JIM BOWSHER - LIFE 101

 My friend and writer colleague Jim Bowsher has the Big C.

That statement deserves a paragraph of its own. So does the next one:

It’s Stage Four. That’s usually thought of as the “ALL She Wrote” stage of that rotten scourge of a disease.

Jim Bowsher in his fabulous Rock Garden
Photo by Mary Jo Knoch - All rights reserved

I know a little bit about cancer. My father died of it. So did my mother. Both aged eighty. My father’s mother died of it at sixty-six. My father’s older brother at seventy-five, my father’s middle brother at about the same age as his mother, and their youngest brother, the reverend, who fought it with all of his grit and faith, managed to beat it until he was in his mid-eighties, when it finally took him.

One thing I’ve learned? It’s not a good death, I mean if there is such a thing.

I take after my mother’s side of the family. Despite her death by cancer, they mostly die of some sort of cardio-vascular disease. Somewhere that statement may hold out some glimmer of optimism for me—cardio-vascular is no picnic, mind you, but it’s not cancer either.

My little brother was the spitting image of the Newland clan—actually the cancer trend appears to have originated with the Henrys, my Grandma Alice Henry Newland’s family—but he flipped a giant bird to that part of the family’s cancerous medical history by dying of what appears to have been a massive stroke, in his sleep, at age fifty-one. It was exactly the sort of “bite me” thing he was famous for. But still, I think I might have been willing to give up part of the nearly two decades that I’ve survived him just to have him around a while longer. You couldn’t help but love that boy, and the world is a much less interesting place without him.

I also know something about diagnosis and prognosis. They’re not infallible. There is a great deal to be said for will, and what some of my British friends have been wont to call “sheer bloody-mindedness.”

Good example? My dad, Whitie. Bloody-mindedness got him through years of combat during World War II. And, despite having been a man who was often suicidal due to decades of chronic depression, he took on the challenge of cancer as if he were going to war. His was lung cancer, which has a five-year survival rate of only nine percent. When the diagnosis was made, and an attempt to remove one lung failed, he was told he probably had about six months. For all of his talk of suicide in earlier years, telling Whitie he couldn’t do something—like live—was a sure-fire way to get him to do it.  Result? He lived for another four years.

In that sense, Jim Bowsher reminds me a lot of Whitie.  Some time back, before I went to visit him, I called to see how he was doing. When he failed to answer the phone for a few days—in all fairness, that’s not unusual for Jim, who always has better things to do than answer the phone—I began to worry. The thing is, Jim only has a land line with an answering machine. He doesn’t own a cellphone or a computer (he still writes on a manual typewriter). He doesn’t have an email address. He isn’t on social media. In a very real way, for Jim it continues to be the sixties, when he and I were both growing up in Wapakoneta, Ohio, where he still resides, in his phenomenal museum of a house on the edge of his artistic masterpiece, the Rock Garden, which surrounds his Temple of Tolerance.  I wrote about both, and, indeed, about Jim, in a book titled The Rock Garden and Other Stories (available on Amazon, and at the Riverside Art Center in downtown Wapakoneta). As that book reveals, Jim lives in an analog world of his own making. It’s as if his entire environment were the contents of an enormous time capsule.

He does have a website, created by his friend and collaborator Scott Bruno. But other than knowing what content goes into it, Jim is completely estranged from that technological process. He’s incurably old school. But google his name and the references to him on the Web go on and on, references from Wapakoneta, from Ohio, from all over the United States and from around the world. So, Jim doesn’t really have to go to the Web. The Web comes to him.

Anyway, after three or four tries I finally get him on the phone—Jim seldom if ever calls somebody back even if they leave a message. And even though he is a dedicated writer—who is a disciplined keeper of the old rule, “Writers write every day”—he also discourages epistolary contact. Long ago I once offered to write back and forth via snail mail. “It would be a waste of your time,” he told me. “I’m a terrible correspondent. You’ll write me, I’ll read it and enjoy it, and I’ll never write you back.”

At the time, I said okay and left it at that. Now, however, when things are as finite as they’ve always been, but with my awareness of that fact heightened, I’m thinking I wish I’d written him anyway all these years, even if I’d never gotten an answer. It was selfish and lazy of me. I offered, he said don’t bother, and I didn’t. Such is life. Such is ego. 

“Jim! Finally! So glad you picked up.” I shout into the phone.

“Yeah, I heard your messages and was listening for the phone. So how are you?”

“I’m fine. I mean other than a few old-man issues. The more important question is, how are you?”

“I’m doing great. I continue to be a medical phenomenon. Nobody can understand how I’m doing so well. I mean, I’m a dead man walkin’, but I’m just fine. The thing is, I’m so busy, I keep forgetting I’m dying!”

Dead Man Walkin’—the term used for a condemned prisoner on the walk to execution—is what some of the little hoodlums that hang out in Jim’s yard will sing out when he emerges from the house. A lot of these troubled kids have been mentored by Jim. Some he has accompanied to juvenile court or visited in the reformatory. They, more than anyone else, will surely miss him when he’s gone. The dead-man-walkin’ thing is a private joke between them and Jim, which they both find amusing.

“The other day,” says Jim, “there was this really nice lady visiting here. She knew about the cancer and wanted to stop by.” So, we walk out into the yard and one of the kids goes, “Dead Man Walkin’!” really loud. Well, you should have seen that poor woman’s face!” says Jim. “She goes, ‘Oh my god, how awful!’ And I say, ‘Oh no, it’s fine. It’s just a joke between me and the guys. It doesn’t bother me, really, don’t worry.’ I’m like trying to comfort her,” Jim laughs. 

Jim's house on Wood St. in Wapakoneta

Later, he tells me about the advancement of his historical framing project. All of his energy right now appears to be going into that, and into creating a foundation to ensure the continuation of his permanent art installation (the Rock Garden) and his local historical research project after he is gone. Every stone, item, artifact, picture and clipping in Jim’s divinely and eclectically cluttered house and yard has a story behind it. He refuses any item that doesn’t. Somebody comes to Jim with some interesting and/or vintage doodad, Jim says, “What’s the story behind this?” If the person says, “I have no idea. It’s just something I picked up at a flea market,” Jim will say thanks but no thanks. “What’s important is the story. If you don’t know the story, why have the thing?”

It appears that it wasn’t until very recently that Jim began to realize he was mortal. That was when Scott Bruno began to collaborate with him, taking on the daunting job of photographing each of the tens of thousands of items in Jim’s story-artifact collection, as a means of documenting this unique historical inventory.

Out of that gargantuan task grew Jim’s “framing project”.

“So tell me more about these frames you’re doing,” I say when we’re talking on the phone (a call between Jim and me never lasts under an hour or so).

“It’s kind of hard to explain,” he says. “I’ll show some to you when you come. I’m taking pictures of everything and framing them with their stories. You’ll see. You are still coming, right?”

“Wouldn’t miss it!”

“Good, it’ll be great to see you.”

“So how’s treatment going?”

“They keep telling me I shouldn’t feel this good,” he laughs. “The other day when I went in, this oncology nurse—she and I have gotten to be good friends—she goes, ‘Jim, would you like more pain medication?’ I tell her no, that I take one now and then, but I’m really not having a lot of pain. She goes, ‘But Jim, at this stage, you’ve really got to be having a lot of pain.’” Jim’s cancer started out as prostate cancer then spread first from there to his hip. “So I tell her, ‘Look, I can drag a leg if it’ll make you feel better, but I’m doing great. No real pain, see?’”  A doctor friend whom he laughingly tells about this says he’s not the typical case, not what people in oncology are used to seeing. “Yours is all a matter of will and attitude, Jim, of not giving in to the disease.”

It’s true. Clearly, Jim is refusing to give in, refusing to become the disease.  He is refusing to become Jim Bowsher Stage Four. He is striving to remain, Jim Bowsher Phenomenon, which is who he has always been. And for now, at least, it’s working! “The other day at the oncology unit, I told one of the (baffled) staff, ‘Well, at least you’ll remember me when I’m gone.’” He said the woman answered, “That’s for sure, Jim. You’re unforgettable.”

Jim says he likes to cheer up the others awaiting oncological treatment. He finds it so depressing to walk in and see all of their sad, doomed faces. He wants to help them realize that they’re not dead yet, that any day they still open their eyes is a good day, or as Whitie used to say, “a helluva lot better than the alternative.”

“As soon as I walk in, I start hitting them with one-liners,” says Jim, “and pretty soon I’ve got the whole waiting room laughing. There’s this one guy who, when I walk in goes, ‘Oh christ! Here he is again, the stand-up comic of the oncology ward.” Jim guffaws.  It’s good, says Jim. Laughing’s good. It helps them feel better. Not so down and hopeless.

Toward the end of October, after a couple of days in Miami, where my plane from Buenos Aires landed, I fly up to Dayton, and then rent a car and drive to Wapakoneta, an hour away. I could just as easily have flown into Cleveland, where my sister Darla lives and where I have my Stateside residence, but I was really anxious to see Jim right away and see for myself how he was doing. I got there the night of the twenty-fourth, had dinner with my childhood friend—a mutual friend of Jim’s—Mark Gallimore, and was supposed to see Jim the next day, and then drive on up to Cleveland on the twenty-sixth to spend a couple of weeks.

So, the next morning, a Wednesday, I had a pleasant breakfast with a few former classmates—including Mark—at a local eatery known as the Coffey Cup, and was all set to go to Jim’s in the early afternoon. Another mutual friend, who pretty regularly visits Jim on Wednesdays, sent me a text, however, saying that Jim had told her he wasn’t up to seeing anybody. She said he was too nauseous to talk to anyone but hoped I’d get in touch and be sure and see him later.

I was worried. This didn’t sound good.  I tried without luck to reach him several times, then gave up and headed for Cleveland. Two weeks later, I was back in Wapakoneta for a week-long stay. One of the first things I did was start trying to get hold of Jim. I called three times without success and had decided to just go knock on the door. I was only staying a block away at the Moonflower Inn, a lovely little cottage for one that I rent when I’m back in town. Finally, however, I got him on the phone.

“Wow, Jim!” I said. “I’ve been worried.”

“Why? I’m fine.”

“Well, when Philippa told me you were too ill to see us on the twenty-fifth, it worried the hell out of me, and then I had to go up to Cleveland for two weeks. I left you a couple of messages.”

“Yes, I heard them. I’m fine. That thing on the twenty-fifth was just some stomach thing. Nothing to do with the cancer. Just indigestion or something. I was fine the next day! Sorry I missed you. I was really hoping you’d be back”

We make plans to see each other the following day, a Saturday. We always meet at Jim’s place and there, surrounded by his inspiring chaos of stories and things, give free rein to our imaginations and talk about everything and everyone under the sun. But this time Jim says, “We can’t stay at my place. I have all the stuff for my frames spread all over the house.”

“I don’t mind. I love going to your house.”

“Yeah, but there’s no place to sit!”

He suggested we meet as Woody’s Diner, a bar and grill on Wood Street, just up the block (between Jim’s house and the Moonflower), which he and I have always favored.  But we were also supposed to be meeting our friends Mark Gallimore, Tom Shaw (who had flown in from Charleston, South Carolina), and Mary Jo Knoch. When I mentioned Woody’s to Mary Jo, she said, “No, it’ll be hard to talk there. Just come out to my place. I’ll make a barley beef soup and some cornbread.”

Mary Jo's place near the Village of Fryburg

“What should I bring?” I asked.

“Pie,” she said. So I went and bought an entire three-berry pie at Bob Evans.

When I called Tom and he asked what he should bring, I said, “Beer.”

So we were set.

When I went to pick up Jim to take him to Mary Jo’s, he wasn’t quite ready, so he invited me in. I immediately saw what he had meant about “nowhere to sit.” Everywhere there were picture frames and stacks of content to mount in them—pictures, cards, carefully-typed texts, drawings, etc.  Stuff everywhere, on tables, in chairs, on the couch, up the stairs…everywhere.

I got out my phone to take a picture.

“Don’t take any pictures,” said Jim brusquely.

“Why not?” I said. “This is great!”

“Please don’t, Dan,” Jim said tersely. This was one of those moments when Jim Bowsher would suddenly become a stranger, an enigma, even to his friends. This was when, in his own words, he was “at the service of his muse.” This was Jim Bowsher the writer, the historian, the collector. This was the Jim Bowsher who was friends with no one—Jim in Jim’s own world, a world to which no one else had passage.

I looked disappointed and said, “Come on, Jim. This is me. I can’t help myself. I’m a journalist.”

He squirmed and said, “I’d rather you didn’t. I never let anybody see the process when I was creating the Rock Garden. And I don’t want anybody to see the process while I’m creating the frames.”

I put my phone away and sulked while he went off to finish getting ready to go.

In the car, he said he was worried about his brother Walt, that he’d been calling him and Walt didn’t answer. Walt was only very recently widowed and still trying to cope with his wife Aida’s death.

I said, “Oh, don’t worry. Mary Jo said she’d invited him out to her place too, and that he said he was going.”

Jim looked relieved. “Oh, great, so he probably went out there already.”

Walt Bowsher

Sure enough, when we get there, Walt is already ensconced in the most comfortable chair in the living room, and is chatting with Gallimore and Mary Jo.

It was a beautiful autumn day—brisk, with azure sky contrasting with the last of the brightly changing foliage. Mary Jo’s place is a quarter-mile off the road, just past the Village of Fryburg, a few miles south of Wapakoneta.  It’s a little old shingled farmhouse with a good shed and a tumbledown old barn on a few acres of land, surrounded by rolling fields and a nice woodlot. It’s a lovely, peaceful place, and on this bright fall day it seemed utterly idyllic.

At first, in Mary Jo’s comfy living room, we chatted inconsequentially and took turns spoiling her three cats, Fred, Bill and the venerable old Captain Jack. Over beer, however, we entered into more controversial territory—small towns versus big cities, Israelis versus Palestinians, conservatives versus liberals. The tone rose occasionally, and Jim, far from presenting the profile of a dying man, held his own and gave as good as he got.  But in the end, it was a civilized discussion of issues among intellectually sound individuals who understood the value of different points of view and respected each other’s conclusions even if they might not agree with them.

Tom Shaw and Jim debate small towns v big cities

Walt, through all of this, sat smiling quizzically while he petted a very contented Bill. He occasionally offered some contribution, but mostly remained attentive, moving his gaze from one debater to the other, as if watching a ping-pong match. He was the first to leave, because he had a jam session with a group of other amateur musicians. But he was sure to let us all know how much he had enjoyed the afternoon, and thanked Mary Jo profusely for the invitation.  

Mary Jo’s wonderful, nutritious soup overrode debate, as did her cornbread and warm butter.  We then switched from beer to coffee and pie and later sat contently together, playing with the cats again.

Jim had brought along a few of his frames and passed them around, waiting to see our reactions. For me, it was like a light had suddenly been turned on. I got it, understood the dichotomy that Jim was seeking to project with each frame. One story on the front, the same, but another, story on the back. The frames were a stroke of genius, the projection of a voiceless debate between two opposing points of view, or between fact and legend, reality and fantasy. Once again, as in the past when I was writing about him, I was blown away by the profound yet simple messages with which Jim was striving to imbue his widely varied audience.  It was a didactic, thought-provoking idea, and nothing short of analog brilliant.

In the car, as I drove Jim back to his home in Wapakoneta, I half-expected him to revisit the issues debated. Instead, he said, “Wow, did you see Walt’s face? He was fascinated! With his friends, who are mostly of like mind, he doesn’t get a chance very often to hear this kind of debate. He really enjoyed it! I could tell.”

Jim explains one of his historical frames

Any thought of the issues had flown the coop. Jim was entirely focused on his brother, his best friend, and on the great afternoon he’d had, at a time when he was in pain. A time when it was exactly what he needed.

The next time Jim and I met, it was for breakfast.  I picked him up and we went to the Coffey Cup. The weather was accompanying me for my stay. A beautiful blue and gold morning with a light frost. I had asked Jim the day before when he wanted to go.

“You tell me,” he said.

“I can go whenever you like.”

“How about nine-thirty? Too late?”

“That’s fine,” I said.

When I arrived and knocked on door at nine-thirty sharp, it took a while for Jim to answer. When he finally came to the door, he said, “Sorry, I slept in. I’ll be right with you.” And he went off again upstairs to finish getting ready. I spent the time to once again browse among the extraordinary collection of items that cover every surface in the house—walls, tables, shelves, everything crowded with vintage pieces, but more than anything else, with countless mementos of life in Wapakoneta and its environs for the past two hundred years and beyond, clear back to the lives of its indigenous peoples before Europeans had ever heard of America.  You couldn’t get bored waiting, especially if Jim had told you the stories of some of the pieces. And in my case he had already, many times, in the past.  

By the time we reached the Coffey Cup, the place was burgeoning with the breakfast crowd. It was the kind of place where breakfast diners weren’t the type to eat and run. They had time to dawdle over eggs and meat and potatoes and pancakes while drinking hot coffee and engaging in neighborly conversation.

The Coffey Cup from the inside.

Fortunately, Jim and I found a great table by a window near the cash register where someone had just cleared out. This table wasn’t going to be much of a money-maker this morning. More than occupying it, we were taking it hostage. And Jim, who said he no longer had much of an appetite in the morning, only ordered whole wheat toast and butter, while I decided on the cinnamon French toast with maple syrup. We both ordered black coffee, but that was going to be a losing proposition for the proprietor as well, since we never said “no” to refills, every time someone passed by with a fresh pot.

 This time the meeting was one on one. We were, as we say in Argentina, “in our sauce,” talking about the things of interest to the two of us—his yard, his house, his projects (didn’t it seem astonishing that a man with stage four cancer was still awash with projects for the future?) I talked about my books and blogs. We talked about writing and writers. He recalled anecdotes about his youthful adventures when he traveled far and wide making a pest of himself until he could meet some of the writers he most admired. I couldn’t help but recall that when Beat Generation writer Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out, one of the items pinned with a magnet to the refrigerator in his kitchen where he did the deed was one of Jim’s haiku poems, in Jim’s own hand.

And we talked about his poetry—his haiku. Earlier, during one of our long-long-distance phone calls he had told me that he was finally considering publishing them. During the reorganization of his house, he had decided to see if he had enough for a book of haiku poetry. Turned out he did…more than enough, in fact: approximately ten thousand haiku by James Bowsher. He told me that he was now writing haiku about cancer. “You write what you know.”

He had tried one out on his oncology nurse friend. In the waiting room, she saw him scribbling in the notebook he carries in his hip pocket and said, “Jim, can I ask you what you’re writing?”

“Sure,” says Jim. “A poem.”

“What about?”

“Cancer.”

“Do you remember it? Can you tell it to me?”

“Sure,” Jim says. And right then and there, as if I were the nurse, he thinks for a few seconds, looks at the ceiling, and recites the little three-line poem. It compares cancer to a predator shark, swimming in his blood, waiting until the time is right to attack and rip him apart.

“It made her cry,” says Jim. For writer types like us, making somebody cry (or laugh, or think, or remember, or rejoice), well, that’s a bullseye. Says Jim, “She goes, ‘That’s exactly right Jim. That’s exactly what it’s like.’”

The breakfast crowd thins out. For a while we’re almost alone in the place, still drinking the coffee they generously keep offering us. Then, the lunch crowd starts drifting in. And still, we remain holed up in our corner under the window by the door. And soon the place is loaded with patrons again. But when we’re on a roll like this, it’s hard to break it, even though neither of us has the stamina we once had any more.

Finally, it’s Jim who suggests we call it a day. After all, we’ve confiscated this table for the past four hours. It’s the first time in any of our marathon conversations that Jim has ever been the one to suggest a pause. Whenever someone he enjoys talking to suggests ending a conversation, Jim is famous for saying, “Okay, but just one more story. You’re gonna love this one!” I figure he must be getting tired. It’s only natural. But then again, maybe he’s just anxious to get back to his frames.

Jim has always been a fanatical baseball fan. And if there was one thing that had become clear to me, it was that Jim’s philosophy on life had a lot in common with that of baseball great Yoga Berra, who once famously quipped, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

In the car on the way back to his house to drop him off, Jim says, “Thanks Dan. This was great! I’m so glad we got together.”

The week in Wapak goes by like a lightning flash. Suddenly, it’s my last day. Again, a gorgeous autumn day. Cold, but clear and windless. There’s thick frost on my rented car when I get up. I go in the morning to have breakfast with a friend and former employer, Leslie Rigali. I worked for her for a year as a consultant in nineteen-ninety, when she was the owner of Davanti Media in Lima, an industrial city twelve miles north of Wapak. We created some interesting media projects together.

Moonflower Inn, "my home back home" in Wapakoneta

We haven’t seen each other in thirty years, but when we meet at the Harding Highway Panera in Lima, it’s almost as if no time at all has passed. It’s a relaxed, newsy conversation that lasts a good hour and a half.  Toward the end, it occurs to me, as we’re talking about my books, that this is precisely the person—a crackerjack businesswoman with years of public relations and advertising work behind her—who might be able to help me improve my book circulation in the Lima area.

I self-consciously bring the subject up, explaining that I had no intention of doing so, and she is immediately all over it, with ideas and suggestions based on her long experience and impeccable contacts. She says she would be more than happy to help me. We both come away from our breakfast happy to have renewed our friendship.

It’s a great start to my last day back home in Ohio.

As the hours tick by, I try to pack as much as I can into one day. Mary Jo and I meet up for coffee in downtown Wapak. We go to Winans, a place with great coffee and even better chocolates, both of which I try. It’s still such a lovely day, if chilly. that we decide to sit at the single table that Winans has on the sidewalk. A chance for me to revisit my home town at street level. Mary Jo knows a lot of people in town and a few of them stopped to chat a while at our sidewalk table. A little later, after we had finished our coffee, we also stopped a little further up the street to talk with the two amiable ladies who run Macky’s Health and Hemp. The store is a medical cannabis dispensary. Had you told me a few years back that someone would be selling cannabis on the main drag in Wapakoneta, I would have said you were crazy. Later, one of the ladies approaches us again while I am taking some pictures and holds up my book, Visions of What Used to Be, and says, “I just realized…this is you, right?”  I nod. “Would you sign it?”

She made my day. So did seeing that my books were once again in a brick and mortar store, and right in the front window of the Riverside Art Center, a Wapakoneta cultural venue, where I had earlier left ten signed copies of each book.

Mary Jo and I walked around town some more, acting like tourists and taking pictures as if this were the first time either of us had ever set foot in downtown Wapakoneta. Eventually, however, it was time for me to go back to the Moonflower and pack. It was about four when I got back.

Meanwhile, Mary Jo arranged with Gallimore to meet her at six at La Grande Pizza, and then she arranged with Jim Bowsher to pick him up and take him as well. I was to get there as soon as I could.  My packing and straightening up of my quarters at the Moonflower finished, I arrived just after six at La Grande and met my three friends at the door. We sat, fittingly, in a place that was once occupied by what was then known as “the front table”, back when this same building was my father’s place of business for a quarter-century from the mid-forties to the late-sixties.

The Teddy Bear, with Whitie at the head of the front table

Back then, the place was called the Teddy Bear, and for many years, the “front table”, a long, Formica-topped table with eight chairs, was where some of the town’s movers and shakers met for breakfast and to exchange gossip. My grandfather, Murel Newland, had hired local contractor Walter Stinebaugh to build the building toward the end of World War II, so that his three oldest sons would have a place of business to come home to when they returned from military service. In the early years, Whitie was in business with his older brother Red and his younger brother Chuck, but they both eventually moved on to other activities and the Teddy Bear became our family’s business, which my father and mother operated.

The gang at La Grande
Jim, Mark, Dan and Mary Jo

It was only the third time I’d been in that building in more than fifty years since my father had sold it. It was greatly changed. But in my mind’s eye, I could visualize it exactly as it had been. The typical diner, all chrome, Formica, glass blocks and fifties colors. I could remember the cigarette machine beside the door, the jukebox just behind where Mark was sitting and the cigar and candy case at the far end of the counter against the kitchen wall. I could see the old kitchen too, and the backroom and storeroom, the booths along the side wall of the dining room and the tables in the middle, the wrap-around glass-block counter with two stools at the end—one of which now formed part of Jim’s eclectic collection of Wapakoneta memorabilia.

We enjoyed excellent pizza and cold draft. The conversation was more nostalgic than political, remembering people and anecdotes from the town, this town, where we had all grown up.  Eventually, however, it was time to say good-bye. Good-byes seem temporary when you’re young, but over seventy, they begin to have a permanence about them, a lack of certainty, a sense of hope without expectation.

Outside in the street, we all hugged each other and, for lack of anything better to say, said, “See you next time.”

When I hugged Jim, I couldn’t help noting how small he seemed. Light as a cat. I said, “Jim, it’s been great. Hopefully, I’ll be back in a year or so.”

Jim said, “I’ll be here.”

I believed him.

 

RUNNING LATE

 

Hi everybody!
I won't be getting a blog out today. I'm traveling. I'll be back in my studio sometime after the seventeenth. We'll catch up then!

YANKEE REDUX - FORT AMANDA: PICNICKING IN THE GRAVEYARD

 

When I was growing up in rural Ohio, in the 1950s and ‘60s, we, like a lot of other Midwestern families back then, liked going on picnics. Our major family reunions on both sides back then were almost always picnics, some held in places a couple of hours away or more by car.

Fort Amanda 1812-1815 - Artist's conception

On these occasions, my mother, grandmothers and aunts would spend the night before and the early morning preparing some of their tastiest dishes to take along and share and no one skimped on what they brought, so that such outings turned out to be veritable gastronomic events of Viking feast-like proportions: Picnic baskets, covered dishes, grocery sacks and dessert carriers arrived heavy-laden with finger-lickin’ pan-fried chicken, succulent baked ham, cheesy scalloped potatoes, sweet-and-sour coleslaw, deviled and pickled eggs, macaroni and relish salad, potato salad, three-bean salad, garden-fresh sliced tomatoes, baked beans with franks, potato and corn chips, syrupy fruit salad, marshmallowy heavenly hash, devil’s food brownies, white cake with creamy white or fudgy chocolate frosting, rhubarb pie, lemon merengue pie, chocolate merengue pie, Dutch apple pie, cherry pie, peach pie...just about any delicious thing you could think of, accompanied by gallon Thermos jugs of strong hot coffee, iced tea, lemonade and several flavors of Kool-Aid.

The farthest we went, and on several occasions, was with my mother’s family to the Indiana State Park, an exciting place that featured sprawling woodlands, a small herd of bison, a tall, scary smoke-watch tower that you could climb if you had the nerve, and lots of trails to hike near the picnic grounds. But we also went to places like the campgrounds at Lake Loramie or Sidney’s hilly, wooded city park (both in Shelby County where my mother had lived as a little girl), to Faurot Park in the industrial city of Lima fifteen miles north of our town, where my father had grown up, to nearby Grand Lake Saint Marys, or to any of a number of locations that my Grandfather Newland decided were halfway points between wherever my father’s youngest brother—a Methodist minister—was posted and Wapakoneta, where the rest of us lived.

But the location where most of our family picnics took place, the one we went to on the spur of the moment, when somebody said, “Hey, let’s meet for a picnic this Sunday,” or “It’s such nice fall weather...How about a weenie roast?” was always Fort Amanda.

Ft. Amanda National Cemetery

Now, what might seem odd about this to anyone not from our area is that Fort Amanda is best known for being a designated National Cemetery, dating back to the War of 1812. At some point, somebody decided to declare the site a State Park and, later on, somebody else thought, as Ohioans are wont to do, that the grounds adjacent to the cemetery would make a good place to have a few picnic tables and grills, and then a shelter house and hand-pump—to bring up water so sulfurous that the rotten egg smell was enough to knock you down—were added, and an outhouse for women and another one for men, and suddenly, next to the graveyard, was Fort Amanda Memorial Park.

Oddly enough, despite being sort of the backyard to a cemetery, Fort Amanda isn’t a depressing place at all. Or at least it never seemed so to us. Located nine miles northwest of my home town, you get there along lovely State Route 198, a two-lane road that wends its way through some slightly rolling, rural, West Central Ohio countryside. Some of what were once green and fertile farms when I was a boy have been sold off piece by piece to the wealthier members of what has become, essentially, a bedroom community—since the super highway, a more urban society and corporate farming carried away jobs, local trade and our small-town culture to other places—to build their sprawling country-squire dream homes. But much of the landscape still looks a great deal as it did when I was young, and I take great pleasure in driving that road whenever I’m back for a visit.

Woodland along the Auglaize River

The park and cemetery have been carved out of the once vast Ohio woodlands, from the times before our Scots-Irish and German ancestors immigrated and leveled the forest to make way for farming. So going to Fort Amanda is a little like cupping your hands, blinder-style, around your eyes, gazing in through the window of an intricate dollhouse or toy train station and trying to imagine what it would be like to actually go in there and walk around. Except that in this case, what you’re looking at through the wrong end of your impromptu telescope, is a tiny piece of Ohio that probably looks quite a bit like it did two hundred years ago, when the land was just first partially cleared to build the fort. Gently rolling woodland peopled with hickory, oak, maple and sycamore, among other forest species, a deep gorge cut by the tawny waters of the Auglaize River, on which the fort was built—and which also runs through the center of our town—and its accompanying bluffs that afford picnickers timeless, bucolic views from the picnic grounds.

Picnic grounds at Ft. Amanda

To us, this wooded paradise in the midst of Ohio farm country was so familiar that, despite our playtime fantasies, it was hard to believe that Fort Amanda had ever been as important as it was in American history, but it indeed had a key purpose in the Early American struggle to maintain US independence. The defeat of American General William Hull at Fort Detroit had already blasted a major hole in US defenses against the British and Native American onslaught in the War of 1812, and now most of the Michigan Territory had fallen into enemy hands. The neighboring Ohio Territory was thus left vulnerable to continuing British expansion.

American commander, General William Henry Harrison, realized that the only hope of containing the British advantage and, hopefully, winning the war would be to ensure that their edge didn’t extend beyond the Michigan border. Having no federal troop strength in the area, he called up the Ohio and Kentucky militias to defend the Ohio Territory. But Nature presented him with a formidable enemy of its own: the Great Black Swamp, a twenty-five-mile-wide, hundred-mile-long strip of glacial marshland in Northwestern Ohio that lay in the former bed of an ancient precursor to Great Lake Erie. Trying to move men, animals, weaponry and supplies through that difficult terrain, Harrison knew, would be logistical and strategic suicide. So he decided instead to make use of barges on a Western Ohio supply route formed by two rivers: the Saint Marys and the Auglaize, both of which flow generally north, about a hundred miles toward Lake Erie.

In November of 1812, General Harrison mapped out a spot in West-Central Ohio for the establishment of a supply depot on the high western bank of the Auglaize—where an Ottawa village had once stood—and sent orders to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Pogue of the Kentucky Mounted Militia, and a veteran of the decisive Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, to build a frontier fortress at that site. Pogue and his men complied immediately, swiftly erecting the fortress in timber-stockade style. They built four two-storey blockhouses at the corners of a square area measuring about one hundred sixty by one hundred sixty feet and connected them with eleven-foot-tall timber palisades all around the perimeter. Colonel Pogue decided to christen the finished fort “Amanda”, after his twelve-year-old daughter, Hannah Amanda Pogue.

In February of 1813, a company of Ohio militiamen arrived to re-garrison the new fort, under the command of Captain Thompson Ward. Ward and his men would almost immediately expand the installations to handle an ever-increasing flow of men and goods that included not only victuals, munitions and whiskey, but also livestock and other bulk rations to help make the fort a sustainable source of food for combat troops. Fort Amanda thus was to become a key debarkation destination for men and supplies being sent north in the American thrust to recapture Fort Detroit in Michigan.

Painting by Edward Percy Moran of
Perry's crossing to the USS Niagra

In early September of that year, a fleet of nine vessels of the fledgling United States Navy, under the command of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, engaged six ships of the British Royal Navy at Put-In-Bay on Lake Erie off the coast of the Ohio Territory. The superior firepower of the British ships placed Perry at a disadvantage at the onset of the battle and his flagship, the USS Lawrence, was hammered to pieces by the British guns. But as it was adrift and sinking, he and the handful of still able men aboard set off a final salvo of cannon fire before abandoning ship. What was left of his crew rowed Perry in a small boat through heavy cannon fire to the USS Niagara, from where he directed the rest of the naval battle. Far from retreating or surrendering as the British commander expected, Perry ordered his subordinate officers to move American schooners closer to the battle and then, he himself sailed the Niagara into the breach, pounding the British vessels with gunfire at close range until they were disabled and forced to surrender, with Perry ultimately capturing them for the US Navy. He then sent his now famous message to General Harrison: “We have met the enemy and they are ours; two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.”  

This decisive battle cut main supply lines to the British troops and their coalition of Native American allies under Chief Tecumseh at Detroit. With the US in control of Lake Erie until the end of the war, and with Americans being supplied from the south through outposts like Fort Amanda, General Harrison was eventually able to rout the British and their Native allies, recovering Detroit and then pursuing the fleeing enemy to a final showdown known as The Battle of Thames, where Tecumseh was killed, and his Native coalition dismembered.

A soldier's grave

Fort Amanda remained active until the end of the war in 1814 (the final battle was actually fought in New Orleans—with victory going to General Andrew Jackson—in January of 1815). Troops abandoned the frontier fort in 1815, but it immediately became an outpost favored by settlers who moved into the area following the war.

When my sister, brother, cousins and I were kids, the place seemed huge and mysterious to us. Now when I see it, I realize how tiny it is—a scant few acres of what remains of primitive Ohio. But back then, for us, it was replete with the echoes of history, and although our parents didn’t know a great deal of its background, the little that they told us filled our heads with fantasies about the Native Amerians who had originally lived there, the French hunters and trappers who had frequented the region and gave our river its name (loosely translated as muddy waters or frozen waters depending on whose interpretation you believe), and the first US settlers to push west into the Ohio Territory from the frontiers of the original thirteen American states.

The monument at Ft. Amanda

We imagined the soldiers there manning the fort, dominating the high ground and fighting off the British troops and Indians who tried to attack them from the opposite bank of the river below, pretending we were them as we gathered around the Fort Amanda monument as if it were the fort itself, a monolith in the midst of open country that was a magical place in which we were invulnerable to enemy fire. While our mothers were back in the picnic area, busy setting the tables for lunch, my cousin Greg, who was my same age and my closest friend—and who could climb just about anything from the tallest trees to light and telephone poles—would grapple his way up the base of the monument and then shinny up its tall obelisk, pretending he was the sentry, and telling us when the enemy was drawing near, so that we could open fire on them. Munitions were always short in our fantasies, and we had to make every shot count. “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes,” was the standing order for an entire generation of Golden-Age-Hollywood movie-goers.

But since both Greg and I had been told we had Native American blood flowing in our veins as well (both on our mothers’ sides) we also, in some renegade corner of our minds, understood the rage of the Indians as their territories were wrested from them by the white man, so we would also sometimes pretend to be Shawnee or Ottawa braves. We sheltered in the trunks of two huge hollow trees near the river (Greg was sure Indians really had lived in those trees, “since that’s what they did when they didn’t have a teepee,” and it was exciting to believe he was right and that we were where some aboriginal ancestor of ours had huddled before us, despite the fact that our mothers warned us that the only things huddling there were maybe black widow spiders).

On those days I envied Greg his dark skin, straight black hair, brown eyes and slight build as we tried to “be quiet as Indians” hiking through the woods and sneaking up the steep slopes to make a surprise appearance in the picnic areas, where our mothers were calling us for lunch. I, with my German frame and light skin, eyes and hair, as well as my natural lack of physical grace, was no match for him when it came to claiming our Native heritage.

After lunch there was also always a walk with the adults through the cemetery, to peruse the inscriptions on the nineteenth-century eroded gravestones, before crossing a wooden bridge—its timbers smelling in summer of the acrid tar with which they were preserved— over a ravine, leading to the Fort Amanda monument on the site of the old fort. But not without a stop at the grave, just over the bridge, of Captain Edward Dawson, which lay within a wrought iron fence, separate from the cemetery proper. Legend had it that the captain had been off on a sort of nature hike outside the stockade, picking grapes from some of the wild vines that still formed part of the forest thicket when we were children, when he was killed by Native archers who spotted him from the other side of the river. It chilled us to read the inscription on his headstone: Captain Edward Dawson—Murdered by Indians.

Captain Dawson's chilling epitaph

Up by the monument itself, we were ever-fascinated by a heavy, round, concrete cover, which, our fathers conjectured, was probably the entrance to an old munitions magazine where black powder and other military supplies had been kept. I have little doubt that if it hadn’t been as large and impenetrably heavy as it was, we boys would have found a way to move it aside and find out what secrets it was hiding. As it was, we could only speculate that, if there were only some way to get down there, we would surely find old muskets, uniforms or cavalry sabers. Or at the very least, some telling sign of the soldiers who had passed this way a century and a half before us.

On a recent trip back to Ohio, I walked the grounds at Fort Amanda again. It was a weekday, and I was alone. It was a pleasant, personal and nostalgic experience. Now, I was accompanied not only by the ghosts of the soldiers who had manned the fort in 1812 and ‘13, or of the ones who here ended their days and are buried, but also by the remembrance of loved ones who have long-since died and with whom I had first come here so long ago on pleasant summer and autumn outings.

I can see it now for what it is. A small, quiet place for a pleasant picnic, an almost forgotten National Cemetery to commemorate the final stage of the struggle for American independence that had begun three and a half decades before, a short hike through the hilly, wooded terrain of primitive Ohio, a tiny spot on the map, maintained by the efforts of the Ohio Historical Society that few tourists are ever likely to see.

But for me it will always be a venue that nurtured my childhood fantasies and a place where my family—both immediate and extended—shared some precious, happy days. 

 

YANKEE REDUX — SNOW DAYS

Winter was long and cold this year in Patagonia. Spring is finally here. The wild apples and plums are blooming and the Spanish broom in budding. But the accumulation of snow on the mountaintops is incredible for this time of the year, and the mountain lakes are so brim full that their beaches are practically non-existent.

Winter in my corner of Patagonia

I was just thinking about how, here, in Patagonia, we’re all breathing a sigh of relief that sunny days are ahead, while back in my home town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, friends and relatives are enjoying the blue-and-gold days of autumn, but already bracing for the coming winter, which can be as inclement as winters in Patagonia.

Some years ago, I reflected on my mixed feelings about snow. In the dead of Patagonian winter, the sound of heavy winter rain would often awaken me when it transitioned into snow. The rhythm of it on the galvanized metal roofing of my cabin in the mountains in Patagonia. The sound of it, gentle, deceivingly soothing if I didn’t know what it meant. Muffled, it sounds, drumming rather than pattering, thumping now and again as well, plopping as rain turns to wet snow and slithers off the branches above the house to fall like a heavy cream pie on the roof.

I raise myself on my elbow, draw back the curtain over the window next to my bed and peek out. It won’t be dawn for another few hours and from this angle, all I can see are the undersides of the boughs of the ancient beeches that surround the house, towering over it, to the east, south and north. With the waning moon behind the clouds, it’s hard to tell the state of affairs: rain, rain mixed with snow, or just snow—the dangerous kind, heavy and wet.

I hear three or four soggy, weighty plunks on the roof and know I can no longer hope for rain. It’s snow, no question. Kneeling on the mattress to get a better look, even in this pre-dawn darkness, I can see how the Spanish broom and smaller trees—laurels and junipers—are hunkering down under the crushing burden of a very wet and heavy snow.

Back then, I would almost immediately get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach and start getting anxious. Better charge the battery on my laptop, charge up the flashlight batteries. Oh, and my cell phone. If the land lines are down, the cells are all we’ll have. I get up as quietly as possible so as not to wake up my wife and pad barefoot into my studio, where I plug in various and sundry chargers and devices. I then go back to bed. I try to relax and go back to sleep. I look at the luminescent hands of the alarm clock. Four a.m.—too early to start the day. But who can sleep? I lie there staring into the darkness, trying to gauge the weight and type of the snow. The worst, I conclude, heavy as lead. Like industrial quantities of lemon ice-cream piling up on the branches of the trees in the windless pre-dawn hours. That means downed power lines, snapped phone cables, blocked roads. It means days of work lost, clients upset, deadlines missed.

I’ll never get back to sleep this way, so I decide to change focus, to think about something else, or to think about this but in a different light. I think about when I was a little boy. Oh, how I loved the snow back in Ohio! I wanted it to snow always. Back then, when I was small and, in fact, until I was middle-aged and moved to Patagonia, I was a snow fanatic. I knew when it was coming, had an intimate relationship with it. I even fancied I could make it snow, so intimate was the bond. I literally had a nose for it. Could smell it on the air, the same way I could smell frost, before it came.

When I was in my forties, I traveled back in Ohio, alone, for a visit with my folks in October. It was the last time everybody was still well —my father, Whitie, and my mother, Reba Mae, and my aunts and uncles, my little brother, whom nobody would ever have guessed would be dead less than a decade later. Nor would my sister and I have guessed that we would be each other’s only immediate family by then. The last time, in other words, when things would be normal and going “home” would just be that, going home.

Ohio had been having that crisp, gold and blue weather of Midwestern autumn. October blue days, Reba Mae used to call them. A gorgeous, euphoric kind of weather in which it seems nothing could possibly go wrong. Cloudless, china-blue skies, the tawny wheat still in some fields, waiting to be harvested, the cornfields just hard dry dirt and raw stubble now, strewn and studded here and there with missed ears and scattered kernels of sun-parched maize, the soft maples already standing stark and stripped against the azure sky, their silver and golden foliage lying like fine lingerie passionately shed at their feet, the sugar maples putting on the last act of their fiery red-leafed show before also letting fall their autumn hues, the oaks looking plucked and sparse with just a single dark-reddish-brown leaf still clinging here and there to their branches, as if trying hard to withstand the temptation to simply let go and allow a random autumnal breeze to carry it drifting down to the ground, where  grey and red squirrels scrambled to collect acorns for their winter hibernation.

Autumn in Ohio. Photo by Bren Haas 

Paying my respects to my native land—this particular rural land solely of which I am a citizen—on the day before I was to return to Argentina, I had gone for a drive in a borrowed car on the familiar back roads of West-Central Ohio. In the auric autumn-light of late afternoon, alone on the Buckland-Holden Pike, I had been privileged to watch a large white-tailed buck, his head holding high his impressive rack of antlers, bolt from the open field where he had been grazing on abandoned corn, make a dash ahead of my on-coming car, vault the seven-strand fence in one impressively graceful leap, gallop and skitter across the pavement, so close I fancied I could see the white of his startled eye, and jump the fence on the other side of the road, before cantering off into a nearby woodlot, where he disappeared from view. It was a sign, I thought, a blessing, an omen: Life was good.

That night, after supper with my parents, in the house where I had been brought up from age twelve, and where they would live for more than forty years, I went for a last-evening walk around town, stopping off at the Alpha for a couple of drafts, bellied up to the gorgeous old African mahogany bar that was owner Bill Gutman’s pride and joy, before trekking the mile or so back home. When I came out of the Alpha, I noticed the weather was changing. My light windbreaker was insufficient for this new twist and I shivered when I exited the homey warmth of the stuffy bar onto the main drag of town. There was a strange, frigid breeze out of the north and the sky was fast clouding over. The air seemed charged and somehow “electric” and, walking home, when I looked back from where I had just come, the streetlamps of Main Street were casting that eerie orange glow, so typical of winter nights, against the clouds.

It was only October 22^nd, but when I breathed in the night air, the scent was unmistakable. Even after twenty years of living in Buenos Aires, my rural Ohio nose knew right away what that indescribable fragrance was. Snow!

When I got back, Reba Mae was dozing in front of the TV and Whitie was in the kitchen dishing himself up a sundae of chocolate ice-cream, peanut butter and Hershey’s chocolate syrup.

“Hey, Dan!” Whitie said when I waltzed in through the back door.

“Hey yourself, Dad, how’s it going?”

“Okeydokey. Want some ice-cream?”

“No thanks. Hey Dad, know what? I think it’s going to snow tonight.”

“Snow!!” he cried, so loudly that it jolted Reba Mae out of her nap in the living room. “No way, Dan. It’s October, for chrissake! Hell, you aren’t gonna get any snow around here till Thanksgiving at least.”

Whitie had never been a fan of snow, but his last job before he retired had been as a route salesman for a local cheese manufacturer and after sixteen endless winters of slipping and sliding around on rural Ohio roads and city streets in a truck loaded with twelve tons of cheese, he had grown to unequivocally hate snow. “Look at that white shit comin’ down out there,” he would say when it started snowing. I didn’t get it. For me snow was about the most amazing and beautiful thing on earth.

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “The air sure smells like it.”

“Smells like it?” he grinned dubiously, “Aw, com’on now, Dan, don’t try an’ bullshit your ol’ man."

“No, really, Dad, I can smell it on the air.”

“Naw, never happen. November, maybe. Christmas for sure. But October? I think you and your schnozz have been in South America too long."

“Okay, Dad, if you say so. But I’ll tell you what, if it doesn’t snow tonight, it’s gonna miss a helluva good chance.”

“Nah, not to worry, Dan. I’d wager good money on it.” Strong words for the Whitie, who had a reputation for being more than just careful with his money.

“Actually, I’m not worried,” I said. “I’d kind of like for it to snow.”

“Well, yeah, because you’re leaving tomorrow, and going back to sunny South America, but the rest of us have to stay here and put up with it after you’re gone and it’s too damned early for it to start snowing already, damnit.” He was so adamant that I half expected him to forbid me to ‘make it snow’. 

An early snow in Wapakoneta, Ohio

But in the morning, we awoke to a four inches of pristine white covering everything. It was beautiful. But I wasn't anxious for my father to get up and see it.

When he did, he was almost furious. Whitie took this miraculous autumn snow personally—a personal affront—and blamed me for it. I had wished it on him!

“You drive,” he said, holding out his car keys to me with two fingers in a gesture whose disdain was only thinly veiled. “I had sixteen years of driving a truck on this white shit. Any time I can let somebody else do it, I will.”

I shrugged, smiled and took the keys. I opened the garage door and then climbed into the big Mercury Grand Marquis and started it up. I had tried to explain to Whitie on numerous occasions that these modern, fuel-injected, computerized cars didn’t have to be warmed up like the cars of the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties that he grew up and matured on. But it was no use. It was easier not to try and fight his routines or soundly developed opinions. His rule of thumb was a warm up of at least ten minutes, so ten minutes it was. His house, his car, his way.

As the exhaust from the big Merc billowed white into the unseasonable chill of this October morning, I went back into the house, retrieved my luggage from the room I had shared as a boy with my kid brother, carried it out to the garage, popped the trunk and loaded it in. It was all decided: We would go right from the pancake breakfast to the airport. “Hard telling how long it’ll take us to do sixty miles in this damn weather,” Whitie said.

Reba Mae and I got into the car and waited. We knew this ritual by heart. We had been participants in it ever since our family was a family. The rest of us would sit in the car and wait while Whitie ran his checklist. Holding his one hand under the spigots in the kitchen and bathroom and tightening the faucets with the other hand he would do the check, a liturgy as strict as that of any religion: “Left faucet off once…off twice…off three times. Right faucet off once…off twice…off three times.” And so on throughout the house checking windows, appliances, anything that might run or leak or in any way operate uselessly while he was gone. Off one, two, three…Closed one, two, three…obsessive/compulsive by the numbers.

My mother and I sat there, saying nothing, waiting patiently, or impatiently but wordlessly, for him to be done. We knew the drill. We waited for it to be over.

Finally, he was visible, at the back door of the house: “Door locked once…twice…”

And as usual this was the point at which Reba Mae’s patience wore thin. She rolled down the window on the backseat passenger’s side, where she was sitting in order to let Whitie sit up front with me and she called out to him, “Norman, will you please come on and get your butt into the car sometime today so that we can get going.”

“Noooowww, Mother,” he said as he approached the car, “don’t go being a dybbuk.” Then he climbed in beside me and said, “Take ‘er away, Dan.”

Already the snow had stopped, the morning turning crisp, a good ten degrees under freezing. The snow crunched and squeaked, a frozen powder, under the tires of the Merc as I backed it down the driveway and onto the road. The county snowplow hadn’t been by yet, but some neighbors had already laid tracks on the road. I followed them and coaxed the Merc gently up the hill to the Hamilton Road Bridge.  These big eight-cylinder engines were entirely too powerful for snowy streets and if you gave them too much gas you just spun the tires and went nowhere.

As I turned left onto Hamilton, I saw in my rearview mirror how, although it was still early on a Saturday morning, the county snowplow was already crossing the bridge and turning onto our road to do its work. When we were kids, we loved to watch the snowplow, and it was the same kind now as it was back then, a big five-ton dump-truck the back-end tipped slightly to keep feeding rock salt into a hopper and feeder that scattered the salt on the pavement, the front-end fitted with a huge blade, set skewed toward the passenger side of the cab so as to throw the snow off to the side of the road. Effective, efficient, a powerful tool with which to keep things open and moving.

The main streets of town, as we cruised through it, were also already cleared and salted. This was a Northern town where people were used to handling snow. Everything was geared to snow’s not being a problem: Even as it snowed, the streets were being cleared. Cables were mostly underground and those that weren’t were over open terrain and were tested and approved for use in heavy snow and high winds. This was Ohio, with its rich rural and industrial tradition.

When we arrived at the K of C Hall, ceded on this occasion to the Lions for this annual fundraiser, its blacktopped parking lot was also cleared. And the machinery used was still in evidence: An aging John Deere tractor with a scoop on the front sat parked off to one side. It almost certainly belonged, I speculated, to a volunteer from the Knights of Columbus, the Lions or both, and he was just as certainly now inside getting his just due—all the pancakes and sausage he could eat, with plenty of hot coffee. There were already quite a few cars parked outside. It was a farm town. People here were early-risers.

Inside we were greeted by the warm sweet and spicy smell of hot buttered pancakes, warm maple syrup and pork link sausage. Drifting above it all, the aroma of brewing coffee, and the cheery salutations:

“Hey, Norm! How are you Reba? Did you guys order this weather?”

"Not me, Charlie,” Whitie responds. “I hate this shit and it’s too damned early for it.”

“Why, it’s just enough snow to be pretty, Whitie!” Another familiar face cries.

“Pretty my ass!  Not if you have to drive in it, it’s not,” Whitie responds.

“Well, you don’t because you retired, so have some pancakes and stop your bitchin’,” says someone else, and then in a sunny tone, “Hey! Is this Dan? Hey Dan’el, how ya doin’? Haven’t see you in a coon’s age!”

It never changed. You went away twenty years, came back, and it seemed like they were all still there. Robust, red-faced, thick-waisted men, being jolly and friendly on a Saturday morning, wearing bibbed aprons and serving up breakfast to their neighbors to raise funds for charity. It was the very best of small-town life. Reliability, solidarity, efficiency. This wouldn’t change, I was thinking—hoping.

Early winter in west-central Ohio

But it was on that snowy autumn morning that it came home to me that, even if the traditions survived, the faces wouldn’t. These men were mostly of Reba Mae and Whitie’s generation, World War II and Korea vets who would soon be gone. Even now, my generation was there too, Classmates, Vietnam vets, who were doing the grill work ceded to them by their elders, who now did the greeting and the dishing up and the ticket-taking.

My generation and theirs dropped by the table to say hi as we enjoyed our pancakes and coffee. They all wanted to know the same thing: “Did I order this weather?” Whitie responded—not without certain acrimony—that, yes, I had… “It’s all his fault,” he would say, pointing an accusing finger at me. Said he could smell it, if you can believe that”. They also wanted to know how South America was treating me. “Brazil, wasn’t it?”

“No. Argentina.”

“So, what do they speak down there?”

“Spanish.”

“So where was it they speak Portuguese?”

And that sparked other inquiries. Was it true that we were going into summer there now and didn’t that seem funny somehow? Huh, Christmas in the summertime, imagine that! But at least you didn’t have to drive in the snow, huh?

It was funny: After all these years, it wasn’t just my family I started missing as soon as I took the plane and headed south. It was this—this place, my town, what it meant, how it felt when I sought it out in my heart and held it cupped in my two hands like something ever-cherished.

On snowy nights, I’ll sometimes think about this, especially about that unique October morning, as I’m standing in the darkened kitchen of my house in Patagonia, gazing out the window at the snow that is gathering on the lawn under the Patagonian beeches. I’m thinking how all of that, which once seemed so permanent, so inexhaustible, is now gone: Whitie, Reba Mae, my Little Brother Dennis, friends and relatives who have passed on, the house I spent my teen years in, people and landmarks I thought of as anchors in my life and keys to who I was, my very links to that town and the land around it.

I’m also thinking of the snow, how it’s a test of individuals and of peoples. How you cope with snow, whether you can love it in spite of itself, whether a people has the solidarity to live with it and make it work for them. I remember that morning, when it snowed in October and surprised everybody. But how everybody in that small, rural-Ohio community knew just what to do, knew there was no use complaining, knew that what you did if you were from that town was clear the roads and parking lot in time for that pancake breakfast you had been planning for months.

Patagonian winter scene

I feel bad, I’m thinking, about how I can no longer see snow like I did when I was a kid, that it’s no longer just pretty. It means grownup things now, especially here in remote Patagonia—hours, a day, a week waiting for the electricity to be restored. Translation clients in Buenos Aires,  Houston or Madrid being incapable of understanding how anybody, anywhere, can be without power for a week, but understanding one thing for sure, that it’s not a problem they are going to stand for ever again. Trying to make it the two kilometers down to the main road in my four by four pickup to leave tracks for my neighbors and me to follow before it gets too deep to move at all, because heaven only knows when the local municipality will get around to sending a road grader out this far. Hoping against hope that no branches break and fall on the telephone lines because repair orders are already normally backed up for weeks on end, hoping the snow will turn to rain, hoping the sun will come out, hoping this won’t be the worst winter ever. Wishing that things were like “back home”, where everybody knew what to do and did it, immediately and without complaint.

Even as I’m thinking this, I hear the UPS alarm on my computer upstairs and know the electricity is gone. With aerial lines, one broken beech bough is enough to knock out an entire sub-station. I climb the stairs with a flashlight and shut down the UPS and my computer. I go to bed to wait for daybreak. There’s nothing else to do.

Lying there still unable to sleep, I think about how this may actually be good in its own way. It’s a more real world. Here, the snow is just the snow and you are just you. It teaches you self-reliance. You cope without expecting anything of anyone else. Whatever you do to cope with Nature, you do on your own. In the meantime, there are no false hopes, no misunderstandings, no thinking anything or anyone is permanent. There’s just you and how you handle what comes at you for as long as you are still breathing.

There’s something to be said for that, and it doesn’t make the snow any less beautiful. On the contrary, it is a thing of beauty that is indifferent to your condition or your problems, which are all of your own making. It just is what it is, and how you live with it is all about who you are. The beauty of it is all its own. It’s up to you to take it or leave it.