Natural Traveler Magazine, Summer 2021

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of looking at things.”

Henry Mille

© 2021 Natural Traveler LL

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5 Brewster Street Unit 2, No. 20 Glen Cove, New York 1154

Natural Traveler Magazine ® Summer 2021 Editor & Publisher Tony Tedeschi Senior Editor Bill Scheller Staff Writers Ginny Craven Aglaia Davis Andrea England David E. Hubler Jay Jacobs Samantha Manuzza Buddy Mays John H. Ostdick Pedro Pereira Frank I. Sillay Kendric W. Taylor Photography Karen Dinan Buddy Mays Art Sharafina Teh

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Table of Contents

Editor’s Letter

Page 3

Contributors

Page 4

Fogg’s Horn:

Page 5

Email from Oregon

Buddy Mays

Page 8

Email from New Zealand

Frank I. Sillay

Page 10

Email from New Hampshire

Pedro Pereira

Page 11

Postcard from Out There

John H. Ostdick

Page 13

Miss Dillon’s Gas Company

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 17

Two Poems

Jay Jacobs

Page 23

Silence in November

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 25

In All Directions

Bill Scheller

Page 34

The Nats and the Greys

David E. Hubler & Joshua H. Drazen

Page 41

Hard To Have Heroes

Buddy Mays

Page 47

Unfinished Business

Tony Tedeschi

Page 57

Some Fine Summer Reading

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Editor’s Letter Federal Writers Project Redux?

On July 7 , Scott Borchert, writing on the th

editorial page of The New York Times, reported that Representatives Ted Lieu (DCA) and Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM) had introduced legislation to create a 21st century version of the Depression Era, Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). An expert on the long forgotten original version of the FWP, Borchert is the author of “Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America,” a history of the Federal Writers’ Project.

“Inspired by the New Deal arts initiatives — which produced government-sponsored guidebooks, murals, plays and more,” Borchert wrote, “their bill is a response to the havoc unleashed by the pandemic on cultural workers in all fields.”

Via the US Department of Labor, $60 million in grants would be distributed to newsrooms, libraries, academic institutions, literary organizations and more. Those organizations, in turn, would hire a new corps of unemployed and underemployed writers who, like their New Deal forebears, would fan out into towns, cities, and countryside to observe the shape of American life.

“They’d assemble, at the grass-roots level,” Borchert wrote, “a collective, national self-portrait, with an emphasis on the impact of the pandemic. The material they gathered would then be housed in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.”

Given the congressional tribalism that exists today, along with the fact that the bill’s coauthors are both Democrats, it’s an easy

call it would pass the House on a party line vote and run into the usual partisan roadblock in the Senate. On the other hand, it may also be fairly predictable that those Senators who opposed the bill could struggle with second thoughts about explaining to the segments of their constituency who would have benefitted from such a beneficial undertaking, which would have carried with it some decent revenue potential for writers.

“The best reason to support a new FWP is also the most obvious,” Borchert writes.

“Like its predecessor, the project would be an economic rescue plan for writers, broadly defined: workers who have been grappling with a slowly unfolding crisis in their industry for at least a decade. Even before the pandemic, the combined stresses of the digital revolution, the so-called gig economy, severe cutbacks to local journalism outfits, and other related developments made writing a precarious business.”

Despite the predictably precarious future of the project, if I can be permitted an absurd level of optimism that the FWP will make it into law, you can count on me to show up with three dozen, or more, issues of Natural Traveler Magazine, drop them with a serious thud on the desk of whoever is allocating funds in this project and making the case that staff writers on this magazine have the clearly demonstrable abilities to take on these assignments. Hell, we’ve been covering that territory for three years now.

-- Tony Tedeschi 3

Contributors “I did not get court marshaled, or keel-hauled, or strung up by my thumbs from the mainmast (windjammer sailors did not have easy lives), for saluting indoors or being out of uniform,” Buddy Mays recounts about his less-than-dignified encounter with the late Prince Philip, in his Email from Oregon, entitled “The Prince & The Pauper Redux.” (Page 8) “The guard on the gate asked what the problem was, and one of the escorts said it was just an old war wound playing up,” Perhaps cover for something nefarious in “War Wound,” Frank I. Sillay’s “Email from New Zealand.” (Page 10) “Sometimes the gods of sport take pity on long-suffering fans and hand us a reason to rejoice.” Pedro Pereira explains how it all came down in “The Pain of Winning,” his Email from New Hampshire. (Page 11) “Post-vaccination, we began to peer around that corner out there again,” John H. Ostdick and family try out the new/once-old normal in “Postcard from Out There, Ripping the Band-aid Off Our Sheltered Pandemic Life.” (Page 13) Jay Jacobs takes us through two poems: “As In A Dream” and “Observations Of A Common Man.” (Page 23) Kendric W. Taylor provides the last installment of his World War I story, “Le Duc, Le Dauphin et Le Comte de Paris,” this chapter titled, “Silence in November.” (Page 49). He’s also written a beautiful family memoire, “Miss Dillon’s Gas Company,” with his great-aunt, May Dillon, in the starring role.

(Page 17) Excerpts from three books by three Natural Traveler Magazine contributors, provide incentive for beach, patio or campsite reading this summer: David E. Hubler’s, “The Nats and The Greys,” Buddy Mays’s “Hard to Have Heroes,” and Tony Tedeschi’s “Unfinished Business.” We also have a preview of Bill Scheller’s finest travel features for his upcoming collection, “In All Directions.”

All of it beginning on Page 33.

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Fogg’s Horn The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus

Smoke Scenes

I am sure most of you think of me as the consummate boulevardier, the kind of guy for whom “outdoors” means a seat on the terrace. But I have my plein air credentials. I never made Eagle Scout, but my mother sewed more than a few woodsy badges on my sash. I got one for canoeing, and I still keep a sixteen-foot Old Town in the garage at Casa Fogg.

Paddling in circles around a lake, though, isn’t my style. I like to go places, Point A to Point B, the farther apart the better. My most ambitious trip involved taking the canoe on VIA’s westbound Canadian from Montreal into the wilds of Ontario, there to be deposited at trackside with no way of reaching civilization but to paddle a 55-mile route through a string of lakes and portages to a flyblown outpost where I could catch an eastbound train. (I know, I could have remained in the same place and caught the return train in situ. I also could have stayed at the Ritz on rue Sherbrooke for a week.)

Did I say “I”? No, it was “we.” There were two of us. For the sake of having a drinking buddy, fireside chatterbox, and bow paddle, I brought along my friend Jack.

Jack wasn’t Mr. Outdoors — at one point along the way, he commented, “Whoever said that the proper study of man is man sure had that right” — but in all the important ways he was the ideal paddling pal. He had no problem helping to heft bourbon, cognac and calvados on portages, he could catch pickerel on a spinner, and he knew how to cook them (we also packed along lemon, butter, oil, seasonings, and a plastic vial of Pinot Gris). The fact that he smoked cigarettes was no big deal, since we’d be out in the open, and I was sure he’d suck down the last of the day’s forty or fifty before getting into the tent. No, the problem wasn’t that he smoked.

It was that he picked the canoe trip as the time to quit.

We were out past Sudbury somewhere. The train had made a scheduled stop at a depot on the edge of the wilderness. Suddenly Jack shot up out of his seat in our compartment, clutching a carton of Merit Lights. He took off down the corridor and returned less than a minute later — good thing, since the train was about to pull out — empty-handed.

“I dropped the carton on the side of the tracks,” he told me. “Some Hoser will find 5

it. I hope he likes Merits. Me, I’m quitting smoking.”

I was happy for Jack, but I’d have been happier if he had waited till we got back. I knew what we had coming. VIA hadn’t yet banned smoking in the club car, so Jack had been able to take care of his jones on the train. And we only had a few more hours to go before the Canadian would stop and let off us, the canoe, and our gear. So, I wouldn’t have to watch Jack climbing the walls of our compartment.

Climbing the gunwales of a sixteen-foot canoe, however, is a different matter.

We got through the first lake, and the first portage, without any trouble. A mile or so into the next lake, though, I was sitting in the stern, smoking my pipe and paddling along with a nice tailwind, when Jack turned around in the bow and said, “Can I have a few hits off your pipe?” Turns out the tailwind had been strong enough to waft smoke the length of the canoe.

“OK,” I said, and gingerly crouched forward, pipe extended in the hand that wasn’t clutching the thwart ahead of me, while Jack reached back. He eagerly grabbed the pipe, clenched it in his teeth, and inhaled deeply. As you may know, you don’t inhale pipe smoke. He may have been the first man ever to fill both lungs with Mac Baren’s Dark Twist … and he didn’t so much as cough. I knew he had been smoking cigarettes since he was fourteen, but this was the major leagues.

A Regular Ritual This became a regular ritual whenever I had my pipe lit, but since I only smoked the thing once or twice a day – the rest of the time it was tucked away in one of our packs with the Mac Baren’s – I had to get used to one itchy Jack. I’d get the pipe out when we hauled out at clearings and set up for the night, but I wondered if I’d see him start to inhale campfire smoke.

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On the third day out, we were halfway along the biggest lake of the trip when we saw our first sign of a human presence. It was a cabin on a point a half-mile or so ahead. I’d barely picked it out of the trees when Jack called back to the stern, “I wonder if they have cigarettes?”

The cabin turned out to be halfcompleted, someone’s little retreat on an inholding in what our topo maps said was Crown Land. “Crown Land,” Jack said as we paddled to shore. “I bet that means they have a few cartons of Alfred Dunhill’s sitting around.”

There were no Dunhill smokes, and no people. I felt like a burglar, or at least a trespasser, and had that creepy sensation where you know you’re going to get caught even when it looks like there hasn’t been anyone around for ages. The place was so remote that whoever was building it didn’t even have power tools, for the simple reason that there was no power. Jack, meanwhile, kept poking into every corner, even opening a toolbox. That made me especially apprehensive. So did the distant sound of a float plane, high and far and still not visible.

“Let’s get the hell back in the canoe and paddle out of here,” I said. Jack reluctantly gave up the search, and we shoved off. The plane droned on, never coming in to land at the cabin cove.

Another day, and another sign of humanity. This took the form of a patch of blue nylon a few hundred yards ahead, partway up a slope above a sandy shore where we could easily beach the canoe. I knew that was where we’d be heading without Jack even saying anything. Tent meant people, people meant – the hope that springs eternal! – cigarettes.

We hauled out and headed up the slope.

There were three tents, actually, but no signs of life. “Hello,” Jack called. “Hello – anybody here?”

We heard a grunt, and a half-dressed guy climbed sleepily out of the tent nearest us. He had a mop of uncombed hair and a week’s growth of stubble. We’d woken him up from a nap, but he didn’t seem to mind.

He was as surprised to see us as we were to find him. We were obviously two guys going somewhere in a canoe, so he didn’t take long to figure why we’d showed up, but what was he doing here in this little encampment?

“My buddies and I are gold miners,” he told us. “They’re out in the bush. I was out early and came back to catch some more sleep.” I had heard there was gold prospecting going on in the area, and it was funny to see that it was conducted on this kind of shoestring level. Before I got to ask anything about it, though, Jack piped in with the crucial question of the hour: “You wouldn’t have any cigarettes, would you?”

It was no surprise that the guy had cigarettes. Gold prospectors in the Ontario bush are not big on healthy lifestyle choices.

He crawled back into the tent and produced a pack of Craven “A” smokes, the old Canadian staple.

“What can I give you?” Jack asked, figuring he was just making a pro forma remark that would be waved off with a “Forget about it.”

But the guy must not have come up with any nuggets that week. “Three bucks,” he answered. Jack fished a loonie and a twonie out of his jeans, and off we went.

Destination Missanabie Two days later we hit Missanabie, our destination on the rail line. We tied up at the dock in back of the Hotel Missanabie, a saloon with three rooms upstairs, and

checked in. Since the only things to do in Missanabie are walk up and down the one street and drink at the hotel, we spent the next day and a half till the train came by hanging around the bar and playing pool.

But we weren’t the only clientele. Around seven in the evening the day we got there, the bar began filling up with none other than our gold miners. There was a dirt road that straggled into town from their camp, and they’d come in every night, covering in an hour’s drive on dry land a route that had taken us two days in the canoe.

The miners were a chummy bunch, and we had a good time with them drinking Labatt’s and shooting eight-ball. But we hadn’t been together a half hour before one of them came up to us and said, “You know, we gave Al there a hard time for what he did when you showed up at the camp. He told us about it, and we gave him shit.”

Jeez, I thought. Were cigarettes that valuable up there that the guy’s pals got on him over letting a pack go? Should we buy them a fresh pack at the bar? I’d barely started to say we were sorry when the guy piped up, “Al broke one of the first rules of the bush. When you’re out there and somebody really needs something, you don’t sell it to him. You give it to him.”

Jack wouldn’t take the three bucks Al offered him, so Al bought him a beer. The law of the bush had been upheld, and we went on playing eight-ball. The next day we were on the train to Montreal, and Jack, happily replenished with cigarettes from the bar, headed straight for the club car.

I imagine the search for gold went on.

– 30 –

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Email from Oregon The Prince & The Pauper Redux (Please forgive me, Mark Twain)

By Buddy Mays

In early April of this 2021, my favorite Personage of Royalty, Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, and Prince Consort of Queen Elizabeth, died peacefully, at home, in bed at Windsor Castle, at age 99. It was a sad moment for me. I don’t know many Personages of Royalty, but I did know Prince Phillip. Or at least I met him. Once. More or less.

It was the summer of 1962. I was an 18year-old seaman stationed aboard the United States Coast Guard training ship Eagle, a 295foot long, square-rigged “windjammer” used to educate Coast Guard cadets in the fine arts 8

of navigation and seamanship. We had been at sea for nearly two months, sailing from the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut to the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa, then north to the Azores, Antwerp, Belgium, and the British Isles. It had been an amazing voyage, especially for a naïve kid from New Mexico, who until the previous year had never even seen an ocean, let alone sailed on one.

The Eagle reached Edinburgh, Scotland—her final stop before heading home—right on schedule and had tied up at the city pier near Leith. The crew was

informed by the captain that Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and husband of the Queen, was in Scotland and would make a quick, military style review of the ship, abovedeck only, the following morning. The officers and senior NCOs were ordered to be in full dress uniform and in review formation on the Parade Deck by nine a.m. The 150 or so cadets, also in dress uniform, were to climb the rigging and spread out along the yardarms and salute when the Prince came aboard. The enlisted men, of which I was one, had not been invited to join the gathering and were ordered to stand down and stay out of sight.

At 9: 15 the following morning, I was below deck in the crew area with 20 or so other sailors, ironing my dress white uniform in preparation for a 12-hour liberty ashore later that day. I was barefoot and wearing only a T-shirt and skivvy shorts, ironing away and dreaming of cold beer and Scottish lassies, when the crew area suddenly got dead quiet. Dead, like a morgue at midnight. I put the iron down and turned around, and there, ten feet away, staring directly at me, stood the Captain, accompanied by the Executive Officer, accompanied by Prince Phillip, accompanied by two or three solemn-looking aides. I snapped to attention and saluted, which must have looked truly stupid because American naval personnel are not supposed to salute anyone unless they are wearing a hat and are outdoors and are clad in something other than their underwear.

Prince Phillip took it all very well.

Handsome and royal-looking in a natty, dark blue suit and dark tie, he left the captain’s side, strode directly to me, shook my hand, and asked how I was doing. I spluttered something, not sure what. Then he surprised everyone (you should have seen the look on the captain’s face) and asked if he could

have a go at ironing my shirt. I spluttered something else, which he took for an ok, did a bit of ironing, smiled, slapped my shoulder, then left with the captain and contingent to finish the below-deck tour that was not supposed to have occurred.

I know all this sounds like B.S. but it really happened. I did not get court marshaled, or keel-hauled, or strung up by my thumbs from the mainmast (windjammer sailors did not have easy lives), for saluting indoors or being out of uniform. And strangely enough, the off-the-cuff encounter between Refined Royal and Skivvy Sailor was never mentioned by the captain or any of the officers. Too embarrassing, perhaps, to speak of. Prince Phillip has been my favorite Personage of Royalty ever since. After all, anyone who can get away with saying “I don't

think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing,” while being married to the Queen of England, has got my respect. By the way, he did a dandy job ironing my dress jumper, as you can see from the picture taken an hour later on the Eagle's foredeck.

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Email from New Zealand War Wound

By Frank I. Sillay

Duncan was a member of the WWII generation, and had served in the New Zealand Navy during that difference of opinion. When I knew him, he had a livestock farm about an hour from Wellington, and I always appreciated his seemingly endless supply of funny stories.

On one occasion, he spent a day in the city, dealing with a few matters that couldn’t be done over the phone, and found himself with an hour to spare at the end of the day.

So, he decided to drop in on his brother, who worked at the Railways Workshop, not far from where I now live. Duncan arrived at his brother’s house a few minutes before the change of shift, and as the house was locked, he sat in the sun on the front steps to await the arrival of his unsuspecting host.

The gate by which the staff came and went from the workshop complex was just a couple of doors down the street from his brother’s house, so he soon saw the crowds of workers, who had just knocked off, pouring out the gate and was confident of soon enjoying a cup of tea when his brother got home.

The smooth flow of workers coming out the gate was briefly interrupted by the arrival at the gate of a man who appeared to be in some distress. He was hunched forward, as if

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he might be experiencing abdominal cramps.

His gabardine overcoat was over his shoulders, but as his arms were not in the sleeves, it simply draped over him. He was accompanied by two friends, one on each side, supporting him by the elbows, and fussing over him solicitously.

The guard on the gate asked what the problem was, and one of the escorts said it was just an old war wound playing up, as it occasionally did, and they had everything under control. The guard offered to call the nurse to have a look, but the man’s friends said his sister’s house was just along the road, and he’d be better off there and soon be right as rain. The guard reluctantly let them go, under the press of workers anxious to get home, and the trio shuffled along the sidewalk toward where Duncan was watching with interest.

When they reached the gate leading to where Duncan sat, one of the men gestured in a way that clearly meant “OK if we come in here?”

Duncan gave a shrug of indifference, and the group entered the front yard, where the suffering veteran put down an anvil that had been concealed under his coat.

Email from New Hampshire The Pain of Winning

By Pedro Pereira

Supporting a sports team is a form of suffering. Especially when the team has a tendency to get so close to glory but not quite reach it. Yet, sometimes the gods of sport take pity on long-suffering fans and hand us a reason to rejoice.

Such is the case this year with my favorite soccer team in the world, Lisbon’s Sporting Clube de Portugal. Typically Sporting ends the season in second, third or fourth place, but this year won the national championship, its first in 19 years. With three more matches to dispute, Sporting, on May 11, defeated Boavista Futebol Clube, a team from the northern Portuguese city of Porto. The win gave Sporting enough points to make it mathematically impossible for a rival to win the title.

The May 11 victory wasn’t without panicky moments. Sporting players had over a dozen shots on goal, but managed to hit the back of the net only once. And as any soccer enthusiast will tell you, a 1-0 score is hell.

Sportinguistas have waited for glory since their last championship in 2001/2002 season.

Nineteen years may not seem like much if you’re a Mariners or Chargers fan but, understand, Sporting is part of the triumvirate of clubs that have won all but two of Portugal’s soccer leagues. The other two habitual winners are Sport Lisboa e Benfica, cheered globally by a madly enthusiastic diaspora of fans, and the almost-as-famous Futebol Clube do Porto. All three have global followings, but as much as it pains me, Benfica has the biggest.

Like Father, Like Son You see, Sporting and Benfica are classic rivals, with stadiums less than two miles apart in the Portuguese capital. As fate would have it, four days after wining the title,

Sporting fell to Benfica in an exuberant 4-3 match. It was Sporting’s first defeat all season, thwarting fans’ invictus dreams. You know rivals, they’re always spoiling the fun.

No one was happier about Sporting’s title win than my dad. It was an early present for his 89th birthday. My love of the greenand-whites was passed on from the old man.

As a wee boy, I trailed him to soccer matches all over the island of São Miguel, Azores.

Dad served as president of the local soccer club, the Sporting-affiliated Sporting Clube Ideal, from 1968 to 1971. Kitted in the same green-and-white jerseys and black shorts of the mother club, Ideal crawled around tortuous island roads in a diesel bus to face off rivals. Back then, highways were nonexistent so a 20-minute trip today would take two hours or more. The saving grace was that the roads, which mostly hugged the ragged coast, gave us spectacular views of an indigo ocean separated from lush-green mountains by ash-colored sand and stern basalt cliffs. Lined with hydrangeas and hyacinths, these roads cut through cliffs and 11

pastures where black-and-white Holsteins added splashes of indolent beauty.

For a boy of three or four, these outings were a huge thrill, providing a veritable assembly line of life-long memories.

Don’t ask me about specific victories or losses (or draws; this is soccer after all). It’s been too long. But I remember sitting with dad at the front of the bus, the players paired up in rows of seats behind us, trading barbs, telling jokes, singing, psyching themselves – and congratulating or consoling each other after a match.

In my childhood, I saw the Lisbon-based Sporting play only once, in 1979. The team flew in for an exhibition game against Ideal.

We braced – and hoped – for a blowout.

Maybe 8-0 or 12-0! We all had bets going.

When Sporting scored only twice and left to catch a flight to Madeira for another exhibition, we despaired. It never occurred to us we were being disloyal to our local team, whose joy and disappointments we shared much more intimately. We followed Sporting on TV, the jersey loops coming across as fuzzy light gray and fuzzy dark gray. But with Ideal, we could smell the grass in the pitch and hear the ragged breaths of the players up close.

I again saw Sporting in person decades later, in 2010, when the team played an exhibition against London’s Tottenham Hotspur at Red Bull Stadium in New Jersey.

It was a 2-2 draw. Two days earlier, Sporting had defeated Manchester City 2-0 on the same pitch.

Eight years later I saw Sporting play at its home stadium of Alvalade against rival Benfica. Talk about anti-climactic. Benfica attacked more, but never managed to score.

Neither did Sporting. It was a dull 0-0 draw.

Did I mention that most soccer games are low-scoring? No matter. I was there for a derby between two of the oldest soccer rivals in the world.

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Success by another name Sporting’s accomplishment this year is a kind of sporting miracle. The team was considered seriously hobbled as the season kicked off. It had lost seasoned players and its newly hired coach was young and short on experience. Still, Ruben Amorin (who rose to prominence as a player at Benfica) assembled a scrappy young squad, reaching deep into the club’s academy to find hungry new talent.

Now, for those who don’t know, Sporting’s academy usually appears somewhere on the list of the top five or 10 soccer academies in the world. It produced the prodigy that is Cristiano Ronaldo, arguably the best to ever play the game.

In a way, Sporting is a victim of its own success. The academy’s excellence often interferes with the team’s prospects of winning championships. Deep-pocket clubs from England, Spain, Italy and France keep a close eye on graduates, poaching them at the first opportunity. Such was the case with Ronaldo, who was scooped up by Manchester United after only one season with Sporting’s main squad.

Ronaldo, through his stunning systematic accumulation of soccer records over the years, has been a huge source of pride for sportinguistas. Though our team may win a championship only occasionally, no one can take Ronaldo’s phenomenal success from us.

Then again, it hasn’t been all bad for the team. Sporting has picked up several trophies in cup competitions since 2002, but of course fans value the league championship most of all. It will be a while before the sheen of victory wears off – well, at least until the first match Sporting loses after the new season starts in August. We may have to wait another 19 years for glory. But it will be worth it. Just as it was this time. Just ask my dad.

Postcard from Out There Ripping the Band-aid Off Our Sheltered Pandemic Life Story and Waterlogue Photo Illustration by John H. Ostdick

Jumping back into life among the masses wasn’t as disorienting as we thought it might be, but the new normal doesn’t seem quite so yet.

For more than a year, we had adapted.

Recoiled. Masked. Zoomed. Back-yard patio visited at a safe distance. Traveled vicariously through reposted social media odysseys.

Remained virtually alive in our house by a wooded creek.

Post-vaccination, we began to peer around that corner out there again. Started slowly by grocery shopping at seven in the

morning instead of six. Attended outdoor dinners of as many as four couples, reacquainting ourselves with social graces, although not without a lot of repeatedly talking over the other guests with the first notions that popped into our disoriented heads.

Friends and family members started booking flights, packing their cars, and heading out there. We knew we weren’t ready to fly yet. Too fast, too soon, too chaotic for the cautiousness that we have become a bit perhaps too chummy with.

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Amid horror stories surfacing about limited, price-jacked hotel vacancies and exorbitant and scarce rental car availabilities, we started formulating some baby steps, such as a day trip to one of our happy places, masks at the ready and little daring involved.

And then, suddenly, a happy, bouncing puppy flash of anticipation hit us, like seeing a distant friend walking up to the door. Or in this case, landing at a huge, buzzing airport almost 20 miles away.

An Offer She Couldn’t Refuse For some time, my pastry chef-writer wife Michelle and I had been extending a standing offer to Jeanne (a food and garden editor-writer who is presently calling Des Moines, Iowa, home) to come visit us in Dallas. As part of her continuing writing research, Jeanne was booked last spring on a bus tour of reality TV stars Chip and Joanna Gaines’ remaking of Waco, Texas, in their own vision. COVID-19 nipped that in the bud as well. So, when Jeanne told Michelle that she was soon to be on her way to a communal Kansas camping trip with mostly strangers (I wait, without spoiling the tale, to

read Jeanne’s account of that adventure in some genre at a point in the future, dear readers), Michelle popped out with an invitation that surprised even her at the time.

Why don’t you come here prior to your camping trip? You can help me bake our monthly cookie batches for ICU nurses, and we will take you to Waco while you are here.

The Waco card proved the final straw, the big carrot, the offer she could not refuse.

And that, my friends, is where Michelle walked into my home office and let me know we were to have our first house guest in more than a year and a half, and when this story shifted to present tense.

My first thought is, who is this person standing in my doorway? This can’t be the same uber-cautious spouse who has been toeing an agonizing conservative social contact line for months. A house guest in 14

quarters where cleaning and straightening has been at best haphazard for a long spell? She’s coming in less than two weeks?

Shifting Gears So, out come the calendars: what to do and see in Dallas; brainstorming options for interesting short hops from here; scheduling for two days for intensive baking and packing cookies for our ICU nurses; and figuring out the best time for a jaunt to Waco, which is an almost two-hour drive.

We scrub, plan and shop for fun meal ingredients, and shoot texts full of activity ideas to Jeanne to determine her preferences.

The shut-ins are throwing open the doors and windows.

Before we know it, we are hovering at baggage claim, mask on, and although all vaccinated, sharing ever-so-wary hugs. The masks stay on all the way home and into the den — then suddenly, they are not, and everyone relaxes.

By consensus, our first full day settles on a drive to our “happy place,” where friends are conjuring up some cool things with food in a small town a couple of hours away. A quick text to determine if we are welcome (our friends are not yet allowing customers inside their shop, rather selling their products on the front porch, and one of their children has been fighting a non-COVID virus). All systems are go, however, and early the next day we are off in a westerly fashion, noting all the curious roadside distractions for Jeanne as we go.

The first thing I’ve noticed about navigating post-vaccine times is a heightened road craziness. Perhaps it is exaggerated in car-crazy Texas, but while so many of us were sheltering, vehicles seem to have been hellbent on breeding. Traffic is unhinged. People who heavily reduced their road time the last 18 months apparently lost their driving skills.

And those who remained on the road throughout seemingly got comfortable driving 20 miles per hour above the speed limit.

Many are not making the adjustment to the new normal.

Nonetheless, the day turns transcendent.

We slip inside Kevin and Holly’s closed shop in jovial spirits. It’s as if a champagne cork flies across the room. Bubbles of joy, relief, and invigoration flow generously.

Turns out that we picked their wedding anniversary to visit, and they hadn’t made any plans. Celebration is de rigueur. As we expected, Jeanne is smitten by our friends and vice versa. Kevin prepares some wonderful hand pies filled with homemade pimiento cheese and squash from their farm, served with ample fresh guacamole. The shared storytelling and laughter are vivid, like cool, cleansing breezes moving throughout the Two Clay Birds Garden Market.

Occasionally, customers will walk across the front porch, and look at us inside, trying to determine if the shop is open again. At this point, Holly will mask up and step out to greet them and tell the customers that she and Kevin are using the down time to renovate the store, and that they hope to reopen fully in the fall.

Soon, Kevin pulls out his guitar and his incredible voice adds to our merriment.

With a little coaxing, Michelle’s ukulele joins the fray. Before we know it more than five hours have elapsed. It is time to hit the highway for home. As we drift through the pockets of small-town rush hours, I decide that this "clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose (Friday Night Lights Coach Taylor nod)," amazing day is officially our post-pandemic Day One. Our hearts seem lightened in concert.

A Blur of Traffic and Activity The rest of the week goes quickly, full of jaunts through traffic to Dallas spots we think Jeanne will like. The disappointingly renovated Farmers’ Market that has glaringly little fresh produce and beaucoup of trendy shops serving the new housing developments surrounding it. Barbecue sampling at Pecan

Lodge and Heim’s Barbecue locations. A sprinkling of Mexican food. A Frida Kahlo exhibit at the wonderfully cool Dallas Museum of Art. A little pre-campout shopping for Jeanne. Happy hour margaritas at warm outside venues. People, people, people are everywhere. Masks come and go by circumstance.

Each day we retreat to the house tired but full of food talk (Michelle being a pastry chef, Jeanne a cookbook author and longtime food editor/writer, and I a kitchen everyman). We produce this month’s 300 cookies for our ICU nurses. Michelle and Jeanne partake in what the chef calls cookiniving, playing with various ideas in the kitchen. My fabled martinis follow.

I pass through the den one early evening, and they are seated on the couch with enough open cookbooks around them to start a first-rate culinary library. The energy level is high, even as the eyelids grow heavy.

A City Branded We get Jeanne to Waco. By now, the Chip and Joanna Gaines story is well embedded in entrepreneurial and reality TV lore. They purchased their first property in 2003. They formed a construction company, Magnolia Homes, that started remaking parts of Waco, a city of more than 135,000 by the Brazos River in central Texas. Chip the builder and Joanna the designer really made their broader mark with HGTV’s Fixer Upper. The Gaines’ empire grew from there.

Today, their brand is everywhere here.

People come from around the country to visit their expansive Magnolia Silos location in downtown Waco to buy the Gaines look in home appointments and more.

We arrive about ten on a Wednesday, to escape the weekend crowds and because it is supposed to be farmers’ market day in the pavilion area. The adjacent parking lot is already filling. An impressive line is already formed outside the site’s Magnolia Bakery, which opens at ten. We are experiencing our 15

first Texas summer heat of the season. To my view, Magnolia doesn’t hold up under the intense white afternoon light. Jeanne gathers her desired anecdotes and mental images, however, before we retreat.

World’s Best Peach Shake

Of course, we cannot leave Waco without introducing Jeanne to the world’s best peach shake, found at one of the town’s oldest traditions, The Health Camp. Truth be told, there is not a healthy thing on the small establishment’s menu, but that’s the inside joke.

By the time we deposit Jeanne back at the airport to continue to her camping excursion, the cover is completely torn off our pandemic hibernation. We still feel a deviant-virus-threatening caution to our steps — we aren’t ready to jump onto the plane with her, for example — but we are sketching out plans for a driving trip to visit a legion of gathering family and dear friends near Crested Butte, Colorado, in August. And raising our martini glasses to what’s out there in our future.

Cloud Bank, Long Beach, New York Photo by Karen Dinan

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Dillon family wedding anniversary, circa 1903. May Dillon (back row, third from the left); author’s mother, Frances Veronica Dillon (front row, fourth from the left).

Miss Dillon’s Gas Company

By Kendric W. Taylor

May Dillon knew that while the gas industry might be thought to be a messy man’s world, it was, in fact, used primarily by the women of Coney Island. Gas stoves and other appliances were taking over the market, and these were women’s tools.

It’s the first day of summer as I write. A dreadful winter is past, and warmly awaited June is here -- a month of endings and beginnings – especially graduations, which are both. This year’s commencement celebrations included participation of one of our editorial number – our publisher – who had the pleasant task of attending, with his wife, two of their granddaughters’ college ceremonies: for a journalist and a lawyer. No doubt others of us on the Natural Traveler masthead – from Maine to Malaysia -- have proudly looked on as one of the young women in their families completed one journey while embarking on the next: one lofty life pinnacle achieved, surely to be followed by others. I myself am closely

following the path of a granddaughter, who just completed her college freshmen year, and whom I am quite certain is odds-on to be the first red-haired woman president of the US. But this was not always so -- as history, and any female, will tell you. Opportunities have improved, yes, with scores of women prominent in almost every profession, but it doesn’t take an historian to remind us it has been a struggle that took centuries to get from there to here, or a pundit to remind us that a complete breakthrough is far from complete: just look at salary inequities. It took immense courage and determination for women to even get out of the house, much less manage to get an education, to get a

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decent job, and to begin that climb to even achieve equality, much less gain the top.

Look back in history: who were the most famous women to come to the mind in the US in the 20’s and 30’s? Mostly movie stars, occasional athletes and spouses of famous men: the 20’s had Mary Pickford and Zelda Fitzgerald (Mrs. F. Scott), Gloria Swanson and Gertrude Ederle, first woman to swim the channel (I had to tell you that one); while Ginger Rogers, Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt were prominent female headliners in the 30’s. This is solely a family remembrance, and not intended as a scholarly work by any means -- an academic treatise by a social scientist– so I am sure there were certainly others at the time -writers, teachers, public health advocates, explorers even, all trailblazers in their own right -- but compared to the enormous potential being wasted, pitifully few.

Of course, women were in the workforce, but doing what? According to the 1930 census, for example, nearly eleven million women, or 24.3 percent of all the women in the country, were gainfully employed. Three out of every ten of these were in domestic or personal service. Of professional women, three-quarters were schoolteachers or nurses, where they worked at a reduced wage. And, if they were recent immigrants, the sweat shops were always available.

Offsetting this, I am sure many families have stories of someone who made it. In mine, it was my great aunt, Mary Elizabeth Dillon. When she passed away in 1983, The New York Times described her as “the first woman to be president and chairman of a public utility corporation.” (That’s not only in New York -- but in the U.S. and anywhere else). She was also the first woman president of the New York City Board of Education, and in 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt called her “one of the women she most admired in America for her ‘well-rounded life.’”

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Known to her family as ‘May,’ she was also part of the Irish story in this country.

Born in Greenwich Village in 1885, back in the days when it was commonplace to see signs in the city reading “No Irish Need Apply,” she was part of a large family that originated here with the arrival from Ireland in 1851 of John Dillon and his wife, Mary Welsh (my great-great grand parents). They settled into Sullivan County, in southern New York State, about 80 miles north of Manhattan. Soon enough, a branch of their offspring moved down to the city itself – more accurately Greenwich Village, and eventually spreading over into Brooklyn and Coney Island. May Dillon was part of this latter group making the move after the turn of the century. She was one of 11 children of Philip J. Dillon, listed in the 1880 and 1900 censuses variously as a brush maker and a postal worker, His wife, Anne Wise Dillon, is listed as a home maker, as are all the females counted that day on those pages.

Back across the relatively new Brooklyn Bridge, one of Philip J.’s sons, George Philip Dillon, my grandfather, had married Mary Jane Maher, herself one of five children whose family owned a carting company. My

mother, Frances Veronica Dillon, was born in 1898 – one of four. George Philip, their father, died in 1907 at age 33 (already with four children, part of a family of hearty Irish boyo’s – who knows what kind of numbers he might have rung up had he lived).

Family Disruptions

My grandmother, Mary Jane, finding herself with four children and a husband just in the ground (died of the consumption), for whatever reason, decided her best course was to take herself off to upstate Saratoga, famous for its year-round fresh- air treatment of TB. She left the four children (the oldest 9, the youngest 3) with her mother -- also Mary Jane (Maher). This was on 158th street on Manhattan’s upper west side, which already had a house-full of Mahers -- grandchildren left by other relatives – boys in one room, girls in another (the 1910 census lists 11 people: 5 adults and 6 children). This ménage over time also included various aunts and uncles moving in and out, and included at one point, a boarder just arrived from Germany who barely spoke English!

In that house, as soon as the children were old enough, they worked: the boys up early, delivering goods from the local bakery, or newspapers, or whatever else that paid a wage. The girls, too, were sent out to look for work as soon as they were old enough, and at age 12, their education was over. That was it for the two Dillon girls; there was no thought of high school: it was eighth grade and done: go find a job. Despite this, and the fact that my mother never forgave her mother for leaving them there, with her and her sister caring for their two younger brothers, she remembered it as a happy time, with “Nana,” their grandmother, ruling the roost and supplying the love they all needed.

Things were different over in Brooklyn, although money was probably tight as well, with a family that size. But May Dillon had managed not only to attend high school, but

when her sister Evangeline left the Brooklyn Borough Gas Company to get married in 1903, she managed to get May to replace her as a secretary. She was 17.

An article in Brownstoner magazine by Susan De Vries, a staff member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, continued the story:

Mary knew nothing about the gas business, and started out in the office as the “office boy” as she would later call herself.

Anything they asked her to do, she did, and over the next few years, she learned everything about the gas business, from billing to operations. She was like an early movie heroine, a pretty, petite and blonde young woman who made her way in a man’s world. More women were eventually hired in the company, but there were very few women like Mary Dillon.

Three years after being hired, Mary had gone from junior clerk to office manager, at the age of 20. By 1912, she knew the gas business inside and out, from top to bottom.

She was so knowledgeable that she was selected by the general manager to be his assistant. Seven years later, her manager left his position. Mary Dillon was the obvious choice to succeed him. She knew more about Brooklyn Borough Gas than anyone else in the company. But she was a woman, by then a 33 year old unmarried woman. It was unheard of that a woman could manage a gas company.

While the board was fretting over public reaction to a female at the helm, they were having trouble getting a rate increase, the company was facing bankruptcy, and word was going around that they were up for sale.

Figuring they had nothing to lose, they gave in, gave her the job, but not the title.

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What was even worse, electricity was now replacing gaslight (my mother remembered as a young girl seeing the electric lights going on up along Broadway for the first time). May Dillon didn’t waste any time: she got the rate increase, and immediately began upgrading their infrastructure, including new and better gas lines, which in turn, allowed them to provide higher quality gas to borough families. She also did something that women will do when given the chance – she showed how things could be done better – and with a woman’s touch.

She began running a series of announcements in The Brooklyn Eagle, the borough’s widely read daily newspaper. As the Brownstoner explained, these were:

Not ads, but simple statements of company purpose and goals, they were reminders of what the gas company meant to Coney Island. Mary Dillon knew that while the gas industry might be thought to be a messy man’s world, it was, in fact, used primarily by the women of Coney Island. Gas stoves and other appliances were taking over the market, and these were women’s tools.

These ads, placed in the women’s pages of the paper, were gentle reminders that gas was important and worth paying for.

The stock went up, rumors of a sale faded away, and the specter of bankruptcy disappeared. Now, there was little doubt that she was able to run the company, and in 1924, the Board of Directors announced she was the new vice president and general manager of Brooklyn Borough Gas. May Dillon was running a $5 million company ($85 million today) with 500 employees, serving 170, 000 customers.

Over in Manhattan, the Great War over, and the nation rebounding into the Roaring 20

Twenties, with all their social changes, my mother and her sister were part of a new generation of young women, bobbing their hair, shortening their skirts and flocking to nightclubs for all that wonderful new jazz music, all considered very sinful. They were known as flappers, and while not sinful themselves, they were looked at askance by the proper folks. Squired around the town by the songwriter Irving Berlin, they and their friends no doubt hit all the speakeasies, the dining and dancing palaces, like Reisenweber’s Café, famous for its glamour, late nights, dance floors hot jazz, and, as she told me, going to parties at his place where Berlin would play “his funny looking piano.”

Models and Movie Extras

During the war, there had been a portrait in the window of the famous Fabian Bachrach Studio on Fifth Avenue of her sister, Mildred, posed in a Red Cross uniform, which had been all the rage. The sisters weren’t shy about riding that celebrity, modeling for Hattie Carnegie, the popular fashion designer (Lucille Ball later modeled there). They also took the ferry over to Queens to the movie studios, for work as extras. It didn’t last long, especially for Mildred, a war widow with a young daughter, and by the mid-1920’s, both were married to advertising men.

Post-war, May had also been adapting to new times – as the head of a large public utility. She set out to build a state-of-the-art corporate headquarters in Brooklyn: a place where customers could not only drop by to pay their bills, but visit the modern showroom as well, to see the absolute latest in gas-powered equipment (washers, dryers, fireplaces, heating stoves and other gas-fueled appliances). And – there was always time for experts on hand, instructing in new cooking

skills, which included not only recipes, but something else – time management.

Back in the early 1920s, May had joined the British Women’s Engineering Society (WES) in London, and the Electrical Association for Women, which, at the time, were the only such organizations in the world. An early networker, later in the decade, she teamed up with fellow member Dr. Lillian Gilbreth, a leading expert in time and motion studies (a hit 1950 movie, “Cheaper by the Dozen,” was based on her family). Based on May’s ideas, they developed a kitchen built around three basics: a circular workplace, at a uniform height, with the work taking place within the circle, thus reducing the time and effort to put together a meal. This development of kitchen design principles –using gas, naturally -- still underlies much of the kitchen layouts we still see today. It quickly became apparent that, whatever the borough, whether living in a house or an apartment, young marrieds like my mother were not interested in old fashioned kitchens: they had been eyeing those advertisements and they wanted countertops, cabinets and yes, those new gas appliances, the kind they could get in the major department stores.

May’s new headquarters was not only beautiful, in an estate-like setting, but definitely appealing to women’s growing sense of place. And, it was a practical gas plant where millions of gallons of were processed and stored. Art Deco in style, not unlike the colossal new Rockefeller Center being built over in Manhattan, it even had its own eye-catching Diego Rivera mural (the Rockefeller’s later got rid of theirs). Not surprisingly, the building won the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce’s Architectural Excellence Award in 1931. And had a new name -- the Brooklyn Union Gas Company.

Brooklyn Gas Complex, 1933 Additionally, she also became a member of the governing committee of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, as well as a member of the local school board in Coney Island – and the director of the Brooklyn and Coney Island Chambers of Commerce.

Recognizing the paucity of cultural life during the great depression, she organized a summer theater, known as the Theater on Wheels. A few years later, with the advent of World War ll, she was on the Mayor’s Business Advisory Council and the War Council of the City of New York.

The Dillon family is traceably back to Ireland in the mid-1700’s. Beyond that, it gets murky. Our original here, John Dillon, took up farming, and gained a certain amount of prominence in Sullivan County.

Those that moved further south, the new city dwellers, became drovers, many of them, hearty men driving overloaded carts behind teams of horses from the wharfs of New York harbor, over cobblestone streets, delivering goods from all over the world to the city’s

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shops and markets. The spouses, homebound, kept house, until women like May Dillon began to change all that.

Now of course, the choices for women are virtually limitless. For four years, I provided pickup after school and sports for my granddaughter Annie and her BFF, Máiread -- both Irish descent, honors students, and already awesome-squared. As they fast-tracked their way through school, I found myself marveling at what they and women in general -- including their own mothers -- were accomplishing – juggling work, home, and children – striking balances never dreamed of by past generations.

Women now were the ones determining their future – not someone else. Not only equal but taking the lead. I mean, what’s wrong with being George Clooney married to an international lawyer? Plenty of achievement for both. Girls like Annie and Máiread are close on the heels of those women who are right now pushing through the so-called glass ceiling, if not already past it May Dillon retired in 1949. She had married, but nothing much is known about her husband. She had lived in Vermont, but then moved out to Hawaii. Naturally, May was a family legend, and we were all very proud of her -- but my mother was my hero.

She was always reading yet another book – fiction and non-fiction, it didn’t matter, she loved to read, and I got that gift from her.

Her favorite employment was a job she had in a bookstore, which provided a constant flow of books for both of us to read. Thrown into the workforce during World War Two, she had a natural bent for sales, and worked at it until they wouldn’t let her anymore. A true autodidact, she never stopped being curious and learning, right up until she couldn’t anymore. When she was very old and dementia had taken her to another place, I’m glad it was to west 158th street, where she thought she was, and had been so happy.

She lived to be 94 and was my rock.

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The rest of the Dillons became part of the demographics of this nation, migrating out of the city up toward Connecticut and out onto Long Island. Many of the Brooklyn branch chose to stay right where they were, watching the borough rejuvenate itself all around them. They all kept in sporadic touch somehow: it was easy for my mother and her sister, both living in the same town.

At any get-together, there would be stories, especially if their two brothers were visiting, huge Irishmen with booming laughs; the youngest would arrive in a chauffeur-driven limousine, to the delight of my cousins who would borrow it to impress girlfriends.

May lived to a wonderful old age, out in Hawaii. A family story was that she was learning a new language, at the end. But before that, she came back to star at a family reunion in New York, organized to honor her. I met her then for the first time. She was very tiny, but that impression quickly faded as you talked with her. Name tags at the event had no practical use really, as it seemed like all the men were named either George Dillon or Philip Dillon, with my father, the proper Englishman, and I the only exceptions. And he was named after his grandfather and I was named after him!

It was a prosperous, well-fed group, mostly sexagenarian, about two dozen people, representative of all the rest of the present family: which now – like many families -- included among their ranks, teachers, lawyers, business executives, bankers, actors, corporate executives, clergy, small business owners, journalists, salespeople, and just plain working people, even a new incarnation of those once called drovers, an engineer on the Metro North railroad -- who promises to honk every time he comes through my town.

You know – the American Dream -- the one that should apply to everyone equally.

Two Poems by Jay Jacobs As In A Dream First there is nothing.

With dawning awareness comes a slow awakening . . .

Perception . . . comprehension.

A gathering of clouds in the above, the turbulent ocean below tossing spray and whitecaps.

Sky-born tendrils of heavy mist descend, crackling and sparking with electricity.

Spontaneously igniting, the sea conceives and gives birth.

A wave of consciousness, the offspring of heaven and ocean, comes into being.

Arising, with self-awareness, the inconceivably vast tonnage of water purposefully surges forward, exulting in the moment.

In sheer, jubilant, utter joy, flowing, spilling, barrel-rolling over itself, gathering speed with pinball momentum, The Grand Kahuna of wavedom irresistibly sweeps all aside.

As in a dream, the monster swell knows itself.

Ecstatic with its existence, it thinks:

I see, I feel, I hear, I know, I am.

There is nothing like me in all creation!

I am the one and the only, I am great and terrible.

I pitch and roll with inexorable power.

I am the wave of consciousness and I live!

One last surge, cresting, highest yet, to touch my brother the clouds, then falling back elated, crashing into myself, spray everywhere, sizzling droplets and mist.

Calming, calm, to sleep again in tranquility.

Borne on the wind, or perhaps the very wind itself, a sigh of joy overflowing with gratitude, growing faint, diminishing . . .

Through the curtains, morning light.

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Observations of a Common Man It is an uneasy truce between the man I’ve become and the man I used to be.

I sit in the barber chair and look at the face that stares back at me, at once familiar and a stranger.

The mirrors seem to reflect all the images of similar barbershops and similar mes going back through time, progression-like.

I think of things I own, most not of the highest quality.

Somehow, I draw a parallel there with my own life; a bit of integrity sold here, a tad of honesty there . . .

The tarnish on top of I’m not sure what.

II We sit, my wife and I in a restaurant, The term restaurant really not appropriate.

One step perhaps beyond fast food.

It is our wedding anniversary.

The walls and shelves are festooned with memorabilia from the 50’s.

Most are not much better than the leftovers found in attics or garage sales.

The food comes and it is no better than the decor-bland, but not completely tasteless; neither hot nor cold; warm and somewhat common.

The table has a linen tablecloth, but it is hidden beneath a paper one.

Crayons are in a cup on the white paper over tablecloth.

This is not a sordid or dirty place, only a non-memorable one, for all the memorabilia.

Paying the check, we leave.

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103rd Aero Squadron Spad 13

Le Duc, Le Dauphin et Le Comte de Paris Silence in November

By Kendric W. Taylor

August 9, 1918 (Near the front) Dear Old Sport: What a lovely time on our picnic. I’m so glad we were finally able to have it. You looked very fine in your new American uniform. I was quite proud.

I’m moving to a base hospital near S ______s. I feel I can help more, especially now as so many of the wounded coming in from the battlefields are American boys. The hospital in Neiully will continue to forward my mail.

In haste, A 25

**** October 14, 1918 Dear Old Chap: A small operating team of two doctors and myself are moving to a Casualty Clearing Station closer to the lines, which are moving so quickly now as the Germans pull back. I am well, tho’ hungry and filthy, and tired, of course. I thrive on the work, and the good I hope we do, altho’ the wounded from mustard gas are especially heart-rending – 600 in the last 48 hours.

This will be over soon, I know, and then we will be together.

Hastily, A. ----They dived out of a cold November sky, a small flight of three. The two enemy observation balloons grew fat in their sights in the late afternoon light. Lawrence felt cramped and cold in the small cockpit. His knee had taken much longer to heal than anticipated -- in the end there had to be an operation -- and he had not been fit for flying for much longer than expected, not until late summer. But it gave him five happy days with Alex in late July, when she had been given a brief leave between assignments. By that time, he had been accepted as a captain in the Army Air Service, posted as adjutant to one of the American squadrons. He had taken Le Duc d’Orleans with him.

He spent little time on administrative duties, delegating them to a parcel of bored enlisted clerks who required little direction and were resentful of interference. Much of his time was taken up preparing the new pilots for what faced them. The great German spring offensive of 1918 had ended in exhaustion and despair for their General Staff, their shock troops stalled short of Paris, replaced with an inexorable tide in the opposite direction, a series of steady attacks spearheaded in part by the fresh American troops.

For the first time since 1914, the fighting climbed out of the trenches and spread over the countryside. As a scout squadron, his group ranged far and wide above the moving battle line, reporting back on the fluid enemy dispositions as their armies retreated out of France.

Earlier in the morning, on the day’s first patrol, they had spotted the two observation balloons. He and Albert had discussed tactics during the afternoon, and then called for a volunteer to accompany them. The entire group stepped forward, and he had chosen the most experienced among them, a man he didn’t particularly like, but who had displayed a cool head in the few air combats in which he had participated. They had taken off before dusk for the flight across German lines.

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It took the three new Spad 13s nearly 20 minutes to climb to 18,000 feet, where they set a course northward over the edge of the Argonne, generally following the river Meuse. His plan was to overpass the balloon emplacement by some 8 to 10 miles, then swing back to attack from where he hoped they would be least expected. Slipping in nose down, he would switch off his engine a few thousand yards out and take advantage of the Spad’s gliding capabilities to coast in and spring silently on the gasbag, taking the ground and gondola crew by surprise.

With the chill quickly setting in, his chest heaved as he struggled to get sufficient oxygen into his lungs and remain alert. Lawrence was grateful their time at this height would be brief. He checked the primitive instruments on his cockpit panel – altimeter, fuel gauge, oil pressure gauge, air speed indicator, inclinometer, and tachometer – all in working order.

This latest model Spad had a second Vickers machine gun mounted forward of the cockpit, and also boasted a more powerful engine -- 235 horsepower -increasing its cruising speed to 133 mph. Its ceiling had also been increased to 21,800 feet.

Peering over the side into the thickening gloom below, he spotted the two balloons ahead, swaying above the drifting battlefield smoke and suppurating pockets of phosgene gas. He counted slowly to himself, measuring the next 10 miles, then waved vigorously at his companions, raising one finger, then two, shaking his gloved hand emphatically, reminding them that he would attack the balloon on the left while they both made for the one on the right. They had determined that he would first strike from above, while the other two pilots would rush in from head-on, counting on his distraction, along with audacity and surprise to get them through safely.

He banked slowly to port, and then eased the Spad into a long dive. At three miles out, and about 2,000 feet above the target, he cut the magneto and glided silently through the buffeting air, his mind and eye estimating the angle that would take him down directly at the top of the balloon.

The trio drifted closer in from their different directions, propellers dead in the air, still unnoticed. Excited by his perfect angle of attack, he reached for the switch to restart the engine. The German ground crew, suddenly alert, scrambled to crank the balloon back to earth, but released the tether instead. The balloon lurched up some 100 feet, the huge Maltese cross on its side popping directly into his sights. He snapped the magneto over, and the engine cranked in with a roar. Almost simultaneously, his machine gun cut loose with a streak of flame that seared into the side of the huge canvas behemoth. He had refilled his ammo belts personally, each round an explosive tracer, hoping that at least one would do the trick, igniting the hydrogen that kept the balloon aloft. He roared in closer, watching intently as a small circle of flame appeared in the center of the cross and almost immediately began spreading. He fired a last burst, then shoved the stick over with all his might, kicked hard right rudder, yawing the aircraft to the left as sharply as he could, as the German crew dove over the side of the

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gondola. He continued in the tight left turn, knowing that if he climbed, the explosion would be directly beneath him, and if he dived, he might hit the tether or the other wires hanging there to guillotine unsuspecting fighter planes.

The giant gasbag exploded with a flashing, deafening roar, billowing into the sky like an obscenely pulsating jellyfish, the lurid flames illuminating the small cockpit, flinging the Spad into a sickening uncontrolled skid across the sky. He fought to right the aircraft, perspiration soaking his flying suit, fogging his goggles, his hands cramping over the control stick. He leveled off, then hauled back on the stick, shoved full throttle and fought for altitude.

The German anti-aircraft guns were making up for their earlier negligence, launching a frenzied carpet of shrapnel into the air, filthy gray and black blossoms bouncing him sickeningly about as he dodged and climbed. He searched with quick glances across the horizon for his comrades, but saw nothing. The other balloon was gone as well – cranked down or destroyed – he knew not which: the ground site was in flames.

Spotting a huge cumulous formulation a thousand yards ahead, he swung right to head for it and knifed into its wispy interior. Inside, he banked gently to the right, the Spad describing a long slow circle as he checked his fuel and ammo. The sound of his engine, which had been muffled in the moist interior of the cloud, began drumming curiously louder in his ears, until he realized it was not only his engine, but the motors of a huge British HandleyPage 0/400 bomber descending onto him from above, its endless wingspan blotting out the already dim light. He chandelled out from beneath in a breathless rush, to rise up next to the bomber, its startled crew staring over mutely through the mist. He dropped the Spad flat out of the cloud, the cockpit seat shoving up against his rear end, his gut dropping in the other direction. He caught a flash of a yellow triplane approaching from his starboard, and shoved his stick forward and dived. This was getting to be a busy morning, he thought to himself.

Quickly he assessed his chances: he was confident he could outrun the Fokker’s top speed of slightly over 100 mph with the Spad’s superior diving capabilities. Although this was surely the feared and famous German Imperial Air Service’s Flying Circus, which was known to be in this sector, Von Richthofen was long since dead, and with Germany’s heavy losses, the quality of enemy pilots had declined. Still, as he craned his head for a look backward, he was not in a good spot and he disliked giving up all this altitude.

He hauled the Spad back and to the left, denying the following triplane a deflection shot with its twin Spandau guns. He climbed for the advantage, then instinctively leveled off and stood on a wingtip as a burst of tracer ripped into the spot he had only just vacated, rounds pinging off his undercarriage.

Then he was turning tightly, trying to get inside the Fokker for a burst of his own. By now he was totally exhausted, his arms and hands numb from hauling on the stick and working the throttle and triggers. Managing to escape the explosion of the observation balloon had used up vast reserves of nervous energy, his near-miss with the British bomber in the cloud further

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depleted his adrenaline, and now he was locked in mortal combat with someone he was discovering was as skilled as himself. Maybe even better.

After the toll of years of combat, suddenly, today, in this gray sky, the bill was due.

Both machines broke off simultaneously and climbed again toward the setting sun, dodging and jinking for advantage, firing an occasional burst as fleeting opportunities for a shot presented themselves. The maneuvering seemed to last forever; he was running nervously low on fuel, and he was certain he was down to his last few cartridges. Again, both machines tried turning into one another, to no avail, trying everything that hard-won knowledge, skill and experience had taught them – Immelmann, split-S, tight loops -- each man’s gambit frustrated by the skill and tenacity of the other.

Finally, the German broke off after a final burst, and started to head for home. “Lost his stomach,” Lawrence thought tiredly, and turned to chase.

In a flash, the German had clapped on rudder and looped over the top, ending up directly behind him.

Lawrence had tried everything he knew and had been unable to defeat this man. He hunched his shoulders; waiting for the burst he had been expecting all these months. He was amazed he had lasted this long. In the early days of his combat flying experience, the German machines had been so superior; their pilots so uniformly excellent, that he had resigned himself before each patrol to it being his last. Somehow he had survived, until now, at this moment, the man at his back would extinguish the brief flame that had been his short life: a man who must be an extraordinary pilot to have survived this long.

Deep within his resigned soul, despite the desperate tiredness squeezing in behind his eyes, his primordial will to live sent a last spasm of energy down through his sinews, gathering strength in his arms for a last mighty effort to throw his Spad into a split- S to throw off the German’s aim.

Instead, incredibly, the Fokker throttled up and eased in beside him.

The two pilots gazed at one another across the expanse.

Was the German out of ammo? Or, like himself, was he totally and completely played out? Maybe he sensed, as did Lawrence, that they could be up here as long as their fuel held out, twisting and turning until the engines sputtered dry and they fell long miles to their deaths? Should he blast away at the man opposite with his Colt, until the clip emptied, as that other German pilot had done at him? He was too tired even to fumble for the pistol. Both men knew the war was nearly done: German plenipotentiaries were already meeting with the Allies, discussing an armistice in a war that had settled nothing. What was the sense of any of this?

The German seemed to give him a satisfied look, then flicked a weary salute and dropped away. Lawrence did not follow him, but only gestured in turn and dipped his wing for home.

And then for some reason, the chorus of a song rang through his head:

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He'd fly through the air with the greatest of ease A daring young man on the flying Trapeze His movements were graceful, all girls he doth please and my love he purloined away.

“Not this time, pal.” ***** As the darkness settled in, he sat exhausted in an old wicker chair at the edge of the field. He still wore his flying suit, his heavy flying boots splayed on the grass before him, helmet and goggles lying on the ground. A silk scarf trailed from his hand to the sparse grass, hooked on fingers too fatigued to release it. A line sergeant stood silhouetted against the horizon in front of him, firing a Very pistol at intervals into the glowering sky, signaling the location of the airdrome to any returning aircraft. Flare after flare rose into the air, popped open, then arched over and floated back down slowly, the hissing light creating an eerie halo in the heavy air. No other planes returned. ***** “Good morning, Captain. Did you enjoy the armistice celebration last night?” The young staff lieutenant stood cheerily in front of the desk in the operations hut, happy, spared, already thinking of the great victory parade down Fifth Avenue in New York, marching in front of everyone with his bright service ribbons. In the corner, a gramophone scratched at a popular hit: “How ‘Ya Gonna Keep ‘em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree).”

“Ah yes, 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month,” Lawrence replied. “Very precise, these politicians. Now it’s all over but the retribution and the boasting: ‘made the world safe for democracy,’ don’cha know. So much rodomontade.”

“Sir?” “Big word -- another way of saying bullshit.”

The lieutenant nodded brightly: nothing could ruin this day. “Sir, I wanted to remind you that that ship with the new Liberty engine that groundlooped last week and killed Lieutenant McKeever? It’s ready to go again.

For the third time. Your orders are that you test everything before anyone else goes up. Of course, it’s probably not necessary now.”

“Oh yes?”

He gathered up his flying helmet from the desk and shoved it into the pocket of his leather flying coat. He glanced once more at a letter in his hand he had been reading from the Russian agent who contacted him in Paris, seeking pilots to fly for the civil war beginning there. He crumpled it into his pocket as well and went out the door and around to the hangar and watched them push the Spad out of the dark interior into the frosty sunlight of the early morning. He followed slowly as the men rolled it over to the flight line,

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enjoying the day, savoring the quiet after four years of guns cannonading across the French landscape. He stood considering the machine for awhile, running takeoff procedure in his mind: full throttle to pick up speed, stick forward to lift the tail skid off the grass, goose it up to about 40 mph, then back gently on the stick and up and away! Simple. He thought of the hundreds of times he had done this during the war, all the takeoffs and landings. For the first time in a long while he allowed himself to think of the men he had flown with, the men who shared all of this with him; the men who were gone.

He nodded to the mechanic standing by to spin the propeller to turn the engine over, and then glanced at the lieutenant who had accompanied him, and inquired: “It’s all ready to go, you say?”

“Yessir.”

He looked at the mechanic: “It’s a bloody under-powered deathtrap with that damn engine, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yessir. If you say so, sir.”

“I do indeed.”

He climbed up to the cockpit, looked in and saw a Very pistol on the seat. He reached in, picked it up and jumped lightly back down onto the grass. He walked a few feet from the aircraft, motioning the mechanic and the young officer away with a wave of his hand. He fired the pistol directly into the side of the wood and canvas airframe where the petrol tanks were.

The Spad exploded with a whump, as the onlookers scrambled away, their eyes wide, mouths open in astonishment. He watched interestedly as the wings bent into a Vee, then folded in on the exposed airframe, the fiery structure collapsing onto the undercarriage, the smoking propeller dropping awkwardly off onto the grass.

“Oh dear,” he said to no one in particular. The lieutenant seemed to be having trouble breathing, his mouth open, and his hands gesturing hopelessly. He began sprinting in short bursts in different directions, then returned to stand gaping at the heavy smoke spiraling up from the wreckage, undecided whether to run for help, or to just run away and pretend he had never seen anything. Within a few minutes, an olive drab Ford bounded across the airstrip toward them, sliding over the grass to a halt next to the group. An anxious soldier called to Lawrence from behind the wheel: “Captain, they want to see you at the headquarters hut – right away, sir!”

He mounted the running board of the Model T and pulled the driver out of the cab. Sliding himself into the driver’s seat, he released the brake lever on the floor and reached his right hand through the wooden steering wheel to advance the throttle.

“Captain -- the airplane,” the driver called, his hands cupped to his mouth. “They want to see you!”

“Tell them to send me the goddamn bill,” he shouted back as the flivver chugged away from the direction of HQ. “For this thing, too,” he

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shouted back. Take it out of my pay. I’m going over to Soissons to collect someone, and then we’re going home.”

New York, December 21, 1918 – (Combined News Services) -- Captain Hobart A. H. (Hobey) Baker, hockey and football player of international reputation, was accidentally killed on Saturday in France, according to a cable dispatch. He was making his last flight, for he had already received orders to return home when his plane fell. Details have not yet been received.

In Memory of Lt. Hugh S. Thompson 96 Aero Squadron AEF KIA 16 Sept. 1918, St. Mihiel, France

Toronto Photo by Andrea England 32

Some Fine Summer Reading Need a book to read this summer at the beach, on a plane or wherever?

Excerpts from these four wonderful books will help you decide. The first, beginning on the following page, is from Bill Scheller’s work in progress, “In All Directions,” coming soon from Natural Traveler Books.

Bill Scheller

In All Directions

Thirty Years of Travel

Tony Tedeschi

Unfinished Business She could only hope to put it all behind her, if the painting,

like that terrible day in her life, were relegated, emphatically, to her past.

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Bill Scheller

In All Directions

Thirty Years of Travel

I wrote this piece for the now-vanished Islands magazine, following a ten-day Venice sojourn in the late winter of 1995. The twenty-six years that have passed since that trip have made certain parts of my account seem quaint — I’m thinking, in particular, of my references to the city’s recently-achieved access to the Internet, and to the association of cell phones with Yuppies, as opposed to everyone on Earth over the age of three. There are fewer Venetians now than there were in 1995, and — at least in the year before the pandemic, when I last visited — far more tourists. But the spirit of the city remains, and I hope the artisans making mattresses by hand do, too.

The Working World of Venice

By Bill Scheller

Islands, December 1995 This afternoon Venice smells like laundry. Not like noisome summer canals or damp plaster in a tilting palazzo; not like fish sizzling in a trattoria or sea mist and doom. I am in a working-class neighborhood known as Santa Elena, and Venice smells like the garlands of laundry strung across the street.

Of all the world's cities, Venice most enjoys -- or suffers -- the cachet of being a place where fantasy looms larger than reality, where work runs a 34

poor second to play. This is partly Venice's own fault. During the days of her 18th-century decline, she worked hard at cultivating the playground image.

The image stuck, and the tourists kept coming.

Venice also answers for her sheer gorgeousness: In a world where aesthetics and economy are driven by the cold Calvinist north, any place this delightful to the eye must have been built to be a fey little theme park.

Venice's great landmarks -- St. Mark's Basilica and its piazza, the Grand Canal with its palazzi and quayside cafés, the palace of the doges and the Bridge of Sighs -- stand in the mind's eye as the stuff of romance and the backdrops to a holiday.

The truth is that no city ever worked so diligently to such serious purpose, ever strove so mightily after the almighty ducat or did so much to set up shop for the rest of Western civilization in the bargain. If Venice is impossibly beautiful, it is because its builders saw no reason why beauty and work should be incompatible. The senators, artisans, and merchants of Venice had no trouble inventing commercial banking, while at the same time wringing a few extra decades of poetry from the vocabulary of late Gothic architecture.

But still the laundry had to be done, as it was being done this day in the secluded far eastern corner of the city, where I stood beneath this festoon of fresh linen. I had spent the past few days exploring outward from the Venetian epicenter of St. Mark's, making it my business to look beyond the Rialto Bridge, beyond the great paintings of the Accademia galleries, beyond the apricot-tinted sunsets behind the church of Sta. Maria della Salute.

Without ignoring gondola rides and Titian-filled churches, I wanted to see past the treasure gloss of Venice and to sense its everyday pulse. I wanted some glimpse of life in a city that dates back 1,500 years, to the days when the first mainland refugees fled the barbarians' sack of Rome's Adriatic cities and settled on the marshy, unpromising islands of the Venetian lagoon.

I got my glimpse, and then some. I found what I was looking for on a narrow street, scant blocks from the fabulous Tintoretto ceilings of the Scuola di San Rocco, in the neighborhood of San Polo, where a metalsmith worked at his anvil in the back of a dusty shop while his wife tended a brazier of coals. I sensed workaday Venice as I looked through a shop window to watch an artisan with a single strong needle craft a mattress from yard goods and cotton batting.

I sensed it again on the soccer field at the naval academy, where the heirs of one of the world's greatest maritime traditions butted and booted their ball around. And I watched as two young civil engineers set up their transit to survey for a new footbridge across a canal on the island of Giudecca.

At another canal in another quarter, where workers had drained the water away so they could shore up a Gothic foundation, I saw brown mud where, on any other day, there would have been shimmering reflections.

"Do you ever find anything interesting when you drain a canal?" I asked one of the workmen.

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The man shrugged and gestured with his cigarette toward the mud.

There was his answer: bricks, last week's empty wine bottle, a couple of broken flowerpots.

I was disappointed. One of my favorite Venetian stories concerns the 18th-century magnifico who impressed his guests by having his golden tableware tossed out the window after each course of a banquet. Of course, he had servants down below, holding a net above the water. But it's fun to imagine that a fork or two might have missed the net.

I went to that most modern and prosaic of institutions, the supermarket. Two or three exist even in Venice. In one, I discovered the justhome-from-work-gotta-throw-dinner-together versions of all the Venetian classics around which two-hour restaurant meals are built. Here was pasta e fagioli, the rich local soup of macaroni and beans, dried and bagged by Buitoni. A frozen, shrink-wrapped assemblage of squid and shellfish was called "misto per risotto."

There was also a display of cat food large enough to fill the shelves of a giant American supermarket, its presence a reminder that Venice is a city of independent cats fed by everyone as a sort of community project. They aren't strays; they know exactly where they are. They aren't homeless; Venice is their home. They are the heirs of the comfortable kitty beneath the banquet table in Veronese's "Feast in the House of Levi," on exhibit in the Accademia, and none of them ever get run over by cars.

But streets that are safe for cats are losing their appeal for people who would dearly love to hop into their Alfa Romeos and drive to work. The maitre d' at the rooftop restaurant of the Hotel Danieli lives in Padua, and it takes him two hours to get home. As I finished my grappa on a slow night, he had nothing but praise for proposals to ease travel in and out of the city.

"Someone wanted to build a new bridge into Venice, from the Lido di Iesolo in the north," he said, "and a metro line -- a subway under the Grand Canal from the train station to the Rialto and St. Mark's. But the ecologists always say no. No one wants anything to be built in Venice."

The upshot, according to the maitre d', is that not only do many Venetians move to the mainland and commute to jobs in Venice; some stay in the city and commute to the mainland to work.

So, Venice makes it hard to live in Venice. Yet someone is buying the frozen risotto mix; someone ordered the handmade mattress; someone is hanging out the laundry. Someone employs the pressman wearing the traditional square cap made out of a newspaper page, whom I saw walking into a bar for lunch. And someone, other than a tourist, buys produce from the little fruit and vegetable barges that tie up along the sidewalks.

Someone, with a Mac or a PC tucked behind Renaissance walls, must have been happy to see the printout banner in the window of a computer store that heralded: "Finally Venice has a connection with the Internet." La Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic, is on the information supercanal.

Of course, there are Venetian yuppies. There are so many Venetians

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walking around with cellular phones nowadays that if one asked another, "What news on the Rialto?" the answer would undoubtedly be, "Un momento -- just let me check."

Suits are everywhere in Venice - even the old pensioner, his dogelike profile turned toward the winter sun as he naps in the public gardens, is turned out better than an American banker. But you can always tell when there's mercantile purpose in a Venetian's stride.

What is in short supply, sadly, is a new generation of Venetians. Of Venice's population of some 75,000 souls - down from nearly 150,000 about 50 years ago - fewer than 4,000 are children.

One afternoon I turned off the Fondamenta della Croce, between Palladio's church of the Redentore and the eastern tip of the island of Giudecca. Before continuing on to the vaporetto stop at Le Zitelle for the short ride to the island and church of San Giorgio Maggiore, I ducked into the narrow lanes of the housing project that lies between two of Venice's most exclusive institutions -- the "Garden of Eden," a walled private enclave planted by an Englishman with that paradisaical surname, and the plush Cipriani Hotel.

The pathway I followed led to a grassy courtyard, surrounded by twostory apartment blocks that could have stood anywhere between Minsk and Minneapolis. I felt like an intruder in someone's yard. There was no one around except for a woman on a second-floor balcony; I tossed her a clothespin she had dropped.

But not long after I turned my back on the courtyard, I felt something small and hard hit the back of my neck. I heard giggling and turned. Half a dozen urchins, like the snot-nose kids in Fellini's Amarcord, were ducking under a portico.

The game began. Every time I turned my back, another pebble would hit me; when I spun around, they'd jabber and point at each other as if to say, "Not me, it was him." Only 4,000 kids in Venice, and I had to run into this bunch.

They followed me out the alley before losing interest. Once I got inside the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, though, I didn't feel so bad: There was Tintoretto's "Martyrdom of St. Stephen," showing the saint being pelted to death with stones.

Among the grown-up pursuits of Venice, perhaps none strike as familiar a chord with the outside world as those having to do with the lagoon city's signature craft, the gondola. By no means are the gondoliers themselves anything less than authentic -- the redoubtable Mario, who took me from the Grand Canal quay called the Riva degli Schiavoni and back via a labyrinthine route I could never hope to retrace, told me that his pedigree as a Venetian was untraceably long and that his father and grandfather had been gondoliers.

But the men who guide the long black boats are, finally, in the front line of the tourism industry. The men who build gondolas are a step closer to

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the old pulse of Venice.

The small canalside yards where gondolas are constructed are called squeri, and there are four of them in operation in Venice today. Equipped with a map and some vague directions from the gondoliers who congregate in back of St. Mark's piazza, I finally found the squero of D. Manin on the Rio di San Trovaso.

The scene there was impossibly medieval. Wooden balconies, their railings crowded with geraniums, lined the two-story tile-roofed buildings around the little gondola yard. Two partly built gondolas lay half beneath a shed roof at the head of the sloping ways. One was overturned, its bottom being sanded and caulked with pitch. Even where I stood, across the canal, the pungent smell of pitch was in the air.

The squero I really wanted to visit was the one belonging to Tramontin and Sons, which Mario had told me made the best gondolas. He has a Tramontin, 16 years old, and when it has run out its useful life in perhaps 5 years, he will replace it with another, at a cost of about $22,000.

Tramontin's establishment was in an even more remote part of the Dorsoduro neighborhood, at the intersection of two obscure canals. I was able to see the yard before I could figure out how to get to it; finally, I guessed that a gray steel door in a narrow alley was the only possible entrance. I rang a bell alongside the locked door, and in a moment I was buzzed in by Roberto Tramontin, whose great-grandfather Domenico had started the business.

A busy man, Roberto Tramontin, or else a man of few words. I asked if I could come in and look around; he said yes. When I thanked him, he responded with a brief, "Prego," the all-purpose Italian word that includes "you're welcome" among its meanings.

It was a privilege to be allowed so nonchalantly into one of the most rarefied manufacturing establishments on earth, and it was quite a surprise when Roberto soon disappeared and I was in the squero alone. It was like being left alone in an old small-town garage when the mechanic has gone out for a part, only this was a world of wood, not of metal.

There are eight different kinds of wood in a gondola - among them elm for the ribs, oak for the bottom, and walnut for the forcola, or oarlock.

The seasoning stock was fragrant in racks beneath the rafters. A single gondola lay overturned, its bottom still only partly planked. Along one wall a long worktable held an array of hand tools that might have been laid down by men who had gone off to join the Fourth Crusade.

I was standing there staring at the tools and at an old photo of Domenico Tramontin, framed beneath two mock wooden ferri (the crested and serrated steel ornaments that grace gondolas' prows) when an old man walked into the shed. He went over to the partly constructed boat and began hand-sawing planking very slowly and with methodical sureness.

"Buon giorno," he said, and that was all. I let myself out by the steel door.

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In a water city, the water is the place to look to see the day's work being done. Watching the traffic on the lagoon and on the larger canals is like watching the rest of the world with its wheels removed, sending up a wake. As I stood for a few minutes along the Fondamente Nuove, the broad quay on the north side of Venice, I saw a speeding ambulance, a shipment of oranges, a veterinarian's boat (a cat emergency?), and a fire boat. A brown-and-white boat went by with "United Parcel Service" emblazoned on its side. Another boat was carrying a new dishwasher, and on the prow was the single word "Whirlpool." And -- startling yet perfectly logical -- a hearse boat chugged past with a shiny mahogany coffin on deck. San Michele, the cemetery island of Venice, was only a few hundred yards away; behind me, along the Fondamente Nuove and its little side streets, the marble workers were busy cutting and polishing headstones and tombs.

One afternoon I set out across the water, to a corner of the lagoon between Venice proper and the long barrier beach called the Lido, to visit a little-known religious and intellectual outpost. Here, in this city of churches and of the original Jewish ghetto - where Hasidim still keep a strict Sabbath in the streets where Shylock walked - one of the busiest retreats of the godly is on the little cypress-studded island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, home of the mother house of the Armenian Catholic Mechitarist fathers.

The Mechitarists have been here since 1717. Within these walls Byron once studied classical Armenian, and today 15 priests and as many seminarians edit and publish editions of old Armenian manuscripts (more than 4,000 books and documents, some dating back to the seventh century, fill the community's library), along with modern works on Armenian culture.

A genial, dry-witted priest explained it all to me and to a small group of tourists I had come over with - that is, after he finished explaining where Armenia was.

"It's in Armenia," he answered drolly, after disabusing a geographical naif of the notion that it was in Israel. Fluent in Italian, English, German, and both the classical and vernacular versions of his native Armenian, he made it seem the most natural thing in the world for a tiny religious order with roots in the Caucasus to publish books in 32 languages on an island in the Venetian lagoon. The connection has a lot to do with the old saying that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend;" traditionally, Venetians and Armenians alike shared, along with a common Christianity, an antipathy toward the Turks.

To Turks and other enemies of the old Republic of Venice, one of the most feared sights on the high seas was a banner bearing the image of a lion holding a bound gospel -- the Lion of St. Mark, Venice's age-old symbol.

The lion is emblazoned all over the city, but as I rode the vaporetto back from the Mechitarists' island, I saw it at its most impressive: set in bronze on the superstructure of a giant freighter, the Fenicia, making its way down the Giudecca Canal. Painted on the stern was the ship's port of registry,

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Venezia. Here was a vivid link with the lagoon city's storied maritime past.

For centuries -- almost since those first late-Roman refugees began to gather on this marshy little archipelago -- Venice had understood that its destiny lay upon the water and its wealth lay in moving goods, at a considerable profit, from where they were made to where they were wanted.

The Fenicia, no doubt, was delivering something other than spices and silks, and Venice is no longer master-merchant to the world. But that ship carried tradition and pride, and in its figurative wake all the commerce of the West had arisen.

On my last day in Venice I went out into the countryside without ever leaving the city limits. The island of San Erasmo is less than a half-hour's vaporetto ride from the busy quay of Fondamente Nuove, but it might as well be a hundred miles away. The morning sounds I heard there were not the bells and bustle of St. Mark's but the trill of songbirds, the crowing of a rooster, and the chugging of a tractor in a distant field. Another surprise, after a week during which I had seen nothing mounted on wheels other than baby strollers and handcarts, was that the people of San Erasmo had bicycles, motor scooters, and cars. Like a train station in an American suburb, the vaporetto landing was surrounded by vehicles left for the day by commuters.

San Erasmo is not merely a bedroom island. Venice's vegetables have to be grown somewhere, and that somewhere may as well be nearby. San Erasmo is all farms and vineyards with a small village attached.

I walked down the narrow lane from the landing, past fields of salad greens, past the straight rows of pruned vines waiting for the warm spring sun to bring them into leaf. The soil was dark and rich. Houses were few and far apart, and people scarcer still.

Here and there someone was hoeing weeds; several times I was passed by women on bicycles, all of whom wished me good morning after looking a bit surprised that any outsider other than the mailman (who had been on my boat) would bother setting foot on San Erasmo. With their black bicycles and sturdy woolen coats, the women seemed like phantoms from Europe's early postwar days as they cycled along the flat, tilled fields.

My hike around the island took two hours, and it was only at the end of that time that I came to the town center that served these farmers and their commuting kin. There was little more than a nursery school named after Pope John XXIII (the onetime patriarch of Venice), a small food market, and a new church with a Romanesque font inside for holy water.

Almost a millennium ago, when that font was freshly carved, the landholders of San Erasmo were no doubt busy at the same fields and vineyards through which I had just passed. And some of them, the young and more adventurous, probably crossed the Lagoon, like today's vaporetto commuters, to pitch in at the task of making Venice work. www.naturaltravelerbooks.com

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The Nats and the Grays “Baseball has always been in David Hubler’s bones. A Bronx boy, he grew

up in 1950s in the shadow of Yankee Stadium and has lived and worked in the Washington area for much of his adult life.”

Except for a few years in the mid-1920s, Washington’s major league baseball team could hardly be described as a powerhouse before, during, and especially after World War II. But whether they were called the Senators, the Nationals, or simply the Nats, the Washington franchise and its owner experienced the war from a front row box seat. The close relationship between the prairie-bred entrepreneur Clark Griffith, frequently known as the Old Fox, and the New York patrician President Franklin D. Roosevelt played an important, if often backstage role in decisions that affected the team but more importantly, the national pastime itself. Roosevelt’s White House door was usually open to the baseball executive because, as author Richard Goldstein writes in his book, Spartan Seasons, “The seventy-year-old owner of the Senators had built a friendly relation-ship with the president beginning in 1917 when, as the wartime assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt marched to the flagpole on the opening day of the baseball season

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in step with the Griffith-managed Washington team. ‘The Old Fox’ would do some quiet lobbying at the White House.”Yet, despite the closeness of the pair, the Washington franchise was not exempt from placing some of its members in harm’s way or temporarily losing several key players who actively participated in winning the war, and in one case shortening an outstanding diamond career.

The ties between Washington baseball and Washington government predated the U.S. entry into World War II when the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Indeed, the nation – and the team in the person of one Washington backup catcher – had begun preparations for the conflict – emotionally and militarily –much earlier, even before Nazi armies swept into Poland on September 1, 1939. Soon after the 1934 baseball season ended, with Washington in its all-too familiar place near the bottom of the eight-team American League with a 66-86 record, backstop Moe Berg – described by Casey Stengel as “the strangest man ever to play baseball” – joined an all-star team that included Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmy Foxx and Lefty Gomez for what was Berg’s second exhibition tour of Japan. Berg had first visited Japan in the winter of 1932 to teach catching techniques to young Japanese players as a member of a three-player American delegation. Always a good defensive catcher, on April 21, 1934, Berg set an AL record catching117 consecutive games without an error. That season was a personal high for Berg at the plate as well. He hit .244, one point higher than his career average.

Now in Japan again in 1934, Berg’s familiarity with the Japanese language (but not fluency as some writers have claimed) and his proclivity to “go native” by wearing a kimono in public allowed him to roam freely about the streets. He took photos and panoramic movies of Tokyo and environs, a highly dangerous activity in an insular country that prohibited “spying” of any kind, especially photography, and was growing ever-more suspicious of Westerners. Upon the group’s return to the United States, Berg collected his photos along with some taken by his touring teammates and turned them over to U.S. military officials. Within less than a year after the U.S. went to war against Japan, General Jimmy Doolittle’s pilots reportedly viewed Berg’s photos to help them become familiar with their target areas before taking off on the famous “Doolittle Raid” on Tokyo on April 18, 1942.

During the war, Berg, the former Princeton scholar and graduate of the Sorbonne and Columbia University Law School – described by his teammates as a man who could speak a dozen languages, but couldn’t hit in any one of them – worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. Among Berg’s OSS missions was to parachute into Yugoslavia to ascertain the strength of the anti-Nazi Chetniks loyal to King Peter and the communist partisans led by Josip Broz Tito. On another mission, posing as a German businessman in Switzerland, Berg met Werner Heisenberg, the 1932 Nobel Prize winner in physics and a prominent German scientist suspected of working on designing an atomic bomb for the Nazi regime. If OSS suspicions were correct, Berg’s orders

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were to assassinate the scientist and then take a cyanide capsule to avoid capture. The astute catcher, who was fluent in German, had boned up on atomic physics for his mission. After listening to a lecture given by Heisenberg, Berg concluded that the Germans were not close to developing the atomic bomb. As a result of Berg’s scientific assessment, both men survived the war, and each went on to claim fame in their individual fields: Heisenberg became one of the world’s most influential figures in nuclear physics, cited in everything from documentaries on television’s The History Channel to the acclaimed AMC TV show “Breaking Bad.” Heisenberg died of cancer at his home in Germany on February 1, 1976. Berg, often called the “smartest baseball player ever,” never married. He had no close friends or known romantic attachments. Although he attended many major league games in New York in later life, he remained a virtual recluse and an enigma until his death in Newark, N.J., in 1972. His extramural career in wartime espionage is enshrined in D.C.’s Spy Museum and was also included in an OSS exhibition at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Some might say that major league baseball survived the war unscathed even if the quality of play was somewhat diminished during the approximately three and a half years that the United States was involved in the conflict. Also, of the more than 500 major leaguers who served in the U.S. military during the war, only two were killed in action. One of them played, however briefly, for Washington. He was centerfielder Elmer Gedeon. The Cleveland native was born on April 15, 1917, attended the University of Michigan, and played in just five games for Washington in 1939. His 15 at-bats included three hits, one run batted in, no home runs, and a very mediocre .200 batting average.

Sent down in 1940 to Washington’s Class B affiliate Charlotte of the Piedmont League, Gedeon appeared in 131 games, upping his stats to 127 hits, 11 home runs, and a .271 bat-ting average. He was then drafted into the Army Air Corps and served first as a B-25 navigator before getting his wings as a B-26 pilot. (Due to a high crash rate of early models, the B-26 acquired several negative nick-names including the Widow Maker, The Flying Prostitute, and One a Day in Tampa Bay.) Gedeon’s twin-engine Martin Marauder B-26 bomber was shot down over France on April 20, 1944, killing him along with most of his crew. Gedeon is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, only a few miles from where Griffith Stadium stood, home of the franchise from 1911 through 1960.

Being co-located in the nation’s capital along with the Congress, the White House, and the five-sided U.S. Armed Forces citadel, the Pentagon, Washington’s baseball franchise led by its wily owner Clark Griffith, alone among the then 16 major league teams, was uniquely positioned to play an important wartime role of influencing top decision-makers. The team – almost universally known before and after the war as the Washington Senators – actually had a different name, the Nationals (as in their current namesake, which is now playing in the National League at Nationals Park, which opened in 2008). Here’s how that happened:

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In its founding years of the late 19th century, the Washington baseball club, like so many other teams, changed names, cities, and leagues with chaotic regularity. Among Washington’s 19th century nicknames were the Washingtons, the Statesmen, the Olympics, the Nationals, and from 1892 to 1899, the Senators, a National League franchise. In addition, those early Washington teams played in a number of different ballparks. Examples include the Olympic Grounds, capacity 500 and home to the Washington Olympics of the National Association in 1871. Later, as an expansion member of the American Association and when the league grew to 12 teams in 1884 to become the Union Association, the team was called the Washington Nationals. However, the bloated Union Association quickly folded and the Washington franchise moved into the Eastern League in 1885, winning the pennant with a 72-24 record. The team then jumped to the major National League as the Senators, (aka the Statesmen) in 1886, taking one of the spots vacated by the collapse of the Buffalo, N.Y., and Providence, R.I., franchises. There the Senators remained, playing between 1886 and 1899, first in colorfully named Swampoodle Grounds. But the Washington Senators folded when the National League contracted from 12 teams to eight after the 1899 season. Little wonder too, because between 1892 and 1899 the Senators finished no higher than seventh place.

The next iteration of the Washington Senators came in 1901 as a founding member of the new American League, where they continued their tradition as a perennial second division team by finishing sixth that inaugural season. The newly formed competitor of the established National League had been the brainchild of three of baseball’s iconic figures – Ban Johnson, a former sportswriter who became the American League’s first president; Charlie Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox; and Griffith, the only man who has ever played for, managed and owned a major league team for 20 years or more in each of those categories. The new Senators played in what was called American League Park I from 1901 to 1903, before the grounds were moved to Florida Avenue and Seventh Street and known as American League Park II, where the outfield included a dog house near the flagpole which housed the Stars and Stripes before and after the games but had no actual canine resident. As author Philip J. Lowry recounts in his history of American baseball parks, Green Cathedrals, the groundskeeper one day failed to close the doghouse door. “It just so happened that a Washington batter hit a line drive that afternoon over the head of Philadelphia Athletics center fielder Socks Seybold and the ball rolled inside the Dog House. Seybold stuck his head and shoulders inside to get the ball and promptly got stuck in the Dog House. Three minutes later, A’s teammates got Socks out, but the batter had long since crossed home plate with the only inside-the-dog-house homer in Major League history.”

Through the 1904 American League season, when Washington lost 113 games against only 38 wins, the team’s worst record ever, the team nickname was the Senators. But in 1905, the franchise officially changed it to the Nationals, “not wanting to confuse fans with the previous franchise,” as the

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official team website explains. It’s more likely, however, that the club wanted to erase for itself (and for its fans) all remembrances of things past. But that was not to be thanks to sportswriter Charles Dryden, whose clever description of the last-place 1909 Senators as “Washington – first in war, first in peace and last in the American League,” stuck with the club for decades.

From 1905 through the 1911 season the Nationals never finished higher than seventh in the eight-team league. On March 17, 1911, the team’s luck changed when a fire allegedly started by a workman burned down the wooden stands at American League Park II and damaged the field. But the loss of the single-tier structure and the team’s perpetual seasons in or near the American League cellar opened the door for Clark Griffith and led to his lifelong association with the team as its owner and as the go-to leader keeping major league baseball alive during World War II. Many Washington fans and even many members of the media never knew or truly accepted the team’s actual Nationals nickname, although there is a paper trail to prove it. Copies of several historic documents sent to the authors by local TV sportscaster Phil Wood form a timeline that provides proof positive that the Nationals was the true team nickname: a scorecard from a 1914 home game between the Nationals and the Philadelphia Athletics, the front page of the Nationals’ 1937 Orlando, Fla., spring training guide, the official 1945 Nationals roster, and the cover of the 1956 Nationals Press Guide. Yet, even after the club incorporated “Nationals” into its jersey logo in the early 1950s, the name failed to gain traction, perhaps because so many sportswriters and the popular baseball chewing gum cards insisted on calling them the Senators. (This was before team logos and nicknames were copyrighted items and huge money-making commodities, emblazoned on everything from replica team jerseys, jackets, and caps to children’s lunch boxes, underwear, and even pet clothing.)

Thus to most of the baseball world, including the general public and a good portion of the working press, they were the Senators – or just the Nats, a nickname that was conveniently short for headline purposes and that also could refer to either name, Nats as in short for Nationals and also as short for Senators, found in the middle of the word. The official nickname remained the Nationals until 1957, when the team gave up trying to bend the popular will and the franchise officially became the Washington Senators once again.

However, according to Phil Wood, the name Senators didn’t appear on the jerseys until 1959. But that rebranding effort was short-lived, a true exercise in futility, as the franchise, now with a roster of young talent including Harmon Killebrew and Bob Allison, moved to Minneapolis-St. Paul after the 1960 season and became the Minnesota Twins.

The following season, 1961, the first expansion in American League history added the Los Angeles Angels and the new Washington Senators.

Both franchises were stocked with aging or castoff players taken from a list of eligible players from both leagues. They played only their inaugural season at Griffith Stadium – finishing tied for ninth place with the Kansas City Athletics with 61 wins and 100 losses, 47½ games behind Yankees. In 1962, the

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Senators moved into their final home in the nation’s capital, D.C. Stadium, later renamed Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. Between 1962 and 1968, the Nats finished tenth, tenth, ninth, eighth, eighth, sixth, and tenth – never reaching even a .500 season.

They did see some daylight in 1969, when they finished fourth and again in 1971, their last in D.C., when they again squeaked into the first division of the 10-team league, this time finishing fifth but with a losing record of 63-96.

Perhaps like Icarus, that year too they flew too close to the sun only to crash and burn. In September, Senators’ owner Bob Short received approval from Major League Baseball to move to Arlington, Texas, for the 1972 season and play as the Texas Rangers. Washington fans were so incensed by a second betrayal and loss of their team that they streamed onto the field in the ninth inning of the final home with the Senators leading the New York Yankees, 75, with two men out. The game was thus forfeited to New York, a fitting coda for the short-lived franchise, and the nation’s capital was again left without Major League Baseball, not to return for more than three decades.

The current Washington Nationals are a Canadian import, formerly the Montreal Expos, a National League expansion team founded in 1969. But unlike its fellow expansion Canadian club, the Toronto Blue Jays, the Expos failed to create a sustaining presence north of the border despite some very good years, and a roster that included stellar players including four future Hall of Famers, catcher Gary Carter, outfielder Andre Dawson, Frank Robinson (who became the new Nationals first manager after also managing the Expos), and former Expos manager Dick Williams. The Expos franchise and all of its baseball records were transferred to the new Lerner ownership group in Washington, D.C., in 2005, which – flying in the face of superstition, a baseball staple – again chose the nickname Nationals. So far the team has outperformed its namesake and, after a poor first few years, has steadily ridded itself of its former image as a perennial loser.* Gone forever (it is to be hoped) is the specter of the perennial loser, the Senators. So no matter what other baseball histories may call the team, for the few years under scrutiny in this book, unless within a quoted passage, we will refer to Washington’s wartime team by its proper nickname, the Nationals.

Authors’ Note: Since "The Nats and the Grays" was first published in 2015, the team won the 2019 World Series beating the Houston Astros in seven games, the hometown team's first championship since 1924, after a 95-year hiatus. https://www.amazon.com/Nats-Grays-Baseball-NationsSurvived/dp/1442245743/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=The+Nats+and+th e+Greys+David+E.+Hubler&qid=1624302194&sr=8-1

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Starvin’ Marvin, Crazy Deeter, And the Meanest Dang Cheeckn in the World “. . . outright laughter throughout. By the end of the book, you have been treated to an engagingly written story about remarkable characters, while being deftly introduced to facts about wildlife, lifestyles, and traditional mouth-watering dishes of the state of New Mexico . . .”

Noah Odell was thinking of life in the wild and wild things as he walked up the driveway toward the main road. He was thinking specifically of rattlesnakes, searching for rattlesnakes to be exact, on the ground alongside the lengthy driveway to the Boggs Ranch. He had never actually laid eyes on a rattlesnake and was not sure that he wanted to lay his eyes on one.

Nonetheless, Noah figured that he should at least know what a rattlesnake looked like, just in case. In case of what, he did not have a clue.

He did not have to search long. As Noah passed between the weathered railroad ties that marked the Boggs Ranch boundary, he heard a loud, raspy buzz coming from a cluster of bushes off to his left. Cautiously, he moved to the edge of the driveway keeping well clear of anything that might offer a place to hide. The snake, however, was blatantly conspicuous. Six feet from the gatepost, the two-foot long greenish-brown reptile was coiled loosely atop

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a flat sandstone boulder. Its wicked looking triangular head was raised slightly and a slender black forked tongue stabbed repeatedly in and out of its mouth rummaging the air for Noah’s scent. A row of dark diamond-shaped splotches embellished the snake’s back and its black striped tail ended in a chain of small cream-colored rattles. Every time Noah moved, the rattles snapped into action.

Not quite sure what to do next, Noah debated between returning to the house and telling his uncle — and consequently his mother who would probably throw a giant hissy fit and order him to stay inside the rest of the day -- or fetching a large stick and committing great bodily harm to a dangerous animal. In the end he did neither. Simply observing the creature’s movements, Noah discovered, was fascinating. With its heavily scaled head and neck resting lightly on its coils and its black beady eyes never leaving Noah’s face, the rattler seemed quite content to bask in the bright sunlight in full view. If Noah moved, the rattles vibrated; if he remained motionless, the raspy buzz stopped. After five minutes, the snake had had enough. As if to say “okay, you’ve ogled me and now I’m going home,” it leisurely uncoiled itself and slithered off the sandstone boulder and across the hot sand into the shade of the bushes.

Grinning smugly because of his daring but also wondering if he had made a stupid mistake by not dispatching what he knew to be a deadly hazard to both humans and cattle, Noah returned to his walk. He had gone perhaps half-a-mile when he saw a horse and rider coming toward him. As they drew closer, Noah recognized the horse as a Palomino, the same color as Trigger, the horse that Roy Rogers rode. Its mane and tail were well-brushed and the rider, who was wearing jeans, a white shirt, and a cream colored, ten-gallon cowboy hat with a very high crown, was about Noah’s age. The skin on his face was almost white with a pale smattering of freckles across his nose and under his eyes.

The Palomino came to a halt a few feet away. “Howdy kid,” said the rider in a high, almost squeaky voice, looking down. “You thet new kid lives with Mr. Boggs? Where’s yer horse?”

Noah mustered up his best Gabby Hays drawl. “Howdy,” he answered.

“Don’t have a horse. Wish I did, though.”

The other boy took his feet out of the stirrups, slung one leg over the saddle horn, and slid from the Palomino’s back. He was several inches shorter than Noah and extremely skinny. His ten-gallon hat sat far down on his head nearly touching the tops of his ears.

“Name’s Marvin,” he said, holding out his hand. “Marvin Couch. We own thet there dairy ranch yonder.” Marvin gestured toward the highway with his thumb, then pushed back his huge hat and wiped his forehead with a sleeve.

He dropped the Palomino’s reins to the ground and said “Stay boy” over his shoulder. “This here’s Jake,” he added. “He’s muh horse.”

Noah introduced himself. “How come Jake doesn’t have a bridle?” he asked, pointing to the braided rope around the nose and ears of the

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Palomino. The reins were attached to the rope directly beneath the horse’s chin.

“You from the city, kid?” Marvin said. “Old Jake don’t need no bridle.

Thet there’s an Injun hackymore.”

“Are you an Indian?” Noah asked Marvin. He certainly did not look like an Indian. Barely five feet tall including the big hat, he looked like a starving midget with a smart aleck mouth who was about to receive a busted lip if he called Noah “kid” once more.

“Course I ain’t no Injun,” Marvin said. “Where you from anyway?”

“Oregon”, Noah answered. “Where you from, Hicksville?”

Marvin thought for a moment. “Ain’t never heard of Hicksville,” he said.

“We come up from Texas when I was jest a kid. Whadda’ya think of thet mean cheekn?”

Bud’s maltreatment of the English language made him sometimes difficult to understand, and Marvin’s nasal twanginess wasn’t that far behind.

“What’s a cheekn?” Noah asked, puzzled.

“What’s a cheekn?” His voice had risen an octave. “Well dang, yer sure from the city ain’t you. Cheekn! Cheekn!” Marvin flapped his arms and made clucking noises. “Cheekn! You got the meanest dang cheekn I ever seen! Like ta scairt old Jake till he puked!”

The sun rose in the East. Chicken. Rooster. “You mean Ee-ho-daypuda!” Noah said, finally understanding what Marvin was asking. “My uncle’s rooster. Yep, he’s mean all right. Chased my mom into the house on the day we got here. Now she won’t come out if he’s anywhere around.”

“Thet’s what I jest said, Marvin grunted, rolling his eyes. Thet’s the meanest, dangest cheekn I ever seen!”

His point made, Marvin walked over to Jake and patted his neck. He took off his hat and scratched the back of his neck. His light blonde, almost white hair was thick and chopped short in a crew cut. Noah picked up a rock and flung it towards a dead soldier lying in the weeds. He missed on purpose because it was worth two cents if he ever needed it.

Marvin broke the silence. “It’s too dang hot to jest stand here doin’ nuthin’. Was you headed somewhere important?”

“Nope,” Noah answered truthfully. “I was looking for rattlesnakes”.

“Lookin fer rattle……” Marvin rolled his eyes again. “Wanna go see my brother?”

“Where’s your brother?” asked Noah.

“Don’t nobody know,” Marvin answered, shaking his head. “He’s crazy.

An’ he pees his pants. You gotta promise not to laugh though, cause Ma don’t like it when people laugh at Deeter. She says he cain’t help bein’ crazy.”

The offer was too tempting to pass up. Noah promised he wouldn’t laugh.

Satisfied, Marvin looped the reins over Jake’s neck. He backed off a few feet, and then took a running jump at the Palomino’s side. With a tremendous effort, he grabbed the saddle horn with his left hand, then, grunted and crawled upward to where he could hook his left toe into the stirrup and swing his right leg up and over the saddle.

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“You ever rid a horse before?” Marvin asked when he finally straddled Jake’s back. He looked down at Noah. “Ole Jake’ll carry double if you ain’t very heavy.”

After the cheekn fiasco, Noah was not about to show any more signs of weakness. “Sure, lots of times,” he said. “Nothing to it.”

Marvin told Jake to stay, and then motioned for Noah to hop on. Noah took a deep breath, stepped back a few feet as he had seen Marvin do, then charged toward Jake’s back. Two seconds before collision, the Palomino decided he did not particularly want to be pounced on by a perfect stranger.

He lunged backward, which caused Noah to land squarely on his neck instead of his back. Jake jumped backwards again at the impact. Noah grabbed the nearest thing handy, which happened to be Marvin, and both boys landed in a dusty heap next to Jake.

“Well, gol-danged horse!” Marvin spluttered, as they untangled themselves and stood up. He spit out a mouthful of dust, looked around, then picked up a three-foot length of discarded two-by-four lying next to the road. Board in hand, he approached Jake, shouted “Whoa!”, and then fetched the horse a clout to the side of his neck that made his knees wobble and his golden tail stand out straight. Marvin tossed the board back to the roadside, and then once again he ran, crawled, grunted, hooked and swung his way aboard Jake.

“Try ‘er again”, he ordered Noah. “Bet ole Jake won’t move now.”

Old Jake was large, but he certainly wasn’t stupid. This time, even when the perfect stranger unintentionally kicked him in the flank while crawling and grunting his way up behind Marvin, the Palomino did not move a muscle.

According to the 1934 edition of Webster’s Second International Dictionary, some of the most fascinating people in mankind’s long and intemperate history have been crazy. For example there was Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, shortened officially by decree to just Caligula.

When he was a child, Caligula wore army boots and accompanied his father on military campaigns. As third emperor of Rome from AD 37 until AD 41, he made his horse a member of the Roman senate. Once during the Roman Games, Caligula ordered his guards to throw an entire section of the crowd into the arena so he could watch them being killed and eaten by lions and tigers and bears, oh boy. As a sexual pervert, he ripped his own, unborn child from his sister’s womb in a temper tantrum--while she was still alive. He was finally assassinated by his own guards with help from a group of concerned Roman senators who concluded that their emperor was a walking loony-toon if there ever was one and utterly out of control.

Another historic lunatic was Jose de Francisco Goya y Lucientes, known to friends and family as just plain Joe, because it was a bit inconvenient to go around saying things like ”Jose de Francisco Goya y Lucientes, please pass the salt,” or “Jose de Francisco Goya y Lucientes, get off your duff and take out the garbage!” A court painter for the Spanish Crown during the late 18th

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century and early 19th century, Joe was thought to be the greatest artist of his century was also known as the last of the “Old Masters.” In later years -suffering from deafness, lead poisoning, boredom, warts, and a complete lack of sexual fulfillment -- Joe went totally bonkers and retired to his house just outside Madrid. There, on the plaster walls of his cottage, he painted his fourteen famous Black Paintings, the most notable of which is Saturn Devouring His Son. Today this graphic depiction of the Roman god Saturn consuming the bloody, headless carcass of little Johnny, along with Goya’s other gruesome paintings from the same period, is housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Goya himself has been housed in a cold stone box in the same city since his death 1828.

Then there was Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, better known as the Mad Monk and sometimes as Tootin’ Rasputin (though no one called him that to his face) because of his daily diet of beet gruel and three-week old bread. A semi-literate peasant, debaucher, and off-his-rocker mystic who lived in Russia during the late 1800s, Rasputin practiced a doctrine of salvation and religious fervor combined with extreme sexual indulgence. Not so bad, really, except that as friend, advisor, and “Holy Man” to Tsar Nicholas II, Rasputin had a strangle hold on the Russian government. When he appointed a group of similarly inclined off-their-rocker mystic debauchers to high political posts and eventually undermined the imperial government, the Mad Monk was deemed a stinky fish egg in the pot of political caviar. In 1916, after surviving a stabbing attack by a prostitute which left his entrails hanging from a gaping stomach wound, he was poisoned by an assassin. The poison didn’t work, so a group of Russian nobles led by Prince Felix Yusupov shot him four times.

Then they threw his body in the river and held it underwater for ten minutes.

Then they crushed his head with a set of weight-lifter’s dumbells. That killed him.

In Noah’s opinion, Marvin’s brother Deeter beat all of those other fellows hands down.

“Howdy Pa.” Marvin’s father was in the front yard when the two boys rode up on Jake. Like his son, Mr. Couch was small, skinny, and wore a large, cream colored hat with a skyscraper crown.

“This here’s the kid what owns thet mean cheekn down the road. This here’s my pa.” Noah slid down off Jake’s back and shook Mr. Couch’s extended hand.

“Glad to meet you son,” Mr. Couch said. “Call me Heze if you want.

Your uncle’s told us all about you. You all go on inside. Lunch is fixed and on the table.”

Marvin’s mother was also short, but unlike her husband and son, she was chubby and rosy cheeked. She was wiping her tiny hands on a dishtowel when the boys entered the house through the kitchen door.

“Ma, this here’s Noah, the kid what owns thet nasty cheekn,” Marvin again made an introduction. “This here’s my ma.” Mrs. Couch smiled and extended her damp hand, which Noah shook.

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“We’re glad to see you Noah,” she said. She pointed to a big kitchen table. “Lunch is ready. You boys wash your hands and sit.”

They washed their hands in the kitchen sink and sat down at the table.

Marvin’s father came in, washed, and joined them. Mrs. Couch set a platter of cornbread and a huge pot of pinto beans on the table and then left the room.

“Where’s your brother?” Noah whispered. “Doesn’t he get to eat?”

Marvin nodded and whispered back. “Jest hold yer horses and he’ll be along.”

At that moment, Mrs. Couch returned to the kitchen, gently pushing her other son in front of her.

“Told you so”, Marvin muttered under his breath. “Ma had to get ‘em out of his cage.”

Deeter was certainly all Marvin had cracked him up to be. He was about sixteen, but a flattened nose and wide, horse-like lips made his face seem much older. He was dressed in fuzzy pink bunny pajamas complete with ears and a white fluffy tail. When Deeter was seated at the table directly across from Noah, his mother wrapped a short length of rope around his waist and tied him to the chair. He began to moan and wave his arms above his head, swaying back and forth to some unknown and esoteric melody that only he could hear. Noah had to admit that he was a wonderful specimen of a crazy person.

“Deeter, can you say hello,” Mrs. Couch said softly. Deeter drooled and waved his arms. One pajama sleeve was already dripping bean juice from where it had been dipped in the bowl of pintos. “Ollalllallla,” Deeter said pleasantly.

“You’all go ahead and dig in, Mrs. Couch said. She placed a cereal bowl filled with scrambled eggs on the table in front of her son and began to feed him with a spoon. No one else seemed to notice the drooling, moaning spectacle across the table, so Noah tried not to notice either. He concentrated instead on spooning cornbread and pinto beans into his mouth, and on Marvin’s oversized hat which Marvin had not bothered to remove when he sat down.

Noah’s concentration was suddenly shattered by Deeter’s loud sneeze.

Mrs. Couch had just finished stuffing his mouth with scrambled eggs, and there they came, spewing across the table like a swarm of giant yellow bees. A large piece of goo caught Marvin square in the forehead, and both Noah and Mr. Couch were hosed down with wet, yellow mush. Marvin wiped his face with his shirt sleeve and continued eating. So did his dad. Noah saw that a large piece of the scrambled egg was floating in his bowl of beans. He used a piece of cornbread to remove it. Deeter’s mother proceeded to refill her son’s mouth with another spoonful of food.

Five minutes later, Deeter sneezed again. This time, Noah saw it coming and had time to duck before the egg mush came whistling by. When he looked up, Marvin was wiping his hat off with a napkin.

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“Hazel, whyn’t you take the boy into the living room until we finish,” Mr. Couch told his wife. “Looks like he’s got hisself a case of the sniffles.”

Nodding, Mrs. Couch untied the rope around Deeter’s waist and helped him to his feet. As he stood, a dark stain spread around the crotch of his bunny costume. The odor of warm urine filled the room.

“Oh, Deeter, now look what you’ve done,” said his mother. “You know you’re supposed to tell Mama when you have to go.” Deeter flailed and moaned and drooled, having a wonderful time as his mother pushed him out of the living room.

With Marvin’s crazy brother in another room, they were able to eat in peace. Noah learned that the Couch Dairy had a herd of forty adult black and white Holstein cows and a dozen new nursing calves. The cows had to be milked twice a day, and the milk was then delivered in cans to Hawthorne’s Dairy in Alamogordo where it was pasteurized, bottled, and sold. Most of the milking was done by machines, but several of the older cows had to be handmilked because of their easily irritated udders. Marvin was in charge of the nasty chore known as mucking, cleaning a hundred pounds or so of wet, smelly cow manure out the barn each morning and evening with an oversized metal squeegee known as a mucking rake.

“Git used to the smell after a while,” Marvin told Noah. “Jest kinda’ hard to git off yer boots, is all.”

When they finished their beans and cornbread, the boys excused themselves and meandered out to the front porch where they collapsed onto an old wooden swing in the shade.

“What’s the matter with Deeter,” Noah asked. “Is he sick?”

“He’s jest crazy, thet’s what,” Marvin answered. “He was born thet way.

Ma and Pa says sometimes God works in mysterious ways, an’ thet everthin’ happens fer a reason.”

“Does he really live in a cage?” Noah asked.

“Kind of a cage.” Marvin said. “Sort a like a big baby crib. Ma says it’s so he don’t hurt hisself.”

“Does he always sneeze like that during meals?”

“Course not.” Marvin brushed a final chunk of scrambled eggs from his hat with his sleeve. “Sometimes he pukes up his guts instead.”

Noah didn’t get home until almost dark. Marvin insisted that he stay to watch the milking, which was just fine with Noah since he had no overwhelming desire to return to weed-chopping or plumbing a bathroom.

Mr. Couch kindly drove his old pickup up the dusty road to the Boggs ranch, just to make sure it was okay with Mrs. Odell if Noah stayed. Deeter didn’t make another appearance during the afternoon, but Noah could hear him moaning and gurgling away through the open windows of the house.

Late in the day when the last cow teat had been squeezed dry by Mr. and Mrs. Couch working in tandem alongside the electric milking machines, and the last smelly cow pie had been mucked from the barn and the concrete floor washed down with a hose, Marvin retrieved Jake from a nearby corral.

Using a metal milk carton to stand on while they mounted, the boys climbed

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onto the Palomino’s bare back and trotted through the dusk toward the Boggs Ranch. As they passed through the gateposts, Noah searched the ground for the rattlesnake he had encountered earlier but saw nothing. At the top of the rise, Marvin pulled Jake to a halt and carefully scanned the yard below.

“Where’s thet danged cheekn at?” he said quietly. “We ain’t goin’ no closer till I find out where he’s hidin’.”

Noah searched the yard as well. Ee-ho and his flock of hens were nowhere to be seen.

“Roosted, probably,” Noah whispered back. “Up on the roof or maybe in the barn.”

Marvin took one more look then kicked Jake in the side. Reluctantly the horse trotted down off the hill.

“You ain’t such a bad kid” said Marvin as Noah slid to the ground.

“Didn’t laugh at Deeter or nuthin’. Most everbody laughs when…..”

At that moment, from beneath a large weed where he had concealed himself to await such an opportune moment, Ee-ho launched his body at Jake’s head, screeching like a demon. Jake nearly reared over backward before Marvin could regain control. Noah let go of Marvin’s waist and allowed himself to quickly slide backwards off Jake’s back onto the driveway before it happened again.

“I knew thet dang cheekn was round here somewheres!” Marvin squealed, his voice again rising a full octave. Not waiting for another attack, he kicked Jake into motion and galloped off up the driveway. With the Palomino gone, Ee-ho turned his aggression on Noah. Waiting until the strutting, squawking fowl got within two feet, Noah drop-kicked the rooster back into the weeds fifteen feet away, violently removing another quarter of his remaining feathers in the process.

Noah didn’t see much of his new friend for several weeks because he was occupied from dawn till dusk each day, helping his mom turn the old house into a comfortable home, chopping weeds or assisting Bud with what seemed like an endless list of chores around the ranch. He did find time to look up “crazy” in Webster’s Second International, however.

Crazy: Affected with madness or insanity; Foolish; totally unsound; Possessed by inordinate excitement; Bizarre or fantastic; Characterized by weakness or feebleness; Broken, weakened, or disordered in intellect; shattered; demented; deranged.

Marvin had been right. Deeter was undoubtedly crazy, at least in Mr. Webster’s opinion.

Among Noah’s principal chores was the care and nourishment of the chickens. Once a day, usually in the morning, he fed the flock a bucket of cracked corn and made sure they had plenty of water. In the afternoon, he

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collected eggs from the nesting boxes in the barn. Another of his jobs was to feed the herd of Brahmas a sixty-pound bale of alfalfa hay each day in the early morning, then, once the cattle had eaten, to herd them out of the corral’s back gate and into one of several large, fenced pastures for the rest of the day. There, they were allowed to graze on the wild grass and shrubs that somehow managed to survive in the sandy soil. The herd always wandered back by itself in the late afternoon, thirsty and irritable, and another of Noah’s daily tasks was to make sure the galvanized metal water barrels in the corral were filled with fresh water from a faucet next to the house. He soon discovered that what he had called “cows” on several occasions were actually steers and weren’t really as mean as his uncle had claimed on their first day at the ranch. The animals were nonetheless smelly and stupid and certainly not to be trusted. Bud warned Noah never to let himself get caught between the cattle and the corral rails if he didn’t want to get squashed, and never to stand directly behind one of the animals if he didn’t want to get pooped on or farted to death.

Noah’s primary task, however, at least for the time being, was to assist Bud as he plumbed the bathroom. The ranch had its own deep well and water pump, so they only had to hook up the ingoing water lines to the stool, sink and tub, and connect the drains for all three to the pipes that carried waste to the cesspool out back. Bud had no further problems underneath the house and the project was finally completed the following Saturday. Mrs. Odell showed her appreciation for the new bathroom by baking a three-layer chocolate cake topped with thick pecan icing.

“We’ll knock down thet old privy jest as soon as the weather cools down some,” Bud said. “We kin cut up most of them boards fer firewood so’s we don’t have to haul nuthin’ off, and we kin fill up thet crap hole with dirt.” He wrinkled his nose and grinned. “Gonna be a stinky job, but nuthin’ you cain’t handle, hey Bub.” While Bud and Noah took care of the outside tasks, Mrs. Odell focused her attention on the local battalions of insect and spider species that had probably resided in the old house for decades. With bug spray in hand, she went on the rampage each morning filling every crack, hole, and fissure with Roach-B-Gone. By ten a.m., the wooden floors were littered with dying vermin, feet up and antennae waving feebly. Bugs that somehow managed to escape the crack-by-crack slaughter and were foolhardy enough to make a break for freedom, met a decisive and untimely finish at the bugger end of Mrs. Odell’s fly swatter. Word got around quickly. A week after completion of the bathroom, the beetle body count had dropped to almost nothing.

Next, it was Ee-ho-day-puda’s turn. The big, ugly rooster was truly an unusual fowl, guarding his front-yard domain with a determination no bulldog had ever developed. His only failing, really, was that unfortunately he often attacked first and asked questions later. Ee-ho never bothered Bud and after getting slammed into the air a couple of times by Noah, decided a less tenacious victim was preferable. Which was, of course, the sturdy but petite Mrs. Odell. She could hardly set foot outside before Ee-ho arrived in full

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battle dress, eyes glittering, wattles puffed out like the fins of a blowfish. With his tail feathers spread wide apart and his head down, the rooster would attack from ambush whenever an opportunity presented itself. Knowing his mother as he did, Noah figured her patience would soon be at an end. When that happened, Ee-ho should take out an insurance policy and see to his personal affairs. The world’s best guard chicken or not, he would not be long for this world.

Early on a morning in mid-June before the desert heat became unbearable, Mrs. Odell was outside washing the new panes of glass that Bud and Noah had installed in the ranch house windows the previous afternoon.

She seemed not to notice as Ee-ho silently strutted from weed patch to weed patch behind her, waiting for just the right moment to attack. After thirty seconds or so, and without so much as a by-your-leave, the rooster gave a loud screech and launched himself at the back of Mrs. Odell’s head.

Noah had always said -- and his uncle would certainly agree -- that woe and despair would quickly and without mercy manifest itself upon the poor soul who pissed off Ethel Odell. Unbeknownst to anyone — least of all Ee-ho — she had been watching the rooster’s reflection in the newly installed window glass. Just as the old bird launched himself from the weeds toward Mrs. Odell’s head, she started to turn. Three feet into the flight the rooster’s feet and claws came out in front and the big butcher knife Mrs. Odell had honed to razor sharpness snickered into sight from the pocket of her apron.

Ee-ho had been around long enough to know that attacking someone who was facing him -- as Mrs. Odell was now -- could produce dire consequences.

At the last second he tried hard to gain altitude and fly up over her head to the roof. Even with his wings pumping rapidly and his long, half-feathered neck extended for flight, however, he did not have a chance. Rooster and butcher knife met formally in mid-air. Ee-ho’s head flew in a looping arc to land in the dust fifteen feet away while his body, spurting blood from a cleanly severed neck, slammed into the house in a flurry of dust and feathers.

It bounced, did three end-over-end backward somersaults, and lay still.

With the butcher knife held loosely at her side, Mrs. Odell stood quietly staring at the rooster’s corpse. Then, with a tight-lipped smile on her face, she walked over and gingerly picked up a very deceased Ee-ho-day-puda by his legs.

“You’re probably as tough as an old boot,” she said to the lifeless body she held out in front of her, “but I’m sure you’ll make a wonderful stew.” https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Have-Heroes-BuddyMays/dp/0826352049/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Hard+to+have+heroe s+buddy+mays&qid=1623775864&s=books&sr=1-1

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Tony Tedeschi

Unfinished Business She could only hope to put it all behind her, if the painting,

like that terrible day in her life, were relegated, emphatically, to her past.

“With Unfinished Business, Tedeschi offers a glimpse into a world that mixes boardroom machinations, Latin American politics, high tech challenges and family tragedy in a expertly woven, quintessential modern tale.”

Prologue Garifuna Village, Atlántida Province, North Coast of Honduras, 1979.

To work.

The rising sun cast a micro-thin blanket of orange and pink across the aquamarine bay. Ancient, wooden boats sat motionless, tethered with frayed mooring lines to buoys a few yards from the white-sand beach, their silhouettes beginning to boast their muted colors, returning with the coming light. The flimsy, thatch-roofed huts were focusing to a dull grey cluster, just beyond a rise of sand that fell off to the fluttering hemline of the bay.

Somewhere nearby a rooster crowed. A tentative breeze rippled the waters, then died without a trace. The hiss of a new fire whispered in a small clearing before the dwellings, emitting a thread of white smoke.

The clack of metal against metal. Repeated. Again.

Their approach was brazen. It belied their use of blackface, their camouflage dress. They walked bolt upright into the village, swaggered actually, a dozen of them. They were young men from similar villages in the mountains or the coastline on the far side of the country. They were short in 57

stature, their skin olive, only a few shades lighter than their fatigues. Their faces were defined by the angular bone structures, shocks of thick black hair, and deep-set eyes of the indigenous people who had inhabited this region for millennia. They walked out of the bushes and into the clearing with their automatic rifles belt high in front of them.

The one in the lead was drawn to the cooking fire, where parrotfish were skewered on thin green shoots just above the bright coals. It was a smell from his childhood. A pleasing smell. Not like that garbage they fed him in the barracks. It made him want to drop his pack, sit for a spell and suck the succulent white meat from the bones of the roasted fish. A woman was attending the meal, her back to him. Just beyond her fire was a communal seating area, with a thatched covering, beyond it a midden mound, where a trio of hogs rooted in the waste of a slop pit that had formed with the previous day’s shower.

As if sensing the approach of danger, the woman turned, slowly, tentatively in the direction of the footfalls. Her eyes met those of the young militiaman.

He nodded, then shot her in the middle of the chest, as she twisted on her haunches and raised her hands to ward off the assault. She toppled backwards into the pit. Her ragged dress burst into flames and she shrieked as the life, mercifully, left her. He hopped over her and waved his comrades forward, the smell of her burning flesh effectively ruining his appetite.

The three pigs began running from their soupy slop and were cut down near the benches in the dining area, their blood spurting and splattering against the weathered posts of the shelter. Their only crime was that they lived . . . here.

Twenty yards away, at the shoreline, two fishermen, who had been preparing their nets, grabbed their machetes and started toward the cluster of shabby huts, where the militiamen stood like statues in people’s plaza. The first, a young man, perhaps twenty, was cut down with a burst of projectiles in the face that tore his head to shreds. The second, a white-haired man, was dropped with a row of rounds across his bare, concave chest, that all but cut him in two. He toppled backwards into the miniscule surf, his spirit stretching toward a burial at sea.

An elderly woman emerged from one of the huts and shouted something in the direction of a stand of royal palms. She attracted the fire of a half dozen men and was jolted backwards into the hut.

A man and a woman ran from an adjacent shack, crouching low to shield two children, determined to make the cover of a beached dugout canoe, then somewhere, anywhere, from there. They made, instead, a disjointed pile in the soiled sand.

The remaining men, women and small children began racing this way and that, in and about their pathetic shelters. Two uniformed men stepped forward, lit a half-dozen torches and tossed them at the dwellings, their roofs

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bursting, almost immediately, into torrents of flame. Within moments, villagers staggered from the dark doorways beneath the orange-swathed shelters, coughing, gasping and spitting, while the uniformed men picked them off like tin figures in a carnival game.

Suddenly, a small child ran from where she was hiding behind a great royal palm, toward a jungle thicket at the edge of the village. The young leader of the band, trained his rifle on her as she raced toward the cover of the foliage, her little legs, pumping, turning over and over.

“Mama,” she cried. “Mama, abrazo. Abrazo!”

A woman emerged from the thicket, a look of horror on her face. She reached for the child, as the leader fired a burst into the tiny girl’s back, the exiting rounds splattering the woman with blood. Then, he fired the rest of the clip at the woman, who fell atop the child.

Movement ceased.

The firing abated.

The men stood motionless.

They began a slow, methodical retreat, their rifles at the ready, watching carefully, to be sure all the buildings were engulfed in flame, that no one was exiting. As they stepped back into the jungle, they left behind the landscape they had altered irrevocably. Bright yellow flames and sooty smoke rose in billows toward the nests of the oropendolas, which hung like great straw teardrops from the giant, old-growth trees.

There was the touch of wet oleander against the skin.

There was the smell of nitrate and scorched palmwood.

There were the lingering echoes of the crying child, obliterating the crackle that spilt the burnt earth and swallowed up all there was of Heaven.

Chapter 1 The bright light of the desk lamp was penetrating the flimsy skin of Caldwell’s eyelids like an orange-yellow sun in a parched sky. He forced open his eyes, first the left, then the right, blinked a half-dozen times at the brightness, then grew dismayed at how dry his eyes felt. Each morning simply opening his eyes had become a chore.

He had fallen asleep at the desk again, the “Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot,” still opened to the opening lines of “The Wasteland,” a stapler draped across the top of the book to keep it from closing. How had he gotten here? He remembered watching TV coverage of the overflowing Red River turning this spring of 1997 into the most severe flooding of the river since 1826 and creating a watery nightmare for people in Minnesota. For an

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antidote, he had turned to a Public Television show on the Orson WellesWilliam Randolph Hearst battle over “Citizen Kane,” then watching the movie and becoming deeply depressed, for some inexplicable reason, about spring and the whole regenerative process nature insisted upon every year.

He needed a counterweight, something to defeat the onset of the season.

“The Wasteland” was the obvious choice. For background, he’d chosen the Rachmaninoff “Piano Concerto No. 2” with its long, drawn lugubrious theme lines. The lights of the CD player shone from the other side of the room.

He’d left it on again, all night, obviously.

Odd, he thought, these mood shifts, the intensity of them. It was surely an aging thing. He seemed to remember the dramatic swings of his twenties, but they were phony: youth laughing or crying for reasons which were lame when played against the context of this aging thing he now dealt with. He’d been a runner in college, ran marathons into his late thirties, now considered himself lucky if he could carry the burgeoning spread of his middle-aged paunch the mile walk down to the beach and back without aggravating the ever-present pain in his knees. The spread at his waistline went with the hair that had receded from his forehead like the edges of a sun-drying rain puddle, then had frosted with white ice above the ears. His face had rounded, his chin was sinking down toward his collar and somehow, inexplicably, lines defined crisscrosses perpendicular to the path that all this moving flesh had taken. His eyes were smallish and a nondescript hazel, his nose a bit large, with a bump an inch below his eyes as if there to hold his glasses in place. He never considered himself much to look at, the kind of person who easily disappeared into a crowd. Until Olivia found him. And elevated him to the position of most beautiful man in the world. Their world.

But who was he kidding, he loved spring, and even the words of “The Wasteland” could not dissuade him. It is said that Eliot had seized upon April as the cruelest month in the opening of the poem because when all the winter-exaggerated depressives realized that spring offered no relief, they left self-pitying notes and took a bottle full of pills. He wasn’t ready to kill himself, yet. Besides, April had turned warm early this year. Soon the strawberries along the back fence would be racing to red, the copper beach would be sprouting its green leaves tinged in gold and he’d see evidence that the red fox was back poking about the corners and skulking under shrubs, waiting for a squirrel to suffer a fatal bout of complacency. So there was nothing to do but hook up the hoses, turn on the water and get ready for the rebirth.

What the hell time was it anyway? He slung his left hand up onto the desk and read the dial on his old, hand-wound Bulova. It was 6:20 a.m. He’d have to take a nap again today. He would simply have to get his days and nights righted.

He wound the watch. He had this thing about not letting it run down. It had been a gift from his father, now dead. High school graduation. It had been through it all with him: the four years at NYU, the Beat Generation, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers at the Village Vanguard, Bob Dylan singing

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in the cafes, Woody Allen doing stand-up at the Village Gate. The “Freedom Rides” to Mississippi and Alabama. The four years in the Air Force, Tactical Air Command; the year in Vietnam, Bien Hoa Air Base near Saigon, a halfdozen mortar attacks. Four years as a supply officer. The USAF did not have a career field for poets. When he’d listed that as his first choice on the Air Force “wish list” he felt sure that — along with his write-in choice of Paris as a base assignment — would send him back to Greenwich Village to scrape out an existence as the east coast counterpart to Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He understood suffering as the pre-requisite to brilliance in the arts. He never realized how bad the suffering could be in a war zone. It had destroyed his concept of the military man as hero. The poetry was overdone, melodramatic, appeared as if he did not want to capture the experience.

Caldwell pushed himself up from his desk, then, a bit unsteadily, out of his chair, made a mental check of the quality of his knees, then took a few steps toward the door of his basement office. The office was a paradigm of late ‘90s, work-at-home technology: state-of-the-art computer, printer, scanner, drives etc., etc.; fax, copy/collating unit; three phones, for no apparent reason; surround-sound system for the music. The music. The other side of the door was . . . the cellar.

Why did he continue to live in the cellar? As Olivia lay dying, he determined he would sell the house and put its memories behind him. But, when she was finally gone, he found that the hurt in his heart would follow him no matter where he tried to hide. And besides, he had grown to love the house, the neighborhood, the patches of forest, the craggy coastline, the rocky beach, the birds, the way spring crept in, then burst upon you with all those colors of forsythia, azalea, dogwood, rhododendrons, all of it. So, he simply descended to the basement and hid as much as he could from the outside world while he wrestled with his demons.

Caldwell really did mean to turn on the water today. He walked between the erector-set racks laden with long-since useless files and “stuff,” to the furnace room, found the lever valve that controlled the water supply to the faucet in the backyard and shifted it from the horizontal to the vertical. He heard the water rush through the pipe, then felt the pipe shudder as the surge was stopped by the valve at the outdoor faucet. The flow is in the pipeline, he thought. He did the same for the front yard.

George Caldwell had been vice president of distribution management for Creative Concepts when it was bought out by International Home Interiors, the world’s largest supplier of home furnishings. He was offered a very attractive severance package when the company downsized his position out of existence in a consolidation of job functions, including a hefty portfolio of IHI-for-CC stock from the one-plus-one shares of CC stock he’d been investing in over his years there. The consistently good metrics for the IHI stock in his retirement portfolio, maintained an attachment to the company and a continued interest in its success. Aside from the retirement bennies, IHI had promised him consulting work and delivered enough of it to allow

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Caldwell to launch a freelance logistics consultancy business. The IHI account provided the credibility to add other clients.

During his years at Creative Concepts, Caldwell had gained the admiration of Jim Davis, the boutique design firm’s visionary founder and a brilliant designer. Davis remained as president of the CC subsidiary after the IHI buyout and was given a seat on the board of directors, but all power at IHI rested with Clifford Stiles, the company’s bullying CEO. Caldwell’s inability to fathom any kind of shift in his reporting authority from Davis to Stiles was the principal reason he’d opted out. Hell, the IHI incumbent in Caldwell’s old position quit three months after Caldwell left and they’d hired a young woman, then elevated the department head title to senior vice president, largely because the board of directors had pointed out the company’s glaring vulnerability in its lack of women and minorities in senior management positions.

While work from the larger corporate universe at IHI had pretty much dried up, whenever the CC subsidiary of the home furnishing giant got a bit bogged down in its own machinery, Davis brought in Caldwell to untangle things. Caldwell had a way about him. He could be directive without antagonizing. He was extremely objective-oriented, was not intimidated by the not-invented-here syndrome, nor colleagues who found a better way or even pointed out the error of his ways. The pragmatist side of Davis appreciated Caldwell’s ability to lead a project from A to B in an efficient manner. It was what defined the discipline for Davis. Logistics was the pipeline through which the corporate plasma flowed. If it were functioning properly, it was ignored. It was not what the company did, but how the company did it. It was ignored, except when it broke down.

It was Davis on the phone, this early.

“There’s a problem,” Davis said. “It’s different this time.”

“This time?” Caldwell replied, still shaking out the early morning cobwebs. “As opposed to which time?”

“The other times you’ve been of help.”

“O . . . kaaay. I feel like I’m in the middle of a conversation here, Jimbo.”

“It’s early, George. I’ll only make sense partially. A well-deserved night’s sleep was invaded a lot last night. Call the invasion a result of non-linear complexities. A simple breakdown in logistics per se is not the problem, this time.”

“Well, you’re right about my not getting my brain around whatever the hell it is you’re talking about.”

“I’m thinking an instinctual understanding of logistics, the way only you can step back and look at the big picture, would start to put some focus on the vagaries of what I’m seeing –” “Jim,” Caldwell cut in, “what the hell are you talking about?”

There was no immediate reply.

“Look,” Davis said after the pause, “Can you come see me?”

“Of course,” Caldwell replied.

“Is today too soon?”

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“Well, you will be interrupting some serious gardening prep, but if you insist.”

“Get here, when you get here, George.”

“On my way in about an hour.”

They rang off.

Caldwell was . . . intrigued? However, it was not the excitement of a challenge, he’d detected in Davis’s voice, it was concern. He’s getting old, Caldwell mused. He sees angels and devils everywhere. Shit, he’s getting like me. www.naturaltravelerbooks.com

Photo by Buddy Mays Clear Lake, a small, extremely clear water lake in the Oregon Cascades on the McKenzie River. Photo was taken during a record-setting heat wave in the Pacific Northwest when tens of thousands of people headed for the mountains to get cool. The temperature was over 100 degrees when the picture was taken and would normally have been about 75 on any regular day. Several places in Oregon reached 117 degrees during the heat wave, breaking all historical records.

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Photo by Kendric W. Taylor

And They Will Come Babe Ruth’s grave on a morning in July in Valhalla, NY. Items left for the Babe are from fans who still come to visit, including: baseballs autographed with the names of people’s who left them; baseball bats, neatly arranged as if in front of a heavenly team dugout; cards, pictures, keepsakes, even a beer, accompanied by a can opener. Across the parkway are the final resting places of the owner of the New York Yankees during Ruth’s era, Col. Jacob Rupert; and the team’s legendary general manager, Ed Barrow; along with the Babe’s equally immortal teammate, Lou Gehrig. And, in a bit of irony, near them is the grave of Harry Frazee, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, who “cursed” the team, by selling Ruth to the Yankees in 1920. On this particular morning, there is a note left by a nine-year-old fan, lamenting that the previous season “the sport you loved” might be cancelled or curtailed by Covid-19. He notes a family member had worked at the Polo Grounds as a boy, and maybe he had met the Babe in heaven. “He loved the Yankees.”

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Portrait of a Sun Flower

Photo by Karen Dinan