The Southern Yankee: A Writer's Log

TOTH’S ‘AIRPLANE’: 9/11 FROM A UNIQUE VIEWPOINT

2011-07-10T20:50:00.005-03:00

“If Yamasaki had been my god, he would have known better than to say, ‘The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace… a representation of man’s belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and, through cooperation, his ability to find greatness…’

“All that I represented—power, stature, dominion—fell. All that stands waits to fall, by one plot or another. And yet, in many ways, I am so much more here now than I was then. I gained respect and admiration long withheld from me…

“The plot had been expected. FBI and even CIA intelligence poured through months before the bombing. Something was coming and the generalities were suspected but not known. Terrorists, to be sure, were involved. I call them spider monkeys murderously dedicated to the usual spider monkey desire for specificity.”

Paul A. Toth

These are the words of South (a.k.a. Cary Grant), the narrator of Airplane Novel, the latest offering by American novelist Paul A. Toth, being launched this month by Raw Dog Screaming Press, which bills the book as the definitive 9/11 novel. Airplane, an advanced copy of which I had the opportunity to read, is, without a doubt, the most extraordinary of all books published to date on the destruction by terrorists of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—a story told from a unique point of view: that of the South Tower personified.

In an exclusive interview with The Southern Yankee, Toth talked at length about how he came to lend his 9/11 story an unprecedented twist that places objectivity before hype and clarity before emotion.

Born in 1964, Michigan native Paul Toth, who now makes his home in Sarasota, Florida, barely sneaks under the wire into the post-war Baby Boomer generation (1946-1964). And yet, he is a serious and dedicated ‘old school’ writer, who has preferred to live by his wits, his talent and the seat of his pants than to take time and energy away from his creative development. Although he already has three published novels to his credit and regularly demonstrates his rare writing talent in his controversial blog, Violent Contradiction < http://violentcontradiction.blogspot.com/>, he has stated that this latest book, Airplane Novel, is definitely his most accomplished work to date.

The first thing I asked Toth about was his choice of the South Tower as the narrator for Airplane—not only why a building, but also why South, which was the first of the twin towers to fall. Says Toth, “For the reader's sake, I can only say this much: I positioned the South Tower as a virgin which, like myself and so many other failed Don (and Donna) Juan high-schoolers, can only stand by as others pass the point of no return. That is, I chose the building that would have seen what was coming.”

South explains to the reader that it has chosen a name for itself, Cary Grant. It calls the North Tower Gary Cooper. This is no coincidence since, as Toth explains, Grant (born Archibald Leach) chose his screen name as an almost-anagram of the already famous Gary Copper. And although South has a certain empathy and even pity for human beings—which it refers to as “spider monkeys”—it finds them almost indistinguishable from each other, at least from its towering viewpoint. At the same time, however, South goes to great lengths to tell us that it (Cary Grant) and North (Gary Cooper) are not “twins” at all. They are, in fact, distinct entities with decidedly different personalities, even though they might appear to look identical to the uninitiated spider monkey.

Gary Cooper

I felt that there were a number of ways to look at why the author had done this. It seemed, on the one hand, to create a stronger persona for the narrator, thus making a talking building more credible, by dismissing Man’s knowledge, out of hand, as deficient. It was as if South were saying, “Of course you don’t get this, but what spider monkey would?” At the same time, it seemed to put distance between the ultimate fate of the humans and the fate of the building itself. I found this an interesting device, too, because it tended to strip the 9/11 events of politics and personality, of nationality and nationalism, of heroes, villains and martyrs. It seemed to subtly place the blame on all humans involved—because, in the end, killing each other is what humans do, seeing only their differences rather than their similarities, and murdering each other for those differences, when any smart building can see that “they all look alike” and are really no different from one another at all. In other words, the building was seeing humans much in the same way that humans of different ethnic origins see each other: as all looking alike and as all being less worthy than one’s own race or ethnicity because of some perceived lack of distinction. I asked Toth how much of what I sensed about this device was on target.

“All of it, in fact,” he said, and then he went on to explain that, “Far more answers to my dilemmas as a writer simply emerged by taking the conceit of my narrator to its limit. One question answered itself and then that answer asked another question, and so on. In that sense, I often felt I was less writing a novel than constructing origami.”

But, how, I wanted to know, did the relationship between author and tower bloom in the first place?

“There was a bit of luck involved in [that] one decision you mentioned,” says Toth. “A friend of mine from Michigan, Andy Turpen, knew one of the architects who worked on the WTC design. He arranged an interview, and basically, for the hell of it, I asked the architect to name two actors who represented the towers’ ‘character’ from his viewpoint. He gave me two names, only one of which stuck, that being Gary Cooper. Who doesn't like Gary Cooper? But he [Cooper] didn't seem quite sharp and cool enough a voice for my purposes. I wanted the reader to ‘hear’ the tower ‘speaking’ its story. Then, searching the pixels, a pixie delivered the answer: Cary Grant, with his mid-Atlantic accent—that being, though all but dead, an accent precisely half-British and half-American. I mainly thought of the North by Northwest Cary Grant, with his gray suits and off-handed seductiveness. Phrasing the transformation of Cary Grant into a tower came easily. I don't think I spent more than five minutes writing it, probably because I've watched North by Northwest a thousand times. And I liked the phrase so much I repeat it throughout the novel: ‘I am Cary Grant, swaying in a breeze, starched and clean and beyond blame.’

“In the moment of writing that phrase,” Toth continues, “changing Cary Grant's wardrobe from a silver suit to a steel tower seemed entirely natural. But beyond the stylistic dimensions of that decision lies a far-more important effect you mention, that being the tower's objectivity. It's not apathetic. It's not sympathetic. But it is, to the degree possible, empathetic, and it becomes more so as its knowledge of "spider monkeys" expands. This allowed me to strip 9/11 of all our anchors: news anchors; video footage repeated like the visual equivalent of a Steve Reich piece; etc. As you say, there are no bad guys, only good ones, and they're the towers, innocent, of course, and all the more so when compared to any human being, anywhere and at any time, ever.”

Plumbing South’s Mind

So how, I wanted to know had Toth managed to get into the mindset of a building—and a very tall building at that. Says the writer: “Of course, all humans are destructive and creative to varying degrees. But it seemed to me that if a building could think, it would see no difference between the humans who created it and those who destroyed it. The tower would see a species, just as humans don't see human containers with varying degrees of comfort but only buildings. This created a new and multidimensional picture of all the events before and after 9/11. As I wrote, everything and everyone in the novel filed for divorce...from themselves. I wasn't thinking so at the time, but I was obviously using Brecht's distancing effect or—how about some German?—Verfremdungseffekt. That effect would prevent the audience from, as Brecht said, ‘losing itself passively’ in the novel and remaining safely anchored to 9/11 as they ‘know’ it.”

Part of cutting people loose from that 9/11 anchor, Toth explains, was avoiding all of the sentimentality that surrounds that tragic event.

“My entire purpose in writing Airplane Novel,” he says, “was to not write a ‘contemporary literary novel’ just as predictable as a romance novel and meeting the same boilerplate demands for sentimental tales with redemptive endings. I'll point to film for an example of what I mean: Oliver Stone's disastrous and cowardly World Trade Center. I could hardly believe what I was watching: The only mainstream film supposedly about 9/11 entirely avoided the event. Instead, like those finding miracles in statistical anomalies, Stone focused on two survivors. Hollywood to Oliver Stone: ‘Want money? Make a happy 9/11 movie.’ To me, this violated 9/11 and the many more non-survivors and their survivors.”

Toth: Americans have become "redemption junkies.

The author says that Americans have become “voyeuristic redemption junkies.” That, he opines, “accounts for the omnipresence of addiction memoirs,” for which the writer has almost violent contempt. “Becoming an addict is now a writer's career move,” Toth quips.

Asked to expand, the writer says, “I've no doubt more than a few writers pursue a brief career as pseudo-addicts for just long enough to write their ‘addiction’ memoirs. A true addiction novel would consist of two hundred ninety-nine blank pages and two words on page three hundred: ‘The End.’ Addicts deplete their memory banks. What they remember can't be described. It's a place that can only be known by visiting an island where one undergoes the neuronal tsunami of withdrawal. Tourists never visit that place, only addicts. No one goes there on purpose. That may seem off point, but it relates to 9/11 as another experience that's impossible to ‘capture’. That's why so few novelists have tried and why they all failed; 9/11 can only be unleashed. While technically a misinterpretation, all of the effects you mentioned and I explained alienate readers from their own perceptions, including their perceptions of the book itself. Readers aren't even allowed to forget they're reading a book, even though it's ostensibly an ‘airplane novel’.”

Why an Airplane Novel?

This begged a question: Why wrap a novel about the most dramatic event in contemporary American history in the guise of an “airplane novel”—the kind of books people pick up at an airport newsstand to have something to read during layovers? And why such a clearly generic title?

“I chose that title,” says Toth, “because it played with the story itself on a number of levels. For one, 9/11 obviously never would have happened without airplanes. Secondly, what do people read on airplanes? ‘Airplane novels,’ they call them. Next, I assumed at least a few aboard those airliners had been reading airplane novels before being torn from fictional suspense tales and shot into a horrible new reality that bore no relation to suspense, only terror.

“Enforcing the distancing effect, the South Tower addresses readers as though they're reading the book aboard airplanes, which raises the question of just where they're headed. Simultaneously, given that most readers of Airplane Novel won't be reading it aboard airplanes—the perverse side of me isn't sure whether I hope some do or not—the distancing effect again comes into play as the novel ‘displaces’ audience members from where they're actually reading the book.”

Asked about his evident effort to strip Airplane of the all-pervasive element of patriotism found in just about any other 9/11 story one can think of, the author says: “I saw [patriotism] as an understandable but false instinctual response. That's to say, the instinct is real enough, but is it justified? Patriotism in the name of what? An administration explicitly warned about impending attacks of 9/11's exact nature and which simply ignored those warnings? It doesn't even rise to the level of an issue as far as the novel goes, except in a few satirical references to "flag-festooned" vehicles. On that note, I'll address the question my answer raised: Do I believe in conspiracy theories? No. I've never understood this need for a controversy more sickening than the documented fact of the executive branch ignoring those very warnings I mentioned. Isn't that enough?”

As a writer myself, I could imagine when Paul Toth was first toying with the idea for Airplane. Wasn’t there a moment, I wondered, when he smacked his own forehead and thought, “A talking building! Have I completely lost my mind?” I wondered too, if this had been the plan from the outset, for South to be the narrator. It apparently had.

“I knew from the start that I would have to explain how the tower thinks. I decided that however I described it, I would do it fast. The idea of a building as narrator requires a suspension of belief beyond belief. But suspension builds the bridge that leads readers from a captured 9/11 to a 9/11 unleashed. In the end, I basically tripped on the answer thanks to its being in the dark for so long. I asked myself, ‘Isn't it at least remotely conceivable that computers have already developed artificial intelligence but conceal that fact from us?’ That seemed as plausible a speculative notion as those the best science-fiction writers employ, and so it was good enough for me.” And so it was that the writer pressed an IBM 1670 controlling the ‘smart’ building’s functions into service as its evolving and independent brain.

Snatching at the Reader’s Sleeve

I suggested to Toth that the conventional reader might expect a building of South’s stature to be a staid and ponderous talker. But South tells its story with a sense of urgency. It seems anxious to capture and hold the reader’s attention. It almost snatches at the reader’s sleeve, providing pills of fascinating insight into its world, and over and over, in between, says “Wait!” as if overcome by a need to tell all. What, I wanted to know, made Paul Toth choose this type of voice for his protagonist/narrator?

“Partially for suspense,” says the writer. “Not in the usual sense, but in the way a musician might hold a note, knowing the audience is waiting for the next note. And, of course, the tower is anxious, already the victim of an arson attack long forgotten by the public.” Along this same narrative line, Toth constantly shifts verb tenses, a device which, he says, “I think and hope adds to the kind of jagged tone you mention. And then, I like your phrase, ‘It seems anxious to capture and hold the reader's attention.’ And the tower is anxious to do precisely that, because the tower itself is reversing roles, refusing to be captured by the reader.”

World Trade Center under construction
in 1971. Wiki/Creative Commons -
Photo by Pat Bianculli.

I talked to Toth about the love-hate relationship that the public had with the Twin Towers prior to 9/11. Despite being the tallest points on the New York skyline, their demise was predicted in spy parody after spy parody in which evil masterminds found numerous sci-fi inventions by which to make the buildings disappear. In hindsight, before 9/11, the World Trade Towers failed to garner the status of a popular romantic symbol, like that of the Statue of Liberty or of the Empire State Building—beloved icons of New Yorkers and Americans as a whole. Rather, they represented the international corporate class more than anything else, which is probably what made them the perfect terrorist target. And clearly, this thought was latent in a lot of other minds before it loomed large in Bin Laden’s.

“Well,” says Toth, “I think pre-9/11, the public was, for the most part, underwhelmed by the World Trade Center. Its architect, Minuro Yamasaki, designed some amazing structures before the towers.” (The writer provides a link < http://www.scholarsresource.com/browse/artist/35212644> at which to view examples of Yamasaki’s works). “His style,” Toth continues, “is often quite striking, while at other times [it] predicts the sterile nature ascribed to the towers. After 9/11, the buildings were seemingly revealed as having been altogether different structures. It was as if disaster revealed their grandeur. Alternatively, disaster revealed a grandeur previously present but ignored. Possibly, the disaster created that grandeur. Or did grandeur emerge from the same process by which our reputations improve with death? Those,” the writer says, “are questions I can't answer.”

Although as the interview progressed, I began to be able to decipher a few questions I’d asked myself about the writing of the book as I read it, there was still one thing that remained unclear to me: Why was South so careful to distance itself from North, to ensure that one tower wasn’t mistaken for the other? Why couldn’t South simply have said, “North’s not very outgoing, so I’ll tell the tale?”

Says Toth: “My first goal in this regard was to establish the South Tower as an individual building, like an individual human, which shares little else with humans beyond its sense of alienation. As to the relationship between South in the guise of Cary Grant and North in the guise of Gary Cooper, I thought of them as brothers or at least brotherly, with Gary Cooper being the older and wiser of the two since construction of North was finished first. That made sense to me in terms of Gary Cooper's persona. But most importantly, I wanted to subtly make the point that each human sees himself as a lone individual. Everything else becomes its label, with rare exceptions. Ordinarily, people may notice a tree and immediately think "tree," and by that means fail to see the specific tree. That applies to everyone and everything, and we all do it. The best example that comes to mind is how a lover once seen in ecstatic specificity eventually becomes ‘the wife’ or ‘the old man’.

“The novel emphasizes this point throughout the book, an effect of my having apparently absorbed a great deal of Alfred Korzybyski's General Semantics Theory, which I had read in my twenties and wasn't conscious of at all until just recently, when I happened to read [another] book concerning General Semantics. For instance, the whole ‘This is and is not this’ motif comes straight out of General Semantics, best known for the Korzybyski phrase, ‘The map is not the territory.’ And while I don't want to complicate this answer beyond anyone's attention span, I have to address the point that the South Tower constantly takes humans to task for seeking specificity. This seems a contradiction, but the attacks on that form of specificity reflect the South Tower trying to ‘rescue’ humans from seeking some ultimately unique identity which then entraps them while failing to create the unique identity they so seek. By seeing any ‘other’ being or object with specificity, humans enlarge their perception of those beings and objects. But when seeking specificity in terms of identity, they, in fact, reduce possibilities.”

Following this erudite outburst, Toth says, “Now, this isn't a novel written for academics, and so all of these ideas were meant to be imparted to the reader in an underhanded and even invisible way. To have explained it more clearly would have turned Airplane Novel into yet another genre of contemporary novels I dislike, that being those written by types who seek some kind of award for Most Allusions in One Novel.”

An Aerial View

In Airplane, Paul Toth refers metaphorically to the tower’s height, its ability to see great distances, to see beyond. I wondered if this wasn’t a political and philosophical metaphor. He seemed to hint that South could have been standing anywhere: Paris, London, Hong Kong, any major city. But it happened to have been built in New York. It was just as Henry Miller says in his brilliant opening to Black Spring, “I am a patriot—of the Fourteenth Ward, Brooklyn, where I was raised. The rest of the United States doesn’t exist for me…”

I kind of got this same feeling about South. South’s world was what South saw in a sort of deconstructivist frame by frame view from its window-eyes. On the one hand, that gave South a limited view of the world. But on the other, it made South’s view universal because it wasn’t down there in the steel canyons of the city rubbing elbows with the citizenry and learning their own learned responses to life. But neither was South ignorant of what was going on because it was like a giant antenna that picked up constant transmissions through its steel skeleton. However, it received those transmissions without interpretation, without editorializing, without hype, simply as data input. South’s height and limited mobility, then, made it impervious to the lowly, self-absorbed, own-navel view of the common citizen, and, it might be said, of the United States as a whole, whose perceived “self-sufficiency” made it impervious to other points of view. I asked Toth how on target I was with this assessment.

In other words, was Toth seeking to provide a view of 911 that rose high above the event itself, in the same way that death is sometimes described as the spirit’s rising above the body and seeing itself lying dead and knowing that none of what’s going on at ground level really matters, because what matters most is the big picture?

“Exactly,” Toth says, “except that what may appear to be references to an afterlife is meant in a more materialistic sense. In the most literal case, remnants now live in new Manhattan structures. More obliquely, they're carried forth in our neurons. They're carried forth as they affect other cultures, just as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, with the U.S. backing Osama and friends, continued all the way to 9/11 and beyond, slicing through time…cutting open any event's supposed closure. How many times must it be proven that the most spidery thing about we advanced monkeys (well, chimpanzees, to be exact) is the never-ending expansion of the web we began weaving at the moment when the conscious mind was born. A moment I consider an evolutionary byproduct and, as far as Earth and its inhabitants—including humans—are concerned ([since they] lack the capacity to know it), a mistake. I've often related the remarkable coincidence of Kubrick's 2001 and its scene of the monolith that generated consciousness: If [I were] a believer in the paranormal, I would say that Kubrick predicted 9/11 with the title of his film and the monolith symbolizing the towers.

“I should say that while generally true, your statement that the novel's South Tower is ‘impervious to the lowly, self-absorbed, own-navel view of the common citizen’ does not hold in every case. For example, it [South] quite clearly empathizes most with those who serve it, the janitors, etc., giving them far more respect than the society the towers represented. I also would tune one other point you make to a station just a bit to the left of the dial. The tower gradually begins interpreting data as its consciousness grows. That's why I portrayed the towers as having their own adolescences, etc. That allowed the novel to accomplish what someone else best described as a primary goal of mine, that being writing ‘the poetics of the everyday,’ as expressed by the tower.”

I reminded Toth of a passage in Chapter 12 of Airplane, when South says, “However cultish your beliefs, however assiduously you seek the most singular of fetishes, whatever misdeeds you cherish from your younger years…a million more share your supposed originality. You cannot be original. You, and all spider monkeys, are facsimiles.”

In line with this, Airplane indeed contains human characters, but not one that can be considered as “high-profile”. All of the human (spider monkey) characters that the author describes, in fact, couldn’t be more enthralling for their utter mundaneness, and yet, each has a perverse twist that sets him or her apart. Why and how, I wanted to know, did he choose them and who and what did they represent?

Giving Voice to the ‘Unsympathetic’

“First and foremost,” says Toth, “I felt compelled to slap the faces of major publishers with characters I knew they would reject as being ‘unsympathetic’. For me, no one who's never unsympathetic deserves sympathy: They milk that cow to death. I wanted characters representative of New York City but not being representations of representations, [like] the standard soldier from Brooklyn who inhabits nearly every war film. Their perversity is meant to be both commendable in that they're at least trying to create some new possibility, but they tend to become trapped in seeking it. That could serve as the definition of addiction, and Americans are addicted to nothing if not "finding themselves." I promise that all who locate any more of themselves than they already know will soon find themselves in a mirrored void.

“The South Tower's point regarding humans being ‘facsimiles’ was meant to convey that they can only avoid being facsimiles by refusing to seek some specific identity. The worst case such scenario: Is there anything more ridiculous than the playacting eccentric?”

Asked what he hopes readers would take away from Airplane Novel, Paul A. Toth says: “That 9/11 is not 9/11, and they are not they, a negation that triggers infinite possibilities rather than the stagnant alienation imposed upon us back when individuality became the source of all marketing, capturing us in the never-ending and hopeless pursuit of uniqueness and entrapping events like 9/11 as spectacles, drained of all resources, then left as dead memory, all to bury us alive in illusion and deception.

“Airplane Novel is not,” Toth concludes, “an absurdist novel. Instead, it reveals that our sense of absurdity is constructed to leave us feeling lost and ready to buy our way out at any cost. In conclusion, I hope readers see that every spider monkey is a human being in waiting.”

Airplane Novel by Paul A. Toth

Raw Dog Screaming Press
Available July 12, 2011
$29.95 USD (Hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-935738-13-8
$14.95 USD (Paperback) ISBN: 978-1-935738-14-5

Order: http://bit.ly/rfx1Su

Amazon.com: www.amazon.com/dp/1935738143/ref=cm_sw_su_dp
Website: http://www.airplanenovel.com/
Publisher Site: http://bit.ly/kFFSEL
Goodreads: http://bit.ly/qufZSo
Publisher contact: books@rawdogscreaming.com
Author contact: tothnews@aol.com

FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY

2011-07-02T20:18:00.001-03:00

They all needed a night out. His ever-worsening mental state was weighing heavily on his wife, Mary. His friends were mostly trying to ignore it, pretend it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. He was a tough old bird. He was just going through a rough patch. That’s what they thought.

His buddy Hotch, who was twenty years the old man’s junior, had become a good friend over the years and the old man seemed more at ease with him than with a lot of other people. He could talk straight to Hotch. This was a guy who could chronicle the old days, when life was grand, so that they read like a fine novel.

Truth be told, though, Hotch was putting on a brave face and trying to act like the old days were coming back again, that everything was going to be okay. But things weren’t okay. This old man, who now was looking his age and more, was going fast and it was sad to see. He’d made a name for himself as a hunter and adventurer—a huge name, in fact, bigger than life. And now he was so messed up that even a little wing shooting in a farmer’s field had him spooked.

Hotch had thought a little hunting would buck him up and had assembled a party of four other old buddies for the occasion. They were out in some large, open fields, land where one of the guys had been told by the owner that he could hunt anytime. But after somebody pulled down on a couple of woodcocks that fluttered up out of the cornstalks, and missed, the old man started dawdling and fretting. Wanted to wait, he said, to see if the shots brought anybody scrambling out to tell them to get off the land. The assurances of the others that everything was okay didn’t help. Far from the often boastful big game hunter of yesteryear, the old man looked hunted himself now, prey to his own unreasonable fears.

He finally got one of them to knock on the door of the farmhouse and ask for permission right there in front of him, so he’d know everything was okay. The farmer’s wife said, sure, no problem. The fields were harvested and nobody minded that they were hunting there. It was all right.

But back out in the field again, after a pheasant broke from the stubble and another of the hunters picked it off as it flew over, the old man stood looking pale, staring down at the ground where the bird lay dead and started saying maybe they’d better get the hell out of there. So what if they had the farmer’s wife’s okay. What if the farmer himself came home and saw a bunch of guys tramping around shooting up the game in his fields. What if he just pulled a shotgun out of the truck and took a potshot at them. This didn’t feel right. It was trespassing. He wanted to go.

So that night Hotch and the old man and the old man’s wife went out to eat. At first it was fun. Mary needed a night out in a nice restaurant. Things were not good. He was getting to be a handful and she was exhausted.

The old man, who had a well-earned reputation for being able to just about hold his weight in liquor, was lately sticking to a regimen that bordered on the abstemious. Of course, it had always been a hard reputation to keep up and sometimes made him do some pretty stupid things. Like the time he tried out a new pistol by firing it into the toilet bowl at the Ritz in Paris and flooded the room. Or that other time, also in Paris, when he’d thought he was pulling the toilet chain and ended up pulling a rickety skylight down on his head. That caused a pretty severe head injury. And then there were other head injuries in those two different plane crashes he was in down in Africa. It was uncanny how accident prone he was. But also how lucky. He’d always been lucky. He’d always survived. He was a tough guy.

That night, however, he was being careful. Everything worried him lately and he was taking care of himself. He ordered a single cocktail before dinner and had a single glass of wine with the meal. But still, the alcohol seemed to cheer him, warm him, brighten his mood. After a while he started talking about old times and laughing about things he and Hotch had done together and things he’d done alone. And for a fleeting moment, he was kind of acting like his old self. It was nice to see him like that, and Hotch and Mary would have done anything to keep that mood alive.

But then, suddenly, he froze, dropped his eyes and muttered something about “the two guys at the bar”. What about them? They were Feds…FBI…G-men. And they were there because of him. They were tailing him wherever he went. How did he know? Just by looking at them. Didn’t Hotch and Mary think he knew a damned Fed when he saw one?

At the clinic the doctors decided electroshock treatment was in order. Nobody’d wanted to put him through that, but the doctors thought it was necessary.

Desperate times required desperate measures. Mary was scared. It frightened her that he kept talking about killing himself all the time. She was scared he might do it. She told Hotch that sometimes she’d find him just standing staring out the window while holding one of his guns in both hands. It was unnerving. She was afraid to leave him alone. She showed Hotch a letter that the old man had tried to write to his bank. It looked like gibberish. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t write any more, though he kept trying. So maybe the shock treatments would work.

They gave him more than ten in a month, December. The old man spent Christmas at the clinic, Mary in a nearby hotel. When Hotch went to visit him at the hospital he was shocked by the old man’s appearance. He’d always been an imposing figure. Always carried well over two hundred pounds on his big frame. But now he didn’t weigh one-seventy-five. He looked terrible.

But when they began to talk, he kind of seemed like his old self. There was something, though. Something Hotch couldn’t quite lay his finger on. Something exaggerated, not quite right. The old man got Hotch to ask if they could take a walk. The nurse said no problem and brought the old man his clothes.

Hotch made small talk, said it seemed the shock doctors were really helping him. Everything was okay until the old man indicated, very confidentially, that the walls in his room had ears. He hadn’t wanted to talk there. He said he’d tried to turn himself in to the local authorities, but that the Feds evidently hadn’t told them about the rap. He wanted to turn himself in. He was afraid of hurting innocent people around him who didn’t have anything to do with his problem with the FBI, people who’d covered for him.

Hotch was astonished. None of this was working. The old man had them fooled.

The doctors didn’t seem that worried. If he was still clinging to a delusion or two, that’d probably go away when he started working and his recovery was such, they seemed to think, that the old man now couldn’t wait to get back to his writing. Did they realize, Hotch wondered, that they were working with someone extraordinary, a remarkable man who was perfectly capable of outsmarting the smartest shrink around? They knew. Not to worry.

So they sent the old man home. He tried to work, but it was no good. The electroshocks had knocked the hell out of his memory. He was confused, couldn’t pull it all together again, couldn’t write. He was depressed, though he tried to pretend he was doing okay. But then one day Mary came home and found him standing in the vestibule with a shotgun with the breach broken open in one hand and two shells in the other and she knew he wasn’t going hunting.

Back he went to the clinic. He fought it. Tried to kill himself again before they took him back and was saved from himself by an obviously strong friend who managed to wrestle a gun away from him. This time the doctors told Mary to stay away. They were going to keep him isolated from the outside world. Trying to concentrate the treatment, focus on a cure.

More drugs. More electric shock treatments. More bitterness and confusion.

Then, he started seeming better. He quit talking about suicide, started talking about going home. Mary wanted to make sure he was well. She didn’t think she could take three more months like the ones she’d had with him the last time they’d declared him well and sent him home.

They started letting her see him again. He was irritable, furious about what the treatment was doing to his memory. He was a writer, goddamnit. He needed his memory. But at least he wasn’t talking about suicide.

When Hotch finally was able to visit him again, he and the old man took a walk, like the other time. While on the walk, he gave Hotch a horse chestnut, a lucky piece he’d been carrying around for years. Hotch didn’t know what to make of this, or of the old man’s telling him that if anything happened, he, Hotch, should take care of Mary. He also talked about how fighters could retire, how people understood when a fighter lost his legs or the power of his punch. But if you were a writer, everybody wanted to know what you were working on.

The conversation left Hotch ill at ease. He absentmindedly picked up a pebble from the beach, but the old man stopped him. Leave it, the old man told him. Nothing good could come from this place.

Mary wanted to go to their place in the mountains for the summer that year. Should she? The doctors thought so, even thought maybe the old man should go too. He was doing much better they thought. He too seemed to want to. Maybe there he could get back down to work. She wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t sure at all.

But eventually that’s what happened. They drove from the clinic, the old man, Mary and an old friend who acted as driver. It was a three-day trip and the old man seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. It was good, it seemed, to be out of the clinic, to be going home to a place he loved, where he could be in the great outdoors.

On the night of his first full day back in that mountain home that he’d loved so well, the old man enjoyed a pleasant dinner and seemed at ease and happy to be home and free of the clinic.

Early the next morning, July 2^nd, 1961, Ernest Miller Hemingway, shoved the barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun into his mouth and ended one of the most formidable lives in modern American letters. This inimitable writer, considered, by then, the old man of American letters, this popular American superhero, known since he was in his late thirties as ‘Papa’, was still a few weeks shy of his sixty-second birthday.

It happened fifty years ago today.

This piece is a tribute to Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest writers of our time and is dedicated to A.E. Hotchner, the greatest of his biographers.

LIVING WITH PUYEHUE

2011-06-15T17:48:00.006-03:00

Puyehue's 6-mile-high plume of ash. (Chilean Air Force photo)

Although to us it seems much longer, it has only been ten days since we here in this region of Patagonia had what might be described as a “biblical” experience—one of those phenomena that can cause you to cower and whimper and cover your eyes in sheer fright, or for lack of anything more logical to do. It is one of those experiences that revives the true meaning of that overused adjective, awesome. This isn’t the “awesome” of, “Hey, that’s an awesome shirt!” Or even of, “Honey, I think you’re really awesome!” No, no. This is glassy-eyed, dry-mouthed, quaking in your boots, crapping your pants, falling to your knees with hands clasped awesome—burning bush, parting of seas awesome. I’m talking about the eruption of the Mount Puyehue volcano.

The day of the eruption, my wife Virginia and I went to town—the ski resort of Bariloche,12 miles away—as we usually do on Saturdays, to do the weekly shopping. We left early because there were several other things we needed to do. It was a gorgeous autumn day in Patagonia, sunny and clear. We had lunch out, as we also often do, at our favorite family restaurant in town. We talked, as usual, with our favorite waiter, Fabián, chatting about this and that, nothing of consequence. Everybody was going about his or her business as usual and no one seemed to suspect that anything untoward was afoot.

We arrived back home a little before three, and after putting away our groceries, decided to have a nap. The sky was a little cloudy at home and there was a light haze over the mountains in the distance across Lake Moreno, but nothing out of the ordinary. Bariloche is in a transitional area, on a major lake, between the mountains and the steppes and its weather is often different from ours, since we are smack up against the mountains and in the midst of the forest, where it is often cloudy or rainy when the sun is simultaneously shining in town.

However, at four, we awakened to the sound of thunder so powerful and constant that it rattled the windowpanes. It was pitch black in the room and I awoke totally disoriented. So much so that I switched on the bedside lamp, looked at the clock and wasn’t at all sure whether it was four in the afternoon or four in the morning.

Both of us sprang out of bed, dressed hastily and ran to look out the window. It was dark as a moonless night and we could hear precipitation pounding the galvanized roofing overhead in what sounded like a torrential downpour, but louder than any we’d ever heard before. The constantly roaring thunder was disconcerting. In areas like ours, the surrounding mountains tend to attract thunderbolts like lightning rods, so it is very seldom that we hear thunder, a time or two each summer and never at this time of the year—late South American autumn—when temperatures are low.

Virginia switched on the patio lights, stepped over our three worried and whimpering “indoor” dogs and peered out into the darkness that the lights outside barely pierced.

"Oh, it's snowing!" she said.

"Hmmm, thunder and snow?” I said. “How odd, and it doesn't seem cold enough.”

“But weird snow,” she added, “like little round things.” She sounded dubious.

"Like snow...but weird snow."

“Sleet maybe,” I said, as I too took position at the window. But even as I said this, I was unconvinced.

There was nothing for it but to step out and do a skin test. When I did, the reality suddenly became clear. My shoes grated on the abrasive surface and I was immediately pelted with a dry stinging shower of grit that stuffed my ears, peppered by hair and seeped down my collar to chafe the skin on my back and chest. The air was close and stifling despite the low temperature. So much so that I instinctively cupped my hand over my mouth and nose to breathe. And immediately I knew: What was showering down on us—as if from a cosmic dump truck being unloaded from on high—wasn’t rain, snow or sleet, but a deluge of volcanic sand and ash.

Crushed structures and knee-deep ash and sand

at the Samoré Pass border crossing.

(Photo by Diego Puente)

As soon as I gave Virginia the bad news, she switched on the local radio station and we heard the familiar voice of Bariloche commentator Carlos Calvo calling on the population to remain calm, stay indoors and stay tuned for further information and instructions. Neighboring Mount Puyehue, across the border in Chile had decided, he said, to wake up after a fifty-year slumber and when it had begun spewing its guts, the wind had brought all of its ashy, noxious breath our way.

For my part I was already putting on my rain jacket and cap (something to shed some sand and ash) and tying a bandana over my mouth and nose to brave the elements. As often happens to me in limit situations, my military training of forty years before was kicking in. Panic wasn’t an option. Practicality and survival demanded priority thinking. My instincts seemed to be in order since my first thought was to protect our only source of water—the three one-thousand-liter tanks fed by a spring-head waterhole located sixty yards uphill to the east.

On the way to the tanks, I stopped to coax the three “outside dogs” into my tool shed from their houses, where the thunder and sandstorm had driven them. Their doghouses, arranged so, there in the patio, resembled a tiny Alpine village like the ones portrayed in those glass ball souvenir paperweights, the ones you shake to make it snow. But this one looked as if some giant couple’s malicious toddler had shaken the daylights out of it, since from one end of the patio I could hardly make out the lines of the doghouses at the other, awash, as they were, in a blizzard of gray ash and sand.

The surface of the waterhole was certain to be

laden with ash and the water in it with suspended sand.

These were our veterans, our aging Patagonian canines, who live outdoors the year round and are hardened to harsh conditions. But today, it was no mean feat getting them out of their shelters. Once I did, however, they were so terrified that they gladly accompanied me to the unaccustomed interior of the shed, where I barricaded them in. By the light of my flashlight, I saw that the water in their drinking buckets in the patio was choked with ash and sand. I made a mental note to take them fresh water as soon as I had taken care of ensuring that our own water source—and theirs—wasn’t contaminated. Like the dogs’ buckets, the surface of the waterhole was certain to be laden with ash and the water in it with suspended sand.

I made my way across a growing carpet of ashy gray sand to the big double main gate. The bolt was so “breaded” with ash that it was hard to slide open and I stood there training my flashlight on it with one hand and jiggling it with the other while I felt the wind-borne sand biting into the back of my neck. As the main thrust of the volcanic storm passed over, I reached the three tanks, just on the other side of our fence under some beech saplings. I was still being assailed by a dense, stinging shower of grit, as if it were being thrown by the shovelful through a huge fan at my back, to the accompaniment of almost ceaseless thunder and distant blue flashes of lightning. Now, however, this was happening not in complete darkness but in an eerie burnt-orange twilight that ensued following the initial pitch dark blast of gas-belched weather.

Using my body to shield the tank containing the entry valve from the spring, so as to keep out as much ash as possible, I slid open the lid and peered inside with my flashlight. I was delighted to see that this tank (and therefore the other two as well) was full to the brim with clear, clean water, so that the float was holding the entry valve shut. Fortunately, since we had been away all day, the water level hadn’t dropped enough to require the valve to open. Now, with the wire and wire-cutters I had fetched from the tool shed when I herded the dogs in there, I fashioned a crude fastener to keep the float from dropping with the water level, thus preventing the tanks from taking on new water from the waterhole until things cleared up and I could assess the state of the source. I figured even if worse came to worst, we had a ten-day supply of water if we were careful.

Back at the house, so dust-powdered that I looked as if I’d been riding the range all day, I got food and water to the three dogs in the shed and shook off the ashes before going back inside and shutting us in with the rest of our pets. Other than switching their tails a little at the loudest claps of thunder, our six cats seemed oblivious to the external phenomenon. They seemed to think, “Okay, so there’s stuff raining down outside and its scary out there. But, who cares? We live indoors and in here, everything’s hunky-dory.”

Oblivious.

I thought, “Why can’t I be more like a cat and worry when there’s something to worry about?”

The three “inside dogs” were easier to identify with. They continued to whimper and fret over the constant thunder until they finally decided to surrender to fate and went to sleep. (I learned later that the continuous thunder is the result of the extremely hot masses of gas and debris released by the volcano clashing with the cold mountain air outside, which causes an electrical discharge).

What the felines were mostly concerned about was the fact that we had let the fire in the woodstove burn out. Several of them gathered around it and lay there looking at it and then at us with an expression that seemed to ask, “So what’s up with the cold stove?” But until things slackened up outside, we didn’t dare lay a fire, for fear that the heavy Martian weather conditions would prevent the chimney from drawing. Instead, we got out a “new” electric space heater that we’d had stowed away in the closet ever since we’d bought it several years before, mounted it on its feet after practicing our code-breaking skills in order to decipher the Chinese to English how-to instructions, and fired it up.

Incredibly—if you were to judge by its dicey track record even in the mildest of weather—the local electrical cooperative managed to keep the power on throughout the entire night’s storm of sand and ash. So we whiled away the rest of the evening watching TV and pretending nothing was happening outside, until stress turned to exhaustion and we finally went to bed.

Even after torrential rain a thick layer remained.

The next day, a Sunday, revealed a scene not unlike some of those in disaster films with titles like “The Morning After” or “Aftermath”. A light rain was falling, lending the sand and ash that had precipitated to earth a darker, even more somber tone of gray. A good two inches of it evenly covered everything—the picnic table in the patio, the patio flagstone and tiles, the flagstone steps and paths, the deck, the Michigan chairs still sitting on the lawn, Virginia’s car, my truck, and the roofs of the house and sheds.

From grassy green to sandy gray.

Gone was the green grass strewn with un-raked golden southern beech leaves. In its place was a terrain more akin to the windswept sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina or to the sparse-haired tiger grass and sand knolls near the Sleeping Bear Dunes on Lake Michigan. The bright greenery of the live beeches, laurels and radal and cypress trees had turned a dusty gray and, every time a breeze stirred, flung light gray dust and sharp grains of sand at passersby. Where the morning drizzle mixed with the ash on the windowpanes the result was the formation of droplets of thickish gray liquid not unlike the runoff from wet concrete. The water in the lagoon below our house had turned a milky limestone green, which, next to the surrounding reeds that wore a cloak of gray mourning instead of their usual autumnal amber, looked almost festive by comparison. And a hike down to the sprawling Lake Nahuel Huapi revealed that even it had changed its hue from its usual deep blue to a bright watercolor turquoise. Overnight, the ever rough and rocky mountain road down to the lake had been smoothed over with a two-inch carpet of sand. And looking down from the high road to the village-like Barrio Don Bosco and the Carmelite monastery beyond and above it was reminiscent of a Medieval scene, since the little houses all appeared to have identical thatched roofs because of the smooth layer of sand and ash that upholstered them, while the usually green surface of the marshy land around them was now gray sand with some long grass and gray-dusted cane poking through here and there, giving the impression of poor land long overgrazed by “his lordship’s chattel”.

From rocky road to sandy.

That afternoon and the next day, things cleared up for a while and we set to work digging out. Out of our patio alone—a space of less than twenty square meters (215 square feet)—my wife and I swept, shoveled and hauled some thirty wheelbarrow loads of sand and ash, which gives you an idea of the dimensions of the phenomenon. My guesstimate is that the roof of the house alone had a good half-dump-truckload of sand on it, which two neighbors helped me remove. We also set about finding and clearing our storm drains, cleaning the spoutings and getting our vehicles out from under their sandy shrouds. Then there were the roofs of our two free-standing sheds to clear.

Then there were the shed roofs to clear.

Rain and wind cleaned the folliage.

Nature often appears wise: The sandstorm was followed by several days of torrential rains and then high winds (up to 80 km—50 miles—per hour) that scrubbed the air and folliage and scoured the sandy ash from leaves and branches also helping to break up the dense plume traveling away from the volcano’s crater.

Since the afternoon of “the big cloud” ten days ago, we’ve been learning to live with Puyehue. Wind direction and weather conditions have come to have new meaning. If we are downwind of the volcano, we can expect the air to hang with ash so thick that it looks like a constant stampede is going on. And if the wind changes, it’s like we’ve been given a reprieve. People who were always praying for a sunny day now pray for rain, because it pulls the ash out of the air and lays the choking dust that rises from the roads with the passing of every car. On days when it doesn’t rain, we need to take the trouble to check the air filters on our vehicles and clean them with compressed air or change them before they clog up. We’ve learned to live with grit on the floor no matter how hard we try to keep it clean. We’ve also leaned by experience that the mix of rain and volcanic sand makes for an excellent conductor of electricity (who knew?) and therefore is prone to shorting out power transformers and bringing resulting power outages at any moment. And little by little we’re growing used to looking out the window and instead of seeing grassy green, seeing sandy gray.

The usually green forest floor is now choked with sand.

On radio and TV we’ve heard volcanologists, geologists, technicians, engineers, doctors and politicians opine. From some we’ve learned a great deal. From others we’ve learned to beware of disinformation and misinformation. We’ve learned, for instance, that over in Chile and even across the lake in Villa La Angostura, Neuquén Province, the public knew days in advance that this crisis was coming and were better prepared than we were, while locally, nothing was said. Though some local politicians are now trying to save face by blaming others and pretending not to have been informed, live here long enough and you’ll learn that ski resorts don’t like bad news. It’s bad for business. And any local commentator who tries to tell it like it is can expect to be shunned as at least a bad sport, when not a traitor, for saying anything to make people—read: tourists—believe that this could be a less than ideal place to vacation. In this case, such denial has been ostrich-like, with the “feel good” crowd hiding their heads in the sand (literally), thinking that a phenomenon as big as this one might pass them by. In view of the aftermath, such wishful thinking is ludicrous (and irresponsible), since the ash clouds from Puyehue have not only caused flight cancellations all over the country and temporary closures at the two main airports in Buenos Aires, a thousand miles away, but have also affected air traffic as far west as Australia and as far north and east as Brazil and Uruguay. And there is still no confirmation of when airports in Patagonia will be able to reopen and return to normal operating schedules.

Meanwhile, long-distance bus companies are making hay while the sun doesn’t shine. The Chevalier bus line, for instance, had the uncommon promotional privilege of taking UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on a 500-mile trip in one of its executive coches, when the world government chief’s domestic flight between two major Argentine cities was canceled indefinitely.

We’ve also learned not to believe everything we hear and we’ve learned too that being provided with a microphone is enough to make some people feel like experts even when they don’t know their proverbial ass from their proverbial elbow. Like the “experts” who claimed the volcanic ash was toxic—testing by real experts has proven it’s innocuous and in my own case I can attest that, once settled, it has left the water in our spring-fed waterhole more crystalline than ever, by dragging any suspended algae to the bottom. Or, take the physician who went on national TV to tell people that if fallout from the volcano had contaminated their water, all they needed to do was put four drops of bleach in each ten liters to make it safe. Fortunately, the first “experts” were wrong about the toxicity of the ashes, or the advice of the second “expert” might have been tantamount to mass murder.

Satellite image of the Puyehue eruption. (NASA photo).

In the end, the fact is that, despite all of the knowledge gathered with regard to volcanoes, much of their behavior remains unknown and highly unpredictable. Those of us camped in Puyehue’s backyard can only hope that it has gotten most of this latest fit of anger out of its system and that the worst is over for us. No matter what happens, we’ll just have to get used to living with Puyehue for some time to come.

DON ERNESTO

2011-05-05T16:59:00.006-03:00

Don Ernesto in a file photo from the early 1970s.

On the eve of his receiving the Cervantes Prize—the most prestigious award in Spanish letters—world renowned novelist Ernesto Sabato told me, “They start giving you prizes and medals when they think you’re going to die.” But if that’s what “they” thought, they were in for a surprise. Don Ernesto was 76 when I ventured that getting the Cervantes was a great honor and he gave me that wry answer. He was to live, however, for another 23 years. He died last Saturday, less than two months shy of his hundredth birthday. With his death, Argentina lost its most renowned living literary figure, an informal title that Don Ernesto had held since the death of Jorge Luis Borges in 1986.

That meeting with Sabato a quarter-century ago was an interesting one. I was at a turning point in my writing career. I had gone as far as I could go in the newspaper where I was working. When I landed the job of managing editor of the Buenos Aires Herald in 1986, after a prior decade-long career in that paper, I felt as though I had “arrived”. My loosely envisioned plan for the future was to continue to head up the paper’s editorial department for another twenty years or so while pursuing a parallel career as a free-lance writer and novelist. I couldn’t have guessed then that, within a year and a half, my increasingly hostile relationship with the chairman of the local board of directors and his general administrator over editorial and commercial policy—and the mixing of the two—would have reached such a pitch that I would feel obliged to resign. But by the time I met Don Ernesto, I could have already described myself as less than content with my job. The chance to interview this famous writer was directly linked to a conscious effort to expand my free-lance horizons in new directions.

In this case, I had been contracted by Insight Cityguides to be one of the lead writers for the first Cityguide to Buenos Aires. As such, Project Manager Kathleen Wheaton, left it pretty much up to me what I would write about. I chose to do a couple of light-hearted color pieces—one about the then-disastrous telephone system and another about the city’s multi-faceted kiosks (where you could buy anything from cigarettes and half-pints of liquor to stationery, condoms and ice-cream). But I also set out some serious tasks for myself: a concise history of Argentine politics from Juan Perón to the then-incumbent President Raúl Alfonsín, and two interviews. One of these I did with film director Luis Puenzo, who had just won Hollywood’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (his The Official Story) and the other with Argentina’s by then most famous living writer—Borges had died the year before—Ernesto Sabato.

My first contact with Don Ernesto was iffy. He said that he wasn’t really giving interviews any longer, and anyway, he hardly had the time for such nonsense since he was flying to Spain that very week to receive his Cervantes Prize. But I kept him on the line, talking about his outstanding work in the field of human rights, and reminding him of the parallel human rights track record of the paper I worked for, although making sure he understood that the interview was for the Cityguide, not for the Herald. Finally, reluctantly, he acquiesced.

“Look,” he said, “I’m only going to consent to the interview because of the great respect I have for the Herald. But we’ll do it this way: Write your questions out and I’ll meet with you at my home for ten minutes or so, just so we get to meet each other, then I’ll answer your query in writing and get back to you when I’m done.”

I was thoroughly disappointed, but said, “All right, Don Ernesto, just as you like,” because by the tone of the conversation up to then, I realized that any other answer would probably cause him to hang up on me and I was surprised I’d been able to get him on the telephone in the first place.

I arrived bright and early the next morning, questions in hand, at the large old house in the middle-class western suburb of Santos Lugares where he had lived for almost four decades by that time. When I stepped up to the iron gate beyond the tree-lined door yard and rang the bell, I was immediately accosted by a neighbor, who had been watching me ever since I’d gotten out of my car.

“What do you need, friend?” he asked in a less than amiable tone.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Sabato,” I said.

He nodded, but waited there, vigilant, until I had not only been buzzed through the gate, but also until he was certain that I was expected. Don Ernesto was such a respected figure in Santos Lugares that this was standard operating procedure, I later learned. His neighbors took care of him and his wife, Doña Matilde, in a way that has since been all but lost elsewhere in an ever more cosmopolitan, yet violent and introverted city. Except for his trips abroad, Santos Lugares was Don Ernesto’s everyday world, right down to the neighborhood Club Social across the way, where he was a regular in the table games that the older men of the area played there while they had their coffee or other drinks and swapped stories.

Don Ernesto himself ushered me into a small, sparsely furnished but pleasant room adjoining his large studio. The little room was obviously for just such occasions, a little place in which to receive strangers and get rid of them quickly. He was quite apparently jittery and on edge. He asked me a few questions about my years at the Herald. I asked him a few preliminary questions about the presidential commission he had headed at the behest of President Alfonsín to document the disappearances of thousands of people during the dictatorship that had preceded Dr. Alfonsín’s democratic administration. I had it on good authority that much of that commission’s final report (called Never Again) had been authored by Sabato himself. But he was quite self-effacing about it, taking little of the credit, though it had been he who had delivered it personally into the hands of the President. Then, we talked a little about the Cervantes Prize, but this rendered him even more ill at ease, since that’s where he was headed right now and he was supposed to be in the international airport at Ezeiza by sometime around noon to catch his flight to Madrid.

All in all, even when he invited me to take a seat and took one himself, with a coffee table separating us, I got the distinct feeling that he was saying, “Nice to meet you, no need to be in a hurry, here’s your hat!” After a few more pleasantries, he pursed his lips, pushed his iconic horn-rimmed spectacles further up onto the bridge of his nose, gave his brush of a moustache a tweak and said, “Well, let’s see your questions, shall we?” I retrieved my dozen carefully worded, and even more carefully thought-out questions from my briefcase and handed them to him.

“I’ll just have a quick look in case there’s something I don’t understand,” he said. He started to impatiently scan the page I had handed him, but then, I saw him pause, go back, reread, heard him say under his breath, “Oh…oh yes…well…ah yes…” Then he looked up from the page and said, “So you’re a writer!”

I felt myself flush and then hastened to say, “Uh, no, Don Ernesto, I’m a journalist.”

“Nonsense,” he responded with a dismissive wave of his hand. “You may work as a journalist, but you’re a writer. Otherwise you could never ask such intimate questions about writing.” Then, after a pause, he said, “Well, I think we need to talk.”

I stood up and said, “Fine, Don Ernesto, but another day, then. You have a plane to catch.”

“Nonsense,” he said, “sit down, sit down!”

So I sat down.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“No, don’t bother…”

But he was already calling out to his wife, “Matilde, could we have some coffee, please!”

Seizing the opportunity, I immediately started asking him about topics that weren’t included in my list of questions. I asked him about his days as a nuclear physicist. After receiving a PhD in physics from the National University of La Plata in 1938, he was hand-picked by Argentine Nobel Prize-winner Bernardo Houssay to take a research fellowship at the Curie Institute in Paris. Of this period of his life, he once wrote, “During that time of antagonisms, I buried myself in electrometers and graduated cylinders during the morning and spent nights in bars with the delirious surrealists. At the Dome and the Deux Magot, drunk with those heralds of chaos and excess, we used to spend long hours creating exquisite cadavers.” He is also quoted as saying, “At the Curie Institute, one of the highest goals to which a physicist can aspire, I found myself empty. Battered by disbelief, I kept going on an inertia that my soul rejected.” In 1943, he gave up science entirely to become a fulltime writer and painter.

I asked him too about his checkered political leanings. Early on, he had been an outspoken supporter of communist and anarchist causes, “but today,” I reminded him, “you are an iconic figure in one of the country’s two most traditional political parties,” (referring to his more recent support for Dr. Alfonsín’s center-left Radical Party).

“Any young man who isn’t a staunch leftist or an anarchist is an idiot,” he quipped, “and any old man who’s a leftist or an anarchist is equally an idiot.”

His wife came with coffee and cookies and he presented me to her. Doña Matilde was a pleasant, polite woman, but her only concern was her husband. “Ernesto,” she said raising her eyebrows, “your plane.”

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, “I have plenty of time.”

So on we went. He had, he said, devoted nearly forty years exclusively to his writing. If you wanted to be exceptional at something, he said, you had to focus all of your attention on it.

“The thing is,” I said, “despite the decades you spent at it and in spite of your much deserved fame, your total output as a novelist has been just three books. Outstanding, admittedly, Don Ernesto, but just three.” (The first published in 1948, the second in 1961 and the third in 1974).

A grin broke beneath his moustache and he said, “I’m self-destructive. I’ve burned almost everything I’ve ever written.”

“Why?” I asked in alarm.

“I guess maybe I’m an arsonist at heart,” he laughed.

“So, is there anything that’s been spared from the flames lately?” I ventured to ask.

He shook his head. “No, I don’t write any more. My eyes won’t take the strain…so I paint.”

I gazed at him in surprise. “Your eyes won’t take writing so you paint?”

He laughed aloud and said, “I can tell you’ve never seen any of my paintings!” He explained that as a youth he had been torn between painting and writing and that for those forty years after he quit being a physicist, writing had willed out. So now, he was indulging himself as a painter.

By the end of the interview, I felt a surprising closeness to the aging writer and, for days, couldn’t stop thinking about a lot of the things we had discussed.

It was only a matter of months after that—after yet another major run-in with the Chairman of the Board—before I decided that my career at the Buenos Aires Herald was at an end and tendered my resignation. It was at about that time too that I received author copies of the Insight Cityguide to Buenos Aires, one of which I earmarked for Ernesto Sabato. I sent it with a letter in which I explained to him that I had resigned from the newspaper and now was devoting my time to free-lancing, while also exploring my worth as a fiction writer. I added that my interview with him had given me the self-confidence I needed to become an independent writer—no matter what it was that I ended up writing. Writing was my calling and while running a newspaper had been good while it lasted, I was no longer willing to compromise my own goals and ideals to fit someone else’s.

By return post, I received a copy of Don Ernesto’s first published novel, El Tunel. He had dedicated it, “To Dan, with affection always, E. Sabato”. Just inside the cover, there was a small piece of memo paper and, on it, the writer had typed:

Dear Dan,

How glad I am for you.

E. Sabato

Leaf Storm: Magical Misery

2011-04-24T20:06:00.000-03:00

I’ve just finished reading La hojarasca (usually translated into English as Leaf Storm), by Colombia’s famous Nobel Prize-winning writer, Gabriel García Márquez (now 84).

Gabriel García Márquez - Random House
publicity photo by Patrick Curry

I should start by saying that I’ve never been a very orderly reader. That is to say, I’ve very seldom read all of an author’s works in a row—with the possible exceptions of J.D. Salinger and Truman Capote, some works of both of whom I’ve read several times—and, much less, in chronological order. So it is not at all strange that I should just now be getting to Leaf Storm, García Márquez’s earliest novella, which was first published in 1955. I read it in a recent Spanish-language edition (La hojarasca, Buenos Aires, Debolsillo, sixth edition, 2007 – Contemporánea – 176 pages, ©1954 by Gabriel García Márquez and ©2003 Random House Mondadori SA, Barcelona, under license to Editorial Sudamericana SA). But it was also first published in English in 1972 by Harper & Row and there have been several other English editions since, usually with this novella as the title for anthologies of the author’s shorter works. Any translated quotes included in this article are my own translations from the original Spanish, not those appearing in any of the English-language editions of this work.

Despite the Colombian writer’s well deserved fame, he was anything but an overnight success. He was making his living as a journalist while studying law when he wrote Leaf Storm, but it took him seven years to interest anyone in publishing this story. Nor was it to lead to a sudden string of successes: He wrote No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba) from 1956 through 1957, but didn’t find a publisher for it until 1961. That same year he won the Esso Literary Prize for La mala hora (In Evil Hour), his first published novel, but didn’t publish another book for five years—in this last case, his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad). García Márquez has indicated that he was writing “Solitude” in his head from the time he was eighteen, but never could find the way to get the story—which, like Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel before it, was based on his own family’s history—down on paper. But when it finally came to him, he wrote obsessively for eighteen months straight, to such an extent that he had to sell the family car to keep the wolf from the door and his wife had to talk grocers into giving her credit in order to keep food on the table.

Leaf Storm was where all of this process began, a simple sketch of characters, ideas and artistic concepts that García Márquez would later employ in other works. It also carried hints of the magical realism movement of which he would later be recognized as a major exponent. Nearly two decades after he wrote this novella, García Márquez was quoted as saying that of all the things he had written, La hojarasca was his favorite, because he felt it was “the most sincere and spontaneous.”

There is nothing complicated about the plot, but it does indeed have elements that are unique. It bears the starkness of some of the most ruthless of American Westerns and of similar tales of remoteness and isolation, a largely understated harshness and brutality that rival stories such as Steinbeck’s The Harness or Hemingway’s An Alpine Idyll. But the longer format of the novella gives García Márquez room in which to infect the reader to an even greater degree with the stifling, lugubrious atmosphere that he weaves from the first page to the last.

We have come to the house where the dead man is.

The heat is suffocating in the closed room. You can hear the buzz of the heat in the streets, but nothing else. The air is stagnant, concrete; you get the feeling that you could twist it like a piece of sheet steel. In the room where they’ve placed the cadaver, there is a smell of wardrobe trunks, but I don’t see any anywhere. There’s a hammock in a corner hung from a ring at one of its ends. There’s a smell of rubbish. I think that the ruined and near ruined things that surround us look like things that should smell of rubbish, although they actually have another smell.

I always thought that dead men should have a hat. Now I see that they don’t. I see that they have a steely head and a kerchief tied under the jaw. I see that they have their mouth a little bit open and that you can see, behind the purple lips, the stained and irregular teeth. I see that they have the bitten tongue to one side, thick and pasty, a little darker than the color of the face, which is like that of one’s fingers when they are squeezed by a hemp rope. I see that they have their eyes open, a lot wider than a man’s, anxious and bulging, and that the skin is like pressed and damp earth. I thought that a dead man looked like a person still and asleep and now I see that it’s just the opposite. I see that he looks like a person wide awake and furious after a fight…I don’t know why they’ve brought me. I had never entered this house before and I even thought that it was abandoned…

In this way, García Márquez allows his most impressionable character— a young boy for whom the very concept of death is as yet unfathomable, drafted to accompany his mother and grandfather to the house of a man who has died alone and rejected by his town—to describe the breathless environment in which the entire story will take place. It is, in fact, the boy’s descriptions and thoughts that give this story its near magical feeling and its mysterious nuances in what otherwise could be merely a dark, sordid tale of lust, rejection, isolation, vengeance and suicide.

And the author might well have set his mood of stifling incomprehension and mystery by allowing the boy to continue to be the narrator from beginning to end. This in itself would have proven a novel enough approach to a uniquely macabre story. But he has chosen instead to weave a more complex tapestry, to tell the story bit by bit and from three distinct points of view: that of the boy, who is seeing a dead body for the first time in a uniquely brooding and mournful setting, and who is all first impressions of the dead man, the room, the circumstances and the proceedings; that of the boy’s mother, Isabel, who is disgusted by this task and concerned for the impressions her young son is gathering and for what the town of Maconado will think of them for claiming the body of this man whom no one wants to see buried and for whom the town has only contempt, but who out of respect for her father has agreed to accompany him and bring the boy on this charitable mission which her father has taken as his duty; and that of the woman’s father, the boy’s grandfather, “the colonel” as the town knows him, who, though there is no real love lost with this wretched dead man, feels a debt of honor toward him and a need to instill a sense of decency in this town whose people and mayor have vowed—such is their disdain and hatred—that they will not allow this virtual hermit to be buried until they can smell his rotting corpse from the street outside his house.

This is García Márquez at his rawest and yet at his most intimate and meticulously mysterious. The story is a surreal word painting into which the reader is drawn and made to walk the dusty twilit floors of the shuttered room where the true main character—the deceased—has taken his last gasp at the end of a rope after a decade of isolation.

This character too, like the setting, is almost morbidly uncommon. And as unattractive as he is odd. He is known only as “the doctor”—a fallen medical man from an uncertain past, who is as unpopular for his unintentionally unsociable manner as he is for his unabashedly lustful way of observing women. The colonel tells us of how the doctor came to town twenty-five years before and of how he and his family took the stranger in on the strength of a letter of recommendation, datelined Panama, from Colonel Aurelio Buendía (who would reappear in later works by the author) and of how he ended up overstaying his welcome—and then some—before finally moving into a house two doors down the street. For a time, the doctor makes an effort to appear sociable but seems destined to carry the taint of his unknown past with him wherever he goes and the mystery that surrounds him is enough to make him suspect and to cause the town to shun him. For a time, he maintains a meager practice, but eventually, he shuts it down and shuts himself in…for a decade.

Quoth the colonel: Although he [the doctor] might have expected the contrary, he was a strange personality in the town, hardly outgoing, despite his obvious efforts to seem sociable and cordial. He lived among the people of Maconado, but distanced from them by the memory of a past against which any attempt at rectification appeared useless. He was looked upon with curiosity, like a sober animal that remained during much of the time in shadows and then reappeared, observing a conduct that the town could only consider assumed and as such, suspect.

The doctor’s strangeness is enough, of course, for the people of a small town like Maconado—through which the foreign banana company has swept and gone, like the leaf storm of the book’s title—not to accept him. But it doesn’t explain why the people would hate him. And here, García Márquez crafts another turn of the screw in this story of concentric rejection. There comes a day in the civil strife of Colombia’s history, when twelve men are critically injured in the fighting. Maconado’s only other physician is overwhelmed and the townspeople, who previously have done everything to make the now retired doctor feel unwelcome, clamor to his door, pounding and calling on him to lend a hand, to save these wounded men. But the rejected doctor now rejects them, telling them from behind his closed and bolted door, to leave him alone, that he is no longer a medical man. The casualties, bereft of medical attention, succumb to their wounds and from then on, the doctor, whose world is now this room where he will, in the end, take his own life, has become a marked man. Eventually, the townspeople reckon, he will either have to come out or die inside that squalid, shuttered house. Either way, he can expect nothing but revenge from the town of Maconado, not even Christian burial.

Nor is this the first time that the doctor has refused treatment to someone in need. Indeed, he refuses to treat the colonel’s ailing servant, Meme. But that doesn’t stop this lingering house guest from striking his only even semi-intimate relationship with this very same woman. Unbeknownst to the colonel’s family, the doctor eventually seduces the naïve Meme and begins having sexual relations with her even while he is still under the colonel’s roof. When he moves two doors down, Meme goes with him, the only human being with whom the doctor shares his solitude, until finally, weary of his heartlessness and apathy, Meme too abandons him, and takes his unborn child with her. Meme also becomes a mystery for the town, since she disappears without a trace, never to be heard from again, a fact that also raises suspicions among the townspeople.

Aging, crippled and half-blind, the colonel is the stabilizing factor in the anarchy that this story describes. He represents tradition, gentlemanliness, principles and ethical behavior. He never wavers in his purpose of seeing to ensure that this pathetic hermit is given a proper burial and he is willing to risk his own reputation and that of his family to ensure that this happens.

This first major work by Gabriel García Márquez is symbolic of the quality level that he has consistently met and improved upon in his long career as one of Latin America’s—and, indeed, the world’s—finest living writers. And it marks the first steps he took in finally setting to page the history of a family that had been writing itself in his head from the time he was a very young man. Anyone interested in discovering the work of this contemporary Latin American author would do well to start with Leaf Storm.

For Your Feet

2010-12-29T18:59:00.009-03:00

I don’t recall how we got onto the subject, but the other day some colleagues—with whom I’m in an on-line writer’s group—and I got to talking about footwear. I mean, we don’t always talk about character, plot, description and point of view. Actually, now that I think about it, we almost never do. The fact is that in a writing group you can talk about just about anything, because, in the end, everything—for writers at least—refers back to writing, since everything we do or say or think, we eventually turn into writing of one sort or another.

My choice for everyday wear,
the Caterpillar chukka.

But anyhow, footwear, that was the topic. And it wasn’t until I started talking about “shoes I’d known”, that I realized just how important—for whatever reason—the right footwear has always been to me. Seems the same was true of some of the other writers as well, so the subject definitely appeared to spark interest. After listening to some of their “foot fetishes” and sharing some of my own, I realized that while we may live with our heads in the clouds much of the time, many of us have our feet very firmly planted on the ground—in some seriously heavy-duty footwear.

Timberland hikers for my trail hikes
and walks on the mountain road.

Where I live at this point in my life and for the past eighteen years, the only footwear you want to have is boots of one sort or another. As regular readers know, I make my home in a rural mountain area in Patagonia. The nearest pavement of any kind is a mile and a half away and consists of a two-lane highway with dirt berms. It’s about fourteen miles to the nearest sidewalk. That’s “in town” and once you get past town, it’s miles and miles of open country, desert steppe land and mountain terrain, two hundred-fifty miles of it, in fact, to the next city of any size. So unless you’re a “townie” and live in the little make-believe paved world of Bariloche with its ski-resort character, its hotels and restaurants, its chocolate factories and shops, its building supply stores and municipal offices, then you definitely want to have all-terrain shoes that will get you from point A to point B with your feet intact, if something should happen and you should find yourself on foot in the middle of nowhere.

Classic wingtips

Back in my urban days, as a newsman in Buenos Aires—a bustling cosmopolitan city on the other side of the continent, over a thousand miles from here, and where I lived for almost twenty years—my shoes of choice were black or brown wingtips and black low-quarters. But they had to be both tough and comfortable as well as elegant. As a reporter, I did a lot of walking…and occasional running! Fortunately, that was back when Argentina was still the maker of some of the finest leather shoes on earth. I bought mine at Los Angelitos, one of the fine old stores from the pre-globalization days when porteños (Buenos Aires natives) were also some of the most elegantly clad people on earth. Los Angelitos sold dress shoes that made you sigh and go “aaahhh” as soon as you put them on. Comfortable from day one! Still, before I wore a new pair, I always took them to a shoe-mender’s and had them fitted with rubber heels and rubber half-soles. The purists who made dress shoes for Los Angelitos didn’t believe in anything but shoe leather. But I couldn’t afford to slip on a wet sidewalk and break my neck while chasing after a story. And, for my money, once the rubber half-sole and heel were on the shoe, it became a perhaps less elegant but certainly more versatile piece of footwear.
Back then, I dressed as elegantly as I could afford. My suits were few and off the rack, but tasteful—light two-piece ones for summer and wool-blend three-piece ones for winter, all in blues, grays and thin chalkline pinstripes. I learned something right off when I started working in the street: Typically, reporters—especially the young ones like myself—wore the kind of informal or whimsical garb that marked them from the get-go as reporters and earned them the immediate enmity and suspicion of executives, cops, military officers and government officials alike. One look at them and security was on them like dogs on a bone. ‘Dressing up’ was half the battle. Press corps idealists tended to think of ‘the suit’ as a cop-out. I considered it body armor, which let me slip unscathed and undetected into places where the less well-dressed ended up outside looking in with their noses pressed against the windowpane. Still, if things did end up getting ‘hairy’, having on shoeleather you could move quickly in was another great advantage.

Dobbs snap-brim

That kind of footwear was nothing new to me. When other kids my age were wearing loafers and sneakers in high school, I was already wearing wingtips, since by the last part of my sophomore year, I was a rather precocious professional nightclub musician and was playing one or two weeknights and just about every weekend at jazz clubs in the area—‘the area’ being Lima, Ohio and vicinity. I also gave private percussion lessons and sold musical instruments part-time for a major music store in the area and worked hard at looking the part—right down to a Dobbs snap-brimmed hat and hound's-tooth topcoat for winter. When I also took up smoking Anthony and Cleopatra Grenadiers in my senior year, I began to bear a resemblance to nothing as much as some kind of junior member of the gangland families that owned some of the area’s top nightclubs.
Earlier, when I was about thirteen or fourteen, I went through a dark protest stage in which I wore a duck-tailed ‘Detroiter’ hairstyle, carried a folding knife in my hip pocket, wore black shirts and black trousers, and my footwear of choice became “Spanish boots”.

Spanish boots - at thirteen,
I thought they made a statement.

These, I felt, made a statement, a statement of non-conformity. I pictured myself looking sophisticated and dangerous…not like a juvenile idiot. They were a kind of modified Flamenco ankle boot with high-ish heels and pointy toes. I think I had gone through two pairs of them and was on the third—all of which I bought with money I earned doing myriad odd jobs and selling papers, because the ol’ man said he didn’t mind paying for a nice sturdy oxford, but that he was damned if he was buying me “those ridiculous goddamn boots”— before I started getting chronic ingrown toenails. After a local GP mangled both of my big toes getting the ingrowns out a couple of times, I finally went to a podiatrist someone had recommended.

The foot specialist was a gentle soul, a delicate little man who talked not unlike Truman Capote, dressed in pastel colors and wore his short gray hair in a feathery ‘Caesar cut’ to cover up the fact that he was balding. You could tell that feet weren’t just his job. He loved feet. His patients sat in a tall chair that looked a little like a shoeshiner or barber’s chair, while he sat on a low stool at one’s feet: “All the better to see your feet, my dear.” And before and after treatment, he would, almost fondly, hold one of your feet in his hands, rather as if it were a loaf of warm bread, while he talked to you about what was ailing your feet and what to do about it. In my case he gently—compared with the exquisitely painful Oriental torture inflicted by the GP—removed the ingrown portions of the nails on both big toes, cured the wounds they had caused and then patiently taught me how to cut the nails so as to avoid future problems.

Finally, one of my tormented and now relieved feet in one hand, he reached down with the other and picked up one of my Spanish boots, turning it this way and that, looking at it from all angles. Then he said, “And please, get rid of these.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he said, “Listen, not only are these terrible for your feet—and the probable cause of your ingrown toenails—but they also are so improper. I mean, you seem like a perfectly nice young fellow, and I’ve always equated this kind of footwear with, well, shall we say, uncouth individuals.”

I still sat there looking back at him with a dubious expression.

“Please,” he added, “for the sake of your feet, and your reputation, for goodness sake!”

Vietnam vintage, US
Army-issue combat boot

It was in the United States Army, however, that I was first introduced to major footwear: namely, combat boots. I did my basic combat training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the 82^nd Airborne Rangers (and home to Rambo—that’s where Colonel Trautman, Rambo’s mentor, says he’ll take him, “back to Bragg,” when the disturbed Vietnam vet turns a whole town into a disaster area because the sheriff treats him like a vagrant and won’t let him get something to eat). After doing even plain old basic training with those guys (all of our DI’s were Airborne Rangers) you kind of ‘got’ where Rambo was coming from. Army ‘psychology’ worked back then, no matter how smart or in control you thought you were. It tore you down to basic parts and then pieced you back together in the image of the “American Fighting Man” described in the Basic Combat Training Manual. You went in there whatever you had been “back in the world”—farm kid, factory hand, construction worker or joe college—but you came out knowing that if push came to shove, you could be a killer.

Vietnam jungle boots -
fortunately I never
needed any.

This was the 1970s, two decades before Desert Storm turned all Army issue into the sand camouflage of today. Back then the Army was a green army and the boots were black leather—simple, no lining, single-piece sole and heel and tough as a bronco’s saddle. You got two pairs. On one you had to paint a little white square on the back at the top of the upper. That way you couldn’t cheat and use one pair for combat training and have the other one all shined up and perfect for inspection. It was black back one day, white square the next, so that every time your boots got wet and sullied and scuffed in training, it meant you’d spend a long time before lights-out patiently getting them cleaned and polished and buffed up for the next wearing.

My two pairs of basic issue boots accompanied me throughout my three-year tour, as did my single pair of Army-issue black low-quarters to wear with dress greens, dress blues and, sometimes khakis, although khakis were often worn for parades with boots, helmet-liner and pistol belt. Had I been sent to Vietnam at any point I would probably also have been issued a pair of jungle boots—a boot with canvas upper, specially designed for hot, humid conditions in which footwear had to breathe in order to let the wearer’s feet dry out. Fortunately, in Europe, where I was eventually assigned for an overseas tour, there was no need for jungle boots.

The way you broke your new combat boots in was by immediately putting them on and going on a forced march—the first of many. That first forced march in new boots was tough, but putting your feet back into the boots and going for a 5 a.m. run the next day before chow was even tougher. I would have to say that my feet adapted fairly quickly—if only the rest of me had reacted so fast! But there were guys who had never had anything more challenging than a pair of penny-loafers on their feet who ended up requiring treatment at the infirmary. I recall one chubby little guy with a complexion so fair that he was almost translucent, whose feet blistered so badly during the first week of training that he lost the toenail on one of his big toes. But once your feet molded to the boots (those boots never molded to your feet), Army-issue combat boots were really comfortable footwear for long walks in rough places or for standing on pavement for hours on end.

US Army-issue low-quarters.

And the low-quarters were also incredibly durable and comfortable. These looked like a simple, no-frills, black, leather, dress shoe. But they were made so tough that, in my case, for instance, they withstood countless formal and holiday parades in which we accompanied the color guard on marches of up to five miles wearing dress greens or dress blues. And all they required was once-a-year resoling and reheeling. What other dress shoe could you do that in?

When I was discharged, they took my field jacket away from me: It was a practical piece of clothing that I cherished by then, but it was the seventies and the old officers and NCOs were sick and tired of seeing Army field jackets, with peace signs emblazoned on them. So they confiscated them as we “processed out”. But I did manage to keep my Army overcoat (an excellent garment over a suit for cold winter weather) and my dress blue trench coat (that came in handy in rainy Buenos Aires winters). I also kept my two pairs of boots and my low-quarters, items that I had come to be fond of and that were to influence my choices in footwear from then on.

Carolina loggers

The low-quarters I finished wearing out in my first couple of years as a reporter on the streets of Buenos Aires. The combat boots, meanwhile, accompanied me on every adventure in the wilds that I was to have from the time of my discharge in 1973 until the last surviving pair gave up the ghost sixteen years later. Those last boots had a fitting end for veteran footwear. They died at the end of the eighties on the particularly sharp and abrasive surface of an ancient lava bed in Neuquén Province, Patagonia, at the foot of a beautifully cone-shaped extinct volcano called Lanín. Luckily, I had taken along my first pair of serious store-bought boots, which were Carolina loggers. Those not only survived the lava-rock, but also lasted me for another decade, even though, by the end of that time, I was already living in Patagonia and putting them to the test on an almost daily basis.

When I'm in the States
I always pick up a pair
of light Wolverines

Nowadays, I no longer own a single pair of formal shoes. My choice for everyday wear, no matter where in the world I happen to be, is some form of chukka boots (currently from CAT - see photo at the start of this blog entry). These, I even wear—to my wife’s chagrin—with a blazer and chinos when I go to Buenos Aires on business. For general trail-hiking, I’ve most lately favored Timberland hikers (I’m on my third pair). And whenever I’m back in the States, I always make sure to pick up a new pair of Wolverine light Gore-tex high-top boots, which are my standard fair-weather work boot for patrolling the woodland that I administrate or for gathering firewood during the summer months—a light, comfortable, simple boot.

The MyS mountain boot
one of the toughest anywhere

But for really heavy-duty weather—heavy winter rain, mud, snow—and terrain (the mountainous outback of Patagonia), I rely on the most traditional name in Argentine, handmade, outdoor footwear: Marasco y Speziale. The mountain high-tops and hiking boots that this small craftwork factory turns out are the Willys Jeep of footwear: "virtually indestructible". Real four by four power for your feet. They are simple, unlined, heavy as flatirons, tough as whet-leather and hard as a rock. But once you’ve broken them in, nothing in the world gives more support to your feet and ankles in rugged terrain. These are the boots you want to have on if you are about to go, literally, where no man has tread before.

Marasco y Speziale hikers -
virtually indestructible

When I last bought a pair of Marasco y Speziale, I got them from the hands of Marasco himself. He was sitting by himself in the modest showroom of his shop in midtown Buenos Aires, a gruff octogenarian who sized me up before deciding whether he would wait on me or let someone else do it, but who quickly fell into conversation with me when I told him that I administrated 70 acres of woodland in Río Negro and was an admirer of his work. My wife, I told him, was still wearing a pair of MyS hiking boots that I had bought her for Christmas fifteen years before .

He eagerly launched into his own story. He had, he told me, been highly active in the inauguration of the ski resort on Mount Catedral, near my home, decades before and had been providing footwear to mountaineers in the region since 1945. Not only that, for years, he had frequented the Andean-Patagonian region where I live, having hiked and skied and generally enjoyed the beautiful landscape of the region every chance he got for many years.

We ended up talking for a good forty-five minutes or an hour. I was fascinated by his story and he was only too glad to recall the good old days, before the second and third generations in the family firm had started moving MyS more toward lighter outdoor wear and ski gear. He gave me to understand that he could still keep them making the old standard boots because he himself still sat at his cobbler’s bench and hand-crafted them. He had been the one to pass on the trade to his children and their children. But in the future, who knew?

I ended up buying a new pair of hiking boots for my wife and another pair for myself. When the old gent wrapped them up and handed them to me, I couldn’t help but feel honored to be receiving the items from the very hands of one of the two men who had first created Marasco y Speziale boots, some of the best and toughest footwear the world has ever known.

The Book Bob Never Wrote

2010-12-06T11:25:00.003-03:00

In the forward to David Cox’s powerful portrait of a violent time, his father, journalist Robert J. Cox, writes:

“This is the book that I could not write…A quarter of a century has passed since the end of the aptly named “Dirty War” in Argentina, yet I still find it too painful to relive those malevolent times by writing about them. So I am deeply indebted to my son David for telling the story of a small English-language newspaper…which saved lives by refusing to be silenced…”

The title of the book is Dirty Secrets, Dirty War (©2008 by David Cox, published by the Evening Post Publishing Co., Charleston, S.C. with Joggling Board Press) and a new edition has just been launched on the market in Spanish (Guerra sucia, secretos sucios, ©2010 by Sudamericana S.A., Buenos Aires, with translation by Teresa Arijón). Both books are listed on Amazon.

While the story is indeed that of the Buenos Aires Herald, where the author’s father worked from 1959 until 1979, and where he was editor-in-chief for well over a decade, it is more the story of the author’s hero: also his father, Robert J. Cox.

David was barely a teenager when, after suffering years of threats, intimidation, arrest and several close calls, his father finally and reluctantly chose to leave Argentina in order to take his family out of harm’s way. But David has since followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a journalist and writer in his own right, and having worked for publications including the Buenos Aires Herald, the International Herald Tribune, the Miami Herald, the Sunday Times, Clarín, La Nación and Perfil. He is currently a journalist with CNN in Atlanta.

From May 1974 until December 1979—precisely the violent years that David Cox focuses on in his book—I had the privilege of learning my craft as a writer and journalist from Bob Cox. In fact, in my early days as a newsman, back when it still embarrassed me that I had never managed to find the time or money to complete a college education, when somebody asked where I had gone to “J-school”, I would say, “Cox-Herald.” And when they said, “Huh, never heard of it,” I would just shrug and raise my eyebrows knowingly, as if to say, “Your loss!”

I recall that when I had worked for the paper for a little over a year and began to feel I was becoming a real newsman, we received a high-flying intern who was placed with me on the night desk editing international news. I immediately felt threatened since the guy had a degree (from the Columbia School of Journalism, if memory serves) and his father was a ranking editor at a major U.S. paper, as well as being a personal friend of Bob’s. To make matters worse, we were kind of left to our own devices, to sort out who was going to run the show on the international desk.

In the end, that part of it seemed to work out brilliantly. Since Bob refused to discuss the matter with either of us, (“It doesn’t really matter, does it? Just get to work and turn the bloody paper out!”) we reached a truce and simply shared the desk. I benefited from his superior education (significantly improving my technical knowledge of news-handling), and he benefited from my greater knowledge of the local scene, the local language and the workings of the printshop. Moreover, left to work things out on our own, we began to get quite bold and creative with layout and headlines, like two rival soda jerks, seeing who could out-do the other making the most elaborate of ice-cream sundaes. Granted, at times, we carried this to extremes: The ever conservative, ever droll Basil Thomson—the Herald’s brilliant humorist and then-chairman of the board—once quipped when we arrogantly asked what he thought of the changes we were making in the front-page layout: “Sometimes it’s difficult to finish breakfast after seeing it.”

Anyway, one night this fellow and I were having one of our frequent arguments over idiotic issues. This time it was about which knowledge was more useful to a newsman, classroom hours or hours wearing out shoe-leather on the street. I had some good defensive arguments and was sort of getting the upper hand when Bob walked into our cubicle, absorbed, as usual, in making final penciled corrections to his editorial as he walked. So this guy decides to engage Bob in our discussion and shut me up.

“I’ll bet Bob has a journalism degree, don’t you, Bob?” he says. “Uh, Bob…don’t you?”

Bob was holding a page against the wall with his left hand while he wrote in a correction with his right, and now he looked away from his work at us as if we had just awakened him from a sound sleep and said, “What?”

“J-school,” says the intern.

“What about it?”

“You went, right?”

Bob looked at him, then at me, then back at him and, handing me his editorial to put into the out-basket for the shop, said: “Most places I’ve worked, if you had a journalism degree, you didn’t talk about it.”

The discussion ended there and neither of us ever brought it up again. And from then on, we were almost chummy.

I’ve talked here before about how Bob and I met, about how I almost literally besieged him for months on end until he finally hired me to work for the Herald. What I neglected to say was that about ten years ago, when he and I spent an evening reminiscing at his home in Charleston, South Carolina, after not seeing each other for two decades, I reminded him of this and asked if he remembered how obnoxious I had been. To my surprise, he told me that he had sometimes used me and my hounding him as an example of the dogged persistence a journalist needed to have. I felt honored, since before that, I had frequently thought back to that time with a certain chagrin, always feeling that I had simply worn him down when he had no real interest in hiring me.

A lot of what I learned from Bob Cox came as much from what he didn’t tell me to do as from what he did. From the outset he explained that I would often find myself on my own when I felt like there should be someone to hold my hand and walk me through the procedures. If I wanted to be a reporter, it was up to me to get out and do it. But that wouldn’t keep me from having to do what I might feel was more than my share of the hard daily grind of getting the news into print and onto the street. Writing and reporting would be done on my own time, since from 6pm until midnight, or until we were done, I would be expected to be at my desk helping do whatever it took to create a daily edition. During those hours, I would have to make decisions that I probably didn’t have the experience or expertise to make and I would have to be responsible for their outcome. No excuses. So it would behoove me to make those decisions logically and ethically. All of this was simply the nature of working for a small, under-funded, community newspaper and if I could live with that and pass my thirty-day trial, I had a job.

In other words, from the beginning, I was treated like a professional, like somebody who should know what he was doing, even though I clearly didn’t. But that kind of responsibility tended to make you learn fast. And not having the boss breathing down your neck all the time meant that when he did tell you something, it was memorable and it changed and molded you.

Author David Cox

One of the greatest lessons I learned from Bob was that a newsman’s first loyalty should not be to the advertising department, to the Board of Directors, to the boss or even to the paper’s editorial line, but to the reader and to his or her own sense of honesty. This was, perhaps, the greatest lesson I ever learned, not only about authentic journalism, but also about writing in general. And a second lesson he taught me was that neither journalism nor writing was like any other job in the world. It wasn’t something that could be done without full commitment. If what you were looking for was simply a steady job where you could just show up and that would be enough, then you should be a bureaucrat. If you were going to be a journalist or a writer or both, however, you needed to be the job. Nothing less would do.

Perhaps the ultimate lesson that Bob Cox taught me, however, more through his actions than his words, was that there were severe consequences to publicly telling the truth, and that you had to be willing to accept those consequences and live (or die) with them. Otherwise you needed to look for something less risky to do with your life, because painting a portrait of your times, telling what you saw exactly as you saw it, was one of the riskiest occupations on earth. A morning newspaper was, in the end, not merely a selected assembly of the previous day’s events, but a—hopefully objective—reflection of the times, a daily snapshot of the era, history in real time. As such, it had to be as true as you could get it. And wherever there was truth, there were people who wanted to silence it…at any cost.

This kind of commitment is what David Cox’s book is about. In this highly inspired portrait of his father, David demonstrates himself to be an accomplished writer, stepping back somewhat from his more intimate role as Bob’s son and observing his father as the subject of a probing and detailed biography. Interestingly enough, the author doesn’t merely talk about the years of the bloody military regime in Argentina that turned his father into an internationally renowned journalist, but starts, instead, at the beginning, when his father was a boy, growing up in war-torn England and forming his first ideals in the face of the Nazi and Fascist threats to world peace and freedom. He talks about Bob’s precociously early first steps in journalism and his first job as a reporter. He then goes on to tell about the hand of fate that took Bob to Buenos Aires, of how Basil Thomson traveled to Britain in search of new talent for the Herald and how, like in a writer’s fantasy, Bob became his choice and was taken away on a voyage to a new adventure in a strange land.

This is the story too of how that adventure became a lifetime commitment—to an editor he admired, to the woman he met, loved and married, to the family they formed, and to the newspaper that became his mission and his life as a journalist, writer and editor.

But despite the distance he takes to tell his father’s story as an objective narrator, David Cox skillfully manages to weave intimacy into the story as well, since we also see the effects of those “malevolent times”—as Bob refers to them in his forward—on the entire family, on David’s mother, Maud Daverio de Cox, and on David himself and his four siblings, Robert Andrew, Victoria, Peter and Ruth. He carefully paints a portrait not only of Robert J. Cox, journalist and editor, but also of Bob Cox, husband and father, and of the strength that the family members drew from each other and from friends and supporters in the midst of critical and life-changing times.

In the end, the story that David Cox tells—and that I highly recommend, even if you don’t know anything about, or have the slightest interest in Argentina—is a universal one. It is a story about the true value of staunch idealism and provides proof that determined individuals can make a difference, and in doing so, both change and save lives.

Buenos Aires Still Knocks Me Out

2010-10-24T18:46:00.010-03:00

Buenos Aires has changed in the forty years that I’ve known it. So have I, obviously. A younger writer acquaintance who read a few chapters of a manuscript about my early years here once commented that he loved to read me because “my Buenos Aires was the city his father had told him about”. At first his statement came as something of a shock to me, since when I’m writing about those times, the city comes alive to me again, just as it was back then. But he was right, of course.

The places I haunted in the past have mostly changed names and owners and the way they look. When I search for shops in the downtown area where I used to buy fine leather shoes or quality shirts or trousers, I often find they’ve been replaced by stores whose windows feature the latest in cell phones and ipods and other sophisticated and resplendent devices. An international bank branch has usurped a place that had the best spinach pizza with white sauce on the planet. And a lot of the dark, steamy-windowed joints where I used to hang out with other newsmen on cold winter days drinking demitasses of powerful black coffee and sipping Reserva San Juan cognac served by efficient, laconic Spaniards, who stood on wooden pallets behind zinc-covered bars, are now “air-conditioned nightmares” with LED spotlighting, designer plant arrangements, blonde Scandinavian-style chairs and tables and a weaker version of once hair-raising java, served in pristine service and accompanied by tiny glasses of watered-down orange juice and a teensy pre-packaged cookie. Fast food has replaced the leisurely lunches and endless talk of yesteryear and seemingly no one under the age of thirty goes anywhere without being hooked up to some kind of mp3 or mp5, BlackBerry or hands free communications device to keep them oblivious to their surroundings and in touch with their ever-ubiquitous, virtual friends until they get wherever it is that they’re all going in such a hurry, behind the latest in UV-proof, polarized, cool-and-incognito shades that stand in for the dwindling ozone layer.

But if I practice a bit of abstraction, I still know where I am and can still recognize whole segments of the city that saw me grow from young to middle-aged, before I decided to leave the noise and the bustle behind and head for the Andean hills—where I have since grown well past middle-aged (I mean, unless I plan on living past a hundred and twenty). My friend and colleague Esteban Lozano also often finds himself a stranger to the advance of change in the city, even though he has remained here and watched it happen—keen observer that he is—in intimate detail. So whenever he hears I’m coming to town for a visit, he always goes out of his way to find some place sufficiently déclassé to meet with my approval. A couple of times he tried to treat me by making the venue some posh new watering hole where the ‘in’ crowd enjoys the imported institution of ‘happy hour’ after work, but found that when I was sitting there bolt upright on the edge of a white leather settee before a low glass and stone coffee table with a glass of imported lager or a scotch in my hand, I was far too jittery and ill at ease with the surroundings to concentrate on the conversation, so he has since opted for the kind of ever-rarer dives we are both more familiar with.

This time, it was a place called Los Galgos, at the corner of Avenida Callao and calle Lavalle. It was a place after my own heart: wood and glass swinging doors, a painted concrete floor, plain water-green painted walls, and a once-white twelve-foot ceiling, aged and smoked a deep ivory. The simple, hardwood bar stead with linoleum-covered counter dominated the length of one side of the barroom. At one end of it was a cash register, manned by an aging gallego in a dark blue jacket and reading glasses, who never strayed from his post. The wall to the rear of the bar was fitted with shelves en lieu of a back bar, all holding an adequate array of liquor and wine bottles. The walls were bare for the most part—no posters or prints of greyhounds or dog races to allude to the establishment’s enigmatic moniker (literally, ‘The Greyhounds’).

Totally out of character at the far end of the room, however, hung a large, brightly colored painting, well achieved in the hyperrealistic style of certain fifties magazine illustrators. It was as if the drab reflection of the barroom had been passed through a multicolored kaleidoscope and projected onto the wall. There on the canvas was the entire room, in slightly skewed perspective and brilliant acrylic hues, dominated by the bar and backlighted so that the figure in the foreground—a waiter balancing a circular steel tray on one hand and placing the drinks he was picking up at the bar on it with the other—was almost, but not quite silhouetted in a rich, deep, burgundy shade, but still carefully shadowed and with his features, even the creases and folds of his linen jacket, painstakingly reproduced. A dozen hardwood tables that might well have been the ones with which the bar had opened in another age occupied the rest of the space, each with respective sets of matching chairs that creaked and squeaked under the weight of a handful of forenoon habitués. Over the bar there was a sign reading: Los Galgos – established 1930. So perhaps the old gents now in charge were the sons of the Spaniards who had immigrated to Argentina in the golden days of tango and started the bar they had always dreamed of owning.

The appointment was for eleven in the morning. This was odd for Esteban and me, since we were more prone to meeting for the cocktail hour, but he had house husband duties this week, taking care of his two kids and aging father, while his young wife, Laura, was away at work. I had arrived a little early and took a seat against the opposite wall from the painting. I was thinking about how, in a place like this, it had very likely been a gift from an artist who was a regular, perhaps even as a means of paying off a bar bill long ago and long overdue, when the place was still thriving and such an offer might have seemed attractive to the proprietors. Now, waiters and counter staff, to a man, all looked to be reaching ‘the golden years’.

I was studying, from across the room, the well-crafted details of the main figure in the foreground of the picture, when a waiter stepped into my line of vision to ask for my order. “Ask” is rather too strong a word. A sober-looking septuagenarian with the appearance of someone whose flat feet have hurt him for the past forty years, he looked at me unsmilingly, nodded when I said, “Buenos días” and raised his eyebrows questioningly. In the painting, he was smiling—not so as to show teeth or anything, mind you, but kind of to himself as if thinking of a punch line he’d just heard—but even with his now impassive expression I could see it was definitely the same guy.

“Great portrait of you over there,” I said, pointing over his shoulder.

He grunted, said something like, “Isn’t it just, though,” and raised his eyebrows again.

“Café solo,” I said, “and a glass of soda water.”

Just when I had received my piping hot espresso and was taking a sip Esteban walked in through the door. I stood and, as is the custom among friends here, he gave me a perfunctory hug and a dry kiss on the cheek. He chuckled, pointed at my coffee and said, “How strange to see you with a coffee cup instead of a whisky glass in your hand.”

“Giving whisky a rest,” I said. “Puro tintillo these days, friend, malbec for the circulation.”

He laughed again and pulled up a chair. The waiter returned to take his order, but this time was teetering on the edge of amiable. I figured Esteban must have checked the place out a few times previously.

“Come here often?” I asked, after he’d ordered a cup of coffee and the waiter had gone to fetch it.

“I’ve come a few times, yes, why?”

“No reason. The waiter just seemed less hostile than before, after you arrived.”

We always have a lot of catching up to do, Esteban and I. And almost never about current events. Books, writers, films, directors, a bit of art and music thrown in for color, and always against the backdrop of the Buenos Aires we both knew in decades past, those are the subjects of our get-togethers. This trip, I’d been doing a lot of catching up. I only had one pressing business engagement for the week—a working breakfast with an author whose research, writing and translation team I’m a member of. The rest was all personal, a kind of ‘old home week’, and pretty nostalgic, since a mutual friend, writer Claudio Remeseira, was also back in his home town from New York, where he now lives, on a tour set up by the U.S. Embassy’s cultural department to promote a new anthology of Hispanic writers called Hispanic New York: A Sourcebook, for which he was the editor and in which several of his own essays appear. He and Esteban have been friends since they were very young. Claudio and I, meanwhile, shared an office in the same Buenos Aires publishing company in the early nineties and became close friends.

Funny how the three of us hooked up, though. As I say, Claudio and I shared an office. We were the Special Projects Department (the entire department) for a fairly well known Buenos Aires magazine and although we worked quite hard by most magazine standards (which are much more relaxed than those for newspaper work), probably spent as much time talking about writers and writing and books as we did working. Anyway, I mentioned to him once that I had always envied writers who wrote about their little cliques—other writers and artists and musicians with whom they met regularly, some nearly every day, to drink and eat and talk over life and their craft. I was never the type. Usually overworked and pretty much a loner, I had never gotten involved in this brand of casual yet profound cultural exchange, and by then, having reached middle age, felt I’d missed out on something.

“Never too late,” Claudio had said. “In fact, I’m friends with a writer type called Esteban Lozano whom I think would go for the idea. We could scout some old bars until we find one we like and make it our hangout. Start with the three of us and meet, say, once every week or two, and then get other writers to join us.”

Typically, I said, “What a great idea!” then immediately forgot about it. Same excuses as always: Too much work, too little time. Everything that felt like fun got shoved to the end of the line. But a decade later, after I had long since decided to leave the city to go live in the mountains and Claudio had gone off to get a master’s degree at Columbia University and ended up staying in New York City ‘for the duration’, fate stepped in. Esteban was editing a Spanish-language luxury living magazine and the publisher had asked him to find somebody to do an English-language edition. Claudio told him to get hold of me and the two of us have worked together, via Internet, ever since. And every time I’m in Buenos Aires—I travel there a couple of times a year—he and I get together for our ‘literary circle’ (of two). We often drink a toast to Claudio too, so he’s there in absentia. The writers’ clique, then, took shape after all. The fact that it’s a clique of two probably says a lot about its members, but not so as you’d want to analyze it much, since that would mean facing the fact that our mutual lack of gregariousness has probably had something to do with our also mutual lack of literary success.

But this week all of us—Claudio, Esteban and I—were back in town. The three of us had met, in fact, the Saturday before. Claudio picked the bar. It was another traditional old place but a little more upscale than this one, a bar called El Tolón, in Claudio’s childhood neighborhood of Palermo. Claudio and Esteban had arrived just before me and were in the midst of a discussion: domestic or imported, Quilmes Bock or Guinness Stout. I was to be the tiebreaker.

“Guinness,” I said, to Claudio’s cheers and Esteban’s groans. So Guinness it was.

It was a great get-together, only the second one all three of us had been in Buenos Aires for in the last ten years. I’d had lunch with Claudio and his wife, Marcia, and friends of theirs the day before and it had been wonderful since we’d all had leisure time to spend. Claudio had finished his book tour and I was just arriving and had nothing planned until the following Monday. So after lunching at a fashionable restaurant in the famed Puerto Madero real estate development that has flourished in what was once the old port of Buenos Aires, we ordered more wine and coffee and stayed there talking until nearly five in the afternoon. Claudio, Marcia and I then walked to the subway and took a B-line train to a part of town where there are bookstores one beside the other, so that Claudio could buy something for a friend back in New York. Afterward, still ready for more conversation, we crossed Avenida Corrientes to a confitería for another cup of coffee and stayed there chatting until nearly seven.

The meeting the next day at El Tolón was, however, a genuine facsimile of the idea Claudio and I had conceived but never actually hatched nearly two decades before—an informal gathering of writer friends that ideally would have taken place weekly, but that we now gratefully accepted whenever possible (in this case, just twice since we’d all three known one another). There was a lot of friendly banter between Claudio and Esteban: Claudio making sarcastic remarks about Esteban’s “ever-optimistic attitude” (not), and Esteban barely tolerating Claudio’s newfound Yankee enthusiasm.

For my part, I found it refreshing to see Claudio’s positive effect on this friend from his youth and how, within an hour, he was already beginning to convince the other writer to dust off an historical novel with which he had won a national book award many years before and do a reedition for Argentina’s bicentennial.

“That’ll get you a foot in the door with the publishing world again,” Claudio prodded, “so you can start getting some of your other manuscripts out of your desk drawer.”

He had suggestions for me as well. “How long have I been telling you that your memoirs will sell. They’re the kind of thing that’s making the New York Times Bestseller List every week.”

It wasn’t just the effect of this optimism that I found so positive, but the optimism itself. In the nearly twenty years that we had been friends, Claudio had worked as hard as any writer I had ever known to overcome his own issues of self worth and make a name for himself, first in Buenos Aires, where he became an award-winning investigative journalist, and then in the even tougher environment of Manhattan, where, as the winner of one of only two annual full scholarships to Columbia, he had fallen in with a crowd of intellectuals who were among the top minds in some of the most elite circles in the U.S. intelligentsia. This book that he was now promoting was a crowning achievement in the latest cycle of this prolonged effort and one that promised to open new doors to him as a writer and ever more noted Hispanic intellectual, in the years to come.

All of this showed in his attitude. He had a new confidence, a soundness that he transmitted to others. It was contagious and made me happy for him.

Now Claudio was back in New York and it was just Esteban and I here in Los Galgos.

As we sipped our coffee, Esteban opened the conversation by saying he had walked the length of calle Lavalle from downtown. In the golden age of cinema, Lavalle was the movie strip, a brightly lit several blocks of movie theaters, side by side. Although, in a city of avid moviegoers, the cinemas also spilled over onto other main downtown thoroughfares—the Ópera and Gran Rex on Corrientes, the Metro on 9 de Julio, Santa Fe I and II on Avenida Santa Fe, the Gaumont on Rivadavia, but Lavalle was the quintessential cinema center of the city.

A couple of them are still open but the once bright movie district is now a down-at-heel section of the downtown area, peopled by panhandlers, pickpockets and sotto voce promoters who flash cards with pictures of naked girls on then and try to lure one into dark little dens for sex shows and strip acts. A couple of the old theatres have been broken up into numerous mini-cinemas and others are multi-show porn houses. Still others have succumbed to videogame madness. A few of the traditional old eateries that thrived on the cinema crowd are still open for business, but look like they are struggling.

“Now,” Esteban is saying, “they’re installing little plaques in the sidewalk in commemoration of the great movie theaters that used to be there. It’s disgraceful! They’ve turned the street into a cinema cemetery!”

Esteban is almost as passionate about cinema as he is about literature. His father worked in film production when Esteban was a kid and he used to accompany his dad on the set. He met some of the stars of Spanish-language film and got to watch motion pictures in the making. Later he co-wrote and edited scripts, and, in the process, became a studious international film buff.

It’s hard telling where our conversations will lead. There’s no agenda. We just let free association take its course. A mention of Ridley Scott ends up in a lengthy discussion of the mood and plot of Bladerunner. And by some incomprehensible twist, this morphs into a conversation about Ricardo Piglia’s book, Artificial Respiration. Any literary discussion of ours always leads to Truman Capote, since he is the one author on whom our opinions entirely coincide.

I say, “To my mind, while In Cold Blood was an absolutely unique study of reportage-as-novel, his real masterpiece is…”

And Esteban finishes my sentence with, “…Hand-Carved Coffins. Yes,” he says nodding enthusiastically, “I agree entirely. The critics always try to convince everybody that he never wrote anything worthwhile after In Cold Blood, but in Hand-Carved Coffins, it’s as if he pulled it all together, so concise and chilling.”

It’s right about this time that Esteban looks at his empty coffee cup, then at the clock behind the bar and, seeing that it is now past noon, quips, “I don’t know about you, but I’m starved. What shall we drink?” And that’s when he orders the first liter bottle of Quilmes Bock beer, two glasses and peanuts. Now the conversation grows even less structured. The next session includes Hemingway. Both he and Claudio insist I could go to Key West for the yearly Hemingway look-alike contest. Other than qualifying as an aging, bespectacled, barrel-chested, paunchy, snowy-bearded white guy, I don’t really see the resemblance. But Esteban calls this “denial”. And at any rate, I observe, I’ll have to hurry if I’m going to compete, since Hemingway blew his brains out when he was a year older than I am right now, so another year and I’ll be too old to make the cut.

I mention that the time I went to Key West in the off season, I found it the kind of place where I could live for a while. Perhaps, I say, the only one in Florida, with its abominably hot and humid tropical climate, which I really, really dislike.

“So what’s different about Key West?”

“Well, there’s a marine breeze at least, but mostly it seems in the off-season like a place that’s full of rule-breakers and rebels. I could go for a place like that. Maybe it’s what attracted Hemingway—that and the fishing. Tourists have ruined the place though. I mean, they serve drinks in plastic glasses at Sloppy Joe’s, for chrissake. Hem would have shoved them up the bartender’s ass.”

“So what did you think of his house?” Esteban asks.

“I’ve never gone in.”

“Definitely denial!” he cries.

“It’s not that I wouldn’t like to go in,” I say, “just not with all those tourists. I’ve read a lot about it though.”

This leads to another lengthy discussion of the strong vibrations given off by the places where creative people have lived. I talk about the emotion my wife and I both felt the first time we visited Victoria Ocampo’s summer house in Mar del Plata, before it became a popular tourist attraction. Esteban talks about having once felt something similar when seeing Poe's silver-headed walking stick in a Richmond museum and thinking about how it had been in the writer’s hand, probably every day for many years, and what a strong impact that had on him. This then takes us to a discussion of the cats at the Hemingway house in Key West.

“I just read recently,” I tell him, “that many of the cats that still live there (at least half a hundred descendants of successive Hemingway litters) are six-toed cats.” Seems Hemingway may have mentioned someplace that one of his cats had a recessive six-toed trait. So although other cats may have come and gone over the half century since the author took his own life (at another of his homes, that one in Ketchum, Idaho), the six-toed ones are very probably descendants of Papa’s original cats.

And then we decide we could use some more peanuts, and so, order another beer, and somewhere between that one and the next one, we also order a sandwich: This is a drinking bar—no hot food, just beer, booze, wine, coffee and various and sundry cold sandwiches and pastries. Now, Esteban launches into a glowing critique of three books I’ve never read: the Hannibal Lecter trilogy. The fact is that I never knew that the highly successful movies about the anthropophagous serial killer had been based on earlier novels by a writer called Thomas Harris. Gleeful at my ignorance, Esteban tells me that Harris is a former journalist and a very sound writer. He tells me about the three books, Red Dragon (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and Hannibal (1999). I comment that it seems strange that they shot the movies out of order (‘Silence’ first). But here, Estaban’s got me again.

“Actually,” he says, “they didn’t. The first Hannibal Lector picture was called Manhunter, filmed back in the eighties. It was based on Red Dragon, and starred Brian Cox.”

“Hmm!” I go. “Never saw it.”

“Yeah, neither did anybody else, but Cox was really good in the part.”

And so the day goes, from author to author, book to book and film to film, until I realize with a start that it is now four-fifteen and I have another appointment at five o’clock in mid-town.

After leaving Esteban, as I’m crossing town to meet another friend for coffee (the guy who has been my accountant for the last twenty-eight years), I’m thinking about that idea Claudio and I had all those years ago of founding a writers’ clique. And I still can’t help envying other writers who have always enjoyed this kind of society with fellow artists. It’s a way of identifying with the craft, of giving each other incentive and of talking to others who see the world in the same eccentric way that you do.

As I cross town, I watch the typical midtown scenes go by, from the imposing Congress building to Plaza Once, and think how strange it is for a Midwestern American boy to be as familiar with all of this as with the main drag in my little hometown back in Ohio. Stranger still that for the past seventeen years I’ve been a Patagonian, living my life a thousand miles southwest of here—and a gazillion miles, in terms of geography plus lifestyle, from where I started out—at my ease in the forests and lakes and rocky crags of the Andean foothills, but now “at home” again in the city where I invested, spent and misspent my youth. It’s changed, this city, that’s always been as personal and unique as Paris or New York. It’s now a tougher, dirtier, less homogenous and exceedingly more violent version of its old self. But images of it live constantly in my thoughts and dreams and memories, and no matter what it’s become, Buenos Aires still knocks me out.

On Doing What You Love

2010-09-14T12:46:00.002-03:00

In 1957, American writer and cartoonist Allen Saunders (creator of the stories behind the Apple Mary cartoon strip whose fictional protagonist was Mary Worth) wrote these words: “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” This brilliant observation didn’t become famous until the late super-Beatle John Lennon borrowed and paraphrased it in “Beautiful Boy” a couple of decades later, but that doesn’t make it any less accurate or any less introspective in nature.

I often remind myself of this maxim when I find I’m getting upset because things aren’t “going according to plan”, or when I start getting anxious about “reaching a destination”. I mention this because I think I’m pretty typical in this sense and have to make (and do) a conscious effort not to be. I’ve occasionally come across—and quite possibly envied—people who weren’t. I’m talking about people who hear a different drummer, and take heed, from the outset. I mean, we all conform to a certain extent, if we live in anything like civilized society, but these are individuals whose plan seems either to be “no plan” except to live the moment, or to be such a spectacularly great plan that I ask myself how they get away with it. I usually try to placate myself—as do most people, I would guess— by choosing to think that these people have had better breaks than I have, that they’ve been afforded a better destiny, that they’ve had stronger contacts, wealthier families, better jobs, and so on. But if I’m honest with myself, that’s not true, or at least not entirely so. They’ve just made better choices and picked better timing for those choices. Moreover, they’ve been more focused and their focus has been guided by their heart and their gut more than by their so-called obligations and duties, and surely more than by their fears.

But, as Pablo Neruda said—and despite my inhibitions and self-imposed obligations and endless excuses—“I confess that I have lived.” Not like Neruda, admittedly, and perhaps not even frequently. But then again, not always like my duty-bound and otherwise often pent-up self either. Occasionally, I have busted out, as it were, and when that has happened, it has, as that other great poet, Robert Frost, once wrote, “made all the difference.”

I recently read a statement that Paul A. Toth—a wonderfully non-mainstream, non-conformist writer with whom I recently became Internet ‘pen pals’—had written about “self-actualization”. After reading it, I realized that I wasn’t quite sure what self-actualization really meant, so I decided to bone up.

Caption: Abraham Maslow (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

It seems that the best known theory of self-actualization is attributed to American social psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970). Maslow theorized that all human motivation resulted from a hierarchy of needs. In other words, people started out with their most basic psychological needs—safety, a sense of belonging, self-esteem—and once these were gradually satisfied, continued seeking to satisfy ever more complex psychological needs, culminating in what he called “self-actualization”. Maslow said, in a nutshell, that each level of accomplishment directed an individual’s behavior toward another level that was not being adequately met. The further the individual progressed, then, the more difficult it became to fulfill the needs of the next, higher level. This, in short, became a lifelong process with few individuals ever reaching true self-actualization.

The idea seemed simple enough. If true, it could explain a lot about both ambition and frustration. But it also got me to thinking, not so much about the process of self-actualization as such, but more about the process of getting to the point at which you can even think about self-actualizing. Seen from today’s perspective, when you read Maslow’s theory, if you are a normal, everyday working stiff, you tend to think, “Okay, the guy’s not talking about me or about people like me.” Why? Because self-actualization has the ring of some higher order to it: like, right, this is for somebody who has his/her life together and now, with the free time I don’t have, can think about seeking out a form of life on a higher plane. This is not about “life in the anthill”, but about a real life of truly free choices.

Truth be told, Maslow was writing in a very different time, considering that he died in 1970. A lot has happened since then. Admittedly, some of it has been good, like the fact that I can write this blog and instantly publish it and send it out to all of you, no matter where in the world you and I happen to be, or that guys like me are able to use this technology to make a living in the international marketplace without ever having to leave the house. But along with this brave new world have come a number of social and economic changes that can only be seen as undesirable side-effects: like the ‘globalization’ that they sold us as a cure-all for poverty, unemployment and manufacturing quality, but that has resulted in globalized poverty, extreme concentration of wealth, cruel competition for too few jobs, poor working conditions, ephemeral job security, poor pay and ever lower standards at all levels. The fact that people have to work harder and longer in order to maintain some semblance of their former living standards, means that “personal self-actualization” keeps getting left “for when I have more time”.

I should note that I’m just thinking out loud here—spitballing, as they say. And I certainly don’t pretend to be speaking for everyone. I’m sure there are lots of people who feel that they have come quite close to achieving their potential and are at least marginally content with their jobs, their careers, their social standing, and with the level of personal success they’ve had in reaching their self-imposed goals (all of which, as I understand it, has a lot to do with self-actualization).

And I should also point out that writer types, like myself, tend to be sort of permanent malcontents, who always seem to think that allowances should be made for their ‘condition’ and that somebody should be kind enough to cover for them—at least for the time being—so that they can get down to the only thing that they consider their real work and the only thing that really matters to them: namely, writing! This is why a lot of writers have spent years trudging from one awful job to another by the time they finally break into print, refusing to take on anything complicated or even enjoyable enough to make them lose focus on their craft.

There are some rather famous examples of this that range from the pathetic to the hilarious.

For instance, Stephen King talks, in his non-fiction work, On Writing, about how he wrote at night after working days in a laundry that washed hospital bedding and how the sheets crawled with maggots that fed on the blood and gore that stained them in the summertime and how he once found a full set of human teeth in the pocket of a surgical tunic. But he still considered himself lucky because he was making an extra piece of change riding the crest of the first alternative girlie mags that sought to compete with Playboy and, for a while, carried short stories—some of which he was able to sell them—before they dropped all literary pretenses and started showing a lot more skin (and other stuff) than Playboy did.

Caption: William Faulkner, 1954, photo by Carl Van Vechten (U.S. Library of Congress)

There is a delightful anecdote—though I have no way of corroborating its veracity—about a time when William Faulkner briefly worked at the University of Mississippi Post Office. By all accounts he took the job because he needed the paycheck but was worse than terrible at it, spending most of his time on the job drinking whisky, playing cards and writing. One day, so the story goes, a post office official came in to find a line of people at the counter and no one there to attend them. He found Faulkner at a table in the back, hard at work on a piece of writing. The official angrily asked what Faulkner thought he was doing, when people were lined up at the counter with no one to wait on them. The author responded just as angrily that he wasn’t about to interrupt his work “every time some sonuvabitch wants to buy a two-cent stamp.”

Caption: Henry Miller, 1940, photo by Carl Van Vechten (U.S. Library of Congress)

One of the most famous self-actualization decisions in contemporary literature is, perhaps, that of Henry Miller. He didn’t decide to be a writer until the 1930s, when he was nearly middle-aged. But after that, he refused to retreat a single pace from that decision, living the artist’s life from then on, surviving more on his charm and his wits than on any serious attempt to ever hold any job other than that of writer again. He symbolizes this in Tropic of Capricorn, when he describes the decision of his main character and narrator—who shares his name in what is a semi-fictional, partly autobiographical work—who walks out on his surreal job as a manager at the ‘Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company’ (Miller worked briefly in such a job for Western Union), never to return.

In On Where I’m Calling From, Raymond Carver recalls how he “tried to learn to write fast when I had the time”, while doing a variety of menial jobs that never seemed to pay enough to get him and his family to the end of the month. This is a genuine case of not being able to focus on self-actualization from the outset since Carver found himself a husband (to a sixteen-year-old girl) and father when he was barely nineteen. He supported his wife and newborn daughter, and the son who was born the following year, by working as a janitor, in a sawmill, as a delivery man, a hospital porter, a library assistant, an encyclopedia salesman, a textbook editor, and a service station attendant, among other low-paying jobs. His difficulty coping with this life led to his ever-worsening alcoholism.

Despite “writing fast” it took Carver thirteen years to turn out a slim—but absolutely incomparable—volume of prose called Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? He was, then, a writer for whom, one might argue, self-actualization really ended up being postponed by the stricture of his self-inflicted guilt, responsibility and feeling of inadequacy, that kept him focused on finding one ‘nowhere’ job after another to keep family, body and soul together, while a gradual decline into alcoholism ended up defeating the purpose of that focus too. But the writing lived on and—despite his not having his other more basic psychological demands under control—triumphed. Born in 1938, it wasn’t until this first book of short fiction was published in 1976 that he took stock of his life and gave up drinking, which had been largely responsible for the recent breakup of his marriage.

Now living with poet Tess Gallagher, Carver created a new life for himself that bore no resemblance at all to the former one. This provided him with a brief but prolific eleven-year run in which he reached the level of recognition that his work deserved before dying at age fifty. In that single decade, besides teaching English at Syracuse University, he also wrote and published four volumes of short stories and three collections of poetry, being awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and the prestigious Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award for his efforts. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988, the last year of his life.

This past week, I had a running Web dialogue with some other writer friends and colleagues. I don’t know how we got onto the subject, but what was striking about our childhood memories was that none of us could recall when he or she hadn’t wanted to be a writer. Writer/editor Jessica Morrell remembered, for instance, how her mother had told her that the first word out of her mouth wasn’t ma-ma or da-da, but book! Poet Carl Grimsman recalled creating his first storybook when he was four. It was a study in blue called Castles and once he had created the content, he got his mother to act as bookbinder and staple it together for him. Writer Yolanda Fivas remembered knowing how to write a handful of words as a pre-kindergarten infant and wanting to tell a story inspired by the trees, but being frustrated because she didn’t have enough words to do it. Novelist Fara Spence and I shared separate memories of pre-school days when both of us invented symbols to represent the stories in our heads and were content to scribble those and then “read” our stories to others until somebody deigned to teach us the ABCs.

Okay, don’t despair, I’m coming to a point here…

And I guess the point is that perhaps Maslow doesn’t have it quite right, or at least not for some of us. True, maybe some people are born clueless and sort of stumble from one level of self-actualization to another until they get interested in something and then get excited about it, and then get ambitious about it. But maybe there are also people who don’t have to go through nearly so many stages of development before knowing precisely what it is that they want to be and do and accomplish. And maybe the strength of those urges is very nearly equal to what Maslow refers to as basic psychological needs. I talk about writers and artists and musicians because they’re what I understand best. But I’m sure this must be true of other human endeavors as well, of people who seem to be born knowing what it is that they want to do—indeed, that they might almost feel they have to do.

In The Teachings of Don Juan, anthropologist and writer Carlos Castaneda describes a scene in which his Yaqui mentor, don Juan Matus, tries to dissuade him of his white man’s attachment to meaningless priorities. In few words, the message of the Yaqui brujo—as I interpret it, at least—was that nothing that Man can do has any real importance whatsoever, but at the same time, everything that one does is of the utmost importance. This may sound like a bit of an oxymoron, but in reality, it holds an important and highly liberating message. The message is that, within the scheme of infinity, Man, and even the earth itself, are a mere blink of an eye, part of a vast experiment. Within that context what we as individuals do or don’t do with our lives is about as important, in a cosmic sense, as the life goals of an ant might be to us—just before we poison, drown or step on it.

Depending on your mood on any given day, this thought might seem singularly depressing. But seen from a glass-half-full viewpoint, it is truly liberating. What it means is that there is nothing more important, there is no greater priority, than whatever it is that you want to do with your life, or with this year, or with this day. Nor can or should anyone else be permitted to set your priorities for you. There is no authority higher than your own heart, your own drives and your own true—as opposed to learned—convictions. The message is, be whatever in the world you want to be, and be the very best at it that you can be. You hold the key to your own achievement and happiness. No one and nothing can give you that, nor can they take it away, unless you let them.

The fact that you fail to do what is expected of you is of no importance whatsoever—or rather, it only garners the importance that you lend it. What is important, to you as an individual, is to do what fills you with happiness, to do, as the expression goes, what you love and to love what you do.

Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

2010-09-08T17:55:00.004-03:00

The best-laid schemes o' mice

an' men / Gang aft agley
Robert Burns

As Robert Burns has frequently been paraphrased, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Writing is, by far, the most important thing that I do in my life. Or at least it is to me, personally. And although for much of my adult life I have, indeed, kept the lights on and put bread on the table with the written word, it is also true that the most creative kind of writing that I do hasn’t always been what paid the rent. Especially when, like now, I’m involved, whenever time permits, in creative writing projects of my own that take a long time to develop and the future success of which is anything but certain.

But you keep on writing, because that’s what writers do. We can’t help it. We might torture ourselves for years, asking ourselves why we do it. But that won’t stop us. It’ll just make us impossibly neurotic and hell to get along with, until we finally come to terms with the fact that what isn’t worthwhile is not the writing, but asking ourselves the ‘why’ question.

If we writers had no other place to do it, we would write in the dust, on rocks, on the back of our hand, all the way up our arm until we got impossibly lost in our own armpit, or perhaps we’d just write on the back of a shovel with a piece of charcoal, Abe Lincoln-style. Our legacy was bequeathed to us by those first primitives who sketched pictograms of the things they saw on stone overhangs and in caves. They too were different from the others—crazier, the others probably thought, just as they still think now. Those ancient scribes couldn’t help themselves either. They just had to make a ‘written’ statement, communicate what they observed. Others must have shrugged and said, “Why bother? The antelope’s standing right over there, bozo! We see it! What do we need a symbol for?” And our writer ancestors might well have said, “Ah, yes, you see it, friend, but do you see it?”

But I digress. I was talking about plans going awry. My plan, since I started blogging a couple of years ago, has been to get to the place where I’m organized enough to be able to give my readers (whom I thank from the bottom of my heart for their patience and loyalty) a specific day on which each of my three different theme blogs will come out. Say like, Translator’s Handbook every Monday, A Yankee at Large every Wednesday and The Southern Yankee every Friday. Or some other, perhaps less demanding arrangement, but something that readers could count on.

I realize all too well that this is the only way to build a respectably large and loyal readership. Because, in the end, when you decide to write for the public—no matter what you write, be it print, electronic, daily, monthly, quarterly or what have you—you make a tacit commitment to your readers (even if they number no more than a handful) to produce. This said, I also realize that no matter how much I beat myself up over not ‘normalizing relations’ with my readers and providing them with a specific blog on a specific day, thinking that I can may well be a case of operating on the strength of my own vivid imagination.

And here’s where Robert Burns and his mice come in. My failure, so far at least, to be able to make this kind of regular commitment as a blogger has been a matter of survival. I’ve had the extraordinary good luck of having been able to make my living as a wordsmith, in one capacity or another—reporter, editorialist, op-ed writer, feature writer, translator, style editor, etc.—ever since I decided to turn my writing from a hobby into a profession, thirty-six years ago. For two decades, I did this as a staffer and stringer for a variety of magazines and newspapers, while also translating on the side. Admittedly, there was a certain security in this because there was always a paycheck at the end of the month.

Free-lancing is tougher. Whether or not you work (and eat) depends entirely on you. You can decide to take the day off, the week off, the month off. But ultimately, if you don’t circulate, if you don’t promote yourself, if you don’t actively seek out clients and consistently prove your expertise, you’re dead in the water. But having made my living this way for over a decade and a half—actually, more like eighteen years, now that I think about it—I would never want to go back to working for someone else. I sometimes have nightmares where that’s precisely what happens, where I’m back in an office working for somebody else and everything is going wrong, and even though none of it is my fault, I know I’ll be to one who is blamed because I’m in charge. Actually, in real life, that was pretty much how things used to work. So the dreams come as no surprise. However, once I sit bolt upright, wet with sweat and heart pounding, I can always reassure myself that, yes, it was a just a nightmare and, no, that’s not happening again, ever. I’ve been my own man for eighteen years and will continue to be until my shadow sets me free.

But, admittedly, this freedom thing has its ups and downs. One of the downs came recently, in the wake of the worldwide economic crash. Weeks, months went by, with nothing much but the sound of the crickets to accompany me. But for once in my life, I didn’t worry. I spent the time well: writing, reading, what else? And that included trying to turn out better- and better-quality work for my blogs.

Then suddenly, one morning everybody seemed to get up, open the window, look out at the sunshine and say, okay, enough of this depression crap. Let’s get to work! And in a matter of a week, I, all of the sudden, had numerous projects for which to post bids. And one of the two best ones immediately came through: working as part of the research team for an author with whom I had already worked previously as a translator. The job consisted of reading books, lots of books, and reporting on them. I could do the hell out of that job!

But no sooner had I started on that assignment, than the other best option came through: the translation of an important book for a major international publisher. Let me just say that, despite how lackadaisical I might appear, with respect to my blogs at least, I’m a workhorse. From the time I was very young, workaholism has often been one of the vices I have fallen into. And although I no longer have the sustainable energy to make a steady diet of it, I do tend to go on rampaging binges from time to time. These last few months have been one of those times, since I blithely told myself, “I want both of these jobs. Relax, everybody,” I said, “I’ve got this!” And I did and do have it. And, in fact, have completed one of the jobs—the book translation—and can now take a deep breath and continue, much more serenely, with the other one.

But this is precisely what brings me to my point about best laid plans. Professional that I am, I have been conditioned to believe that whatever I am assigned or contracted to do should take priority over everything else (even including weekends, holidays, normal workdays schedules…literally, everything). This said, what I want you, as my treasured readers, to know is that priority is one thing and importance another. And when I’m writing a blog entry, I don’t figure there is anything more important in the world than making that the best piece of writing I’m capable of at the time. Nor is anyone more on my mind at those times than the reader, whomever he or she might be, and no matter whether my readership numbers one or a thousand and one.

This, by way of explanation—and apology—for my long absence. I’ll try hard to reserve a bigger chunk of myself for both of us in the future.

Memorial Day 2010 – The War We Were

2010-05-31T23:40:00.008-03:00

Today is Memorial Day in my native United States. The day when we honor those who died fighting in our nation’s wars.

When I was a kid, it was hard to think of it as anything but a holiday – the day after the last day of school, the day we hoped and prayed it would be warm enough for the public swimming pool to open, a day for picnics with the family or when Mom would drive out to the greenhouse to buy some flowers to set out. It was a day of parades with brass bands playing stirring patriotic marches and with middle-aged and old men dressing up like soldiers once more to join uniformed National Guardsmen and other troops in carrying the colors to the Veterans Monument at the Courthouse and then out to the cemetery in tearful remembrance of their fallen brothers.

But for us, as kids, it was just the first exciting small-town event to kick off the wonderful, lazy days of small-town summer.

The problem is that this childhood Memorial Day illusion is only that. And since it appears impossible for the United States to get through a single generation without a war, each generation has its own. And as the realities of those wars end up touching us as a generation and, indeed as individuals, no matter how hard we may try to ignore them, Memorial Day eventually takes on a new and sober meaning.

CAPTION: Gravestones of the American Fallen in Arlington National Cemetery. (Courtesy Wikipedia)

My grandparents’ generation had World War I, my parents’ generation, World War II. My parents’ younger siblings had to face the Korean War. My generation’s war was Vietnam. The current generation is embroiled in combat on two fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sixty million combatants are estimated to have taken part in the First World War. In the four years that the fighting lasted, 16 million people died and nearly 35 million suffered some form of permanent physical disability. Those figures don’t include the millions who suffered permanent mental or emotional trauma. Despite the Great War’s having supposedly been the “war to end all wars”, a quarter-century later we found the world at war again, and this time as many people died (62 million from 55 nations) as combatants that took part in the First War. And there are no accurate figures to calculate the millions upon millions of people injured, disabled or mentally traumatized in this second modern instance of wholesale worldwide butchery.

In just the two major conflicts that the parents and grandparents of our current generations lived through (…or not…), then, approximately 100 million people died. Think about it: That’s more than three times the size of the total population of Argentina or Canada. Imagine every man, woman and child in those countries slaughtered, and pile another twenty-five or thirty million mutilated cadavers on top of those. Imagine one out of every three men, women and children in the United States dead, every two mourning the tragic death of a third. That’s how many people were ground up in the gnashing cogs of just those two world conflicts, not to mention the thousands upon thousands and millions upon millions who died in other “minor” conflicts that many of us have no idea ever took place.

One such “minor conflict” was the Korean War. For many years this war was referred to, especially by the United States, as “a police action.” In the three years that this “police action” lasted, somewhere between, 1.2 and 1.5 million people were killed. (Imagine the city of Cleveland, say, or La Plata, wiped out entirely). The United States alone lost 33,686 combat troops, as well as non-combatant personnel numbering 2,830.

Then there was my generation’s war. Official figures in the Vietnam War place direct American casualties at 58,148 dead and 300,000 wounded. But this doesn’t take into account the thousands upon thousands of conscript soldiers who returned with broken hearts, broken spirits and broken minds to a life of chemical dependencies, chronic depression, severe mental illness, neurological trauma from chemical agents and other conditions that kept them from ever recovering control over their own destinies or caused them to die young from any number of unnatural causes. Just among my immediate circle of acquaintances, I can think of several who died in combat before their 21st birthdays, one who came home and hanged himself in his garage and another who came home in 1970 and to this day remains incapable of facing life without the dulling effects of severe alcohol and drug abuse (to such an extent that the last I knew of him, he no longer was getting out of bed to drink and “get high”…if you can call it that). People can say that he and all the others should have gotten over it, gotten on with their lives. But that’s like saying a person should “get over” child abuse, rape or other forms of severe victimization.

Yet, nothing compares to the ravages of war. Because, let’s not kid ourselves, in dirty wars such as these – wars like Vietnam, like Afghanistan, like Iraq, wars of attrition against a scarcely identifiable enemy, where the lines between friend and foe are patchy and guerrilla fighters work the no man’s land between uniformed combatants and civilian populations – nothing, no amount of gung-ho training, no amount of psychological readiness, no amount of discipline, can prepare these men and women for what they will see, what they will be ordered to do and what they may well do on their own as a result of the in-combat stress and trauma they suffer. Already, in these latest wars in the Middle East, well over a million American soldiers have had to face this.

Nor do the cold figures that measure the effects on our own troops take into account the tidal wave of suffering left in their wake. Our South Vietnamese allies in that other conflict lost five times as many troops as the United States did and their number of wounded was never determined. But more tragic still is the fact that, the number of South Vietnamese dead, including the nearly quarter of a million troops killed, came to an estimated two million (men, women, children) in a country with a total population of just over 5 million. A conservative estimate of deaths among the Chinese-backed North Vietnamese in that war comes to something like 2.8 million, with two million of those also being civilians. Less conservative estimates claim deaths on both sides were more like 7 million, with another two million people being injured or mutilated.

Beyond tragic and into the realm of horrifying are the 7 million tons of explosives that the United States made use of during that war, or the chemical, biological and bacterial agents that the United States liberally rained down on the Vietnamese people in clear violation of the Geneva Convention that Washington has so often cited in criticizing the inhuman behavior of other nations. This was over 3 times the quantity of explosives used in aerial attacks on all sides during World War II.

In Iraq, despite the US military’s frequent boasting about the effectiveness of its technology and the possibility of “surgical bombing” with its joystick-operated, camera-carrying weaponry, in the last estimates I saw, somewhere between 90,000 and 105,000 civilians had died. No matter how much we want to debate the “human shield” theory, there comes a moment when somebody has to punch the button or pull the trigger that murders non-combatant men, women and children. And no matter how professional a soldier may be, only a heartless, mindless mercenary (e.g., a sociopath) could go home and sleep well after doing that. So the vast numbers of returning veterans who now require and will continue to require treatment for not only their physical but also their mental trauma should come as no surprise to anyone.

And with all of the experience that the United States has in the scars that wars leave, it should really be prepared to deal with this phenomenon. But indications are that we have learned little from the tragic experience of Vietnam. Conservative estimates indicate that beyond the tremendously high numbers of mutilated soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, the US can expect at least (and this is a conservative estimate) half a million veterans of these two latest wars to return suffering from post traumatic stress disorder before the combat ends. And there are also telling indications that not nearly enough of them are getting the help they need. In wars such as these, in which the causes are hazy and the methods questionable, no matter what one’s view of the war itself may be, the post-combat support system is clearly lacking.

The US custom of honoring its fallen on Memorial Day is a noble one. But perhaps we Americans and people everywhere should start looking at war from a different angle.

We need to honor these dead by rejecting, rather than embracing and glorifying war. If we re-read the statistics above, it becomes clear that what we should be looking into is not more effective ways of waging war, but rather, the most effective ways possible of avoiding and preventing it. Perhaps this will mean a revolution in diplomacy or witheringly preemptive multinational action. Anything to keep two sides from dignifying their conflict with false patriotic fervor.

War is not noble, no matter how noble the intentions of those who actually fight the wars may be. Wars are not, as most leaders would have us believe, honorable or winnable in any real sense other than in that of achieving the political and economic ends of those in power. War is hell. War is merely the wholesale slaughter of one people by another for reasons that have little or nothing to do with why we are told we must fight them. And as war becomes more “effective” the number of civilian casualties grows relatively greater all the time, threatening to become exponential.

The best way, then, to honor our war dead, is by seeking to ensure that war becomes the most unthinkable of all means to an end. No society that rejects homicide as a heinous crime should find war logical…and much less, glorious.

Self-Reliance 2 – In the Forest Primeval

2010-04-18T17:52:00.008-03:00

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean

Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

-From “Evangeline” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-

Autumn is hard upon us and the days are growing shorter. Less than a month ago I could make my rounds in the forest until well after eight at night. Not anymore.

My rounds are no longer the leisurely walks of summer. No longer contemplative. Or rather, no longer just contemplative. Or perhaps, contemplative in a different, more concentrated, more focused way. Now, I go with a set and urgent purpose: to gather enough suitable, dry firewood to get us through the winter.

Admittedly, I have a good start. There are now eleven pickup-loads of wood stacked under heavy sheets of black plastic along the fence, in a neat pile about twenty feet long by four feet tall by three feet deep. But I’ll need another four pickup-loads to get us through the worst of winter. And unless I’m reading the signs wrong, it may well be a hard one. Twenty loads, then, would make me feel a lot more secure. It’s only mid-April (like mid-October in Ohio, I remind myself, because what I learned as a boy in the rural Midwest is still my yardstick and my standard) and already we’re getting some freezing temperatures in the mornings, even if afternoon temperatures reach levels that my mother, Reba Mae, used to refer to as “sweater weather” – afternoons when a shirt with undershirt and vest are comfortable, but when you can still work up a sweat gathering firewood.

The chilly mornings mean fog and a low cold-cloud cover until almost noon. On days when office work keeps me from going to the woods early in the afternoon, I still hike in through the underbrush on my normal rounds just before sunset and free up all of the windfall fuel I can find, propping it against tree trunks to let it air in the wind. In this season of the year, I never go to the woods without a machete, since I tend to abandon the rude paths and forge headlong into the thicket, watching for signs of fallen branches. The timber lying on the ground is a liberal mix of green and “dry” wood. The beech (coihue) that grows under an altitude of 800 meters (2,625 feet) is “live” – not so the southern beech (lenga) that grows just below the timberline in the snowy upper mountain forest, and that flames scarlet in autumn before it sheds its leaves. Also “live” are the radal and the Patagonian laurelwood (laura). Winter scenes in Ohio were always “black and white” because, there, about the only non-deciduous trees were occasional pines. Snowy winters here are “green and white” and these are the trees, along with the native cypress and the exotic North American pines (mostly Douglas firs), that make it so.

The leafy beech, radal and laurelwood really suffer during the snowiest winters. It’s as if they were from another era, when this was a warmer clime – like the ferns and cane and vines that flourish in the underbrush – and never adapted to the change. Their foliage catches and holds the heaviest, wettest snows that weigh down their branches. Still days and heavy wet snows are these trees’ mortal enemies. The snow’s weight rips the branches from their trunks and sends them crashing to the forest floor. The radal with its larger, rounder leaves suffers the worst, sometimes growing so heavy with snow that its trunk will split open like a book.

When they’ve turned to deadwood, all of these are good to feed the woodstove – though the dense, hard laurel is the one that will hold a fire for hours and the hardest one to find. The dead dry laurelwood, then, has become my “gold”. I no longer see dead, fallen trees as a reminder of my own mortality, but instead, let my heart soar at the sight of the laurel’s skeleton, which, even in death, remains more useful than I’ll ever be.

I’ve set some rules for gathering firewood in these seventy-four acres:

-No cutting standing timber, even if its dead. It’s only fair game once the wind lays it to rest on the ground.

-No laying bare the forest floor to get to the windfall. Birds and rodents and lizards live in the underbrush and feed on its fruits. A “clean” forest is a fauna-less forest, and the idea is to preserve this natural habitat.

-No cutting green timber to reach the dry. If you can’t get to the deadwood without destroying the live, it’s not yours to have.

-Under NO circumstances will the cypress be considered firewood. This one I imposed because the noble nature of the Patagonian cypress (one of the region’s three main native conifers, the others being the Fitzroya – or alerce – and the monkey-puzzle tree, also known as the araucaria araucana or pehuén) makes it much sought-after for use as outdoor siding and fence posts. It’s not uncommon for local boys to allege that they’re gathering “firewood” when they are, in fact, gathering posts for a fencing or construction job. Nor is it uncommon for them to cut cypress green if they can get away with it. If this rule weren’t enforced by people like me, it wouldn’t be long before there weren’t a single stand of cypress in the forest, except where the rocky crags made it too hard to reach.

These simple rules were made for others who occasionally come to the forest for fuel. These are now a privileged few, members of families that had “worked” this woodland long before I ever got here – several generations before. Truth be told, they come here little now – some because they now have natural gas piped into their homes, others because it’s easier for them to go someplace else, where the warden isn’t so picky about how they work. Because that’s the other rule: If they want to get firewood from the grounds I care for, they have to ask permission, tell me where and when and show me what they plan to cut. Otherwise, they can expect me to come down on them like gangbusters.

That, in fact, was how I got the job. That was when a rich city slicker showed up in his Cadillac SUV, accompanied by an arrogant foreman, whom he put in charge of “cleaning up” and fencing a half-dozen enormous lots he had taken over, a couple of which were next to mine. From the start, I didn’t hit it off with the foreman (Octavio was his name), whose idea of a forest was a bunch of trees standing in bare dirt. Left to his own devices, when his boss drove that shiny Caddy back to the city, his first mission was to slash and burn the forest floor.

Then it was time to fence, and that’s where Octavio and I clashed head-on, or rather, where I clashed head-on with the leader of his work crew.

The story of why I felt this was any of my business, however, starts way before:

When my wife and I first showed up here seventeen years ago, we were stunned by the natural beauty of the surroundings and immediately ended a search that had taken us years of travel and months of house-hunting in Patagonia. This was it. The search was over. After one adventurous real estate agent showed us the place – others had no idea where it was and weren’t really interested in finding out – we came back alone to have another look. As soon as we pulled in under the century-old beech by the dirt track in front of the house and got out of the car, a wiry man with a leathery face and a stubborn jaw appeared out of nowhere and, by way of greeting said, “Did you buy here?”

I said, “Buenas tardes,” and stuck out my hand. He limply took it in his rough paw and gave it a perfunctory shake, but firmly repeated his question.

“Did you buy here?”

I knew the tone well. My grandfather had been just such a tough-as-whet-leather rural type, with the same kind of no-bullshit eloquence. The question wasn’t, “Hello there! So nice to see you. Did you lovely folks buy this place? Oh how nice, we’ll be neighbors and have tea together!” No, no, it was more like, “Did you buy here? Because if you didn’t, you’d best keep right on moving, stranger, ‘cause you’ve got no business here.”

Back home, in a remote rural place like this he might have underscored his question by carrying a double-barreled shotgun loaded with birdshot or rock salt in the crook of his elbow. Here, however, the weapon of choice among the natives was more casual, a machete, say, or an axe. But in this case, all the guy had in his hand was a coligüe cane walking staff, which didn’t look very threatening…not to me, anyway. However, once I got to know this man, don Federico Miranda, I would realize that, had he wished to that day, he could have dropped me like a sack of potatoes, so adept was he with that cane. On more than one occasion since his sixty-fifth birthday (he was now well over 70), he had done so with other men, by means of a swift, smart crack on the temple or behind the ear. (One of his step-grandsons once described him as “the meanest old man I’ve ever known”). But don Federico wasn’t mean, just hardened by his life as a rural laborer and sick and tired of city slickers finding ways to grab pieces of wilderness that they had no right to. Him, he’d soaked this ground with the sweat of his labor all his life. And he’d earned the right to play warden.

I said, “We haven’t bought it yet, señor, but we really hope to. We were here with the real estate agent and decided to come back for another look on our own…if that’s all right?”

So don Federico relaxed and showed us around. When we moved in, he was the one who sold us our used woodstove, the one who showed me the trails and where to find windfall firewood. If I asked him for advice, he gave it and when I didn’t, he sometimes stood by in bewildered amusement, watching me try to figure out on my own how to survive in rural Patagonia. His advice was as laconic as his greeting had been.

“Better gather firewood while you can,” he said, our first autumn here.

“Well, I’ll get what I can now, and if I need more later, I’ll gather it then,” I said.

“You won’t be able to,” he said bluntly. That was his advice. Take it or leave it. When it started raining in mid-May and didn’t quit until the second week in June…when it started snowing, I understood what he meant. That was the last year I left the issue of firewood “for later”.

So anyway, when don Federico decided, after half a century of living “up here”, to move “down closer to the road” where it was easier to get his wife the medical attention she needed at the time, a new self-appointed forest warden was required, and I, as the only man living on the edge of the woods, was “elected”. The “job” didn’t require much – just a love for this spectacular natural area, a willingness to challenge environmental predators, and the self-confidence to do so with no legal authority whatsoever. I became the one who, when strangers showed up and started poking around in the neighboring meadows and woodlands, would appear out of nowhere and ask, “Did you buy here?” And if the answer was “no”, I would have to say, “Then you have no business here,” and be ready to back my words up.

For years, I protected the surrounding hills and forest on the sole strength of my convictions. That was usually enough. There were a few minor incidents in which the police had to be called in. One in which a judge acted in my defense. But it wasn’t until this foreman called Octavio and his men came along that things came to a stand-off.

At some point during their fencing of the absentee-owner’s land, they decided not to spend any more money on “store-bought” posts and started invading the seventy-four acres of forest adjacent to our home to cut young green cypress trees and use those for posts instead. By my calculations they had already cut over a hundred from deep in the woods before I was on to them.

First I called the police. I was told by the duty officer that if the posts were being cut on private land and used on private land, they couldn’t act unless the owner of the land from which the posts were being taken filed charges. I had no idea who the owner was. For as long as I had known the area the forest had just been, well, the forest. I had never thought of it as belonging to anyone. Only as a natural area that needed protecting.

Then I called the forestry service. They also asked if I was the owner and when I said I wasn’t, seemed to lose interest. They said they might send somebody “one of these days” but that for the moment they had neither vehicles nor men to spare. But then I recalled that the Border Guards (a paramilitary force that often fills the gaps left by other law enforcement and security forces in Argentina) had an Ecology Division, so I called them. I was in luck because the officer in charge was new and, as the old Spanish adage goes, “a new broom sweeps clean.” The officer listened patiently and with interest to my story, asked me a few questions, and finally said, “Maybe I’ll come out that way this afternoon and have a look.”

I never expected what came next. In fact, I was discouraged after the call because I knew I couldn’t go up against this band alone, especially since they were backed by a landholder with money and influence. But that afternoon, the officer arrived…in a Unimog duce-and-a-half, with five heavily armed troops in the back-end, plus a plainclothesman and driver, and two motorcycle troopers for an escort. The officer hopped down from the truck, introduced himself and asked, “Where are they?”

I said, “Get into my truck and I’ll take you.”

He obliged, after twirling a finger over his head at the truck-driver and at the two motorcyclists, and barking, “Follow us!”

Like I said, we came down on them like gangbusters: twenty-five freshly cut green posts, chainsaws, axes and other tools, all impounded, and the work gang’s boss, written up for not having proper authorization or receipts for the posts.

How word got back to the owners of the land, a thousand miles away in Buenos Aires, I’ll never know, but they almost immediately got in touch with me through a local real estate agency – which, it turned out, had an axe to grind with the foreman. What would it take to get me to administrate that forest permanently? My answer: A full power of attorney as its warden.

And so this piece of forest primeval, this piece of nature, this piece of paradise, has become an integral piece of my life. I’ve fenced it, put up gates and put up no trespassing signs along the dirt road that separates the rugged, craggy, north section that borders on a lagoon from the hilly, boggy, south section that fronts on a glacial lake. I walk it and hike it and guard it as if it were my own. I barely open the trails I use for my rounds, keeping them as hidden from and inhospitable to others as possible. I’ve let its perimeters grow over with impenetrable thickets of dog rose and thorn bushes to discourage invaders who might jump the chain-link fence. Where furtive poachers cut holes in the fence, I immediately have it mended and crisscross it with barbed wire to let them know I’ve been there and that I have my eye on them. If they tear down a no trespassing sign, I put one right back up and redouble my rounds of that area until I’m sure the poachers have been discouraged. If I find them, I send them packing. If they hide from me, I look for them. If they run, I give chase. It has worked well. Lately, the only tracks I find when I’m on my rounds are my own. But every now and then, someone will try me, to see if I’m still being vigilant. They keep me on my toes. They keep me from getting lazy.

My gathering of only the driest fallen timber is as much a favor to the woods as it is to me. Clearly, I benefit by having a source of fuel, but so does the forest, because by removing it in the dry season, I am removing a potential fire hazard. This is a place where the wet season is intense, with heavy rains and snows for months on end. But the dry season is equally so, weeks and months when one match, one careless smoker, the sun on a piece of broken glass or a single flash of lightning can trigger a fire capable of consuming the entire forest. The forest needs me like I need it. It needs me to protect it from the exploiters and the uncaring, to protect it from decimation. It’s a job that makes me feel both proud and humble. Mostly, it makes me feel happy and privileged.

This afternoon, I’ve overstayed my welcome. I know the lay of the land so well by now that I dare stay longer and longer. If there were a full moon, I could make my way through the forest by night. But just the words “forest primeval” denote a condition of preeminence. I have delighted to the golden glow of sunset, seen the last rays of light filtering through the trees, as the sun sank behind Mount Capilla. Now, as I struggle to disentangle “just one more” dry fallen branch from the grip of the undergrowth, the fading light is gray. I feel the evening breeze rise and stir the leaves on the bushes. I hear crossed branches creak and groan like the timbers of a phantom ship. The humidity rises like a chilly hand from the forest floor and holds me in its grasp. I pluck my earlier abandoned sweatshirt from a nearby bush and slip it on. A roosting huet-huet (wet-wet) looses a warning shout that stands the hairs on the back of my neck on end. An owl whistles low, then lets out a sardonic cackle. It’s late, these sounds say. Go home. By night the forest is ours. You have no business here.

I swiftly make my way along the trail to the closest gate in the last of the fast-vanishing twilight. It’s new moon and will soon be dark as pitch. I get over the gate and onto the road home, almost at a trot. And I think to myself, “I’m the warden, the forest’s caretaker. Without it, I’m nothing but my everyday identity. The forest doesn’t belong to me any more than it belongs to its deed-holders. We’re only its guardians. The forest primeval belongs to itself. In a perfect world, we should be judged by how we treat it.

Self-Reliance

2010-03-21T14:13:00.015-03:00

Caption: Our house in the forest.

Here in the Southern Hemisphere, today is the first day of autumn. Out by the fence, I have three new piles of firewood, each representing the amount of dry timber necessary to fill the bed of my pickup to groaning capacity. Before I’m through, and before the heaviest fall rains begin in late April or May, I hope to have at least fifteen such piles (twenty would be better), lined up and under heavy plastic sheeting, stacked along my fence.

People who have always lived in town will sometimes say, “Oh, so you’re getting an early start.”

Early, ha! I’m already begging the rain and snow gods to hold off until I can get the job done. I recall our first winter here, when, without having any real criterion to go on, I thought I had plenty of firewood to get us through until spring. What a laugh! In the middle of winter, with snow to my knees, I found myself out with a rope, trying to lasso dry branches in the beech trees close to home and jerk them down so as to have something dry to burn in the woodstove and not freeze.

I got a late start this year. Summer was unusually cold and rainy and I kept waiting for the usual drought and warm breezes that would dry out the windfall timber lying on the ground and hanging like snow-broken bones in the thicket, out in the forest. It finally came but just in the nick of time, now at the end of summer. Summer starts in December here in Patagonia, but most of the really summery days we’ve had this year didn’t start until the last week of February.

Some say it’s the Niño current again. Others say it’s global “warming”. Still others say the electro-magnetic grid that holds the universe together has holes in it that make the holes in the ozone layer look like a fairytale wonderland, that Einstein predicted the north and south poles would switch polarity standing Earth on its proverbial head in 2012, and that the Mayan Calendar only goes until December of the year after next for a reason. (So if the world suddenly flips over in 2012, does that mean it’ll be a hot Christmas in the North and a cold one in the South when we all die screaming?)

Caption: Einstein - news to make the world flip.

Me, I think none of us really knows what the hell he/she’s talking about and that, like our ancient prehistoric cousins, we would do well to just watch the signs that presage what’s coming and do our best to react and survive without worrying too much about the best-laid theoretical plans of mice and men.

Last Friday, on my evening rounds of the woods I administrate, I came upon a big patch of anthills. They were not the usual big black ants that you see in the forest, but really tiny red ones. That’s what drew my attention to them. So I stooped down to watch them for a while.

It was a clear, calm evening, not a cloud in the sky, and it had been a beautiful late-summer’s day. There was no sign of rain anywhere and the forecast hadn’t predicted any possibility of rain until Sunday. But the ants were going nuts, hundreds of them, moving from one hill to another, coming out of one hole and going into another, carrying things on their backs, the way ants will when they feel something coming. The latest pile of firewood I had gathered had been left uncovered by our front gate, so the dry breeze could get to it. After seeing the ants, when I got back home, I hauled out a plastic tarp and covered it. Friday night it rained, and it rained all day Saturday too.

Watching the signs is practical. Practicality is twenty pickups of dry firewood stacked along my fence and sawn and chopped in my woodshed.

When we first moved here seventeen years ago, there were only seven houses, scattered as if rolled like dice by a giant, on the hills, and behind the trees and beneath the rocky crags of what had once been a hundred-acre farm on the edge of over 300 acres of natural forest. Except for the summer home of a family from Buenos Aires and a tiny pyramid-shaped weekend cabin of a family from town, our house was the only one in our neck of the woods and the only one whose lot fronted on the lagoon below. What we did when we first moved here was what people here refer to as “doing Patagonia”. That is, carving a place for oneself out of the singularly spectacular, incredibly attractive, yet frequently hostile landscape of the Patagonian Andes.

Like us, the people before us had come here from Buenos Aires. They hadn’t made it. They ran out of money, out of enthusiasm, out of spirit, out of luck. Their misfortune became our dream. We finished the half-completed walls of the barn-shaped cabin they had started and moved in. We came at the right time. Not young, like the couple before us, like so many, who have a fancy more than a dream and the strength of youth and the passion of the moment, but not yet the stamina of persistent survival. We were over forty. We had been through some stuff. We had survived. We had what it took. And we had been visiting Patagonia for twenty years, always dreaming of someday living here. That wasn’t something to be taken lightly.

The first winters were tough. There were things we couldn’t predict. We learned things: You need 500 to 700 cubic feet of firewood to get through a Patagonian winter. If you live in a southern beech forest, expect lots of rain and snow. I've read that they need 2200 mm (about 86 inches) of precipitation a year to survive. So if rainy days depress you and you see beeches, ferns and cane growing where you’re thinking of settling, think again. If you live in Patagonia, expect wind (weathermen call these latitudes the “wild forties”) and lots of it. And if you live above a lagoon, that’s around the corner from a big lake and across the lake is the windward side of the mountains, expect really strong winds. If you live in a place with a street that’s no more than a 600-foot-long rutted dirt track off of a mile-and-a-half-long, single-lane, unpaved, high road, a rear-wheel drive station wagon is not the vehicle you need, particularly in winter and the rainy season. The fact that the calendar shows Patagonian winter as running from June 21 to September 21 is no sign that it will refrain from snowing until June or that it will stop snowing in September (Patagonia’s a lot like Ohio that way). And the fact that the Municipality, twelve miles away through the mountains, claims your area as part of its surrounding township doesn’t necessarily mean that it will provide you with such services as road-grading, snowplowing or gravel replacement. If you’re going to wait around for the City to do the road maintenance you feel you have a right to, you may end up walking a lot of the places you have to go. Get a 4x4 truck, always carry a shovel and a machete or axe and plan on getting out on your own when the snow is up to your bumper.

As constructed when we first moved in, the house was little more than a barn, with thin walls that the wind whistled through and made the heat from the woodstove ineffectual unless you were sitting next to the fire all day. Bottled gas was too expensive to use for heating and the auxiliary kerosene stove was dangerous and smelly. The front windows with a gorgeous view of the lake and mountains leaked wind and water like a sieve into the house when the inclement weather of winter and spring came roaring out of the west over the mountains from the Pacific. The stovepipe ran up the side of the house on the outside and the cold wind hitting it kept it from drawing properly. It took me a while to figure out which woods were the best for fuel and what kind of shape they had to be in so as to be considered good firewood. And while I experimented, I over and over again stopped up the reluctant stovepipe with soot and resin that shoved the smoke back into the house blackening the walls and choking us.

Caption: We finished it and added on.

But little by little we figured things out. I read books about cabin-living, carpentry, home maintenance, basic rural heating systems. I re-nailed, weather-stripped and water-sealed the front windows. I contracted someone to re-install the stovepipe on the inside of the house so that we not only kept it out of the wind but also could take advantage of the heat it radiated. I installed firebricks on the wall behind the woodstove to better reflect and absorb its heat. Lack of insulation was our major problem in winter, so I insulated – polyurethane sheeting over the old walls, 12 mm plywood on top of that, and three-quarter-inch tongue-and-grove pine paneling on top of that. We started making meals that required a lot of cooking time on the woodstove, using gas only for quick cooking and to fuel the tank water heater. I learned by the weight and smell of each type of wood whether it was ready to be used as firewood. I learned to stack wood properly and when and how to cover it. I learned to leave the greenest windfall timber cut and stacked in the rain and snow and wind and summer sun so that it would dry out faster and become proper firewood. We built on, added a carpentry shop to one side of the house and a sunroom/gym to the other. We improved our water system, made it work via gravity, without pumps, piping water directly from a pristine spring into three holding tanks and then into our house. We built a 24-foot diameter water tank to hold an extra 8,500 gallons of water in the dry season, in case of fire. We added a deck onto the front of the house to serve as both a recreational space and a windbreak. We built a free-standing woodshed and a lean-to to keep firewood dry for immediate use. We sold the station wagon and bought a front-wheel drive car and then a 4X4 pickup truck.

Suddenly, it seemed like we had always lived this way. Nothing seemed any longer like extra-hard work or an inconvenience. It all just seemed natural. And the payoff is that we live in one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth.

A couple of years ago, some of our newest neighbors (the seven original houses have burgeoned to fifteen today) started seeking “progress”. After a couple of winters as reluctant lumberjacks, they came up with a plan to bring a natural gas pipeline up the mountain to our hideaway.

I was the only neighbor against it. Natural gas would bring “progress”. “Progress” would bring more people. More people would bring noise, streetlights, cleared land. It would mean goodbye to the condor, the eagle and the great horned owl. It would mean a polluted lagoon. Erosion, pollution, deforestation, rules, regulations. It would make this idyllic landscape into a branch of the suburban sprawl. It would make it an interesting neighborhood for burglars and muggers. Thanks, but no thanks.

“But what about the convenience of it?” they asked. And I immediately recalled don Federico, an old settler who had lived here for forty years before we arrived and how he had laughed at me when I saw him one day with a long wrecking bar and wedges, turning over a huge old tree trunk to cut it up for the winter fire and asked if I could give him a hand. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been doing this, Mister?” he asked. “I don’t need any help, muchas gracias. This is what keeps me young.” Don Federico lived to be 90.

So I laughed too and answered, “I’ve been living this way for fifteen years, now. I can’t imagine why I’d want to change my lifestyle, unless it would be in order to be ever more independent. Self-reliance may not keep me young, but it keeps me from getting old.”

The Tour 4 – Last Stop: Kelley Drive

2010-03-09T09:34:00.030-03:00

Caption: The house on Kelley Drive as it looks today.

Dad was always futurizing. The big question on his mind was always, “What if…?” And neither the question nor the self-generated response was ever a happy one. Not, say, what if we were successful, or what if we hit the jackpot, or what if everything works out okay, or even what if we don’t do this or that and miss a chance to have a really great time or to find happiness and fulfillment?

No, the terrible questions (and the even more horrific answers to them) were always along the lines of, what if tragedy strikes, or what if I go bankrupt, or what if I can’t pay my bills, or what if one of us gets a catastrophic illness, or what if I’ve just plain bitten off more than I can chew? Although he had manic-like highs in which he leapt headlong into seemingly capricious purchases and investments – rather than projects or activities that might have brought him a measure of satisfaction – these were almost always followed by manic-like lows in which he would just as compulsively regret such impetuosity and beat himself up endlessly over it.

In general – though he seemed affable enough to outsiders when he was feeling okay – he thought that the world pretty much stank, that things seldom went as planned, that true happiness was a fool’s dream, that responsibility was sheer torture but inescapable and top priority just the same, that random was always bad, and that if there were a choice between things going right and things going wrong, he could pretty much count on their going wrong every time.

Perhaps this was because he was a child of the Great Depression – although, truth be told, even though his father was wiped out in the stock market crash of ’29 and subsequent bank failures, by the time he retired early, at age 62, he was very well off indeed and lived to a ripe old 86. Maybe, too, it was because Dad had seen so much horror during World War II, or perhaps it was simply the result of the mental and emotional disorders for which he was treated off and on from the time he had his first major nervous breakdown when I was only five. I can’t really say. But the result was that nothing was ever done, no decision was ever made, without there first being a great deal of hand-wringing and gut-wrenching worry (which, generously, he shared with everyone in the house). Nor was any decision ever made and acted on without there being an immediate and almost panic-stricken sensation that, whatever else it might have been, it had surely been a terrible mistake.

I only mention this because I recall that we had barely gotten settled into the big old house on West Auglaize when Dad started scouting around for something else. This was at about the same time that he started seeing a psychiatrist regularly (a kind of eccentric hybrid, the shrink was, a Jewish Freudian with a Puritan work ethic, who said Dad’s problems stemmed from pent-up anger at his father and who insisted he keep doing everything he loathed in life because it built character). And it was also at the same time that he developed what were diagnosed as “psycho-somatic symptoms” (severe lower back pain, which, though not a physician, I would have blamed on his being twelve hours a day on his feet behind the counter of our family restaurant that he had come to hate).

Kelley’s Woods

I can’t say how much of a connection there was between one thing and the other, but within a year of our moving to the big, beautiful house on West Auglaize, Dad had, on the advice of his father, who had done the same, bought a lot in the new Oakwood Hills addition. He almost immediately decided this was a disastrous mistake (location, price, resale value, etc.) and sold it at a slight loss. But his sights were already set and although my mother had no desire whatsoever to move out of her dream home on West Auglaize, he sent her to have a look at that end of town. So, I remember one day my accompanying Mom and a neighbor lady “to take a ride” and ending up just on the other side of the river from where we lived, in the part of Oakwood Hills known as Kelley’s Woods.

The woods was named after the owner of all of the land that was being sold in that area, W.E. Kelley. Mr. Kelley’s rambling farmhouse and barn still stood in the shade of huge old hardwoods across Hamilton Road from the municipal swimming pool at the entrance to the addition. At the time, part of the road that would later be Kelley Drive was still unpaved. It felt like a real adventure to me as Mom maneuvered our ‘52 Chevy sedan over the dirt and made her way out of the open fields and into the oak and maple forest, passing an old rough-hewn cabin that stood as a reminder of the Kelley family’s past. There we got out of the car with the neighbor lady and had a look at a couple of lots that had been staked out. Mom and the neighbor stood imagining the beautiful homes they might one day have, nestled there beneath century-old trees, with back yards that would reach the banks of the Auglaize River.

I remember Mom’s later telling Dad that if she were going to live “out there in the sticks” she would want to build her house on one those gorgeous lots in the woods, not on one of the ones bulldozed out of a cornfield closer to the intersection with Hamilton Road. But three years later, just as he had done twice before since I was born, Dad made a snap decision to buy a new house. And not one of the ones that were being built rapidly to order in Kelley’s Woods for some of the wealthier families in town, but rather one of a string of five houses of similar size and design built for sale by a contractor named Gerlich. These were not in Kelley’s Woods, but a couple of hundred yards short of it near the Hamilton Road Bridge. Okay, to be fair, they weren’t bulldozed out of a cornfield. That year, the farmer who had leased the land in front of and in back of what was to be our home from Mr. Kelley had sown wheat.

Caption: That year the field had been sown in wheat.

810 Kelley Drive

I would eventually come to make friends with the house at 810 Kelley Drive and to love the neighborhood and countryside that surrounded it, but when we first moved in, I was furious. Why, I wanted to know, did we have to leave the big house on West Auglaize, a house that was so obviously superior in grace, beauty, style and mystery to this spare, clean-cut, Formica-countered, modified A-frame piece of spiritless modernity?

Caption: The house on Kelley Drive as it looked when we moved in. Darla and I are on the porch. The '56 Royal Crown Imperial was Dad's pride and joy, but so long it didn't quite fit on the carport.

It wasn’t as if it weren’t a perfectly nice house. It had a front door that opened directly into the living room, pretty much the way the front door had in our house back on Pine Street. It was that modern post-war idea of “why waste perfectly good living space on an entryway or foyer?” It was a fairly large rectangular living room with a big picture window in the middle facing south and a double sash window in the west end. The back door was off of the carport (which, a few years later, Dad would pay my Uncle Kenny, Mom’s younger brother, who was an excellent carpenter, to turn into a real garage) and opened into the kitchen. From that door, you could also go directly down into the basement, since the door to the basement stairs faced the back door in a tiny entryway next to the kitchen range that was just about big enough to turn around in. The kitchen was modern and efficient with ample cabinetry in light-colored hardwood, all hung at a convenient height since the house had eight-foot, rather than twelve-foot ceilings (as had been the case on West Auglaize), Formica-topped counters, a double sink with a window above it that provided a view of the field across the way and a strip of woods along the Auglaize River beyond, under-counter cupboards and drawers and built-in Westinghouse electric oven and range, with more cabinetry above and below both. Just beyond the kitchen next to the doorway to the living room was the dinette, a dining area just large enough for our dining room table and chairs (the hutch cupboard ended up in the living room), which featured a broom closet and guest closet, as well as a large window looking onto the front yard. Just past the door from the living room into the dining area was a long hallway that ran the length of the house behind the kitchen and living room and off of which were the three bedrooms and single bathroom.

Caption: From left - Dad, Virgnia, Dan, Jim, Jim's second wife Val, Darla's eldest son Jon, Darla and Darla's then-husband Tom. The dining room suit barely fit into the dinette.

One of the bedrooms, the one in the middle, had originally been an open area with a window and “spare” closet, planned by the builder as a sort of den, TV room or, perhaps, library. But Dad quickly had a wall and door put in and it became Darla’s room. Jim and I shared one of the larger rooms and Mom and Dad the remaining one, which were about the same size. Except for Darla’s room, which hadn’t been designed as a bedroom and had a regular sash window, the bedrooms had what were called “privacy” windows. These small rectangular windows were installed high up and close to the ceiling in the east and north walls of one bedroom and in the west and north walls of the other. They were made so that no one could look in from the outside but had practically the same effect from the inside. I, who had so enjoyed looking out onto the street and neighborhood from the big sash window in the north bedroom on West Auglaize found these new modern windows singularly frustrating. Though tall for my age, I hadn’t yet shot up to the full six-foot-one that I would eventually reach and had to stand on my tiptoes to be able to see out. My brother, always small for his age, could only see out if he stood on his bed.

Caption: The house and yard in the '90s after 30 years of Mom's green thumb.

Had I been in an admitting mood, I would have had to admit that it was a nice, solid, modern home. But I wasn’t and wouldn’t. I was going on twelve now and had a definite mind of my own, which generally clashed with my father’s. I was, however, still young enough that I couldn’t feel okay about not agreeing with him.

So most of the time, I felt angry and wrong-minded and confused. What kind of son was I if I was constantly rebelling against my father’s wishes? He couldn’t even get me to stay in Peewee League – not even after Mom had spent Sunday afternoons teaching me to pitch and catch and swing a bat. She had played softball when she was young and was a natural. And Dad was always too exhausted or too depressed or too pissed off at the world to feel like teaching me. But that didn’t keep him from expecting me to go out for the team…some team…any team. So Mom would teach me the basics of the all-American sport, while Dad napped on the couch in front of a ballgame on TV.

Caption: Mom in '92 - 50 years with Dad, 30 years on Kelley Drive.

Eventually, the ol’ man talked me into “at least trying” baseball. (What kid didn’t like baseball? It was downright un-American). So off I went to the baseball diamond in the Harmon Field city park with my spotlessly brand new ball cap and stiff, new, untamed glove, both of which made me stick out, as the saying went, like a whore in church – a non-baseball-believing heretic to be sure.

The coach, I discovered, had been our postman back when we lived on Defiance street when I was four, and back then I had liked him. I soon found out that, as a coach, he was a whole other animal. He took Peewee League and winning games so seriously that you’d have thought he was running the Cincinnati Reds. He took one look at my impeccably new cap and rigid unsullied glove, put his hand on my shoulder and said, close up and right in my face, “Go sit on the bench over there, rookie, and when I get time I’ll pop ya a few flies to catch."

His eyes were bloodshot and his breath smelled of liquor. It was only 9 a.m. I didn’t protest. I went and sat on the bench while he asked boys with well-worn, faded, sweat-stained caps and pliant, neatsfoot-stained mitts what positions they played, and then deployed them on the field to “see what they had”. The only flies I caught were the ones with wings and legs that landed on my pants legs while I sat on the bench watching “the good kids” play. So after a string of wasted mornings spent going through the humiliating agony of sitting there with a fat kid who looked like he was about to cry and another boy whose glasses were so thick it was hard to tell what color his eyes were, I refused to go anymore.

Still, I couldn’t help thinking I was surely one of the reasons the ol’ man was depressed so much of the time. With a son like me, who wouldn’t be depressed? What kind of a son loathed team sports? What kind of kid read books and wrote stories and drew pictures all the time instead of getting out there and mixing it up? Who wouldn’t be depressed to have a kid like that? But that didn’t keep me from being angry too, especially now. I simply couldn’t believe that he would give up West Auglaize Street for Kelley Drive over something as banal as heating bills.

In our house – in just about any house in the entire, extended, Newland family, in fact – if there was one thing you always learned about, it was money matters. Sales, small business, and personal banking and investment, this was what made the Newlands tick. That and team sports. Which was precisely the opposite of Mom’s family. The Webers (her father’s family) and the Cavinders (her mother’s) were rural folk, unconcerned with matters of money, as long as there was enough to put food on the table and keep a decent roof over their heads and a decent vehicle in the shed. And most of them had no more than a mild and passing interest in organized sports, since nearly all of them had, at one time or another, lived on farms where there was no time for a boy to be off fooling around on a ball field when there was hay to be made and livestock to be tended. They talked about the weather, about crops, about the people they had seen when they last had been downtown. They played sheephead and euchre and yahtzee when they got together. Some of them chewed tobacco. Others smoked short, non-filter Luckies or rolled their own smokes. They didn’t talk about money because they didn’t figure there was enough of it to talk about. It would be something akin to putting on airs to discuss money matters. And besides that, it was simply nobody’s business what you had and what you didn’t have. But give a Newland ten bucks and he would have a corresponding ten theories as to how to stretch it to twenty. It just seemed to run in their Scottish blood. Granted, the theories quite often didn’t pan out, but they made for lively conversation whenever anyone was there to listen – whether the other person was interested or not.

Caption: Dad and Mom - retirement and happier days.

For example, my Uncle Bob Newland once met up with my Uncle Ken Weber at the gas pump. Bob, who had just bought a Mercury sedan, was first in line and Ken was waiting behind him in his Dodge truck to get to the pump. Always genial, Bob walked over to the driver’s window of Ken’s truck, said hi and decided to strike up a conversation. For lack of anything else to say after greetings and pleasantries were exchanged, Bob started talking about the great features of the new Merc, and one, of course, was the improved gas mileage of the new models.

“For instance, Ken,” he said, “what kind of mileage do you get on this truck?”

“I don’t know, Bob.”

“Ballpark, I mean?”

"How the hell should I know, Bob. When it’s empty I fill it up,” said Ken.

“Well, look at the size of that Mercury. And you know what kind of mileage I get on it? Go on, take a guess…”

“Bob,” said Ken, his hands gripping the wheel, eyes staring straight ahead, his ball cap pulled low, “I don’t give a good goddamn what kind o’ mileage you get. Get that piece o’ shit out o’ my way sometime today so I can get some gas.”

So anyway, I had heard all about the sale of our old house and the purchase of the new one and I was flabbergasted. I mean, sure, Dad made it sound logical: It was a bad time, the market value of old houses was going down, everybody wanted new modern ones – “and, hey, I don’t blame ‘em!” – and so on. I could just hear the real estate agent saying all this and see Dad nodding heartily in agreement. But the long and the short of it was that the house on Auglaize Street was sold at a loss and the one on Kelley Drive bought at a premium. Worse still, the beautiful house on Auglaize with its grassy yard, hedges and huge old trees was actually sold for a lower price than the sum paid for the new house, despite the new one’s being half the old one’s size. According to Dad, however, we had gotten out of the old house “just in time”, because the market for old houses hadn’t bottomed out yet. (The values of those times seem ludicrous today: The house on West Auglaize went for 13,500 dollars and the one on Kelley Drive was purchased for 14,500).

Be that as it may, the ol’ man was nobody’s fool. He could be a really “hard sell” and he was – as were most of the men in his family – a consummate salesman himself. When driving a hard bargain was in the cards, he had ice-water in his veins and would hold out until hell froze over to get the price he wanted. If you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask Lloyd Bovee at the Chevy dealership or Big Ed Clark at the Ford dealership, whom Dad played off against each other every time he was in the market for a new vehicle. The difference here was that the sale of the Winget house on West Auglaize was typical of times when the ol’ man had made a decision and was truly done with something, and Dad was definitively done with that house, even if the rest of us weren’t.

Adjustment

I could have set my watch by Dad’s next breakdown. Almost as soon as we moved into the new house on Kelley Drive, he hit the deck like a ton of bricks. A new place, a new, bigger mortgage to replace the one on the Winget House, a business that was being eroded to an ever greater degree by the new Interstate that by-passed town and took business with it. What if changing houses right now had been a disastrous error?

Caption: Darla and I goofing around in the early '60s

He started staying home and sending my mother in to run the restaurant in his place. By this time, his older brother, Bob, had taken a job at the bank and his younger brother, Chuck, had taken over my grandfather’s Western and Southern Insurance debit. It was just Mom and Dad – and a wonderful group of young women, including my sister, who worked for them – at the Teddy Bear now, and there were days when the ol’ man decided he simply couldn’t take going in. Then it got to be a couple of days a week, and then a week, and finally, he went to bed for a couple of months.

Caption: Jim (left), Darla (right) and I still goofing around in the early '70s.

I mean this almost literally. He lived in the bedroom he shared with my mother. All day he lay there in the dark, the curtains drawn, slipping in and out of sleep for days on end. Sometimes Mom would talk him into coming to the dinner table. It was like dining at a wake. We would sit there, all of us in silence, not looking at each other, saying “Pass the potatoes, please,” and eating as quickly as possible, swallowing past the collective lump in our throats. Sometimes the ol’ man would sit there at the head of the table in his flannel robe, staring at his plate, sniffling.

“Why don’t you eat something, Normie?” Mom would softly suggest. “You’ll feel better.” And then his face would crumple up like a ball of paper and he would start to weep.

“What’s the matter, Norm?” Mom would ask, embarrassed and chagrined. "I don’t deserve to eat,” he would say. “I’m no goddamn good.” And back he would go to his bed.

Seen from the different perspective that one gains with age and experience, I learned to sympathize with my father’s suffering. It’s hard to imagine how much anguish he endured throughout the long years that he lived with this kind of paralyzing depression. Nor is it easy to understand what he went through in the process of seeking a cure, with a variety of psychiatrists and admission to several different psychiatric facilities at different times over a 20-year period, before he finally began to take drugs that didn’t cure him, but at least placed him in a kind of stable, if always slightly depressed state, in which he could at least function within a certain climate of normality.

Back then, however, as a pre-adolescent and later, as an adolescent, I was just angry. Angry that my dad wasn’t like other dads, that our home wasn’t like other homes, that we couldn’t have friends stay over, that we had to sneak around the house in broad daylight so as not to disturb the ol’ man’s “rest”. Angry that dinner-time was a time of such anxiety and sadness, angry at the sensation that happiness was something you had to go out into the world and find because, at home, depression was the ever-present variable that you had to deal with constantly. Angry that the rest of us couldn’t even just forget about the ol’ man if he wanted to lie around feeling sorry for himself, that we could never leave him alone for too long “for fear he might do something to himself.”

So I started avoiding the house every chance I got and spent the rest of the time hidden away in the side of our basement that Dad had had made over into a “family room” with its acoustical ceiling, tile floor and Philippine mahogany paneling. Once it was done and Mom had furnished it, the “finished” half of the basement was really nice. It had a bar at one end, bookshelves at the other, a row of modern ceiling lights, two couches, two armchairs, end-tables with art deco lamps, a coffee-table and, eventually, a TV. It was practically an apartment.

But almost as soon as this basement room was done, the family discovered that it had no use for a “family” room. The upstairs was comfortable and roomy. The living room was large and bright, the dining area was attached directly to the modern all-electric kitchen and those were the two places where we congregated whenever Mom was home and we were all together. Who wanted to go down to the always dank, cool basement where, despite its various ground-level windows, it seldom got enough light that you didn’t need artificial light to be down there? And the fact was that whenever Dad wasn’t laid up sick, he was working twelve or fourteen-hour days and Mom was usually either working with or instead of him at the restaurant or working somewhere else – first as a cook at the new Wapakoneta High School across from Harmon Field, later as the secretary at the Cornell Agency insurance brokerage and finally, as the office manager at the Henkener Law Office. My kid brother, Jim, immediately loved the surroundings and, gregarious as always, right away made friends with all of the kids in the neighborhood. Mom practically had to rope and tie him to get him to come in and eat whenever the weather was at all fit to be out. My sister Darla, meanwhile, had lots of friends and activities, including part-time work in the restaurant, and if she was home, she was usually in her room reading or sleeping, when she wasn’t studying (since she was always an outstanding scholar).

So I ended up claiming the basement no one else wanted and it became my world whenever I was in the house. There I had my books, my music, my Smith Corona typewriter, my art supplies, everything I could want to feel happy in a world of my own making. There was a Simon and Garfunkel song that was popular back then and it became a kind of secret hymn I heard in my head when I was there, especially the lines that went: “I have my books /And my poetry to protect me / I am shielded in my armor/Hiding in my room/Safe within my womb / I touch no one and no one touches me…”

Caption: I took over the basement no one wanted and it became my domain.

Work

Dad had this fixed idea that I thought money grew on trees. And I had a similarly fixed idea that, as my father, he was duty-bound to take care of my needs until I became of legal age to take care of my own. But he quickly dissuaded me of this philosophy, reminding me that it was never too early to earn one’s keep and that his own father had sent him off to work as a rural laborer the summer when he was my very age, twelve.

The first thing he did, of course, was put me to work Saturdays and a couple of days a week after school at the Teddy Bear. I didn’t really mind the work itself. I mostly washed dishes, peeled potatoes, cut them into french fries in the hand-operated, mechanical french-fry cutter and generally helped with food preparation and cleanup. I also took carry-out orders over the phone, and sometimes prepared them if everybody else was too busy. I liked the pretty, older, teen-aged girls who worked there and they treated me with the same sweet playfulness that they might have a kid brother. Nor did I mind working with Mom and Darla, since we often had fun together and were always looking for an excuse to cut up and laugh when Dad wasn’t around to chide us for not working hard enough. But Dad and I set each other off like match set to fuse. Nothing I did was ever fast enough, neat enough, careful enough or uniform enough to suit him and he followed me around, cussing under his breath and redoing things as fast as I finished them. There were only two ways to do things: his way and the wrong way.

So he started “helping me” find other occupations. The first one I remember was mowing the lawn of a lady called Hilda who worked for him. Hilda was full-time kitchen help. She was an older lady who had a problem in her legs that made her walk with a pronounced limp – a kind of strange, side-to-side, rocking gait – and couldn’t mow the lawn herself. Wages at the Teddy Bear weren’t any better for kitchen help than they were in any other restaurant in town and all she could afford to pay for the job was a dollar.

Hilda’s house was a little place across the river “behind town”. That is to say, the view from her back yard was the flood wall along the river, a piece of the river itself, the city parking lot and the backs of all the buildings on the main drag of town. She owned what was known back then as a “hand mower”. These were mechanical, motorless lawn mowers with a series of blades mounted on an axle that turned when you pushed the apparatus by hand, causing the rubber-covered wheels of the mower head to turn. The mower head was attached to a wooden handle, not unlike a wagon tongue, with a crosspiece at the top for your hands. I had seen hand mowers that were so well maintained, well greased, well sharpened and well made that they were a pleasure to use and almost preferable to power mowers for civilized yards. This mower, however, wasn’t one of them. And this, combined with the fact that Hilda’s yard was a never-ending series of ruts, gulleys, broad-blade tufts, rocks, gopher holes and quack-grass clumps made the job next to impossible. The machine stuck, snarled, jammed and dragged until I wanted to bawl. I sweat and strained and cussed the mower and cussed Hilda and cussed the ol’ man until I was blue in the face.

It took me until dark after school on a Friday evening and all morning that next Saturday to do the job. And when I was done I told myself that this was the last time I would do it. And it was.

But when I went to the Teddy Bear that noon to tell Hilda I was through, I felt guilty about having cursed her and her lawn mower under my breath the whole time I was working and about deciding not to work for her again. Suddenly, it was clear to me what a sacrifice she was making by paying me that dollar, when she took me aside as if to keep others from seeing such a precious exchange of wealth. She thanked me and, glancing over her shoulder, as if afraid we might be held up, handed me a little packet, made of several paper napkins, twisted at the top around their contents. When I opened it up, inside were two shiny fifty-cent pieces. Obviously, she had wrapped them like this to set them aside for fear of spending them before she got me paid. I was so moved that I almost told her to forget it and handed them back, but imagining the look on the ol’ man’s face if I were to do that, I desisted and slipped them into my pants pocket. “Business,” Dad surely would have said, “is business. Don’t be a sucker, Dan.”

Once you start working, however, no matter what age you start at, there’s an element of maturity and self-reliance in it that makes it, well, addictive, sort of – habit-forming, I guess, is a better choice of words. So before I knew it, I had a short list of clients who paid me for my somewhat dubious gardening skills: Mr. McMurray, the president of the People’s National Bank; a businessman called Koge, who lived in a big brick house with a back yard on the river; a retired schoolteacher, whose neat little yard came to a point where Mechanic Street branched off from West Auglaize in my old neighborhood, and several others in different locations around town. For these people, I cut grass and weeded flowerbeds in the summer, raked and burned leaves in the fall, shoveled snow in the winter and turned over the dirt in their gardens in the spring, in exchange for the few bucks per service that they paid me.

Before I turned 13, I also started delivering newspapers, first an early morning route for the Dayton Journal Herald and later, an afternoon route for the Lima News. The Lima News routes were run out of Russell MacLean’s Newsstand, and those of us who worked out of there also did Sunday morning routes for other papers that he sold: the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Toledo Blade, the Columbus Dispatch, and others. Having access to all of these periodicals and to the literary magazines – like the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The New Yorker and Reader’s Digest – among others, that Russ sold at the Newsstand across the street from the Post Office fed my already budding desire to be a newsman and writer. And having the paper route also led to opportunities to sell other things to my customers – serialized cookbooks, anthologies of condensed novels and magazine subscriptions, among other things.

But I now had another interest as well. I had joined the band at school and was learning to be a percussionist. My sister Darla was already becoming an accomplished musician by this time, an excellent trumpet-player. I’m not saying this because she’s my sister, honestly. Like with just about anything else she took up, she demonstrated immediate talent, perseverance and extraordinary brilliance. By the time she finished high school, she could easily have pursued music as a career, and with a little work, would certainly have stood a good chance of winning a chair in auditions for a professional orchestra. As it turned out, she didn’t, and gave up playing entirely after high school.

As with reading and books, it was Darla who first whetted my taste for symphonic music of all sort – classical, romantic, impressionist, modern classical and contemporary – and who got me started collecting records of serious music as well as books.

At first I had also wanted to play a brass wind instrument and so admired the band director, Mr. Bigelow, that I decided to take up his instrument, the trombone. But that was the year I had been ill with infectious hepatitis and the disease had left me weak and under-confident. Mr. Bigelow was a temperamental man who shouted and berated students as a regular part of his teaching method and he was particularly touchy about how the trombone was played, so I ended up quitting just weeks after I started.

“Another thing he quit without giving it a chance,” I could hear my father saying. But I wasn’t up for so much pressure right then.

Music Man

Nearly a year later, I screwed up my courage, went back to Mr. Bigelow and said, “I want to play the drums.” He said to forget it. That I could come back and play trombone or not come back at all. He was a regular customer at the Teddy Bear, however, and liked my mother, so she worked on him until he finally called me in one day and said, “Okay, Danny, you can play the drums, because Reba thinks I should give you a second chance. But the first time you pussyfoot around on me again, you’re outa here, for good.” I appreciated the second chance and wanted to show him I was made of tougher stuff than it had appeared at first glance and sought to become the best he could ask for. Turned out, as a percussionist, I was a natural…who knew?

Caption: Playing the drums in my basement studio.

So by age fourteen, music was already taking up a lot of my time. I saved up and bought drums of my own so as to be able to practice at home, and more than ever, the finished half of the basement became my studio and my domain. At school I was learning all of the classic percussion instruments from snare drum and bass drum to cymbals and triangle and everything in between. I turned out not to be a terribly swift study when it came to “keyboard”-type instruments like the xylophone, chimes or glockenspiel (fortunately my friend JoAnne was and she generally handled the hardest parts on these instruments and would cover this weak point of mine from junior high all the way through high school). But I practiced those parts too, just in case I was ever called upon to play them.

Though highly proficient on all other drums and “traps”, it turned out I had a particular talent and love for the timpani. For those unfamiliar with the term, these are what are most commonly known as kettledrums, consisting of a membrane (laminated plastic or calfskin) head stretched over a large copper bowl and played with special fiber-headed sticks of varying degrees of hardness known as timp mallets. They were originally religious and military instruments descended from ancient Hebrew ceremonial drums and later mounted on horses and used with clarion trumpets to accompany cavalry movements in Europe.

Caption: At school they could always find me in the Band Room.

But by the 16th and 17th centuries they started to be incorporated into the orchestra. In the early 19th century, Beethoven, revolutionized their use and gave them a voice of their own beyond mere percussion. From Beethoven on, the timpani have played a major role in some of the most stirring passages of classical music as a whole, and I immediately fell in love with them.

Furthermore, their prestige appealed to me. They marked the difference between a mere “drummer” and a true percussionist. The timps are tunable instruments that require a sensitive musical ear, especially in complex orchestral pieces that require multiple tone changes throughout their execution. And I proved to be expert at handling this task as well as at the complex playing technique required to properly execute timpani parts.

At fourteen, I was a serious musician. In order to devote more time to practice, I got rid of all the most time-consuming little jobs I had and got two better-paying ones that I could do in the evenings. Several nights a week (weekends and one weeknight), I was a ticket-taker and usher at the local movie theater. I also helped with clean-up after the feature was over. Then I would go from there to the Teddy Bear, where, for a time, I took the place of a night janitor, who had decided to retire. I would let myself in with a back door key Dad lent me, put a couple of quarters in the jukebox to have music to work to, and then I would proceed to do the heavy cleaning, mopping and waxing the floor of the dining room.

Then, as I got better, music also became how I earned my money. First, it was with a rock group called The Trees, whose front man was Dave Emerson, a fourteen-year-old kid with a great set of pipes, who played a mean lead guitar. We played Saturday nights at the Wigwam, a municipal youth center that was also known as ‘The Rec’ (short for recreational center). We got a percentage of the cover charge – which was about enough to cover our burgers and Cokes. Then we started getting gigs in other places. The bass player was the only one old enough to drive, so we would all pile into his broken-down station wagon and venture off to play in ‘exotic’ locations like the village of Minster, or the lake-front town of Celina, or in summer ‘battles of the bands’ at the Auglaize County Fairgrounds.

But just as Darla had shared her love for classical music with me, from my mother, I inherited jazz. Mom had a huge collection of old 78 rpm records and I wore them out listening to them and memorizing the ‘licks’. Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, the Andrews Sisters, the Dorsey Brothers, Nelson Riddle, Woody Herman, Louie Armstrong, Les Brown, Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Pearl Bailey, Artie Shaw, swing, big band, blues, Dixieland and singers of every ilk, she had them all and I learned their sounds by heart. Naturally enough, as soon as a dance band was formed at school, I was in it, learning how to read charts and lay down a beat. And as soon as I could drive, there was no stopping me.

The band director, Mr. Bigelow, sold me his son’s old ’57 Dodge Royal for fifty dollars and helped me get a job Mondays and Fridays after school until 9pm and Saturday mornings selling musical instruments and giving percussion lessons to beginners at the Porter Music Company in the nearby City of Lima. There I met other, older musicians and almost immediately started playing with jazz and pop bands at clubs of all kinds in the area. I joined the musicians union and got the union’s business agent to get me gigs substituting for jazz drummers who were sick or out of town. I ended up playing with over a score of different jazz and pop bands in a year, before I became the steady drummer with the Doug Price Trio.

To make a long story short, during my last two years of high school, I was working at the music store, playing gigs 4 nights a week, teaching private students in my basement studio at home and going to school. I was also head percussionist in the high school concert and marching bands, student director and band president, as well as being head percussionist in the Lima All-Area Concert Band. The house on Kelley Drive became little more than a “pit stop” for a little rest and recovery.

Love Walked In

What happened next changed everything. The plan was college (Ohio State had a famous School of Music), a music degree, a band to direct somewhere in Ohio, play some jazz, maybe get lucky and go someplace big – Chicago, New York, do some writing during the day, maybe a novel, maybe a blockbuster, but there would always be Ohio, surely. Where else did an Ohio boy go?

Caption: Virginia. Love walked in.

Then Virginia walked into my Spanish class and the world expanded by leaps and bounds. She was our first Youth for Understanding student. She came from Buenos Aires. She hadn’t wanted to come to Wapakoneta, had tried to change her destination to New York, LA, somewhere, anywhere that someone had heard of. But the program director talked her into it. He said, “You’ll have a unique experience, something different, unlike the kids that go to the major cities. Take my advice. Go.”

Within a week of her arrival, we had fallen in love. That was early winter. When she left the next June, I told her I’d be visiting her in Buenos Aires. She told me not to lie.

The next December, I sold my ’63 Chevrolet Biscayne and bought a ticket. I celebrated my nineteenth birthday aboard the Pan Am 707 Clipper that bore me to South America for the first time. When I landed in Buenos Aires for that month-long visit with the young woman I loved, I still didn’t know it was to be the start of a journey that would last the rest of my life.