Residue edition 2 0

RESIDUE

Short Stories

by

GARY DWYER 1

RESIDUE Short Stories by GARY DWYER

RESIDUE

Photographs and Text By GARY DWYER Published by Ångstrom Unit Works Copyright © 2014 Gary Dwyer. All rights reserved.

No Part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

ISBN 978-0-98989986-4-4 Front Cover Photo: Hvar, Croatia 24 May 2007 and Lyon, France 25 June 2013 Back Cover Photo: Hvar, Croatia 24 May 2007 Gary Dwyer Photography http://www.garydwyerphotography.com http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/478911 http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/dwyergc https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/gary-dwyer/id265388372?mt=11 Other books By Gary Dwyer are available on Amazon, Blurb, and Issuu

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I would like to acknowledge The Rocky Mountain News, Safeway, Texaco, Pacific Inter-Mountain Express, United Air Lines, Donald Roark and Associates, Vail Associates, Arapaho Basin, Winter Park, Breckenridge, Bethlehem Steel and the American Bridge Division of United States Steel and anybody else that had to put up with me during the evolution of this short collection of stories.

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Paperboys

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W

hat did we know, we were just kids.

It was only seventh grade, but we liked to say that we were in the first year of Junior High School. We were boys, playing around, trying to stay out of trouble, but always looking for it. All we wanted to know was where are the edges, and are they sharp? Where were the boundaries? Who said they were boundaries, and what happened, what were the consequences if you actually crossed one of them? It felt more like discovery and exploration than any real quest for danger.

That’s it, we were exploring, and explorers are always running toward limits. Twelve, maybe, almost thirteen year old boys on bicycles aren’t any different.

At least one of us had a bicycle and that was me. I didn’t care that it was a second hand bike because it was a real bike, a bike with what I think were twenty-one inch wheels and coaster brakes. It was an adults bike, the kind you have to push along and then kind of side-saddle hop to get on because your legs are just barely long enough to reach the pedals, even with the seat all the way down. What resulted was that riding was a lopsided back and forth affair with my crotch perilously close to the frame bar.

I named my bike ‘The Green Hornet’ after a favorite radio character and because I had painted it with a color I would come to know later as ‘British Racing Green. The paint job was done with a brush because paint spray cans weren’t very common yet, and it was the last part of the process of rebuilding the bike.

My father carefully oversaw the long and elaborate process. I had to learn how to replace spokes, true-up wheels, pack wheel bearings and clean and paint a very rusted frame. My father was very intent on letting me learn and consequently stood by to give advice rather than him doing the work and having me watch.

It was very kind of him to use this approach because I had to learn there was a sequence to things and if you violated the sequence, the

consequences were serious. Sadly I thought he was just being unhelpful and resented him watching me struggle. I don’t know how many years it was before I realized that struggle is what leads to discovery.

My friend Wayne didn’t have a bike yet, but he was working on getting one. His father sold weather stripping for a living and I never figured out how anyone could make a living by selling weather stripping, but his parents had just built a modest brick house on a smallish corner lot in what was then, East Denver. Wayne Snyder and I had been going to school together for several years, but had only become close friends after I had a bicycle and could ride from my house to his, which was about ten blocks away from mine. (It seemed like ten blocks, but it was probably a lot less.) The first time I went over to his house I had two small but still surprising revelations. When his mother opened the front door for me, I noticed that their floors were bare wood. They were bright and shiny, with red and brown rectangular rugs covering a little less than half of the floors. It was the first time I had been in anyone’s house that didn’t have wall-towall carpet and it looked entirely unfinished.

Some days later, when Wayne and I were at school, I asked him when they were going to get the carpet installed in his house. I think his response was, “Probably never.”

The second revelation occurred in Wayne’s house when I went to use the bathroom and was reaching for the toilet paper when I saw that someone in Wayne’s family had installed the toilet paper roll so that the sheet fed from the top of the roll. I was amazed. I had never seen this before either. In my house, the sheet always came off the bottom of the roll. It had never occurred to me that it would work the other way around. Obviously I had a lot to learn.

Next door to Wayne’s house was a new house under construction. The concrete foundation was in, but had not been backfilled yet so 7

there was a wide dirt ditch forming a kind of moat around the house and the only way to enter the half finished framed house was to walk across a sagging set of some two-by-ten’s that had been nailed together. Of course there were no railings, no barriers to entry. This was decades before anyone ever thought of The Occupational Health and Safety Administration and there weren’t as many lawyers practicing liability claims either. No matter, Wayne and I thought it great fun to bounce our way across the flimsy bridge above the deep empty moat and enter the secret world of ‘things under way’. The house was a place where things were actually happening every day. The smell of fresh mortar, the dust of lime and the acrid and spicy smell of knotty pine, and Douglas fir.

One day, after school, we went into the unfinished house and the electricians had just finished roughing in the wiring conduit and the switch boxes. The conduit entered the switch boxes through holes called ‘knock-outs’ because the boxes were perforated in such a way that there were multiple round entry points and by prying out one of the ‘knock-outs’, you could attach the conduit, but having done that, the electricians didn’t pick up after themselves and the round galvanized steel knock-outs were littered around on the floor in every room in the house. I can’t remember if it was Wayne or I, but one of us realized that these little metal pieces were the same size as a quarter. They had a little rough and sharp edge where they had been broken free of the switch box, but if that irregular edge could be gotten rid of, these little slugs, could be used as fake money. Or at least that’s what we thought. I think we must have used a concrete block as our substitute files to smooth away the steel ridge on the slugs, but when we were finally brave enough to try out our fake quarters in parking meters and vending machines, we discovered that the slugs were either a little bit too big to go in the slots, or too small and fell right through. We thought we were going to have free money and instead 8

we got a lesson in precision.

The method for Wayne to get a bicycle was much more honest and straightforward than our misadventure with making phony quarters.

In the 1950’s, door-to-door sales were still rather common and if Wayne could walk enough streets, and pound on enough doors and fasttalk some kindly mom into buying a box of Hallmark Christmas Cards, he was one step closer to having a bike. And if he was able to sell a hundred and fifty boxes, Hallmark would give Wayne a brand new, 3-speed, English, racing bicycle.

It must have taken him months of tramping around, but at any rate, he did, indeed, get his bicycle from Hallmark. And from then on, it was the two of us, out on the streets, looking for the edges of everything because boys with bicycles means they are going to get into everything.

Somewhere along in those thin years, lurching around between uncoordinated childhood and arrogant adolescence, we became paperboys. It was a problematic exchange between the world of commerce and the world of emergence.

The newspaper companies provided us with bazaar leather edged canvas bags for carrying the newspapers. The bags were intended to be worn by placing your head through a hole, then the bags would hold the folded newspapers in both front and back and you could still ride your bicycle down the street and throw the newspapers to the subscribers on your route.

Some very smart earlier paperboy discovered if the original handlebars were replaced by ‘box’ handlebars, and turned upside down so they looked like steer horns then the canvas bags could be attached to the handlebars with hose clamps.

The bags hung open mouthed and down from the handlebars instead of hanging off the rider.

It made the bike much more stable by lowering the center of gravity and was an ingenious way to carry the papers. The technique was passed on down to each new paperboy. It was as though

we had transformed our vehicles into something capable of gathering the universe. In actual fact, we were only cruising the back streets and alleyways, trying to discover what was next. On most days, I would get out of bed about fourthirty in the morning to retrieve the bundle of papers from the curb. The Rocky Mountain News was a morning paper and had to be on everyone’s porch by seven AM, so we had to be on the streets with our bicycles and our canvas newspaper bags before dawn each day. A tall order for rowdy kids that were still just boys.

The papers had to be individually folded and wrapped with rubber bands. This allowed the papers to be stacked in the canvas bag that hung down from the handlebars. In theory, a good strong rider, could ride down the center of a pre-dawn street, pick a paper out of the stacks in the bags, remember the addresses of his customers and then throw the paper on exactly the right porch, in theory. The surprising thing was that it worked as often as it did, given lawn sprinklers, snarling dogs, snow on the streets.

Rain! No one had yet come up with little plastic bags for the papers, so often it meant propping your bike up against something and walking up to the house to drop it somewhere out of the rain, occasionally inside the screen door. Some paperboys were so good at their rounds, they could effortlessly fling even the heavy Sunday edition right up on the porch. I was way more clumsy than that and often ended up dumping the bicycle, spilling the papers and getting a lot of 7 AM phone calls from people about why their paper was such a mess? Winter meant learning a lot more about how responsibility could be miserable.

The delivery truck would drop a bundle of one hundred and six unfolded papers at the curb. In winter it meant I had to either tromp through the snow or shovel the driveway to retrieve the papers. I had to get them into the garage where I could kneel down and fold them into threes or fours depending on the thickness of the edition

and put a rubber band around each paper then stack fifty-three into each bag hanging on the sides of the handlebars. When you got good enough it meant that you could ride down the street and throw a paper up on to someone’s porch in one seamless motion. Pure grace if you did it right. The problem was seldom with the bags or the gymnastic skills of the paperboys, it was the snow.

The main streets were the first to be plowed and most of the streets on my route never got plowed at all. Riding a bicycle loaded with fifty or sixty pounds of newspapers in the pre-dawn dark is a feat in itself, but in six inches of snow, it is impossible. Walking, pushing the bicycle in the dark, while it is still snowing and then slipping and falling and dumping the load of newspapers can make you angry or cry. Often both.

After finishing our deliveries at about 6:30 a group of paperboys would spontaneously convene at a Bakery on Colfax Avenue where the glazed donuts and gingerbread men were steaming as they came out of the oven. As we ate our soft hot and delicious hard earned treats, we would have contests to see who could throw an extra paper the farthest down the middle of the street. The game was fun but having an extra paper meant that one had not been delivered and because we boys had technically purchased the papers from the publisher, an undelivered paper meant we were loosing money.

The hardest part of being a paperboy was not getting up early and working in the cold and dark, it was that we early teens were also collection agencies. At least once a month, we had to go to each individual home or apartment, knock on the door and ask for cash payment for the newspaper. With a hundred and six customers on my route and each paper I delivered made me about a penny a day. That is, if I was able to collect what I was owed. People weren’t home, they had excuses, they might be able pay me tomorrow, could I come by at 8PM? 9

They slammed the door in my face. I wrapped dog turds into their papers, and threatened to set their bushes on fire. After seven months and two blizzards, I was done.

Wayne worked for an evening paper, The Denver Post, and he lasted about as long as I did. We did other things for pocket money. Mowed lawns, burned trash, raked leaves, but in between, we explored on our bikes and we invented games.

It is sad and perhaps inevitable that most of us loose this skill later on, but kids can invent a game out of absolutely nothing, and then, five minutes later come up with a variation on the theme, or drop the old one and start something new completely from scratch.

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were told this story, to our great surprise, they were tearing down the perimeter wall and the mansion itself. Not only could we see in, after the contractors had left for the day, we could go in and explore. The mysteries would finally be solved.

The nun’s and girls had obviously had a large garden in the back of the mansion. There were fruit trees and tilled rows where vegetables had been grown. A large lawn was now brown from neglect, and there was a small empty wood structure off to the side that could have been an ice house. A great deal had already been bulldozed so it was difficult to determine what some of the garden spaces and structures had been.

Near Wayne’s house there was an enormous foreboding gray stone mansion whose back and side yards occupied an entire city block. Even though the mansion fronted onto the street, like a normal house, it had an eight-foot high cut stone wall that went around the whole property.

In addition to the mansion, there was another large two-story structure but there was no way to determine what it was used for because we couldn’t see over the wall. There were large entry gates on one side big enough to drive a delivery truck through, but they were never open, and there were no cracks to look through.

Because the cut stone was valuable, the contractor was taking the mansion and surrounding walls down a little at a time, rather than just driving a bulldozer through the whole thing. By the time Wayne and I heard about the demolition there were big gaps in the walls and we could push our bikes right in and snoop around. The large two story building at the rear of the site was still intact and locked up tight.

The first afternoon we were there, we were too spooked to do anything except look around for clues that would tell us anything more about the place than we had already been told.

Of course, Wayne and I thought the house was completely haunted. Each time we passed by the walls we would walk up close and occasionally we thought we heard women’s or girl’s voices.

Then once, we actually saw some catholic nuns go in the front door. Finally we asked an adult what that place was about, and we were told that it was a special catholic school for girls. This didn’t make any sense to me because St. James catholic school was only a few blocks away and they had both boys and girls in that school. Then we were told it was just for girls because it was something like a monastery. That sounded more like a prison than a school. A few weeks after we

The next day we came to the mansion, we had a plan and none of it would have been possible without paperboys, alleyways and a falling down mansion.

How Denver came to be a town with a lot of backyard alleys is a bit of a mystery, but it is probably due to the developers granting a public easement to the city for trash collection and deliveries. Most of them were not paved or even graveled, but just plain dirt, and in my neighborhood the alleys were both fun and dangerous. In everyone’s back yard, adjacent to the fifteen-foot wide alley, each homeowner had

an incinerator for burning trash. Made of brick, lined with fire clay and about four feet high and wide. Anything that would burn got stuffed in the incinerators and set alight. Recycling was not even a word during this decade and smog was something that happened in Los Angeles.

In addition to the incinerator, each house had a couple of thirty gallon galvanized trashcans.

One can for garbage and one for things that wouldn’t burn, like liquor bottles and broken toasters. The mud, dust, ruts and even snow were total magnets for boys on bicycles, but the hidden treasure was what we could find in the trashcans.

It was probably on a weekend that we first had the idea of picking empty liquor bottles out of people’s trashcans and collecting them in our canvas newspaper bags hanging on our handlebars. The reason for the collection was that we had invented a game.

Having pushed our whiskey, gin, and beer bottle laden bikes into the still nearly complete enclosure of the mansion, and inspected what we could of the now half-disappeared mansion, most of the mystery and fear of trespass had worn off and it didn’t seem like we were going to discover any more about what went on in this place. So it seemed like the perfect place and time to do something all boys like to do: Break things.

One of us would take an empty bottle from our bags and throw it up into the air as high as we could. The other would then throw rocks at the bottle to try to break the bottle before it hit the ground. A rather primitive and dangerous form of skeet shooting, but we thought it was great fun.

The broken glass all over the place didn’t hurt anything because they were hauling everything away anyway. The fact that flying glass could have seriously hurt either one or both of us didn’t seem to occur to us. Every time a rock broke a bottle we would laugh uproariously.

We thought the game so much fun that we decided to come again the next day and rode our bikes through different alleys and got more bottles, but when we rode up to the site we could see that most of the mansion had been hauled away. The perimeter walls were half way down and the two-story structure at the rear had its barn-like doors open wide and there were two men standing in front of the doors looking inside. We laid down our bikes on the far side of the lot and walked over to see what the men were doing. As they sensed our approach, they turned sideways and even from a distance we could see there were cars inside. The men asked us what we were up to and we said we were neighborhood kids, just looking around trying to discover what this place was about. The men said they had been hired to move these old cars to a garage in downtown where they were to be auctioned off. They said the old guy that had owned them had died a long time ago and now the money from the sale of the cars was going to some charity. The light was dim inside, but we could now recognize a garage with stairs probably leading to servants quarters upstairs, We could easily see three very dusty and very unusual cars. Of course we had seen old cars and even ridden in a few, but these were not just old with flat tires and under years of dust. Even young kids could tell these cars were spectacular.

With the men there, we couldn’t exactly spend the rest of the afternoon breaking bottles, so we decided to go home, but now we had to get rid of the bottles. We went down the alley behind Wayne’s house and decided we could just put them back into anyone’s trashcans. Just not the same trashcans we had found them in the first place. Naturally this made quite a bit of racket and we then went into Wayne’s house and were greeted by Wayne’s father who promptly accused us of drinking. There was no way to explain what we had been doing that would make sense to an adult. Yes, we smelled like liquor because we had been putting empty liquor bottles into trashcans and some of the dregs had spilled on 11

us in the process. The question, of course, was “Why were you putting liquor bottles in other peoples trash cans?” “Because we couldn’t leave them where we had taken them to break them, because the men were there with the old cars.”

Wayne’s father said, ”Now this is getting completely out of hand and so before I figure out how to discipline you two, I want to know some details about this cock and bull story.

Where were you really, and what cars?” Wayne almost shouted when he said, ”We were at Holland Hall.” I said the men were showing us a Franklin, a Duesenberg, and a Cord.” Wayne’s father said, “That’s impossible. You are telling me they tearing down Holland Hall and expect me to believe that you saw cars nobody in this town has enough money to own. The two of you get in the car right now. We are going to Holland Hall.”

When we arrived, the men were still there with their truck and a trailer discussing the best way to move the rare, expensive and fragile cars.

As we approached, I heard them say they were going to have to winch them up onto the trailer, one at a time. Wayne’s father was stunned. The men told him that they had wiped the dust off the odometers and none of the cars had more than a thousand miles on them. “Priceless, said Wayne’s father, “Just priceless.” The men had the papers for each car. There was a 1937 Cord 812 that looked like it was speeding when it was standing still. And a1930 Duesenberg J Town Car that looked elegant and powerful and at the rear was a 1932 Franklin 163 Oxford that sat square shouldered and utilitarian, but also had an air of dignity. One man said, “I bet none of these cars have moved an inch in twenty years.” All of us walked around the cars one last time, before they hooked up the winch. As we walked it stirred up even more dust and the light coming in through the windows made it look like a cathedral of sorts, and I guess it was.

The three of us walked back outside and Wayne’s 12

father saw all the broken glass lying around in the former garden and we explained our game with the liquor bottles. He wasn’t happy about what we had been doing, but he wasn’t scolding us either, he was still in a little reverie about seeing the magnificent cars.

As we walked back to the car, Wayne said, “Since we told you the honest truth about what we were doing here and the truth about the cars, why don’t you tell us the truth about what this place really was?” Wayne’s father said, “OK Holland Hall was a home for un-wed mothers.” Really?

“They would keep them at Holland Hall until they had their babies and then they would let them out.” I said, “It sounds like a prison to me.”

I didn’t know what an un-wed mother was, but I had seen some awfully fancy cars and broken a few bottles. What did I know? I was just a paperboy.

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15

Fumes or Diesel Sometimes

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ometimes, mostly in the morning, if I smell diesel fumes, I get nostalgic for Paris. I think about the damp early mornings near the square in front of St. Sulpice and cranking the engine of the battered red Renault 4 that was barely up to the task of jerking me into the disconcerting pulse and snarling danger of morning traffic. If someone is lighting a fire using kerosene to get green wet wood going it makes for a biting light gray smoke that sends me instantly back to the early morning streets of Kathmandu. This form of olfactory reflection has nothing to do with Proust and his Madelaine.

These odors are robust and sting, they cling and hang on my clothes jolt me hard enough so twitches and spasms are not uncommon. You would think I would get some reverie, but no, it is much more about doing what it takes to survive. Perfume doesn’t always come in bottles.

Particular odors like burning diesel are supposed to trigger memories more quickly than other senses, but my memory never comes cleanly. It comes in lumps and layers with imagination in the gaps.

Hallucinatory linguistics. Images of the wished for and the perhaps, all tangled up with the supposedly real. The historical finality of the half-truths of memory are very different from the current, insistent imagery of seeing and perceiving, and yet, occasionally they are the same. The fuzziness that makes memory bearable is replaced by the requirement of vision to be clear. Seeing has a special need to be focused.

The first time diesel and vision came into focus together was when I was returning to Denver from a weekend ski trip. I was 17 (and a half) and driving a 1954 Ford Victoria down the east side of Berthoud Pass in the Colorado Rockies. The driving conditions were normal winter, hard packed snow covering both narrow lanes of the highway, with intermittent ice and constant steep downhill. Everyone knows the road warning sign, the one with the yellow diamond showing the black truck skidding downhill. We were following the sooty coiling diesel wake of a Greyhound bus as it extruded its black stripe into the crisp afternoon air. Each side of Berthoud Pass is somewhere around eleven miles long and has what seems like fourteen switchbacks. I’m not really sure about those numbers because exaggeration of numbers is one of the major accomplishments of

nearly everyone’s memories.

What I am sure of is that those miles and switchbacks are filled with frozen danger and adrenaline fueled exhilaration. Most cars built in the 50’s didn’t exactly have great handling or traction. My snow tires had walnut shells mixed into the tires treads for some extra traction and chains were an expensive nuisance mostly, I just took my chances. My car had two sandbags in the trunk in the vain attempt to get some more weight over the rear driving wheels, but it didn’t seem to help much. There were a lot of us rabid teenagers who drove to the mountains to go skiing every day we possibly could, and while driving we had made some observations about the other mountain drivers. For example, if you saw a car with license plates from Nebraska or Kansas, you had better get the hell away from them as fast as possible because they were ‘Flat-landers’ and they had no clue how to drive in the mountains. Another edict was that Buick drivers were also to be avoided. Why Buick drivers, I have no idea, it was just one of our little rules, some of which made some sense, some didn’t. The most important rule we had for winter driving in the mountains was in regard to driving uphill and was, ‘Don’t stop!’ For if you do, you can begin driving again, but it won’t be until spring. So if you follow someone, make sure they have better traction than you do, stay glued to their rear end and keep rolling. Trucks and buses have a lot of weight and a lot of rubber on the road. They’re usually a good bet to follow. The second important rule was don’t run into anything, find an escape route, drive around the problem.

When the bus in front of us began to slide, the high school girl sitting next to me began a high-pitched scream and started to flail around. I think she was my friend, because I had forgiven her for the joke she played on me in the autumn when she gave me picknick snack that was in reality a sandwich made out of canned dog food. I must have forgiven her because we been skiing together today and I was giving her a ride. Her name was Gretchen and this part of the ride she really didn’t like. She was beginning to drown in panic. Panic caused by the sight of a thirtythousand pound bus sliding downhill perpendicular to the road, blocking both lanes, directly in front of you, at forty miles an hour, somehow assist in the quality of this vision of impending doom.

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The real clarity in this horizontal highway hallucination comes with the numbing realization there that there is now a way to drive around this problem because on the left side of the road is the steep and solid wall of the mountain and to the right is a cliff with a minimum five hundred feet of free fall and in an instant imagine the exploding car scene we all have seen a hundred times in fireball movies. The bus continues to slide broadside, leaving us somewhere between the instant impact and potential spaceflight. I wanted to go down the mountain, not leave it. What we didn’t know is that on the other side of that bus, there was another car coming up the mountain at the same time the bus was sliding down.

Oh, by the way, the third, and very important teenage rule of driving in the mountains in winter is; don’t slam on the brake unless you want to die; then break all you want, because dying is guaranteed. When I double-clutch and down-shifted, the wheels didn’t stop but the engine compression slowed us down.

The engine screamed, but I never had to touch the brakes. The bus slides back into the right lane but we are coming up behind it too fast and fortunately intuition tells me the right thing to do and I intentionally hit the brakes just once, in order to begin a slide. By cranking the wheel to the right we begin to slide to the left and then backwards around the rear end of the bus The bus began to slow down as we were sliding past it sideways on the inside lane.

I spun the wheel hard to the right having now spun a full circle, we straighten out and pointed downhill in front of the bus. We miss the oncoming car by some distance. Well, actually, under a foot, but no one is measuring.

Gretchen indicates her approval of this astounding maneuver by asking to stop. She says, almost screaming, “Not right now! When it’s convenient, somewhere down the road.” It is because she has pissed her pants. We pull over in what the British call a ‘Lay-by’ and she grabs a pair of Levi’s from the back seat, opens the door and scrambles into a not-to-be seen position somewhere near the rear wheel, and changes out of her sodden ski pants. Later, climbing back into the car, she said, “You’ve got lousy taste in sandwiches and girlfriends, but you sure as hell can drive!”

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The bus survives the near-death accident as well and finally catches up and passes us while we are on the side of the road. We have lost a lot altitude and the pavement is dry and no need to follow the bus, but the acrid diesel smell lingers long after the bus has gone past. It takes a lot of fir trees to push a bus stink away. The diesel fumes became automotive version of the high school speech class, a glandular testing ground. A place where you can smell anxiety. If it was bad out here on the roadside, I imagine what it must have been like inside that bus filled with thirty or forty screaming teenagers in sweaty ski clothes with enough adrenaline squirting around to keep a deodorant company rich for years. We’ve been told that animals can smell fear. It’s true. The part I forgot is we are animals too.

The reason for all this diesel-fueled fear was skiing.

Specifically ski-racing. Danger disguised as sport.

Athletic adrenaline. Ram the needle in your arm and hope you get off. It seems a contradiction. Why would you be a danger junkie in the mountains? They are a huge buzz anyway. A literal and metaphorical high. Why go any higher? To ask the question is to miss the point. The reason for all that adrenaline existing in the mountains is not because of a desire to go higher. It is because of a fear of coming back down. Flatland is not a special place. The mountains are. They are always up and you get infected and inoculated against flat terrain. High is where the juices flow.

In my junior year of high school, I had passed my first aid course and spent my apprenticeship time and could now proudly wear the red and white parka of the junior ski patrol. Being on the ski patrol allowed me to ski for free and if I could con someone, anyone into paying for the gas it made for a great day in the mountains. Of course I had to help attend the injured and ski as the anchorman with a heavy gurney-like toboggan, often filled with even heavier people, in very real pain, lying down wrapped in canvas and always scared as hell. The injured were always relieved to see someone arrive in the red parka with the white cross, but when they saw my teenage face their expressions turned to anxiety and fear. What they didn’t know was that I had already been skiing for ten years and I knew every bit of terrain on this mountain. Many times

there were three of us to handle the toboggan. One strong one in front to steer with clumsy steel handles that protruded over the front and two of us on the back holding ropes and skiing to act as drag anchors.

Even so, it was always a rough ride for everyone and there better be no mistakes. There were from six to eight of us patrolling each day on any given busy weekend and a doctor and other helpers at the base station. We could count on three or four breaks and sprains each day. Pretty routine stuff most of the time but occasionally we had something gruesome. A broken back or a high speed collision with multiple injuries where we had to get the doctor to the site before taking the injured anywhere. The worst was when a girl got her long hair tangled in the twisting and untwisting strands of a rope tow and before the lift could be stopped the rope took her right through the pulley at the top of the lift and out the other side looking like a nylon parka wrapped side of beef in a slaughterhouse.

It was early January, so the days were still quite short.

The heavy snows of February and the avalanches that came with them were a month off. The lift lines closed to the public at the end of the day when all the ski patrolmen would line up and get on as a group and the line would be closed behind us, insuring that we would be the last ones down the mountain and we could be sure everyone was down and off safely before nightfall. The final run was called, ‘The sweep.’

I was the last one on the chairlift when the power failed. I was often the last patrolman on the lift and it was a position I enjoyed most of the time. It was a reflective and quiet time when I could enjoy the mountains in peace. Sitting solo in a double chair, I could watch the tree sided valleys silent in shadowy dusk, white-orange peaks aglow in the last of the sunlight. There were half a dozen empty chairs between me and the next to last patrolman and he had already gotten off the lift. My legs ached with the fatigue of skiing all day, but they had just enough strength to make the sweep.

This time being the last on one the lift was a serious liability. My meditative perspective was jolted the instant the lift stopped. It was supposed to move.

After all, it was called ‘the lift’? So lift, dammit.

Nothing. Static. Well, not quite. Swaying isn’t static.

Swaying a couple hundred feet off the ground, in

the half-dark, above timberline, in mid-winter Colorado is not static at all. Below, a ski patrol buddy, already on the way down, yelled up to me and said, ‘Hang tight. We’ll go down and come back with the crossbow.” The crossbow he was talking about was a rescue device that will shoot an arrow with a line attached, over the main cable and then after a heavier rope was pulled up, I could attach myself to that rope with a harness that came up on the rope and be gently lowered away from the frozen doom of night on a static, chairlift that wasn’t lifting anything.

Ski patrolmen are really just ski-racers with red parkas. They love going really fast and they might have patience with the injured, but I was not about to wait for some patrolman who might, or might not, be a good archer in the dark. A St. Bernard Archer with night vision. Frostbite I had already known, and it seems like an overly soft name for a really extreme problem. Exploded blood vessels in black hands. I knew this so called bite had venom and it is lethal. It should be called Frost-death. I ran a scenario through my head. The patrolman who told me to hang tight didn’t have a radio. Even with the road flares we were told to carry, (but often didn’t)it would take him twenty minutes to ski down because of the flat light and the coming darkness.

Maybe he would panic ski too fast and crash. He didn’t have any backup. I was supposed to be the guy skiing behind him. Or at least nearby as part of the buddy system on the sweep. It would take him fortyfive minutes to get the Thiokol snow cat started, and then up the mountain, maybe. Maybe not. The sky is almost clear and only a light breeze, in the rapidly approaching night, but oddly starless. Having spent a lot of time in my early years in the mountains I learned not to ever second-guess the weather, but if reading the skies could help at all, I’d bet it’s now near fifteen below zero and dropping fast. I’m coming down.

OK. First take off the skis. Drop the skis and notice how quickly they fade into the darkness and how awfully long it takes for them to clatter onto the hard packed snow. Now reach into your parka and put on the extra gloves so that you can manage the now increasing cold and the grease on the overhead main cable. Your very smart, very trendy expensive ski clothes are about to become rags for survival. Stand up in the chair, clamber on the steel pipe bracket that 19

connects the chair to the cable. Grab the cable with both hands; lift one leg first then one arm up over the cable and hope like hell you can hold on, as you slowly do an awkward slither, down to the nearest tower. Now that I have wrapped myself cobra style around this black greasy cable, the tower appears to have moved further away than when I was sitting in the chair. Just about the same distance as Kansas.

Okay, danger junkie, ram the needle in your arm, just don’t let go. Death, or at least its shadow, makes the adrenaline flow. Coming down off a high used to be a vague form of threat. Now, It is real, because a single stray strand of cable wire rips a furrow in the palm of my glove and as the tear begins to turn dark red, the cold begins to tighten it’s nighttime friendship with the dark.

When I get to the tower, the cable pulley rack is between the tower, and me and makes things even difficult. I try to calm down, to breath slower, but I am shaking now. Somehow, I struggle past the pulley rack and with a leg wrapped around the rack with one hand I can reach the first round rung of the steel ladder welded to the tower. The blood from my hand sticks to the steel of the rung and freezes there, but I can pull it away as my shaking limbs begin to quiet, having finally reached the tower ladder I begin a chattering and ragged decent. About halfway down I see headlights slashing the sky and hear the growl of the snow cat. The archer was on his way, just like he said he would be. Patience never was my strong suit.

A giant slalom race is being held on portion of an extraordinarily seep trail called ‘The Elevator Shaft.’

And before the race, racers were expected to ski adjacent to the course in an attempt to memorize and anticipate the difficult and dangerous portions of the race course. And that was exactly what I was doing when my friend David, also a racer, who always had more skill and coordination than I could ever hope for, skied up next to me and almost stopped, or at least he tried to. A length of bamboo pole was halfburied and flush with the surface of the snow, just uphill from me. David’s ski edges slipped on the pole and as he fell, he hit me somewhere around mid-calf.

Moments later, our skittering and bouncing tangled bodies stopped moving, but we were not the same people as a few moments ago. We were different. The impact had changed us. We had met the mountain and we had changed. All this because of something as 20

simple as a single piece of bamboo. For many years, bamboo poles were used to make the gates for every racecourse, and were brought to the racecourse by racers skiing with them over their shoulders. There were usually about fifteen of them in a bundle, not tied together in any way, and the bundle was about ten feet long and could be seriously cumbersome.

The most important thing in alpine skiing is position.

Second is posture. The corollary being, if you are not great, you have to look great. Elegance in the liftline has a lot of cachet, and it can be traded in when you do something called after-skiing, so looking fast while standing still is worth many points. Wearing a crash helmet always helps and especially if you have it on un-strapped in a completely cavalier fashion.

It means you intend to go really fast on a racecourse and have done it very well, many times before. A race number tied over your sleek parka helps even more than the helmet, while a large long bundle of race-gate bamboo poles slung comfortably over your shoulder is the final seal of approval. Just a little, no risk, casual chic, that could pay off handsomely at night, in the bar, or anywhere else for that matter.

Just demonstrating a little pre-race adrenaline arrogance in order to mask the fear that is screaming just under the skin.

These particular poles are a little longer than usual at about twelve feet and a hundred or so people are watching as I cut in the front of the line. Racers have special privileges and it makes for even more charisma. The chairlift comes around the cable wheel and I am oddly not surprised as the chair stem catches the end of the poles and lunches me airborne, soon to arrive, rather ungracefully, sprawled in a snow bank.

In a position that is often called ass-over-teakettle.

In my now, somewhat dismayed and distanced position, ten or fifteen feet below the loading ramp, it is possible to hear the howling laughter coming from the people who I passed up standing in the lift line. They are the same people, who only moments before were so impressed with this young, hot racer.

It has was an event embarrassing in the extreme, but very memorable. I won’t forget this day.

Our race coach heard of my incident with the chairlift and asked me, “Did you take clumsy pills today, or what?” Gretchen was standing nearby and responded for me. “He is a great driver,” she said. I

just smiled. The coach was not impressed.

The race season faded with the melt water rivulets of spring and getting a job to pay for next winter’s new ski equipment became paramount. (And salt some away for college.) But how? Doing what? Being eighteen isn’t what you would call a resume. I did have a class III chauffeurs license and that meant I could drive trucks. Big trucks When I showed up at the Dispatcher’s office I said, “I can drive.” “Yeah sure,” the dispatcher said, “But can you drive gentle? A dumb question and yet appropriate for the times. The trucking company had only one soft-sprung trailer for the special run between Denver and Idaho Springs and all the union Teamsters were staying away from this job. They knew better. It looks like it was my turn.

Hauling blasting caps and dynamite together in the same truck violates safety codes, trucking laws, and a sense I used to call common, until I discovered it wasn’t. Sense has never had to do with making money, and usually the less sense there is, the more money there is to be made. Risk factors, and the like, are just business school talk. They are all just jive.

Risk is a raging red Peterbuilt Truck, and nineteen tons of nitroglycerin dissolved in sawdust, stuffed into cardboard tubes and jiggling around in the back of a forty foot semi-trailer, along with twenty cases of fragile blasting caps whose whole reason in life is to detonate the same dynamite it is riding with. Not just electric caps, the ones with Medusa wires, but old-time cordite too. Cordite is snakelike ropes of nitrocellulose fibers and Vaseline. When the cordite burns the smoke it gives off could give you a headache that would last for days. It made the fumes, a firecracker stench. If I had to classify the smell is somewhere between pine sap, gasoline and vomit.

There are six tunnels and thirty-five very curvy miles of U.S. highway 6, snaking along sometimes perilously above Clear Creek, running from Denver to Idaho Springs. The Peterbuilt and me were supposed to make four runs a day up and back with all that horrific boom-boom stuff in the trailer all the way uphill from Denver. Was that way too many trips to make in one day? You bet. It was boring exhausting and dangerous too, but when you are

eighteen, so what? The only other eighteen year old I knew that was making as much money as me was working on the ‘kill floor at a meat packing plant.

When President Eisenhower Signed the Interstate Highway construction bill in 1956, no one knew how they would get that type of high-speed divided highway through the Rockies. The truth is they were going to have to move some of the Rockies out of the way and bulldozers seem to work great for regular highway construction, but this job was going to require the drilling, blasting and explosives experts.

My job was to keep the explosive experts from Dupont supplied so that after six weeks placing the charges, half of a small mountain would fall away and it was going to do it all at once. The work of placing the explosives even continued during the weekends, so at the end of each week, I would leave the trailer in the mountains and drive the Peterbuilt tractor down to Denver with no trailer.

Even with all the mountains in between the blast site and the city, I was betting my friends that you were going to be able to hear the explosion in Denver. This was going to be one hell of a boom. It was going to be one enormous noisy and dangerous geologic lurch attempting to make way for Interstate 70. There was going to be no little tunnels edging a curvy stream bank for that highway. No Sir. Baring a couple of monstrous tunnels this one was going right up and over most the mountains. And if a mountain did get in its way, then that mountain would just have to move. The Governor of Colorado was going to turn the detonation into a politically motivated media event and he adamant about going to be the one in front of the television cameras who pushed the classic plunger down and set off the charges.

Finally, on one of those crystalline bright autumn days when the air seems to shimmer with color and possibility, the Governor stood on an adjacent mountain ridge in front of the television cameras wearing a suit and a hard hat. He gave some pointless little gratuitous speech, smiled for the cameras and pushed the plunger down and nothing happened.

The Governor, still smiling, and the cameras rolling swiftly turned to the man standing next to him and said, “What the he-” and then the whole thing went off and the Rocky Mountains moved.

21

One particular mountain-side moved a lot more than the others. It moved sideways and up all at once. Fast and slow, at the same time. I was watching from down below, downwind and the cordite fumes caught up with me and a headache like an ice pick, started almost immediately. The rush of the explosion was so huge everything else was blocked out. No hearing, no vision, just stone dust, smoke and blast fumes. It was gigantic geologic sex. Yes, it was heroic and it was sad too.

Driving down from the blast site on the last run of the week with no trailer and no explosives was where the headache caught up with me and I thought I better come up with a diversion for the pain or it was going to cripple me and even though I had aspirin in the cab, this was headache was going to need a level-one narcotic pain reliever. This section of road was narrow with no place to even pullover. I glance a little farther down the road and bingo, the light goes on. About three hundred yards in front of me is a little white Porsche, merrily playing agile sporty-car on the descending sensuous mountain road. Having left the trailer at the detonation site, now the road is clear and empty, it is just that Porsche, the Peterbilt, and me.

Coming down the canyon, I always had the ‘Jake’ brake on to slow down by using the engine compression and with five inch exhaust stacks it made a low but rattling and raucous rumble you can easily associate with landslides and avalanches.

As soon as I saw the Porsche, I flipped off the Jake brake and went quiet. The Peterbuilt had three hundred seventy-five horsepower supercharged Cummins diesel and ten wheels making contact with the pavement. This truck was glued to the road.

I waited until I could judge the sequence of spaces between the tunnels and finally snuck up behind the Porsche in a tunnel. Lights off. The only peculiar feature about this truck was the sign bolted to the huge front bumper, just about the same height as the rear window of the Porsche. The sign covered the whole bumper and in backwards-boldface letters, allowing it to be read in a rear view mirror, it said, HIGH EXPLOSIVES. When the Porsche cleared the tunnel I was five feet from his bumper and I hit the Jake brake and the air horns at the same time and I watched the Porsche driver making random spastic actions. He didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.

22

Laughing while double-clutch and downshifting is something I had learned to do earlier that year, but this time was even better. As the Porsche slithered to a stop on the shoulder my headache began to go away. I was bouncing up and down in the seat like a little kid. I had finished a delicate dangerous and demanding job and only one person got scared witless. I was deliriously happy, even if I was coming out of the mountains.

Driving and skiing. One takes you up to the mountains and one takes you down and when I smell firecracker fumes, the cordite memory haunts the day the mountains came down too. These are mountain memories and they come with the fumes or the diesel sometimes.

23

The mechanics of behavior

24 

I

t turns out that Browning makes a very good shotgun. Even though at the time I didn’t know a good one from a bad one. Teenagers have an uncanny ability sense quality. They don’t seem to know what to do with it, but they do understand what it looks like. If something is well made, it just looks expensive. Quality and cost are the Siamese twins of the adolescent mind. This is probably why I was so amazed to see Steve with the Browning 12 gauge shotgun clamped in the gouging hardened steel jaws of it a workbench vise. Carefully crafted, elegant things usually have a protective aura, a shield of some kind against stupidity and carelessness and that shield often keeps them beautiful, and sometimes it is just padding. Whatever protection the finely machined and expensive shotgun had before was now breaking down. Something deeply out of line was happening down here.

A single light bulb dangled from the ceiling and the glare illuminated a small corner of the basement.

It was the workspace typical of a homeowner who almost never works with their hands and even then, it is only because they can’t find someone else to do the job for them. Steve wasn’t the homeowner, his grandfather was. How Steve ever came to be living with his grandparents I don’t know, but neither of them ever seemed to be around. His grandfather was the head of a grocery store chain and in the three years I hung around with Steve I never saw his grandfather even once. Grandma was occasionally home, but I only remember seeing her when she was pulling out of their oversized garage. This was during an era when homes in this neighborhood had single car garages and two care garages were becoming more and more popular, but Steve’s grandparents had a three car garage.

During his first year in high school Steve had customized and restored a 1932 Ford roadster with so much horsepower and chrome plating that the gleaming and complicated open engine compartment appeared to occupy the entire first half of the car. He had done all of the things to the car that was popular among hot-rodders of the time.

The Engine was an Oldsmobile rocket 88 that had been bored, stroked, ported and relieved and sported two four-barreled carburetors. The body had been chopped, channeled and lowered. The black leather bench seat that had been rolled, tucked and pleated.

Racing slick tires on the chrome rear wheels and to top it off, a candy-apple red metallic paint job with flames painted on the side. I remember being surprised that he parked the precious roadster on the street, but there was only room for three cars in the garage.

When he was home, grandfather drove the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR with the gull wing doors.

Now before I say anything further it is important to provide a little detail about Grandfather’s Mercedes.

Sterling Moss was regarded as one of the greatest racing drivers, if not the greatest racing drivers in the world at the time, and he had even won the famous Italian road races, the Mille Miglia and the Targa Florio driving almost exactly the same car. He called the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, “The greatest sports car ever built.” Not an idle statement from someone this famous in racing. The car was mystifyingly fast, and exceedingly rare. Forget the horrific price tag, so few of them were built, I don’t know how Steve’s grandfather was even able to locate one to buy. But regardless, there it sat, in all of it’s quiet splendor, at the far end the garage.

Next in line in the garage was the reason Steve and I were recently spending so much time together. It was a car and it had a red paint job that was so bright that in the dim flat light of the garage the car looked as though we had pointed a searchlight at it. This was a vehicle whose only intention was speed. This was not for picking up the kids from school, nor was it for impressing your girlfriend, particularly because we had removed the second seat. This little red screamer was a 200 S I Maserati with the tubular steel frame that with good reason came to be called ‘birdcage’ and along with the Ford roadster, this outrageous example of Italian engineering and flamboyance, also belonged to Steve. The third car in the lineup was a brand-new fuel-injected Corvette, and it belonged to grandma.

Now it was bad enough that I had a friend who was rich enough to have a deuce Coupe like the Beach Boys sang about, and a race car like Sterling Moss and Juan Fangio had driven, but to have a grandmother who had a fuel injected ’Vette’, was just simply outrageous.

My family, in contrast to Steve’s, meaning all four of 25

us together, owned and shared one, singular, light green Falcon. A disgustingly colored early form of small four door sedan that never quite evolved far enough to become even a real Ford. That was it.

We had a Falcon. Like most people I knew at the time, we were a one-car family. My grandmother wouldn’t know a Corvette from her knitting basket.

My grandmother might talk about cars in terms of their colors and that was about as far as it went. I don’t think my grandmother even had a driver’s license and fuel injection was certainly not in her vocabulary.

When I came down the stairs Steve was dragging the hacksaw across the barrel of the shotgun to start the cut. With a serious yet nameless fear, I asked him, “What the hell are you doing? He answered, “Revenge.” I knew it was time for me to leave but I didn’t. Confucius is supposed to have said, “When you begin a campaign of revenge, you dig two graves.” Sawing the barrel of a shotgun was like handing you a shovel.

Adolescence doesn’t seem to be an anxious time in the process of growing up so much as it is a time of consistently making the wrong decisions. So I stayed. I stayed and I started to ask Steve another question, but was stopped by his saying something I had heard endlessly from my father. He said, “Shut up and watch.” I didn’t know what I was going to learn from this watching but the adrenaline was squirting and my mouth stayed shut. As long as his hand stayed away from the trigger, I felt okay, at least temporarily, maybe, sort of. Wrong. Lies. All lies. I was terrified out of my skull and I loved it.

Mechanical foreplay is always such a cheap thrill.

He was panting by the time he finished the cut and fourteen inches of precisely machined blu-black barrel clattered onto the bench. He took a file from the toolbox and began to smooth the ragged burrs at the edge of the cut. Now, I don’t want to give the impression that Steve was mechanically inept. He wasn’t. His real passion was cars, not shotguns; tools fit in his hands as though they had grown there. The file in his hand was one I had come to know as a ‘Rat Bastard.’ The name was a kind of technical dirty joke. The kind you could get away with anywhere because someone would always jump in support you by saying, “That’s the real name of the thing.” I know 26

it sounds bad but he’s right, it’s called the Rat (tail) Bastard.” This time, the ‘Rat Bastard’ was too coarse and Steve asked me to go upstairs, into the garage, where his enormous tool chest occupied much of the front of the garage and to get him a different file. “What kind?” I asked. Smiling, he thought for a moment before he responded, thinking about the times we had joked about the name ‘Rat Bastard’ and he said, “Aw, just get me one of them skinny little round motherfuckers.”

Now Steve might have had a lot of money but he had a lot of tonnage too. A thyroid problem at eighteen years old can be a downright liability. It meant two hundred and fifty pounds on a five foot ten inch frame. Steve’s passion for cars was an exaggerated form of what every teenage male in middling America went through during the 1950’s. His cars existed as a diversion. The manufacturers had said they were making cars for transportation. They lied. We knew better. They made them to temporarily distract teenagers from sex. Making cars for transportation was a nice idea, a clever ruse, but it didn’t work.

Teenage mechanics have permanent hard-ons, and they don’t result from leaning over sensually curved fenders, they come from anticipation. Steel cleavage, so carefully arranged that nearly every moment near a car is spent thinking about getting laid. Steve’s being rich would normally have made it easier to get laid, but being fat evened the odds, so he was just like the rest of us, except he had enough money to make his wet dreams metallic.

Having anticipated that the completely ostentatious collection of cars in his family might be recognized by someone, Steve had borrowed a rather ordinary looking Chevy station wagon from a friend and parked two short-end blocks from the squat, one story police precinct station. Our position was just a little uphill from the station and partially obscured by some trees. Steve showed me how he had removed the shot from some shells and that the size of the barrel was just big enough so he could slide and a cylindrical M80 firecracker into each of the barrels, follow them with the now completely blank shotgun shells. He then snapped the newly short-barreled shotgun shut.

“What this has to do with, Steve said, is getting their attention.”

As he squinted through a spotting scope that was propped up on the dashboard he said that Officer Buster Snyder had given him another ticket for having a loud exhaust on his Ford roadster and if he got one more ticket he would lose his license.

Buster Snyder was a newly-licensed teenage drivers version of the plague. He was the archetypal cop and he had an annoying ability to show up just as the fun was beginning to start. His idea of a good time was conflict with any and all teenagers and yet, there was a bizarre kind of symbiosis where police arrogance was fueled by disrespectful youth. A pig eating bacon, because that’s all there is to eat. At the very least they fed off of each other. Many years after my time with Steve, I read in a magazine that Buster Snyder was the cop who had arrested the world heavy weight champion boxer Sonny Liston for carrying a concealed weapon in his car. It was a minor switch from teenagers to prizefighters.

They’re both dumb and get knocked around. Even later, I heard that officer Buster was trying to pull a car over when the young driver threw a wrench into the spokes of Buster’s motorcycle. The wrench caught up against the front fork tubes and caused his front wheel to stop in a rather abrupt fashion.

Leaving Buster to perform some primitive aerial gymnastics before giving an Elm tree his very last kiss. Perhaps this event never happened. It may be only wishful thinking, a mere rumor, an urban legend, but it makes me smile. Even smirk.

Steve rolled down the window on the driver side just far enough to allow him to stuff the recoil pad against the window frame and point the barrel, like some aberrant form of executive mortar, up and toward the police station. When he pulled the trigger there wasn’t any real bang, more like a loud whoosh, the kind you would hear in a garage when they vent an air compressor. A noise like a mechanical diarrhea, ugly and disgusting, but part of every day. Not a sound you would particularly notice.

I don’t really know where the firecrackers landed but the blank shotgun shells certainly did propel them in the right direction, and yes, the heat of moving through the short barrel was enough to light the fuse, and when those little noisemakers arrived at, on, or near the police station, they went off with enough

volume to convince everyone inside the station that they were under attack, and that their assailant was using some serious artillery.

Steve was laughing so hard he could barely get off the two final rounds Each time he sat up from looking through the spotting scope he laughed harder, causing the whole car to shake and making it nearly impossible for me to look. What I did finally see was three or four cops running out the front door and then moving in opposite directions. Jerkily moving just like they had just been part of the firecracker.

Just like the Keystone cops, clumsy, stumbling, in pre-terrorist times.

Years later, I saw a kid in Los Angeles use a fork in a tree as a slingshot during the Watts riots. With some inner tubes and a few friends to help, he could throw a brick the length of a whole city block. Like Steve with his Browning, the boy with the giant slingshot was protesting police harassment by getting their attention. Letting the watchers know they were being watched. Watching the watchers.

The right-hand drive Maserati had to go to the racetrack in the morning for time trials and it took most of the night before to get it prepared. Just the simple act of changing the oil is, in itself, a twentytwo quart activity on an engine that has a dry sump.

Why an engine would ever have a dry sump and need twenty-two quarts of oil is the kind of mystery only understood by Italian engineers, but that remains true of a lot of automotive lore.

The hardest part of the evening was getting a new aluminum driver’s seat bent to accommodate Steve’s very large and lumpy body. Second was the complicated task of adjusting the suspension to compensate for Steve’s being the equivalent of three Italians in the driver seat and because the Maserati (for another mystical Italian reason) was righthand drive, giving the car a distinct tendency to tip over while turning to the left. Halfway through the process our sometime friend, and brilliant mechanic, Bill Thomas, showed up to help prep the Maserati and like Steve had his slew of speeding tickets. Even though the three of us had been hanging around together for years, Bill was a guy who treated me like more of an annoyance than a friend. He was always long on tactics and short on 27

diplomacy. Bill asked how we were going to get the car to the track. For some inconceivably forgotten reason, there was just the Maserati and no trailer was either rented or available and Steve said he would just drive the Maserati on the highway, (no license plates, not street legal in any way and louder than any three motorcycles.) the thirty miles to the race track, leaving Bill and I to follow in another car.

Okay, fine. I’m fine with that, but I didn’t have a car.

Bill’s car was temporarily lacking some critical parts.

The Ford roadster had no license plates, wasn’t what you would call a road car and it sure as hell didn’t have much room for tools.

Grandma needed the ‘Vette’, and grandpa, invisible grandpa, was out of town. His gull-wing Mercedes sat in shining silver splendor next to the Maserati.

It had a kind of majestic presence. The unconfirmed legend of the time was that this car had an engine that was so powerful and special that the engine was ‘sealed’ and could only be worked on by mechanics from the Mercedes factory. The garage lights were now all focused on the brilliant glowing red of the Maserati, and yet in the shadows, off to the side, you could feel the presence and the power of this smooth German mechanical dream. Steve looked at me and said without even a trace of hesitation, “You drive the gull-wing.” “Me? Me drive? Me drive the fucking gull-wing?” I hadn’t even so much as opened the door on that car. This was the era when high school boys argued the virtues of Ford over Chevy. When people make jokes about foreign cars and Volkswagen was something that gas station attendants, (Remember gas station attendants?) said things like, “Where do you put the gas in this thing?” Or, “Hey Joe, they forgot to put an engine in this one.” And now, me, a seventeen-year old punk from nowhere, was going to drive the German race car with doors that open like the wings of a bird? A Mercedes-Benz, 300 SLR (The ‘R’ stands for Racing.) with gull wing doors?

Yeah. Right. Sure.

We were on the road just before dawn and the Highway Patrol was sitting in his car on a small perpendicular side road and he must have thought he was seeing things when the red blip of the Maserati flashed past. The Maserati is only twenty-one inches high at the base of the windshield and it had a highpitched whine crossed with a rumble. It’s brother, the Testa Rosa Ferrari, had a deep throated, even 28

thunderous roar, but the Maserati whined. Actually more mechanical scream that caused the highway patrolman to realize there was no way in hell he was going to catch that one, so he didn’t even try.

A few minutes later however, he was alert when the shimmering gull-wing’s deep and elegant silence rolled by a little too quickly. This one, he was going after and he was going to catch it too.

Glancing in the rear-view mirror, the flashing lights became obvious and I blurted, “Oh shit.” And started to pull over. Bill Thomas, sitting in the passenger seat next to me, said, “What are you doing?” “Cops.”

I said. Bill replied, “Shit man, you’ve got the power.

Lose him!” It was the only time I ever really listened to that kind of advice. But, we were nearly coasting in second gear at seventy-five miles an hour and that kind of power was a substantial encouragement. The road was dry and flat, four lanes with a median and no other cars in sight. The foot goes down and the rear wheels break loose, screech, smoke and shudder a bit as my head snapped back when I shifted into third. I watch the rear view mirror as the front of the highway patrol car slowly shrinks away to finally become only a small dot on the long straight road and then it simply vanishes. When my eyes returned to the road head I realized elevated speeds had caused the dashed road markings to visibly become a single continuous line and the telephone poles that were actually five hundred feet apart began to look like a picket fence. This silver seagull was flying on the ground. Weightlessness. A howling moving meditation and the mode was tilting toward orgasm.

About half way to the race track we found ourselves a small town a little way off the highway and were very careful to park the car on a side street out of sight from the main road and we went into a café for some coffee.

When we returned, the cop had his foot on the edge of the front tire and was writing out the ticket.

“Going to little fast, weren’t you son?” “Yes, I guess so.” I sheepishly replied. “You guess so?” He said, “Listen here, you little punk, I was doing hundred and twenty and you walked away from me.” The vein on his forehead was beginning to stand out. “I’m not about ready to start off my day dealing with some smart-ass rich kid that pulls a horizon job on me

before breakfast.” He shoved the ticket toward me.

We climbed back into the car and Bill Thomas said, “How are you going to explain this one?” I said, “Explain to who?” “Your parents, the judge, any one.” I said, “I don’t understand, what’s to explain?

I got a speeding ticket.” Bill looked at the ticket, smiled, looked back at me and said, “Doing fifty in a thirty-five zone is a speeding ticket. What you have here is seventy miles an hour over the limit in a sixty zone. That’s something else.”

“What are you going to tell them when they ask why you did such a thing?” He asked. “I probably won’t have any answer.” I said, as we pulled away from the curb. “But if they do, I’ll tell them it was friendship.”

“Friendship?” He asked. “How do you figure that?”

“Well, I said, I’ll just tell them that you were the one driving and I took the wrap for you because you’ve got so many tickets you would lose your license.”

“Simple, friendship.” Somehow I knew for the first and only time I had Bill Thomas, like I had the cop.

I had his attention.

29

The Pizza man

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I

t wasn’t the stink as much as it was the taste. The red air came into your mouth and sat on the back of your tongue and just stayed there, on the part of your tongue that senses all the things that are gray, bitter and vague.

The Shift Foreman didn’t have a memorable face, he was only a shape with the voice. The shape was a piece of broken concrete and the sharp and crumbed voice matched exactly. Think Tom Waits at the end of a bad night. Without a hello or even a nod, he handed me a pair of steel-toed boots and a pair of green safety glasses, He bent down and pulled some steel filings off a magnetic broom used to sweep his little corner of the mill. He intentionally smudged the lenses with the filings and his grimy thumb.

“Don’t want ya’ ta’ see things too clearly on your first day.” “From now on Kid, get used to seeing the world through Green steel wool. Your glasses are going to look like this after the first hour anyway. I just wanted you to get the right idea at the beginning.”

Making steel is like making candles, only a lot bigger and hotter. First you get a lot of iron ore, add some scrap metal and then you put it in a big pot and heat it with raging coke fires or enormous amounts of electric arc. Steel is only iron with carbon added to make it stronger. When it gets hot enough to turn liquid, around two thousand five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, add other metals and powders to vary the characteristics of the new steel. Sometimes you blow oxygen through the liquid to burn away a little of the crud that you don’t want in the new steel.

Then you pour it into molds and let it harden. Most of the furnaces today are electric, but the ones in the mill where I was working were the old-style open hearth, but it doesn’t really matter which method you use for making steel, they all still use big buckets and when the metal had been poured out of the buckets (called ladles) there was always some good metal and a lot of slag that formed a big lump in the bottom of the bucket. When the lump had cooled,

31

the fifty-foot high overhead gantry crane came and picked up the bucket, and took it up to the end of the building where the bucket was tipped up and dumped the steaming blackened mass, banging the bucket to get the lump to fall out into the dirt. Like banging a coffee canister on the side of the sink to get the grounds to fall out. The lump comes out from the steel pour bucket all in one lump and when it hits the ground the ground shakes. They call this lump a ‘Ladle Skull’ or a ‘Button.’ The bottom of the bucket is rounded so the button looks like a round and dark gray hill. Sometimes with crooked orange veins still dribbling and steaming like cow shit on a winter morning. Sometimes just mute gray and but with enough heat inside so that fifteen feet away seems far to close. Twelve to twenty feet in diameter and up to 4 feet high, the buttons were too big and clumsy to move and still had too much valuable metal in them to be bulldozed off into the slag heaps. They needed to be cut up to sort the good parts from the bad. The only worse job in the mill was ‘The Raker’ who pulled the slag off the top of the molten metal during a pour, but they were very well paid and died early, so being the most recent hire in the mill this low on the ladder seemed OK for me, and after all, I didn’t have a union card yet, so I had better keep 32

my mouth shut and do what I was told. My job was to be, “The butcher,” cutting away the fat from the bone. After I had been there a while and proven I could take it, I didn’t get a raise, but my job title got an upgrade. No longer ‘The Butcher,’ I became known as, “The Pizza Man.” The standard attire for this job was an aluminum fabric suit to reflect the heat with an air hose feeding into a helmet with a reflective face shield. But when the suit was in use elsewhere what I wore was leather and cotton and occasionally there was no real air hose, just a respirator with a hose and filter dangling down my back. It all sounds somewhat nice and sanitary and somewhat protected, doesn’t it? All the air coming into the helmet was the same scorched stinking air in the mill. The cutting tool I used is called an oxygen lance. It consists of a piece of steel pipe, from six to twelve feet long depending on the job, with some handles and a hose attached at one end. The hose delivers the mixture of iron powder and high-pressure oxygen. Just think of it as a garden hose with a really long nozzle. The difference is that the business end of the nozzle has a spark plug and when the trigger is pulled, the spark ignites the iron powder being pushed through the pipe by the oxygen

and fifteen feet of flame rockets from the end of the pipe. Army flamethrowers squirt lit napalm at about six hundred degrees. The oxygen lance gets up to about three thousand five hundred.

This is not some cigarette lighter. Dante had nothing on this inferno. This flamethrower is a long streak of raging light just hot enough to slice through those enormous steel and slag buttons. “Hey Pizza Man, get goin’. “Cut ‘em up.”

They would pour steel during the day shift and leave the ladle skulls for me to cut at night.

They had a behemoth fork lift capable of lifting forty-five tons, but the skulls were heavier and had to be cut so this monster could hall them away. Night after night in the smoking dark slicing ladle skulls. Me, the steel butcher. I had become an industrial hybrid between saint George and his dragon, standing in the dark with aluminum armor and breathing fire.

If you want to understand what it is like to work in a steel mill at night, go into your kitchen at night. Turn the oven up to broil.

Turn the kitchen lights off and come back in five minutes. Leave the lights off and grope your way to the oven. Open the door all the way. Then fumble around to find a cigarette, light it and smoke it all the way down. Get down on your knees and put your chin about an inch above the open door. When heat is so intense that you don’t think you can take it anymore, have someone blow cigarette ashes

and smoke in your eyes while you try to read what is written here.

Don’t get up. Stay in this position. Stay there for 20 years. Or stay until steel prices drop. Whichever comes first. Then you can leave.

By November it is cold in the Northeast. The back of me is anyway. The front half is cooked from the still glowing button and the fire-spewing lance. It has been a long time since I lost the fascination of pissing fire at the steel rocks. Its just night and it’s cold and the work is stupid.

The man running the gantry crane high above me is someone I never see because his crane cage is so blackened by grime that the windows are nearly opaque. The mill’s name for this type of crane is ‘The Skull Cracker.’ He hangs, dangling his dead hot payload in the darkness. He doesn’t have a radio or radar, he runs on instinct. Although I have never seen this man face to face I understand that he too, is bored and finds a little fun in dropping a 30-ton button behind me in the dark. Never close enough to hurt me, but close enough. His world, like mine, is darkness and heat. When he drops one behind me the ground shakes like it has been hit with artillery.

My flame sprays around wildly with the shock of the impact. He doesn’t want to kill or even hurt me; he just wants to screw me up. We are almost the only ones in this end of the mill on the night shift and he wants to splash my fire around to prove he is still alive. Existential fireworks.

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Break time meant turning off the lance and taking off the helmet. Always with the expectation that the air would be fresh and crisp and always with disappointment when it was the same hot brown gas as with the helmet on. At least you could sit down. Take a leak, get a coffee, and sit. Graveyard and swing shifts in the mill are relatively easy and the pay is the best, but there are less workers and when the brakes are staggered you don’t see many people and the loneliness begins to seep in. It crawls around your feet, slides up through your coveralls and sinks into your spirit. Sitting on a lump of new steel, carefully selected to keep the cold night away, but not hot enough to make you think of the mill.

Crossed Legged, stinking, half-assed, half lotus.

Knowing full well that enlightenment won’t come here and the skull cracker crane looming overhead is no fig tree and it doesn’t even pretend to be.

A little ways past the surprisingly spindly, stork-like legs of the crane was a set of railroad tracks. They started at the side of the furnace building, curved around the end of the gantry and finally disappeared into another black-brown building that might have

34

been a rolling mill but I never went in so I don’t know. A little past the midpoint of the curve in the tracks stood a small dark red-brown wooden railroad-switching shack. No more than ten feet on a side. It had enough space and protection for one man to stand inside and direct some of the track switches.

An iridescent glow began to emerge from the furnace-building end of the railroad tracks when I realized it was a hot-metal car. Pushed by two diesel switch engines. The hot-metal car is a rail car on a tilt-bed so that the molten steel it receives from the furnaces can be poured out in another building.

You could tell it was a full car as the engines were groaning just to get it going, but once rolling it went faster than I expected. It had wheels, not just in the front and back, but all along the bottom, to support the hundred tons of liquid fire sloshing around inside. As the car and trailing engines neared the midpoint of the curve, I could tell it was going too fast. The intuition of speed is a visceral thing.

It is not about vectors and tangents. It is about the tightening of the sphincter and what someone in the

race car business calls that, “Oh fuck.” feeling. The hot metal car leaned slowly, snapped its connections to the switch engines and fell in slow motion onto its side. Vomiting a heavy yellow orange lake in the direction of the shack.

I am told that sublimation is something that occurs when a solid passes directly to a gas without ever going through a liquid state. That’s the only way to think of the switchman’s shack. It didn’t have time to burn. It simply vanished. A small spasm in the boiling metal and smoking dirt. No one seemed to know if the switchman was in the shack or not, but that red air in the mill tasted different that night, it tasted like something had left.

35

Super Chicken

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W

hen you work high steel you get paid a lot.

Not always money either. Just a lot.

You learn to slide down a column with your feet pushed against one flange and your hands pulling against the other. You learn the rule is three points of contact with the steel. Two hands and one foot.

Or the other way around. You learn that everyone pays attention to this rule about forty percent of the time. They (Bethlehem, I think.) put up a safety net after the third guy died. The net had two foot square holes to let the wind blow through it. We still had nine other falls, but they survived. This was decades away from the era when iron workers were to be clipped-in to a monkey line and harness at all times.

The Verrazano Narrows Bridge connects Brooklyn with Staten Island and had a time-of-completion contract: It would open at Noon on November 21, 1964. And every minute past noon it would cost the American Bridge division of U.S. Steel $15,000 per minute. Consequently, the last year or so of construction was with three shifts. By the time I got there the two towers were finished, the cable stringers were mostly gone and there was a big piece of lower bridge deck swinging in the sky.

I wasn’t over being a ‘Punkin’ (apprentice) but I wasn’t a real rigger yet, I was supposedly a rigger

after all this time, but actually I was a ‘drifter,’ because I used a drift pin and a spud wrench to line up steel connections and then bolt them together. I wasn’t a good enough climber or beam walker to be called a real rigger. I learned to drift bolts into the ends of the beam while the crawler crane operator is still swinging the other end the beam around. And I learned that moving steel swinging on a cable has something called inertia and it will keep this inertia thing going in spite of what anyone thinks.

You learn that everyone on the job has a name and it’s not the name on your pay stub, but it is the one that you are given by the job and that you must earn this name. Names like “Lunchbox,” “Brainboy,” and

“Dicknose,” mine was, “Super Chicken.” In a pinch it was “Irish.” Everybody is a redneck that works high steel, or red Iron as they sometimes call it, But some necks end up redder than others. For no particular reason, I was the only white guy on the rigging crew at this height. Everyone else up here was Iroquois, Seneca, Pemigewasset, Mohawk or Cree. I have red hair and freckles, so they tell their friends it is because before I came to work on the this bridge I worked in the steel mills and when I was in the mills I got ‘cooked’ and that’s how I got red hair. I got the name “Super Chicken,” not because I am the only Anglo on the job but because when I am 300 feet off the water I am still scared, but I keep on working (That’s the not-chicken part) and “Super,” because of the time I had said some disparaging things about the Italian electrician’s girlfriend, and he came after me with a screwdriver and I broke his arm with my spud wrench. I didn’t take much heat from anybody after that. Everything was rather cordial in fact, it didn’t need to be anymore dangerous. I had earned my stripes and my name.

‘Hazardous duty pay’ is what they call it when they give you a lot of money for trying to make a way for some fool to drive from Brooklyn to Staten Island. (The pedestrian walkways were cut out of the budget so the only time pedestrians are allowed on the bridge is during the New York Marathon.)

The hazard part is when you learn about the bar in Brooklyn where they cater to iron workers and the only drink available is called ‘A Depth Charge.’ The double shot of whiskey, glass and all, dropped into a tall draft of beer. Oh, and besides selling ‘depth charges’, for a small fee, they will cash payroll checks at 3 AM. so you can buy more depth charges. By some miracle I once had back-to-back swing and night shifts on a Sunday and it was also a holiday weekend so I was really well paid. Add on to that hazardous duty pay, plus height pay, means triple time and a half. One brutal weekend I made enough to pay for one year of college tuition. And two depth charges.’

The hazard part of the duty is when you realize that because of wind resistance the average human body reaches the terminal velocity of a hundred and thirty miles an hour in about forty-eight feet. So, if you fall off a four-story building you will be just as dead as if you fell off the Verrazano Narrows. There is not 37

much comfort in this comparison because learning that you can drown in a bucket of water doesn’t prevent you from being afraid of the deep.

The lower bridge deck of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge is 265 feet above the water and while not the longest in the world, the mid span is sixty feet longer than the Golden gate Bridge in San Francisco.

At least that is how they say it on the scratchy static speakers of this New York City tour bus I am riding on. Hearing the tour guide babble doesn’t seem to convey anything to me. Perhaps it is because as I sit in the back of this tour bus, I think of the 1500 other people who worked on this massive steel lump of deadpan engineering? Perhaps I am thinking this because a bridge should be about grace and finesse as well as transport? Or is it because I am remembering the Iroquois ironworker we called “Bonefish?”

The Golden Gate Bridge was built by attaching the bridge deck first to the land side and came out toward the center. Working both from Marin and the City, to meet eventually in the center. The Verrazano Narrows Bridge was built by hanging the bridge deck at first in the center and then extended outward toward both shores. This made it much more difficult to get workers and materials to the center, but the system used on the Golden Gate caused the unconnected parts to sway dramatically in the wind - the unceasing miserable wind every bridge worker knows and hates. The Verrazano Bridge was done center-out to put more stabilizing tension on the cables. What this eventually meant was that for a long time, we had perfectly completed pieces of highway hanging in the sky.

Occasionally, Bonefish came to work a little drunk.

Today he was wasted. After arriving on the bridge deck, he climbed onto a tool supply motor scooter and proceeded to merrily drive along three or four hundred yards of perfectly normal highway bridge before coming upon a series of sawhorse style barriers. The barriers were meant to indicate the safety net was being repositioned at the unfinished end of the bridge. Bonefish thought these barriers were merely an inconvenience and simply drove around them. The foreman saw Bonefish fall and hit the air horns with three blasts. Everyone ran to the nearest edge.

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After having fallen over hundred feet, he gracefully pushed the scooter away in a delirious aerial pas de deux and in what seemed like slow-motion, he curled up into the shape he had when he came into this world, and entered the water like a stone. Two days later, Bonefish was propped up on the bridge deck with white plaster around various limbs, waiting the shift change whistle to blow so he could go for a drink with his buddies.

Or maybe I am not listening to the tour guide because I am thinking of the Apache welder from Flagstaff, the one called “Man Fred.” He was the one I finally told I was working on the bridge to make money to pay for college. Something I never told anyone else the whole time on the bridge. This was during a period when redneck iron workers had short hair, aluminum hard hats and looked for any opportunity to beat up any long haired anti-war hippie smart assed college kid.

Man Fred was the one I finally asked. “Why do you do this?” “Risk your life up here in the howling wind, every day. Is it just for the money?” “No, he said, looking into the early-morning sun streaking across the water.” “It’s because up here, I am with the birds. And sometimes, if I listen really hard I can even hear the wind in the Pines.

39

Summit County

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W

hen I drove to the airport to pick her up I didn’t know what to do about it.

I mean, what were the alternatives?

The office had asked me to go to a ski condo complex to make some survey corrections. taking on a passenger didn’t mean I couldn’t get the job done. She flew in from Kentucky and just needed a lift to the mountains and back. No harm in that. She was the one with the friends in a wedding in the distant mountain town, not me. We had to drive over the passes because the tunnel wasn’t finished and so we took the scenic route over Independence Pass. After all, the name of the pass seemed like an appropriate name for a quasi-irresponsible act.

I went up into the mountains when I wasn’t supposed to. Well, I was supposed to be going up, but for different reasons than the ones I had said. I was supposed to be going for work. The real reasons had a lot more to do with lust and boredom, but I can’t remember if it was more boredom or more lust. Didn’t matter, I was going to go anyway. Like they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time. It was summer and we were going to a wedding of some people I didn’t know. It didn’t seem to matter much. The wedding was just an excuse. The wedding was going to be in a crummy little mining town that was in the process of becoming a ski town, then a condo town, then a big-time destination resort of some sort, but that resort stuff was years down the road and it was still just a beat up old mining town with a main street and a couple of bars, a few actual log cabins. There were a some glaciers higher up that hotshot teenagers would ski, or rather try to ski, in the summer. It was the kind of place my father would have called, “A moss–backed dung heap, all dust and a yard wide.” It was an almost ghost town, maybe just a cow town, in serious need of repair. The miners had come for gold, but stayed for the silver, tin and lead. And once all that played out, ranching was the only thing that could come close to helping someone eke out a living, but there is not a lot of lush pastures in altitudes

close to ten thousand feet and the cattle are as thin as the rock strewn pastures they try to graze. Wanna-be-ski towns can be pretty grim places in summer as they have temporarily lost their purpose. More than one mountain town has had to reinvent itself as some sort of center for whatever festival the next town over doesn’t have. The skiers had continued to press their case no matter how thin it was. And continually hoped the new white fluff above timberline would turn into gold.

The wedding was to be a stylish and expensive outdoor affair. A white tent, young girls with wild flowers in their hair, Flamboyantly dressed young men in duded-up western garb of all types and a kind of phony cowboy sophistication. All of us were urban dwellers, playing outdoorsy for the weekend. The only stained sweatbands you saw were on the grim hats of the few locals.

Lots of flashy cars clustered around the wedding tent and not a callus or a pair of work gloves in sight. It was near noon when we arrived and the pre-wedding festivities were well under way with lots of food and drink but they seemed to have a forced giddiness to them and everyone seemed they were trying to kill their newly found high-altitude headaches with alcohol.

The atmosphere was one of people desperately trying to have a good time, while the thin air carried the acrid smell of the last illusions of young adult freedom. Somehow they knew this weekend in the mountains was the little trickle of time just before the chains of parenthood and mortgage payments. Everyone was here for a wedding and yet knew relationships would unfold, collide, unravel and dissolve in complicated and unpredictable ways. And yes, there was the distinct possibility future decades of careers that would end up meaning nothing, and go nowhere. This mountain wedding weekend was just a pretend weekend. Yes, it was summer, but at this altitude, you could taste the chill of the wind off the glaciers and that wind said the thundering avalanches of winter were not far away.

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One thirty-seven PM was the somehow supersignificant time the bride and groom had decided the vows were to take place. As I a stumbled around the throng, I began to realize I was getting bored. I’m one of those curious people who can be fascinated by almost anything.

Rocks, dirt, old buildings can send me, and my imagination absolutely away. It takes an awful lot to get me bored, but this group was making me want to scream. These people were city folk, all flatlanders. Some of them probably didn’t even know where they were. I was both nervous and exhausted by the polite chitchat with people I didn’t know, didn’t care about, and would probably never see again. The woman from Kentucky had gone off to be with the people she knew and I decided to go for a walk by myself.

I had left my truck at a house near the wedding tent and in the process of one silly conversation or another had somehow acquired a brand new, never opened bottle of Grand Mariner cognac.

With no particular direction or intent I set off walking away from the gathering toward the edge of town. Not a car was moving on the long dirt street with some sad old clapboard houses, a scattering of single-wide trailers, clumps of aspens and some scrawny old elms lining the edges of a few pastures. It was open ranch country, impossible to get lost. After about twenty minutes, the town was now far in the distance and I found myself at what appeared to be a public junkyard. A junkyard is not the same as a dump. A dump is for garbage and rotting things. It is the place you go to shoot rats with a .22 rifle. This junkyard was all manner of metal that had ceased to have any utility. All the usual culprits were there: Propane tanks, refrigerators, barbed wire, half a tractor, chunks of twisted aluminum siding, and cars, lots of cars. The cars were neither stacked nor arranged in any particular order fashion. None of them looked like they had arrived under their own power, but had the appearance of having been winched off the back of a flat bed truck, or towed there with a chain and then just let go.

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By the time I was having a close look at some of the cars, I was pretty well into the bottle of Grand Marnier and stumbled around the front of what used to be a Ford pickup and snagged my left shin on the mangled and protruding bumper. This was the era when bumpers were chrome steel and I had banged my leg against that ragged steel hard enough to make me howl in pain. There was a rip in the left leg of my Levi’s and when I pulled the pant leg up, there was almost no blood, but there was a hole the size of nickel that had been gouged out of my shin and it was down to the bone.

Suddenly I was much more sober and decided I had better get back to the town as quickly as possible. My wounded leg was not bleeding much and I didn’t do anything to bandage it, but it began to throb. Not like a pulse, but occasionally, and without any pattern at all, the pain would wind around me like a rope and make me groan. With my half empty bottle still in tow, it took about half an hour to limp back to the town. When I got back to my truck, the wedding was going to begin in about ten minutes. I set the bottle of Grand Mariner on the hood of my truck and found a plastic bottle of antiseptic in the glove box. I was standing with my pant leg rolled up and the injured leg hoisted up onto my front bumper and in the process of pouring the antiseptic on the gouge in my shin when the wedding’s ‘best man,’ whom I had been introduced to earlier, walked up to see what I was doing.

He was in a white tux, with a white tie, disheveled hair, and swinging a nearly empty bottle of something. On his left shoulder he had a stain of the local red dirt the size of a tomato. He glanced at the bottle on the hood and then looked down at my leg he said, “What happened to you?” I said, “I was walking around in the junkyard at the edge of town and stumbled into a mangled truck bumper and tore a hole in my leg.” He said, “In my experience, it is best to maintain an even strain.” And without another word, he stumbled

off in the direction of the wedding tent.

I don’t recall if I went to the wedding or not.

Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. It doesn’t matter.

Regardless, I have come to understand what it means to maintain an even strain and how hard it is to do it. There are two ends to a rope. It takes tension on a string to make music. I don’t think the woman from Kentucky and I talked at all on the way back to the airport. We did not go back over Independence pass. Since that time I have slowly discovered, and have become somewhat accomplished, in the many convoluted and various ways there are to maintain an even strain, but I still have a nickel-sized dent in my shin from that truck bumper. And I still don’t know what I was looking for in that junkyard.

43

INTERSESSION

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I

f you live in snow country and don’t ski, it seems eerily strange that you would remain there. Does anyone think it is an accident that people from New York and New England end up retiring to Florida and Arizona?

People who do ski can be very picky about how to ski and especially about where to ski. All this gets stirred into the mix along with snow conditions, time and distance, friendship, and sometimes women and beer.

If you live in or near the Rockies, it is not often that you worry about snow conditions, because they are so often perfect. (There are those who would contend that snow conditions can occasionally go beyond perfect and enter the realm of ecstatic, but that is entirely another discussion.) If you live in or near the Cascades, you often ski at night because the snow is colder and not slushy like it is during the day and you might occasionally go skiing wearing a black plastic garbage bag because sometimes it rains when you want it to snow. If you live in or near the Sierra Nevada you might hear the term ‘Sierra Cement,’ because of the occasional condition the snow. Powder seems to be a term reserved for the conditions in the Rockies while the term most often heard by Eastern skiers is ‘ice.’ And those that can ski ice are truly wizards.

Those of us who were brought up on the fluffy light white powder of Colorado and Utah are spoiled, Just plain spoiled. I once skied in Utah for two weeks when it snowed about eighteen inches of fresh powder every night and there were clear blue skies all day. And it was April! I have been spoiled, just spoiled.

Eastern skiers from the White Mountains of New Hampshire to the Green Mountains of Vermont make do with wind and ice and from time to time they have real snow. Even with often terrible conditions on the slopes there is enough fun and excitement to lure people out of their snug homes to do battle with winter.

It is hard to imagine two more out of place people than Greg and myself. He was from Hawaii, I was from Colorado and yet we had somehow decided to attend university in the sub-arctic swamp known as Syracuse New York. It is hard for me to remember his reasons for deciding on Syracuse, but mine were very clearly presented to me by my very much respected prep school adviser, who said, ‘You are not going to Williams College because although you are smart, you are not that smart and you would struggle all the time to just stay even at a place like Williams.

You are not going to Middlebury because their specialties are in liberal arts and your strengths are in sciences and fine art. You are going to Syracuse because they have a broad enough base to offer you more options and also access to the breadth of the whole college experience.”

What he didn’t mention was the weather.

Syracuse gets around ninety days of sunshine per year. Ninety days? So let’s see, that makes three months of summer and nine months of shitty skiing. No, that is unfair. There are autumn days so glorious you want to cry. The colors of the trees, the parties, the football games and the cool air with just a hint of what is to come.

Spring isn’t bad either. For perhaps a whole week everything seems possible and renewed, but I have also seen a foot of new snow hit the ground on the 10th of May. Of course after that disconcerting week of flowers and sunshine comes the humidity and the bugs, but that is off track. What I wanted to talk about here is skiing. No, that is not really true either. What I want to present are some of the conditions and circumstances attendant to skiing.

Greg and I were going to go to Vermont. I think we were going to trade housing with some friends who were bartenders at a ski area and they had relatives in Syracuse. I can’t remember the details but it doesn’t matter. Vermont had some very ski-able snow, even if there was ice under it and we were going to go. What allowed us to go is one of the most bizarre and baffling 45

university scheduling screw-ups to ever have occurred. Syracuse University was on the semester system, but they were clueless when it came to making it effective. In the winter, We had a break that began on the 23rd of December and had to return on January 3rd. Ten lousy days. Not a big deal if you lived forty miles down the road in Utica, But if you were from Denver like me or in Greg’s case, Honolulu, you were screwed. If you were lucky, at that time of year, you could count on a day and a half of travel each way, two days of jet lag and altitude adjustment, and that leaves you with five days at home. Just not worth it. Way too expensive and exhausting. Stay in the East, visit friends and go skiing.

The other very real oddity of the university schedule was a thing called ‘Intersession’ and happened because when you returned from Christmas vacation on the 3rd of January you had a week to prepare for exams that started on the 10th of January and if you had all your exams scheduled in the first few days of exam week, you might be finished with the semester by the 15th and not have to begin the spring semester until the 4th of February. Hmm, let’s see, eighteen or so days off in between semesters in the dead of winter. Of course all of this could easily be combined into one long winter break, but it seemed to be higher math that the university was just not able to grasp. Eighteen days of freedom in Upstate New York in the middle of winter meant it was time to go skiing - in Vermont.

Stowe was for snobs from New York City, Sugarbush was for hot shots who knew how to ski on ice. Glen Ellen was for people who didn’t know how to ski and were taking beginners lessons. Mad River Glen was for real skiers and it is normally about a five hour drive from Syracuse to Mad River. Down the New York State Thruway (a toll road that was paid for in 1955, but still charges exorbitant tolls.) then up the Adirondack Northway, cross over from 46

New York into Vermont. It was normally a very pictorial and simple drive, but not this time.

Because we left Syracuse in the afternoon we knew we would be driving in the snow at night, but that was not a problem because I had a Volkswagen bug with snow tires on it and with all the engine weight on the rear wheels it had great traction and had already taken me places impossible to get to with other two-wheel drive cars.

Our skis were in a very small rack on the sloping back and stuck up about three feet above the roof in probably the least aerodynamic manner ever invented. It also gave the car the appearance of a rounded television with rabbit ears antenna sticking out the back or a beetle with horns.

Of course, because the car had an air cooled engine the heater produced about as much heat as a small child breathing and the same goes for the defroster. And that meant keeping the wing window (remember wing windows?) open, consequently we wore hats and parkas and gloves inside the car. The only difference between being outside in a snowstorm and inside the car was that the car had lights and a windshield, otherwise it was the same.

By the time we got down to Utica, Greg had opened the first can of beer from the case of Schaeffer in the back seat. Because I was driving I couldn’t indulge. The Schaeffer company had an advertising jingle at the time that said, “Because good friends and good times deserve a great beer ... Schaeffer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one.” And Greg was definitely going to have more than one.

Proceeding up the Adirondack Northway in the snowing dark is the shortest and fastest route to get to Vermont but it is sad to do it in the dark because much of the scenery is Northeast climax forest - Birch, Beech, Maple and Hemlock and Pine. The towns and cities have a lot of charm and character - Saratoga Springs, Glens Falls,

and Lake George, all invisible to us on a weekday evening, rolling along in the snowy dark.

By nine PM we are still in New York and about to turn onto route 4 and be at the Vermont border in about half an hour. The bridge crossing Wood Creek at the nothing town of Whitehall is a ninety degree turn from the road and as I down shift and brake to make the turn I realize by this time Greg has a nice collection of beer cans on the floor and is pretty well wasted. He’s happy and jovial, but he is gone. I also see on the guardrail of the bridge streaks of every color of automobile paint ever made and it is obvious that a lot of people have had a great deal of trouble negotiating this turn, but even though its a bit scary, we make it through without a problem until we get to the other side of the bridge and the police car pull out after us.

There is not another car in sight as I pull over, but I don’t get out of the car. Greg is mumbling and slurring his words so I tell him to shut up and I will handle this. I roll down the window and I hand the cop my license and registration.

The cop gets one whiff of the beer in the car and orders me out of the car. I ask the cop as politely as possible, “What’s the problem officer, I wasn’t speeding and I haven’t had anything to drink?”

He said, Your license plate is not New York and I couldn’t see where it was from because it is blocked by those damn skis. So you got a drunk buddy and you are from Ohio - I want to see some more ID.” I handed him my wallet, which was a mistake because it had one of those plastic accordion fold-outs and all my ID cascaded out, showing about a foot long display of cards. The cop moved his flashlight up and cramped it between his shoulder and jaw so he could use both hands as he said, “My, my, what do we have here?” “What am I supposed to believe? “Your car has Ohio plates, your license says you live in California, you have a draft card registered in Colorado, one says you are a union ironworker in Brooklyn and another says you are a Student at Syracuse University. What the hell am I

supposed to believe here?” I responded in a very quiet respectful voice. “I’m sorry, sir, but those are all true. He said, “ I ought to throw you two clowns in the can for attempting to defraud an officer until I find out what is going on here.

However, if you promise to never come through this town again, I’ll let you go. He handed me my wallet, shifted his flashlight down from his shoulder, and without another word, spun on his heel and walked back to his squad car. I got back in my car and Greg said, “What the hell was that all about? I said, “I have no idea, he was probably just bored and I confused the shit out of him. He has probably never been out of this crummy little town. Could be boredom, could be jealousy, both those things tend to work the same way.”

When we got to Vermont it was cold, much colder than Upstate New York. We didn’t have any real thermometers, but we had ways to make calculated guesses. When there were almost no lines at the ski lifts it was around zero degrees.

If you walked outside from a heated building and the hairs in your nose immediately froze, it was twenty below. If your down parka made crackling noises when you moved, it was too cold to snow and you started to hear fire cracker noises from the sap in the trees freezing and splitting the branches it was real close to thirty below. And once, years later, when I lived in New Hampshire, the plastic jug of kerosene on my porch froze solid and when I checked a real thermometer it said fifty-five below zero.

It was right around zero most of the time Greg and I were at Mad River and the only thing remarkable was the wind. Nobody talked in terms of wind-chill factor in those days but even with all the protection we could muster, the ride on the chair lift was painful and borderline insanity. We couldn’t stay out in that wind any longer than two runs and then would have to go in to have a hot drink in order to warm up.

After our last run of the day my teeth were 47

chattering so we ran to the warmth of the base station cafe. I was in the process of telling our waitress that she was the most beautiful redhead I had ever seen, but she was not interested. All of her attention was completely focused on Greg. Without him saying so much as hello, she was mesmerized. I went off to the bathroom and when I came back Greg was telling her all about Hawaii. I lost track of Greg that evening at some party or other and he came back into our borrowed apartment about 9am the next morning looking more than a little bit bedraggled. I knew I was in shallow water so I said, “I thought we were going to make the milk run. (first run of the day when the lifts open) He said, She was a real redhead.”

We finished that last day in style and decided with the weather being stormy we had better get on the road home. I’m not quite sure what route we took on the way back but we sure as hell avoided that cop who had stopped us in Whitehall, Somehow we got back to the Northway and by then it was snowing heavily.

There was hardly any traffic because in this kind of weather the smart people stay home but our little beetle was running fine and we were glued to the snow covered road.

Near Albany we came to the intersection with the New York State Thruway and discovered the Thruway was closed. Closed? Ridiculous! The Thruway is THE major East-West artery in New York. This is a part of the world where people understand how to deal with snow and winter.

What the hell is going on? OK, the road we are on is the Northway and it is the major NorthSouth artery and it has not been plowed. We are driving in about six inches of new fallen snow and more is coming. The wind is making the snow go sideways now instead of down and it is getting dark. The only thing to do is take the old highway twenty as kind of the back road back to Syracuse. There is a good chance highway went wont be plowed either, but we have no choice.

We didn’t know at the time that hundreds of cars 48

had already been abandoned on the thruway because they just couldn’t continue on and this storm was going to get worse, a lot worse.

Driving at night in snow and cold is something I had grown up on. In fact, the first night snowstorm I drove in was in Denver to see a Warren Miller ski movie but there was no movie at the end of this ride. On highway twenty it was snowing so hard I couldn’t see where I was going. Greg asked to stop and I did so he could get out of the car and sit on the hood and shout directions back to me. We crept along for maybe half a mile when Greg shouted to stop.

It is a damn good thing I stopped because when the snow let up momentarily we saw that we were sitting perpendicular to the road on the wrong side of the road so that if we had continued on the same course would have driven directly into a half frozen lake. But in the process of seeing the lake, the break in the storm also showed a neon beer sign. I think it was Utica Club Pilsner Lager. We were saved!

Another small break in the squall allowed us to get pointed in the right direction and we parked next to the beer sign and waded through a snow drift into the bar.

I had no idea who I was at this point. I knew what I was doing, who I was with and where I lived, but I had no idea as to who I really was or where I was going with any aspect of my life.

At the moment I was with a friend in a roadside dive bar in a big deal snow storm. Other than that, I didn’t know anything.

I think we had almost three dollars cash between the two of us. We asked the bartender for two drafts and wondered if we could nurse our beers until the snow stopped or at least let up from its present near white-out condition. There were two other men in the bar when we got there but they were at the far end of the bar and seemed deep in their own conversation so we asked the

bartender what he thought of the storm. He said, “I’ve lived here for thirty years and I’ve seen some bad ones, but the way this one is shaping up it might be the record breaker.”

A slow but steady stream of customers were coming into the bar and all were in various states of disarray and they certainly weren’t in the bar to have a drink and the storm was the only topic of conversation. The bar had small tables as well as a real bar and could seat about thirty people and by about ten PM the place was packed and you could see the bartender was getting jittery about whether or not he could stay in control of the crowd. Everyone was in a pretty cheery mood considering the circumstances. There was some small time gambling going on to get money for drinks. There was some anxiety, but there was a lot of booze too. The peanuts and popcorn ran out long ago. A few people were trying to be humorous by laying down on the floor and pretending beer coasters and napkins were pillows and by this time you could barely see out the windows because the snow was beating sideways in waves as well as falling down.

Around midnight, Greg and I were chatting up two women students from Utica College when a State Highway Patrolman came into the bar.

Before any of us could ask him any questions he motioned for the bartender to come talk with him in private. A couple of minutes later both the bartender and patrolman returned to the main room and the bartender said the owner had called the police and told the police that because of liability concerns the bar had to be closed and everyone had to leave. This statement was greeted with cries of derision and dismay. “We have no where to go.” “This is an emergency.” “You can”t evict us that is reckless endangerment.” “This is bullshit!!!”

The patrolman jumped in, held his hands up to get us to calm down and said, “Just hold on a second. There is a small motel about a mile from here and if you all follow my car in single

line convoy formation, the motel has room to take you. It is not luxury, and you will have to partner up because it will be crowded. You will be OK for the night. They predict the storm will end by morning. So then you are on your own again.”

I shouted to the cop, “What if you don’t have any money for the motel?” He said, “Find someone who does. Write an IOU. That’s between you and the motel. You’ll figure it out. My job is to get you there. Now, let’s GO!” One of the girls said to Greg, “If you promise to dig our Volkswagen out of the snowbank tomorrow, I have enough money to pay for a room we could share with you guys.” For a whole host of reasons, this sounded like a great idea. Not the least of which was that both of them were trim, fit, and vivacious brunettes. “Of course.” Greg and I said in unison, as though we had rehearsed it.

The four of us laughed a sideways, somewhat sexual laugh as we gathered up our belongings and headed for the door. Just before we got to the door I stopped and said to the bartender, “I hope you don’t live very far from here.” In a low voice, he said, “I’m the owner, I live in the back.”

I thought, you prick, but I didn’t say anything.

During the time we were in the bar it had snowed about eight more inches and was still snowing and coming down hard, drumming even. Snow flakes are supposed to float, these were hitting me and everyone else in this part of the world.

Just getting the cars going, getting them all in line all about ten feet apart and following the State Patrol car was an adventure in itself. We must have looked like ducklings following the duck mom, and a view from above might have shown just that, if it wasn’t so god damned cold and dark. I was just glad to be close enough to see a set of tail lights and that whoever it was in front of me actually knew where they were going because I sure as hell didn’t.

The motel room is a double, I guess they call it that because it has a double bed, well no, 49

because in this case, it is a queen, but no one is measuring.

The place has all of the standard accouterments of The Bates Motel, except Norman with the knife doesn’t live up the hill, if he did, he would probably be frozen by now because soon after we arrive, the power goes out. Amid flashlights careening around the walls and ceiling the sleeping arrangements get sorted out as follows: Greg gets the bed with the two women and I get the floor. I volunteered - yes, I know, profoundly stupid, but actually kind of gallant and crafty, but we will get to that later, and besides, someone had to do it. We could have slept four cross ways but then everyone would have been uncomfortable. After a few hours, the power came back on and the remainder of the night was uneventful except for the noise on the bed when Greg was trying to get some action and as he was in the center was apparently dismissed on both sides. The floor was hard, I was warm, I didn’t care what was going on.

In the morning, like the night before, we dug out their red Volkswagen (coincidence) and my car as well. Hungry, unsettled and unsure, we were all in pretty rough shape from being cold and frightened the night before, but the snow had stopped and all of us were reasonably optimistic we would be able to get home before the sun set. Of course, because it was miserable Upstate New York, the skies were still pale gray like most of the time, and they could still let loose again, there was no way for us to tell. There are two choices of words the weather forecasters can use in this region: bad and worse.

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Driving this side road was a dodgy proposition at best because the plows had only made one or two passes, they had done what my father would have called, “A lick and a promise,’ and there was still six or eight inches of new snow to slalom through for several hours. We stayed within sight of the girls car in case of further trouble almost to Utica and then we waived good-by and turned to continue on to Syracuse. Much to

my surprise and irritation the snow was getting deeper and driving was a serious struggle. Slow and plodding, often less than ten miles an hour, but thankfully it was only snow under our wheels and no ice. I finally asked Greg what was all that ruckus up on the bed last night? He says, “That was me, getting nowhere fast. Twice!”

I just smiled and told him I remembered the gorgeous redhead at Mad River. He grumbled as he said, he remembered her too.

We are listening to the car radio and someone says, “In Oswego, New York (thirty-five miles north of our destination in Syracuse) The accumulation from this one storm, not counting what was already on the ground, is 106 inches of snow in 24 hours. What! Almost nine feet of snow? There was about two feet on the ground when we left Syracuse and none of that melted.

If thirty-five miles north they got a hundred and six inches I don’t know what we are going to find when we get home.

When we enter the city there are very few cars willing to attempt to negotiate the drifts and it is eerily quiet. The major streets are the only ones open and it turns out that the big time snow blowers have been down our street but the snow banks on the side are so high it is impossible for the snow blowers to blow high enough to get over the walls of snow. The radio tells us hundreds of abandoned cars have been damaged or destroyed by the huge plows trying to clear the Thruway and we see bucket loaders growling as they pick up snow and dumpit into trucks. I do not want a bucket loader to scoop up my little car, but by now we are exhausted and have had very little food. When you are twenty something you can do almost anything so the only thing that seems reasonable is to carve out a small tunnel in the snow perpendicular to the edge of the plowed street and park my car inside.

On this very same day, as crazy as it sounds, thousands of university students are trying to get back to Syracuse to register for spring semester classes. Either that or they have been stuck here

the whole time. In contemporary parlance, these past few days would be called a ‘snow event,’ like car dealership talks about a ‘sales event’ - all bullshit. In reality, it was a huge fucking storm.

day for three days and made back his savings plus enough money to pay for his entire fourth year of college. Horrific weather can be a good thing if you have the right angle.

For the first time in the exceedingly long history of the university, registration for Spring Semester is canceled until further notice. The University football stadium has been used as the dumping place of all the snow the trucks were hauling off the streets and all the snowmobiles have been commandeered for use by doctors to get patients to hospital. All snowmobiles except one.

Sometime around the middle of May when the weather in Syracuse was starting the short window of reasonable comfort called spring, most of the snow had melted out of the football stadium and I was living on the second floor of a former carriage house behind a limestone mansion, and as I had no phone a friend who lived in the mansion came to stand below my window and yelled up to me, “There is a beautiful girl down here and she is looking for you. She says she goes to Utica College.” I said, “I’ll be right down.”

Jimmy Bowman was a member of the same fraternity as Greg and me and had lived in Syracuse all his life. He didn’t go anywhere for this idiotic vacation called Intersession, he stayed home and watched the snow come down.

He watched this storm from the comfort of his living room for the first day and a half and thought, I have never seen it snow like this, and then the light went on. By this time it was just ordinary nasty, miserable, foot deep Syracuse winter, so he got into his four wheel drive Jeep and went to the bank and withdrew his savings.

Then he drove home and got his snowmobile out of the garage. Quite by chance it had a red cover on the trailer, and with some old strips of sheets and some duct tape he fashioned a big white cross over the top. He then drove to the wholesale liquor store and bought all the liquor that trailer would hold, came home and made two more trips to the liquor store and then sat down by the telephone.

She was even prettier than I remembered and while walking back up to my tiny apartment we engaged in petty small talk about the storm and the now almost exuberant spring. When we arrived, she looked around for a bit and seemed surprised by the visible organization and said, “From the looks of this place you can see why you were able to get through a blizzard.” Then she said, “Why didn’t you make any moves on either of us when we were in the motel? I said, “I didn’t think it was either the time or the place.”

She said, “How about now?”

An enormous devastating storm can be a good thing if you have the right angle.

At this point it is necessary to remember Syracuse University as a dry campus. Because of the storm, there were a lot of high-rise dormitories and fraternities and sororities where hundreds, perhaps thousands of college students were trapped with nothing to do and no place to go. Jimmy Bowman made a lot of phone calls saying to whoever answered the phone, “Bowman’s liquor - we deliver, what do you need?” He drove that snowmobile night and 51

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