Natural Traveler Magazine - Quarterly Cultural Magazine - Winter 2020 by naturaltravelermagazine

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

Natural Traveler Magazine ÂŽ Winter 2020 Editor & Publisher Tony Tedeschi Senior Editor Bill Scheller Staff Writers Ginny Craven Aglaia Davis Andrea England David E. Hubler Samantha Manuzza Buddy Mays John H. Ostdick Pedro Pereira Frank I. Sillay Kendric W. Taylor Photography Katie Cappeller Karen Dinan Buddy Mays Art Sharafina Teh Webmaster Will Rodriguez

Table of Contents Editor’s Letter

Page 3

Contributors

Page 4

Trips: The Phone on the Rain Forest Wall

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 5

Our Reporter-at-Large Stars in a New Video: “A Quick Trip Around The World With Markus Fogg.”

Page 10

A Conversation with Sharafina Teh

Page 12

Email from New Zealand: Animation ‘60s Style

Frank I. Sillay

Page 14

Always Time for a Train

Bill Scheller

Page 17

A Christmas Ghost Story

Frank I. Sillay

Page 27

Desert Elves Are Dancing All Around Me

Buddy Mays

Page 29

The Bombardier

Tony Tedeschi

Page 43

Email from the Upper West Side: All Roads Lead Home, Batmo Retires

Aglaia Davis

Page 49

Waaaaht? “That’s Why I’m the President”

Malcolm P. Ganz

Page 52

The Shuffle Inn

Tony Tedeschi

Page 55

Photo Essay: Summer in Antarctica

Page 61

Editor’s Letter Vol. II, No. 1

With this Anniversary Issue, we begin our second year as Natural Traveler Magazine®. After four quarterly issues, bringing you the work that our journalists, memoirists, writers of fiction, poets, essayists, photographers and artists have contributed to our magazine, we are even more convinced of the relevance of Henry Miller’s statement: “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of looking at things.” To make the point, we’ve taken you through subjects ranging from the creation of a CD to the protection of sea turtles on the Texas Gulf Coast, explained how a company that manufactures nonstick coatings has made the world a better place in which to live, how artificial intelligence has become the human within, and why Iceland has been a great place to visit, whether you Fina at work. were a U.S. Marine in the 1960s, or one of the world’s best photojournalists visiting there just last year. Regular features spotlight our correspondents’ klutzier moments in a column we call “Trips,” or outrageously bad moves in a feature we call “Waaaaht?” Two correspondents cover unusual or everyday things half a world apart in Emails from New Zealand and Manhattan’s Upper West Side. We take you train-tripping and hangar-flying. Honor the work of author Donald Bain and artist Georgia O’Keeffe. Have run photo essays on some of the world’s most fashionable city streets, or the dazzling colors where a boardwalk on Long Island borders the sea. Published finely crafted fiction and poetry. And do it all again, every quarter. On the cover of this issue, we’ve chosen to highlight the fine work of our Malaysia-based artist, Sharafina Teh, who managed to put a face on our alter-ego, reporter-at-large, Markus Fogg. Fogg’s exploits, detailed each issue in his column “The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus,” are covered in his dispatches from far and wide. Fina’s contributions have been lending her art to the settings of Fogg’s journeys. Recently she turned her talents loose on a short video highlighting his travels, entitled, “ A Quick Trip Around the World with Markus Fogg.” How Fogg’s star turn came about is detailed in this issue, including a link to the video. “A Conversation with Sharafina Teh” puts her art in perspective and recounts how a need to create becomes a life’s work. So, welcome to this quarter’s edition. We hope you are nourished yet again on the work of people who honor us by sharing their art. – Tony Tedeschi

Contributors For this issue’s installment of “Trips,” Kendric W. Taylor takes us into the heart of Costa Rica for encounters with venomous snakes, a never-say-die frog and 700-pound egg-laying sea turtles, where the only connection with civilization was “The Phone on the Rain Forest Wall.” (Page 5) Our reporter-at-large stars in a new video, “A Quick Trip Around the World with Markus Fogg.” How his star turn came about, followed by a conversation with Sharafina Teh and how she came to the art and expertise that made it all happen. (Page 10) When Frank I. Sillay had to tackle an animation for the New Zealand Ministry of Works in the 1960s, “computers in those days had an entry price somewhere well beyond a million and could only be found in places like government departments and multi-national corporations; even machines with computing power now surpassed by a $100 cell phone.” He explains how artistry, technology and hours of manpower made it all happen. (Page 14) “A passenger train is a rolling village,” Bill Scheller writes in his memoir, “Always Time for a Train.” “Some people move in and out; others are long-term residents. Club cars are the village squares, where you run into your neighbors, make friends, and find out who to avoid.” Bill, who has logged more train time than just about anyone on the planet, including authoring Amtrak’s first guidebook, takes us along for many of those rides. (Page 17) “Christmas mornings brought footsteps on the stairs that could not be accounted for,” Frank I. Sillay writes in “A Christmas Ghost Story.” “We accepted this as just one of those inexplicable things and didn’t think too much more about it.” The answer is revealed. (Page 27) On a camping excursion deep into Mexico’s Barrancas del Cobre (Copper Canyon), Buddy Mays records remarkable journal entries about the indigenous Tarahumara people, trekking demanding canyon trails, meet-ups with wild pigs, brushing by a jaguar and more, all of it with the stunning photos that are Buddy’s trademark artform. (Page 29) “My grandfather was a pyrotechnist and one of the unrecognized artists who’d brought this spectacular art to these shores from Europe,” Tony Tedeschi writes in his memoire, “The Bombardier.” “The Long Island of the first half of the 20th century was a gathering place for clusters of these nameless immigrants determined to recast this new land in the images of the old.” (Page 43) “Batmo was my first – and truest – car love,” Aglaia Davis writes in her latest “Email from the Upper West Side: All Roads Lead Home, Batmo Retires (October 2019).” “It was Batmo’s final weekend. Not in his life, but in mine. Since sometime in mid-2008, after Batmo had long imprinted on me, I had never seriously imagined the day of parting from him.” (Page 52) “My five thousand dollar chairs,” my father used to say, but never with bitterness,” Tony Tedeschi writes in his short story, “The Shuffle Inn. “He’d taken his best shot, and he’d recognized it as such.” (Page 55)

TRIP

S o

o o

The Phone on the Rain Forest Wall By Kendric W. Taylor

Costa Rica is a country so tranquil it has no army, so rich in natural abundance Beanstalk Jack would have had giants falling from the skies everywhere, a country so peaceful and laid back I once saw a full grown sloth clicking its way across the street without drawing so much as a glance from its fellow pedestrians. Up on the Caribbean side is a fishing lodge on the bank of the canal that runs north and south between the mainland and the Sea, providing a navigable waterway before spilling out into the open water. To get there, a group of outdoor writers and I flew into the local airport, and from there pushed off in canoes for the long paddle up to the lodge through verdant jungle closing in on us from both sides of the canal. Owned by a friend of mine who ran a whitewater rafting company in-country, he had invited me to shepherd the group to the lodge for a week of fishing in the Caribbean, followed by rafting on one of Costa Rica’s world-class rivers. I never thought to ask how we were going to do this. While looking a ramshackle affair, the lodge was surprisingly sturdy and comfortable in a primitive way, made of local woods with small motel-style rooms thatched over with grass rooftops and fronted by a shaded veranda. Meals were taken outside at a long wooden table. The food was hot and substantial, with the dedication to garlic that so distinguishes Costa Rican cuisine. Presiding was Axel, the lodge manager, a slim German with wispy blonde beard and mustache. It was easy to visualize him in a faded white Untersee Kapitan’s hat, oil-soaked rag around his neck. Indeed, my friend claimed Axel was, in fact, the son of a U-boat captain, who had found his way into the canal in the dying days of WWII and gotten stuck. Dinner at the lodge each evening was an exchange of the day’s fishing tales and tips among the group. They had much to say, all of it interesting. One had lately, in his 50’s, taken up skydiving. Another had been one of Henry Kissinger's interpreters at the Paris Peace Talks with the North Vietnamese. A third was the son of a former Green Bay Packer. It was scintillating writer conversation, occasionally obscene, not always believable, but always literate and splendidly funny. Fastened to a wooden stanchion alongside the dining area was its sole decoration, an old-fashioned telephone – one of those where you spoke into the mouthpiece while holding the receiver in your hand. Who knows how long it had been there? Perhaps Axel’s father had come ashore and used it to call Berlin Triple A for a tow. 5

At dinner Saturday night, one rum-enhanced guest, perhaps overcome by the romantic remoteness of the location, the canopy of stars gleaming overhead the way they should when there is no civilization to dim their luster, stood up amidst the squawk and screech of the canal denizens off in the darkness, and announced: “I’m gonna call my wife." Stepping up to the bamboo wall, he lifted the receiver, brushed away a hairy spider the size of a golf ball, and quickly dialed. Incredibly, in an instant, the number was ringing in New York City, nearly 2,000 nautical miles and several civilizations away. He listened briefly, and then with a look of disbelief, turned to us and said, “Gee, she’s not home! They want to know if she can call back and where I can be reached.” After dessert, we boarded small boats and crossed the canal to a spit of beachfront where a research station is maintained by the University of Florida. My friend piled in, lugging two World War II ammo boxes, and perhaps mindful of the journalist still bemused over his missing wife, warned us to remain alert – “the snakes here are among the most poisonous in the world!” “Yes, that’s right,” chimed in Dr. Jim, our naturalist guide: “The fer-de-lance, coral-colored, very small, and really hard to see.” “Jim here was bit by one,” one of the guides added: “Right Jim?” “Oh yes,” replied Jim, rather too smugly. “Right around here. I was hunting specimens in the swampy area and felt a sting. I looked down and there it was, hanging on my leg.” “What happened then,” someone gasped. “Oh,” Jim replied, “it was a dry bite.” “For God's sake,” I cried, “what’s a dry bite?” “His venom had dried up,” Jim explained, “so it didn't kill me.” “That’s why he’s called Lucky Jim,” the guide boasted. “Jeezus,” I gulped, looking at my friend, “I’m wearing flip-flops! Why didn’t you say something earlier?” “Ahh, you’ll be OK,” he replied with notable unconcern, “I have plenty of anti-venom venom.” “What the hell is anti-venom venom?” I sputtered apprehensively. “It’s snake venom that counter-acts the snake venom.” “Oh my God!” At the time, the marine station was the sole place in the world devoted to the study of the giant green sea turtles, 700-pound mammoths that drag themselves up the shore once a year to bury

their eggs in the dunes. They are ponderous out of the water, and it’s an easy matter to follow them along as they slowly breaststroke across the black Caribbean sand and begin to dig their egg depositories well above the waterline. Dozens of them were scattered like green boulders across the beach as we began our watch. Dr. Jim explained that their main predators are hungry locals and their dogs, both of whom are avid hunters after the eggs. Those that survive hatch in the hundreds after the incubation period, at which point instinct kicks in and drives the tiny turtles back down to the sea. To get there, they run a gauntlet of swooping, diving sea birds that snatch up the small creatures like hors d’oeuvres before they can reach the haven of the surf. Those who make it swim far away until they reach full turtle tonnage, then return after several years to repeat the age-old process. We stayed with the turtles until well after midnight, by which time most of them had completed their digging and egg-laying ritual, then watched as they chugged back down into the surf. We recrossed the canal by torchlight, then, after a cold beer nightcap, retired to our tiny cabins, where another spectacle awaited — my friend choosing a cot for the night. As noted, the lodge at that time was no-frills, there primarily to provide basic housing and meals for fishermen. Each bedroom had two double beds -- bamboo frames with a latticework of leather straps providing both spring and mattress. On top of this went personal bedrolls. I was sharing a room with one of the guides when my friend appeared, stark naked from the shower, impressive in all his 250-plus pounds, chortling: “OK, who gets to sleep with me?” With a wild cry he leaped into the air and crashed onto the guide’s bed with a horrible cracking noise of unbearably stressed leather. I was spared. Breakfast the following morning on the outdoor terrace was a subdued affair, the only stir caused by a jocular order of “turtle eggs, and make sure they’re fresh.” As platters of jungle fruit and fresh, hot Costa Rican coffee made the rounds, a solitary frog hopped across the sunlit lawn up from the canal. “Look at the size of that fat bastard,” someone remarked. As the frog slapped onto the concrete floor – wham! A slim, six-foot green snake dropped out of the thatched roof above us and impaled the frog in a pair of steel trap jaws. With its tail firmly anchored in the rafters overhead, the snake began to haul itself back up through the roof, his prey clamped firmly in its mouth. At the same time, the breakfast table erupted in a crash of silverware and crockery as the journalistic group made a wild scramble for cameras. Within seconds, each was clicking away, hoping for the photo-of-a-lifetime from the life-or-death match now unfolding in front of them. The snake hadn’t figured on one thing: the frog was too fat to pull through the slats of the ceiling. Even though a pair of hideous fangs had punctured the amphibian’s speckled brown body, the blood oozing down his side, he lived on. No poison! A dry bite! Realizing his miscalculation, the snake was trying to overcome the roof obstacle by eating the frog -right at the counter, so to speak – articulating his awesome jaws to envelop the frog’s body as they both pendulum-ed back and forth through the dining area. But the frog was making the fight of his life, jamming his powerful rear legs up against the snake's mouth in a desperate effort to pry loose his head. Raucous cheering burst from the group, with several bets quickly placed -- smart money

on the snake. The sentimental favorite clearly was Frog, however. Dr. Jim, our naturalist, had arrived amidst the uproar and was feverishly explaining the intricacies of Darwinism to us: basically, Frog was a snake staple. Tough luck Frog! The deadly standoff continued, Frog struggling to extricate himself, the snake alternately trying to draw him through the roof, or devour him in mid-air. The journalists crowded closer, climbing over the breakfast table, squishing through the mangos and plates of French toast, clicking away like paparazzi after pop stars, the snake glaring at them with malevolent red eyes. Then, with a mighty tug, the frog broke free, dropped to the concrete, bounced up and flopped down the veranda, chased by the snake, a pack of wild-eyed photo-journalists and Dr. Jim in the rear crying: “Don’t disturb the food chain! Don’t disturb the food chain!” Within seconds the frog had stuffed itself under a wall, and the snake was cornered near the woodpile. Rearing itself up on its tail to an impressive height, he eyed the group while he swayed slowly back and forth, his sinister black tongue flicking in and out. The photographers crept still closer, gripped in a picture-taking frenzy, unbelievably shouting instructions to the snake to hold still for just one more shot. Admonitions continued to issue from Dr. Jim as I crept forward, trying to figure a way out of this that wouldn’t involve any proximity to the snake, when a small man in a white cap bolted around the corner waving skyward shouting: “The plane, boys, the plane!” Taking advantage of the distraction, the snake bounded away like a demented rubber band and the group scattered for their belongings. I stood in the midst of the rain forest and watched as the aircraft buzzed overhead. “He looks like he’s trying to land,” I wondered out loud. “He is,” my friend replied. “Oh my God, where?” “Ahh, no problem, he’s coming down on the beach.” “The beach? You mean we’re going to take off from the beach too? With all those turtle holes? “That is if he lands ok. I mean it’s a very narrow beach; it’s got grass growing out of it. Don’t we need a seaplane?" “He's a very good pilot,” he replied, waving as the thing shot past over our heads. It started to rain. And there I was, sitting in the right-hand front seat of the small biplane, the morning sky misting down lightly across the windscreen. The two in the backseat and I were to make the first flight of the morning. “This isn’t so bad,” I thought. “I love flying.” The single engine roared mightily, the pilot standing on the brakes to hold it to full power. His feet jumped off the pedal and we bumped slowly past the rest of the group, the ghostly white of their faces blurred in the rain. We struggled over the dark sand, thumping noisily like a horse cart

on a planked road, the vibration running up my legs. I thought of the old newsreels of Lindbergh taking off for Paris, his tiny silver plane struggling to clear the trees. At least he wasn’t on sand. Gaining speed, we roared down the beach in the rain, gray surf crashing almost beneath our wheels. Then we were up, wings fluttering, into the overcast, moisture spatting off the windscreen, then out, into a blast of sunshine and blue tropical sky. The departing words of my friend teased at me: “Wait until you try river rafting, then it gets really exciting!”

Toucan in the mist Villa Caletas Jacó, Costa Rica

Our Reporter-at-Large Stars in a New Video: ‘A Quick Trip Around The World With Markus Fogg.’

How His Star Turn Came About

Our man, Markus Fogg, has been dutifully recording his admittedly miscreant meanderings about the world since he wandered into our office last winter and wheedled an assignment as our reporter-at-large. We green-lighted him to report back from his journeys in a column we called “Fogg’s Horn, The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus.” For the past year, Fogg has been diligently providing copy for the column, crafted in his inimitable stylings. However, words on a page in our print edition or digitized for our online magazine – www.naturaltraveler.net – seem just a bit static given the movement implicit in the whole concept of meandering. Several months back, we raised the issue of our correspondent’s stasis in static media with our talented artist, Sharafina Teh. Fina allowed as how she could fashion a brief video with some clips of Fogg’s journeys, including dispatches filed but yet to appear in the magazine. The outcome is a wonderful work, representative of Fina’s own inimitable stylings entitled: “A Quick Trip Around The World With Markus Fogg.” We were so taken by the process that has brought this about we decided to share it. It began with a storyboard we emailed to Fina at her studio in Malaysia.

Fina began by sketching line drawings of Markus as he would move across the various locations.

“After drawing out the storyboards, I sketched the keyframes and edited timing in Pencil 2D animation software,” Fina explains. “I needed to see if the pacing and the duration were suitable and were working right. This would be the first draft of the animation. After that, I worked on the background. I took out the sketches of the character from the animation and imported them into drawing software called Painttool SAI. Next, I sketched and painted out the backgrounds for the animation. Then, I worked on the animation in Pencil 2D and started drawing out the “in betweens” – those frames between the keyframes – to make the animation look smoother.”

Once she felt satisfied with the animation, Fina got started on the cleanup. “The first step was to export all the frames I drew in Pencil 2D and traced over the linework in Painttool SAI, then coloring them all one by one,” she says. “I also imported the finished drawings into Pencil 2D and matched them up with animation that I made to make sure it all looked OK.” After cleaning up the animation, Fina exported the frames into a folder created for the animation to make sure the process was properly organized. Next came post-production using Adobe After Effects to assure visuals looked their best. After importing the animation and backgrounds into the same sequence of video footage, she made sure it all synced up properly. “When I’m satisfied with the timing and the composition, I do final touches,” Fina says. “I added a bit of gradient to the animation and background, overlaying them so it all wouldn’t look too harsh. I also added some special effects like the camera flash, as well as the sunlight in the sequence at the Sphinx, then fade-ins and fade-outs. Next, I added the title at the beginning and credits at the end; then finally, the music.” The wonderful result: “A Quick Trip Around The World With Markus Fogg.” https://drive.google.com/open?id=1lJV_OC5gIfwLUyz8NJvVx8PTN1kcQ0nd

A Conversation with Sharafina Teh When did you first develop an interest in drawing?

I have been drawing since I was a kindergartner, here in Malaysia, and doodled a lot in the kids’ storybooks that my parents gave me, much to their dismay. I sort of went back and forth and drew once in a while, occasionally showing off my little comics to my friends. I got more serious about drawing when I was 14 in secondary school and remember drawing a lot in those tall notebooks that were supposed to be used for schoolwork. Despite all that, I still managed to score straight A’s in the final examination of my final year in high school. Though not without a lot of reluctant hard work and self-reflection. Many children start off making drawings in elementary school, but few persist. What made it different for you?

I guess something clicked in my brain to think that the act of gliding around pencil lead on paper and producing an image, ugly or not, was actually enjoyable to me. I think watching a lot of cartoons and kids’ shows, even until high school, got me more and more interested in drawing. I wanted to create my own fantasy of the characters that I saw. And I guess I figured that drawing was one way to make that fantasy a reality. How did all that lead to an interest in animation?

My early influence has always been animation. Though I’m not a hardcore enthusiast of any specific animated shows, the ones that really stuck with me through the teenage years, as I was trying to flourish my skills, were two: a cartoon called “X-Men Evolution” and a legendary animated show called “Avatar the Last Airbender.” Other animation, games and even just movies influenced what I drew, but those two shows were big factors in my passion.

How did you turn those influences into producing your own creations?

I grew more interested in animation when I saw a video of someone doing animation using one of those little “sticky” notepads where you peel off a piece and stick it somewhere. Because of how easily they flip, you can use them to animate by drawing the first frame on the last page and the next frame on a page earlier and so on. So I tried drawing my own animation on one. It was a stick figure girl doing some gymnastic moves: a backflip and a cartwheel. How did these early influences move from play to more purposeful pursuits?

It was just by happenstance that I came across a booth in one of those education fairs at my sister’s university, a well-established institution with a lot of programs. I discovered that they offered a course in animation so I just decided to take it up immediately, applied, and thankfully was accepted. I was interested in other fields such as finance (following in my sister's footsteps), veterinary and psychology, but I leaned more towards animation in the end. I had many random interests, but drawing was my one true passion. If animation could make me keep doing what I love, then why not take it up? Where else did that life choice take you?

While learning animation, I also gained knowledge in other areas like audio and video production, along with design and writing for film. Those subjects really made me more interested in creating my own stories and possibly having my own production business. At the same time, I developed an interest in voice-acting, thanks to a lecturer of mine, who also worked as a voiceover artist and is a great one at that. Today, I do voiceovers for my own assignments as well as for friends, who have been very encouraging. I have done minor professional jobs, but nothing too great yet. I’m just grateful for the opportunities that I was blessed with. Maybe in the future, if I’m lucky, I can get to work with the likes of great professional voice-over talents like Troy Baker or Jennifer Hale. But for now, it’s only in my dreams. Any other creative interests?

One of my goals is to write a book for my late father, who passed away eight years ago. But I have yet to find inspiration for subject matter, as well as the time to write, because so many things are demanding my time right now. I have been thinking of writing a fictional story based on my life with my family and my father, or even a memoir/biography. I’ve always liked writing and it is something I want to do when I can find the time and the right subject matter. My mother had always commended how I write and speak in English, and that was a push of motivation to me as well. I remember when my father was still alive, he really encouraged me to write something he could get published. He was an English teacher and lecturer and published books, mostly children’s educational books. I really want to make that a reality, but in my own time.

Email from New Zealand: Animation ‘60s Style By Frank I. Sillay

The grand plan was to outline the science-fiction-tinted future that lay before New Zealand under the elegant technical husbandry of the Ministry of Works. I had been in New Zealand for something over a year, in the middle ‘60s, before falling under the spell of the girl who was fated to become Mrs. Sillay. In the interval, I participated energetically in the social life of Wellington, which offered rich pickings, with a university, a teachers’ training college and a couple of poly techs, as well as being the locus of junior employees of government departments and their training. My evenings were spent going from pub to party, party to pub, concert to party, and so forth, seeking the company of young women I probably wouldn’t introduce to my mother. One of my companions in this quest was a young fellow by the name of Hugh Macdonald, who worked for the National Film Unit, making (unlikely though it seems) films. 14

Hugh and I shared many hilarious adventures, ranging from falling off a stationary motorbike to inventing the Chinese take-away meal by the simple expedient of holding open a stout plastic bag while placing our order. (No separate containers, everything just ladled into the bag.) As is usual with such friendships, we also solved a number of the world’s problems, and pushed forward the frontiers of human knowledge in the beer-sodden small hours of the night. If only The Encyclopedia Britannica had been listening. It was on one such night I explained to Hugh that any old digital computer could be used to produce many kinds of special effects for film purposes. This was decades before Star Wars, not to mention green screens or the wonders of The Lord of the Rings. Computers in those days had an entry price somewhere well beyond a million and could only be found in places like government departments and multi-national corporations; even machines with computing power now surpassed by a $100 cell phone. While drawing this fantastic looking picture, (all of which was true) I may have neglected to mention that the client for such services would need to be entirely disdainful of petty considerations like cost. Several years rolled by, and I had completely forgotten my sales pitch for computer animation when my employers, the New Zealand Ministry of Works, decided that they should avail themselves of some publicity through the National Film Unit, a fellow government department. The newly promoted Commissioner of Works approached the film unit and Hugh was sent to negotiate a plan. I have no idea what kind of cock-and-bull story Hugh put across, but I suspect I was quoted as an expert witness, and he came away with a blank check in terms of use of the Ministry of Works computer, at that time a fairly basic IBM 360. The grand plan was to outline the science-fiction-tinted future that lay before New Zealand, under the elegant technical husbandry of the Ministry of Works.

A proposed computer-generated animation The Government Architect had a rough plan for a proposed group of buildings that he fondly hoped might one day form a “Government Center,” in downtown Wellington, and it was proposed that a computer-animated view of this group of buildings should form the title sequence of the film. It is worth reminding readers that at the time we are talking about, screens associated with computer terminals were green cathode-ray tubes with white lettering projected on to them. The graphic displays that are now taken for granted were not even dreamed of. The way we drew pictures like engineering drawings in those days was on a large (approximately 1.0 meter x 1.2 meter) flatbed Calcomp Plotter, which moved a pen across a stationary sheet of paper in conformation with instructions fed to it via magnetic tape. Or maybe the pen moved in one dimension, and the paper moved back and forth in the other. It’s a long time ago, and I have difficulty remembering any detail that doesn’t directly shine glory on my younger self. Pictures

drawn in this way could then be set up in an animation frame and photographed, exactly like an individual drawing of Steamboat Willie, the progenitor of the Disney studio. That’s fairly straightforward; nothing new, but the title sequence was to run about 45 seconds, and a second of screen time required 24 such photographs. Call it 1,080 individual drawings. It was decided to simulate flying a camera around the proposed government center a couple of times, as if in a helicopter, or a cruise missile, and then swoop into a central courtyard before passing on to the main part of the movie. This meant that each drawing showed the cluster of buildings from a slightly different viewpoint and required a separate tape of pen movements to be generated by the computer program. If you will indulge me a bit of the computer jargon from those early days: The first computer program I ever wrote, as a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (using 650 Fortransit, a subset of Fortran) took three dimensional coordinates of the vertices of a wire-frame layout (a display method that shows solid objects as outline drawings). These coordinates were then put together with viewpoint and interocular separation and used to produce two dimensional coordinates on a stereo pair. In order to produce animation cells of a wire-frame object, as viewed from a moving viewpoint, all that was required was one half of the stereo pair algorithm.

The Hidden Line Problem The perspective was precisely correct, but the “hidden line problem” was not fully sorted out. For computer-drawn solids, there is the problem of determining which edges, or parts of edges, are visible from a given vantage point. So, we had to do manual corrections to several of the drawings. We never did identify the problem, or else I would have earned a small measure of fame, as the hidden line problem has really only been put to bed in the last 20 years or so. It’s a long time ago, and I can’t remember the exact timings, but using the computer to produce the tapes was reasonably quick, not a major problem, and the Christmas holiday break was devoted to this task, but my recollection is that each drawing required over an hour on the plotter, and this monopolized that equipment for weeks after the holidays. People with “serious” work waiting to be done on the plotter were howling for my blood. And so, it came to pass in 1971, that the long-suffering New Zealand taxpayer financed a significant step in the progress of computerized animation. As a matter of fact, this was the first use of a computer to produce animated film in New Zealand, and surely one of the very first examples on planet earth. I’m not aware of an earlier instance, but that doesn’t prove there wasn’t one. Decades would pass before New Zealand film director Peter Jackson and Weta Workshops, the special effects and prop company based in Miramar, New Zealand, would bring this infant artform to maturity in their movies of the Tolkien books.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vkriD42mUXNg_4jNc3KjXEME44HAuGpJ

Always Time for a Train Scenes from Life on the Rails By Bill Scheller

‘A passenger train is a rolling village. Some people move in and out; others are long-term residents. Club cars are the village squares, where you run into your neighbors, make friends, and find out who avoid . . .’

I was very nearly born on a train. My mother was a secretary with the Erie Railroad, and rode an Erie local between Paterson, New Jersey and her office in Newark. She worked throughout her pregnancy, almost one day too long. We used to joke, when I was growing up, about whether Erie conductors had been trained to deliver babies. I don’t know if it’s true that playing Mozart to your tot in utero will help create a classical music lover, but I’m open to the idea that sloshing along on the Erie for a full nine months gave me my lifelong love of trains. It’s an affection that has taken me many times through the Canadian Rockies, and to the shores of Hudson Bay; to Venice on the Orient Express, and on a 27,000-mile Amtrak odyssey that left me feeling like a human pinball. But it all started – the ex utero part, at least – on the seventeen-mile run from Paterson to Hoboken, in the days when the Jesuits were trying to din Latin and algebra into my skull at St. Peter’s Preparatory School in Jersey City. The 7:29 out of Paterson was an Erie-Lackawanna train by then, the two roads having had a hopeless go at a merger before New Jersey Transit came along to pick up the remains. My mother still had a proprietary feeling about the Paterson station from her Erie days, and she introduced me to one of the conductors, on my first day of school, as if she were passing me off to a trusted guardian. “We’ll take care of him,” the conductor assured her. He was resplendent in the uniform conductors still wore then, a three-piece blue suit with a watch chain and a stiff round cap bearing his title on a shiny brass plate.

The old Erie-Lackawanna terminal in Hoboken, NJ, where the author first caught the train bug.

Northern New Jersey is so densely populated, and its communities, in the middle of the last century, were so self-contained, that there were places not ten miles from Paterson that I had never seen, and knew nothing about. The Erie station where I boarded the 7:29 was seventeen miles from the grand copper-clad Lackawanna terminal in Hoboken, where Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d catch the bus to Jersey City. That half-hour trip took me through places like Passaic Park and East Rutherford, which may as well have been Mars. The last fifteen minutes were spent crossing the mysterious Meadows, a vast reedy swampland penetrated by little more than the New Jersey Turnpike and the railroad tracks. I had no idea there was such a wilderness ten miles from my house. We never took the Turnpike, so the Erie had to show me. The Erie also introduced me to my first high school friends. Rich got on in South Paterson, Ray in Clifton, Roger in Passaic. We flipped one leatherette seat towards another, and made a face-toface foursome. It was a finish-the-homework foursome in the morning . . . and in the afternoon? I doubt if I was the first guy to learn the facts of life from dirty jokes on the Erie.

And all around us – in the morning, at least – there was a sea of newspapers and fedoras. At Hoboken, the subway and the ferries went straight to Manhattan. Some of the St. Peter’s boys must have taken that ride every morning for the next fifty years. The fact that I didn’t may have had a lot to do with what I saw at the cavernous old terminal at night, when I had stayed at school late for a dance or band practice, and had to wait for one of the last locals to Paterson. I’d kill time by walking the length of the dim, quiet train shed, ending down at the far end where the long-distance trains were stabled. The Chicago-bound Phoebe Snow, once the pride of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western, still ran then, but she was a morning train. The one that caught my eye was the Owl, which left for Buffalo after midnight. I would stand on the platform and look into the brightly-lit cars, as porters made up beds in the roomettes and the dining-car steward got the tables ready for breakfast. Sleeping on a train! And not because you nodded off in a coach over your Latin book. Eating on a train! Breakfast, and not the Hostess cupcake left over from the lunch your mother packed. The windows of the Owl were windows on another world. It was a world I kept in the back of my mind, but couldn’t do much about, for another ten years. After college, I moved to Vermont, which didn’t have any trains except for Amtrak’s Montrealer (today it’s called the Vermonter, because it no longer goes over the border). The schedule was inconvenient, and I lived close enough to Montreal to drive.

Four days across Canada But Montreal was also the eastern terminus of two of the world’s great trains. In the early Seventies, before Canadian rail passenger service was consolidated under government-run VIA Rail, these were the Canadian Pacific’s Canadian, and Canadian National’s Super Continental. A college friend who had moved to British Columbia invited me to go salmon fishing on Vancouver Island, and I immediately thought of the train. He thought I was nuts. Four days out and four days back meant that many fewer salmon, but there was no convincing me to fly. I chose the Canadian for the ride west, and the Super Continental to take me home. Those would be my first and second long-distance trains. I rode coach both ways. There were cars with roomettes, and those upper and lower Pullman berths you see in old movies, but cushy accommodations like that would have cost a lot more than the hundred or so dollars I was paying to travel from Montreal to Vancouver. Right off, I learned the mystery of sleeping in coach: you can nod off for hours with no trouble while you’re reading or looking out the window in broad daylight, but once you set yourself up for a night’s slumber – seat back, footrest up, shade down, shoes off, jacket tossed across your face, and one of the pillows Canadian Pacific conductors used to rent back then – you’re in for a wake-up call at every stop, with every signal light that sneaks through the slit between shade and sill, with every lurch and squeak. If you’re really unlucky, there will be no more empty double seats left, and someone will get on at three a.m. and sprawl out next to you. I’ve never had this happen, but just bracing for it is the worry at every stop. And I took a four-day lunch. At Central Station in Montreal, I spent ten and a half Canadian dollars on a loaf of rye bread, a pound each of summer sausage and Swiss cheese, a little tub of

paté de campagne, two apples, and a Greek pastry. I also snagged six pats of butter from the food court. All I brought from home was a flask of bourbon. Of course my provisions didn’t last four days. I had to eat the paté first, and the rest was gone by the time we hit the prairies. I ate breakfast and sandwiches in the coach-class club car, which was also where I fetched up in the evenings. It was there, and upstairs in the observation dome, that I came face-to-face with the obvious: trains are full of people. They take up far more space in my old notebooks than even the most spectacular scenery. A passenger train is a rolling village. Some people move in and out; others are long-term residents. Club cars are the village squares, where you run into your neighbors, make friends, and find out who to eavesdrop on or avoid. Long-distance Canadian trains have their first-class lounges in the last car — Canadian Pacific introduced boat-tailed beauties as part of their new stainless-steel train sets in 1955, and these still serve VIA Rail’s Canadian. I was traveling coach, so my introduction to rolling café society was the CPR’s ingeniously designed combination dome/club/kitchen-bar cars of the same era. At one end were coach seats; at the other, booths and tables. In the middle, there was a window where a guy dispensed drinks, sandwiches, snacks, and light breakfasts. Above the little kitchen, a stairway ascended to the dome seats. And who did you meet in the village square? The gruff Canadian nuke plant worker who said that the U.S. should annex his country. The old lady who kept bitching about my pipe, and who was told by the conductor that if she didn’t like it, she could move to a non-smoking car. A woman wearing a T-shirt that said, “Playmate of the Year,” and who looked like the playmate of the Kenora, Ontario curling club. A Japanese farmer who had been interned at one of the camps in California as a kid. An ice-road trucker named Frosty. A stoner who asked the conductor at a stop, “If I get off here, can I meet the train in Winnipeg and go on to Vancouver?” (“Do you want to meet this train, or the one after it?” the puzzled conductor answered.) A guy named Pop Wagner, a folksinger who’d been on “A Prairie Home Companion,” and who took out his guitar and played, not in the lounge but to a cluster of us in coach, before some old bat — the pipe lady? — complained to the conductor. Most memorable of all was a porter who held forth late one night upstairs in the dome. He’d put his sleeping car passengers to bed, had come up to look at the stars and the shadowy mountains, and got to talking about how he happened to be working for the CPR -- “I do not porter as an avocation. I do it because of circumstances.” He was from Tobago, and held a PhD from a British university; his dissertation was on economic aspects of the American revolutionary period. An American Jefferson scholar had read it on the train, and had offered to help him get a teaching job in the U.S. “But the chances are slim,” he told us. “I expect to go to Trinidad, to law school.” He was speaking, in his beautiful Caribbean English, about late eighteenth-century Atlantic shipping when there was a commotion on the stairs. It was a middle-aged couple coming up from the lounge, the husband first and the wife in pursuit. They were both drunk. “I’ll go up here,” the man said. “I’ll follow you, you bastard,” she answered.

The husband sat in front of me, as his wife bellowed, “I hope you’re satisfied, you fool, you son of a bitch.” The porter approached. “Madam,” he said, “this is public transportation.” “I don’t care.” “I’ll get the conductor, then.” “Go ahead. This is the last time I’m riding on this damn train.”

The author waves farewell to passengers on VIA Rail’s Canadian in the Ontario wilderness, summer, 1984. A more primitive mode of transportation awaits. (Chris Maynard photo)

“Who needs you? This is public transportation, and you cannot behave this way.” The suave Islands voice was raised not a decibel.

“You think I don’t know that, you asshole?” The husband, by now, had slumped in his seat and gone to sleep. The wife swore her way back down the stairs. The porter, unruffled, had to go help a woman get off at Salmon Arm, British Columbia. I went back to my coach seat and slept, as we rolled along the Fraser Canyon. I imagined none of this cast of characters when I stood in the gloom of the Hoboken terminal and watched the Owl being readied for its run to Buffalo. Sometimes they were irritating, sometimes fascinating. Sometimes I wished the lounge was like a game of seven-card draw poker, and that I could get rid of up to four of them and replace them from a human deck. But I knew one thing for certain: I’d never meet them, or sit around and drink beer with them, on an airplane. I’d never enjoy a meal on a plane as I have on trains, either. That’s not only because even Amtrak or VIA’s most pedestrian offerings are superior to air fare, as what isn’t, but because nothing compares to sitting at a starched-clothed dining car table as the world passes by. That first crossCanada trip wasn’t all a multi-day bag lunch and sandwiches in the lounge. On the last day out, as we drifted through the Rockies, I joined two new acquaintances for dinner in the diner. The special of the night was roast turkey – the Thanksgiving special, as it was billed. I puzzled over this until the waiter told me it was Canadian Thanksgiving, something I hadn’t known about. I also hadn’t known that some of the dishes served were CPR standbys dating back decades – the mixed pickles delighted generations of travelers, and had become something of a minor national treasure. It’s often been said that the Canadian Pacific Railway bound Canada together; it’s a lesser-known fact that the pickles helped.

I enjoyed that 1974 trip so much that I did it again in ‘78 – my return journey from Vancouver to Montreal was the last transcontinental CPR run prior to VIA’s taking over Canadian passenger service – and yet again, in 1981. But by that time, my railroad experiences had taken a professional turn. I spent the summer of 1980 riding American trains, researching what was published, a year later, as the first comprehensive guide to the routes that the National Railroad Passenger Corporation – Amtrak – had taken over from the private railways. I divided my 27,000-mile careen around the country into five separate trips, the longest lasting five weeks. Sustaining the whole operation was a $3,000 advance from my publisher and full ticketing from Amtrak, including roomettes (and an occasional larger bedroom) as overnight travel required. My plan was to write a description of each route – history, scenery, railroad lore – along with guides to each city the system served, including lodging, dining, and attractions, all written for travelers arriving downtown and using public transportation. Amtrak didn’t always make this easy, having in those days abandoned many centrally located stations in desperate need of renovation for prefabs on the urban outskirts. It wasn’t all a lark, as a forty-year-old notebook reminds me. There were lodgings to arrange, reams of publicity material from visitors’ bureaus to lug around, and post offices to find so I could mail the stuff home and pick up general delivery letters from my girlfriend. And walk, and explore . . . seventeen miles around Chicago in one day, according to an analog pedometer that fit in with the rest of my Neolithic technologies. (An earlier piece of mine in Natural Traveler Magazine describes my primitive method, flipping through libraries’ phone books for hotels in upcoming cities, and calling them on pay phones.) Ah, but the trains . . . I finally had all the trains I ever wanted. Best of all were the overnight trips, when I’d be snug in my roomette, propped on a pillow with the shade pulled up to let in the darkness and give me an odd and lordly perspective on dimly lit milk-stop stations. I’d switch on the reading light mounted on the wall, take out a book, and sip cognac from a little silver cup. It was a world, a small cozy world, and it moved wonderfully through the night. Yes, you miss scenery, if you’re rolling through a place where there is scenery – but sleeping on the train also makes for magical transformations, as when, years later on the Hudson Bay from Winnipeg to Churchill, Manitoba, I went to bed in the woods, and woke up on the tundra. Having a private sleeping accommodation on a train means that you don’t have to let a coach car conversation drag on until one of you glazes over and falls asleep. But neither did it mean that I hid from the cast of characters I had started to meet on my Canadian rail journeys. They’re all there in my old notebook – the southern family, ma, pa, five kids, and a banjo; the woman working on John Connally’s presidential campaign on her boss’s orders; the lady who said that watching Phil Donahue was like a college education; single mothers dragging unhappy children from one end of the continent to another . . . and the London-based American stockbroker who, for me, still stands as the man who ushered in the Roaring Eighties. An acquaintance and I had been talking with him on the Empire Builder, somewhere in Montana, when he looked at his watch and announced that the market had opened in Sydney, and he’d just made five grand. How he knew this, not having any of our 21st-century devices that would confirm it to the penny, I don’t know, but he did possess a new gizmo that neither I nor the other guy had ever seen: a Sony Walkman.

Starting about 1900. the fictional Phoebe Snow was the face of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western’s marketing campaign for its crack train on the Hoboken to Chicago route.

The stockbroker was traveling so he could photograph freight cars on the western rails, which would enable him to copy their logos and liveries for his handmade model railroad equipment. Meeting him was not only my introduction to the brave new world of Gordon Gekko, but to the species of humanity known as railfans … or, simply, train nuts. These are not rail travel enthusiasts like me, in love primarily with the experience, but walking railroad encyclopedias conversant with every nut, bolt, and defunct Indiana short line that has ever existed within the four foot, eight and one half inches separating one rail from another (make that three feet, for the narrow-gauge fans). In the Denver station, I met a fellow from Massachusetts who carried the requisite car-spotter manual, was a personal friend of the last chef on the Twentieth Century Limited and collected that famous train’s dining-car china, taught me how to tell a GM Electro-Motive Division “E” locomotive from an “F,” and pointed out a Burlington Northern business car parked on a siding. I’d meet these characters from time to time, and my publisher heard from them when my book came out – the stylized locomotive on the cover, they complained, didn’t look like any unit they had ever seen. But they’re harmless, and I confess that it is fun to know that the Pennsylvania Railroad painted their GG-1 electric locos Tuscan red. My 1980 involvement with the nuts and bolts of the railroad world often had to do with whether the nuts would come off the bolts. In those days, Amtrak’s long-distance routes primarily made use of equipment inherited from the private roads, and some of it was past its prime. When something broke, it was usually the air conditioning, and it was usually on one of the routes in the Southwest or the Deep South. One of my most vivid memories of things going mechanically awry, and of happily making the best of it, is of a mid-September trip on the Sunset Limited. The A.C. packed it in somewhere in New Mexico, and didn’t come back on until we got to San Antonio at five-thirty in the morning. I had a roomette, and even with the door open it was intolerably hot. 23

Fortunately, the car was old enough to have an open vestibule, sort of a porch, at one end. I went out there as we crossed west Texas, wearing nothing but pajama bottoms. The breeze was delightful, and the stars, as the song says, were big and bright. But the dining cars! Vases to match the blue creamers and sugar bowls, with fresh carnations. Broiled trout. The “Iowa Chop.” Breakfast – poached eggs on corned beef hash, side of grits, toast. One morning, somewhere down South, I ordered pancakes and bacon, and had my appetite whetted by hearing the waiter call to the kitchen, “Gimme a stack and a bit of the hawg,” That’s the talk of one kind of diner, riding on the other. The afternoon before, that same train, the Eagle, had lumbered through east Texas counties still clinging tenaciously to Prohibition, while visions of a martini danced in my head. We were still in dry Texarkana, but close enough to escaping into wet Arkansas, when the club car waiter called to the bartender, “Fuck it – he’s been waiting since Dallas. Give the man a martini.” Then, to me, “Better take two.” Perhaps my happiest dining car story concerns a meal I didn’t even eat. It was on the Broadway Limited that a middle-aged black lady told me about her fifteenth-birthday trip to Washington, D.C. a gift from her railroad chef father. At dinnertime, he made a chicken pot pie just for her. When the other passengers saw it, they wanted one, too – but it wasn’t on the menu. The birthday girl was enjoying a dish the white folks couldn’t have.

Train Trips published, but . . . My guide, Train Trips: Exploring America by Rail, was published in the spring of 1981. It was just appearing in bookshops when the headlines hit. In Reagan’s first budget, the line item for Amtrak was . . . no line item at all. The federal government’s ten-year-old experiment in helping to finance a national passenger rail system was written off as another Democrat boondoggle and scheduled for starvation. (It was, in fact, begun during the Nixon administration.) The whole system – at least the long-distance routes – would have to shut down. Right away, people started asking me what may be the dumbest question of my career, and I’ve fielded a few: “Why’d you write that book? There isn’t going to be an Amtrak anymore.” Did they think I’d gone out and written it that week, in the face of the headlines? What was worse, Amtrak itself had just ordered 10,000 copies from my publisher. I’d barely finished calculating the royalties when the cancellation came in. I wasn’t a fan of the Gipper to begin with, but – all politics, as Tip O’Neill used to say, being local – I immediately put him on a presidential antipedestal from which he wouldn’t be displaced until January 2017. A couple of weeks later, Congress put the Amtrak money back into the budget. Unlike the proposed cut, which was page one material, that bit of news was buried deep inside the papers. The damage was done, although I did bring out a second edition of “Train Trips,” including VIA Rail’s Canadian routes, a couple of years later. Like Amtrak, VIA provided me with tickets and sleeping-car accommodations, so that I was able to see how the Canadian other half lived, years after those days and nights in coach, digging into my food bag to see if the Montreal paté was still good. And in the summer of 1984, a friend and I gave those lounge-car magnificoes quite a

surprise when we had the Canadian stop in the northern Ontario wilderness, where they watched us haul my canoe out of the baggage car to begin a river and lake journey that would take us to a bush-town depot for our return. (Even more surprised were the Montrealers who, a day earlier, had watched me shoulder the boat and descend an escalator at the city’s Central Station. “You know,” the baggage clerk told me down in the main lobby, “things that big, we have people bring around the back.”) I have ridden European trains, and when that subject comes up, the first thing people ask about is the Orient Express – the Venice-Simplon Orient Express, to be precise. It is, still, the premier privately-operated excursion train, its meticulously restored Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lit cars freighting not only champagne, caviar, and a lounge piano, but also decades of Agatha Christie mystique. Of course I enjoyed my ride from Zurich to Venice, but I couldn’t help thinking that the train, and the people on it, were trying too hard and too self-consciously to be grand. I wanted . . . I don’t know, maybe a bit of the hawg.

1967 Erie-Lackawanna timetable, showing the route and schedule of the Owl and other long-distance trains out of Hoboken, NJ

Far more satisfying, in my European railroad recollections, is the night my wife and toddler son and I escaped from six weeks of murderous heat in Granada, Spain on an air-conditioned sleeper bound for Madrid; and, later in the same trip, the sleek overnight express from Barcelona to Geneva, its cars gimbaled so that our beds never tilted on curves. Just as memorable, though, was the ticketing for that trip, which began on a connecting train in Lisbon. We had bought those tickets at a dusty little station in the south of Portugal, after waiting on line for over an hour. One clerk was on duty, and there was no computer. He drew up every ticket – Lisbon to Madrid, Madrid to Barcelona, Barcelona to Geneva – with a ruler and a pen, consulting a dog-eared fare book throughout. The antiquarian fascination of the experience was matched, in Lisbon, by a baggage agent’s dipping a brush into a glue pot, slathering the glue on our suitcases, and slapping on those city-destination labels that you see on old travel posters. This was in 1989. Those sleeping-car nights, tucking into a cool berth in Granada or gliding through unseen France between Spain and Switzerland, may soon vanish from the European travel landscape; most of their intercity trains have gotten so fast that you don’t need to bed down along the way. Americans and Canadians are well behind in high-speed rail, and the distances we have to cover would require overnight trips even if we ran trains twice as fast. But the day will no doubt come when sci-fi contrivances like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop will be a reality. Too bad – Musk’s Boring Company, which will conceivably gnaw the Hyperloop tunnels into existence, is for my money a very aptly named outfit. At six hundred miles an hour, with no backyards or defunct steel mills or high plains pronghorns to see through my window, I will be bored.

From dining cars to ‘Ready to Serve’

Nowadays I ride Amtrak to visit my son in Minneapolis. The connections from Vermont would be too complicated, so I take the bus to Boston or Albany and pick up the Lake Shore Limited, connecting at Chicago for the Empire Builder to St. Paul. (Were there ever airplanes with such wonderful names?) Unfortunately, the Lake Shore has, like Amtrak’s other east-of-the Mississippi trains, lost its dining car. Passengers, even in first class, are obliged to eat “Ready to Serve” meals, either in the café car or in their compartments. The lame explanation that’s been offered is that millennials don’t want to sit at tables with strangers . . . the unspoken assumption, I suppose, being that they’d rather be alone with their phones. Thankfully, the Empire Builder and other western trains still carry diners, and so do the Canadian trains. But for how long? Eventually, I may be reduced to poring over my 1920 Canadian Pacific Railway staff handbook of menus and serving instructions. Roast haunch of venison on a silver platter, with port wine sauce and a side of fondante potatoes? Certainly, with diplomat pudding for dessert, on the dream train. In that wonderful Stan Rogers song, “City of New Orleans,” there’s the line, “And the sons of Pullman porters, and the sons of engineers / Ride their fathers’ magic carpet made of steel.” Count me as the equally privileged son of an Erie secretary, riding his mother’s magic carpet.

A New York Central postcard celebrates the 1948 launch of the newly modernized 20th Century Limited, America’s most storied passenger train

A Christmas Ghost Story By Frank I. Sillay

I had always believed that the British tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas began with Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, but apparently that was merely a revival of a much older practice that had been suppressed by Cromwell and the Puritans a couple of centuries earlier. This neatly explains the absence of a similar tradition in the United States. Once reawakened, the genre has been taken up with enthusiasm and great skill by such practitioners as Jerome K. Jerome, E. F. Benson, Walter de la Mare, and the incomparable M.R. James. While I don’t presume to such august company, I offer the following story, on the principle that “even a cat can look at a king.” Christmas mornings brought the sound of footsteps on the stairs. . . While our two sons were still toddlers, my wife and I bought a rambling old wooden house in a small country town about an hour from the city by rail. I commuted to the city to work and devoted the remainder of my waking hours to repairs and maintenance on our pride and joy.

During the First World War, the house had been operated as a boarding house to accommodate the wives of officers serving at the nearby army camp, so steps had been taken to maximize the number of bedrooms on the ground floor. There were two little attic bedrooms upstairs for the children of the families, and that is where we put our boys. The larger of the two rooms had a large, feminine signature in pencil on the inside of the door which read, “Katherine Viles.” When I was growing up, my father had always insisted that Mother prepare a formal, multi-course breakfast on Christmas morning, which had to be eaten before we kids were allowed into the living room, where the presents lay under the tree, so, over my wife’s protests, we introduced this practice into our family. The narrow, twisting staircase down from the boys’ bedrooms opened into the kitchen/ dining room, and a door from there gave into the living room, where the tree and presents were. As we were in the southern hemisphere, Christmas day was within a couple of days of the longest daylight hours of the year, so the early sunrise combined with yuletide excitement to prompt early rising on the part of the younger generation. Christmas mornings were times of turmoil, as we heard footsteps on the stairs, and my shouted threats and admonitions were greeted with denials and professions of innocence. One year I remember going upstairs to confront the boys, and found them both still in bed, and seemingly only half awake, when there had clearly been footsteps on the stairs, only moments before. On another occasion, both bedroom doors were open, so that the boys could see each other’s beds, and each of them supported the other’s protestations of innocence. It went on like this for several years until my wife finally prevailed on me to drop the Christmas morning torture and adopt a more relaxed stance. At the same time, the boys were outgrowing the little attic bedrooms, and we eventually moved them into bigger rooms on the ground floor. Even after these changes, Christmas mornings still brought footsteps on the stairs that could not be accounted for. We accepted this as just one of those inexplicable things and didn’t think too much more about it. The busy life of a growing young family filled the years and days, as it does, and crowded out lesspressing concerns. A few years later, it may have been on the sixtieth anniversary of the original events, the local newspaper ran a feature on the 1918 influenza epidemic and listed the names and dates of the local fatalities. We were startled to see one of the last to die was Katherine Viles, age 12, on 25 December 1918.

Desert Elves Are Dancing All Around Me Perhaps celebrating the arrival of darkness or the emergence of stars in the heavens, or even the temporary company of humans. Story & Photos by Buddy Mays

I hoisted my 40-pound backpack and stepped off the Ferrocarril Chihuahua Al Pacifico train, locally known as El Chepe (che for Chihuahua, Pe for Pacifico), into a warm, pleasant, early October afternoon in the heart of northern Mexico’s Mother Mountains, the Sierra Madre. I was about to begin an extended backpacking trip into the Barrancas del Cobre, or Copper Canyon, one of North America’s deepest and least explored gorges. The Mexican exploits of the intrepid explorer, and my old friend, Dana Lamb, detailed so exquisitely in his book “Quest for The Lost City,” had, for two decades, poked and prodded my explorer worm into doing something adventurous in a remote part of the world. But Dana had also mentioned the Barrancas del Cobre specifically, telling me about the Tarahumara Indians and the vast, unexplored canyon network that made the Grand Canyon look small in comparison. I had been to the Barrancas before on several occasions, but only on the rim where I gawked and oohed with the other tourists. Dana had told me there was no other place like it in North America. He was long dead, and I was way beyond my youth with a wife and daughter and a mortgage at home, but, as Dorothy Thompson said, “Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy. Some people are born old and tired while others are going strong at 70.” I was a ways from 70 and I had plenty of energy, and I couldn’t resist the challenge of taking one, last, long adventure. The seven-hour train ride from Ciudad Chihuahua, capital city of the Mexican state of Chihuahua, was an unhurried, beautiful trip, winding southwest through the Chihuahuan desert foothills for the first 75 miles or so, then climbing into the rugged Sierra Madre Occidental, the Mother Mountains of northern Mexico. The train had made a short stop at the town of Cuauhtemoc, heart of an 80,000 strong Mennonite community, before starting its 3,000 vertical feet climb up the steep eastern flank of the Sierra Madre. As the elevation changed, creosote bushes and prickly pear cactus gave way to pine and piñon trees, oaks, and red-barked madrones; the train tracks wound and twisted through the hilly terrain, often burrowing through a rocky ridge or uplift like a gopher in tunnels up to a mile in length. The Tarahumara Indian town of Creel –110 miles southwest of Ciudad Chihuahua -- is the last stop on the east-west route before reaching the Barrancas del Cobre rim. Thirty years ago, Creel was a rough, lawless town in which many residents openly carried revolvers in hip holsters and crime was common. Even in the late 1970s, armed bandits still roamed the nearby villages and hamlets, robbing and sometimes beating tourists who were unlucky enough to cross their path. More recently, a gang of 40 odd ladrones (outlaws) wiped out a Mexican Army base and pillaged a number of local villages, then shot down a pursuing Army helicopter before they were finally hunted down and killed by Mexican Federales. Today, most of Creel’s 5,000 residents have given up their pistolas, and depend on tourism instead of crime for their daily bread. 29

El Chepe, the Copper Canyon train, making a stop in the rough and tumble Tarahumara town of Creel.

Fifteen miles west of Creel, the Divisadero is the first, and one of only two stops El Chepe makes on the actual canyon rim. Train passengers get their first look at the Barrancas from a spot near the platform known as El Ojo de la Barranca (the Eye of the Canyon), from which you can look directly down to the bottom, some 7,000 feet below. There are always dozens of Tarahumara Indian women dressed in brightly colored cotton wraps squatting or sitting on the platform, most of them selling hand-woven baskets, traditional Indian dolls, colorful seed necklaces, and handcarved wooden violins with fishing twine strings. I detrained at the second stop on the rim, the Estación Posada Barranca (Hotel Copper Canyon Station), two miles west of the Divisadero, so named for a small hotel nearby. Several dozen tourists headed for the coastal city of Los Mochis where the Chihuahua Al Pacifico terminates waited patiently on the platform clutching their duffle bags and suitcases. The Posada Barranca itself, where I planned to spend the night, was just a short walk away, clinging to the edge of the canyon like a morning glory vine clings to a picket fence. I’d made my reservation months before by telephone, using the hotel’s middleman in Ciudad Chihuahua because there were no phones at the hotel itself. The Barrancas del Cobre canyon system is difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t been there. Basically it is an amalgamation of six massive, V-shaped, converging gorges, each one more than a mile deep, which encompasses 10,000 square miles of corrugated landscape in the heart of the Sierra Madre Occidental. The largest and deepest of the six is the Rio Urique Canyon, but at least three others, Rio Batopilas, Rio San Miguel, and Rio Chinipas canyons, are similar in size, depth, and terrain. The average elevation along the rim is about 9,000 feet above sea level and at river level, about 2,300 feet. In between lies a wild, and for the most part unexplored, desert landscape in which jaguars, cougars, and javelina are still masters of their environment, and where only the Tarahumara Indians flourish. 30

I planned to spend at least seven nights in the canyons, though I was prepared to stay an extra night or two if necessary. A close friend from New Mexico, Michele Jenkins, had led half-a-dozen weeklong “adventure” trips into the Rio Urique Canyon the previous year using Tarahumara guides, and had briefed me on the best trails to take in and out. I didn’t have a map—simply because no maps of the Barrancas existed as far as I could tell—but Michele said if I paid attention to where I was going and stuck to the widest, most used pathways, I wouldn’t get lost. If I did get lost, she said, I should find the nearest Tarahumara, point to the rim, and say simply “Estoy perdido. ¿Qué camino hacia el Divisadero?” which means “I’m lost. Which way to the Divisadero?” If that brought no results, I should take off my pack, bend over, and kiss my butt goodbye because I would be on my own. Michele didn’t mince words, so I had a feeling she probably wasn’t kidding.

The inhabitants are Tarahumaras In the late afternoon, after I had checked into the Posada, gotten settled into my room, and checked and double checked my gear and food supplies, I went searching for the trail Michele had suggested I take into the canyon (which actually began at the hotel). There were no signs saying “This Way To The Rio Urique” but the trailhead was easy to locate just a short stroll from the hotel lobby. With no other pressing business, I went exploring, hiking down a lesser-used pathway into the canyon just to see where it went. The first part was a bit daunting, as it switched back downward but half a mile from the hotel. I found myself standing on a level ledge at the bottom of steep rock face, staring into a high-roofed, smoke-blackened overhang called a rock shelter. It was occupied, something I had heard about but never seen. The inhabitants were Tarahumaras, an elderly gentleman about 70, a younger man and woman probably in their late twenties, and three children—two young boys and a younger girl perhaps four. The woman and girl were dressed in the Tarahumaras’ traditional colored blouses, long skirts, and head scarves; all four males wore tattered cotton pants and shirts. The old man spoke a tiny bit of English and broken Spanish and told me his name was Atlahua. He shook hands shyly and graciously waved off my apology for arriving unannounced. He said the two adults were his son and daughter-in-law, and the kids his nietos or grandchildren. I asked how long he had lived in the rock shelter. He said por siempre, forever, and chuckled. I asked politely if I could look around and the old man nodded. Hand-woven baskets in several sizes and stone grinding tools were neatly stacked against the back wall of the shelter, and hanging in the deep shade above them, the hindquarter of a deer swung from a wooden peg driven into the rock. The shelter contained three stone huts with wooden ceiling beams, probably used as sleeping quarters. Water for washing and drinking was provided by a tiny spring seeping out of solid rock at one end. With the exception of an old iron skillet and some empty Mescal bottles probably used to carry water, the place could have been recently transported from the Desert Archaic Period. The Tarahumara are a colorful and extremely interesting society. No one really knows exactly where they came from, but archaeologists are reasonably sure they’ve occupied the Barrancas del Cobre area for at least 2,000 years. Linguistically, they are associated with the Uto-Aztecans, a widespread society of prehistoric cultures that include the Aztec civilization in south-central Mexico and the Hopi Pueblos in Arizona. They call themselves Rarámuri (Tarahumara, a

Tarahumara families have lived in remote rock shelters in cliffs below the Copper Canyon rim for generations.

Spanish mis-pronouncement of the word) means “foot-runner” or “fleetfooted” or “he who walks fast.” Long distance running, in fact, has become a trademark of the Rarámuri culture. Hunters have been known to chase a deer on foot until the animal collapsed from exhaustion. Interestingly enough, Tarahumara feet are splayed out from wearing only open sandals—usually made from tire treads—and nothing else, all their lives. Their feet are usually so hard and calloused that thorns cannot penetrate the skin.

No one seems to know just how many Tarahumara occupy the Barrancas del Cobre but the Mexican government thinks the population is somewhere between 35,000 and 60,000. Years of gold and silver mining, logging operations, and drought conditions in Northern Mexico, have severely degraded Tarahumara territory, however, and their numbers are probably decreasing. Some Indian families, such as the one living below the Posada Barrancas, still reside in primitive rock shelters and subsist mainly on wild meat—rabbits, squirrels, snakes, gophers, javelina, and deer—that they trap or kill with bows and arrows in the canyon. They also make pinole, a combination of parched corn, agave, cocoa, cinnamon, chia seeds, vanilla, and other wild spices, all ground together on a grinding stone into a powdery flour and used to make tortillas, mush, and sweet, non-alcoholic drinks. Recipe for pinole dates back to the Aztec Empire that flourished in Mexico in the mid-1400s. A much larger percentage of the Tarahumara live in rancheras or ejidos, small hamlets of between five and ten families scattered throughout the canyon country. Resources are scarce in the Barrancas and ranchera occupants usually share food, water sources, and arable land on which to grow corn. Pinole is a basic food source here too, but many Indian houses — typically one- or tworoom dwellings built of chinked logs or hand-hewn stone blocks with slatted shingle roofs—have small gardens attached in which the occupants grow beans, mustard greens, squash and potatoes. Large plots of arable farmland with water nearby are rare and often farmers have to walk several miles each day to their corn fields. Some families might own a burro or two to haul baskets and other tourist trinkets to the rim, and at harvest time, corn home from the fields. Others keep small herds of goats for milk and meat, and everyone in the family forages for whatever is available and in season, be it cactus fruit, agave (century plant), wild onions, milkweed, wild grape, or sotol. The latter, a sort of low-growing desert palm, is perhaps the most important wild plant in the Tarahumara environment. Most of the baskets sold by Tarahumara women are woven from sotol’s long, slender leaves. A potent alcoholic drink, also called sotol and a poor cousin to tequila and mescal, is made from the fermented innards of plant.

Tarahumara Legend Traditional Tarahumara believe that all animals have souls, and that the soul is what gives human beings the ability to speak and to sing. They also believe that being drunk is considered an enlightened state, and not cause for shame or embarrassment. Drunkenness is a way to vent violent emotions, and if violence—up to and including murder and rape—happens to occur when someone is drunk, the Tarahumara blame the alcohol, not the perpetrator, and that person is not usually punished for his or her actions. And like the women of many primitive cultures, when a Tarahumara woman is about to give birth, she leaves the house and goes to some hidden spot that has earlier been prepared. There, attended sometimes by her husband, or sister, or a neighbor, or sometimes with no assistance at all, she squats over a soft bed of grass and has her child. Within 24 hours she’s usually back at work in her home, and a few days after the birth, a traditional curing ceremony is held for the new infant by a local shaman. When the ceremony is finished, if the baby was a girl her umbilical cord is buried under the hearth so that she will become a good housekeeper and mother. If the baby was a boy, the cord is buried in the family cornfield or hung from a tree, depending on whether the father wants the baby to become a good farmer or a good hunter. The Tarahumara creation story is similar to that of Navajos, just told a little differently. Legend says that the sun and moon are brother and sister and in the first days of the world, the only light came from the morning star, which was a louse from the head of the sun. When the moon noticed the louse, she ate it, plunging the earth into darkness. When the first Tarahumara came to earth, they erected tall crosses of madrone, soaked them in alcohol and set them on fire, allowing them to shine in the sky and brighten the world. Brother sun and sister moon grew angry and flooded the land, destroying everyone except for a one Tarahumara boy and one girl who hid in the mountains with three kernels of corn and three beans. When the flood waters subsided and the earth dried out, the corn and beans were grown into a bountiful harvest and the boy and girl procreated, creating all of the Tarahumaras in the world today. I left the hotel early the next morning, just as the sun was beginning to light up the Barrancas rim, taking the trail I had scouted the afternoon before. I’d been warned by my friend, Michele, that there were many crisscrossing trails in the canyons, most of them leading to a Tarahumara village or rock shelter or field. There were simply no maps available for the canyon country and signage was unknown here, so her advice was simply to stay alert and keep to the main trail if I could. The first segment of the trail was well-used and easy to negotiate as it switch-backed downward, following smaller side drainage into the main canyon system. Sweating under the load of my backpack and a rapidly warming sun, I plodded along, trying not to think of the 6,000 vertical feet climb out. After a mile or so, the Chihuahua and lummox pines began to give way to oaks and junipers, and by noon, the landscape had changed dramatically. The upper elevation forest had been replaced by a fuzzy, tropical, deciduous blanket of cactus, acacia, cat claw, sotol, and various other thorny shrubs that I didn’t recognize. In early afternoon I passed a Tarahumara ranchera of five or six chinked log huts, built on a patch of high barren ground above a trickling stream. A few burros wandered loose nearby, their front feet hobbled with segments of rope. Near one of the houses was what looked like a garden, enclosed by a low “coyote fence” made of dead tree branches. Pods

Hiker on the trail to the Rio Urique Canyon in Barrancas del Cobre.

of clucking chickens scratched here and there as they searched for insects and seeds in the dry earth. A young girl, perhaps 10 years old, ran out to meet me waving a small woven basket above her head. Within seconds, four or five other children appeared, tugging at my clothing, offering me baskets, flutes, and bead necklaces. I was led, or pulled, into the compound where four or five women traditionally dressed in colorful cotton skirts and blouses sat in the shade of a sagging wooden porch weaving sotol baskets. They greeted me with smiles but said nothing. I tried some elementary school Spanish. “Buenos tardes, senoras.” My accent was terrible but it had gotten me in and out of Mexican beer joints for years. “Es un lindo día, no?” The women looked at me blankly and said nothing. I motioned to the beautiful basket one was weaving. “Esa canasta es bonita.” Still nothing. “Where are you going?” It was one of the girls who spoke. I was surprised because the nearest school was in the town of Creel, a considerable distance away both vertically and horizontally. “To the Rio Urique,” I answered. “Please tell these ladies their baskets are very pretty.”

The girl said something in Tarahumara to the older women. They all chuckled and nodded their heads in my direction. “Why you go to the river?” the girl asked. “It far away.” She pointed down the canyon in the same direction the trail went. “Just to see what it looks like. Where did you learn English?” “I go to school for one year,” she said, holding up one finger and grinning, “at the Jesuit mission. Pretty good, huh?”

With her two daughters watching, a Tarahumara woman weaves a sotol basket in a ranchera deep in the canyon.

I was coerced into buying a basket from the girl for a dollar, a small one that I could tie onto my pack with a piece of string. As I walked out of the compound back toward the trail, the children accompanied me, all of them still trying to sell their wares. I don’t know how far I walked that first day, but it wasn’t more than eight or nine miles, most of it downhill. I didn’t want blisters and I didn’t want the muscles in my legs and thighs to feel like I had been straddled by a hippo, so I camped early on a level shelf near a little creek that cascaded down a mini-canyon next to the trail. When I had gathered enough dead cactus wood for an evening fire and found a level place for my sleeping bag, I stripped and soaked in the pool at the base of a small waterfall, letting the cold water splash deliciously on the top of my head like a shower. Refreshed, I built a fire and fixed a package of rehydrated chili for dinner. Darkness came early because of the towering canyon walls, and somewhere around eight p.m. I spread my sleeping bag on a groundcloth of lightweight plastic and turned in, hoping that the creepy crawlies would keep to themselves. There are some truly nasty creatures that live in northern Mexico’s dry tropical forests, and among of the worst are kissing bugs, members of the Triatominae family, and also called assassin bugs or vampire bugs. Kissing bugs feed on the blood of vertebrates — humans included — and often give the object of their bloodsucking a nasty illness called trypanosomiasis, or Chagas disease. The illness is not pleasant; victims suffer from swelling at the infection site, fever, fatigue, a rash, body aches, swollen eyelids, headaches, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and enlargement of the liver or spleen. During the day, the bugs hide in crevices or under rocks, but at night, when campers are sleeping in the open, they emerge, hungry and aggressive. They tend to feed on people’s faces, thus the name "kissing bugs," and after they bite and ingest blood, they defecate on their victim’s face. The unsuspecting, sleeping person may accidentally scratch or rub the feces into the bite wound, eyes, or mouth and if the trypanosomia parasite carried in the bug feces enters the body through mucous membranes or even minor scratches, the result isn’t pleasant.

Then there are the rattlesnakes, at least three kinds that inhabit in the Barrancas. Most common are rock rattlesnakes, Crotalus lepidus, light gray reptiles with dark, zigzag banding around the body. Twin-spotted rattlers, Crotalus pricei, are also gray or sometimes medium brown, with cream colored bellies and an exceptionally venomous bite. The third kind, ridge-nosed rattlesnakes, are small—less than two feet in length—but they have big teeth and a nasty temperament. Because of a ridge Spring-fed waterfalls provide clean, cool water. of upturned scales along each side of the nose (thus the name), they resemble the African Gaboon viper, one of the most ominous looking reptiles on earth. The ridge makes them easy to identify, but I had no desire to get that close. The next morning I soaked in the waterfall pool once again, then devoted another hour to breakfast, coffee, and refilling and purifying water bottles. I broke camp late, mainly because I was in no hurry to get anywhere and wanted to give night-hunting rattlers plenty of time to slither back to whatever lair or den they occupied during the heat of the day. The farther I plodded into the canyon, the steeper the trail became, spilling in switchbacks down steep, crumbly slopes, or corkscrewing through fields of granite boulders and thorny stands of catclaw. In one place where the trail tiptoed along the rocky lip of a side canyon, I spotted a Tarahumara woman with a young child seated on a rocky ledge with the maw of the gorge spread out below her like a quilt. While her child looked on, the woman worked on a large basket, deftly plaiting the slender sotol leaves into a beautiful herringbone pattern. I waved and took her picture. She nodded and then returned to her weaving giving me no more of her attention. Where she lived I had no idea; I hadn’t seen any sign of a rock shelter or passed near a ranchera the entire morning. I wondered if she actually enjoyed the view, or just required personal space after an argument with her mother-in-law.

Campsite along the river I reached the Rio Urique in late afternoon, just as my thigh and calf muscles were beginning to scream in agony from what I estimated was a 10-mile-long downhill hike from the previous night’s camp. I was caked with mud from trail dust mixing with sweat, and my eyes ached from the glare of the sun. I was trying not to think of the hike out. . . 18 miles of rocky uphill trail that probably had heart attack written all over it.

After a couple of days of rest and recovery, however, I hoped I could persevere. Newt Gingrich once said, “Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.” I already did it so I figured I could do it again. Beginning near the Indian hamlet of Norogachi in the lesser canyon country southeast of Creel, the Rio Urique flows southward through the Barrancas del Cobre for about 100 miles before joining the Rio Gatopilas and the Rio San Miguel, Woman weaves a sotol basket while her son looks on. to become the Rio Fuerte, which then dumps into the Gulf of California near Los Mochis. Perhaps in April or May, when the stream was gorged with spring runoff, it would be fatter and wider and deeper and more impressive. But now, in the Mexican winter, my first glimpse of the river was disappointing. Green, sluggish, and very low, it alternated between long, shallow pools and lengthy boulder flats, and seemed insignificant and far out of proportion compared to the massive gorge that it had carved over the eons. The only campsite in view was on the opposite bank; it was a narrow fifty-foot-long bar of white sand lying next to the river, with a thick hedge of thorn scrub growing between it and the steep canyon wall behind it. I waded across in waist-deep, lukewarm water, carrying my pack and boots above my head and hoping I didn’t step into a hole or get spined by a catfish. Before I made camp, I checked the sand for tracks, hoping the sandbar wasn’t a playground for snakes or a watering hole for jaguars, but found nothing. I gathered driftwood for a fire and refilled my water bottles, adding a couple of drops of Clorox to each bottle to kill the parasites and bacteria, and then stripped and spent the next half-hour soaking my tired muscles in the tepid river. I really didn’t expect to meet any other hikers at that lonely campsite along the Urique, and didn’t really want to. I didn’t mind being alone and was quite content with my own company, mainly because I was too tired and too achy to carry on much of a conversation. An hour before dark, however, I heard a shout from the other side of the river, and saw three backpackers, one man and two women — all of them college age — smiling and waving. Judging by the modern expedition packs they carried and their composite trekking staffs, they looked like they knew what they were doing. “I ask you please do you mind if we share your camp?” the man shouted. He spoke with what sounded like a German accent. “There is no other place.”

“I waved them across. The sandbar was certainly large enough for the four of us and I had taken a couple of aspirin for the aches and pains. They removed their packs and boots and waded across, holding their gear above their heads. “I’m Hans,” the man said when he waded out onto the bar. “This is Lisa and that is Marna. They’re twins as you can probably notice. Thanks for letting us stay on your sandbar. We think Marna has Javelina provide food for local Indians, jaguars and cougars. been kissed by the kissing bug last night.” He pointed to one of the girls. The left side of her face was slightly swollen and a she had a bright red spot on her cheek. “We take her to the doctor tomorrow.” They found a spot they liked at the far end of the sand bar and dumped their packs in a pile. Lisa and Marna immediately and unabashedly stripped naked and went swimming, squealing like children as they splashed and gurgled in the green water. As we sat around the campfire after supper, Hans told me that they were all law students from Heidelberg University in Germany and that they were taking a few months off before starting their final year of law school. A month earlier they had been in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, exploring the trails above Wengen and Grindlewald, but bad weather had moved in and they decided to go someplace warmer. Trekking in Mexico, they knew, would be cheaper than trekking in the southwestern United States and since Lisa spoke fluent Spanish in addition to German and Hans spoke English they had the language problem pretty much covered. They had flown Lufthansa from Frankfort to Mexico City to Ciudad Chihuahua and caught the train to Creel. They hiked into the Barrancas two days earlier on a trail that began near the Divisadero, planning to stay in the canyon for at least six days. The plan had been scrapped, however, when Marna was bitten by something during the night. “We never saw what bit her,” said Hans, “but I have heard about this kissing bug. It makes you red and swollen and gives you a rash. Then you get fever and vomiting and diarrhea and your liver grows to twice its size. It does not sound happy. We have no aspirin but we have some very good weed.” He said something to Lisa in German. She produced a small tin and a package of ZigZag papers and rolled four of the most perfect joints I’ve ever had the pleasure to see.

Swarms of fireflies were beginning to pirouette I donated half a bottle of aspirin from my first-aid kit to Marna, and at dark, my three campmates retired to their end of the sandbar and spread their sleeping bags and pads on the sand. I stayed by the fire and finished the joint Lisa had given me. In the distance I could hear the evening nocturne,

a couple of coyotes squabbling over a rabbit kill somewhere downriver, and the squeaks and squeals of bat sonar echoing off the canyon walls as they worked their echolocation magic in search of insects. Above the river and up and down the far shoreline, swarms of fireflies were beginning to pirouette and cabriole across the landscape in search of lovers, each displaying its bioluminescence like a swimsuit model displays her booty. It was probably the weed, but I could imagine a troupe of desert elves waving tiny torches as they danced all around me, perhaps celebrating the arrival of darkness or the emergence of stars in the heavens, or maybe even the temporary company of humans. I could see that the Germans were sitting up in their sleeping bags watching the spectacle too. Hans and the twins left early the next morning, hoping to reach the Divisadero by the afternoon and then find a doctor, if there was one, in Creel. If not, they would have to catch the train to either Los Mochis, or back to Ciudad Chihuahua, in order reach civilization and medical help for Marna. After they left, I did very little except to hike downstream until the nearly vertical canyon walls on both banks made walking further impossible. It was easy to see why no one had ever rafted or kayaked the Rio Urique from end to end. In low water even a kayaker would spend most of the day pulling or carrying his craft over boulder field after boulder field, with very little paddling in between. In high water, no kayak or raft would have survived the rapids caused by those same boulder fields. And because of the steepness and corrugated nature of the inner gorge walls and the thick riparian hedge of thorn bushes that grew down to the water’s edge on both banks, I could see that camping spots were probably rare. My sandbar, in fact, was the only level place I saw in the half-mile of riverbank I had explored the previous afternoon. I spent the rest of the day birdwatching. Bird life in the riparian belt along the river seemed inexhaustible. Three types of parrots inhabit the canyon, red-fronted, thick billed, and green parakeets, all of them raucous and chattering constantly as they gamboled from tree to bush like brightly colored mini-rockets. There were belted kingfishers waiting for sucker or squawfish minnows to carelessly venture into the shallows, and dozens of endangered black-capped vireos and fly-catchers popping in and out of the thorny shoreline hedge searching for insects. Quail, Inca doves, and chachalacas — long-legged, rust-colored birds that look like the offspring of a mourning dove and a roadrunner — cooed and twittered from the shade beneath the thorn bushes. Overhead, there were the ominous and ever-present turkey vultures, floating like black kites on the canyon breeze, always on the lookout for something dead and rotting. Larger creatures occupy the bottomlands of the Barrancas as well. Cougars and jaguars still roam the canyons, not many, but enough to be concerned about if I was a white-tailed deer or a herd goat meandering about unattended at night. The latter, known as El Tigre by Spanish-speaking locals, is the third largest wild feline on earth after tigers and African lions, and is not to be taken lightly when it’s hungry. More common are white-tailed and mule deer, and collared peccary — smelly, tusked, pig-like ungulates that, because of inherent species blindness, can’t see much farther than their nose. They are social animals and often roam in herds of 30 or more animals. When startled, the herd tends to bolt headlong in every direction and woe to the hiker or Indian who stands in their way. The small group than I ran into along the river broke and ran when they saw me, luckily in the opposite direction.

I left the sandbar camp early on my fourth canyon day, not looking forward to the long climb out. Hiking uphill would be slower and more difficult than descending, and I wanted an extra day or two to do some exploring. My friend Michele had suggested I take another trail back to the rim, one that branched off the Posada Barrancas trail a few miles from the river and was supposedly marked with a rock cairn. If I took it, I should then look for a secondary trail forking off to the right about three miles from the junction. Michele hadn’t been there herself, but according to the Tarahumara guide she always hired for her canyon expeditions, the smaller trail led to a box canyon that contained a prehistoric rock shelter and some Tarahumara pictographs. The first trail junction was easy enough to find. There was no signage whatsoever but the fork was marked with a pile of rocks Jaguars, “El Tigre,” keep a low profile in canyon country. that I had completely missed on the way down. The secondary trail leading to the box canyon was more difficult to locate but I finally spotted what I thought was an old and little-used pathway branching off to the right. I’d gone less than 100 yards when I saw the first set of pictographs painted on a sheltered rock panel 30 feet above the trail. I could make out birds with feathery tails and wings (called thunderbirds in the American southwest), and four or five quadrupeds of some sort, probably goats or deer. There were also several sets of rectangles within rectangles, and what looked like a corn plant. They had all been painted using red ocher pigment. I knew that Tarahumara rock art was fairly common in the Barrancas, but it was often difficult to spot because of where it was located—usually in rock shelters and hidden overhangs well away from main pathways. The red ocher paint, made from hydrated ferric oxide, has been used by the Tarahumaras for centuries and is still used to paint drums and other tourist items today. This particular panel could have been made a thousand years earlier or painted yesterday; I simply had no way of knowing.

A cliff dwelling deep inside the Copper Canyon. A hundred yards past the first pictograph panel, I spotted another one on the opposite side of the trail. It too featured thunderbirds and four-legged, goat-like animals. The rock shelter itself was another 50 yards along the path, tucked into the base of a nearly vertical rock face. I leaned my pack against a tree and scrambled up to the overhang, expecting to find nothing but crumbled ruins. Instead, there were three, almost textbook perfect stone huts built against the back wall, each with a single rectangular doorway facing outward. When I peered inside the first doorway, I knew immediately this was not just an abandoned homesite. The interior floor was littered with stacks of bleached bones—what looked very much like leg bones, tibias, fibulas and femurs—of human beings. Human leg bones are easy to identify because the fibula, the larger bone, is triangular in shape and the tibia and fibula are two separate entities. In other mammals, tibia and fibula are usually fused and the fibula is round, not triangular. I looked through the doorways of the other two rooms and saw more stacks of bones. Sometime in the past, the rock shelter had obviously been a burial site, but for whom I didn’t know. Tarahumara often bury their dead in caves and rock shelters but the bodies are usually entombed in sealed burial chambers, not left lying around for the coyotes to gnaw on. And the Tarahumara seldom bury more than three bodies in one spot, but the three huts contained the leg bones of at least 15 or 20 people and probably more. The real mystery, however, was that there were no rib cages or skulls or pelvic bones or any other body parts mixed in that I could see. An archaeologist told me later that the site was probably an Apache burial cave, not Tarahumara, but he had no explanation for the “legs only” phenomenon. I stayed

in the rock shelter just long enough to snap a few pictures and made camp that evening as far away from the place as I could hike in the remaining daylight. It required another full day and a half to reach the rim, by which time I was running out of food and water and enthusiasm. The trek was uneventful save for the chance to watch four Tarahumara boys practice a running game called rarájipari. They barreled around a corner in front of me Two Tarahumara serenaders at speed, taking turns at kicking a hard wooden ball down the trail in front of them. They were wearing nothing on their feet but lightweight, homemade sandals with soles made from tire treads and tied to their ankles with leather thongs. Rarájipari is only a game, but it’s taken seriously by traditional Tarahumara. Each match involves two competing teams of from four to ten to men or boys. Each team is given a solid wood ball about the size of a baseball, and the object of the competition is simply to shovel kick the ball over a predetermined course to the finish line. The first team to do so, wins. The amazing thing about rarájipari is that most races begin directly after a long night of dancing and drinking beer, but even suffering from what must be wicked hangovers the teams may run 40 miles without stopping. I spent my last night in the Barrancas at a small, tidy tourist hotel near the Divisadero. The following afternoon I would catch El Chepe back to Ciudad Chihuahua, and from there catch a flight home. First came a long hot shower and a cold beer, then Bistec Sonora smothered in onions with papas fritas on the side, at the hotel’s small restaurant. Later, sitting on the patio sipping a final beer, I listened to a three-piece Mariachi band render the local version of an old Mexican favorite, Guadalajara.

Tienes el alma de provinciana, (You are the heart of the province,) Hueles a limpia rosa temprana (You smell like the pure early rose,) A verde jara fresca del rio, (Like the fresh green river,) Son mil palomas tu caserio, (You are the homeland of a thousand doves.) Tarahumara, Tarahumara, (Tarahumara, Tarahumara,) Hueles a pura tierra mojada. (You smell like pure moist soil.)

The Bombardier By Tony Tedeschi

You would probably mistake the men for revolutionaries about to invade new territory with their bombs . . . It was the smell of the crushed grapes that reminded me of the boss – dead more than twenty years – and the family heritage that had died with him. I thought, once again, of the wooden box that contained his papers, given to me by my grandmother after the boss died. It was in the attic, of course, with all the useless bric-a-brac we accumulate as we grow older. The damn thing was a real bother. I’m not about to say it haunted me, but whenever I thought of the box, it seemed to demand I do something about what it contained. My bus had made an unscheduled rest stop near Wallingford, Vermont, and someone nearby was making wine. It’s true what they say about smells being the most powerful catalyst of memories and the strong smell of the pressed grapes was one of my most vivid childhood remembrances. Every October, my grandfather made wine, a deep red zinfandel with a rich grapey taste. We drank it with dinner, as soon as it had fermented, while the taste was still quite raw. My family seemed to make a virtue of impatience. In the case of the zinfandel, it worked for me. I liked the wine new. It had that unchecked power of youth. As a kid, I drank it, greatly diluted with cream soda, but still it always left me light-headed. Then after dinner, my grandfather would show me how to draw animals.

The animals my grandfather drew were always elliptically shaped, fat really. He put them down on the white paper that was used to wrap the Italian bread from the warm ovens of our neighborhood bakery in Astoria, Queens: fat fish, fat birds, even fat cats. They had to be robust to accommodate the split bamboo he used to fashion set pieces, anchored to the turf at fairgrounds, which held his exploding powders. My grandfather, you see, was a pyrotechnist and one of the unrecognized artists who’d brought this spectacular art to these shores from Europe. The Long Island of the first half of the 20th century was a gathering place for clusters of these nameless immigrants determined to recast this new land in the images of the old. Pyrotechnics had been my family’s trade for generations, as far back as we could trace. In fact, in the living room of the home where I lived with my parents and grandparents, there was a photo above the mantle, taken in Melfi, Italy in 1900, showing my grandfather as a boy of about 12, along with his father and his father’s father, outside a cave, with what were obviously explosives, wrapped neatly in brown paper. If you didn’t know that the sign, in Italian, above the cave read “pyrotechnics laboratory,” you would probably mistake the men for revolutionaries. In a way, I guess, they were. They were about to invade a new territory with their bombs. My grandfather was the first of our family to cross the ocean. It was 1912. Then, two years later, he sent for his father. For a short time, they labored together, putting on shows across most of the eastern United States, putting in long hours working for other men who had the capital they never managed to accumulate. When my great-grandfather died, my grandfather carried on alone. He was on the road for days, sometimes weeks at a time, living in economy hotel rooms, preparing his meals off hot plates, because he didn’t like the tasteless “American” food they served in diners. Instead, he heated the pasta, artichokes and chicory or escarole soup my grandmother packed for him in jars, accompanied by the salted mozzarella and dried sausages she wrapped in waxed paper. When my father was a teenager, my grandfather began to teach him the business. But I never knew my father as a pyrotechnist, and my grandfather never tried to teach the art of his bombs to me, beyond the harmless drawings on the bread paper. It was a moot point, really, because I never had any real desire to learn it. I asked my father why the family tradition had been allowed to fade so quietly into oblivion. He told me it was a matter of fear. When my father was 16, he was working with my grandfather at a fireworks company compound. My father, being an apprentice, was making fuses in a small, outbuilding, separate from the main structure where my grandfather worked. One day, the building where my father worked was blown to smithereens. My grandfather was like a crazy man and had to be restrained from entering the burning skeleton of what remained of the building. My father, however, had left to go to the bathroom, a few minutes before another apprentice had struck the spark that leveled the fuse factory. I don’t know what pact my grandfather made with

God to spare his son, but when my father came running around the bend from the outhouse to see what had happened, my grandfather determined that my father’s career in pyrotechnics was over. The art of pyrotechnics had created in my grandfather a reverence for fire and he made the fire work for him in dazzling ways. The shows he staged when I was a young boy were the most spectacular things I’ve ever seen. His aerial bombs filled the sky with rich reds, bright greens, whites that hurt the eyes, yellows like the light at the center of a flame. There was a two-dimensional quality to his air shows. As a spectator, I always felt as if no distance separated me from the sky, as if I could reach up just a bit and pull the colors down about me. And his set pieces were even better, built of the split bamboo that he fashioned at the long tables where he worked, then driven into the soil of the fairgrounds where he wowed his audiences. The fairgrounds were flat, empty places that my grandfather filled with color. He seemed to like that setting, the sheer blankness, unencumbered by backdrop, uncluttered by someone else’s work. I remember the distinctive form he cut, silhouetted against the colors, his sweat-stained and pockmarked fedora shielding his head from the burning pellets that rained down upon him like tiny meteorites. I remember the cadence of his limp (a wound from an explosion) as he moved from set piece to set piece, lighting the fuses, releasing his fountains to spill cascades of burning, colored waters; his birds to flap their wings then fizzle back into darkness; his gunfighters to do battle with each other; and a burning-bright, 48-star flag, that to my young boy’s eyes was the only flag worthy of the name, “America.” My grandfather was never home, of course, on the Fourth of July, but he always left his calling card. On the last few days before he went on the road for the Independence Day celebrations, he would retreat behind the closed door of his cellar workshop, so neither I nor my sister might see what he was doing and be tempted to repeat it when he was not around. Then hours later, he would emerge with the neatly fashioned aerial bombs and pinwheels, hung with the familiar brown-paper pods, which he would turn over to my father with the appropriate instructions. When the evening of the Fourth would arrive, and after all of the amateurs had had their time to play with their weak Asian substitutes, my father would unleash my grandfather’s tour de force, nailed to the telephone pole alongside our house. Always a police car would come by early in the show. Always my father would go to the squad car window and explain that we were pyrotechnists. Always the police would give permission to continue, reluctantly, the way police do. Always they’d stay around to “supervise.” When my grandfather retired, he was, for the most part, stubborn to a fault and extremely set in his ways. He lived with my parents in Copiague, just east of the Suffolk County line on Long Island, in a slab ranch with no wine cellar. He’d while

away his days at home making repairs to things that didn’t need repairs and painting things that sometimes needed a new coat. I had lost interest in drawing and developed an interest in photography. I liked the feel of the machine in my hands. My grandfather was a favorite subject. I’d sneak up on him and do candids. He’d pretend not to notice. He was painting a footstool in the backyard one summer day. While I squatted for a low-angle shot, he mumbled something. “What?” I asked, after clicking the photo. “Giotto,” he said. I assumed he was referring to himself and his painting technique. Then, I wondered if he were not acknowledging a passing of the torch. My grandfather’s stubbornness, more than anything else, had kept him from gaining the recognition he deserved during his most productive years and making the money he should have made. For one thing, he had refused to learn English beyond the barest minimum vocabulary of mispronounced words that he needed to communicate, and this badly broken English kept him from conducting any kind of meaningful business of his own. Often his intelligence was underrated because of his language deficiency. And, he did not suffer fools lightly, so he made his share of enemies. His bitterness sometimes took the form of we (Italians) against they (every Philistine who had preceded him here). They, of course, did not appreciate his art, understand his metaphors. There was, however, one man who took a great interest in my grandfather’s work. He was another Italian immigrant, younger than my grandfather, a lower-echelon helper at one of the pyrotechnics companies where my grandfather had worked. This man had managed to save some money and began his own business about the time my grandfather retired. He convinced my grandfather to come work two or three days a week during his retirement, to make some extra money off the books. My grandfather accepted the offer to break up the boredom of his days at home and because he loved making his bombs. Also, I believe, he felt he had a legacy and no place to leave it. This man had been kind to my grandfather and my grandfather returned the investment in kindness many fold. He taught the man the wonderful things he knew. It was a few years later that I graduated college, joined the Air Force, married and fathered two daughters. In the service each year, on the Fourth of July, we would have a USO troupe entertain at our base in New Mexico. After the entertainment, there would be a fireworks show. My wife would enjoy it. My daughters’ eyes would grow wide in a combination of fear and amazement. I would be totally unimpressed.

When I left the service, we returned to New York, to Queens, not far from where I had been raised. We’d go each Fourth of July to a place under the Throgs Neck Bridge and watch our neighbors set off those same lame fireworks that were a mere warm-up for my grandfather’s neighborhood show when I was a boy. I would tell my wife and my daughters that this was nothing, couldn’t compare to the fireworks my grandpa used to make. They had known him for the final few years of his life, but he had long since stopped making fireworks, and it was impossible for them to relate to what he had done, without ever having seen it. Then, the man my grandfather had taught began winning awards at international competitions and gaining greater recognition, until he became one of the foremost pyrotechnists in the country, if not the world. He did big national and international celebrations. I decided to take my family to see one of the new impresario’s shows. So, I stood one night in the wind and the rain at Shea Stadium. The game and the fireworks display had been delayed several times, but finally things got under way. I looked straight up, my eyes turned to a black sky, the two-dimensional sky of my boyhood, just inches from the end of my nose. But even the sky, in its shortened dimension, seemed to be shaped by the magnitude of the aerial bombs – the designs I’d seen so many times. How they lit the sky with color, with design, complicated design – symmetry, asymmetry. The rain made my face wet and I was glad for that because it hid my tears. I knew my grandfather was staging this whole extravaganza. I saw my grandfather’s face behind the exploding circles of color, as clearly as I’d seen it in the late ‘40s, when he’d shown me how to draw the fat fishes on the Italian bread paper. They had a set piece that night at Shea Stadium, something that said “Mets” in the team colors, but it was lame compared to my grandfather’s fountains, his dueling cowboys, his birds, his American flag. The following weekend, I dug the wooden box out of the bottom of a cardboard shipping carton in my attic. In it were white papers, rolled and stuffed in, too many for the small box, crushed on both ends, flattened along the length. The roll was tied with a piece of twine, yellow with age. I loosened the knot and unrolled the scrolls. The drawings were on an array of papers: white bread paper, brown bag paper, some on stiffer oak tag. The pictures were cruder than I’d remembered and that disappointed me a bit, but as I began to examine them more carefully, I realized it was not the drawings themselves but the promise of what they would become that was the true marvel of their meaning. The formulas scrawled in the freehand boxes in the corners marked these as the blueprints of his set pieces: compounds of strontium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, sulfur, in combinations I couldn’t begin to understand. I rolled the papers back up again and tied them with the same twine. The roll wasn’t quite as tight as it had been before, nor the knot as neat. I was sorry I had

disturbed them. Then I couldn’t help but smile. I couldn’t blame him for holding something back. The set pieces were special. They were his gift to us, to live only in the memories of those of us who had seen them, the way only he could have built them. I pushed the wooden box back into its setting among the inconsequential cartons that protected it. The bus was moving now through the hills of central Vermont. I was on a long, overland trip, the way my grandfather used to travel. It was a Sunday; I was heading for a writing workshop, which would begin the following morning. I was about to chuck the corporate life still one more time and take another stab at something creative. My wife always viewed such forays into a new life as writer or photographer as detours in an inevitable business career path, from which we always emerged poorer. After each, I always promised I would get serious about becoming a businessman, but they were promises I knew I couldn’t keep. I’d been looking at the sky, watching the clouds thicken. I followed the bank of clouds back down to the road. It was one of those sparsely populated rural roads: a house here, a barn there. A chilly, early autumn wetness covered everything. There had been sprinkles, but a serious storm was building overhead. It would empty the landscape of all human movement. Then I thought, if they ever exploded the big bombs, if the lunacy ever took them that far, I could only hope that for one brief instant I would see the boss’s colors again, his designs – that they would at least have had the good taste to let my grandfather put on the show.

Coming in for a landing Bend, Oregon Photo by Buddy Mays

Email from the Upper West Side All Roads Lead Home Batmo Retires (October 2019) By Aglaia Davis

My one and only misgiving was what would I do with Batmo. It was Batmo’s final weekend. Not in his life, but in mine. Since sometime in mid-2008, after Batmo had long imprinted on me, I had never seriously imagined the day of parting from him. But in October 2019, almost 12 years after his “adoption” (purchase) and arrival in New York City, Batmo was going “home.” Granted, as readers of this column know, Batmo’s “home” had been the isle of Manhattan since his first set of license plates were affixed to his front and rear bumpers. He had lived the punishing life that was New York City parking, complete with its smattering of dirt, sand, and scratches—and hours-long waits to cut the engine and actually park. Mechanical misfires, near-breakdowns, and chunks of our lives spent sitting on the “Big LIE [Long Island Expressway]” or in Tunnel Traffic, I adored Batmo and Batmo adored me. We were as close as a car and owner could be. And then it happened. Sometime in September 2019, I made the deal—an across-state-lines purchase of Batmo’s successor: Black, tiny, stick shift, and brand new. The Honda SI that I’d finally steeled myself with the chutzpa to acquire was waiting for me in the southern tip of Maine (where the price was the best and the games were the least), and, hence, Batmo’s retirement beckoned. It had not been easy. Truth be told, my one and only misgiving – the “no” that kept me denying myself my next set of wheels – was what I would do with Batmo. You see, unlike the “average,” “normal” (sensible) American motorist, for me, my cars were family. I did not sell my cars; I retired them. My first – a rusted-out 1977 Chevy Caprice Classic – sits (to this day), rusting in peace (painted pink) in my father’s field in Fayette, Maine. That car – which I never actually named – became mine the year I earned my driver’s license at age 16, and I “saved” it from no uncertain death with my down-the-dirt-road neighbor, Alan Poland, who was a car enthusiast happy to take on a project and happier still to teach me how to care for a vehicle. “Change the oil every three months like clockwork,” he counseled, “and don’t let it rust—and your car will run forever.” Alan was old when Batmo was young—and though I knew the answer, I called him on more than one occasion, as his health faltered and ability to work on his own cars corroded, to ask, “Alan, is it possible to change Batmo’s oil too much?” He would ponder the question – if only to artificially delay the call – and then assure me, “No, you can’t change the oil too much.” At the

tail end of the road of Alan’s life, my connections to him were the occasional long-distance phone calls about how proudly I was keeping my car—as he had taught me. But, the Chevy aside, Batmo was my first – and truest – car love. Yes, there was the tiny red Toyota Celica that my father bought for me the year I took off for (Baylor) law school, that I dutifully waxed every single weekend like clockwork. There was the “hiccup” of a Celica I bought immediately after law school, when I misguidedly figured I would need one for my daily commutes to New Jersey. And there was the aged Toyota Avalon that my father bought me in or around 2006, which got me to and from various riding stables, until 2008, when I determined that I needed my own car. And the rest is history. As well as Alan taught me to treasure and care for my cars, I never doted on one like I doted on Batmo. Even though Batmo was far bigger a car than I realized I needed (as soon as I got him from Maine to Manhattan); and even though he looked so utterly boring in his birthday suit (I quickly realized that “pimp” cars did not come like that), he quickly and surely became my most prized material possession. Sure, it took many years before the Batmo of 2019 took shape – years of studying and copying other cars, ordering after-market parts, and sending Batmo out for work – but my adoration for him never wavered. As temperamental as his operations proved to be, and as many schleps we made to Nissan, Batmo imprinted on me and I on Batmo years before his miles stalled at 75,000 when I broke my collarbone and sent him west to New Jersey for five months of R&R. It was never a question of Batmo’s replacement – for which none would do – but a question of Batmo’s retirement. It was that notion I could not come to terms with. The vehicle would never be owned outside of the family, of course – meaning a Davis or Malik (who had all but co-owned Batmo with me) – would have to adopt him. In fact, I placed Batmo in my Will upon my untimely death. Perhaps the slow unravel began when I finally faced the Blue Book reality that Batmo was valued at $1500 in “real life,” when, to me, no price could buy him – and that it was therefore fool-hearty to continue insuring him like he would not be declared “totaled” by a small fender bender. That was April 2019; and, by August, purchasing his successor had become inevitable. But the deal was not sealed until the day I resolved that Batmo would go to live with my father. Alas, he (Jed Davis) was the only person I know who would keep Batmo in the style and shape he was accustomed to (immaculate), fill him up only with high test gas, and give him the quiet home he always deserved. I scheduled Batmo’s retirement and the dawning of a new vehicular chapter in my life for a day and week that ended up passing by because, well, I fell ill and couldn’t drive. But it bought me a few days—and another whole weekend with Batmo. That Saturday, perhaps, I was still refusing to think about what would occur on the Thursday next, but I enjoyed my day. Then Sunday. Batmo’s last day ever with me in our favorite state (New Jersey). Batmo’s last drive to the barn; Batmo’s last drive on Route 3; Batmo’s last traffic jam on the Helix; and Batmo’s last

roll through the Lincoln Tunnel. Everywhere we went, I videoed and took pictures. I wanted to memorialize our final days together because, well, I adored my car. I officially retired Batmo on a weekday, October 3, 2019. Eerily, for the entire drive north (which I documented numerous times on video and camera), my normally chatty business email was dead quiet. Nothing was coming in. I fielded no phone calls, and placed none of my own. For eight solid hours, Batmo purred as well as he ever had in his life for approximately 350 miles to Maine. That same day, he rested at Honda, where I officially signed the “adoption” papers for his successor (whom I met but did not take yet). Only I would know and believe that Batmo drove better on his drive up to Maine than he had ever driven in his 12 years with me. I dare say he knew he was going “home.” We drove out to Fayette together on October 4, 2019, where Jed was waiting with waiving arms to greet his new car. The next day, Jed and I signed Batmo’s Title, and then dropped him off down the road at the mechanic for (of course) an oil change and look over. Batmo’s odometer read just north of 117,000 when I cut his engine for the last time. Yes, it is true that Batmo let his “emotions” be known the first day that Jed attempted to drive him to the office in Augusta (by cutting his engine and refusing to move any further, about five miles from the house). AAA had to come tow him. The diagnosis was “bad gas” – though it was the same gas he and I had driven the second half of our trip on (and of course high test). But Jed and I both knew it was Batmo’s rebellion against being left behind. And, yes, he threw a typical “Batmo-style tantrum” when Jed left him all alone (in a garage, of course) for two solid weeks. I warned that he had never been left like that and would not be happy. He had a completely dead battery that had to be replaced upon return. But, aside from those small “expressions” of his personality, Batmo adopted Jed just as Jed adopted him. It was a gift of sorts for both of them, and when I got into my brand new Honda SI (“The Black”) to drive back to NYC, I was for the first time overjoyed by all of it. I – the car-crazy country girl-turned Manhattanite – finally had the black sports car I had wanted; Jed had an unexpected, but delightful, second car; and I had done right by Batmo. Alan Poland would have given me a nod. So, Retire in Peace (R.I.P.), my beloved Batmo. May you drive many more miles with your new owner, and may every road always lead home. I love you. Aglaia

Waaaaht? ‘ That’s why I’m the President.’ By Malcolm P. Ganz

In the late ‘70s, I was working as the PR guy for the American Airlines catering subsidiary, Sky Chefs. I know, I know, how the hell does anyone PR airline food? Nonetheless, we had a test kitchen, where world-class chefs labored day in and day out, eventually destroying any chance to return to the elite gourmet universe with their reputations intact. But they had benefits that allowed them to grab empty seats on flights to isolated islands in the Pacific where they could vacation incognito and bitch about the food. We were definitely the stepchildren of our counterparts, who worked the more glamorous jobs on the jet-setting airline side. Not surprisingly, however, we did have one helluva company picnic each summer, with near-gourmet food prepared by our chefs, who, at least for that one day, could escape the frustration of creating food on plastic dishes for flight attendant carts. What transpired during one moment in time on one of those sunny summer days was a life lesson about how, at least sometimes, I may not be as smart as I think I am. Or, to put it another way, my considered analysis of a situation turned out to be not as good as an opposing point of view that I thought was, well, ridiculous. It all involved the company softball game. Of course it would. I was chosen by the team that was captained by the company’s president, Al Ferrari. Ferrari was one of those executives who had taken years to work his way through the ranks to the top spot and now was going enjoy whatever limelight went with that, even if it were just within the borders of his less-than-glamorous company subdivision. Ergo, he always made sure he was the center of attention. For the purposes of the softball game, he determined to showcase his rifle arm and therefore named himself our third baseman. I had spent most of my baseball-playing youth, long gone, in the New York City Police Athletic League as a first baseman (I loved the shape of the first 52

baseman’s mitt) but for that day’s game could not find my now-ancient glove, so I had to settle for second base in deference to a first baseman who remembered where he had put his mitt. I’d always considered second base a kind of weenie position, where you could practically hand the ball to the first baseman, except if you were the second baseman on our junior league precinct team, who threw everything my way either in the dirt or one of those tweener hops that are virtually impossible to catch and almost always hit you in the crotch and had you pondering in an age of little-published sexuality research, whether you would ever be able to have children. Alas, I digress. Back to our game. We took the field and the other team promptly put their first two batters on first and second, which was not surprising since these games were generally 32-31 affairs. That sort of predictable outcome notwithstanding, Ferrari was not pleased with the way the game had begun and trotted over from third to call for a conference on the pitcher’s mound. After exhorting us to, “hold ‘em down,” he turned to me and said, “if the ball is hit to me, you know to cover second, right?” “Sure,” I answered. I wanted to add, I am the second-baseman, ain’t I? But of course I didn’t say that. I had a more serious issue to contemplate: my analysis of how we should handle a hot shot to the third-baseman differently. As the conference adjourned and we trotted back to our positions, I was wondering where our captain’s brains had wandered off to. Was he thinking double play? Double Plaaaay? I mean this is company picnic softball, we don’t know from double plays. We don’t even know from catching the damn thing and throwing it in the general direction of first base. Here we had the wonderful, force-at-any-base scenario staring us in the face, which meant that any of us infielders who somehow managed to field the ball cleanly – including, dare I say, third-baseman Ferrari – didn’t have to throw the ball anywhere. We’d merely to run to the nearest base and stomp on it. You got that, chief? This is the stuff of dreams for company-picnic infielders. Of course, as I might well have predicted, the next batter whistled a one-hopper right at Ferrari, who fielded it two steps from the bag. But does he take the two steps to the right and record the easy out of the lead runner? Nope. He has to demonstrate his rifle arm, remember? And that means he expects me, a displaced first-baseman, to perform as a real second-baseman. Dutifully, I had begun to move toward second base, just in case he did do something predictably foolish. In an instant, the ball was winging my way, belt-high, just as I was reaching the bag. Miraculously, I handled the throw smoothly, stepped balletically on the bag and, in a continuation of the same fluid motion, made what could have passed for a gold medal figure skater’s perfect ten axel, while redirecting the ball toward first. The first-baseman received the relay with the batter a full three steps from the base for an easy completion of the double play. But hold on, wait a second. Our first baseman realized the runner who had been on second – the guy big Al should have killed off by stepping on third – was still very much alive, had rounded third and was headed for home. Our first baseman turned and fired to our catcher who executed the perfect swipe tag.

Triple play. The first time we handled the ball. We trotted off the field with an air of nonchalance that said we executed this sort of play routinely. As my path converged with Ferrari’s, a few steps from home plate, he said, out of the side of his mouth and without turning his head, “that’s why I’m the president.” He continued on toward the bench, where he took a swig of his drink, then sat down. OK, Al, point conceded. That’s why you are the president, while I’m flacking for your product line that has our creative team members refusing to come out of the test kitchen unless they can hold newspapers in front of their faces when anyone points a camera in their direction. The final score was 32-31. Unless maybe the kid from the mailroom had simply no more room on his official scorecard. Around the water cooler on Monday morning, no one could remember which team had won. Son of a bitch, I thought, that first inning was something. But reality intercedes. I went back to my office to fend off newspaper food writers, forever hounding me about visiting our JFK flight kitchen, where prepping food for five 747s a day, headed for San Juan, was like a SAC base on alert with Russian bombers on the way. And an airline catering PR flack had to make sure no one ever saw the mayhem there. Al Ferrari died Oct. 10, 2016 at the age of 96. I only found that out when I Googled him many years after that softball game, wherein my elitist attitude had suffered the effects of whatever karma he was channeling that summer day long ago when he provided me a memory I still drag from the depths of my age-related brain fog and wonder . . . did that really happen?

Pizza in the Piazza Piazza de Duomo, Florence Photo by Molly Neal

The Shuffle Inn By Tony Tedeschi

‘My five thousand dollar chairs,’ my father used to say, but never with bitterness. He’d taken his best shot, and he’d recognized it as such. Imagine my surprise that New Year’s Eve when my father stepped up to the mike to sing. He opened with his favorite, “You’re Nobody ‘til Somebody Loves You,” accompanying himself with two swizzle sticks beating against the mike stem, and even doing that imitation of a trombone break I have always found so weak, so silly. He did three more numbers: “Slow Boat To China,” “Dark Town Strutters Ball” (including the Italian stanzas that Lou Monte had made popular), then he finished up with “Sleepy Time Gal.” And even then, they didn’t want him to leave, but he was getting tired, you could see. He was drained, and it was time to go. Everyone could see that, even my father. Actually, my father, Nicholas Roman, Sr., had always been a crowd-pleaser. He enjoyed the limelight and, as a young man, had a visceral yearning to be a celebrity or at least some kind of big shot, which, as was the case for many sons of immigrants at that time, meant making it on something less than a high school education. My father opted to become a 55

bartender; there was a bit of theater to that and there were always women there to watch you work. His first job was, right after World War II, at the Metropole Café, smack in the center of Times Square, where he learned the art of mixing drinks from Big Otto Klaus, a German with shoulders the width of one of Hitler’s Panzers. Otto was a likeable German when not a lot of people liked Germans, and he mixed drinks during an age when there were truly wonderful mixed drinks, with wonderful names – brandy Alexander, sloe gin fizz, Rob Roy, angel’s teat – in a night club that featured jazz greats like Gene Krupa, Jack Teagarten, Harry James and Artie Shaw, before it became a topless bar in the ‘60s. After his internship at the Metropole, my father went back home to Queens, tending bar at the Boulevard, the Queens Terrace, and the Merry-Go-Round (one of those rotating bars). Then, after about ten years of that, he put it all on the line and bought a failing restaurant and bar under the railroad trellis off Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria. “Bought” was a euphemism. He borrowed from everyone, including most heavily from family, because family did that for you, and my father, they knew, knew his trade very well. He called the place the Shuffle Inn (my father always had a thing for word play, no matter how corny). My mother cooked and she was a terrific cook (what daughter of an Italian immigrant mother wasn’t?), but my father wanted his place to be known as a nightclub; the restaurant was just so that people wouldn’t go home early or come in too late. He didn’t have the money to buy the top acts, so he showcased new talent, and he was good at picking performers on their way up. He had a good ear for music and he had a wonderful sense of humor, so he knew what he liked in a comic, as well, and if he thought a guy was funny, his clientele invariably agreed. The most successful performer who got his start at the Shuffle Inn was Danny Torreone, a liquid-voiced Italian crooner who was a friend of my father’s brother, my Uncle Carl. My father gave Danny his first paying job: thirty-five dollars a week. Irrespective of the money, the exposure got the guy’s career going, despite the fact that my father ended up firing him. “You’re no good and no one will want you,” my father told him. (I’d always thought there was a touch of humor in the line, during the many times I’d heard my father tell the story over the years; it being an obvious negative inversion of the title of my father’s favorite song.) Firing Danny Torreone was not the misjudgment it appeared to be. “The guy made his name on records,” my father would tell you. “He still can’t work a room.” He’d fired Danny for refusing to sing “You’re Nobody ‘til Somebody Loves You,” to a post-midnight New Year’s crowd so besotted they wouldn’t have recognized the song. And Danny’d been offered more than his weekly salary to sing it. When he’d refused to take their big tip, a table of thirteen drunks, who were spending money like water, got up and left. The crowd thinned after that – just after the ringing-in of the New Year, with a lot more booze to be sold. That less-than-productive New Year’s Eve was symptomatic of the

general downturn the club was experiencing, in its inexorable slide toward bankruptcy, after a good run that made its ultimate fate even sadder. The Shuffle Inn continued to grow, flourished really, for about five years, to the point where it drove its nearest neighborhood competitor out of business. Then, instead of business turning up dramatically, it began to decline. It was a glitch in the business cycle. The nightclub scene had lost its oomph and my father didn’t have the capitalization to ride out the slack period. He didn’t file for bankruptcy protection; you didn’t screw your family out of the money they’d lent you by hiding behind some escape hatch in the legal canon. He just closed the place one day and went back to work for other people to begin paying off his ten thousand dollar debt – an enormous sum for a working man in the 1950s; hell, a brand new Ford cost less than a thousand dollars. Years later, all that was left of his investment were two wooden folding chairs, painted over many times to reflect the changing colors of basement decor. “My five thousand dollar chairs,” my father used to say, but never with bitterness. He’d taken his best shot and he’d recognized it as such. Part of my father’s problem had been alcoholism. He was a small man with a thin build, but he was tough as nails and he had a high tolerance for booze. He never got hangovers. What he got was the predictable running battle with my mother. And since they were together all day and night at the Shuffle Inn, it became more and more difficult for him to hide his alcoholism. So he got her out of the business. He told her she wasn’t spending enough time with my younger sister, Louise, and me; that since the business was doing well, he was hiring a cook. But my mother was no dummy. She knew what was going on here. She waited up for him most nights. The fight went on for years after the Shuffle Inn had folded, and finally she told him, it was her or the booze. She didn’t really mean it; she was too crazy about him. But he chucked it, kicked the booze. Either he didn’t want to risk losing her, or he realized it was killing him – or both. For me, the most important decisions you make in life are the partners you choose to travel with. My father made his best decision when he chose my mother. His worst was Joe Sorrentino, his partner in the Shuffle Inn. Joe, however, was not my father’s choice. To open his club, my father needed five thousand dollars above what the family could muster, so he applied for a loan from the Small Business Administration and was turned down. He tried raising it from other friendly sources but could not; they’d lent all they could. So, when it looked like the place was slipping through his fingers, he went to those “other people” who lent money to Italian-Americans. Their price, along with the usual exorbitant interest rate, was their man as a full partner. My father said yes. What choice did he have? Now, Joe Sorrentino was what you would have expected. He had few, if any, redeeming qualities. He cheated on his wife, openly, at the bar, with just about any unaccompanied woman who wandered in, even some whose dates were merely visiting the men’s room. He was a hot head, a hot head who carried a gun, which he drew once on a patron with whom he’d gotten into a heated argument. I remember watching, from under a table,

while my father settled him down. Encounters like these, with women and men, were costing the Shuffle Inn business, adding to my father’s growing sense of frustration – desperation really – and not helping his alcoholism. On the night my father fired Danny Torreone, the crowd was less than he had hoped for. It was not a good sign to have a lighter-than-expected crowd on New Year’s Eve. But they were a good crowd, the regulars, my father’s biggest spenders. Maybe, he thought, he could make up in trade what he lacked in attendance. Joe was at one end of the bar, holding forth with a couple of women, wives of regulars who were off bullshitting in the nightclub side of the club. My father was behind the bar really humping it. No one could mix drinks faster than him at this point in his career. Besides, his heart rejoiced to the repeated rings of the cash register. “That asshole Danny won’t do ‘You’re Nobody ‘til Somebody Loves You,’” Paulie Ponti, one of my father’s heavier-spending regulars, said. “I know,” my father answered. “It’s one of the numbers he’s still working on. He won’t do anything until he’s got it down perfect. He’s practicing to be a goddamn recording star. I just brought him in off the street, and he’s already practicing to be a recording star.” “There are no talent scouts in the audience, Nick,” Paulie said. “I know that. Don’t you think I know that? To him, it doesn’t matter who’s there or isn’t there. He won’t do anything until he’s got it perfect. I guess you’ve got to admire him for that.” “I don’t, Nick. Stella’s sinking like a stone. She gets that way when she’s been drinking for some time. The song’s her favorite. It will lift her up. Get him to say it’s dedicated to her. You know how to do it. You ask him. I got a fifty, if he’ll do it.” “Shit, that’s more than he makes in a week.” “That’s fifty more than he’s worth, Nick.” Paulie handed my father the fifty. “Ask him. Show him this. Go ahead, ask him.” My father walked over to Danny who was taking a break over a virgin cola at a table opposite the end of the bar where Joe Sorrentino was sitting. Joe got up to take a spin through the tables in front of the bandstand, to troll for any loose women he might have overlooked. “No way,” Danny said to my father . “I told that guy I don’t know it.” “Everybody knows that song, Danny.” “I haven’t practiced it.”

“These guys are plastered. They wouldn’t know if you sang ‘Vesti la Giubba.’” “I’d know.” “Danny, the guy’s offering you fifty bucks.” My father practically pushed the bill into Danny’s face. Danny gave my father his what-do-you-want-from-me look. “I’m going to lose them if you don’t do requests,” my father countered. “And that means the register stops ringing and pretty soon all of us are out of work. Do you want that, Danny? Is that what you want?” “I got my dignity,” Danny replied. “Stick your dignity up your ass! You don’t need dignity with a bunch of drunks. They just want to spend their money and go on with the party. In the morning, they won’t remember a goddamn note you missed. But they will remember that you wouldn’t sing for them.” “I got my dignity,” Danny repeated. He rose from his chair and walked off toward the men’s room. Joe Sorrentino came back into the bar. “The natives are getting restless,” he said. “They’re about to do the shuffle out.” He loved mocking my father with take-offs on the club’s name. “Danny, the asshole, won’t sing,” my father said. Joe heaved a great sigh, as if this whole thing had somehow been a great strain on him. He went behind the bar and poured himself another scotch. My father watched him. Bastard never has the answers to anything, he thought. My father went back into the nightclub to talk to Paulie Ponti and his party. “Look,” he said, holding out Paulie’s fifty in front of him, “Danny insists he doesn’t know the song and he doesn’t want to embarrass himself.” Paulie stared at the bill a moment, then, “everyone knows that song,” he said. My father just stood there for a few moments searching for something to say. “I’ll get him in here to do another set,” he said weakly. “What, those same six songs he’s been singing all night – all month? Sorry, that’s what’s depressing Stella.”

“He sings beautiful, Paulie. Sit down. I’ll send over a bottle of champagne – on the house. Enjoy yourselves. Let’s get the year off to a great start.” Paulie took back the fifty my father still held in his right hand. “We’re leaving,” he said. “Have a happy, Nick . . . for old time’s sake.” My father didn’t like the finality in that. “It’s just after midnight,” he said. “Don’t start to empty the place on me.” Paulie shrugged, then turned toward his table, where his wife and other guests could see by his face that it was time to go. They started gathering their things. Then they heard the mike click on and when they looked up, my father had started to sing. He had a small, tinny voice, and no range, but he gave it his best. My father always gave it his best. “You’re

nobody ‘til somebody loves you. You’re nobody ‘til somebody cares. You may be king, you may possess the world and its gold, but gold won’t buy you happiness when you’re growing old.” Then he did the trombone break, while accompanying himself with the swizzle sticks against the mike stem. I was seven years old, in and out of sleep at the table my father had set aside for our family, my sister sleeping across three chairs, my mother just shaking her head. I’m fifty-seven, but that night still remains the saddest of my life. Even sadder than the night my father died. At my father’s wake, just about everyone who offered me his or her condolences said, “your father was my friend.” And they all said it with tears in their eyes. Real tears, not phony, funeral-parlor tears. “Your father was my friend.” Chisel that on my tombstone, hah, Danny Torreone, Joe Sorrentino, Paulie Ponti. You bastards. You just didn’t get it. You never did. You never will. Me, I get it. Chisel that on my tombstone. You bastards.

Night walk, Seville, Spain

Summer in Antarctica Photos by Tony Tedeschi

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice,” Gabriel García Márquez wrote in the opening of his 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. That line has always stuck with me. Recently, I am inextricably drawn to ice, the ice caves of Iceland, ice floes in Antarctica, the Arctic Circle later this year. I find the experiences so stunning, I’m convinced God does his best art sculpting ice. What follows are photos from last January’s voyage to the Antarctic summer.

Zodiac ride to the Antarctic continent

Silver

Silver Cloud Expedition at anchor off Antarctica.

Sun that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t set in the Antarctic summer. 62

Miles long, miles wide 10-story ice floe, broken loose from the continent.

Silver Cloud Expedition at anchor off Antarctica.

Gentoo penguins fill their rocky nesting area.

Early morning light on the Lemaire Channel.

Chilean Navy vessel patrolling Antarctic waters. 64

Natural Traveler MagazineTM is published quarterly each year as Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall issues in January, April, July and October. A Web addition of the magazine is available at www.naturaltraveler.net

Antarctica Photo by Tony Tedeschi