Natural Traveler Magazine, Autumn 2021 by naturaltravelermagazine

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

Natural Traveler Magazine ® Autumn 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 Katie Cappeller Karen Dinan Buddy Mays Janet Safris Kasia Staniaszek

Art Sharafina binti Teh Sharifuddin

Table of Contents

Editor’s Letter

Page 3

Contributors

Page 4

Fogg’s Horn:

Page 5

Sculpting Coffee

Tony Tedeschi

Page 8

The Coffee Artist

Juliana Zeledon

Page 12

Ripping

Bill Scheller

Page 14

Postcard from Glacier Bay

Buddy Mays

Page 16

Images of Poland

Kasia Staniaszek

Page 20

California Dreaming

Katie Cappeller & Ben DiRocco

Page 24

Poetry

Jay Jacobs

Page 27

Ghost Story

Frank I. Sillay

Page 28

Klepto Currency

Frank I. Sillay

Page 30

Best Little Whorehouse in Ketchikan

Buddy Mays

Page 31

Sardinia: Prideful Isle

Bill Scheller

Page 33

Ah, Paradise

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 40

Days and Nights in Buenos Aires

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 45

Two-Run Triple

Tony Tedeschi

Page 54

Editor’s Letter Three years and counting . . .

Above are the bookend covers for our three years and twelve quarterly issues since we began Natural Traveler Magazine over the winter of 2018-19. The inaugural cover photo by Annie Cappeller of her daughter Katie in Colorado managed to include the sun and the moon in the same photo, so that had to be some kind of omen that we were onto something special. The second, of course, is the cover for the current issue, by our inimitable artist, Sharafina binti Teh Sharifuddin. Fina has done five of our covers, including many original works of art, from line drawings to full color pieces, represented in every issue of the magazine to date. The magazine got its start when I opened a Word doc and dropped in some wonderful examples of writing by colleagues whose work I had admired for years, including articles, stories, poetry, memoirs, photographs and artwork. In a matter of a few days, I had a 64-page magazine. I decided to turn it into an online publication, but also print several dozen copies as an accession to that dying experience of holding a piece of reading material in one’s hands. Within a few weeks of publishing that first issue, I had material pouring in for a second and the magazine began to take on a life of its own. From the outset, Bill Scheller agreed to join this quixotic project as senior editor and contributors lined up as a staff to fill our pages with their disparate artforms. And so it has gone for a dozen issues now, more than 800 pages of some the best reading material and visual arts you will find anywhere. (I’ve already got material for our lucky 13th in a folder for next quarter.) Thank you to all of our contributors who have taken part in making Natural Traveler Magazine a labor of love we can all take pride in. It is an honor to publish your work.

-- Tony Tedeschi

Gull at Sunset Photo by Karen Dinan

Contributors Following Tony Tedeschi’s lead article about the late Matias Zeledon, his daughter, Juliana, writes: My dad always said, “I’d rather be known as the guy who sold the best cup of coffee you have ever had, rather than the guy who sells the most coffee.” Read more of her poignant thoughts about her father’s coffee producing in artistry, “The Coffee Artist: A Personal Memoir,” Page 12. Photo spreads by Kasia Staniaszek and the team of Katie Cappeller and Ben DiRocco take us through depictions of Alaska, Poland and Northern California, beginning on Page 16. Examples of Karen Dinan’s photographic art grace pages throughout the issue, while Janet Safris introduces us to her stunning bird photography on the back cover and on Page 13. “Memories are jogged, recalled and dusted off,” in a poem by Jay Jacobs, Page 27. Frank I. Sillay, presents us with an “alluring vision” in his “Ghost Story“ on Page 28. Then he explains how, “having started off with three or four dollars between us, Tom and I stayed drunk for several days” in “Klepto Currency” on Page 30. Buddy Mays treats us to spectacular pictures of wildlife in Alaska with his photo essay, “Postcard from Glacier Bay” (Page 16). He also contributes some history of the north’s most celebrated sporting woman in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Ketchikan.” (Page 31) “Sardinia: The Prideful Isle,” is excerpted from Bill Scheller’s new book, “In All Directions,” published by Natural Traveler Books and available on Amazon (Page 33). Bill also writes a short piece on one of his many train travel experiences, “Ripping” (Page 14). “For I, with all my dumb luck, had been given a life now of such wonderment,” Kendric W. Taylor writes in the first of two short stories, “Ah, Paradise.” (Page 40) It is followed by his story, “Days and Nights in Buenos Aires.” (Page 45) “Coach Grant was hoping I’d just keep the bat on my shoulder and watch the next pitch, hoping it was a ball,” fourteen-year-old Nick is thinking as he prepares to step back into the batter’s box in Tony Tedeschi’s short story “Two-Run Triple,” beginning on Page 54.

Fogg’s Horn The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus

The Living Legends of Fiji

We’d suffered a “puncture” on our way from Suva, the capital, to Deuba on the south coast of Fiji’s principal island, Viti Levu. My driver/guide, Stino Elliot, had tried dealing with the flat tire himself, but decided he needed professional help, so we stuttered into a filling station on the outskirts of the capital, fortunately just a few blocks from our misfortune. Stino had bought a bag of powdered kava root at a farmer’s market in Suva, tossed it into the glove box and told me we’d mix some up with water when we got to our hotel in Deuba. But now we had some time to kill, so he took a chipped porcelain bowl he kept in his van, grabbed the bag of powder and headed for the men’s room to mix us some potion. Everything I’d read

about kava was considerably less than revealing. It produces a euphoria but isn’t a drug. It has side effects that affect the brain and/or the liver, or it doesn’t. What the hell, I was in Fiji to write about some of the inexplicable things Fijians do that seem to have no rational explanations, except some preposterous legends that the locals say explain them. Stino emerged from the bathroom with his chipped bowl sloshing a brownish liquid that looked like runny cement, balanced on the clenched fist of his left hand. It seemed a bit of a chore to balance the bowl that way, but I assumed there was a ceremonial process by which you imbibed, even if the ceremony was performed in the parking lot 5

of a filling station. Ergo, I clenched my right fist and bumped Stino’s left, figuring he would provide the ceremonial wherewithal for me gain possession of the bowl. His eyebrows furrowed. “What the hell are you doing, Mr. Markus?” he asked. “I am attempting to retrieve the bowl of kava in the manner by which it is being presented to me,” I replied, in my most dignified attempt at a ceremonial voice. “My hands are still dirty from messing with that tire,” he retorted. “Just grab the damn bowl and take a drink.” Stino was a big man, descendent of a Melanesian race that produced a lot of big men, who could remove your head with one mighty swing of their war clubs. When he offered something that sounded like an order, one would tend to obey. I was already having images of bellying up to bars throughout our journeys together, confident of being able to counter any difficulties which might arise with, “got a problem, take it up with my man here.” He had his quirks, like having me slip off my sandals and walk across his bare back as he lay on the floor each night before he’d slip on his shirt, and we’d head out for the evening. He said it loosened up his muscles and the last thing I’d want for our late night drinking was my man with an unloosened back. I took the bowl from his hand, took the first of several sips, then swooned the rest of the way to Deuba. I’d read up on Fijian legends before leaving home and became skeptical of any attachments to reality. The Tagimoucia Blossom on the island of Taveuni, which has never been successfully transplanted anywhere. Ergo, a young woman who had so angered her mother, she was banished from their village. Crying pitifully while running into the forest, she got entangled in a vine and everywhere one of her tears fell, a homesick blossom bloomed, never successfully transplanted anywhere away from

Taveuni. The sea turtles of Kandavu who rise to the surface of a bay when women of the local village chant from an adjacent hillside. Ergo, the turtles are descendants of village women who were captured by warriors from an enemy village but turned to sea turtles and slipped from the hold of the boat whence they lay and escaped into the bay. I was convinced that there was not enough scientific interest in the Tagimoucia flower or the Kandavu sea turtles to discover a logical explanation for each, but it was the firewalkers of Mbengga Island that intrigued me the most. How could the men of the Sawau village walk across white hot river stones and suffer no ill effects? As the legend goes a warrior was walking along a beach, pulled an eel from the wet sand and decided to take it home for a barbecue. But the eel transformed into a spirit god and to save himself offered the warrior power over fire. To prove it, they built a pit, lined it with logs and river stones and let fire burn until the stones were white hot. At that point the spirit god walked across the pit and encouraged the skeptical warrior to follow, whereupon both made it across unscathed. There had to be a realistic medical explanation for that one. Disembarking at a finger pier in an aquamarine bay on Mbengga, I noted the solitary figure of an elderly man in faded brown Bermuda shorts and a wrinkled Tshirt. “Ah,” Stino said as we hopped down onto the pier, “Ratu Wame.” “Excuse me?” “The Sawau chief.” “Mister Markus,” Stino said to the ratu, who offered his hand. The limp handshake was more in keeping with the elderly man before me than a warrior chief. He ushered us into the communal bure hut for the preceremonial luncheon. I sat at the ratu’s left as a huge tanoa bowl was prepared with kava and we all indulged, a ceremony that I was more and more considering for Friday night cocktail

hours at my place for a gathering of my closest friends. I was sure I could get even the most skeptical to walk barefoot across heat grates in Manhattan, after a ceremonial round of kava. A fisherman brought in the day’s catch, offered Ratu Wame the first selection but he, in turn, ceded the selection to me as the guest of honor. Presented with a dripping wet string of fish, none of which I recognized as having seen before, I chose a smallish one, which had what looked like a teardrop slowly working its way toward the gravitational pull that would release it from its – how do you know if an eye is left or right if each is on opposite sides of its flattish body? After roasting the fish over a fire that I could only hope was not the firewalking pit, my fish was doused in what I was told was gravy but turned out to be cold coconut milk and turned what might have provided some pickins’ between fishbones into a dreadful obsession with that oozing eye, while the rest of the firewalkers devoured everything in their plates, bones and all. I was way out of my element here. When we advanced to the firepit, the walkers had receded to a bure hut opposite to engage in whatever Zenlike preparation was necessary to justify frying your feet in an oversized barbecue pit. Trying my best to examine the pit for any clues as to why what was about to happen was even remotely possible, I could not advance to within ten feet of the pit, without having to fall back from the intense heat. The firewalkers emerged from the bure, walked across some moist mud on their way to the pit, whence there muddied feet bottoms began to sizzle upon the hot stones. Ah-hah! Mystery solved. Magic mud. I approached the fire for a closer look, confirmation of my discovery that had confounded westerners for centuries. Too hot! Had to back off. Another approach. Same outcome.

I just stood there shaking my head and still trying to get within ten feet of the firepit without having to back off. Ratu Wame, sidled up to me and smiled. “You teach me to do that,” I said, “and I win a million dollars in bets alone back in the States. Send you an agent’s commission.” He looked at me quizzically, then, “come,” he said, “we walk. Like the ancient warrior, you just got to believe.” “And if I don’t believe?” His smile turned, well, I wasn’t quite sure. Eelish? I chuckled and we both turned from the fire pit and walked back toward the communal bure. After returning home, I searched the Net for anything I could find that would explain this inexplicable phenomenon. It wasn’t exactly a priority for anyone except devotees of bizarre customs among peoples whom most of the rest of us care little if anything about. The closest to anything scientific I could find were reports of British academics and medical researchers going to Mbengga to write papers about Melanesian customs, gathering info to explain the firewalking, then returning home dragging their thermometers behind them. They just didn’t bother to ask me . . . There was this warrior walking along the beach in Mbengga, I would have told them, when he pulled this eel out of the sand. Expecting to take the eel home for a barbecue, it transformed into a spirit god. Don’t eat me the spirit god entreated, and I will give you the power over fire . . . To this day, one of my greatest regrets was not seeing if somehow Ratu Wame could have gotten me to walk across the fire. On the other hand, I did get to walk across Stino’s back, each night for the rest of the trip. - 30 -

Sculpting Coffee

Photo by Coke Riera Oxigeno Magazine

Sculpting Coffee I came to recognize Matias as an artist, who began by creating his foundational brew, then continually sculpting and shaping variations on the theme. By Tony Tedeschi

When Matias Zeledon died on September 10 the world lost the consummate artist among gourmet coffee growers. And I lost a dear friend. To Matias, creating his coffee was not simply the product of the business he founded some 20 years earlier, but the ultimate expression of his art. The concept of what constitutes art is far too limited if we think only in terms of painting and sculpture, music, literature, the generally accepted creative fields. I see art in a limitless landscape of endeavors, where creativity turns anything that crafts its own version of clay into its own innovative pottery. This is a story about the art of sculpting coffee and one gifted artist’s mastery of his medium. It is based on a friendship of more than 20 years and notes taken over the course of multiple visits to Costa Rica as a freelance journalist writing for newspapers, magazines and websites. No matter what assignment took me to Costa Rica, I always th

found time for Matias. He was a man of culture, a wonderful raconteur, a delightful conversationalist, as well as an astute businessman, who built his company with a deep respect for its place within the ecological context of his country. “Down To Earth,” he called it, with every nuance implied by that appellation. I met Matias in 1998, in his former incarnation as an adman. We’d been vectored together at the intersection of our professions. I was writing one of the special travel sections I did for each issue of Audubon magazine; Matias was doing marketing for a former president of Costa Rica, who owned a small property with the potential to attract ecotourists, particularly bird-watchers. Audubon was pretty much the go-to magazine for bird-watchers. I was headed to Expotur, a travel trade show on the outskirts of Costa Rica’s capital of San José, a gathering to make multiple contacts for my special magazine sections. My hotel

accommodations and roundtrip airfare were being arranged by the PR agency for the Costa Rica Tourism Board. I got a call the day before my departure, advising me that the PR people could only secure me a place on the waitlist for my return travel. With images of spending hours, if not days, trying to get an airline seat home, I informed the PR contacts I would be canceling my trip. Two hours after that phone conversation, I got a call from the agency informing me to pick up roundtrip business class tickets when I got to the airline counter at Kennedy Airport the next day. I had no idea what had changed my situation. When I arrived at the travel show, Matias introduced himself. He told me when he informed the former president that the writer from Audubon had canceled, the president would have none of that. He insisted upon having me visit his property, resulting in the PR agency doing a rapid oneeighty on my transportation requirements. Along with the former president, multiple tourism operators benefitted from the section I wrote for Audubon. I have always admired people with a bias for action. Matias and I were dear friends ever since. Lure of the Family Business Matias’s family has worked in coffee since the1880s. Although he began college as an agriculture major at the University of Costa Rica, he broke away from the family tradition to study marketing at the State University of New York in Fredonia. But after a decade at this new career the pull of the family business drew him back. “I guess I could be defined as a coffee farmer at heart, who spent 15 years on loan to the advertising industry,” he said. “I went back to my roots at age 40, looking to produce the best coffee on earth while caring for the environment as well.”

Ripe coffee cherries

The Tarrazú Region High in the mountains of Costa Rica’s central cordillera is the Tarrazú region, the country’s premiere coffee producing area. Among connoisseurs, it is one of the top three regions in the world for the production of coffee, along with Kona, Hawaii and Blue Mountain, Jamaica. Matias’s Down to Earth farm is located in the town of Providencia, in Dota, one of the region’s three counties. Dota occupies the highest part of the Tarrazú region, averaging 900 feet (300 meters) higher than the other two counties. Coffee beans grown at high altitude are designated “strictly hard bean,” recognized as ideal for gourmet coffee because their density holds aroma and flavor, which translates to uniquely citrus acidity and a complex combination of fruit and smooth chocolate notes. This coffee type represents the classic, clean, Central American cup. With such cachet going for it, Down to Earth utilizes both the name of its county and region, i.e. Dota Tarrazú, in its marketing. “Dota in Tarrazú produces very distinctive coffee,” Matias wrote on his blog, “with aroma and flavor that make it unique. This creates a smoother, more balanced coffee than is even the norm in the rest of Tarrazú. But don’t get me wrong, we are happy to be part of Tarrazú. Among true connoisseurs, who know the virtues of the Dota coffee, our region, Tarrazú, is a 9

recognized name, so there are benefits to market our coffee under the Dota Tarrazú umbrella.” Aside from the gifts of terrain and climate, there is the hands-on aspect of the Tarrazú coffee farmers. More than 90% of the region’s coffee is produced on familyowned-and-operated farms. In absolute terms, there are 6,600 farms averaging 10 acres each. Of these, 6,000 are worked exclusively by the family members who own them. Hands on here is a matter of family pride, oaths taken to ancestors. “You don’t just drink Tarrazú coffee,” Matias said, “you commune with generations, some still here, some long gone, who celebrated the soil they were given and the plant that would call out its riches.” Seldom content with status quo, Matias began an effort to bring back the Villalobos varietal, an heirloom coffee unique to Costa Rica. Villalobos trees are highly productive, resistant to winds and poor soil, making them easy to cultivate in high elevations like the central mountains of Costa Rica. “Villalobos was a lost treasure,” he wrote on his blog, “the product of about 80 aging trees we rescued in our La Piedra Estate. All our new growth after that was from our own Villalobos seeds. I am proud to perpetuate the quality that put Costa Rica on the world quality coffee map since the late 1800’s. With our Villalobos nursery, we planted a 16-acre chapter of coffee history.” Roasting as an Artform Suggest to any chef that his cuisine is something less than edible art and you may be fending off blows – perhaps physical as well verbal. After choosing the best location to grow your beans, roasting provides the nuance in the art of sculpting coffee. Despite his family history, Matias, was new to taking on the challenge of roasting his coffee beans.

“In 2000, when I started growing my beans I did not do the roasting personally,” he explained. “I used to take it to a roaster and, even though I was there all the time and got involved in the process, the roasting was somebody else’s craft, not mine. After a few years at this, I decided that to master my product completely I had to roast it myself. Once I got into it, I felt I had found my true calling: shaping the flavor of coffee in 15 to 20 minutes of roasting. Despite how good the coffee grows and how much care you put into that process, if the roasting is not good, then the coffee quality that you’ve worked for is ruined, or at least diminished.”

The Science of Roasting So, how can the roasting affect the coffee both positively or negatively? “Roasting is the key factor in driving the bitter taste in coffee beans,” explains Dr. Thomas Hofmann, a German expert in food chemistry and molecular sensory science at the Technical University of Munich. “So the stronger you roast the coffee, the more harsh it tends to get. Prolonged roasting triggers a cascade of chemical reactions that lead to the formation of the most intense bitter compounds. The roasting process changes the chemistry of the coffee bean.” Matias took the advice very seriously. “The lighter roasts are the better cups of coffee, technically speaking,” he explained. “On the other hand, I tell people it doesn’t matter if you swim against that current, you like what you like. But if you have a chance, give the lighter roasts a chance. If the light roast might be too much of a change, the medium is the perfect point to start. Our coffee is reddish like tea because it is 100% pure, highlands, strictly hard bean coffee. The only reason coffee will turn black is if there are additives in it. So, even though it looks light and watered down, our coffee will give you a satisfying cup every time.”

Vectoring Over the years, I have become more and more conscious of fellow aliens from my planet vectored together here on earth where we recognize each other in some sort of extradimensional space. The feeling of recognition is often gone in a whisper – sometimes barely remembered – but the relationship has been created or, more likely, reestablished. The girl who sat opposite me at a table on a lawn in Urbana, Illinois, at the only ice-cream social I’ve ever been to and generated the immediate sign of recognition, which created the relationship that has lasted a lifetime. The woman who sat down next to me at the bar on a press junket in Tobago, looked me in the eye with such warmth and told me I needed the music again, with no idea that as a teenager, I’d played guitar and wrote music for an early rock ‘n’ roll band, and her warmth launched a return to writing and performing original songs and eventually the creation of a musical play. The bestselling author whose introductory smile began a mentorship, then more than four decades of collaboration on books, newsletters, magazines; but it was the smile of recognition that established the connection. The painter who read my history in the muddy lines of the coffee residue in my cup,

then she told me who I was, who I am, who I am destined to become. And then there’s Matias, bless his soul. Can one feel the pull toward connection with the connector a cup of coffee that is pure art? Was my connection with the adman just to establish the relationship, which would continue to pull us together via the warmth of a two-decades-long friendship.? As Matias’s daughter, Juliana, expressed so elegantly in her eulogy to her father, “To me, a cup of coffee doesn’t taste just like coffee. It tastes like home, it tastes like kindness, like greeting a stranger with a smile and exchanging stories.” As someone who has been importing his coffee since he opened for business, I came to recognize Matias as an artist, who began by creating his foundational brew, then continually sculpting and shaping variations on the theme. You gotta know he’s back on the home planet scouting locations high in the central mountains to establish his coffee fields and show the angels what they were missing while he was away. I mean, come on, folks, Matias named his company “Down To Earth.” I rest my case.

Dota/Tarrazú, Costa Rica 11

River that provides water for Down To Earth farm, Providencia, Dota, Costa Rica

The Coffee Artist: A Personal Memoir I have grown up around coffee. To my family, Down To Earth has been a big part of our lives. By Juliana Zeledon

“We are far from a big company and even farther from a cash cow,” my dad used to say, “but we feel satisfied to see how our principles turn Down to Earth into a company we can be proud of. If you cannot do good while making money, then it is not worth it.” My father died on September 10th, but his legacy lives on in the company he built, the level of integrity he instilled in my mother and me and the principles that guide all of us who are now responsible for producing and delivering the special product he created. Our family has worked in coffee since the late 1880s. My dad’s Uncle, Yanuario, worked with coffee his whole life. My uncle 12

never had children, so he considered my dad as his own. He’d take my dad to his farm beginning when he was eight years old, set him on the hood of his Land Rover, and say, “son, one day all of this will be yours.” When my dad was 17, he started college at the University of Costa Rica and chose the career that was expected of him: agriculture. But he quit less than a year in. He wanted to “find himself,” so he moved to upstate New York to study communications and media arts at the State University of New York in upstate Fredonia, where he specialized in documentary production. However, finding himself eventually led to an “early middle life

crisis” when he turned 40 and realized he wanted to come back to his roots: coffee. Nonetheless, he never regretted his years working in advertising, it gave him a different perspective going into the coffee business. He saw the customer side of the industry and used his marketing skills not just to create a brand but one that meant something to the world. Social Responsibility I have grown up around coffee. To my family, Down To Earth has been a big part of our lives. My mom has worked in the accounting and administrative side of the company for the last 20 years. And I grew up working in the coffee shop and conducting tours during summers from elementary through high school. I started working fulltime in November 2017, managing to work and go to college at the same time. At Down to Earth we project our purchasing into social action, our production into environmental protection, and our

quality into a guarantee. Another thing that differentiates us from other bigger producers is that we do everything ourselves. We have total control of our quality. The coffee industry usually consists of intermediaries. It is very rare to encounter another company that does everything: plants-roasts-sells, the full cycle. By doing everything ourselves we guarantee the quality is going to be exactly what we want, which is only manageable with total control. I’d rather be known as the guy who sold the best cup of coffee you have ever had,” my dad always said, “rather than the guy who sells the most coffee.” My dad decided to generously donate his body to the University of Costa Rica for medical research. This altruistic gift will teach future generations of doctors, nurses and other medical professionals. He wanted his death to mean as much as his life did to us. We’re very grateful he is going to touch many lives, even in death.

Scarlet Tanagers Photo by Janet Safris

Ripping By Bill Scheller

‘Ripping’ was her catchall word for a hoarse verbal battle with the world.

I woke up in Winnipeg, around dawn. It had been a bad night for sleeping on the train. Four young snots had gotten on in Moose Jaw, and they didn’t like the seats they’d been assigned in the forward coach. So they wandered back to my coach, which was reserved for long-distance passengers. A

porter had told them to move back to where they belonged, but they ignored him, sprawled out, and went to sleep. The porter got the conductor, who showed up and shook them awake. He was gruff and dead serious, and off they went to their assigned seats. The good conductors are all part cop.

That little fracas, and three girls who sat gabbling across the aisle, had kept me up. Now it was five o’clock, but even though the louts were gone and the girls had nodded off, I wasn’t going to get back to sleep. Yvette the old railroad lady took care of that. She had a bull’s body and a bullhorn voice. She’d gotten on in Brandon, Manitoba, where there was no night ticket agent, and parked herself in the row behind me. She slept for a couple of hours, and got off during our layover in Winnipeg to get her ticket to Chapleau, Ontario. When she got back on, she was ready to start talking, fastening on a couple across the aisle. Steam engine of a woman Yvette was pushing seventy. She was the widow of a railroad man, a lifer on the Canadian Pacific. This entitled her to travel on his lifetime pass, which she had shown the teenage girl at the ticket window in Winnipeg. The girl, who likely had never before seen such a thing, gave her a hard time. What came next was something else she’d probably never seen – the explosion of a living, breathing steam engine of a woman. We heard all about it as we pulled out of Winnipeg, but it was only the opening volley of a take-no-prisoners tirade. “She was chewing gum, for Chrissake and she comes out with a smart remark,” Yvette boomed. “She didn’t know what the hell the pass was, and she says it’s no good. Did I rip into her! I told her my husband was a dispatcher – asked her if she knew what that was, and she didn’t! I told her she wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for men like him, that the trains wouldn’t even run!” When she was done with the girl, she ripped into the city of Winnipeg, the

province of Manitoba, and everybody who worked for the railroad “west of T’under Bay.” “Ripping” was her catchall word for a hoarse verbal battle with the world. Verbal? We even got to hear about the time she gave her abusive bum of a son-in-law a black eye. “I used to weigh 238,” she said, “but now I’m down to 186.” Fighting trim. The railroad itself – the mighty Canadian Pacific Railway, the CPR – was the godhead of days gone by, its people and machines heroes of the way things were and the way they still should be. Yvette’s husband – “he was a good man, and he worked like a bastard” – had put in forty-six and a half years on the CPR, and her father had been an engineer. One or the other of them had even gotten her in on the act. “I switched steam engines in a roundhouse,” she boasted. “They even have pictures of me doing it in one of the maintenance shops.” “You’re lucky one of them steam engines didn’t run away on you,” one of her listeners said. “The steam engines are lucky they never tried,” she snorted back. I didn’t doubt that Yvette was a match for the iron horse, and for anything or anyone else that had stood in her path as she rattled down the rails of life – the ticket girl in Winnipeg was but a pebble on the track. But it was plain to see what really had her ripping. Her dispatcher husband had died right at retirement. She must have had a notion of the two of them traveling around Canada on passes for years, and now it was just her, and a pass she had to fight to have honored. Yvette was stuck on a siding, stranded in a gum-snappers’ world.

Postcard From Glacier Bay The temperatures of sea water and the Earth’s atmosphere are rising, and the park’s glaciers are retreating more rapidly than ever before . . . Story and Photos by Buddy Mays

I will be the first to admit that a onethousand-foot-long mega-liner carrying 2,000 passengers is hardly my first choice as an ideal platform for wildlife and nature photography in southeast Alaska. Most wild animals quickly skedaddle as something the size of a cruise ship blunders through the swells in their direction making enough noise to wake Davy Jones. But if you are on one of the lower decks just after dawn or an hour before dusk, and if the ship happens to be navigating slowly 16

through growler ice in Glacier Bay National Park, and if Mother Nature is in a good mood, and if you haven’t tugged on Superman’s cape or spit into the wind, the chances of getting some halfway decent photographs from the ship are better than average. I have been to the Land of the Midnight Sun many times, but I had never visited Glacier Bay National Park until last July when my wife and I set sail for Alaska’s Inside Passage on Holland-America’s Nieuw

Amsterdam. A stopover in Glacier Bay, located in a many-fingered nook of the Inside Passage northwest of the capital of Juneau, was part of that cruise. Three-million-plus acres of mostly unexplored rocky, mountainous, ice-covered wilderness, interspersed with miles and miles of deepwater inlets and bays, Glacier Bay is a geological byproduct of the Little Ice Age, which began around 1300 A.D. and reached its maximum extent 450 years later. Back then, the entire area that is now encompassed by the park was a single massive glacier that covered both earth and water with thousands of feet of ice. Because of a changing climate, however, this mega-glacier stopped growing about 1750 and to date it has retreated nearly 65 miles, leaving dozens of smaller breakaway glaciers and hundreds of miles of navigable fjords in its wake. Rich in Marine Life Considering the region’s harsh climate and icy demeanor, most visitors are surprised to learn that Glacier Bay’s waterways are extremely rich in marine wildlife. There are three kinds of whales here—humpbacks, orcas, and minkes. All of them are migratory, but they visit Glacier Bay by the hundreds during the summer. Steller sea lions, harbor seals, bottle-nosed dolphins, and sea otters are abundant. Likewise, bald eagles. Seabirds by the uncountable thousands—murres, alcids, guillemots, tufted puffins, and numerous other species—nest in Glacier Bay’s steep cliffs and along its rocky shoreline during July and August. Commercial ship traffic in Glacier Bay is closely regulated by the National Park Service, so there are never more than one or two large cruise ships in the park at the same time. As I said earlier, mega-liners are not the best way to visit, but the rule of thumb here is the smaller the ship, the higher the price. Several companies (National Geographic for

one) use ships that carry fewer than a hundred passengers, for instance, but the cost for one of these custom cruises is between $7,200 and $10,000 per person. Using rubber zodiacs and rafts they can bring passengers much closer to the glaciers and wildlife and provide professional naturalists who supply one-on-one assistance or advice when needed. Bigger ships, however, offer two advantages that little ones do not; they are much cheaper, and if the weather turns nasty as it often does in Alaskan waters, you do not have to strap yourself into your bed while wondering if the next swell will fill the dining room with seawater. Instead, you can head for the casino, order up nachos and a beer, and tough it out the way civilized wayfarers do . . . in comfort. Whether you choose a big ship or a little one, or no ship at all (hundreds tour the park each year in kayaks), you should do it soon because here’s the kick in the pants. The temperatures of sea water and the Earth’s atmosphere are rising, and the park’s glaciers are retreating more rapidly than ever before in history, in some cases as much as 30 feet per year. Many are already “grounded,” meaning they no longer reach the sea. Glaciologists say that a day will come in the not-so-distant future when these rivers of ice will simply melt away and be gone forever. Not to worry. We all know that global climate change is a fact, and that it has always happened. Ice ages and glaciers come and go and will do the same forever. Sure, when Glacier Bay’s glaciers are gone, cruise ships will no longer ferry thousands of passengers north each summer to see them, but the whales, dolphins, and eagles will still be there. Perhaps they will have the place to themselves for a little while. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

A transient orca, or killer whale, has a peek at a passing cruise ship near a grounded (no longer reaching the sea) glacier in Glacier Bay National Park.

A trio of adult bald eagles skirmish over landing rights on a small iceberg near Johns Hopkins Glacier in the northern part of the park. 18

Tufted puffins, also called sea parrots, are one of many migratory seabirds that nest and raise their young on the steep cliffs and rocky shorelines of Glacier Bay.

Images of Poland Photos by Kasia Staniaszek

Elation, Old Town, Warsaw

Linear, Old Town, Warsaw

That Way, Warsaw

An Opening, Warsaw

Pathway to Heaven, Zakopane

Speckled, Zakopane

Flight at Dusk

California Dreaming Photos by Katie Cappeller & Ben DiRocco

Early morning, Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park

Rare view all to ourselves at Taft Point

Hazy view caused by wildfires in the Yosemite area

Millennia-old sequoias along the Congress Trail in Sequoia National Park

Night has fallen on the mountain, enveloping the little cabin in the woods in a quiet shroud of palpable darkness, and frigid, forced seclusion. The doors and windows are tightly shut to stave off the cold autumn draughts that seek out cracks in the floor and walls like probing anteater tongues to suck out the radiant heat. On the couch, a man sits looking at a postcard, remembering. Memories are jogged, recalled and dusted off, the best ones shined and placed within a secret box kept close to his heart. The most cherished ones are reserved for his wife and sweetheart of fifty years, who left him this very day one year ago. Sleepy now, his reverie is interrupted by a watery ripple in the air, and the feeling that someone is in the room with him. Suddenly he feels a hand in his, unmistakably feminine, with a woman’s soft, gentle warmth, strikingly familiar. The touch so casual as to be almost mundane lingers, moving slow as clock hands. Instantly he is given to understand that for the sake of love, a bridge of mercy was created for a lonely spirit to cross. His heart swells to bursting, too small to contain his overflowing emotions. Stay he implores, don’t leave me again. But such things, he knows, may not endure, and as fingertips draw farther apart he senses a farewell, then one final touch before the forever goodbye. By Jay Jacobs

Ghost Story I struggled to my feet, in hope of reaching the alluring vision. By Frank I. Sillay

During the year I was stationed in Iceland, I took a few weeks of leave and spent it doing the tourist thing around Britain and Europe. Due to a series of accidents and misunderstandings, I found myself, at one point, hitchhiking from Copenhagen to Frankfurt. I had almost despaired of getting a ride, darkness and snow were setting in, when a rattletrap panel truck stopped and picked me up. The driver’s English was of the same feeble level as my scraps of German -- that is to say, totally inadequate, so we discovered that both of us had almost enough schoolboy French to meet our limited needs. To summarize, August was a student at a polytech nearby, which was having a mid-term break, and he had stepped in to fill a last-minute vacancy as handyman/driver at the residential dormitory to help the supervisor, who was committed to attending a conference over the break. He was coming back from restocking essentials in the nearby market town and assured me I could have a bed overnight. Rooms in the main building were all tenanted, though their occupants were away for a few days, but there were several cottages out back which were sometimes used for staff. My kind host unlocked one of these, and a quick look revealing that it was ready for use, he left me to it.

The cottage was small and simple, but perfectly comfortable, especially as a sack of coal had been provided for the small fireplace. I soon had a cozy fire going, which took the chill off nicely. After my day in the cold, I was soon sleeping that deep, impenetrable sleep that is only accessible to the young and fit, regardless of the state of their conscience. I found myself in that state of cognitive dissonance where I knew I was awake, but at the same time, I knew I was dreaming. The room was warm, and past the foot of my bed was the most voluptuous woman my febrile imagination could conjure. She wasn’t naked, but her physical assets were somehow fully revealed, yet at the same time kept enticingly just out of sight by some diaphanous wisp of fabric that defied the laws of optics. Quite apart from her state of aesthetic perfection, she exuded a raw, primal attraction which must be comparable to that exerted by a black hole, so beloved of astronomers. Her voice was like a sensuous massage. She spoke no recognizable language, but her meaning was transparent and persuasive. She didn’t exactly sound like Julie London, but shared the same ability to weave an alluring trance that could deprive the hearer of any will to resist. If the hearer was a sufficiently libidinous young male. My thorax seemed to be filled with fluttering butterflies, and the blood in my veins to have been replaced with champagne. Despite being sound asleep, I struggled to my feet, in hope of reaching the alluring vision. I awoke alone on the floor of the freezing room, just short of the door, the coal fire having burnt away. Trembling with cold, I quickly returned to my bed, and as soon as I warmed up, sleep returned, though without erotic dreams. I awoke in the morning refreshed, but with an unusual awareness of my vivid dream. As arranged with August, I went to the kitchen in the main building for breakfast, where we were soon interrupted by the arrival of the supervisor, back from her seminar. After perfunctory introductions, they reverted to German while the situation was explained. The supervisor suddenly became visibly alarmed, or angry; it wasn’t altogether clear to me. It seemed August was in serious trouble, though I couldn’t figure out why. After they had settled matters to their satisfaction, the supervisor turned to me, and explained the matter in English. Unknown to my host, the cabin I had occupied had, a century earlier, been the site of the suicide of a young female student, who suffered from an unrequited obsession with one of her classmates. Tragic as this was, it gradually became apparent that whenever a male was housed in that cabin, he would be found dead the next morning just outside the cabin door. It took several such deaths for the pattern to become apparent, since which time the cabin had been withdrawn from use and kept locked. When I told the supervisor of my experience the night before, she was stunned, and we both were left reflecting on my narrow escape.

Klepto Currency During the 1960s, silver disappeared from American coinage . . .

It was late morning, on a weekday in 1960, when Tom and I, both students at MIT, walked into a bar (known to us as “The Greasy Spoon”) around the corner from the fraternity house in Boston. Surveying the interior, we saw that there were only three or four drinkers in the place. We seated ourselves at the bar, and Tom pulled an old, greasy, patinated leather pouch from his pocket, dropped it on the bar so that its contents of several silver dollars spilled out and said to the bartender “beer for everybody in the house.” (draught beer in those far-off, happy days, was 15 cents a glass.) The customers soon gathered around, and the conversation was exclusively focused on the silver dollars: “Jeez, I haven’t seen one of those since I was a kid! Where did you get those?” Tom, an accomplished raconteur, spun a yarn about having just hitchhiked from Alaska, where, in a poker game, he had won a quantity of silver dollars from an old prospector, this being the last residue of his windfall. Only a moment of silence passed before one of our guests broached the question: “Could I buy one of those from you?” Refusal gave way to reluctance, then negotiation, and Tom and I were soon on the sidewalk with fifteen or twenty dollars in folding money, plus a couple of the remaining silver dollars. We made our way to the nearest bank, soon converted the paper money to silver dollars, and selected another bar. This time was my turn, and my story was that while tearing down an old house on my uncle’s ranch in Nevada, I had found a cache of the antique currency. The play proceeded much as before, and the net result was having started off with three or four dollars in change between us, Tom and I stayed drunk for several days. I sense disbelief, especially among younger readers, but this story, while describing elements of deception, is entirely true. Prior to the mid-sixties U.S. one dollar bills bore the inscription “The United States will pay to the bearer on demand one dollar in silver” or words to that effect. This was universally understood to mean silver dollars, and banks were required to keep reasonable stocks of them in hand. After that time one-dollar bills became Federal Reserve Notes, and fell into line with larger denominations, claiming only to be “legal tender for all debts, public and private” In the early ‘60s, silver dollars, while still legitimate currency, were virtually never seen in circulation, except in the far west, where the occasional gambling machine and unattended gas pump still accepted them. People in the East, who were not coin collectors, tended to be unaware of the significance of Silver Certificates, which were the last remaining legacy of William Jennings Bryan, who famously objected to working people being “crucified on a cross of gold” in a dispute over the basis of currency backing in the 1890s. It was during the 1960s that silver disappeared from American coinage, leaving only the faith of the general public as a basis of value. Just like crypto currencies.

-- Frank I. Sillay

The Best Little Whorehouse in Ketchikan As the years went by Dolly’s fame and fortune grew . . . By Buddy Mays

When thirteen-year-old Thelma Dolly Copeland ran away from her rural home in the small mining community of McCall, Idaho in 1901, she probably had no inkling that one day she would be arguably the most famous, and most adored, prostitute in Alaska. Thelma probably ran away because she was being abused, but no one knows anything for sure except that her childhood was “unhappy.” From Idaho she went to Montana, working, when she could, at whatever low-end jobs were available for someone her age. Next came Seattle, Spokane, and then British Columbia, where

she waitressed in a Vancouver eatery. Thelma was not shy, and by the time she turned nineteen in Vancouver, she had discovered that she could make far more money from “the attention of men,” as she called it, than from waiting tables. Smart, pleasant to look at, and ambitious, Thelma just needed the right opportunity. She found it in Alaska. By 1919, Thelma was living in the rough and tumble fishing and mining town of Ketchikan, where men outnumbered women 100 to one. She was now 31 and had changed her name to Dolly

Arthur, (attaching her middle name to Arthur -- possibly for writer Arthur Conan Doyle). With money saved from a year-long stint at a local bordello, she had made a down payment on a cozy two-story house on Ketchikan’s infamous Creek Street, a quarter mile-long strip of dance halls and “cat houses” built on pilings along both banks of Ketchikan Creek in the middle of town. Creek Street was known throughout the region as the place “where men and salmon came upstream to spawn.” The women who worked there openly sold sex and booze and had no shortage of customers. Prohibition was in full swing, but no one paid much attention, and prostitution was legal in Alaska. The town roared day and night, packed to the gills with salmon fishermen, gold miners, and loggers, all with money in their pockets, a healthy thirst, and a need for female companionship. Probably because of Dolly’s charm, good looks, and experience at what she did, her new establishment—which she named The House of Pleasure—quickly became one of the most popular businesses on Creek Street. 32

Three minutes with Dolly cost $3, a sum equal to about three day’s wages for most local working men. To the sex-starved male population Ketchikan, however, price was no object. Dolly had so many customers and made so much money that she was able to pay off her mortgage of $800 in just two weeks. According to old photographs and to those who knew her personally, Dolly was a large, handsome, heavily made-up woman who stood 5’10” or 5”11” and weighed 200 pounds plus on her more substantial days. She was well-liked by her neighbors and local townspeople and adored by most of the men who frequented her House of Pleasure on a regular basis. She always denied being a “whore”, describing herself instead as a “Sporting Lady”. She considered whores to be tasteless and crude, though she never made clear exactly how she determined who did, and did not, fall into that despicable category. As the years went by Dolly’s fame and fortune grew, even though she was getting older and losing some of her good looks. Ketchikan’s red-light district along Creek Street flourished until the early 1950s, but even after it was finally shut down in 1954, Dolly remained in her house, still entertaining men in the parlor and possibly the bedroom (she claimed proudly that she turned her final trick at age 70). Finally, in 1973, she became so frail that she moved to a local nursing home, there to remain until her death in 1975 at age 87. Today, Creek Street Historic Boardwalk is on the register of historic places and is one of Ketchikan’s principal visitor attractions. Dolly’s House, as it is now known, has become a locally owned museum and is almost exactly as she left it, filled with six decades of Sporting Lady memorabilia and visited by thousands of cruise ship tourists every summer.

The following article is excerpted from In All Directions, Thirty Years of Travel by Bill Scheller, published by Natural Traveler Books and available at Amazon.com

Sardinia: Prideful Isle Islands, April 2003 By Bill Scheller

Most of what is written about Sardinia has to do with the posh playground of the ultra-wealthy, the Costa Smeralda (”Emerald Coast”) on the island’s northeastern extreme. Far less well known are the mountains of the interior – the wildest country I have even encountered in western Europe – and Sardinia’s capital, small towns, and curious prehistoric ruins.

Was I on the right mountain? I told myself it shouldn't matter, since only about 15 feet of altitude separated Punta La Marmora and its barely less lofty twin, Bruncu Spina, the two highest peaks on the island of Sardinia. And it didn't matter - not when I considered my surroundings. The May sky was bright blue, and an array of jagged peaks stretched for miles in every direction. That far above tree line, the panorama spreading beneath me was equally vivid. From the summit cairn, where I sat next to a cross made from welded iron pipe, I could see a queue of sheep straggling through the gorse a half mile below, and two dogs holding them to their path. The tinkling of the sheep's bells, a liquid-silver sound that seemed to come from immensely far away, drifted uphill on the breeze. If there was a shepherd I did not see him; very likely, he had just finished milking and had sent the sheep and dogs to the high spring pastures. I thought of the shepherd making cheese, like the pecorino I was enjoying with crisp native flat bread and a bottle of Sardinian wine there at my 6,000foot aerie. Whether on Punta La Marmora

or Bruncu Spina, the cheese and wine would have tasted just as good. I was lucky to be alone up there. Just a few days before, at the pier in Naples where I had waited to board my ferry for Sardinia, I had found myself surrounded by at least a hundred men in identical plaid shirts and feathered Tyrolean hats. Some of them carried tin cups on their belts. One of them had an accordion, and after warming up with a few Italian songs, they roared into “Roll Out the Barrel” with all the gusto of the best bowling team in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. As they sang, I read the patches on their shirts. They were members of the Club Alpino Italiano, and I immediately suspected what they were up to. They were going to get on my boat, and they were going to climb Punta La Marmora the same day I was. But instead they got on the ferry to Sicily. And so I was alone by my iron-pipe cross, in the emptiest part of Europe that I know. The high peaks of the Gennargentu massif in east-central Sardinia are the sort of mountains that are easy to climb, once you've managed the far more complicated business of getting to the trailhead. The road from Aritzo, my village base, was almost laughably tortuous - a rutted, stream-crossed cow path 33

that no one in their right mind would inflict on anything but a rental car. It really was a cow path. At several places I had to wait for the beasts to hoist themselves onto their feet and off the road before I could pass, and at one narrow spot a horn nearly poked into the open window of my Fiat. I am used to horns when I drive in Italy, but not that kind. The rural interior of Sardinia, especially the region known as the Barbagia, of which the Gennargentu is the rugged rooftop, might easily be mistaken for a land in which cows, goats, innumerable sheep and the three horses that skittered away as I approached my mountaintop – have abandoned humanity and gone off to live a life without history and beyond time. The business of tending herds and flocks is very much an invisible pursuit, so much so that I was almost surprised to come across two men milking goats in a farmyard at the dead end of a wrong turn way up in the hills. The terrain around them - sere, vertical, with limitless grudging pasture and spotty stands of chestnut and oak - was a landscape indifferent to people. But people have been there for a very long time, long before they built the tight clusters of tile-roofed houses that make up villages like Aritzo. All of Sardinia, and particularly the Barbagia, is dotted with the prehistoric ruins called nuraghi, cylindrical towers constructed of mortarless stone masonry and slightly narrower at the top than at the bottom. The towers date from the Bronze Age; most were constructed between 1800 and 800 B.C. There are some 7,000 nuraghi on Sardinia, in various states of ruin, preservation, or restoration, and there has been a lot of debate over what they were used for. Various hypotheses have been offered: that they were forts, sun temples, astronomical observatories, or simply the living quarters of tribes or extended families.

A model at the Museum of Archaeology in Cagliari, Sardinian's capital, showed what a nuraghe would have looked like with a wooden parapet, and lent credence to the fort theory. As for temples or observatories, 7,000 seemed like a lot. After visiting Nuraghe Arrubiu, a site on a wind-blasted plain between Cagliari and the Barbagia, I came down on the side of the living-quarters hypothesis. The stone compound hardly looked comfortable, but it might have served a Bronze Age family well. In the end I discovered that the leading theory suggests they were strategically placed fortifications inhabited by local families. Fragments of Mycenaean pottery, which the ancient Sardinians acquired in trade, date Nuraghe Arrubiu to the 14th or 15th century B.C. It was abandoned about 600 years later, and aside from the nearby ruins of a Roman winery, it seemed hardly to have changed since then. The site consisted of five towers clustered around a central tower that still stood 50 feet tall. Shouldering sideways through narrow openings - nurgahe dwellers were apparently not quite as well nourished as I am – I explored the central tower's firstfloor room, crept down a dark corridor straight out of a Saturday matinee, and edged my way up a cyclopean stairway in one of the side towers. But despite the best efforts of the weather, I couldn't muster up a sense of mystery. Instead, I was put in mind of someone poking through the ruins of my house 3,500 years from now. Very odd construction techniques, they might say, but when all is said and done, it must have been some family's home. Far stranger, although lit far more clearly by history, was the Roman amphitheater I had toured back in Cagliari. I hesitate to say “ruined,” since the great stone semicircle - most of which was gouged from the rock - was still in such good shape that it

was rigged with a concert stage. My guide led me through the puzzle of rooms beneath the 1,800-year-old structure, some of which were Carthaginian cisterns dating to pre-Roman times. “This chamber, he explained at one point, “is where severely wounded gladiators were brought after a combat.” Then he pointed up. “Do you see the soot marks on the ceiling? They're from the cooking fires of people who lived here.” “When was that?” I asked. “After the Second World War, for 10 or 15 years. They had lost their homes in the bombing.” It was hard to relate the cosmopolitan Cagliari of today, with its outdoor cafés and buzzing Vespas, its shops selling Prada and Bruno Magli, its 13th-century duomo and 21st-century graffiti, with such abject postwar misery. But the soot on that ceiling, and the resiliency of life as I had found it in the hinterlands, made me see in the amphitheater-dwellers more than a touch of resourcefulness and ultimate indifference to Allied bombs, Carthaginians and Romans, Saracens and Spaniards, and all the other vagaries, human and otherwise, of life on this island over the past several thousand years. Of course, today's Sardinians are an amalgam of many of those ethnic influences. Their strongly distinct dialect of Italian many would call it a language of its own - is said to be the closest modern European tongue to Latin. But undergirding the mixed cultural antecedents was something elementally Sardinian, which was clear in the way the islanders spoke of Sardinian honey, Sardinian cheese, and Sardinian mountains with an ancient and innate pride. Not far from my hotel in Aritzo, I came upon an outdoor mural of a man on horseback with mountains in the background; both horse and rider looked immensely proud. Alongside the mural was a poem. I could translate only fragments, but I understood enough to be reminded of

simple line of Latin carved in the stone threshold of an inn where I've stayed in Vermont: Montani Semper Liberi, it said. “Mountaineers are always free.” It was certainly true there, up in the Barbagia, where the natives held out even against Christianity until well into the sixth century. Driving north from Aritzo, I steered for the hill town of Tonara, one of several Sardinian sources of torrone, a great treat from my mezzo-Italian childhood in New Jersey. Produced in various guises around the Mediterranean, torrone is a nougat candy studded with nuts and coated with a thin white wafer that, as kids, we always said looked and tasted just like the Communion host. When I heard torrone was made in Tonara, I saw my chance to crack the mystery of what exactly goes into nougat. Before I found out, I lucked onto the answer to another mystery – the question of whether, other than on festival days, anyone ever wears what guidebooks love to call “traditional costume.” The main road into Tonara rode the crest of a long sloping hill, with splendid views westward across a broad, deep valley. I was glancing in that direction as much as Italian driving prudence would allow, when, just past the Bar Harley-Davidson, I saw her a woman in her 60s, all in black, with a wide black headdress and a black cloth-wrapped parcel balanced on her head. Older women in black are not uncommon in small-town Italy, especially in Sardinia, but this lady was different. She had on a bright red apronlike cloth, square and starched, and she wore it not in front but in back. In eleven trips to Europe, it was the first time I’d seen anyone in traditional costume, not counting Bavarian hikers in lederhosen and Englishmen in tattersall shirts. My torrone revelation was no less serendipitous. Having picked up the business card of a local maker at the tourist office, I

was off in search of the address when a man on the street asked me the time. I told him and then showed him the card, which he looked at as if it were the logo of a disfavored soccer team. “You don't want to go to that place, he said. “You want to go to Signor Peddes, right down this street.” I found Natalino Peddes and his wife, Antoinietta Marotto, in a big sunny workroom on the ground floor of their home, surrounded by torrone and its ingredients. When Natalino heard that I had been an enthusiast of the confection for just about as long as he had been making it – forty-three years - Mr. Peddes got out a bottle of wine and poured us each a glass. “There are eleven torrone makers in Tonara,” he told me. “We have a consortium, and we make torrone the old way. Some factories on the mainland add flavorings, but ours is all natural.” But natural what, I asked. What goes into torrone? Mr. Peddes took a sip of wine and pointed to one of two industrial mixers with waist-high bowls. “Into here go egg whites and honey – our good Sardinian honey,” he said. “There is a little gas flame under the bowl, and the egg white and honey are stirred and cooked for five hours.” “That's all - just those two things?” “And nuts. We make four kinds of torrone, with walnuts, with hazelnuts, with peanuts or with almonds.” He pointed to shelves filled with boxes of nuts. At a nearby table, Antoinietta Marotto was packing the warm, gooey nougat into plastic-lined boxes, smoothing each scoopful and layering it with nuts. When the creamy, sticky mass cooled, she would slice it and sandwich the slabs between sheets of ostia, the wafers. “You call it that, too - like the host?” I asked her.

“Sure. It's just like the host. It's the only part we don't make. It's from the mainland. Here, try this.” She spooned a blob of nougat onto a torn sheet of ostia and handed it to me. It tasted like warm honey ice cream that couldn't melt; it was ambrosial. From the sweet torrone of Tonara, I wandered into a realm of decidedly sharpflavored politics in Orgosolo. At first glance the hamlet was just another Barbagia hill town, its old quarter a tight warren of steep, narrow streets surrounded by more spaciously arranged blocks of modern flats, many still under construction. But those central streets were enlivened by one of the frankest and most unusual displays of political folk art in the world - the famous murals of Orgosolo. Public murals are common in Sardinia, although in many towns they primarily serve a pictorial or folkloric purpose - the proud mountain horseman I’d seen in Aritzo was an example. In Orgosolo, though, mural painting acquired a special political pungency after 1975, when a local art teacher inspired his students by beginning a series of works that only after a decade began to veer from polemicism. The politics of the Orgosolo murals have an Old Left tinge; they are in a vein not extensively mined in the United States since the 1930s, the heyday of artists like Diego Rivera. The first one I encountered chronicled important moments in the life of Antonio Gramsci, the Sardinian-born founder of the Italian Communist party. Ironically, I had learned the year in which the party was established - 1921 - only the night before, while watching “Chi Vuol Essere Milionario?” (Who Wants to be a Millionaire?) on the TV network owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The painters of the Orgosolo murals wouldn't have wanted to be millionaires, and they wouldn't have had much use for the

billionaire Berlusconi. On wall after wall I encountered Marx and Lenin, Che Guevara, and the heroes of a strike at Italian auto factories in 1920. There was a faded mural of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, with the legend “Colombo assassino” (Columbus, murderer). Another eulogized the radical German leftists Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, creators of the terrorist BaaderMeinhof Gang. Yet another, on the wall of a butcher shop, portrayed a throng of workers and peasants in Picassoesque style and proclaimed, “Né pocos, né locos, né male unidos” (neither few, nor crazy, nor poorly organized). Since disembarking from my ferry at Cagliari, I had not seen the sea. I might have thought that odd on an island, even an island as large as Sardinia (at some 9,300 square miles, it is about the size of Vermont), but my map had revealed the paucity of Sardinian coastal towns other than a few port cities, and I had read that in the past Sardinians had associated the sea with pirates and invaders. The guide of an English hiking party I had met in Aritzo, however, suggested I visit the coastal town of Santa Maria Navarrese, which was home not only to small, low-key resort hotels but also an excursion boat or two that made scheduled runs up the otherwise inaccessible shoreline along the Gulf of Orosei. To reach S. M. Navarrese from the north, I decided to follow Route 125, the Orientale Sarda, through a rugged, sparsely populated region lying largely within a national park. The 125 wound south from the town of Dorgali along the edge of a precipice, with limestone parapets soaring above me on the east side of the road. To the west the cliffs descended to a vast, arid valley whose fields of vines and olive trees lay so far below me that they seemed to lie not merely at a different level of elevation but on a whole

different plane of reality. At several places along the road the guardrail had broken away. After some 30 miles of what, for once, could accurately be called drop-dead scenery, the Orientale Sarda culminated at Baunei. The town hung on the lip of a great green basin. Olive trees clung to its sides and spread onto a plain 1,500 feet below Baunei’s main street, which was lined with houses that were not for the acrophobic. From there a side road descended to the flats and S. M. Navarrese. I found a seaside hotel whose spring clientele from northern Europe was just beginning to trickle in. The local attractions included a tower built by the Saracens and a celebrated olive tree budding in its 1,000th year. As I walked past a soccer field, the boys in yellow jerseys scored a goal. And, yes, there was a small excursion boat. I showed up at the dock the next morning at the appointed time and found only Andrea, the captain, and Enrico, the mate. They were a perfect captain-and-mate pair; Andrea was thirtyish, more serious and reticent; Enrico was in his early 20s and had an entirely devil-may-care way about him. They were both sailor-swarthy, both built as if they could tow the boat to Naples by swimming with ropes in their teeth. No one else was around. “Am I the only passenger today?” I asked Enrico. “No. There's a group of Inglesi. Here they come now.” I looked up the ramp leading down to the dock. There were the English hikers I had met in Aritzo, with their guide who had told me about this town. The plan, I learned, was to drop them off an hour up the coast; they would then hike through the mountains for five hours, while the boat - and I, its only other passenger - would head to a cove farther north.

As we motored to the hiker's drop-off point, I learned from the guide that I had, as I half suspected, mistakenly climbed Bruncu Spina instead of Punta La Marmora. It mattered less than ever on that bright day on a calm sea, with the bottom visible ten fathoms down, limestone spires straight out of Gaudi shooting up from the shore, and an offshore breeze carrying the fragrance of the macchia - the herb-heavy Mediterranean coastal brush - down from the clifftops. An hour after Andrea ferried the hikers into their cove by dinghy, we anchored again at the Spiaggia dei Gabbiani (the beach of gulls), where I got a private ride to shore and was left to swim, lie in the sun, and explore a strand framed by bizarrely weathered formations of creamy-colored calcareous rock. By the time Enrico came for me in the dinghy, though, it was beginning to cross my mind that no one had said anything about lunch. I needn't have worried; back on the boat Andrea was in the galley. Enrico and I set up a table and benches on deck, and soon the three of us were sitting down to spaghetti with a marinara sauce based on sun-dried tomatoes; Sardinian flat bread drizzled with fragrant green olive oil and topped with slabs of pecorino and thick-sliced dry prosciutto; and a half-gallon bottle of inky homemade wine that was all body and flavor, complexity be damned. I thought about American boat trips I’d been on, where a deckhand might sell you a Saran-wrapped sub and a soda. When we were finished, Andrea lay down for a nap. Enrico went into the galley and came out with a basket of small oranges. “Blood oranges,” he said. He cut one in half, and the flesh was bright red. “Did you ever squeeze them into your wine?” “Do they make wine in America?” Andrea piped up from his bench along a gunwale.

“Yes,” I said. “But not like this, except the old Italians.” And to Enrico, “No, I've never squeezed blood oranges into my wine.” “Here,” he said, and he crushed half an orange into my glass. Delizioso. We killed the basket of oranges and the rest of the wine, and I talked with Enrico while Andrea dozed off. He spoke of the tourists they carried: “The English are always particular, and the Germans, you can always tell the Germans because they go in the water no matter what time of year it is.” He told me about the local sea cows, the bue marino, nearly extinct now. (“Too many people, not enough fish.”) And I asked him about the part of Sardinia best known to the rest of the world, the string of fabulously exclusive resorts along the Costa Smeralda to our north. “Do they ever come down here?” I asked him. “The people from the Costa Smeralda?” “No,” he answered, with a dismissive northward wave of his hand. “Anyway, we have it better than them. We don't have to live by the law of the jungle like they do; we live beautifully without much money. Life here is healthy, tranquil. We can see the Via Lattea [the Milky Way]. We live to be old.” It was time to go back and pick up the hikers. “Poveri Inglesi, [the poor English],” I said to Enrico. “They don't have any spaghetti up there in the rocks; they don't have any wine or blood oranges.” “Solo panini e acqua,” Enrico answered with a smug little grin. Only sandwiches and water. Weren't we the lucky ones, we both agreed. Poveri Inglesi - no, poor everybody who wasn't at that moment bobbing on the pellucid Tyrrhenian Sea, squeezing blood oranges into their wine and eating the fresh white cheese of the sheep of Sardinia.

Bill Sche!er

In All Directions !irty Years of Travel

Bill Scheller’s prose is so artfully crafted he could write about any subject and you will want to read it. Fortunately, he is also astute at finding places you really do want to know about, with the dual benefit of offering up compelling subject matter, beautifully delivered. Whether he is driving around the boot of Italy in 18 days, searching for Columbus in the Bahamas, snowmobiling Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula, or always finding time to work his unmatched expertise on train travel, you will want to go there with him. The music of his prose is such that you feel you are reading short stories by some of the masters of that genre. If you are seduced to make specific selections that strike your fancy from the titles in the book’s table of contents that will only draw you deeper into all of Scheller’s explorations. So, do yourself a favor; start at the beginning and read through this wonderful selection of stories from Scheller’s thirty years of writing for major travel media. In All Directions By Bill Scheller On Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle editions.

Ah, Paradise For I, with all my dumb luck, had been given a life now of such wonderment . . . By Kendric W. Taylor

I live in a distant land so remote even Indiana Jones couldn’t find it, so far off the grid, we have no idea what a grid even is, so tucked away in amongst the vast tundra, it makes the lost city of Atlantis as prominent as the Eiffel Tower. I live in a village so poor the Czar’s Tax Collector, on his last visit, gave us money; so potholed and cratered, the moon looks like provolone instead of Swiss; so cold and miserable, the reindeer moved to Lapland for the milder climate. Though it’s named Paradise, it’s really only a few rickety-rackety wooden shacks with sod roofs, peep holes in the linoleum passing for windows, and yak hides for doors, its few pathways so empty of pedestrians, they make the Martian canals seem like freeways. No one here knows exactly where this is, as no one has been anywhere else to find out where they came from. We think the Capitol City is out there where the sun does shine; but that’s it. One thing we’re sure of, if you did leave, managed to get beyond the ice fields, through the great forest, even 40

past the frozen desert that’s out back in the back of the Outback – and -- if you didn’t bump into the Capitol City -- you’d fall right off the edge of the earth. Yep, it’s the steppes alright, but these don’t head anywhere but down, and you can bet it’s not as nice there. We’re not sure who or what administration of the Czar governs us; or even which Czar it is –- still Ivan the Terrible, maybe? We did have a visitor stumble in out of the blizzard many years ago. He said he was looking to set up a thing called a Gulag (whatever that is) and claimed we were perfect for it. We were very impressed, thinking of the tourism it would attract. He mumbled something about being a commissar for some son of a bitch called Stalin, and then the freeze finished him off before he could tell us who ran things. His tied-up underwear bundle had an encyclopedia book with lots of pictures though, which allowed me to make all these clever comparisons. A big part of life here is our religion, one that believes in little, harms no one, and collects nothing on Sunday. We worship no false idols, except of course the Ьросиьїя (Brosnya), a mythical Russian lake monster, who, when not scaring the bejeezus out of little children, also serves as our beloved village symbol. We dress modestly, eat sparingly, and bathe not at all. There are no restrictions on our women, except they must cover their noses: given the freezing cold that peels the skin right off the face, they’re all too happy to comply. There had been talk of having the women grow full beards like us, but this proved difficult. The one girl who did manage, quickly ran away to join the circus. Our religion doesn’t have a name – it’s just there every day – be nice, stay out of one another’s way, and definitely keep your hands off your neighbor’s wife. That lets me out – I have no neighbors, but if I did have one, he’d be too ugly to get a wife anyway. Of course, I’m pretty good looking, but we have no mirrors, so that’s not a sure thing. We have to rely on one another for a description, and as everyone thinks he’s the handsome one, we all lie to each other. There is plenty of down-time in our village, hours piled upon hours to do anything we want, even though there is nothing here worth doing: watch the wind maybe, or wait for Summer Day, when we can struggle out of our bearskin coats, fling off skunk skin hats, shake off our beaver skin gloves and frozen tundra mukluks, and run around bare-arsed in the snow. There is only one prohibition in this idyllic life – we can’t leave the village, which is a problem as there are not enough women -- hardly any, as a matter of fact. Each year, as the small group of females that do live here near marriage age (about the time they might begin growing a beard, around 11, which is when mine began) they are put in a cart, hitched to a yak, and accompanied by one of the wives, sent off to charm school in the Capitol City. For some reason, they never come back. Paradise has few sports: bear wrestling, wolf chasing and mud flinging. I’m not much good at any of this, but Saturday nights are my fun time, standing up to our knees out in the marsh cursing at the moon, especially when it’s full; that’s when things can get out of hand.

But about the women problem: we do have an agreement with another village further along the permafrost line, one with a surfeit of women. The village elders there have convinced the unmarried females that a better life awaits them here. What salesmen they must be! Talk about selling iceboxes to Siberians. I had arrived at the stage of my young male life where getting drunk and purging with the boys didn’t hold the attraction it once did, and weird thoughts now snaked through my mind that set me quivering all over. I went to one of the eldest of the elders with my problem. He mumbled into the beard covering him to his ankles for a long time, then jumped to his feet and shouted: “Yes! Yes! I remember now. A woman! Go get a woman! Then, settling back into the mud, he seemed to smile up through the hairy undergrowth and added: “one under 75, if you can.” It was perfect timing. We had just recently taken a huge leap into the age of advanced communications technology. So after weeks of laborious composition, I addressed my idea of a marriage proposal to any female who might be interested, to those far-off village elders, and specifying expedited handling, quickly dispatched our new carrier pigeon,. However, as the months passed, I began to consider my folly, if indeed it was, even though at the same time, eating away at my brain were those stimulating images of what might someday be delivered to my front door (which I made a note to fix as I didn’t want the package falling into the compost). I had just hammered in the last wooden peg, when she arrived, six months later, chased screaming down the path by a pack of howling wolves. A tall sturdy girl -- plain of face of what I could see, with the customary shaven head for those seeking a husband, and amazing blue eyes. But then, set almost directly between them, emerging as she lowered her mask, was an equally amazing nose. Formidable, even. Spectacular for sure. Not round like a doorknob, nor pink and snubby, or pointed and scary, like those Bronsnya lake devils I mentioned that we scare the kids with. No, this nose stuck out slightly, then plunged quickly down at a right angle, reminding me at once of the village bully’s beezer, given to him by an annoyed bear who had smacked him in passing. Well, I couldn’t leave her standing on the porch, it might give way at any minute, and then she’d smell terrible, to make things even worse. Not that she could out-stink me, if that was possible. We squeezed inside, and I pointed her to what passed for the bedroom, the goats who previous domiciled there, now kicked outdoors. It was then, that I made the smartest move and dumbest mistake of my life. Instead of returning her postpaid and hoping for a refund (if the wolves didn’t get her on the way out), I decided I would let her to stay on, figuring she’d soon have her fill of listening to my endless village weltanschauung, and bolt on her own. Instead, I made a different proposal than one she might have expected: “let us take a few days before deciding,” I oozed, “time to

become acquainted,” With a puzzled look, she agreed, and I brought the goats back inside. The days passed. I moved the stove into the bedroom so she could sleep on the shelf above it, the warmest spot in the hovel. The months went by: I didn’t overwork her; I didn’t beat her, which was the local custom in those days. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t dare; she was as tall as I, with a ferocious left hook that could knock down a camel, which I saw her do one day when one spit at her. We began to know each other. She didn’t tell me her name because she couldn’t say it herself. The Cyrillic alphabet has only 21 characters, and she had three names. She had a few unsettling ideas too – such as we should be equal partners. I was expected to share in the cooking and cleaning and not laze around all day with the other men. But I was confident that my imposing command presence would soon unburden her of these those silly notions, and I would soon rejoin the lads flopped in the mud around the village circle, squirting goatskin bags of 200 proof homemade vodka down our gullets, to keep from freezing. But all the time, those glittering blue eyes would look at me, the mouth curled into a mysterious smile, and the nose began to recede. She would brush against me in passing – she could hardly avoid it in those narrow spaces -- and things beneath the bearskin vest she wore brushed teasingly against me, setting my mind aflame. The nose kept getting smaller. And smaller. She bathed daily in an old washtub, packed with melting snow, a custom absolutely unheard of hereabouts. Her hair had grown back, and one night after her bath she unleashed it in front of the stove. It flowed over her shoulders and down her robe like a golden waterfall, smelling wonderfully, and it sealed my fate. I began sharing the water trough with the village animals, jumping in daily and rubbing off with rolls of birch bark: it got the grease and smoke smudge off at least. We would talk all night, bundled up together on the porch waiting for the midnight sun to set. She told me of things I had never imagined, of things she had read of in books, of tales she had heard, even of things she had seen in visions. I began wanting to share everything, every moment, with her. More and more I began to regret my decision to wait her out and rid myself of her. I thought of chaining her to the stove, but the chains had been lost after the last ice bondage festival. Then one evening, at bedtime, she stood at the doorway of the bedroom and her robe parted, not shyly, nor wantonly, but happily, eager to be seen, explored, shared: there was revealed the female form in unmatchable glory. Surely if we are made in God’s image, he is a female, and a God of love, of giving, a happy confident God, one of compassion, possessor of supreme good taste. If the body is a temple, this was the Taj Mahal; if a cathedral; Notre Dame; a museum; the Louvre, a statue; Venus. It was perfection. So perfect in form and style in fact, it would make a dressmaker’s dummy cry sawdust tears. In God’s eyes, the male figure was obviously Plan B.

And now, here, it was being offered gladly, unrestrainedly, to me, and if ever anyone was so undeserving, so unworthy, and generally not good enough -- in a word – it was me. But I write no more of this: I close the book. Too often prying eyes of precocious pernicious minors might be snooping in these pages. I withhold this information, not out of any moral sense, nor of shielding impressionable young minds from the sins of life. No – just the opposite – let the unspeakable little cabalistic beasts twist in the flames of the burning hell of puberty. Let them boil in their own lust. They can find out for themselves. I take this secret to the grave. By now of course, I was beyond caring about a silly little thing like a nose. What nose? That cute little nubbin? That adorable mile post directing kisses to the sweet mouth below? And that hair -- down to her waist now, thick and quite lovely, framing her face, setting off those piercing blue eyes, and yes, alright, that nose. That fabulous, rubable, loveable, kissable nose. For I, with all my dumb luck, had been given a life now of such wonderment, such joy snuggled next to my darling in our new queen-size shelf over the oven, forever happy together in this stultifying rickety-rackety village, with no light except a few small candles that sputter out quickly in the long Arctic night. Ah, but in that last flickering glow, when the robe parts, it is truly Paradise. (Apologies to Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev and Isaac Bashevis Singer)

Photo Shoot, Long Beach, New York Photo by Karen Dinan

Days and Nights in Buenos Aires Later, back home, Kent thought of that last dawn . . . By Kendric W. Taylor

For William Kent, the restaurants in central Buenos Aires were someplace to keep the darkness out. He ate alone nearly every night, late, amid the crisp white tablecloths and slowly twirling ceiling fans. Even though he could understand little of the conversations around him, the talk itself was enough; that and the color and the movement. Along with the solid fare and glow of the wine, it cast a circle of warmth that cold despair could not readily penetrate, unless he invited it in. He was working in this fabled city to escape events at home, not an uncommon theme in Kent’s jumbled story: only this chapter was tall, thick brown hair to her waist, foul-mouthed and funny. And as it turned out – no surprise -- the laugh was on him. As much as Kent could stretch the workday, at some point loomed the inevitable return to the small commercial hotel and his room with its view of the airshaft. Long after the last newsletter article had been written and everyone had gone home, it was time to shut off the lights and leave, chancing the antique lift down to the street. That’s when he usually headed for a Palacio Papafritas on Avenida Florida, deep and dark, not a palace, only a modest respite for traveling salesmen, lonely clerks and tired pensioners. It was inexpensive and never crowded, and the waiters, after a few evenings, seemed to view him as a regulár. He would sit quietly, reading the Englishlanguage edition of Time, purchased at the kiosk outside, or a paperback. The staff was tolerant of his limited language skills, and his curious Yankee

penchant for blood-red bifé. He would eat slowly, silently, the red Mendoza wine replenished unhurriedly at intervals without the necessity of asking. He thought about a Hemingway story he’d just re-read, about a waiter who was reluctant to close up at night in case there might be someone who needed the café for its light; a refuge clean and pleasant. That’s me all right, Kent thought, nodding in self-pity. Without flourish, the reckoning would appear at his table, the tally increasing over the weeks as his appetite returned. He would do the necessary currency adjustments, allow for the daily hyperinflationary swoops, figure in the tip, and leave the unfamiliar banknotes in their huge denominations in a small white dish. Nodding politely, Kent walked out into the traffic-free thoroughfare, joining the crowds strolling slowly through the warm crowded streets. Even in these days of the military junta, Buenos Aires was alive until late at night with families and young couples casually window shopping or settling into a late meal at the outdoor tables flowing along the sidewalk. It was a city so Parisian in appearance, but so Italian in mood, Kent thought, and one of pleasure, it was so easy to stay out all night, and not even notice the passing hours. Sipping a cold Pilsner at a corner table, he gazed up at the Belle Époque buildings, their tall windows warmly lit behind wrought iron balustrades, glimpses of paintings and gilt mirrors on the walls inside. Kent imagined what it would be like to live along this street, wondering even if Borges, the great Argentine writer, whom he was trying to read, might be on the other side of one of those windows. He thought again of that Hemingway story: about what it was that made them seek out the café to sit in the quiet light. Was it the deathly loneliness, the fear of another sleepless night in their dark, fetid rooms? But Kent knew why – a woman! Like the one with the long dark hair. It had started as an intense crush, lasted a couple of years, then she was gone, leaving him with the usual pathetic cycle of questions: why didn’t I do this; or not do that, and on and on. It was always like this when these affairs of his ended – which they did with regularity. Kent smiled ruefully to himself – he always thought they would last forever -- the women in turn always thinking they could change him -- improve him – and it never worked either way. A friend‘s wife called Kent “Birdbath,” because he was so shallow. No more Christmas cards. As Kent settled into a routine and the long weeks passed, he began to realize he was not only boring everyone with his terrible tragedy, he was actually beginning to bore himself, and losing friends in the process. His usual reaction to these breakups had been to pick one step of the Stages of Acceptance that would cause the most pain and stick with it, but now even that delicious squirm of self-pity was loosening its grip on the pit of his stomach. Then two things happened: he had gone one night to La Boca, down by the dock area of Buenos Aires, to see a guitarist friend from the states, whose

band, Tony and the Night Hammers, was traveling South America on a passthe-hat tour. Launched into his usual heartbreak lament, he was taken aback by his friend’s immediate and summate reaction: “Willy man, you got more trouble with women than Hank Williams, and you’re dumber than Elvis. Get over it, for chrissake!” Then, the following day, he was confronted at the office by a fellow expat, who instead of her usual glazed eyeball reaction to his sob story, cut him off in mid-bleat, snarling in a flat menacing tone: “Look, we’re all sorry for you, but everyone’s been through it sometime in their lives. Haven’t you figured out yet that the common denominator in all of these is you? Are you that fucking clueless?” Finally shocked into actually facing up to his situation, instead of enjoying it, he began to wonder what actually to do about it? One of his problems, he knew, was to be cursed with almost total recall of every dumb-ass thing he’d ever done. Maybe now it was time to stop remembering and start forgetting. - including any thought about this last one. To his gradual amazement, it began to work -- the self-inflicted wound began to heal. As it did, real life slowly began to intrude; not only was he going to live, but he would be doing it in one of the most vibrant cities in the world. From the beginning, Buenos Aires had been something new and exciting. He had arrived that first time, shepherding a group of prominent journalists brought to Argentina to assess the potential for foreign investment. Tired and hungry after the long flight down from New York, they had rendezvoused in the oak-paneled bar downstairs at the legendary Plaza Hotel, where they were staying. This was where Eva and Juan Peron held functions in their heyday (the older staff remembered them well for their tips). The party was seated among the dark leather-covered booths beneath the polo pictures on the wall, enjoying cocktails and canapés, when their translators arrived -- the younger one turning heads all the way to their table. She had introduced herself in passable English as their tour guide, and the other woman as their official translator, who happened to mention as her bona fides that she had once translated for an Israeli psychic known for bending spoons with his mind. This galvanized the journalists to crowd around her to unearth his gimmick, and left Kent the opportunity to chat with his new guide -- about the itinerary. He saw a girl in her twenties, with animated blue eyes, burnished gold hair to her shoulders, and a slightly offkilter smile that spoke of mysteries to be discovered. She had been an international tour guide and part-time au pair (in Penang, of all places). He thought her sophisticated in a European way. She liked Americans, she said, telling him later that he had reminded her of an actor in an American war film that was playing in Buenos Aires (“Owe you one, Indy,” he thought, getting the actor right but the movie wrong). He realized later that his feelings for her began the day the journalists had interviewed the general running the Junta at the presidential palace – the Casa Rosada. At the last minute, the two female interpreters had been replaced by

a barely competent male from the Foreign Office. This of course prevented her from seeing at first hand her country’s equivalent of the Oval Office, and no less importantly, the entry to the famous balcony where Eva Peron had appeared before the adoring crowds. Kent was surprised how bad he felt for her, and as they spent more and more time together, it changed into something else. One long lovely Sunday was spent sunning themselves on deck aboard a financier’s yacht on the Rio de la Plata, where they had been shunted, while the journalists lunched in the galley below with the great man. No problem, Kent thought smugly as they lay on the canvas pillows, then wondered why he was so dumb as to say no when she offered to rub coconut oil on his back. A few days later, flying back to Buenos Aires at night on the military transport supplied by the junta for a visit to an abattoir in Mar del Plata, (a horrible experience that had made him sick to his stomach), their official host, an army colonel, after many whiskies, tossed aside his machine pistol, got on the intercom and launched into an endless drunken serenade. “Lele,” Kent asked her, “what the hell is the colonel yowling about?” “Ah, Querido, you feel better, I’m so glad. Well, he sings of his Buenos Aires, and of sadness and love.” She explained. “Well, as long as he keeps his hands off you. Listen,” Kent continued, leaning across the armrest to whisper into her glorious hair, “what do you think would happen if these guys ever got into a real war?” Her reaction was instant and wide-eyed: “Cheesh, darling,” she said in a low voice, “I hope that never happens.” That night she knocked at the door of his room at the Plaza to check on him: “Before I go home,” she explained, “I brought you pills from the Pharmacia, for the stomach,” “I feel better now,” he had replied. “I just need sleep.” “Yes, it’s a long day tomorrow.” The next night he asked her to stay with him. When the junket ended, Kent had stayed on a few days settling bills. Together, they had seen the journalists off at the airport, and now he sat outside at the fashionable Café de la Paix with this young creature, watching the local yahoos skid their Porsche 911s around the huge buttonwood tree in the plaza. He wondered at the oddity of this lively rendezvous being located smack across from Recoleta Cemetery, a virtual borough of the dead in a city itself very much dedicated to the past. Eva Peron was buried over there, entombed under Duarte, her family name. They were having a drink with her married boyfriend, who had just arrived, no doubt in one of the Porsches. How sophisticated it all was, he thought. How Buenos Aires. How to get rid of the boyfriend!

He wondered if she was thinking the same thing. He knew some things about her now: she was born in Havana, of English parents on their way to Argentina. She was kind, intelligent and without pretense. Not for the first time his focus settled upon those blue eyes, marveling how the day’s humidity had forced that glorious hair into tiny ringlets, remembering the night before and that fountain of gold fanned out on the pillow in his hotel room. “So, Señor,” the boyfriend announced confidently, unaware he was heading for his own Ricoleta, “we will drop you at your hotel, no? The Plaza, I Believe.” Before Kent could even think of a reply, she interrupted: “Bieñ, Paco, you can drop me as well. Señor aqui must sign some vouchers so the tour company gets paid. And I know you should get home to your wife.” And that was the end of Paco! Ah, these modern Buenos Aires girls! And now it was time for Kent to go home to the states, and here they were, at a small café on a corner in the evening. Afraid to address the topic, he asked her about Borges; where he might live. “Who knows?” she replied in her curiously accented English. “Well, I know he likes visitors to read to him in English,” Kent mused: “Kipling, I heard. At one point, Peron made Borges a Chicken Inspector as a sign of disrespect.” “How do you know these things,” she had asked, tilting her head to the side, her hair sliding across her bare shoulder. “I read a lot,” he replied, “as do you. I fancied he might be up there tonight, behind one of those marvelously filigreed balconies.” “You like Borges, then,” she asked. “Actually, I prefer García Márquez, and the Peruvian, Vargas Llosa – wonderful story tellers. But Borges as a person is really interesting. Did you know that, after Peron was kicked out of office, the new government awarded Borges the job of his dreams: director of the National Library? But he was going blind: ‘I speak of God’s splendid irony,’ he said, ‘in granting me 800,000 books, and darkness.’ “You wonder about such things,” she had smiled, waiting to be kissed in the warm night. They talked awhile about places he might go on the way home -- once-in-a-lifetime opportunities -- Rio and its beaches, or south to the Pampas and Tierra del Fuego. He had seen the legendary gauchos at an estancia, rough men around the cook fire at night, eating bull’s testicles or tearing away at long strips of roasted bifé, one end clenched in their teeth, while slicing the other with their ornate silver knives, finishing by wiping the blade against their bombachas, the distinctive floppy pants they wore tucked into their boots. He had heard of the great cattle breeding plains, the shoreline further south, teeming with penguins and seabirds, and elephant seals plying the waters. It was a place that pulled at his imagination, Kent thought; how much he wanted to go, but now it was time to decide.

She regarded him quietly: “these are wonderful things for you to see,” she said, glancing sidelong at him. “Should you go north to Rio, or south to Ushuaia?” She looked at him full on: “Or, más importante, will you stay here with me?” Kent looked at her across the tiny table: it felt as if they both stopped breathing at the same moment; the traffic muted, the streetlight behind them dimmed. He felt the music pulsing from the tango palace down the street. “Maybe I’ll stay in Buenos Aires a little longer,” he ventured,” letting his breath out slowly, adding quickly. “But you have to promise to be with me while I’m here. No boyfriends.” They leaned across the table toward each other in the soft night and kissed. She smiled her lopsided smile: “Let’s run for the collectivo and go home,” she said. “No hotel. And this time, you must pay the driver.” Ah, Kent understood -- now they were a couple. She was no longer the guide and interpreter, shepherding everyone. It was Buenos Aires and he was the hombre; it is the man who must now to pay the driver on the bus for them both. Ah, these machismo Buenos Aires men! At her small flat, sipping wine while looking through her albums of classical music, she smiled at him questioningly, “we’ll have to sleep on a mattress on the floor, querido; my roommate has her boyfriend over.” “From the Plaza to the parquet,” Kent mumbled happily. “Que?” “No es Nada,” he smiled, actually meaning it, “I don’t mind a bit.” Ah, these romantic Buenos Aires nights! He remembered the next few days as sunshine and holding hands: ballet at the ornate Teatro Colón, where on hot summer days young boys swim in the fountains in front; Sunday at an outdoor crafts fair in a small park beneath the rosewood trees where they bought small gifts for each other; the smell of leather along the Florida from the goods on display in the doorways of shops; the construction workers cooking up their lunchtime meal of steak and chorizo on small grills. Late their last night together they had sat on the balcony of the flat, gazing across the River Plata at the lights of Montevideo in the distance, the scent of jacaranda heavy on the still air, the rhythmic cadences of a long-dead tango singer, floating up to them from the leafy street below. And now, here he was, several years later, back again, away from the mess he had made of his life, the long days stretching before him, the topsy-turvy Argentine calendar moving into the heat of sub tropical winter below the equator. With his new liberation from his self-pity, he entered into the social life of the office, went bar hopping, took the ferry across the river to Montevideo, rented a car for long drives out into the amazing countryside. He spent most evenings outdoors at the cafés and began to think more and

more about the blond Argentine that he had let go. He went to a street telephone and dialed the number he had saved on a scrap of paper: “Lele?” They met for lunch at La Mosca; near the Retiro train station, in a huge, clamorous restaurant popular for its prodigious servings. They ordered what looked like man-eating South African prawns and vino blanco. “Weely, the most awful thing has happened” she blurted almost immediately: “You recall my cat, Gastón?” “Of course.” “He fell off the balcony,” she cried softly. He visualized beautiful brown-and-white Gaston, his eyes as blue as hers, plunging down the high-rise, claws outstretched, slicing like a Chuck Jones cartoon character through a pedestrian 16 stories below, spreading him neatly on the sidewalk like a loaf of bread. “You are heartless. You laugh. You never like poor Gaston! ” “No, no. No, not heartless,” an immature sense of humor,” Kent explained. “Ah, like that dusty old Renault on the street you’d salute? You said it reminded you of the fall of Paris in 1940?” “I know, foolish.” “Yes,” she replied, “but it made me want to hug you then.” She saw his face brighten: “Querida, I am married now.” Her husband was a studio musician, she said, writing jingles. They lived in a small, lovely apartment in a modern high rise in one of the better neighborhoods. She had no children. He saw her only occasionally after that, generally for lunch. One long Saturday afternoon, they returned to his small hotel and made love. He never knew when she might call, but began hoping to see her, wanting to see her. Thanksgiving back home arrived, virtually unknown in Argentina, but he was able to share it as a combined holiday with some new friends from the Canadian embassy. But Kent knew his time was growing shorter. He must be home by Christmas. And then, as before, it came down to a last dinner, another conversation, another decision. When he called, she suggested dinner, as her husband would be away for two days, at a convention in Rosario. That night, as they dined, the setting sun brought a cooling mist off the river, and she suggested stopping at her apartment for a wrap, before going on for an after-dinner drink. He knew there would be no lovemaking; the weight of inevitability hung too heavily over them They stood on the fatal balcony where Gastón had misjudged his last stroll, while she pointed out the apartment where a famous general lived. There was a small-framed photograph next to the couch of her in Venice; she, lovely, smiling her crooked smile, her beret tilted over that luxuriant hair, the pigeons a halo around her. The honeymoon? He didn’t ask.

“I wanted you to see where I live,” she told him. He didn’t ask if she was happy. They walked along the riverfront for a time, her hands tucked into his arm at the elbow, finally stopping at a café. It was evident neither wanted to make it end as they talked all through the velvet night. Then as the rising sun’s rays crept down the broad avenue, dissolving the river mist and sliding across their table, warming them, it came to the final conversation. “You know I care for you,” Kent told her. “That’s why I asked you to come to the states after I went home that time.” “I had thought that you wanted to marry me,” she replied softly, looking down to smooth her dress. “I didn’t know that,” he said, surprised and shaken. “I am so foolish sometimes, especially when it comes to these things. After you had been there for awhile, when you asked me whether you should send for Gaston, I made a terrible mistake. I said no, without thinking. No -- I thought of my responsibilities. I guess I couldn’t deal with it.” She looked at him sharply: “And now you use me to get over another woman.” “No, that’s over,” he said. “Many months ago. I told you that. I never have room for two. But you have always remained with me. You’re in my prayers every night. And I’m not even religious.” “Back then, as strong as my feeling had grown for you, I knew you would want children, and I could barely afford the ones I had. It sounds selfish. I didn’t want you to go home, but I let you, like a fool.” “Es verdad. You are selfish,” she nodded, unsmiling, “most men are, but you have a good soul. I still have feelings for you, chéri. In my heart. That last day at your house, before I came back to Buenos Aires, I say to your mother: ‘take care of my boy.’” “Always –Siempre --” she told me. “My mother speaks Spanish?” “Tu no escuchas! You don’t listen, Weely, especialmente to those you love. You take them for granted. I see you at work here at your officina; you have only a few notes, but you remember everything when you write the article. Maybe if you listened more to us, those who love you . . .” her voice trailed off. “I try,” he interrupted. “I try,” seeing it slipping away. “Maybe I daydream too much. Or say the wrong things. Or don’t do the right things. Or be scared and do nothing. Then I lose those I love. But it can be different with you. I’d make it different,” straining at the words, already knowing the answer. “Ah, mi pobre Chico. But now it is too late, eh? I have my husband now. It is too late for you and me, no matter how we feel.” Kent looked at her sadly: “Si. Siempre. Always, I guess.”

Later, back home, Kent thought of that last dawn; he had gone to Buenos Aires to forget one girl who had left him, only now to find himself falling back in love with this girl, whom he had let go. And she wasn’t coming back. Always, one wants the other to be something they are not. That’s what it’s usually all about anyway, he thought. If it’s about anything.

The Boardwalk, Long Beach, New York Photo by Karen Dinan

Two-Run Triple I called it a “Nicky Hit,” he said, “a late-swing, opposite-field, extra-base hit. Whenever one of my players got one of those, I called it a Nicky Hit. When they looked at me confused, it just gave me the opportunity to talk about that game. By Tony Tedeschi

Beginning in my early teens, I started scribbling stories in a speckled notebook I kept in my school bag. I brought it out whenever I had free time during breaks, in my classes and after, writing down my observations on just about anything. Becoming a protagonist in my own story, however, was not something I’d experienced until the story I was about to share with Billy Boylan. Our paths converged in late August of 1955, on a baseball diamond across the street from my home in the Astoria section of New York City’s Borough of Queens.

Billy Boylan was one of those kids whose path in life was planned out for him by an over-controlling father. Oft-told tale, I know, but each of these stories has its own plotline and, in this one, Billy’s father couldn’t keep from trying to write his son’s story. Bill senior was a New York City cop, who took pride in his nickname, “Basher Bill Boylan,” although he was universally despised by both the members of the community he patrolled and his colleagues on the force. Basher Bill had boxed in the Golden Gloves one year, where he took out his first two opponents in the first round with his bashing right hand to the head. But Bill fell in the third match to a fighter who had a full repertoire of punches, could defend against a roundhouse right, then dance around his opponent with well-choreographed footwork. Bill’s air swings were so tiring, his opponent had barely to tap him on the chest in the fifth round to send him to the canvas. It was the end of Basher Bill’s brief boxing career. Billy junior had no interest in boxing, but he could throw a baseball. By the time Billy had reached his early teens, he had grown into a hulk of a kid. He plied his paternal DNA to terrorize fellow students in the schoolyards and hallways of his schools. He was toughened further by his father, with grueling workouts at a gym near his home. He spent hours hurling a baseball at different mockups to simulate batters, which his father created in the backyard of their house in St. Albans, Queens. His father’s objective for Billy was to turn his son into a star pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, the dominant National League team in the 1950s. Billy seemed to have all the natural skills to make his father’s objective his own. He was a dominant pitcher on little league teams from the youngest age children were accepted. He blew away batters who faced him at all age levels. Most of his opponents were terrified he’d hit them with a fastball he couldn’t control. Billy and I were each fourteen and headed for high school at the end of the summer of 1955. By then, we were both playing in New York’s Police Athletic League, I in the 114th Precinct in North Queens, Billy in the 113th in South Queens. But while I was delusional about one day replacing Moose Skowron at first base and batting fifth for the Yankees, I had at least a very strong suspicion that would never happen. Billy, on the other hand, was captive to his father’s grand plan of getting him on the Dodgers. Bryant High School, the local high school within the neighborhood of my 114th precinct, had produced Billy Loes, one of the top pitchers on the Dodgers during this time period. That Bryant High could do it once only fed Bill senior’s plan for his son. He could see a path forward by using the address of his sister, Billy’s aunt, as the home address for his son, thereby getting Billy enrolled at Bryant where he would train under the baseball coach who had nurtured a bona fide pitcher for the Dodgers. At the same time, Bill senior somehow managed to provide Billy junior with a kind of dual residency by keeping the home in St. Albans for the purposes of the PAL, so his son could pitch on what he considered the superior precinct, and thereby add New York City Champion to his baseball resume. I guess you really had to hand it to the guy. Irony of course was, if Billy’s father’s tortured maneuverings had only

used the aunt’s Astoria address as a residence, Billy and I would have been teammates and our facing each other would have been in a dugout not on the pitcher’s mound versus the batter’s box. But I digress. Every year, New York’s five boroughs would each field its best PAL precinct team in a tournament, playing teams representing the other four boroughs, eventually crowning the winner of the PAL City Championship. Each precinct team was made up of the best players from the teams in the various age divisions within their precinct’s summer baseball programs. I was our team’s first baseman, an unlikely position for a singles-hitting righthander, whose right-handedness was an inherent disadvantage because my glove hand was on the foul line side of my body, just like Moose Skowron, however. I’d made the team as the second-string first baseman behind a heftier lefty, who despite his dexterous advantage was a lousy fielder, but he hit a lot harder than I did. I replaced him as the starter, when his family moved away just as the playoffs were beginning. My better glove work saved a few runs during games leading up to the Queens Championship and my singles and doubles had been in the middle of some key rallies. Winning Queens was a big deal, since our borough had gone on to the City Championship nine of the last ten seasons. So, there we were, the 114th battling the 113th in a one-game playoff to represent Queens. Both teams had finished with the same won-lost record during the regular season facing other precincts in our borough. We had won a coin toss giving us home field advantage on the diamond in Astoria Park, and we were feeling good about playing on our home field, but watching Billy warm up before the start of the game was stressful. While most of us in our fourteen-year-old age group seemed to be growing by inches, as we slept an inordinate number of hours during growth spurts, Billy, on the other hand, must have had a growth cascade. “That guy’s gotta be a ringer,” our coach, Bob Grant said, watching the warmup and shaking his head. “Am I out of line to ask to see his birth certificate?” It was just Mr. Grant grousing, and clearly no birth certificate was going to happen. Not surprisingly, Billy’s warmups were nothing but fast balls – fast fastballs and Mr. Grant spent a good deal of time shaking his head and mumbling over and over, “that guy’s gotta be a ringer.” “Get ready to be blown away,” Billy’s father yelled from the stands. “Go get ‘em, Billy!” Once the game began, Billy throwing strikes was almost impossible to hit. Mickey Jordan, our pitcher, threw “stuff.” He had a curveball that actually curved and, when combined with his respectable fastball, he could be very effective. Mickey was effective until the fifth inning, when his curves decided not to curve, and we ended the inning down 2-0. In the bottom of the sixth, Billy Boylan lost his rhythm and had trouble finding the plate. We worked him for two walks and a couple of weak singles to push in two runs of our own. It gave us the sense that he was tiring and we could start facing a pitcher who was perhaps human. Alas, the loss of rhythm had been a temporary

issue and Billy was back blowing us away in the seventh and eighth. In the top of the ninth, the 113th hitters put together a walk, a single and an error by our shortstop to score a run, pushing us to the edge of elimination with one chance left in the bottom of the inning. Up to that point, I’d had two strikeouts and a walk against Billy. I sat in the dugout, despondent because, as the third hitter up in the inning, I could be the final out, eliminating us from the PAL championship round. But our leadoff hitter managed to just get a piece of a pitch and blooped it over second for a single. Trying to overcompensate for allowing that lame hit, Billy threw one too close to our second hitter that struck him on the left elbow. Suddenly, we had runners on first and second. As I walked, tentatively, to the batter’s box, I was wrestling with anxieties of killing a last ditch rally as a fate even worse than making the last out in the elimination game. Since Billy had made me look lame with strikeouts during my last two at bats, I was sure he viewed me as the first of the three strikeouts he needed to put the game away. The first pitch I faced was a ball, inside, and close enough to force me to back off the plate. I viewed it as intimidation and held my position, only briefly questioning my sanity for remaining that close to the plate. The second pitch was a strike, way too fast for me to get around on. I stepped out of the batter’s box to compose my thoughts. Even as a fourteen year old, I was marveling at how much Billy had left to be throwing that hard in the ninth inning of a game. Seemingly determined to put me away, his next two pitches were hard and fast and considerably off the plate. With a three-andone count in my favor, conventional wisdom would dictate I take the next pitch, hope for a walk and leave the up-or-down theatrics to the next hitters. As I settled in, however, I was convinced he would not want to walk the bases loaded and would ease up on his delivery to throw me a strike. So, I was ready. I began my swing as soon as the pitch had left his hand, made solid contact, launching the longest drive I had ever hit down the left field line. . . foul. The 113th coach, with a facial expression like he had just seen the Wolfman or Frankenstein, asked for time and made a trip to the mound to talk to his pitcher. On the way, he motioned his outfielders to move a bit toward left in anticipation that if I could pull another pitch, it would create a real problem for them with the two men on base in front of me. As I stood at home plate and watched this, I was betting the conversation on the mound was something about his pitcher showing signs of tiring, when a singles hitter like me pulls a ball that far. Their manager left the conference on the mound, waving his outfielders even further toward left field. Billy had been fiddling with the rosin bag the whole time during this conference, so it was clear to me that he didn’t like what was being said about how he was fading. Hell, he’d been in there all nine innings throwing his signature fastballs, fast, fastballs. “Do your thing, Billy,” his father yelled. “That scrawny kid won’t hit anything this time.”

As I stood there watching their manager take his seat in the dugout, Mr. Grant was yelling, “Good eye, Nicky. Make him throw a strike. Look it over.” Clearly, with a three-two count on me, Coach Grant was hoping I’d just keep the bat on my shoulder and watch the next pitch, hoping it was a ball. He was willing to sacrifice me with hopes the better two hitters who followed would bring in at least one run to tie the game, especially if we got lucky and Billy missed with the next pitch. I had other plans, however. As I settled into the batter’s box, the words of baseball’s great guru, Yogi Berra, were settling over me, like some metaphysical passage from the great yogi’s book of inspirational sayings: “You can’t think and hit at the same time.” Just swing, I thought. What’s the worst that can happen, you strike out? Your coach is already willing to accept that. You’ve done it twice already today. Don’t take, I thought, just swing. Well, Billy must have taken all that had transpired during the conference on the mound as a deeply personal afront. The next pitch I saw from him was the hardest he had thrown all game. But my swing was only a shade slower than the home-bound journey of the ball and I struck it just before it would have thumped into the catcher’s mitt, launching a high fly to right field, almost precisely toward the position where their coach had motioned his right fielder to move out of while he was walking from the mound. It would have been a long, but easy out had he not repositioned his outfielders. As I rounded second and headed for third, the second of my two teammates crossed home plate and the game was over. The umpire waived me on to third and declared the hit a triple. The right fielder had not even retrieved the ball yet. “Hell, ump,” I said. “I could walk home.” “As soon as your second teammate crossed the plate, the game was over,” he replied with that voice of authority they must train umpires to deliver. “You weren’t even on third yet. I could have ruled it a double.” I quit while I was ahead. Only then was I fully aware of all the celebrating going on among my teammates: jumping up and down, pumping fists in the air, slapping each other on the back and, finally, rushing toward me and lifting me into the air. It was definitely the high point of my life thus far. Way past the history medal in elementary school. Oddly, even as my teammates were parading me around the diamond on their shoulders, my attention was drawn to Billy Boylan, who was still on the mound, his right arm hanging loosely by his side, like the sleeve in an empty jeans jacket. His father was yelling at him from the sidelines: “That scrawny kid? You let him beat you? He can hardly lift that thirty-two-inch bat, let alone swing it.” Billy just stood there, staring at the ground. “You’re a loser, Billy. A loser.” His father turned and walked toward the parking lot, under the Triboro Bridge, beyond right field.

All I could think of was Billy having to hitch a ride home. Would he even be welcome at home? The late August, late afternoon shadows began to lengthen, darkening the infield as my teammates and I collected our gear to head home. Those whose parents could make the weekday game began streaming toward the parking lot with their sons, others dispersing for homes in walking distance from the baseball field. When all were gone, I hoisted my backpack, containing my Moose Skowron first-baseman’s mitt and my spikes, hefted my forever-venerated, thirty-two-ounce bat, and stood at home plate for a few moments, reliving my moment of glory. Although it was still fresh in my memory, of course, I was nonetheless a bit surprised at how I could remember each pitch and what I was thinking – or to quote Yogin Berra again, not thinking – as I swung at that fateful pitch. Somehow I knew, then and there, that no matter what life had yet in store for me, the memory on the baseball field was the part that would live on forever. The edge of the creeping shadows swallowed home plate at my feet as I turned for the short walk home, skipping down the grassy hillock to Hoyt Avenue and my home across the street. My parents would both be on the way home from their jobs by now and would be thrilled with the story I had for them. As I came through the front door, my grandmother was preparing dinner, as she did every night for as long as I could remember. “How was the game?” she asked. “We won,” I answered. “Good, Nee-key,” she replied with that beautiful Italian inflection that defined the comfort of home for me. “I drove in the winning run, Grandma,” I said. “Nice, Nee-key,” she replied. “Wash up for dinner. Your mama and papa will be home soon.” I headed up to my bedroom to drop off my gear and wash up for dinner, the end of another day in the midst of another summer vacation for a fourteen year old. We cruised to the City Championship in 1955 with easy victories against each of the other boroughs. * * * * * In 1974, I read about Dodger pitcher, Tommy John, undergoing special surgery to repair a tear to his ulnar collateral ligament. The operation allowed John to continue a career, which would certainly have ended otherwise, winning a total of 288 games. The operation was so successful that pitcher after pitcher, over many decades, had what came to be known as “Tommy John surgery.” Many surveys determined that overuse of the pitching motion, especially in boys nine to fourteen, was a major cause of the injury to the ligament. Billy had to have thrown more than 100 pitches during that playoff game in Astoria Park. Given the velocity of the pitch that I hit, and the way Billy’s

arm hung limp as my teammates were parading me around the bases, it would not be much of a stretch to conclude that Billy had suffered the torn ligament, especially if you considered how much his father overworked his arm with his pitching drills. The irony was that the surgery, which extended Tommy John’s career as a Dodger, was more than nineteen years too late to repair Billy Boylan’s dream of becoming a Dodger. * * * * * As the baseball season began again in the spring of 1956, I was finishing up my freshman year at prep school in Brooklyn. Given a commute that involved a bus and subway, and classes that sometimes ended at 5 p.m., there was no way I could participate in the PAL baseball season, which began near the outset of spring. My chance of replacing Moose Skowron at first base with the Yankees was effectively over. I read the sports section of our local weekly in Astoria religiously looking for Billy’s name in the writeups about Bryant High, but it was never there. Eventually, I’d heard he hadn’t moved in with his aunt and that he wasn’t even pitching in the fifteen-year-old division at the 113th. By the end of summer my interests had turned away from baseball as I took on the tough later-term programs in prep school, then eventually the pressure of driving my grade point up and studying for the admission tests for MIT. Thoughts of Billy, and even my famous two-runtriple, faded into memory . . . until I read about the murder of Billy’s father in the New York Daily News: “New York Cop Executed by Crack Dealer.” “William Boylan, a member of the NYPD for 28 years, was gunned down last night in what police investigators are calling a ‘brazen ambush by a crack dealer with multiple convictions.’ It appeared that Officer Boylan was lured down an alley in South Jamaica, Queens and executed in a shower of bullets from an illegal handgun. The killer, Jesus Colon, was cornered in the alley by backup officers from the 113th Precinct in South Jamaica and died in an exchange of gunfire with police . . .” The New York Times picked up the thread, two days later, with a more in-depth article. “. . . . Jesus Colon and his brother, Joachim, were known to 113th Precinct, and Officer Boylan in particular, as neighborhood crack cocaine dealers. Each had been arrested multiple times by Officer Boylan but had spent little time in custody. Known in the neighborhood as “Basher Bill Boylan,” Officer Boylan was described by witnesses as harassing Mr. Colon’s autistic brother, José, two days before the murder. Witnesses said José had been sitting on a crate by the Tejada Deli at the entrance to the alley, a regular location for drug dealing. When the young man failed to

respond to Officer Boylan’s questions expeditiously, Officer Boylan lifted José Colon up off his seat and hurled him to the sidewalk, his head striking the pavement, blood trickling from the corners of his mouth and his eyes rolling back in his head. He was rushed to Jamaica Hospital with serious brain trauma. He remains in the ICU at the hospital. Neighborhood residents said the injury José Colon suffered at the hands of Officer Boylan had set off his older brother, Jesus, who despised the officer and became obsessed with revenge. Police were scouring the neighborhood for Joachim Colon, but fear he may have fled to the Dominican Republic . . .” Eventually these stories slowly faded into the forgotten history of stories like them. Over the following years, as search engines and social media became more ubiquitous, I developed the universally addictive habit of searching friends, long-lost relatives and former sweethearts on the Internet. A dozen years after the notoriety around the death of Billy Boylan’s father, another shootout between drug dealers and the police triggered a search of Billy’s name. I found various reports of his battles with drug addiction, which would have gone unnoticed as just one of so many similar stories, except for its ties to the details of his father’s notorious end. So, there it was again, the game. This time, I couldn’t just put aside an incipient and growing obsession with placing the baseball encounter into its context in the history of the Boylans. More and more it seemed that it was a pivotal driver of what became the rest of their lives . . . and mine. I remembered I had written notes of the events of that day in one of the notebooks I’d kept in my backpack. It took several days to find the notebook, in one of those cardboard filing boxes we consign to basements. After I’d finally found it, and began reading through it, it had that almost narcotic effect of returning my thoughts to my room that night, after the game. I’d scribbled notes, which I marvel at now, years later; words that were precursors of my career as a writer. I’d written, that night, how my triumph would not have been possible without dealing a blow to another boy’s dream. Although I couldn’t fully relate to something that consequential as a fourteenyear-old, nonetheless the inference in my notes seemed to recognize it: “My win had been at the expense of Billy Boylan’s loss.” I’d read another line that stuns me to this day: “How can you have a winner without having a loser?” But, at the time, I had been incapable of scribbling down my answer to that question. That reflection, from the hindsight of so many years, still moves me with the simplicity of the notion that someone must lose for someone else to win. In many ways, that day on the baseball field in Astoria Park solidified what became my starkly negative feelings about our need for the competition we find necessary to evaluate us, to measure our performance against others, instead of understanding the only competition that should matter is the one we each wage against ourselves. My singular moment of success was forever

tied to Billy Boylan’s far more significant failure. Baseball was never going to be my life. Baseball was to be all he had to distinguish himself. * * * * * In 1975, I got an email from Jimmy Procida, centerfielder on the 1955 team. Vic Rappelone, our third baseman, had been killed in a car crash. Vic had spent his entire life in Astoria and the wake and funeral were both being held not far from where I grew up. Jimmy had written that he expected maybe a half-dozen of the players to be there and we could have a kind of reunion to perhaps brighten things a bit for Vic’s wife and children, with stories about that championship season. He ended with, “Coach Grant RSVPed.” When I finally got a chance to talk with Mr. Grant, sipping from paper cups by the water cooler at Vic’s wake, he said, with a smile, “Nicky Melfitano, good to see you.” “You as well, Mr. Grant.” “I think you’re old enough now to call me ‘Bob.’” “OK,” I replied with a note of hesitation in my voice, “. . . Bob.” “You know, I christened it a ‘Nicky Hit,’” he said. “Excuse me?” I questioned. “A late-swing, opposite-field, extra-base hit. Whenever one of my players got one of those, I called it a Nicky hit. When they looked at me confused, it just gave me the opportunity to talk about that game.” I shook my head and let out a laugh. “But you wanted me to take,” I said, smiling. He smiled in return. “I knew if you walked, having the bases loaded with none out, we were all but certain to tie the game and most likely to win it.” I said nothing, just continued to smile. “I knew you were going to swing, Nick,” he continued. “I knew it. I could see by the death grip you held on your bat. You were always the smartest player on our team and, in the instant before Billy let go of the pitch, you were certain about what you had to do.” “It worked, didn’t it?” We both had a good laugh. But mine faded into introspection, which had become the coda for that day whenever it crept back into my thoughts. “Then again look at what became of Billy Boylan,” I said, but let the words trail off, as the pall bearers took Vic’s coffin to the hearse, while Coach Grant and I headed for our cars in the lot behind the funeral home. “Nick,” he said, “you didn’t end that boy’s dream. It was over before his arm hung by his side, as we celebrated our victory. The result for Billy Boylan would have been the same if he had struck you out.” We both stopped for a final moment by my car before separating for him to head for his, a bit further along in the parking area.

“Your victory and his defeat were separate issues,” he said. “Enjoy it, Nick. All the rest of us certainly did. To this day, I still remember it as the most thrilling victory I’d ever coached.” “Thank you, B . . . ” I started with a warm smile, then, “Thank you, Mr. Grant.” He nodded and smiled in return, then continued toward his car. I got in, started the engine and joined the procession heading for the cemetery.

Boardwalk, Long Beach, New York Photo by Karen Dinan

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

Avocets, Breeding Plumage Photo by Janet Safris

Natural Traveler Magazine, Autumn 2021

Articles inside

Days and Nights in Buenos Aires Kendric W. Taylor

Best Little Whorehouse in Ketchikan Buddy Mays

Two-Run Triple Tony Tedeschi

Ah, Paradise Kendric W. Taylor

Sardinia: Prideful Isle Bill Scheller

Klepto Currency Frank I. Sillay

Ghost Story Frank I. Sillay

Contributors

Poetry Jay Jacobs

Sculpting Coffee Tony Tedeschi

Ripping Bill Scheller

Fogg’s Horn

The Coffee Artist Juliana Zeledon

Editor’s Letter

Postcard from Glacier Bay Buddy Mays