Hamilton Stone Review #25
Nonfiction
Reamy Jansen, Nonfiction Editor
Vivian Faith Prescott
Veil of Water, Veil of Story
I kneel beside the petroglyph, tracing a killer whale fin with my finger. There is a story here. I feel the ovoid eyes, the high dorsal fin. I imagine the artist with her carving tool, gouging rock. I take the time to thank her: Gunalchéesh. Gunalchéesh Platform House, Frog House, all those from the Shtax'héen Kwáan—Bitter Water Tribe. These are the stories that shaped my childhood, my identity.
*
My sisters and I steer the porch-rail, yelling to the crew, "All hands on deck." In the grass below, we hit one another with sticks. We run fast around the yard. The deck is "base," a safe refuge; though, sometimes, we perish at the hands of the sea monster. It devours us, chews us to bits. We run and chase each other until we collapse on the ground, laughing. Sometimes, it's just my two sisters and I, and my brother. Sometimes, it's the whole gang of twenty or so neighborhood kids.
I am a child of seafoam, of the Suomalainen people. My family migrated to Alaska five generations ago and we intermarried among the Tlingit. Our stories float across my field of vision to my grandfather's yard where I'm seven years old. Grandfather's yard easily transforms into a place filled with danger. My Grandpa Al's front deck looks out over the town of Wrangell, Alaska and to Zimovia Strait, a narrow passage of Pacific Ocean in the Alexander Archipelago. From the deck, we can see his seiner, the Sachem, come and go from the harbor. On his grassy yard, we play "Sea Monster," our invented game of tag.
Back then, we didn't know what kind of a sea monster we were invoking. But, living in Southeast Alaska, we'd seen our share of large sea creatures. We heard a story about a sea lion plucking a fisherman off the dock, dragging him down into the harbor. Close-up, we'd seen pods of killer whales swimming by our fishing boats. Plus, our parents warned us that whenever a pod of killer whales swam by the beach, we were not to talk loud or with disrespect. If we did, the killer whales would come and get us. This warning rang true because we'd heard stories of killer whales snatching sea lions from rocks.
And, of course, we'd listen to fishermen's stories. In my father's own words, he describes the power of sea creatures:
“I was down Sumner Straits trolling on the "Irish," heading out towards Red Bay, Point Colpoys, just off of McNamara Point. We were heading across the mouth of Snow Pass and I looked out and I could see this whale thrashing around in the water. I wondered what the hell is going on? The humpback was right on the surface, flapping his fins back and forth. And, I looked and saw there were two killer whales: a big one and a little one. They were attacking that big whale, a big humpback.
“I steered the boat over toward them a little bit and there was blood around it, about 200 yards. The water was sopping-soaked red. The killer whales were feeding on it, making it bleed and that whale couldn’t surface. Every few minutes, the big killer whale would jump out of the water and land on the humpback whale and knock all the air out of him, just like getting punched in the stomach. Then, the killer whale would roll off of him and then the killer whales would go around like a couple of big sharks and dive under and take a bite out of the humpback. Again, the larger one jumped clear out of the water and landed right on him and rolled off. That big ole killer whale jumped up and knocked the air out of that humpback. I could see just two of them. I didn’t want to get too close so I kept on going. I could see them in the distance as they finished off that whale: it was a bloody mess.”
In our world, fishing was, and still is, a dangerous vocation: my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father were fishermen. Water is our life. It is a resource that gives us our salmon, our humpback whales, our sea lions, even our killer whales. And, importantly, the sea gives us our heritage, our stories. After hearing such tales, we imagined anything could lurk in the grassy depths of my grandfather's yard: sea lions, killer whales, giant pacific octopus, even sharks. Still, today, these great creatures survive. In the sea, they carousel feed and spy-hop. On land, they are engraved in stone on Petroglyph Beach, carved on totem poles, and woven in dance blankets.
*
My eyes follow the killer whales, appearing like black sleek canoes, cruising with great speed through the water. I walk along the shore at Gáaw X'aayí, the point where a reef sticks out from the shore. I feel the killer whales presence before my mind can register the alert: I remember the childhood warning. Black dorsal fins, small ones at first, rise from the water. Soon, the water swirls with activity. I look behind me and see more large fins moving around the point. It is kéet, the orca. A dozen, like a whale highway, round the point and head into Brown Bear Bay. The kéet yadí—the little ones—follow closely alongside their mothers. Last in line, a towering dorsal fin emerges from the swirl of silver water, like a huge sail on a sailboat. It is his pod. It is his story.
*
The story of the origin of killer whales glides along my tongue like a yellow cedar log adrift on the current. In the village of my children's ancestors, Hoonah, Alaska, I'm telling this traditional story to a room full of high-school students in the Tlingit language class. One of my students tells me, "I am a Killer Whale, Dakl’aweidí." She smiles and listens while I tell the story:
Naatsilanéi is abandoned on a small rock out in the ocean and left to die. He visits the Sea Lion People beneath the ocean by lifting up the thin veil of water between the world of man and animals. The Sea Lion People teach him how to carve the killer whales, first from a hemlock tree, then a cedar. Each try fails to float the beasts. Then, the hero carves the killer whales from a yellow cedar log and it floats perfectly.
I tell the children that the Sea Lion People, essentially, were giving life to their greatest predator by revealing the killer whale pattern to Naatsilanéi. One student wants to know how big a killer whale is so he paces the length of the room. And, with our arms outstretched, we imagine the size of a killer whale head. Next, I tie the traditional story of Naatsilanéi into a recent news story:
A young man is out swimming near Ketchikan, just south of Hoonah. He's not far from shore; in fact, he can still touch bottom. A killer whale moves towards him; its high dorsal fin slices the waves. Possibly, it thinks the youth is a seal flailing in water. The young man sees the whale approaching, as does his mother who's wading a short distance away. The whale approaches; the mother screams. The young man dives underwater, coming face-to-face with the giant mammal. The boy looks into the whale's eyes. The whale looks at him, bumps him, then turns and swims out to sea.
By means of this contemporary story, it is as if Raven is lifting the veil of the sea in order for us to take another look at how we interact with sea creatures: We must respect them. A friend of mine is Dakl'aweidí, Killer Whale crest, and he tells me that whenever he encounters a Killer Whale, he must offer something. Usually its tobacco, but sometimes it's a strand of his hair, or something valuable from his pocket.
Through the Naatsilanéi story, the youths learn about traditional knowledge and respect. With my words and the words of a story told long ago, I stir up the seafoam—I stir imaginations. The youth gasp at the thought of encountering one of those sea giants. They realize their landscape is alive and they're connected to it through clan crests and yellow cedar logs seeping with story.
Afterwards, I explain to the children how Keet Shagóon, their ancestor, Killer Whale, has a complex social structure similar to the Tlingits. Like humans, Kéet lives in groups and cooperatively hunts; their lifespan is similar to humans. The Grandmothers live into their 80s, and even reaching a type of menopause in their 40s. Grandfathers live into their mid 70s and grow up to 30-feet and 8-tons. At birth, a kéet yadí weighs around 400 lbs and is 8-feet-long. Like the Tlingit matrilineal structure, the whales form their ‘house-group’ for life with as few as three members to as many as forty: one or more adult males, several females, and children.
With this knowledge, I connect the youths to their shared myths. They see how killer whales dance in the water, fluid and sleek, as if they're dancing on cedar floors at our tribal house. At the tribal house, dance blankets billow like windswept waves; on their backs, abalone shells border a clan image of fins and sharp teeth.
*
A Tlingit traditional story says that long ago Raven visited the world beneath and returned to tell us how sea animals are like human beings with their own customs and language, i.e., they have their own stories. I think about my father's story: the humpback whale attacked by killer whales, the water bright red from their feasting. That image is still vivid in his mind all these years later. Also, when I remember my childhood, I can smell the grass in my grandfather's yard. And, when I recall the look on my student's faces as they learned of the boy who encountered a killer whale face-to-face, I consider all the stories being shaped in our lifetimes.
*
The ancient artisan looks to the sea and is inspired. Behind her, spouts of mist; familiar black and white bodies porpoise the surface of the water. She remembers the oral tradition, the young man abandoned on a rock out at sea. She leans over, presses her stone tool deep into the surface of the rock. She carves a killer whale. A shadow on the rock bends as a dorsal fin moving through black water. Ten thousand years later, I am here tracing her story, connecting my life to hers. Maybe she is Raven, the trickster, lifting this veil of water.
Michael Hettich
The Small Animals
Every morning before the neighborhood swimming pool opened, I helped the lifeguard collect the water rats he’d caught in the mousetraps that often only stunned them. He’d grab the rat’s tail and drop it into a brown paper lunch bag, scrunch the bag closed, and chuck the bagged rat as far out into the harbor as he could. Proud of his arm, he claimed he could throw a rat as far as the low-tide islands. But I never watched. He had slicked-back black hair and a cigarette behind the ear, and he thought he sang falsetto like a do-whop star. So he screeched all afternoon up in his lifeguard chair, combing and petting his glistening hair, working on his suntan. He never swam: it messed up his pompadour. Years later I heard he’d gone off to Viet Nam, that he cried now uncontrollably and punched the empty air. He was probably just a few years older than I was, but I flushed with pride when he called out my name or gave me the thumbs up when I did jackknives off the diving board. And the girls I had secret crushes on stood at the foot of his lifeguard chair, faces turned up to him like sunflowers, giggling and snapping their fingers to the radio tunes they all sang along with, the songs I practiced at night that summer, in my basement bedroom, while my parents lumbered and mumbled upstairs, turning off the lights and locking the doors. Then they called down goodnight to me, one after the other. My brother and sister were already sleeping. I could hear small animals moving through the dark, just outside my window, and I wondered what their lives were like. So I turned off my light and just lay there, listening.
Michael Hettich
The Seed
Inside my body is another tiny me, smaller than a fingernail. But this person lives a few miles outside town, in a cottage in a field of tall grass with a small stream he can wade and even sit down in to cool off in when the day grows hot. The water is cold there as it runs over gravel from the wall of pines just a stone’s throw away. Sometimes deer step from those trees at dusk when this other me is sitting on the back porch reading in the fading light, with a cup of tea. He wanders out sometimes in the near-dark and sits by the stream to look for the first stars. His wife stays inside, working at her loom, making tapestries and baby clothes, singing softly. Sometimes she works through the night and sleeps all the next day in their wood-paneled bedroom whose window looks out on the empty road. And no one plows that road in winter, so the other me inside me must walk all the way to town for supplies.
The food he brings back is delicious, and she is always waiting when he gets home--as though she’d forgotten who he is, what he looks like, and is pleased to meet him. Down in the basement the potatoes have started to grow with ever-greater urgency, aching for this other me to come down there and gather them. Up in the attic spider webs grow thick. Everyone thinks of these people with the names of trees, thinks of them turning vivid colors in the fall. We’ll go out for a drive, someone says to his family, and visit the hills that are red and yellow-orange, and then we’ll stop in town for cider and pie. The man and his wife wait for these visitors, though they live in that field of tall grass beside pine trees, whose colors never change much, only turning slightly darker.
Joan White
A Wartime Tale
1954 - Although victorius to written accounts, the scourge had eaten deeply into the hearts of the English people and a pervasive air of here today and gone tomorrow” still prevailed.
On one particular Sunday evening, a young girl of 18 tremulous years waited anxiously in a doorway outside the Cumberland Hotel. Clutched to her breast was a bottle of Johnny Walker’s Red. “What am I doing here she fretted? I should be home getting ready for work tomorrow.” Her job was as typist/clerk at T.P. Moore and Co., in Stepney Green, the East End of London which was an hours ride from her home in Camberwell, the S.E. of London. But the thought of the American airman she had met that afternoon in the Lyceum Dance Hall near Charing Cross Road, held her captive. Glancing at the occasional streetwalker sauntering by, she saw a policeman rounding the corner of Marble Arch. Panic stricken she tossed the bag and its contents over a wall into a bombed out area, returning quickly to the doorway. As the constable came to a stop in front of her she let loose. “I know what you think but I’m not a streetwalker, I’m just waiting for my boyfriend.” She wished she could shut her mouth but the guilt was too intense. She hoped Fran would not come out now because she didn’t want the Bobby to see she was waiting for an American, he might believe her to be treacherous. “Lucky boyfriend,” the copper answered smiling and touching his helmet with the tip of his truncheon he moved on back to Oxford Street.
Light headed, the girl peeked through the glass door barring her from her new boy friend, relieved to see him coming toward her. “He’s so good-looking,” she reminded herself. Her heart was thumping furiously from the encounter with the policeman. “I’m sorry I was so long” he drawled. “Where’s the whiskey?” “I threw it over the wall” she told him feebly. “You did what?” he asked disbelief, blurring his warm brown eyes. “I threw it away” she pleaded. He stared at her confused but convinced of her innocence. Then he laughed. “Tom said I was robbing the cradle, I think he’s right.” She looked up at him liking his easy-going American way. “You’re not cross with me?” she worried. He shook his head. Her simplicity beguiled him. “Let’s get a spot of tea,” he joked. Taking her uncertain hand, he tucked it into the crook of his arm as they moved toward the bright lights of the West End.
Joan White
In My Soul
It would be remiss of me to continue speaking of Stephanie as if she was a victim in this life. In spite of dealing with OCD since a child, she graduated from Green Meadow High School; received her BA from Skidmore College; was given a full Fellowship to Brandeis U where she earned her MA and was pursuing her PhD in her 24th year when her illness overcame her. Over the next twelve years she fought her compulsions and endured the devastating side effects of the medications prescribed by an assortment of psychopharmacologists. Dealing with the bureaucracy as well as the stigma of mental illness is an exhausting business. Emerson said, “We build our character on the debris of our despair.” While Aristotle wrote, “Thought without action, is but the ruination of the soul.” Stephanie had both these qualities. What strength it took to jump off the Tappan Zee bridge at the highest point. She preferred taking the ‘leap of faith’ from this world into the unknown. She chose a beautiful sunny day, three days before Thanksgiving, a holiday she feared, when the depression repeatedly returned to torment her. At 18, Stephanie wrote a poem “It’s in my Soul” now etched on her gravestone along with her drawing of an angel sheltering a child in a crib that’s floating on water.
Pamela Floyd
The Whispering Bench
The name of my Vermont home town, Barre, was decided by a fistfight, if you can believe the paper placemats of a local restaurant. By the last half of the 19th century, Barre was calling itself “the granite center of the world”, and its extensive quarries of magnificent light gray granite had attracted renowned stone carvers and sculptors from Italy, Scotland, Germany and Ireland. Many of their most extravagant masterpieces remain in Barre as public monuments or cemetery mausoleums, statuary and headstones. The carvings are mostly classical—beautifully proportioned columns, tiered steps, pediments, and friezes. There are semi-recumbent figures, weeping, bent over sarcophagi and angels winged with granite feathers, modestly draped in deference to new world sensibilities. A glaring exception is Barre’s largest statue and WWI memorial, “Youth Triumphant,” a kneeling classical warrior suing for peace. Erected in 1924 at the convergence of Barre’s Main and Washington Streets, it looms huge, dramatic, and largely disregarded, visited only by a few hapless tourists.
I remember my induction into the city’s collective embarrassment over this edifice. My mother had, unexpectedly, found a parking place angled along the city center’s small park, and my sister and I ran along the sidewalk, eager to get to our ice cream sundaes at Cummings and Lewis across Main Street. “Wait,” my mother called out, and my sister and I ducked onto the deserted memorial platform and sat on the end of the huge empty semicircular granite “Whispering Bench” that is backdrop to the statue. “We have to whisper” said my sister, giggling. “Look at the statue. The guy is naked.” I was shocked, but did my best to make out the contours of the huge, bright form above us. What’s that big round thing?” I asked. ”That’s his shield”, whispered my sister” and next to it is the back of his bum.” My mother caught up to us at that point, and when I said I wanted to see the naked man, she yanked me toward Cummings and Lewis. I wondered why the statue was there, but I already felt I had asked about something shameful. At the age of eight, I had begun to suspect that males had some part in reproduction, but I couldn’t come up with a possible, much less plausible, idea of what it might be. My mother seemed to think I had already penetrated beyond her explanations of reproduction accomplished solely by females, and quite possibly with the help of the Sunday school nuns who were always going on about the Immaculate Conception. But for all I knew, the Immaculate Conception was called that just because it produced Jesus and he was very clean, always wearing white clothes.
I was depressed by all the things I couldn’t understand and people wouldn’t tell me as we emerged from Cummings and Lewis and I saw the great, white reflection of the statue towering over Main Street traffic. I concentrated on the salty tang of the Ritz cracker Cummings and Lewis always served customers when they had finished their ice cream ”to cleanse the palate”. I wished there were a way to cleanse the frustration of blind ignorance I so often felt. Suddenly I heard an incongruous sound above the downtown din: steel-shod hoofs striking concrete in a rapid, skittish arrhythmia, approaching fast. My mother grabbed Leslie and me and, shielding our heads, held us against a parked car. I wriggled into position to see what I knew was coming right past us, Pamaris, the hired man at the riding stable on his nameless spotted horse. Suddenly the deafening tumult was upon us, and I glimpsed what I knew was Pamaris’ long hair, his reddish skin and his red neckerchief. He rode almost standing in the stirrups, his elbows high and angled like folded wings, using his upper body to balance against the wild equine gyrations beneath him. The horse’s eyes flashed crescents of white above the quivering black and white patched coat that seemed barely able to contain the vigor within it. Pamaris held the reins short, half way up the horse’s neck near the pink nostrils that struggled to point skyward. I listened as Pamaris shot up Washington Street and the traffic milled around the park until I could no longer hear the hoofs.
Nearly a lifetime later, with the help of the Internet, I investigated ”Youth Triumphant” and found views of the classical warrior with shield and draped sword. The pedestal poem suggests taking comfort in knowing that dead youth do not face old age. I expected something magnificent, neglected because of the straitlaced, secretive parenting style I, for one, had experienced. Pictures from the statue’s dedication show the park’s elm trees, already old in the 1920’s, had lost most of their lower branches. It is tempting to speculate that members of the Methodist, Episcopal and Congregational (formerly Puritan) churches were responsible for planting the thick growth of low branched replacement trees that screen all but their steeple tops from the naked man. Only the Universalists, the Hotel Barre and the Aldrich Library have an unobstructed view. But as I looked at more pictures and read what information I could find, I realized the people of Barre had not failed to appreciate their memorial because they were prudes. It seems more likely that few people developed a sense of reverence for the memorial because it did not speak to the struggle and loss of soldiers and sailors in WWI. The design was chosen by committee. It is possible that the artist-carvers were directed by people more interested in memorializing themselves than n Barre’s war dead. No doubt there were disagreements, for something odd, almost dishonest hovers about the oversized figure, its legs positioned unnaturally, perhaps for modesty.
The whispering bench, it turns out, is acoustically constructed so that someone whispering on one end of its huge arc can be clearly heard at the other. Only the tourists try the trick, and I doubt they whisper about the war dead. The entire memorial’s pretense of connection with the war is strained, an attempt to borrow dignity from another age. For the people of the 1920’s, the grit and blood of sacrifice was still present, close to home, of their own time. Pamaris was one of the last to use a horse as transportation on Barre’s downtown streets, but after WWI there must have been dozens of riders, many of them veterans. I only wish Barre’s stone carvers had been at liberty to choose a Pamaris and his horse to memorialize the countlessf warriors who charged enemy lines on foot or on the backs of horses, the men as resolute, the horses as terrified as the pair that clattered past the memorial that day.
Reamy Jansen
My German—Tag 6: R. Takes the Train
Once I had arrived in Munich, I had to take the bus to Freising, in order to get the train to Schwandorf, but transferring first at Regensburg. Which I managed with sleepy fragments of German, the bus driver seemingly passing with honors at gruffness school, as bus drivers often do. And I wouldn’t have made the train, my luggage now full of nothing but exhaustion weighted like wet clay, if a young woman hadn’t helped me with the ticket machine (the machine next to me was giving a man the raspberry with his Euros, he muttering scheiBe while chasing after ejected bills). But then I made it to Schwandorf, just barely, though—gazing out the window thirty minutes later, saying to myself, oh that’s the sign for Schwandorf and then, slowly, very slowly (tooth pain deciding a bit earlier to put in the boot in), thinking to myself, oh yes this is my station, how very interesting, and, oh, scheiBe, leaping up, making it through the closing door of the departing train. This morning, three days later, I’m going solo to Regensburg, a medieval town, whose Jews were expelled in 1519 after losing the protection of Emperor Maximilian I, the guide book making him sound a bit like Tony Soprano, but also reminding us that we all may need protectors at one time or another; it turns out, too, that Oskar Schindler lived in the town and his house of many years bears a plaque). The town is only a half hour to the south, and I didn’t want to put this short trip off, for here, at the start of my stay, I often must force myself every step of the way in new, unfamiliar environs, giving myself a severe nudge from behind when ordering from the bakery, buying stamps at the post office, asking the butcher for Lachsshinken, the thinly sliced, smoked ham that Monica and I used to order from Yorkville, and would then follow up with Berliner WeiBe und Apfel Pfannkuchen at the Kleine Konditorei on east 86th St. (now a jewelry store; the only store left in the area seems to be Kramer’s, still offering great Sandtorte—pound cake, sort of, shaped into a ring). And now I was still waking up getting myself to the railway station, anxious about the Czerny five-finger exercise I would have to play on the automated ticket machine, without the presence of a fairy Mädchen. A machine that seems to have some thirty keys, incidentally, along with symbols for adults, children, dogs, bikes, Martians, their dogs, terrorists, their bikes, usw (etc.), although Jeff, a sound installation artist (don’t ask; I’ll tell you when I find out) insisted that there was a ticket office, and, hey, presto, one appeared as I went through the entranceway of the station and there was no line (almost invariably one person will be in at the ticket line ordering as he or she makes up a vacation on the spot—St. Petersburg to Antwerp to Tunis to Mars, no problem, and which perhaps explains the little green men represented on the machine, and German railways, Die Deutsche Bundesbahn, can truly solve any problem, but one now understands how even Germans are willing to put up with a bit of S&M from a machine). I stepped up and purchased my ticket—2nd class, always get second class, I think; besides, how different can thirty minutes of first class be? I made sure it was round trip and that there wasn’t some occult German Diktat that required my returning via a particular schedule, say the 16:47, and none other (note to self: brush up on subtraction, or plan to sleep the night in the station). Off to track 4 and with a tremulous,"bitte, Regensburg?," I bided my time on the platform. Two cars arrived, one for passengers with bikes, the other not and that was also non-smoking; I managed to wedge my knees out into the aisle, thanks to a suitcase as stolid as its owner and which was taking up a goodly part of the space between the facing seats. I start to read a manuscript, keeping an eye out for stations, and, predictably, get up to get out too early, afraid I’ll miss my stop, as I did once as a young teen going from Penn Station to Newark and thinking, it can’t be this soon, as we pulled into to the Newark Station ten minutes later and then my realizing too late that—as the Newark sign winked at me as it went slowly backwards along with ads for South Pacific—that I was on my way to Philadelphia (a kindly conductor switched me around at Trenton). And I again mis-pronounce Regensburg as berg, the woman probably thinking that I’m going to have poor mountain climbing when I arrive, but the nächste stop was the correct one, and off I sailed, through the Bahnhof, cockily shuttling up Maximilianstrasse for all I was worth, although somewhat spoiling the effect of self possession by almost having my left foot run over by a bus. Mishap over, I safely made it to the Dom St. Peter, an important Gothic cathedral, chock full of amazing stained glass, while hiding in a side chapel is an equally breath-taking, small oil by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff of Christ being taken down from the cross (or might it be a Van Dongen?). I then ambled along and across the Danube (Die Donau) and through the narrow streets in my usual magpie way, thus discovering one of the best small museums in Germany (Museum Ostdeutsche Galerie ) to the east of the old city (not even mentioned in Lonely Planet, generally silent on neat little out-of-the-way museums and galleries, which luckily I am able to suss out). Earlier, I had found the most extraordinary set of tall, thin, wood sculptures, a grouping of bishops by Andreas Kuhnlei, a weird and startling mix of Giacometti, Barlach, and Francis Bacon in this most Catholic of regions). All in all, Reamy ascendant on this fantastic day and feeling only the hint of the full blush of a sunburn. But on my return a soupcon of travel panic reappears, and so I have to check again at the ticket window (yet another person inquiring about the 2nd class fare to Swaziland through Georgia, either one, by way of Cairo), and I soon after see that the information is clearly posted on my way to Gleis 3, although I am, nevertheless, compelled to squeak out another, ”bitte, Schwandorf?” when I’m on the platform, and then am finally on board, but still I wasn’t fast enough to beat all the savvy commuters from picking the window seats that weren’t exposed to the sun, and where the one I sit in is under a giant magnifying glass (plus I was now realizing how mightily burned I was from crossing and re-crossing the Steinerne Brücke, Germany’s oldest stone bridge, then thinking, hey, I’m blazing on the Danube.) And, while generally, I’m not shy about speaking richly, deeply in English, my German public voice again reverts to an anemic, fainting Heldentenor, and it will remain so throughout the area (Grosslandkreis), although I try to regularly remind myself of William Strunk Jr.’s advice to the class of which E.B White was a member—”say it loud.”(Stuart Little, makes the same assertion to a seventh-grade class, I seem to remember). But, since I didn’t say it loud, perhaps the startled girl thought that I had said, Sudan or Somalia, and thus that was where we were really headed via the new Mediterranean tunnel I hadn’t been informed about, bien sur. And so for thirty-two hot and slightly anxious Minuten I search the landscape—a diorama of red-tiled houses, blue skies, broad yellow fields, and dark, green pine forests passing me somewhere around 90-100 kilometers per hour—and I look for signs that I am really on the way to Schwandorf. The train slows down for a stop, “Wagen haltet” the interior sign reads, and I try to search out anything familiar and, there, that suburban corner, the distinct shape of its curve, which I spot in Regenstauf, and looks, well, so familiar: the downward slope, and then I’m sure that the name Marhütte-Haidof sounds right, and then I’m sure I recognize the very pine tree, that one there, the one next to the little aspen, it surely is straighter than the rest, and it was in the forest that I had already passed going south; ach, and here’s the Kloster at the edge of Schwandorf, so it’s been a solo success, but all I can think about as the scenery goes by, especially on seeing the disused rail yards on our approach are my train trips on the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) from Manhasset to New York City and my memorizing of the stops, Great Neck, Little Neck, Douglaston, where we crossed over a shaky trestle traversing the marshes at the southern end of Little Neck Bay, and you could just make out the Throgs Neck Bridge, except that it wasn’t there yet then, and then here was Flushing, with the Quaker Meeting House my mother had told me about, but which we never got out to see and I always asked if we could, and then it’s on to Shea Stadium, although also not there at first, that came later, too, and then suddenly approaching Woodside, the last stop before an ear-popping noisy rush through the tunnel, us beating again the odds that the East River would come crashing in from above, and now I was stepping on to the platform of track 9 in Penn Central Station, and this was the new station, although I remember, as a small being in a dark wool coat, the old one, a crystal palace lightly framed in cast iron, and I’m now on my way downtown on the Broadway express, switching at Chambers St. to the South Ferry local, where my stop is Wall St. and with it a summer job at my father’s brokerage firm, W.E. Burnett (seventh oldest in the nation, according to our order room code), a job that would pay for books and for French films at the Bleeker Street Cinema (Seventh Heaven—the silent with Janet Gaynor, you idiot; not the one on WB11, Boudieu Saved From Drowning, Orhpee, Beauty and the Beast, Forbidden Games, A Nous La Liberte, usw), and when I stepped back out into the gently advancing night I felt a little bit like Rastignac on Bleeker, which was yet to have a Blimpie’s for a couple more years.
Reamy Jansen
Angst
“I am just going outside and may be some time”
--Titus Oates
I might as well come clean about my fears at the beginning of the trip, a beginning that begins around a month before I set foot on the plane to Munich. Because, while I’ve been feeling my mortality more these days, this being the-run-of-the-mill, self-conscious narcissism of aging—checking in the mirror for age spots on my forehead, seeing them always on the backs of my hands as I type (a small, browning constellation of four on the right), and they are rather like those my father exhibited when he was this age, although the skin won’t get translucent until my mid-seventies and won’t reach full transparency until my early nineties. And, then, there’s Leslie telling me in the shower, You ought to have this checked, as she washes me in out-of-the-way places. And I do, get things checked, that is, by a skin specialist, who tells me I have nothing to worry about, but she also seems rather like Dermatologist Barbie, so who knows really and Leslie doesn’t like it that I only go to women doctors. But what can I do? I’ll probably eventually become a two-legged mole (and likely blind by then, also, so I’ll just move into the assisted-living theme park based on The Wind In The Willows). And you’ll be glad to know that I just rushed off to put on sunblock (Sport 30!) because I’m sitting here in German farmer sunshine and I wisely walk my work table over to the shade of an apple tree and you notice I’ve gone off the subject—the promised angst—because I like to put things off, and perhaps this is style’s real function, to put things off, to dress up fear. And, so, to get to the point, I began to have the fear that my plane would crash, explode, actually—the very thing that I think Elizabeth has always had to tamp down when going off on a book tour, and which I have felt only once—reduced to a shame-filled jelly brought up on the beach, along with medical waste and used condoms—when I told Monica, on the way back from Paris, how terrified I was right then, there, inside the plane, trying and failing to keep a fearful squeak away from my voice, and she said something, well, not really something, it was this, Oh grow up, and I had also had this feeling, a bit diminished, a week earlier in the Loire valley when I began to be haunted by the idea of going back, believing that going back would be the death of me, an explicit knowledge, of course, I didn’t then possess and which awareness would have been something that would have allowed me to get a grip on my wet, leaking self, this free-running viscosity of angst embraced by a useless safety belt. Grow up was like a slap, the stinging report of calf-skin gloves smack across the side of the face, and maybe the things that grew into a terrible wrongness in the marriage grew out of that short, stern phrase (one that was, nevertheless, true in many ways), the liquidity of fear, its sloppy fungability then slowly stagnating, and I do and do not digress here—hey, Heine gets away with it all the time. And so, one month before, during May, a month before I leave, I fear the plane will crash or explode midair in fiery pieces (although when I think through precisely how such a thing will occur—one of Osama’s apocalyptic 4H’ers firing a missile at Flight 8263 from East Paterson, and airport security, you’ll be assured to know, did have me take off my shoes, so there’ll be no more surprises from Richard wanna-bees—well, then I know that I’m full of it and that this fear is more about leaving behind my anchors, Leslie and Gabe and Paul, for starters, and also having a fear, long standing, about going off on my own and how on the first three days of school I would vanish from the first-grade lunch room , walking a mile back home to my mother, who called the school and cooked me a lamb chop, I seem to remember, and on the second day my even promising the teacher, Miss Staples, I wouldn’t leave school, just saying I just had to go off to use the bathroom, which I never had to do in twelve years of school, and somehow on the third day Miss Staples was smiling, standing at the exit, gently shepherding me back to the lunch room and seating me with the other boys and anyway I was beginning to enjoy the company and the peanut butter sandwiches so neatly wrapped in wax paper and to watch Herb Minnerly eat carrots sticks, which I didn’t know you could eat raw, and which was a departure from Herb’s already regular diet of paste during art. But none of my sophisticated, psychoanalyzed knowledge kept me from starting to scratch out a quick will, which I didn’t follow through on as Leslie would know what to do, especially for the boys, although this feeling of security didn’t entirely stop me from setting out in the boys’ bedroom, which they don’t really use much any more, my mother’s family’s Civil War bayonette (an eponym, by the way) for Gabe and to place out on the lower bunk for Paul a slim leather folio, the size of a small window, meant for letters and papers, and was so elegantly hand-tooled and embossed by my father’s uncle Otto, a fine craftsman few had any use for and who was the last of the Jansen artisans and Paul wants to be a writer, as I had been, and as my dad had been before, and let me assure you that Gabe isn’t the warrior type, but that maybe the bayonette, a long, triangular, deadly tapered thing of steel, with a wood handle, capped off by brass fittings to attach it to a muzzle, maybe this sword would help him go into the world feeling touched by a bit of protection from his dad, which I didn’t have too much of a sense of when I was young and married and adrift, although, as I say, I didn’t then know it on the plane back from Orly. But, once I was in the airport, an München, I knew that the boys and Leslie were with me, love notes from Leslie in my luggage, a father’s day card from Paul, and a Walkman from Gabe, batteries included, and I went off to seek a new world for a short while .