’d give that time to rise and then add oil, salt, more flour, and other ingredients particular to the bread we were making. 

We always made a batch or two of Whole Wheat and three or four other breads, such as Swedish Rye, Sunflower Seed, Challah, Oatmeal, Poppy Seed, Cinnamon Raisin. At the beginning of the shift, we’d check out the dinner leftovers, on the chance that they’d inspire us to concoct a new bread recipe. My favorite was “pizza bread,” made by sprinkling a thin layer of marinara sauce and mozzarella over the dough before rolling it into a loaf.

When the dough had risen to twice its size, we would punch it down and begin to pinch off one-pound hunks, using a kitchen scale to measure. Then we’d get to it, loafing on the two long low countertops that filled the center of the kitchen. It was work that felt like play, work filled with tactile joy. We all developed similar methods for shaping the loaves: kneading the dough, flattening it into a large square to remove any remaining air bubbles while flipping and patting it to smooth its surface, then folding it once, folding in its ends, rolling it into a loaf shape, and pinching the seams shut. We’d drop the loaves into seasoned pans strapped together in groups of four and set them atop the warm stove to rise one last time.

Joy of baking - Cheryl and Pat at the Stone Soup Restaurant bakery.

As the night wore on, the sensory stimuli would become more robust, helping us power through the wee hours. We’d start pulling steaming bread out of the ovens, removing the brown loaves from the pans and putting them on cooling racks in the dining room. While the loaves were still hot, we’d run a stick of butter over the top crust. Some granola might also be cooling, some peanut butter cookies, perhaps a batch of cinnamon rolls.

Because the restaurant was rarely closed and one could get a meal for working in the kitchen, it drew street people, many of whom were named Rick – Rick the Hobo, Red Rick, Crazy Rick. The bakery’s aromas also attracted attention. My friend Tony, who lived nearby and kept odd hours, might stop by to hang out and share a new poem. The basement kitchen’s windows were at sidewalk-level along the route from the downtown bars to the eastside dorms. In the summer, a few weak box fans would move the heat around, and we often stripped down to the minimal amount of clothing (although we at least kept our aprons on). A lot of foot traffic passed by at two o’clock, after the bars closed. When the windows were open, we’d hear our share of catcalls. Believe me, we gave as good as we got.

The restaurant had a portable record player and maybe twenty well-worn albums, most of their edges decorated with dried bread dough. Those albums provided the soundtrack to our work – Linda Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, Joni Mitchell’s For the Roses, Jackson Brown’s Late for the Sky. After the baking was done and the loaves had been bagged up with their handmade labels, we’d sit down at one of the dining room tables and pull out a runt loaf. We’d slice thick hot chunks of bread, slather them with melting butter, and enjoy the flavor of our work. We’d talk about the night, or the approaching day, while listening to songs like J. J. Cales’s “After Midnight” or Bonnie Raitt’s “Nothing Seems To Matter.”

After my shift, I’d usually go upstairs to the yoga studio to sleep. Greeted by the lingering scent of incense, I’d lie down on a yoga mat and snooze until someone from the breakfast shift came up to wake me for my nine o’clock Intro to Philosophy class that fall semester. I held this job for a full year, until I left for Mexico the next fall. When I returned in the spring, the bakery was being relocated and revamped as Morning Glory Bakery. I helped its staff move into two classrooms upstairs, lugging out all but two of the heavy slate blackboards, power-sanding those buckled oak floors down to their light brown grain, removing 75 years of Catholic school memories. In their place, we offered a passionate energy inspired by the aromas and traditions of baking bread.

Footnotes:

[1] After her ’67 Dodge Dart ferried her cross-country, its passenger seats were removed so the car could haul baked goods to New Pioneer and 50-lb. sacks of whole wheat flour, brown rice, etc. from Blooming Prairie Warehouse.

[2] Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three other married couples who either worked alongside each other or met at Stone Soup.

[3] To support non-profit community organizations such as Emma Goldman Clinic, Free Medical Clinic, Dum-Dum Daycare Center, Willowwind School, as well as the restaurant.

[4] Except that we multiplied the ingredients by 8 to achieve economies of scale.

Vagabonding in Europe: Un Americano a Milano

The Piazza Mercanti in Milano. On the right, the loggia steps referred to in this essay. (Photo by Jakub Hałun)

We all know the pitfalls of social media – the reduction of every meaningful experience to a shareable post, the obsession with other people’s status and our own competitive urge to impress, the unholy merger of envy, anxiety, and distraction. How often have we responded to a beautiful moment by whipping out our phones to document it, calculating how much it will boost our status, and in the process ceasing to be in that moment? But occasionally, social media can rise to all its promise of connectivity across space and time.

Three days ago, I opened a “message request” on Facebook. It was from Luca Garofalo, who was not a Facebook Friend: “hello, are you the David who traveled to Milano Italy 40+ years ago?” I straightaway responded, “Ciao, Luca! Yes, your family generously hosted me for a few days, and you let me hang with you & your friends. A sweet memory.”

And it was. My path intersected with Luca and his family amid four months of wandering the European continent in the summer of 1981, what would prove to be my last big hitchhiking trip. After earning my Bachelor of General Studies degree that May, nine years after graduating from high school, I had persuaded my folks to give me a graduation present (partly by reminding them I’d paid my own way through college) – a round-trip ticket from New York to Brussels with an open return date. I had saved up $700 and planned to travel as long as it would carry me.

On June 29, my one-person Army surplus tent was pitched in a campground near the Piazzale Michelangelo, just across the Fiume Arno and outside the old city walls of Firenze.[1] I had been there for three days, enjoying the art, architecture, and history of that beautiful Tuscan city. I was tempted by the sunny morning to stay another day, but I decided to pack up and move on. My campground neighbors, a friendly Brit couple, asked me where I was off to. When they learned I was planning to hitchhike to Milano, they told me they’d be passing by there and offered me a lift. Such good sports – he a prep school Latin and Greek teacher, she a chatty librarian. We loaded up their VW van and headed north toward Bologna, through the lush green hill country of Tuscany and out onto the open plains of Emilia-Romagna’s Po River valley, and then northwest through the auto manufacturing city of Modena and the cultural and gastronomic center of Parma.

A week earlier, while hitching along the Italian Riviera, I had met Raffaele, who gave me a ride from San Remo to Genova and, when we stopped for lunch, invited me to crash at his apartment if I came to Milano. I was about to take him up on that offer. My British friends dropped me off five kilometers outside of the city, so I decided to hike along the shoulder of the autostrada until I could catch a bus going downtown. But before long and unexpectedly, a car stopped, a woman and her two young adult sons. The mother, Giulia, drove me into the city and to her home, inviting me in for an espresso and conversation. 

Her 22-year-old son, Luca, had just completed his obbligatorio (year of compulsory military service) and was enjoying his newly reclaimed freedom. About to head out to do errands, he offered to accompany me downtown. We caught a bus, and Luca helped me find the tourist office so I could pick up a city street map and work out directions to Raffaele’s home. Before we parted, Luca shared his phone number, suggesting we meet up again.

I tried reaching Raffaele by phone but, upon learning there was a Dire Straits concert in Milano that night, concluded that’s where he would be. Should I call Luca and ask to stay there? Should I spend the night in a pensione? I chose instead to locate Raffaele’s place and wait. When I finally knocked on the door of his apartment, a neighbor told me he was in the hospital. Che peccato![2] I tried calling Luca, but it was late, and I wound up leaving a short incoherent message with his father. I decided to do some impromptu urban camping, sleeping comfortably nel prato tra la ferrovia e l’autostrada.[3]

The next morning, I called again, spoke with Luca, and asked if I could stay with his family for a few days. We made plans to meet later that day. To stay with una famiglia italiana was an honor. In my years of traveling, I’d learned this truth, which applies in any language and place. Ennio, il padre, worked in the largest commercial bank in Milano. Giulia was a warm, vivacious, and intelligent woman who spoke fluent English. She showed me to her studio, where I would be able to stow my backpack and sleep. Its double French doors opened onto a balcony overlooking their garden. Luca was an excellent folk guitarist, in the style of John Fahey and Jorma Kaukonen. The rest of the household consisted of his three younger siblings – Isabella, Nicoletta, and Paolo– all in their late teens or early twenties.

During the day, Luca and I bicycled around the city as he showed me the sights. We visited Santa Maria delle Grazie to see da Vinci’s remarkable fresco The Last Supper, painted on a wall of the monastery’s dining hall. When Luca visited a friend to give a guitar lesson, I tagged along. Afterward, as we smoked a bowl of hash, I pulled out my cassette tape of the Iowa City band I played in, Pink Gravy, and we listened to a few songs. Another afternoon, Luca and I met up with a friend who fronted a punk band, her hair dyed a stunning crimson, and went to her flat to listen to Italian new wave bands Decibel and Krisma. That evening we ate, drank, and conversed with a big group of friends at a trattoria and bar that specialized in la musica folklorista.

It was a pleasure da mangiare all’italiana con la famiglia Garofalo.[4] One night was special – the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Paolo’s feast day. First, spaghetti al pomodoro, then bistecca alla milanese, followed by a plate of salame piccante, thin slices of pecorino, and arugula, tutti in olio d’oliva,[5] capped off by a transcendent dessert of gooseberries and raspberries in whipped cream atop a shortcake. Il miglior vino, e certo, molto parlando e apprendendo l’italiano.[6] 

My last night in Milano, Luca and I went to a concert in the Piazza del Duomo, the city’s main square. The music was not memorable, but to hear live music in front of a stunning fourteenth-century Gothic cathedral, its tall white marble spires and pinnacles spotlit and ghostly against the night sky – that was memorable. The scene was crazy crowded, so a group of us wandered off to a quieter spot nearby. In the Piazza Mercanti, the square of merchants, emblematic of the city’s position as a financial center, we were surrounded by beautiful palazzi, some dating back to the thirteenth century. It seemed somehow right to sit on the steps of a loggia and roll spliffs of tobacco mixed with hash and get molto sconvolto.[7] 

A tanned, wiry-haired guy carrying an artist notebook under his arm walked by, then stopped to ask if we wanted a caricatura. —No. He was insistent, looking each of us in the eye. “Per un caffè?” —Still, no. Willfully disregarding our wishes, he crouched down, pulled out a sheet of paper and a charcoal crayon, looked at Luca’s friend Renata, la ragazza più bella del nostro gruppo,[8] and began to sketch her. I grudgingly acknowledged his dogged intensity, his swaggering braggadocio. The drawing was not remarkable, but when he again asked for coffee money, we all dug deep for spare 100-lire coins. It was his style, not his artistic skill, we were paying for. After sitting with us for a while and sharing stories, he looked at me and asked, “You speak English, yes?” I nodded my head. “American?” I nodded again. “You don’t look at all like an American.” I took this comment as the highest of compliments.[9] Then he strolled off, forse per un caffè, ma non lo so.[10]

I haven’t yet heard back from Luca. But if I never do, knowing he reached out, knowing a connection persists that we made over a few summer days forty years ago in Milano, that’s enough for me.

Footnotes:

[1] In my last year of school, I studied Italian, a lovely language. As it did in my travel journal, some Italian will creep into this essay. And it feels right to use Italian for Italian places such as the Arno River and Florence.

[2] What a shame!

[3] In an empty field between some railroad tracks and the highway.

[4] To eat in the Italian style with the Garofalo family.

[5] Spaghetti in tomato sauce … breaded and fried steak cutlets … spicy salami … pecorino cheese … all in olive oil.

[6] The best wine, and of course, a lot of speaking and learning Italian.

[7] Literally, very shattered.

[8] The most beautiful of the women in our group.

[9] I was in one of the hate phases of my love-hate relationship with the land of my birth, ashamed we had elected Ronald Reagan as our president the previous year. His “trickle-down” Reaganomics policy would prove to be both ineffective and deceitfully mean-spirited.

[10] Perhaps for a coffee, but I don’t know.

Hod Carrier (Jobs of My Youth #4)

Hod Carrier (Handlager), c. 1927, by the German photographer August Sander, from his “People of the Twentieth Century” project.

“Capitalism couldn’t really take hold, [Max] Weber noted, until people became convinced, one way or another, to make more money than they needed. That would seem an easy sell today, but it wasn’t in 17th-century England, when many commoners still earned money only occasionally, lived mostly by subsistence, and felt that they had enough, much to the frustration of the landowners, who wanted them to do steady work for wages. ‘A man [or woman] does not by nature wish to earn more and more money,’ Weber argues, ‘but simply to live as he [or she] is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose.’”  –Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

After spending nine months building houses with Brother Ralph and Jon and Mike in the Pennsylvania mountains, I returned to Ohio and, by the beginning of June 1973, with my dad’s help, landed a job as a rough carpenter with a small construction outfit. But I was a little over my head; I missed Brother Ralph’s gentle mentorship. 

We were transforming an old barn into lawyers’ offices in Peninsula, a quaint village located in the middle of what would later become the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.[1] One task involved climbing high into the loft of another old barn to salvage the sturdy oak roof timbers. I was straddling a beam atop the wall of the barn, trying to drive the pegs from the mortise and tenon joints that held the bones of the barn together, admiring the view while being scared shitless. That barn was being torn down to make room for the vast parking lot that would surround the Richfield Coliseum, then being built for the new Cleveland Cavaliers pro basketball team. The coliseum served as the Cavaliers’ home from 1974 to 1994, but (I’m pleased to report) it was demolished by the National Park Service in 1999, and the land was converted to meadow.

My father may have overstated my carpentry skills to my boss, who was clearly less than impressed with me. I tried to make up for my lack of experience with my willingness to work hard, but I lasted less than a month at that job, fired for literally “not having all the necessary tools,” although I took the meaning metaphorically as well. I shrugged off this setback, deciding to travel the rest of the summer – back to McConnellsburg to help Brother Ralph build another home, then to Vanceburg, Kentucky; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Provincetown, Massachusetts; Mount Katahdin, Maine.[2]

My month of wage labor paid for one edifying semester at Ohio University in Athens. Then I decided to do another volunteer stint with Glenmary Home Missioners,[3] this time in Butler County, Kentucky, and supported by Glenmary’s $450 monthly stipend. By May 1974, I had completed my commitment to Glenmary but decided to stay on in Kentucky. I had fallen in love with my living situation – I was renting a four-room farmhouse at the end of a dirt road seven miles outside of Morgantown, the county seat. The house was heated by a coal stove and had electricity but no running water. The west door off the kitchen led to the back porch and the well; the kitchen’s east door provided access to the outhouse. I had already planted a garden between the house and the tobacco barn – long rows of corn, tomatoes, and green beans.

I found work on the assembly line of a wood pallet factory on Sawmill Road, but after a week of that, noticing that nearly all my co-workers were missing one or more fingers, I decided to look for something safer. I met a young bricklayer named Oval Clark, who had recently parted ways with a crew to start his own business, and was in need of a helper. Oval was a bit moody and habitually disgruntled, but I needed a job and liked the idea of returning to house construction. 

I soon learned Oval had a drinking problem. When it started raining at a job site, we’d retire to the nearest bar to shoot pool, and Oval would start drinking. We’d never make it back to the job site that day. (If nothing else, I became a decent pool player that summer.) Most mornings, I’d hitchhike into town to meet Oval at his house, knocking on his door to wake him up, usually hungover, sometimes still drunk. His sixteen-year-old wife would answer the door, wearing an oversized Butler County High Bears t-shirt, grumpy from lack of sleep and vexed by it all. I could see her coming to the slow realization that this was the life to which she’d said I do.

Since we weren’t finishing any bricklaying jobs, I wasn’t getting a paycheck. For suppers, I was either resorting to a big pot of green beans from my garden or shamefacedly stopping by to visit my good friends Walt and Betty Essex around supper time. One morning, after a couple of weeks of this, I walked from Oval’s apartment to the Farm Boy Restaurant, the meeting spot for Oval’s former brick crew, and asked the boss, Wavy Romans, for a job. Familiar with Oval’s tendencies, Wavy had already let me know his outfit could use another worker.

The rest of the summer, I worked for Wavy and his son Ronnie, becoming their number-one hod carrier. I assembled the scaffolding and carefully leveled it with wood scraps, adding a second level as we worked up a wall. I made the mud (i.e., mortar), mixing the correct proportions of sand, cement, and water in a large tub with a hoe, and then kept the bricklayers supplied with fresh mud and made sure it maintained the right consistency. Using brick tongs, I delivered twenty bricks at a time, ten in each hand, to whoever needed them. As we finished a wall, I’d use a joint raker to clean excess grout from the mortar joints and then wash the bricks. And at the end of the day, I’d carefully clean the trowels, hoes, and mortar tub.

We worked all over Butler County and neighboring Ohio and Muhlenberg counties. Sometimes our job sites were rather rudimentary; on one job, I had to draw water from a well by hand to make the mud. Every day was a workout that included lugging mortar blocks or tongs full of bricks and buckets full of mud, often lifting them above my head to reach the 2 x 10 scaffold planks. My upper body became as ripped as it would ever be in my life. At the end of the day, I’d arrive home exhausted, walk out to the back porch, strip down, pull a pail of bone-chilling cold water up from the well, and pour it over my head. Nothing had ever felt quite so good.

I enjoyed working with the crew, which usually consisted of four bricklayers and two hod carriers. Driving to a site with our equipment, we’d shout, “Brick job!” – our voices charged with pride and delight – whenever we saw a house under construction, as if we could claim it by exclamation. We’d stop for lunch at one of the grocery stores found at many country crossroads. At the small deli counter, sandwiches could be made to our liking and pickles fished from a ceramic crock.[4] Head cheese sandwiches were popular, but I always passed.

By the end of September, Wavy was talking about training me to lay bricks. Although the idea of becoming a bricklayer appealed to me, summer was fading, the wind was changing, and my wanderlust was calling. At the time, I tended to agree with Joni Mitchell that “all that stays is dying and all that lives is getting out.”[5]

In retrospect, I can say that hod carrier work was hard labor that didn’t pay well, but it wasn’t a “bullshit job,” a job like telemarketing or fulfilling orders in an Amazon warehouse. It felt meaningful to make homes, especially ones with some durability, ones that could protect a few little pigs from a wolf. After four months working for Wavy and Ronnie, I’d saved enough from my paychecks to buy one of the Volkswagen Beetles my friend Walt had rebuilt, with enough cash left over to roam for the next three months, first driving out to Iowa, where my family now lived, and then hitchhiking to the West Coast. It was as much as I needed, a fair exchange for my labor.

Footnotes:

[1] Located on the land of the Erie and Kaskaskia peoples, the park was designated in 2000. It follows the Ohio and Erie Canal and the Cuyahoga River, which caught fire in 1969, and it includes what was once the most contaminated dump site in the U.S.

[2] For more on that trip, read my blog post entitled Carpe Diem Days.

[3] You can refer to my blog posts An Alternative Education, Part 1 and An Alternative Education, Part 2 for more details.

[4] And if we were particularly hungry, bags of Mikesell’s Bar-B-Q chips.

[5] From her song “Urge for Going” (1966).

My Black Angel & Ana Mendieta

“I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is … a return to the maternal source. Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth…. I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body.”  –Ana Mendieta

In 1961, as part of a covert U.S. government action called Operation Peter Pan, twelve-year-old Ana Mendieta and her older sister were flown from Havana to Dubuque, Iowa. In all, 14,000 Cuban children were evacuated in response to their parents’ fears of Fidel Castro’s Communist regime. The sisters were lodged at St. Mary’s Orphan Home[1] in Dubuque and then, for the next four years, were shuttled between foster homes in Cedar Rapids until Ana graduated from Regis High School. She studied at the University of Iowa from 1969 to 1977, earning two master’s degrees and jump-starting her career as a ground-breaking multimedia performance artist. One of her performances would happen at a locally famous site in Iowa City’s Oakland Cemetery.

This year, on the last night of August, as a crescent moon was rising on the eastern horizon, my friend and I walked one block from her house on Brown Street into that cemetery. We commented on how dark it had suddenly become – no streetlights, no house lights, no headlights, and large trees blocking out the city around us. We were soon engulfed by the sonorous call-and-response of a choir of tree frogs. Walking deeper into the cemetery, we could see a glimmer in the distance. As we approached the light, we realized it was a lamppost illuminating the Black Angel, likely placed there by cemetery staff to discourage acts of vandalism or bacchanalian gatherings.

The Black Angel is a popular attraction, a statue commissioned by a mother to look down on the grave of her son, who died at the age of eighteen. To the left of the angel stands his headstone, a sculpture of a ragged tree stump with an ax head buried in it to symbolize a life cut short.[2] The unusual color of the angel, combined with the overactive imaginations and superstitious tendencies of college students, has led to a plethora of urban legends about curses of all types, which enwrap the statue in a patina of mystery and might explain the offerings left at its feet.[3]

I’ve walked and biked past the Black Angel many times. When I arrived in Iowa City in 1975, my first apartment was two blocks away on Reno Street; then in the 1990s, I would bike by it on a shortcut from my home on the east side of town to my job on the north side. I’ve admired it, studied it, but always respectfully kept my distance. It is rather foreboding – the angel, her enormous wings raised, towers thirteen feet above ground level and has been blackened by the natural oxidation process of the bronze.

But that night I felt emboldened, perhaps because my friend was with me, perhaps because no one else was in the cemetery. I climbed atop the four-foot-tall pedestal, using the tree stump gravestone to give me a boost. I sidestepped the day’s offerings and, with little room to do anything else, looked up at the Black Angel and hugged her around the waist. I never realized how attractive she is. Her long sheer gown clings, revealing the figure of a young woman. When viewed at ground level, her facial features are enshrouded by hair that hangs down around her face. But from my vantage point, I could, for the first time, see her face clearly. Although her eyes were closed, I felt her tenderly looking down at me. Some artistic vandal had smeared her lips with red lipstick, which somehow made her look more beautiful. Graffiti had been scratched into the bronze of her upper torso, but the accretion of patina was slowly obscuring those marks. A swarm of paper wasps had built a nest in her left armpit. Smitten, I hugged her longer than seemed proper, and then carefully climbed down.

The Czech Bohemian woman who commissioned this statue,[4] Teresa Doležal Feldevert, immigrated with her son, Eddie, to the nearby Goosetown neighborhood in 1878 and found work as a midwife. After Eddie’s death in 1891, she moved from city to city, eventually settling in Eugene, Oregon, and remarrying. When this husband died, Teresa inherited his cattle ranch and used some of her wealth to build this monument. On the base of the statue, beneath the raised letters “Rodina Feldevertova,”[5] are engraved “Nicholas Feldevert 1825–1911” and “Teresa Feldevert 1836–” They are buried beneath the large stone slab that extends in front of the sculpture. She died in 1924, but no one was left to add her end date. 

In 1975, Ana Mendieta, performed one of the early iterations of her earth/body sculpture series Siluetas[6] at the Black Angel site. According to Jane Blocker,[7] Mendieta filmed herself lying face down on the stone slab, arms outstretched, dressed in black, then rising to sprinkle handfuls of black pigment powder to form a body outline, adding a pile of red pigment powder in the area of her heart and a large black X over the entire silhouette, and finally looking directly at the Black Angel and swinging her leg in a wide arc to sweep away the silhouette. We can offer many interpretations of this performance: an act of commemoration, an identification with maternal grief and the immigrant’s pain of displacement, a ritualistic enactment of death and rebirth, a healing ceremony. Perhaps it was all of these, and more.

My friend and I continued our walk. We headed back toward her house, taking a different route, picking our way through an unfamiliar corner of the cemetery that borders Church Street. The large oaks, hickories, and pines intensified the darkness. The nineteenth-century gravestones leaned off-kilter, rimed with lichen. At one point, I came to a stone border that demarcated a narrow paved lane no longer in use as a cemetery entrance. I looked down in the dark and estimated that the lane was at most a foot below where I stood. As I stepped down, I realized I had gravely misjudged the distance and was stepping into air, unsure when I would land. I was falling, but it felt like slow motion, like an unseen hand had reached out to help me down.

When I was a child, one of the few framed artworks in our house was a small reproduction that depicted a guardian angel hovering over a boy and girl at play unaware of their proximity to a precipice. The scene gave my mother some reassurance as she sent the ten of us out to play beyond her reach and sight. The actual distance of that step down was three feet. I tipped forward, breaking my landing with my hands and right knee, while my left ankle scraped against that stone border. My friend said I just disappeared from sight in front of her. That misstep earned me a few scrapes, but no blood, no broken bones, not even a bruise. Some might say my fall was the Black Angel avenging the liberties I had taken with her. I prefer to think she was protecting me.

On September 8, 1985, the Cuban-American feminist artist Ana Mendieta fell to her death from her 34th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village. Many believed she was pushed, whether intentionally or accidentally, by her husband, the artist Carl Andre, in the midst of a heated argument. I want to believe an angel was with her, perhaps not to save her but at least to hold her hand as she flew to the earth, filling her with peace in that last moment of her life.

Footnotes:

[1] Run by Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, the facility shifted its mission in the 1960s to serving “hard to care for children.”

[2] The last three lines of the headstone’s inscription: “I was not granted time to bid adieu / Do not weep for me dear mother / I am at peace in my cool grave.”

[3] Such as Norway spruce cones, a pair of tea roses, a guitar pick, a beaded star brooch, a couple of dollars folded under a piece of pink quartz, small piles of quarters and pennies, and two unexpired credit cards!

[4] The sculptor was a Czech-American artist, Mario Korbel, who also sculpted the Alma Mater statue located at the entrance to the Universidad de La Habana, which young Ana Mendieta may have seen.

[5] Czech for “The Family Feldevert.”

[6] The Stanley Museum of Art is now showing a piece of hers documenting three other Siluetas, as well as two films she made during her years in Iowa City.

[7] See her essay “The Black Angel: Ana Mendieta in Iowa City,” published in The Latino/a Midwest Reader, University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Rough Carpenter (Jobs of My Youth #3)

Mike, Jon, me, and Brother Ralph standing in front of the modular home factory we helped build

“It’s not just that you’re an adolescent at the end of your teens, but that adulthood, a category into which we put everyone who is not a child, is a constantly changing condition; it’s as though we didn’t note that the long shadows at sunrise and the dew of morning are different than the flat, clear light of noon when we call it all daytime. You change, if you’re lucky, strengthen yourself and your purpose over time; at best you are gaining orientation and clarity, in which something that might be ripeness and calm is filling in where the naïveté and urgency of youth are seeping away.”  –Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

When my county road crew gig wrapped up at the end of the summer, I got ready to start my next job, one for which I received no financial compensation. In the last semester of my senior year, I decided to postpone college and commit to doing volunteer work with my classmates Jon and Mike for a Catholic order called Glenmary Home Missioners. Although I attended a college prep high school, I don’t remember anyone from the counselors office asking me about my college plans, and my parents never broached the subject.[1] Maybe this lack of initiative on my part indicated I wasn’t ready to make that step. In any case, when I heard about Jon and Mike’s plan to take what is now called a gap year, I jumped at the chance to join them. By September 1972, we were driving east on the Penn Turnpike toward McConnellsburg, a south-central Pennsylvania borough located in Big Cove Valley, amidst the Ridge and Valley section of the Appalachians. We were on our way to help out with Glenmary’s Project HOPE (Homes On People’s Energy). 

More precisely, we were helping Brother Ralph build homes for and with the families that lived on The Ridge, a segregated Black community located a mile outside of town. Brother Ralph became our mentor and friend. Raised on a farm in southern Indiana, he was a man of saintly simplicity, as easy-going and tender-hearted as they come. One of our favorite interchanges went something like this: Ralph would be kidding one of us about something. We’d say, “Brother Ralph, are you making fun of me?” He’d reply with a chuckle, “Shucks, I can’t make fun of you – the fun’s already there.” We never tired of that joke.

Brother Ralph was a skilled master builder. Thanks to his patient guidance, we learned how to lay cinder block, drive a sixteen-penny nail, toenail a rafter beam into place, mud sheetrock, install windows, doors, and electrical outlets. We experienced the exhilaration of nailing together the two-by-fours that became the frame of an exterior wall and then raising it, the four of us together, into place. 

I enjoyed the construction work – the pleasures of learning the craft and using what I learned to build something as essential as a home. I also enjoyed building friendships with the tight-knit group of families on The Ridge. That fall we sometimes lent a hand to a local roofing outfit run by Bob Wolford and Harvey Kneese. They were funneling their roofing business profits into a project to build a modular home factory. The agreement was that, in exchange for our donated labor, Bob and Harvey would offer discounted rates to families on The Ridge who wanted to buy one of their homes. 

Jon, Mike, and I helped them replace a few lovely old gray slate roofs with asphalt shingles. They didn’t let us up on those high steep-pitched roofs, but we’d serve as the ground crew, tossing the pieces of slate into a dump truck, lugging packets of shingles up the ladder to the crew. We also spent a couple of beautiful autumn days on the low-pitched roof of an auto dealership on Lincoln Way[2] at the east edge of town, preparing the roof for fresh shingles by prying up the old ones with roofing spades. We would occasionally stop, take a deep breath and a long swig of water, stretching our aching backs as we looked east to the wooded slopes of Tuscarora Mountain or west toward town and Sheep Meadow Mountain beyond. Then we’d get back to it. 

Our nine-month stint in McConnellsburg was not all work. Brother Al Behm, director of Glenmary’s volunteer program, occasionally visited us. Late that fall, the four of us drove to Glenmary’s retreat house and youth center in Fairfield, Connecticut, for the weekend. He engaged us in some deep discussions about “life’s big questions.”[3] And I got my first taste of Manhattan when we took the train down to the city. We caught the newly released movie Sounder, featuring the great actor Cicely Tyson and a soundtrack by Taj Mahal, and saw our first Broadway play, Joseph Papp’s production of Two Gentleman of Verona.

By late fall, the six of us – Bob, Harvey, Brother Ralph, Jon, Mike, and I – had begun constructing a 50-by-100-foot sheet-metal building in a sheep pasture on a wind-bitten hillside west of town. When the site was being leveled and dirt needed to be moved, I learned how to use a stick shift ... while learning how to drive a dump truck, pretty much killing that transmission. 

I gained respect for any construction work done outdoors in the winter. Because of the need for precision when framing a steel building and the unforgiving nature of that material, we did a lot of standing around before we wrestled a steel column into the bolts of a concrete pier or persuaded two roof trusses to meet at the ridge with the help of a log loader. Handling the steel was miserably cold work – I had not yet learned the perfect practicality of Carhartt coveralls. 

By March we were helping to construct the first modular home, its two halves efficiently built side-by-side on flatbed platforms that would then be hauled out through the large sliding doors by semi trucks. And not long after that, we were back on The Ridge, putting the finishing touches on a sturdy two-story house for Bebe and her four kids, painting the interior and exterior walls, installing cabinets and sinks and toilets, laying carpet and linoleum flooring, and replacing the temporary cinder block steps with an inviting front porch. When Bebe and her family moved in, we joined the rest of The Ridge in a huge housewarming potluck. Bebe, the tough matriarch who rarely cracked a smile when she worked alongside us on the house, could barely stop beaming.

By the end of May, Jon, Mike, and I[4] were saying goodbye to Brother Ralph, our friends on The Ridge, our second-floor apartment overlooking Lincoln Way. We were driving home in the blue 1952 Chevy Impala that Ralph had used to transport us all to work sites and then sold to me for one dollar. The tail fins of that Impala felt like wings slicing through air as we drove west toward Ohio and the next chapter of our lives.

Footnotes:

[1] My father had gone to Marquette University on the GI Bill after World War II, my mother never attended college, and they were probably too busy raising my younger nine siblings to think much about this.

[2] U.S. Route 30, also known as the Lincoln Highway, which follows the route of the 18th-century Philadelphia-to-Pittsburgh Turnpike.

[3] The following year, Brother Al included two of my poems in his 12-page booklet titled “I Never Met a Bad One,” which began “...but I have met some of you who have been confused, looking for the thing that will make you happy, and that doesn't always mean what feels good.”

[4] By then, we were known around town as “the church boys.”

Road Worker (Jobs of My Youth #2)

Four Brothers, Hudson, Ohio, 4 June 1972

“You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally. Youth is a high-risk business.”    –Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

The words happen and happy both derive from the same Old Norse word, happ, meaning “good luck.” I sometimes reflect on how my life has unfolded, and the relationship between what has happened to me and my happiness. I know the latter had something to do with luck but also with finding a measure of contentment among those “simple twists of fate.”

The photograph introducing this piece is worth an explanation. This portrait of brothers – from left to right, Jon, Jim, me, Michael – was taken at Jim’s home the evening of our high school graduation. We were basking in the warmth of our friendship and the spotlight of our achievements. Jim shared the photo with the three of us at the recent reunion of the Walsh Jesuit High School Class of ’72. Studying this fifty-year-old photo, one can almost foresee the trajectories of our lives. 

Jon – in my opinion, the leader of our class – instead of facing the photographer, turns to the rest of us, more interested in our reactions to the moment, already preparing to become the empathetic school psychologist. Jim offers his wonderfully engaging smile. He would eventually apply his gregariousness, love of global travel, and facility with languages to a career with Rail Europe. His signature lighthearted chuckle often punctuates things he’s said, part amused by his statement, part sheepish about his amusement. Michael, at first blush a ball of red-haired energy, is an unexpectedly gentle and soft-spoken man. We are both introverts, writers, poets, who for portions of our lives shared our love of literature with students, Michael at the college level, me at the high school level.

We were fully aware that we stood on the cusps of our lives. Behind our good front of bravado and self-confidence, something else was brewing. One only need notice what we were doing with our hands – well, not Jon’s self-assured cowboy pose, thumbs tucked in his belt, but the hands in pockets, hands in fig-leaf pose, crossed arms – to see that we were unconsciously signaling our understandable anxiety about the future.

Within a week of graduation, I started a job working for the Summit County Roads Department, tending the roadways in rural Twinsburg Township, north of Hudson and east of what would later become the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I had my father to thank for this government job. He was a liquor salesman, which meant he spent his workdays schmoozing the owners and bartenders of one restaurant or tavern after another. His goal was to persuade those people to put his brands in the well, but he knew the best way to do that was by building relationships. He truly enjoyed getting to know people, telling stories and jokes, talking with them about their businesses. Through all this, he developed the kind of connections that could land me a summer job taking care of the county’s roads.

This was my first time working on a crew. The road maintenance garage we worked out of was home to a dozen full-time workers. I quickly learned who the chiefs were and the pecking order of the rest of the outfit, an order decided mostly by seniority but to some extent by charisma. I was one of three summertime workers, but the only rookie, the others being college students returning for their second or third season. I did what any newbie should do – watched, listened, took mental notes, put up with teasing that seemed a kind of initiation, and learned how to fit in. I dutifully laughed at the jokes, sensing from the reactions of others that they’d all heard the punchlines before. 

Road work is manual labor of course, at times physically demanding, and I sometimes finished a shift exhausted. But I followed the lead of the full-timers, who showed me how to pace myself, and reminded me with their looks that I would gain nothing by showing them up with my youthful energy and enthusiasm. I was grateful for these tips; certain members of the crew took me under their wings in a way that felt paternal or at least avuncular. I learned how to handle the scythes and beat-up mowers we used to trim the grass around guardrails. I learned how to wield a wide-scoop shovel, reaching into the back of the bright orange dump truck for a shovel-load of gravel and slinging it so it spread evenly over fresh tar. I also learned how to lean on that shovel so it looked like I was doing something when there was nothing to do.

This was also my first time punching a time clock. Punctuality was required; I was no longer a high school student, and being late resulted in harsher consequences than a frown from one’s teacher. I’d punch in and then join the crew, who would invariably loll around sipping bad coffee and swapping stories for a half-hour before we hopped in the trucks and headed off to some work site. There was a side benefit to this job: One of the other summer workers was dealing a little pot on the side. A few times that summer, we’d slip away near the end of lunch and meet at his car so I could buy an ounce from him, something the full-timers would’ve never condoned.

During those three months in the employ of the county, “chipping up rocks for the great highway,” I came to appreciate the pleasure of doing a hard day’s work. I took a particular pride in the muscle-tiredness from eight hours of manual labor, the tan lines of being outdoors, and the calluses of working with my hands. I was also given a glimpse into the mind-numbing routines of such work and how it could wear on a body over a lifetime.

Paperboy (Jobs of My Youth #1)

One of my favorite jobs from the early 1980s - apprentice printer at Coffee House Press. Me on the left getting ready to ink the clamshell platen press, Allan Kornblum on the right running the ATF Little Giant flatbed cylinder press.

A week ago, my neighbor Loren stopped by to ask if I could lend him and his cousin Quentin a hand with pouring a backyard patio slab. I said I’d be glad to. So, early Monday morning, as a concrete mixer chugged up our quiet side street, I finished my bowl of granola and hustled over to his house. I was the youngest guy on our crew, so I wheelbarrowed the concrete from the mixer on the street to the slab form behind the house. Loren pointed where to drop each load as they adjusted the rebar and leveled the surface with a two-by-four screed. The work brought back memories of my days as a hod carrier for a brick crew in Butler County, Kentucky, and other honest labor I’ve performed for hire. I began to write about jobs I’ve held, hoping for more than a pleasant swim through nostalgia, hoping to get at what the work taught me.

In 1964, at the age of ten, I landed my first job. My friend Mike Keller had signed up for an Akron Beacon Journal paper route and asked if I’d like to help him. He had ninety customers, so it would’ve been a challenge for one kid, especially on Wednesdays. Loaded with advertising inserts, the Wednesday paper was so big I could barely fit thirty in my canvas bag, carrying the last fifteen in a precarious stack atop them. I’d put the strap of the paper bag on my head and lug the load that way, leaning forward a bit as I walked, reaching under my left arm to pull out a paper when I got to a house. Except for Sunday’s six a.m. edition, it was an afternoon paper. After school, I’d pick up my papers at a pallet near Kent Road, where the bundles for four other routes would be dropped off. Across the street, a drugstore with a soda fountain was our refuge if the Beacon Journal truck was late. We’d sip vanilla or cherry phosphates while keeping an eye out for the truck from our swivel seats.

Before long, Mike and I lucked out when a condominium apartment complex, Silver Lake Towers, was built within the boundaries of our route, doubling the number of customers. Mike decided to divide the route in two. No surprise, he took the condominiums, leaving me the rest – a few apartments on Kent Road, then Sycamore Drive, Gorge Park Boulevard past the cemetery, Patty Ann Drive, Lake Road, and up and down Englewood Drive. I was able to arrange the route so I finished just a few minutes from home. I got used to the routine of delivering the news, rain or shine, in the snow of winter and the heat of summer.

On days when the edition was smaller and the weather was favorable, I developed the skill of folding the newspaper – holding the paper so the fold pointed up, slipping my index finger into the center of the left edge of the paper, folding over the first two inches of the right side of the paper, folding that again, then tucking the folded right half of the paper into the center of its left edge. I could fling a properly folded paper twenty feet without it opening in mid-flight, and land it softly on the porch, right at the front door.

A few customers took care of their bill through the office, but most paid me. Some paid four or five weeks at a time, but more paid me weekly. I’d collect on Saturday mornings, knocking on doors, getting to know my customers – the Greenwalds, Domingos, Wynns, Huscrofts, Mariolas, Cardones, Rubels. During most of my paperboy career, from 1964 to the fall of 1969, the cost for a weekly subscription was sixty cents. Folks would hand me a dollar, and I’d reach down to the coin dispenser hooked to my belt – ching, ching, ching, quarter, nickel, dime – and hand them their change. I’d stop halfway at Isaly’s, a diner and ice cream shop on Kent Road, to sit in a booth and treat myself to lunch while I updated my books. I was a bona fide businessperson. 

I paid my bill once a month. The district manager would meet up with the paperboys in the basement of a church on Graham Road. We paid him in cash. What was left over was profit, and I was able to save enough to pay my tuition at Walsh Jesuit High School.[1] For the most part, I liked my customers, and they liked me. One customer on Gorge Park, Mr. Taylor, ran a ceramics studio out of his basement and began to hire me to do odd jobs. Besides clay mixers and kilns, his basement was filled with endless shelves of ceramic molds. People would take classes there, learning to paint, glaze, and fire sugar bowls, coffee mugs, vases, statues of cats with long eyelashes, all manner of dust-collecting bric-a-brac. When I handed down my route to my brothers Joe and Tom, I started working for him regularly, raking endless piles of leaves in the fall, sweeping out his studio, unloading pottery molds and large bricks of earthenware clay, loading boxes of ceramic pottery into customers’ cars.

By this time, I had also started caddying (or as we called it, looping) at Silver Lake Country Club. The country club was only a mile and a half from my house but a far greater distance by income bracket. I looped for lawyers and doctors and investment bankers – the upper crust. You wanted to caddy for golfers who hit the ball long and straight, who actually enjoyed their time on the golf course, who didn’t drink during their round or throw their putter at you when they missed a tap-in, who tipped well – that was a rare combination. I sometimes crept onto the course late at night and swam around in the water hazards, salvaging the expensive Titleists the duffers I’d caddied for, whose hubris lent them an unreasonably high regard for their golfing prowess, had deposited there.

The caddy shack was another milieu entirely. Most of the loopers were older than me – guys in their twenties who would loop a double (carry two bags) before lunch and then take another eighteen-hole loop in the heat of the afternoon. I tried to steer clear of these guys – they viewed younger kids like me as fresh meat – and never joined their card games, where a day’s wages could be lost in the blink of an eye. One reason I caddied was that it gave me the privilege of playing the course for free on Mondays, when it was closed to the public. But more importantly, looping at the country club allowed me to appraise the world hidden behind the facade of those expensive homes and expansive lawns I biked past on my way to Silver Lake to go fishing.

Overall, I grew to appreciate the rhythms of working, the discipline it required, the camaraderie it offered. I wore with honor the newsprint ink that covered my hands after delivering papers, agreeing with Van Morrison’s sentiments about work: “What’s my line? I’m happy cleaning windows.”

Footnote:

[1] I was a “scholarship boy” my first year. (Entering its fourth year of operation, the school freely distributed scholarships to recruit students.) The tuition the next year was $350, increasing to $700 by my senior year.

Finding a Way Home: On Homelessness

My son Jesse and me in Austin, Thanksgiving 2019.

Friday, June 17, one moment in a sixteen-day road trip I’ve just returned from, some tame version of the journeys of my late teens and early twenties. Even in those days, for all the pleasure I took from the act of vagabonding and hitchhiking, of going where the climate suited my clothes, I appreciated the value of home, which by the time I turned twenty-two had become Iowa City. 

On this trip taken in my sixth-eighth year, I was always able to make a temporary home somewhere – in Louisville, the home of my girlfriend’s brother and sister-in-law; in Roanoke, the home of my daughter and two grandsons; in the Long Island town of Centerport, the home of my high school girlfriend and her husband; in Columbus, Ohio, the home of one of my sisters. In all these places, I was blessed with the comfort and security that home represents.

Lately, I’ve been troubled by a world that forces some to live without that comfort and security. In the last fifty years, the withering of government funding for social services, mental health care, substance abuse programs, and low-income housing has resulted in the tragic fact that over a half-million Americans now experience homelessness every night. In March, I watched a documentary film, Lead Me Home,[1] that introduced me to those who reckon daily with housing insecurity, and with the arbitrary twists of fate that landed them in such circumstances.

As I watched the film, I kept thinking about my youngest son, Jesse, who recently lost his home and is living on the streets of Austin, Texas. A talented cook, he began to suffer from bipolar disorder in his early twenties while living and working in New York City. His condition undiagnosed, he self-medicated the extreme mood swings, which led to an alcohol addiction. When my wife and I learned of this, we invited him to move back home, and encouraged him to seek help, with mixed results. Over the last fifteen years, various stints in rehab have offered glimpses of hope followed by relapses.

That Friday, I drove Interstate 81’s compass-precise northeast route, 360 miles nearly nonstop, following the Roanoke Valley, James River Valley, and then Shenandoah Valley from my daughter’s home in Virginia to Locust Lake State Park in eastern Pennsylvania. The lake and camping area of the park were nestled alongside Locust Mountain in the Appalachians’ Ridge-and-Valley range, an oasis of second-growth forest and wetlands surrounded by land first mined for coal in the middle of the 19th century. These forests were harvested to build and support the mines and tanneries but have been untouched since.

By 6:30 on one of the longest days of the year, I’d found a campsite, set up my tent, and scrounged for dinner at the camp store. (One apple was all that remained from the food I’d started out with that morning in Roanoke.) I sat at a picnic table edged with moss, pieces of sunlight filtering down on a slant, illuminating the west side of gray tree trunks. Streaks of light green foliage angled toward the ground, against a backdrop of darker green shade. Sixty feet up, through a canopy of northern red oak, chestnut oak, red maple, eastern hemlock, tulip poplar – blue sky.

I was surrounded by an understory of mountain laurel in bloom, of ironwood and sassafras saplings. Good Sir Chipmunk, with his handsome stripes, wandered through my campsite to see if I had anything for him. I tasted the sassafras leaves, a childhood favorite, chewing one into a creamy mush, conjuring up memories of its earthy aromatic flavor.[2]

After finishing a long rehab in Austin four years ago, Jesse seemed to be making peace with his life, but a double charge of DUI and DWOL landed him in jail. One of the terms of his probation was that he wear an ankle monitor and report his sobriety via a breathalyzer, those items costing him at least $600 a month to rent, a heavy burden for anyone trying to get back on their feet.

In the past year, unable to keep up with the rent of an apartment he shared with a friend from rehab, Jesse was asked to move out. Since then he’s been living in his tent in various spots around Austin, relocating when the scene got too volatile. Spending a single night camping, by my choice, in Pennsylvania woods, I think of Jesse doing that night after night, by necessity, in Austin. We’ve been corresponding by email, my small attempt to be there for him, and to be with him. His dispatches are both heartening and heartbreaking:

Met a girl named Deseree. She gave me a dollar. Well, two. Followed me into the Home Depot parking lot. Shared stories about life and her cigarettes.

I told her my name. She had bad memories of Jesses and told me the stories. Reaffirmed my belief that there can be only one. As a pacifist I guess I just have to outlive them all.

Been a long time since something like that has happened. Sitting on the curb, talking, smoking her menthols. Said she had never done anything like this before.

I have, but not with you. So, I guess I haven't either.

The camping area was quiet, just two campsites within view – a young couple and another couple nearly my age. The lake was a half-mile away by trail, and I could hear the faint sounds of children laughing and squealing with delight, while nearby birds intoned vespers, the last songs of the day. I made dinner with what I’d found at the camp store: Round Top white bread, Kraft American singles, mayo. I thinly sliced the apple to add some crunch to my sandwich while sipping from a waxed carton of green tea brewed at Guers Tumbling Run Dairy, located in nearby Pottsville, home of Yuengling Brewery, which has been in business for nearly 200 years. In 1930, the brewery survived Prohibition by opening that dairy.

Dude threatened me tonight. –“You got a problem with somebody?” –“You think you can just walk by me?” Snatched at my pockets. –“What you got?” 

Walked away and stole a bus ride. It ain’t safe no more. Makes me sad. Feel that there should be unity amongst the desperate despite disparity. Common bond for fuck’s sake. 

Off to sleep in an alley behind a church. Help them in the morning. I like helping. And because 7 bucks is 7 bucks.

I welcomed sleep, although in the middle of the night, I awoke to the sound of an animal heavily treading on dead leaves outside my tent. As the first rays of sunlight peeked over the mountain, I studied a wood thrush’s flutelike two-part call moving from tree to tree through the woods. Packing up my tent, I discovered, beneath the dead leaves, moss completely covering the ground.

Surrounded by native prairie which is sort of sanctioned to not be fucked with. ’Cept they mow it. Which seems not right.

Still full of native flowers. I wear them in my hair. Not that I need adornment, but shit, I will wear my environment like a boss.

Out of the campground and down the mountainside past religiously segregated graveyards – this one for German Lutherans, that one for Byzantine Catholics – and into Mahanoy City, a five-by-twenty-block coal mining town squeezed into a narrow flat stretch along a creek. Before getting back on the road, east toward Long Island, I stopped at the 123 Cafe for breakfast. After requesting flapjacks and coffee, I overhear three women at a nearby table all order scrapple with their eggs, and realize I missed a chance to try that local specialty.

I woke up this morning thinking of you. That I should tell you what is going on and how I am doing. I’m back to work through a temp agency. That’s sort of adjacent to what I wanted to tell you.

Life out here is strange; I need to get out. I know that I got myself where I am and am the only one that can change that. I am surrounded by people who blame others for their situation and expect someone else to get them out of it. That mentality doesn’t work. So they just get angry. It’s a hard environment to live in.

Although homelessness has reached crisis status, there have been successes addressing it. In the last ten years, Houston, Texas, has reduced its homeless population by 63 percent, thanks to its “housing first” program, which has moved over 250,000 people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, not with the prerequisite that they’ve been weaned of drugs, or completed a 12-step program, or landed a job, or found God. 

I try to find magical shit in life to keep me moving. There are good people and I try to help them. The sky last night at dusk: clouds torn to shreds and ribbons, layered, glowing pink and orange. It was beautiful. I told the other people on the bus to look out the window at it. None of them looked up from their phones. I saw it and I hold it with me because ... fuck, it was beautiful. I can’t help the people who don’t want to see something so magical.

Couldn’t sleep that night because there were gunshots and a lot of strangers around. Apparently some cop was involved and is now suspended. Meth, ice, clear, whatever you want to call it is an epidemic here. I don’t even know what it is now; it’s like a mystery drug that everyone is on because it’s dirt cheap.

It’s hard to stay positive surrounded by so much negativity and complacency. I guess that’s what the clouds are for. I never forget that there is so much that is wonderful in this world. I have so much to say and no one really to say it to, so I’m trying to write it down.

Be well, Papa

The documentary Lead Me Home ends with Angel Olsen’s song “Endless Road”:  “Well, every road I see/ Leads away from me/ There’s not a single one/ That leads me home.” Still, I hold out hope for Jesse, and for all homeless people, that they may find a way home.

Footnotes:

[1] The 2021 film by Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk was an Oscar nominee in the documentary short category. It’s available for streaming on Netflix.

[2] Dried and ground sassafras leaves are the main component of filé, used as a spice and thickener in Louisiana Creole cooking.

4 May1970 / 30 May 2022: On Gun Violence

Minutes after the Ohio National Guard opened fire on protestors at Kent State, Mary Ann Vecchio kneels over the body of Jeffrey Miller.

Every year on May 4th, I stop for a few moments and go back to 1970. I was fifteen years old, living in Stow, Ohio, six miles from the Kent State University campus, when four students were killed and nine others wounded by National Guard troops during an antiwar demonstration. When I taught at Cedar Rapids Washington High School, the song I’d choose to play between classes on that date would be Neil Young’s “Ohio,” and sometimes the song would provide access to a teachable moment. 

I came of age during the Vietnam War. It was one of the issues my father and I would butt heads over at dinner, to the discomfort or boredom of everyone else at the table, from my mother down to the youngest of my nine siblings. However, through these clashes with my father over the war and the protests against it, I not only sharpened my argumentative skills but also began to define my personal ethics.

I took the not unusual position that the war was wrong. No one had been able to persuade me that the United States should be militarily involved in a civil war taking place in a small Southeast Asian country. The domino theory seemed the concoction of paranoid minds. I didn’t know whether I could claim to be a pacifist, but when my dad took me on his annual Thanksgiving morning hunting trip after I turned fourteen, I refused to fire the .22 caliber rifle he’d handed me. When they flushed a deer from a thicket and Dad yelled, “Shoot, Dave!” I couldn’t, squeezing back tears. And the next Thanksgiving my parents decided to start a new tradition: a family hike followed by touch football. 

In 1968, Nixon won the presidential election after a campaign based primarily on scare tactics, claiming he alone would be able to “lead us in these troubled, dangerous times,” pledging to “rebuild the respect for law,” and promising “we shall have order in the United States.”[1] He also vowed to scale back U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but that wasn't happening. On April 30, 1970, he announced on national television that the United States had invaded Cambodia, expanding the war. The next day, Friday, May 1, protests erupted on college campuses across the nation. At Kent State, on a large, grassy area in the middle of campus called the Commons, an antiwar rally was held at noon, featuring fiery denunciations of the war and Nixon. Another rally was called for Monday, May 4.

Between 1964 and 1973, nearly 2 million men were conscripted into military service so they could travel halfway around the world to fight a war that made little sense to them. In 1969, the Selective Service System held its first draft lottery, a random selection process. (In previous drafts, the method had been to draft the oldest men first.) Born in 1954, I wouldn’t be eligible for the draft for another three years. But I knew by heart Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” Phil Ochs’ “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” And I’d absorbed the antiwar messages of e.e. cummings’ “next to of course god america i” and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

That Friday night after the rally at Kent State, anger seethed in the Water Street bars and eventually spilled out into the downtown streets, escalating into a confrontation between protestors and local police. Store windows were broken, and beer bottles were thrown at squad cars. The next day, Kent’s mayor asked Governor James Rhodes to send in the Ohio National Guard.[2] By Sunday, nearly a thousand soldiers occupied the campus, lending it the appearance of a war zone. Rhodes flew to Kent and, at a press conference, scolded the protesters, promising to apply the full weight of the law in dealing with them.

As was true of everyone, the war had touched me. I had a cousin who died in Vietnam on April 5, 1966, at the age of 19. The previous five summers, his family and two others would join us for a week, jam-packed into two rental houses a block from Lake Erie beaches. My next-door neighbor Jimmy Flowers went to Vietnam and returned radically altered – as Jimi, wearing a scruffy beard, shoulder-length hair, and a thousand-yard stare.

Although Kent State officials had informed students that the May 4th rally was prohibited, a crowd began to gather, and by noon, the Commons was filled with 3,000 people. About 500 core demonstrators were gathered around the Victory Bell at one end of the Commons, another 1,000 students were supporting the active demonstrators, and an additional 1,500 students were spectators standing around the perimeter of the area. Across the expanse of lawn stood 100 National Guard soldiers armed with M-1 rifles. The students were ordered to leave. When this had no effect, several Guards hopped in a jeep, drove across the Commons to tell the protestors to disperse, but quickly retreated when their command was met with angry shouting. 

I was a student at Walsh Jesuit High School in Cuyahoga Falls. The Vietnam War came up often as a topic of discussion, especially in our Theology classes. One of the leading antiwar activists and pacifists at that time, Daniel Berrigan, was a Jesuit, and the majority of the Jesuits at Walsh supported his efforts. Brother McDonough, my 20th Century American History teacher, would later persuade me to canvass for the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern, the liberal Democratic senator from South Dakota. The 26th Amendment of 1971 had corrected a gross injustice by granting eighteen-year-olds (being drafted to fight in Vietnam) the right to vote, but my first vote didn’t alter Nixon’s landslide victory.

The National Guard troops locked and loaded their weapons, fired tear gas canisters into the crowd around the Victory Bell, and began to march across the Commons to break up the rally. The protestors retreated but then counterattacked with yelling and rock throwing. The Guard began retracing their steps until they reached what was known as Blanket Hill. As they arrived at the top of the hill, 28 of the more than 70 Guardsmen suddenly turned and discharged their weapons. Many shot into the air or the ground. However, some shot directly into the crowd. Altogether 67 bullets were fired in a 13-second flurry.

The victims were all a football field or more away from the National Guard when they were hit. Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause were active demonstrators. William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer were killed as they walked to classes; Schroeder was shot in the back. A photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen-year-old runaway screaming over the body of Miller, appeared on the front pages of newspapers and magazines throughout the country.

A number of our classmates lived in Kent, and news of the shootings quickly spread through the school hallways. We spent much of the rest of that week, first, in informal discussions about the event. Then the dam burst and the discussions spilled over into a range of topics, including education in general and our school in particular. One session got especially heated. As we expressed our grievances and declared we should be educating ourselves, Father Anderson slowly nodded, smiled, and said, “That’s exactly what you’re doing.”

The Walsh Jesuit High School Pioneer newspaper staff in 1970. I’m the curiously proud one in the left middle of the group.

Three hours after the shootings, the university was closed, not to reopen for six weeks. I was a cub reporter for the Pioneer, “published by and for the students of Walsh.” One of the juniors on the staff proposed we bypass the roadblocks that had been set up by taking back roads into Kent. I didn’t have a driver’s license but offered to ride along with him. I’m not sure if we were merely curious for our own sake or hoping to get a news scoop. In either case, that curiosity would not be satisfied. The campus was deathly still, 21,000 students suddenly gone, leaving no evidence of Monday’s tragedy.[3] Every non-essential downtown business was shuttered. Stoddard’s Custard, the Kent Road drive-in where my Little League baseball team went for soft-serve treats after every game, win or lose, was boarded up.

Looking back, I can’t help but compare that tragic event[4] to the world we live in today. Was it a forewarning that the double-barreled pressure of fear and hatred in an environment of widespread gun ownership would inevitably result in gun violence? Our frequently irrational and always inflated fears about personal safety have fed a gun epidemic. There are now more guns than people in the United States, and gun owners firmly believe this fact makes them safer. The students and teachers at Ross Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, didn’t feel safer. Nor did the shoppers at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York. Nor did the 17,798 Americans who have died of gun violence this year, as of Memorial Day.[5]

Gun violence is a multifaceted problem, and gun control isn’t the sole solution, but most Americans agree that universal background checks would be a positive step, and many agree that semi-automatic assault-style guns should be banned.[6] Lawmakers need to stop listening to the gun industry and NRA and start listening to the people. Upon watching the breaking news footage of the Kent State massacre on TV, Neil Young walked off into the woods and wrote “Ohio.” The haunting outro refrain memorializes the “four dead in Ohio.” To commemorate the thousands of victims of mass shootings in the U.S. since then, the song would have to go on for a long time.

Footnotes:

[1] These quotes from his televised campaign ads pandered to voters shell-shocked by recent events such as the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobbie Kennedy, the race riots and antiwar protests in U.S. cities, and the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

[2] Reluctance to serve in Vietnam had led many young men to join the National Guard, aware that they would not likely be sent to Vietnam.

[3] We didn’t see the bullet embedded in Solar Totem Number 1, a steel sculpture on the Commons. At the request of the artist, Don Drumm, the bullet is still there, a quiet memorial.

[4] This would not be the only mass shooting on a college campus that month. Eleven days later, city police and state patrol officers opened fire on Jackson State University students, killing two and wounding twelve.

[5] Per Gun Violence Archive data.

[6] Per The Pew Research Center’s Key Facts about Americans and Guns.

On the Road in 1980, Part the Last

Caye Caulker, Belize, in the late 1980s

Wednesday, 16 April. Before catching a small skiff from the Belize City docks to Caye Caulker, I exchanged travelers cheques for Belizean dollars[1] and bought some fruit. A one-hour trip skipping across Caribbean waves brought us to a coral island twelve miles off the coast, five miles long, north to south, and one mile wide. The island was situated just east of the 190-mile Belize Barrier Reef, the second longest coral reef system in the world.[2] That first day, I fell in love: the water was mildly choppy at best, pristinely clear, just cool enough for comfort, and teeming with tropical fish. I walked in up to my waist and dove, swimming underwater, kicking my legs like a frog, gobsmacked by the rainbow of small fish flitting around me.

Caye Caulker was a laid-back paradise, explaining the number of young North American and European travelers who had washed up on its shores, drawn by word of mouth. On the island’s windward side, the fairly steady trade winds kept the mosquitoes and sand fleas at bay. I settled into the idea of becoming a beach bum – whiling away my days doing a little swimming and snorkeling … a little sailing and fishing … cooking meals, playing music, getting high with friends … kicking back and letting go.

By Friday, I was hatching a plan with Bruce, Cheryl, and Ruth to rent a house on the island. I’d caught a truck ride and then skiff ride from Punta Gorda to Caye Caulker with Bruce, and I’d crossed paths with Canadians Cheryl and Ruth in Livingstón and Punta Gorda. We scouted around and soon located a house on the southern tip of the island renting for $25BZ a week. It had the basics – stove, refrigerator, indoor plumbing, beds. We bought a supply of vegetables and fish from the local co-op, where freshly caught red snapper and jack crevalle sold for $1BZ a pound, and started cooking. The house was located in a coconut palm grove, so we were using coconut milk and/or meat in all our dishes. And I’d begun constructing a percussion drum from coconut shell halves. The four of us got along well based on our shared appreciation of coffee, music, and marijuana.

We were living on island time. My Rastafarian friend Charlie just happened to sail up from Punta Gorda and settle in nearby. The notes of his wooden flute came floating from his camp on the beach. At the hostel where I stayed the first two nights, I’d found a copy of John Irving’s The World According to Garp. The opening fifty pages had been ripped out, likely used to help start some traveler’s campfire, but I was enjoying rereading the last 550 pages. Common yellowthroats, little warblers known as yellow bandits, hung out by our back doorway, eating flies and sand fleas, flitting about, even hopping into the house. 

On Monday, I made coconut bread – using the milk, meat, and oil of the coconut[3] – and added the finishing touches to a chowder Cheryl had started with fish caught by Charlie and his friend Freddie. On Tuesday morning, I made another loaf of the bread at the request of my housemates, and cooked up a breakfast slumgullion for six, frying an onion, adding apropos leftovers from the fridge, and scrambling in eggs. I was completely out of B-dollars, but others supplied the food and I did the cooking, taking pleasure in serving as cook and housekeeper for our improvised family.

It would rain most nights and then clear up during the day. I had gotten used to the occasional hassle of the fleas and mosquitoes; the others not so much. By midweek, Bruce, Cheryl, and Ruth had moved on. Another Canadian, Marcos, moved in with his Belizean girlfriend. Then two Swiss guys, Pascal and Alain, joined us. Charlie had settled into a nearby house, but spent most of his time at our place, sometimes good energy, sometimes exhausting. He had found a way to hustle every pretty girl on the island.

On Thursday, after breakfast, a couple of us got high and walked into town, went for a swim, and were soaking up sun and coconut oil on one of the piers when we learned that Paulo and George, two local fishermen, were taking folks out on their sloop. We joined the group, sailing out to a spot on the lee side of the reef and dropping anchor. Masks and flippers were available, so I dove to get a close look at the amazing variety of colorful fish darting among the coral. After an hour, we got back on the boat and sailed into deeper waters near the southern end of the reef. When Paulo and George went diving for conch, many followed to watch, but I headed a different direction toward the reef. As I was admiring a beautiful school of yellow-finned goatfish and fluorescent blue triggerfish, I happened to notice a shark, about five-foot long, slowly patrolling the waters three meters below me. A bit spooked, I swam directly back to the boat. When I later mentioned my sighting to Paulo, he laughed, “Ah, Caribbean reef shark – you kids always find the sharks.”[4]

As the expiration date of my Belize travel visa loomed, I faced the realization that this three-month trip had run its course. I began to think about my return to Iowa City and what I would do when I got there: Help wrap up the issue of Police Beat, the lit mag I was co-editing. Start a bagel street vendor business. Take classes at the university – Spanish, French, film, poetry workshop. Reconnect with the crazy music-making of my Pink Gravy friends. And reconnect with Pat and little Sierra, see if there was still a place for me with them. It felt like my life was waiting for me to rejoin it.

Syd’s Restaurant & Bar on Caye Caulker

My last night in Caye Caulker, I made a hearty rice-veggies-cheese casserole for our household, then strolled down to Syd’s Bar to raise one last glass of stout and bid goodbye to my friends, especially Freddie, who’d become a good pal and who still owes me 5 B-dollars. Next morning, I caught the Mermaid, the seven o’clock boat to Belize City. As we approached the harbor, I asked the skipper for directions to the airport. He took it upon himself to call Kimba International Airport, found a TACA[5] flight leaving for Miami at 10:40, and called a taxi for me. I sailed through the morning traffic to the airport, bought a ticket, passed through immigration and customs, all in a blur. My first plane ride, I was enthralled by the dance of the flight attendants demonstrating how to use the life vests and oxygen masks. We soared over the blue Caribbean and its pattern of reefs and islands, then the green Everglades, then Miami International Airport.

Back in the US of A, I walked out of the airport, got my bearings, and began hitching north, excited to be back but also disturbed by the jarring reminder of this country’s superfluous affluence. I thought back on how the trip had begun, my commitment to “the interior voyage … to trace that path.” I had promised to pursue this inquiry: “Are the things I do and say equivalent to my feelings, my emotions, my convictions?” I couldn’t say I had returned a changed person, but I had come to know myself a little better.

When I now reflect on this trip, The Barr Brothers’ song “Defibrillation” and these lines come to mind: “Where would you wander? / What would it mean? / There might be saviors, but no guarantees / … It’s not my nature to pretend / That any one road leads to any one end.”

Footnotes:

[1] At an exchange rate of $2BZ for $1US.

[2] To preserve the biological diversity of this coral reef, UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site in 1996. Although Belize has taken notable steps to protect it from bottom trawling and offshore oil drilling, the reef is still threatened by oceanic pollution and global warming.

[3] To process coconut oil, shred coconut meat, soak it in water, strain the milk from the meat, and cook the milk at a low simmer until the oil separates and rises to the surface.

[4] Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws, released five years earlier, had left all us kids with an unfounded fear of sharks.

[5] Transportes Aereos del Continente Americano, a Salvadoran airline now known as Avianca.

On the Road in 1980, Part 8

El Cerrito del Carmen, site of a hermitage on the northern edge of sprawling Guatemala City.

“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other [people] with common curiosity and pleasure…. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.” –G. K. Chesterton

Martes, 8 de abril.[1] The package of literary magazine submissions finally arrived that afternoon. I was staying in Guatemala City at Pensión Luna, impatient to move on. I bided my time by wandering the crowded, rackety streets, hiking to Parque Minerva, on the northern edge of the city, where I shot baskets with a kid at a beat-up hoop and watched a local semi-pro baseball team practice. Atop a nearby hill, I came upon the quiet gardens of a beautiful old church, La Ermita del Carmen.[2] Following the cloister’s winding path, I thought about the next stage of my journey: down from the Highlands, northeast to Puerto Barrios and the Caribbean coast.

I started that 300-kilometer trip the next morning, walking far enough to get out of the city and quickly hitching a ride from two friendly foresters driving a flatbed truck, who took me almost halfway, to the town of Santiago. The day warmed up as we drove down into the lowlands and along the Río Motagua. I soon caught another ride from two guys transporting a truckload of sandias. I gently clambered atop the pile of melons and settled in for the ride, the last sixty kilometers growing tropical lush, the road lined with orchards of mouth-watering sapotes, papayas, guayabas, mangos, tamarindos.

Arriving in Puerto Barrios at four PM, I located a pensión and then went down to the docks to suss out information for the ferry to Belize. The ferry crossing Bahia Amatique to Punta Gorda would depart at dawn the next morning. I had enough quetzales for the ferry ride but not for the Oficina de Migración’s exit fee. Rather than waiting for the next Punta Gorda ferry, I decided to take the first ferry after the banks opened, which would take me across a smaller segment of the bay and the wide mouth of the Río Dulce to Lívingston, still in Guatemala.

While I was at the docks, I watched a departing ferry and two Aussies missing the boat by seconds. I got to talking with them, horticulturalists from Canberra collecting tropical plant seeds for their farm back home. We all had an evening to spend in Puerto Barrios, so we smoked some of their hash and drove around in their rented car, winding up at a whorehouse, where we drank too many beers and engaged in friendly banter with the Belizean sex workers. Port towns are always lively and captivating, but I was hoping Lívingston would be more laid-back.

On the ferry ride the next day, I met Liz, a charming Brit from Salisbury. We got off the ferry at the dock, both of us looking for a place to stay, and were led by a young kid to a pensión that offered a single room with two beds. We just looked at each other a minute and said, “Why not?” After unpacking, we headed out to explore the town, almost immediately running into two American girls I’d met in Antigua. I had to extricate myself from an awkward moment, since they knew me as David and I’d just introduced myself to Liz as Francisco. All good though.

The next day we rented a cayuco[3] and paddled across the wide mouth of the Rio Dulce to an isolated beach. Although the water was choppy and the cayuco tippy, we crossed without incident, enjoying each other’s company as we shared tales of our journeys and a picnic of sandia and aguardiente.[4] Liz was a social worker in Edinburgh, a gentle heart, with the wisdom and sensibility of an experienced traveler. When we returned late in the afternoon, the wind had picked up, as had the waves. The cayuco capsized twice, but after a few false starts and a lot of bailing, we learned how to balance the counteracting forces of river current and sea winds to keep the craft upright, laughing afterward about our little fiasco.

I was smitten by Liz – tall, lithe, athletic, adventurous. In my mind, she fit the mold of intrepid British explorer-travelers such as Gertrude Bell and Beryl Markham. Our last night together, I finally proposed joining her in bed. A bit shy about such things, never wanting to assume, I’ve always had a hard time distinguishing between the signals for friend and lover. Liz laughed, “I’ve been wondering when you’d ask.” We spent a sweet night together before she headed toward Antigua and I caught the ferry to Punta Gorda.

The quiet Punta Gorda waterfront. The craft in the foreground is a cayuco.

Formerly known as British Honduras, Belize had been a British Crown Colony for over a century. The name change had occurred in 1973, but the country wouldn’t gain its independence until 1981. Punta Gorda, the southernmost coastal town of Belize, was a small fishing port. I found a place to stay at Madman’s 5 Star. Trust me, the five stars of the name were aspirational at best, but Madman offered a cozy restaurant – a single long table with benches on his enclosed front porch – serving wholesome food in robust portions, and behind his house a palapa,[5] where I hung my sleeping hammock.

I had finally found the seclusion I needed to read and comment on the eighty submissions to the literary magazine I was co-editing with Michael Cummings, which we had decided to call Police Beat.[6] When Mrs. Madman heard about my project, she loaned me a spare table that I repaired and set up as my desk. After three days of editorial work, I sent off the letter that included my notes on which pieces should be included in the issue.

The first and only issue of Police Beat. The postcard on the cover had arrived mysteriously at my address two years prior.

My first afternoon in Punta Gorda, I befriended a gregarious dreadlocked Rastafarian named Charlie, who had spent time in Canada, the U.S., and the military, but who now tended a field of ganja somewhere in the backcountry and lived on his sailboat. We met two Canadian girls whom Charlie invited to go sailing with us, but I wasn’t much of a first mate, and we never got out of the inlet he’d been anchored in. Instead, we hung out on the boat and got high while Charlie played his guitar. On shore later, as we walked through town, Charlie accosted a young British soldier, all the enmity toward the colonial oppressors seeming, at least to me, to explode out of nowhere. 

On Saturday night, I gave in to Charlie’s nagging and let him introduce me to a food vendor on a dark side street who dished up “ground food” – yams, potatoes, plantains, all cooked with pigtail and lots of grease, served on wax paper and eaten with our fingers. The bars in Punta Gorda sold good stout in plain brown bottles. Everyone cooked with coconut oil and milk. Sweet coconut bread buns were sold by little girls who walked the grassy lanes of Punta Gorda, carrying baskets covered with tea towels, almost too shy to show me what they were selling.

Punta Gorda was a trip. The beaches weren’t great, but I still went swimming among the jellyfish. Walking back, I chatted with some young guys gathered under a large spreading ceiba that they called “the learning tree,” and later went with a Rasta named Soul to a shanty on the outskirts of town to buy a spliff and get high right there on a Gospel Sunday afternoon. Folks spoke English to me, but when they conversed with each other, I heard an incomprehensible blend of English, Belizean Creole, and Spanish. Besides fishing, not much work was available. When people needed something, they were so laid back they’d just ask for it. Thanks to this custom, I was able to present a pair of pants I wasn’t wearing to an old man. The town was inhabited by a mix of Creoles, Garifuna, Maya, and peachfuzz-cheeked British soldiers.[7] The music was good – lots of reggae, and the funkiest U.S. music.

Madman had his finger on the little pulse of Punta Gorda. When he heard a truck transporting empty bottles would be stopping in town on its way to Belize City, he let me know I could catch a ride with it. Just one road meanders the 270 kilometers north to Belize City, and I’d heard that the hitching could be painfully slow, so I decided to take him up on the offer. It turned out I wasn’t alone. 

That night, two other Americans – Bruce and David – joined me on the “empties express,” which stopped for the night in Big Falls. After sharing canned mackerel and crackers for dinner, we crawled into our hammocks, rising at four AM to be on our way. From the back of the truck, we got a good look at the dense tropical forest we were passing through. Most houses were mounted on stilts; churches adhered to the English Colonial style. We helped load the crates of empties as we stopped in shantytowns – Hellgate, Bella Vista, Georgetown, Santa Cruz, Silk Grass, Bocotora, Hattieville. By noon, we were being dropped off at the Belize City docks, where the three of us found a skiff going to Caye Caulker, 30 kilometers northeast into the Caribbean.

Footnotes:

[1] Tuesday, April 8th.

[2] The Hermitage of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the patroness of the Carmelites, one of the first religious orders of Christian hermits.

[3] A shallow dugout canoe carved from the trunk of a palm tree.

[4] Literal translation, fiery or burning water, made from fermented sugar cane mash.

[5] An open-sided dwelling with a palm thatch roof.

[6] After an unintentionally funny column in the University of Iowa’s student newspaper, The Daily Iowan.

[7] The Creoles are descendants of enslaved Africans; the Garifuna are descendants of Maroons (Africans escaped from slavery) who mixed with Native Arawak and Carib people.