Laird Creek Scribbler

Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer

2011-04-26T18:12:00.000-07:00

As a young, would-be writer back in the early 1960s, I read quite a bit of the once notorious Henry Miller -- his book on Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi; his study of Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins; his essays in The Wisdom of the Heart; his book on America, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare; the collection of letters between him and Lawrence Durrell -- but his first book, the infamous Tropic of Cancer, first published in France in 1934 and, until 1961, banned from publication in the U.S., I'd somehow missed until this past winter in Mexico.

This despite that my copy of the book, a paperback edition of the original Grove Press hardback, was purchased in 1962, the year the paperback came out in the States.

Tropic of Cancer is a kind of memoir in the form of a kind of novel, I've now discovered -- an anarchist's rant, a cry of despair, a shout of rage and crazy hope. It's racist (particularly anti-Semitic), misogynist, profane, crudely sexual, provocative. It's deliberately raw in parts, lyrical in others. It's also funny, and contains whole swaths of brilliant, sometimes surreal, even profound writing. I'm reminded of a later writer's all-out, last-ditch expression of himself, Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, published in 1968. Exley, despite his acute alcoholism, managed to write two more fictionalized memoirs before he died, early, of alcoholism. But with Notes he'd shot his wad. Miller, on the other hand, went on to write many more books, mostly of reminiscence, and was famous, rather than infamous, by the 1960s as a voice of free expression, sexual and otherwise. Playboy took him up! He lived to be 89, a kind of sage, before his death in 1980.

One wonders now why his first book was banned for so long as too sexually explicit. The sex in it is the least of its content.

Here is Miller stating his case at the beginning of Tropic of Cancer, after three warm-up paragraphs:

"It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.

"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.

"This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing . . . "

2010-08-06T20:32:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a while since my last post. I've been just off stage all along, however, too busy working on a novel, currently in its fourth draft, that I hope eventually to hew into some semblance of shape and substance. And then there has been helping my wife plant and then tend our garden, weekly jaunts into the mountains with members of our hiking club, nighttime reading and/or movie watching while helplessly, hopelessly becoming a political junkie via the Internet and Democracy Now!. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I get a dose of concern or outrage every weekday morning by listening to Democracy Now! over Kootenay Co-op Radio while sometimes having to choke down my breakfast.

But heck, life is still good, still worth the struggle. At age 75, I still have my faculties and reasonable physical health. I have a loved and loving wife and family, and live in one of the beautiful places in the world. There's a Spanish saying that Malcolm Lowry put in Under the Volcano, his great novel set in Mexico, and that I've taken to heart: No se puede vivir sin amar. One cannot live without loving (or without love, as some translate it). Yes. I recite that to myself almost every day. And live on in the teeth of climate change, perpetual war, and political, economic, and environmental disaster. What can you tell us about life? William Faulkner was asked after he'd emerged from obscurity by winning the Nobel Prize for literature.

"It goes on," he said.

Distractions

2009-12-02T11:22:00.000-08:00

I can't be the only writer (permit me to call myself one, though I'm an obscure, one-book author hopefully working on a second) who finds himself inordinately distracted these days by the sorry state of the world and the inept, not to say criminal, way it's being run.

Every morning I wake with a fresh resolve to eat a quick breakfast and then start writing. Instead I can't abstain from listening to Democracy Now! over my oatmeal and coffee for its reports of this or that national or international outrage. Afterwards, fed and suitably inflamed, I go to my computer, not immediately to resume working on the second draft of my novel, but first to check my email. Then, helplessly, I go into Salon and The Nation and various other vehicles of the Left, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times for their takes on the news, the Globe & Mail, The Guardian, and maybe a blog or two of the Left and sometimes of the Right. I even, now and then, check out Fox News for its poisonous slant on things. Usually, though, I save that entertainment for later.

Eventually I get to my writing.

What I'm writing now, as mentioned in the previous post, is a novel about back-to-the-land hippies (mostly Americans) in Canada, circa 1971, and so perhaps my procrastination every morning to catch up on the world's (notably the United States' and Canada's) bad news isn't entirely a waste of time. The Sixties, to borrow once again from Dickens, were both the best and the worst of times. These times seem only the worst. In the 1960s we in the counterculture lived, as some acknowledged, off the fat of the land. Now, at the start of the 21st century, most of the fat's been rendered except for the obscenely rich one percent.

In the Sixties we more or less played at making a revolution. We can't play at it anymore. We have to work for it. In any case, change is coming, whether we work for it or not, and whether we like it or not. You don't have to read James Howard Kunstler or Jeff Rubin to get an inkling of that.

Now back to my novel.

Step One in the Writing of a Novel

2009-07-20T18:16:00.000-07:00

Two days ago I completed the first draft of a novel I made notes and an outline for ten years ago and have worked on, sporadically and for the last year exclusively, ever since.

It's a kind of love story I'm calling Waiting for the Revolution that starts in Mexico at the end of the 1960s but is mainly played out in a back-to-the-land hippie commune in British Columbia.

I started it in 1998, shortly after completing the first draft of my memoir, Leaving the Farm, only to abandon it after thirty pages to concentrate on subsequent drafts of the memoir. Resumed work on the novel in December 2000 and completed six chapters of it before again abandoning it. Picked it up again in August 2005, after sending out the thirteenth draft of Leaving to Oolichan Books, and worked on it until my wife and I left for Mexico in January 2006. Laid it aside at the end of that month to work on yet another draft, the fourteenth and final one, of the memoir, which was accepted by Oolichan in June 2006.

I gave the rest of that year to the editing process. Returned to Mexico in January 2007 and made little progress on the novel, chiefly working at revising what I'd already written while waiting, with some eagerness, for the publication of my memoir, which happened right after we got home from Mexico at the end of March 2007.

The rest of that year was given to the book launch, to subsequent readings, to my little "tour" in Minnesota, and other promotions of the book.

Got back to the novel the winter of 2007-08 in Mexico, again mostly revising what I'd written before, but from July of 2008 until this past Saturday -- exactly a year -- I wrote nearly every day on the book to complete this first draft.

Length: 287 printout pages. Count: 74,390 words. I see a final draft of no more than 75,000 words.

So now I'll let this draft sit for awhile and work on something else. Then try to read "objectively" what I've written before going at the second draft wth the hope of finishing it by the end of this year or, at the outside, by the end of another winter in Mexico.

I won't approach any publishers until I've completed a second draft, and maybe not then if what I've written still seems too rough or unrealized.

Like any other writer with a first draft, established or otherwise, I'll have my work cut out for me. First, I'll have to see what I've got so far, if anything, to work with. Then there'll be stuff to cut, stuff to expand upon, characters to flesh out, characters, perhaps, to drop or to introduce. A first draft is just a lump, after all, waiting to be hewn into some form; a negative not yet developed; a slapped-together frame one might have to tear apart and start over; at best a hazy picture in need of focusing.

A confusion right now, a mess. Oh yeah, I've got some work ahead of me. The first draft is only the first step, a crude suggestion, after all, of what might -- that is, might -- become a finished thing.

Have I mentioned my excitement?

A Morning in Yelapa

2009-06-28T12:39:00.000-07:00

For what it's worth (if anything), here is a video taken one morning last winter in Yelapa as April was preparing our breakfast and we were surrounded by the raucous calls of chachalacas, a pheasant-like tropical and sub-tropical bird that lives almost entirely in the trees. In Yelapa they compete every morning with the crowing of roosters in the village.

Back to the Land

2009-06-26T17:49:00.000-07:00

My wife April and I came to Canada as Back-to-the-Landers at the end of the Sixties. Recently we were asked to reminisce about those thrilling days of yesteryear almost forty years ago, and I'm now moved to offer the following little piece, written initially for a reading in Nelson and later published online in The Tyee as "Note from an American Refugee." I should note here, as I did for The Tyee, that I was not a draft dodger at the time, having served in the U.S. Navy before Vietnam, but was certainly against the war and a supporter of those resisting it. This is the original (revised) version of the piece:

BACK TO THE LAND

November 13, 1970. Friday the 13th. We arrive in British Columbia after a three-day drive from my native Minnesota.

The first day we’d traveled northwest from Hamel, Minn., to Minot, N.D. The next day we drove straight north to the border, reached the Trans-Canada Highway, and drove west across the prairies of Manitoba and Saskatchewan to Medicine Hat, Alta. The third day we drove through the Rockies and down the valley of the Kootenay River, then over the Salmo-Creston Skyway and, after dark, along that empty stretch between Salmo and Nelson wondering where in the boondocks we were getting to. Finally, about 9:30 in the evening, after the 25-mile drive up the West Arm of Kootenay Lake to Queens Bay (and noting with some relief the pleasant-looking cottages along the lake, reminding us of the shore of Lake Minnetonka, near where I grew up), we found the rented house in which we would live communally with April's sister and her husband and her two children by a previous marriage, and which, by the following summer, would include, in and around it, some ten of us Back-to-the-Land expatriates.

At the little border station on the cold prairie north of Minot, the Canadian guard had peered into our '64 Ford piled high with virtually everything we owned — including April's sewing machine on the back seat; the trunk was weighed down to the car's axles with my books — and said with the suggestion of a wink, "Just visiting, eh? Well, you're entitled to look around, but if you decide to settle, I'd advise you to see Immigration." And waved us through.

We felt like refugees from eastern Europe after having passed successfully through the Iron Curtain.

It was the worst of times; it was the best of times (to borrow from the start of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities). There'd been the Kennedy assassinations — both of them; the Detroit race riot of 1967 (I was a Detroit mail carrier that summer, walking streets strewn with broken glass and discarded loot to deliver to addresses that no longer existed because they’d turned to rubble overnight, while gangs of young blacks went by in cars with police cars following them, shotguns sticking out of the windows, and Army trucks carrying National Guardsmen trundled by, and police helicopters hovered overhead); Martin Luther King's assassination; the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention; the much-protested Vietnam War . . . this in the face of self-indulgent prosperity.

As we crossed the border, we were only dimly aware of Canada's own brush with the tumultuous times — it had been in the news just a couple of weeks before: the October Crisis. What was that? Something about Quebec, a late battle in the war between the French and English that was supposed to have ended in 1763, just as the American Civil War, a hundred years later, was supposed to have settled the differences between the North and the South, between blacks and whites.

Certainly it was, or had been, the worst of times for my wife and me after breaking up in Mexico the winter before and since then struggling to reconcile our differences. This trip to B.C., this escape from our troubled past and the troubled U.S., this final remove from "the city" (though we'd lived the last two years in the country, outside Minneapolis, on my parents' golf course — once part of our family farm), was, besides a last-ditch effort to save our marriage, our enlistment in a movement. Somewhere in the boxes of books we'd hauled with us to British Columbia was a copy of Helen and Scott Nearing's Living the Good Life. It would be our bible.

A week or so after our arrival in Nelson, I was reporting my first impressions to friends back in Minneapolis:

Here we are homesteading in the Kootenays of British Columbia.

We're living in an old farmhouse with April's sister and her husband, on a slope above Kootenay Lake, 90 miles long and two to three miles wide, like a Norwegian fiord with its mountainous shores and the play of light and cloud on the forested, frosted slopes. With the house are a couple of outbuildings, shacks, and a little orchard of apple trees.

My first job on arriving here was to help Al trim the apple trees, then drag the branches to the garden where we burned them for fertilizer. Worked one day for an old lady up the road and got paid for it. Cut wood with a chainsaw and threw the furnace-sized chunks into the basement. Dug up the septic tank and drainage tile, bucketing out the former and spreading it in the garden, lifting out the latter and re-laying it. A good job done, as the mess in the septic tank was like a great biscuit ready to take out of the oven. We put yeast in the tank after emptying it, so in about ten years (hopefully no sooner) there'll be another biscuit all nicely formed for us. Got the tank and tile work done just prior to the freeze-up.

Our life here is generally comfortable, if at a subsistence level. We exist, right now, almost entirely on the $300 a month Dianne receives for child support. Al, who has a definite talent for organization and a good bargain, sees that we buy in bulk: five-gallon drums of peanut butter, for instance, cans of honey, sacks of brown rice and powdered milk. Of necessity we're vegetarian — except for the odd windfall: last week someone brought us a side of venison; he'd chanced on the animal, still warm, a roadkill. I wish I'd brought my shotgun for grouse.

This is country where Vikings, you imagine, could come rowing out of the mist on the lake, or Valkeries ride down out of the dramatically clouded sky to fetch some hero to Valhalla. It’s a landscape, in short, out of the Romantic School of painting, the light streaming down on the mountains like God's grace in a holy picture.

I think I like it here.

Those Great Old Classic Comics

2009-06-04T15:22:00.000-07:00

Who, among those of my generation, didn’t read, and thoroughly enjoy, comic books when they were a kid? And who, particularly those who otherwise read books, didn’t read, and thoroughly enjoy, Classic Comics (later called Classics Illustrated)?

I went to Google recently and was happy to find, in Wikipedia, a listing of all the Classic Comics and Classics Illustrated titles ever published. The series ran, according to Wikie, from 1941 to 1971. Since then there have been revivals of the series, I gather, in North America and England, but the original, the “classic,” series will remain, for old nostalgia buffs like me, the one worth remembering.

My introduction to the series, unless memory fails, came on Christmas Eve of 1942. I was five days away from my eighth birthday, living with my parents and my two younger sisters on our dairy farm in Minnesota, and because of regular chores on Christmas Day morning and mass at the nearest Catholic church afterwards, the folks had arranged for Santa Claus to visit early on Christmas Eve, early enough for us kids to receive and open our presents from the old elf — and from the folks — before bedtime.

I forget what Santa brought me that year, but I remember vividly the boxed set given to me by my parents of the first four numbers of Classic Comics. They were: The Three Musketeers, Ivanhoe, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Last of the Mohicans, and I read them all, one after the other, sitting hunched before the heat register in the dining room of our old farmhouse (the heat coming up from the coal furnace in the cellar) far into the night, long after the folks and my sisters had gone to bed. That I’d been allowed to stay up, I suppose says something about my parents’ leniency or neglect. Anyway, I was perfectly absorbed, that long-ago night, till about 2 a.m.

After that, I started collecting Classic Comics, and eventually Classics Illustrated, until I had piles of them in a drawer in my room: Numbers 1 to about 105, I think, after going down Wikie’s list and recalling with pleasure the many titles. Moby Dick, Westward Ho!, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Deerslayer, Huckleberry Finn, Two Years Before the Mast, The Moonstone . . . Title after title, engrossing story after engrossing story (the series went to 169 titles), all wonderfully filled with vivid, if rather slapdash, illustrations. Those comics led me to many of the books themselves as I was growing up. I’m sure they’ve led others.

And oh, if only I’d kept them — they’d be worth thousands now, I imagine, on eBay. Instead, as I was about to leave for Navy boot camp in January 1955, or a couple of months later, as I was heading for San Francisco to wait for assignment to my first duty station, I gave them to my twin younger brothers, who in turn, I guess, gave them to our kid brother, who may have passed them on to friends . . . until, one by one or in bunches, they disappeared.

Alas.

Lunch in Yelapa

2009-06-03T14:24:00.000-07:00

Here, in the winter of 2008, April is preparing our lunch on the back (kitchen) balcony of our rented place in the coastal village of Yelapa, just south of Puerto Vallarta, where we've gone to escape British Columbia's cold, gray months since 2005.

Another Winter in Yelapa

2009-04-10T10:20:00.000-07:00

This was our fifth winter in Yelapa, the still pleasantly offbeat Mexican village some twenty miles south of Puerto Vallarta that, unless one has a vehicle and chooses to drive the twisting, dusty jungle road down from El Tuito to where it ends on the ridge above Yelapa, can only be reached by boat. The people who make that drive are mainly fliers who come down in trucks or SUVs with their paragliders; one sees these birdmen (and birdwomen) almost every day, soaring in the updrafts above the beach with the buzzards.

We arrived this time on New Year’s Eve, after flying into Vallarta on the 30th, and were in Yelapa until April 7th, when we flew back to Spokane, where we'd left our car, to spend the night there before driving to our home on Laird Creek outside Nelson, B.C. We got back to find, as we'd hoped, that spring had started in the West Kootenays.

There were noticeably fewer tourists in Vallarta when we arrived at the end of last year; the bank on Insurrentes, for instance, where we use the ATM and ask for change afterwards, was virtually empty, whereas in other years one had to stand in a long line before reaching a teller.

I went down this year sick with colitis, gambling that I’d get better in Yelapa’s muy tranquilo atmosphere. And indeed I have gotten better — my diseased intestines are working again and I have my old energy back — after seeing a young Mexican iridologist and naturopathic doctor early in January in Vallarta who, after studying the photographs he took of my eyes, told me to avoid carbohydrates (including, except for small, occasional portions, even beans and rice, formerly one of our staples), stop enjoying those guilty pleasures I’ve long indulged in (sweets, alcohol, coffee), and put me on a strict diet of vegetables (mainly raw) and protein (mainly fish, a little chicken, no red meat). In addition, he prescribed a “liver cleanse” of the juice of three limes mixed with three teaspoons of olive oil each morning on an empty stomach, followed by three teaspoons before each meal of what he called “the scorpion,” a blended mixture of an entire glass of lime juice, seven cloves of garlic, a large red onion, and seven tablespoons of olive oil. Also lots of juices during the day. My wife April joined me in taking the liver cleanse each morning, as well as a dose of the scorpion.

Through January and most of February I kept strictly to the doctor’s diet. Then gradually I began cheating a little. I started by enjoying a cup of coffee again — one only — with breakfast (helped me go!), and I graduated from there to having a drink now and then, usually a beer at Mimi’s or the at Yacht Club, and occasionally treated myself to a flan at the Pollo Bollo or the avocado pie at Tacos y Mas. Such periodic indulgences seemed to do me no harm, but I had to admit that old age had caught up with me, alas, and my intestines were tired, as the good doctor had informed me. I must more or less follow his diet, he said, for the rest of my life.

Which thought reminds me of the end of the life, in January, of Yelapa’s great representative of its gringo community, and how “the rest” of one’s life can suddenly be very brief indeed.

Isabel Jordan was an American woman who had lived here since 1971 and was felt to embody the lively spirit of this tropical paradise by her fellow expatriates. Her Casa Isabel, which included, apart from her own palapa, a number of rental casitas, served as a retreat for winter vacationers, as well as a place to stay for her friends among the Huichol, natives of the mountains of central Mexico, when they came down to Yelapa to sell their beaded artwork or hold a sacred ceremony.

Isabel was a student of the ancient culture of the Huichol, and she helped to preserve it by buying and selling their intricate and colorful art to galleries and at exhibitions in the United States, Canada and Europe.

We missed seeing her this year, though we were in the habit of walking up to the Casa Isabel to pay our respects shortly after arriving. We might have seen her at the Yacht Club on New Year’s Eve (had we not stayed home and, tired from travel, gone to bed early), where doubtless she enjoyed the celebration. Part of Isabel’s legend is that she never missed a party.

A few days after the New Year’s Eve party she went off on vacation to another part of Mexico where, in a freak accident, she fell and broke a couple of ribs that punctured her vital organs. We heard of the accident from our friend Paloma on January 9th, by which time Isabel was in intensive care in Puerto Vallarta. She died ten days later. She was 81, or perhaps had passed her 82nd birthday. By all accounts, she’d had a full, adventurous life.

A memorial for her was held on the beach at the Lagunita Hotel in Yelapa on March 22nd, attended by one of her daughters and a brother, here from the States, and more than a hundred present and past members of the gringo colony, as well as Yelapa natives especially close to her. A Huichol shaman, in splendid traditional garb, was noticeably present.

Chris the flyer (and pounding keyboard player at Mimi’s every Friday night), and his wife Beverly, flew tandem over the beach in his paraglider and cast rose petals into the air. And after everybody had filled up on the potluck food, a number of those who’d known her stepped up to the microphone to tell favorite stories about Isabel. Most touching was the cheerful email she wrote to a friend on New Year’s Day from Yelapa — read to us by an old friend — that was full of news and plans for the future (notably she was looking forward to watching Obama’s inauguration on television), full of life, in short, the life she was soon to lose.

Apart from our usual activities down here — April’s QiGong and yoga, my writing, our afternoon walks, visiting with friends, sunbathing on the beach and occasional swims in the ocean, etc. — we took more side trips this year.

Our first, which we take every year, was in mid-January to El Tuito, the mountain town above Vallarta and Yelapa’s government seat, for the Virgin of Guadalupe festival. It’s a spectacle that includes, in the morning, a procession carrying an effigy of the Virgin, Mexico’s patron saint, to the church, followed by, after dark, the fireworks in the churchyard in which a three-story bamboo tower strung with fireworks is lit, starting at the bottom and working up, to produce an awesome, twenty minutes or so display of blazing, hissing pinwheels, shooting, exploding rockets, and culminating with the entire top of the structure lifting off like a fiery magic carpet to rain bits of flaming debris on the delighted crowd and nearby buildings, resulting, it seems, in neither burned flesh nor property damage.

As usual, we spent the night in a hotel in El Tuito and returned to Yelapa the next day.

A few days later we witnessed the quinceañera of the fifteen-year-old daughter of the owner of Yelapa’s largest tienda (store), the largest celebration of its kind that the village had seen in a while. In Mexico a girl “comes out” at age fifteen in her quinceañera, which is put on, usually at great expense, by her parents or extended family. This one was for Iris, daughter of Hortensia, and began with the morning procession to the church for the ceremony there, followed by the evening reception, held in the village hall, at which virtually everyone in the village, Mexican and gringo alike, was served a free plate of chicken cordon bleu with mashed potatoes and a salad, deliciously provided by the Yacht Club, whose owner, Elena, is a family relative. As well, there was the traditional bottle of tequila on every table to wash your food down.

Following the meal, projected onto a big screen in the hall, we were treated to a “home” movie starring the beautiful Iris performing before the camera — dancing by the sea, lolling on the rocks, striking sexy poses like a professional model in a shoot for a fashion magazine. It struck me that Mexican girls are more comfortable in their bodies than American or Canadian girls, or maybe it’s just that I haven’t been around many teenage girls lately.

There was a series of robberies in Yelapa about this time (only the second such “wave” in the five years we’ve wintered here). The rumor was there were two “bandits” at work, one whose family in the village reportedly paid $10,000 to get him out of jail after he’d been turned in by an aunt for stealing from her and served a two-year stretch. Reportedly, he and another young man, also just out of jail, had returned to their burglarizing ways.

Another rumor was that the culprits were non-local workers on the paths upriver, doing a little off-work moonlighting. In any case, and whoever they were, the thieves were hustled out of town by visiting police after giving some other young men the idea of doing a little breaking and entering themselves. These kids, so the story went, locals for sure, were taken upriver by “elders” concerned about the threat to tourism, forced to dig their own graves (in Mexico a classic intimidation, it seems), and told that if the robberies continued they’d be put into them.
Whatever the truth of this tale, there have been no further reports of robberies this winter.

Toward the end of January we made contact with Gretchen and Glen Backus, friends from Nelson and members with April of the Nelson Choral Society, who were staying in a swanky hotel near the Los Muertos pier in Vallarta; we got together with them and stayed overnight in their suite.

Then, hardly an hour after our return from Vallarta the next day, who should show up at our door but my brother Mike! I hadn’t expected to see him this year, though he lives in Mexico with his Mexican wife Araceli (mostly in Cabo San Lucas, sometimes in Guadalajara, where his wife is from) and had planned to meet us at the airport on our arrival and stay with us awhile. That was before hearing he’d lost all but some $40,000 of his 1.8 million-dollar fortune (acquired from the sale of his half of what had been our parents’ golf course outside Minneapolis) in the financial crash.

Turned out his financial “guru” had been playing with his and other clients’ money — the news of which came out after he’d reportedly died in his sleep at age 38, probably of the stress of watching his crooked house of cards collapse. Subsequently, my brother learned the guy committed suicide, thus escaping prosecution and leaving his bilked clients high and dry.

Anyway, since they were more or less in the neighborhood, Mike and Araceli drove down in their SUV from Guadalajara to Vallarta, and Mike came out to Yelapa, leaving his wife in the city with a couple of girlfriends, and stayed two nights with us. After that we went up to Guadalajara with Mike and Araceli and stayed two nights with them. While there drove to nearby Lake Chapala, where a lot of American and Canadian retirees have settled. Saw both places for the first time.

Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city, is immensely spread out with no tall buildings, it appeared, other than churches, museums and government structures (and they more massive than tall) — no buildings higher, I’d guess, than were in ancient Rome. The residential areas especially with their straight narrow streets lined with two- to four-story houses or apartment buildings, neat constructions of brightly painted (blue or yellow) cement, some very handsome in the Mediterranean style, reminded me of what remains of ancient Pompeii. Then too the vender trucks going by in the streets, as they do in most Mexican cities, loaded with plastic water jugs or metal cylinders of gas, and announcing their passage with recorded jingles, seemed like modern equivalents of what Seneca or Pliny the Younger must have known.

I’d read that Lake Chapala — that is the lake itself — Mexico’s largest body of fresh water, is gradually being drained for irrigation and to provide water to the city of Guadalajara, but it’s still huge, stretching to the horizon from the city park where Mexican families were enjoying their Sunday off the day we visited there. I wondered how much had changed since D. H. Lawrence visited Lake Chapala in the mid-1920s.

We were driven back to Vallarta by my brother and his wife and said goodbye to them. “We’ll try to visit you again before you leave Mexico,” Mike said, but I doubted that, and indeed it never happened. When last heard from, Mike was back in our native Minnesota, looking for a job on a golf course, and Araceli was in Cabo. His hope is to obtain a visa for Araceli so she can join him in the States, where he’s probably going to have to live from now on.

The other places we visited this year — for the first time — were Moscota, a mountain town northeast of Puerto Vallarta, reached after a two and a half-hour bus ride, and Sayulita and San Poncho, both on the coast north of Vallarta.

We went to Moscota on March 1 with our Yelapa friend Adrianna, a longtime resident in Mexico, and shared a room with her in an elegant old hotel for 350 pesos for the night — Sunday night in Moscota, where, in the town’s crowded plaza, we witnessed an age-old spectacle: a parade of young men and women, men on one side, women on the other, counter-circling the plaza’s promenade in order to display themselves to one other. One saw many significant exchanged glances, etc. (though we saw no examples of the practice we’ve heard about of young men throwing roses to the young women they fancied for the encouragement of having them picked up). We might have been in Spain or Italy two hundred years ago.

On the bus the next day, heading back to Vallarta, I started to itch, and in our hotel that night in Vallarta, both April and I found ourselves infested with what we thought were bedbugs, probably picked up in our Moscota hotel.

Back in Yelapa we were assured that the bites covering our bodies were from guinas, the tiny ticks you’ll encounter if you stray off the paths in tropical Mexico. Where had we got them? Probably in the overgrown ruins of the ancient church we explored in Moscota. We were careful not to leave any in our bed in our Vallarta hotel but found a few still on us when we got to Yelapa, sticky brown mites smaller than a kernel of rice that popped when you squeezed them. April found a bloated one the size of a ladybug on her groin. On advice from one of the villagers, we stripped and disinfected each other with a mixture of lime juice and rubbing alcohol, after which I carried our bedclothes and mattress onto our front balcony and sprayed them with Raid.

We went twice to Pizota, the still “primitive,” mostly “unspoiled” village just south of Yelapa, a 15-minute boat ride around The Point and down the coast a short way, the first time in February with our friends Sophia and Earl and Lannis, then again in March with Sophia and some other people we got to know that day. More so even than Yelapa, Pizota could be on an island in the South Seas, with its sandy, palm-lined shore and thatched houses set back in the trees. Just getting off the panga in Pizota, rocking in the surf after the boat has nudged onto the sand (Pizota has no pier), is an adventure: you’re liable to get wet. And you’re for sure likely to get wet, possibly drenched, getting back on the boat after your visit, because it’ll be late afternoon and the sea will be high, and even though the boatman will have backed his panga onto the sand to make it easier for you to board, the waves will be coming in, right over the bow sometimes, and over those unfortunate enough to be sitting too close to the bow. I’ve seen people get washed off their seats.

In mid-March we went with a Yelapa acquaintance to Sayulita, a coastal town less than a two-hour bus ride north of Vallarta, where who should we meet on the crowded beach but our friends Earl and Lannis, who’d left Yelapa a couple of days before to head slowly back to their St. Louis home. We stayed there only long enough to have lunch with them and to find Sayulita too loud and expensive and touristy, its main street being torn up to replace the old cobbles with smooth cement, the better to attract more tourists, probably, before hitching some two or three miles down the coast to even more expensive but much more attractive San Poncho (or San Francisco, if you prefer), charming, quieter, its side streets all nicely paved and tree-shaded — classy, in contrast to Sayulita’s apparent crassness and Yelapa’s funkiness. (Not that Yelapa doesn’t have pretensions, but they’re hardly on San Poncho’s level: in San Poncho they play polo, in Yelapa croquet.) Caught a ride with a friendly Mexican who, though he was heading to Vallarta, took us first in the opposite direction to San Poncho, where we meant to stay the night.

We looked for the American expatriate called Joaquin, a landscape gardener we’d met in Yelapa early in our stay this year and who’d encouraged us to visit him in San Poncho and stay in his house. We didn’t find him. Instead we met a beautiful woman of early middle age named Mika. She looked like an upper-class Mexican or an old-time gringa but was, we learned, a Yaqui Indian, born in Sonora, Mexico, an ex-fashion designer, ex-model who’d lived in Europe, now living in Mexico, somewhat precariously, on her child support and from teaching yoga. She knew Joaquin and, took us in her car to where he lived in one of the Villas Paraiso, a lovely complex of white- stuccoed condominiums (known unofficially as the Taj Mahal) at the far end of the long, virtually empty beach past the town center, but he wasn’t there. He was golfing, we were told.

We decided to wait for him, and to kill the time and at Mika’s assurance that it was all right, we swam with her and her twin boys in the Villas Paraiso’s swell pool. Before she and her boys left, Mika said that if we failed to find Joaquin, or otherwise couldn’t stay with him, we could stay with her.

Joaquin never showed up, and anyway, after knocking at his door for the second time, we learned from one of his guests that there were three cats in his house. I have an asthmatic allergy to cats, so we decided to take up Mika’s offer. We found in a tent on the beach, ready to spend the night there with her boys. But she gave us the key to her place! Which turned out to be a small, two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment, neat and tidy, if a little stuffy, but we slept very well in her bed (her boys’ was a mattress on the floor in the next room) with a fan going all night.

The next morning Mika appeared as we were having breakfast, and April went off with her to her yoga class. I stayed in the apartment, making use, at her invitation, of her laptop and high-speed Internet connection to check and reply to our e-mail.

After she and April returned from yoga, Mika drove us to the highway outside town, where we caught the bus to Vallarta, and from there the bus to Boca, and finally the six o’clock boat to Yelapa.

We had three weeks left here. They were soon gone. We didn't want to leave. But then, we never want to leave, while at the same time, after three months in this tropical paradise, we are ready to go home. We go with our memories of the place and the thought we'll be back next year.

Morning in Yelapa: the drone of a panga’s outboard on the bay, the cackle of chachalacas (pheasant-like birds) in the trees, the crowing of roosters around the houses, the oi oi oi of a trogon (a colorful, shrike-like bird) in the jungle. The sun hot, just lifted over the mountains and shining through the east window in our bedroom.

We get up, do our morning ablutions, our exercises, on the flat roof of our place, April her QiGong, me my calisthenics. I finish with some pushups and situps, gradually increasing their number each morning. (When I started, after recovering my health this year, I could hardly do one pushup, and only a couple of situps; I can now, with some difficulty, do a dozen pushups and twenty situps, and note a gratifying firming up of my flaccid old body.)

Then, following the “liver cleanse” of lime juice and olive oil that both April and I adhere to from Dr. Adrien’s diet, a breakfast of granola or scrambled eggs and a tortilla, with a cup of coffee for me (my only one of the day), and for both of us a fruit smoothie.

Following breakfast, this was our routine over the three months:

Three days a week, April went off to yoga in the village, leaving at 10 for the 10:30 class, while I, at least six days a week, set up my laptop on the front or back balcony (depending on the weather: the front is warmer on cool and cloudy days, the back cooler when it’s hot and sunny) to engage in my morning struggle with the novel I’m attempting to write.

April’s return about 2 p.m. was my signal to stop writing and help prepare our lunch. Following lunch, soup and a salad, say, we usually read and napped, April in the hammock on our front balcony, me on the couch. Then we usually took a walk, upriver or along The Point, or to the playa, where we’d always find members of those among Yelapa’s gringo colony who frequent the beach, sitting around a table or two at one of the palapa restaurants enjoying the ocean breezes and drinking their afternoon margaritas, and where April sometimes joined the table of regulars playing Scrabble. Sometimes we swam off the playa, when there were no jellyfish in the water to sting you, and sometimes off Isabel’s little beach on The Point.

Evenings we often ate at one of Yelapa’s restaurants, the Pollo Bollo, Tacos y Mas and Brisas’ being our favorites. We ate at El Manguito upriver once or twice, and a couple of times at April’s (not my April’s) Passion Flower Gardens upriver, where there’s “dinner and a movie” Monday nights and La Noche Romantica on Thursdays. We’d split one of April’s American-style meals there, or just the dessert (a piece of one of her decadent pies or cheesecakes).

Wednesday and Saturday nights there was disco at the Yacht Club. Friday night was open-mike music at Mimi’s.

Other nights we read or played the simple word game (for ages 8 to adult) called Quiddler, or cards — gin rummy, usually, after April taught me. Of the ten books I brought down with me this year, I read seven of them, including two fat biographies of writers William Humphrey and Richard Yates and Oakley Hall’s Warlock, his fat, superb “western.” Now reading Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which I started and never finished almost thirty years ago, and as many stories as I can in Alice Munro’s Runaway before having to return the book to Mimi’s lending library.

April, more concerned than I am with health and “growth,” read books on somatics (re the mind’s control of movement, flexibility and health) and on neuro linguistic programming, most of the stories in Munro’s Runaway, and has just completed The Shack, a paperback bestseller about an encounter with God, and is now racing to complete The Book Thief, another borrowed book, before we leave.

As a final excursion, we hiked to the waterfall upriver this past Thursday — took an hour and 45 minutes under the hot sun or cool shade, depending on where the dusty path led us — and had the place to ourselves to go skinny dipping in the refreshing pool below the falls. Then stopped for the obligatory meal at Christina’s far upriver health food restaurant on the way back.

As a contribution to the community, April and I helped in a garbage cleanup organized by Bob McCormick, a children’s book writer and longtime resident of Yelapa, along with a group of Yelapa children. Then April and I, with several kids, did a second cleanup. Garbage, ever a problem in Mexico, remains a problem in Yelapa.

And as for the novel I’m working on, after two years of snail’s pace writing and rewriting, here and at home in B.C., I’ve compiled a rough 61,000 words (including many wrong turns or loose ends that must be fixed or tied up somehow), and I’m at the point where I might start working toward the book’s climax (I see it as a short novel of from 75,000 to 80,000 words), except that I laid it aside a couple of days ago to write this piece for my blog.

On Palm Sunday, at the start of semana santa (Holy Week), we watched the procession through Yelapa of palm-waving villagers following a man on a donkey to the church in a reenactment of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. The man portraying Jesus was none other than ascetic-looking, long-haired Tomás (Thomas, no doubt, to his American mother), a longtime gringo resident of Yelapa who, wrapped in a blue robe, was the very figure of the Messiah.

Our last night in Yelapa we had our landlords, Emilio and Norma, and two of their three children, Nora and Omar (Emi was in Vallarta), for a farewell supper.

The next morning Emilio, in two trips, carried our two heaviest pieces of luggage to the pier. We caught the 10:30 boat to Puerto Vallarta, flew out at 6 p.m. to Phoenix, and from there to Spokane. Drove home the next day.

And so — next year in Yelapa!

No adios, as we told our friends here, pero hasta la vista.

Author's Revisions

2008-09-06T11:47:00.000-07:00

One of the excruciating things about being an author -- especially a first-book author -- is to come across all the errors, typos, and just plain crudities in your first edition. One longs for a second edition of the book and the opportunity to correct its sometimes embarrassing imperfections.

In line with the above, what follows is my current list of corrections. If you happen to own a copy of my book (Leaving the Farm, Oolichan Books, 2007), please note them and forgive my mistrakes, for which I am entirely responsible.

Note of explanation: In the case of revised paragraphs, one has to be careful to keep the same length as the original so as not to upset the book's page sequence. Hence the added word counts.

REVISION (top of page 194):

Original

One day when we were out sliding there was another visitor at the Tysons’, a kid from Loretto named Rudy, who was one of those unfortunates among school children like the gamma member of a pack of wolves. He was the butt of jokes, and the Tysons especially teased him unmercifully. Having been teased and the butt of jokes myself, I felt sorry for Rudy. But then he seemed to ask for it by his craving for acceptance, his tail-between-his-legs hanging around alpha kids like the Tysons. It didn’t help matters that, besides wearing glasses, he had a whiney voice and was a bit of a sissy. [106 words]

Revision

It was a reckless ride, another of the Tysons’ initiations. One day a fresh initiate, a kid from Loretto named Rudy, joined us on the Tysons’ hill. In school, and especially with the Tysons, he was like the omega member of a pack of wolves. He was teased and the butt of jokes. Having been teased and the butt of jokes myself—having been, like him, a bottom dog—I could identify with Rudy. Why he hung around alpha kids like the Tysons, I suppose was because he wanted, as I did, their acceptance. It didn’t help matters that he wore glasses, seemed a bit of a sissy. [106 words]

MOST IMPORTANT CHANGE (if revision of entire paragraph impossible):

Page 194, first sentence: “. . . like the gamma member of a pack of wolves. . . . “ Change “gamma” to “omega.”

REVISION (bottom of page 64):

Original

L’Ange (spelled Lange by then) died in 1887, the same year my maternal grandfather was born. It was also the year that the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad (the Soo Line) cut through the Hamel land below the settlement known then as Medina (the name of the township), constructed a depot, and named it Hamel. By that time hay was the family’s principal crop, and William Hamel and his sons were hauling it off the farm to sell to owners of horse-drawn vehicles in Minneapolis—to the streetcar company (until its cars were electrified), creameries and ice companies, and private owners of horses and buggies. [107 words]

Revision

L’Ange (spelled Lange by then) died in 1887, the same year my maternal grandfather was born. It was also the year that the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad (the Soo Line) cut through the Hamel land below the settlement known then as Lenz (for Leonard Lenz, the postmaster), constructed a depot, and named it Hamel. By that time hay was the family’s principal crop, and William Hamel and his sons were hauling it off the farm to sell to owners of horse-drawn vehicles in Minneapolis—to the streetcar company (until its cars were electrified), creameries and ice companies, and private owners of horses and buggies. [107 words]

REVISION (bottom of page 80):

Original

Together they watched Bobby Jones play in the St. Paul Open. My father played golf too, of course, once taking the lead and drawing a crowd in a tournament at Alexandria, Minnesota. But then: I blew up under the pressure. [40 words]

Revision

Together they watched Bobby Jones win the 1930 U.S. Open at the Interlachen Country Club in Edina. My father played golf too, of course, once taking the lead in a tournament at Alexandria, Minnesota. But then: I blew up under the pressure. [42 words]

TYPOS

Page 65, last paragraph: change Hennepin “Country” to “County.”

Page 101, second paragraph, sentence beginning “The teacher was reading to us to one warm, sleepy afternoon . . . Delete second “to.”

Pages 179-180: missing numbers

Page 182, second to last paragraph: change “blwoing” to “blowing.”

CORRECTIONS

Page 55, second to last paragraph: change “only nineteen” to “twenty-two.”

Page 61, first paragraph: change “nine years later” to “six years later.”

Page 209, middle of last paragraph: change “on those long summer evenings” to “in . . .”

Work and Play

2008-09-02T22:34:00.000-07:00

More than half this year has passed since my last posting. My excuse is that I'm anything but prolific, have only so much time and energy to sit at my computer, and most damnably this poor scribbler has only so many words and ideas in his head. What I have I've been putting into the novel I've been working on since last winter in Mexico and, intermittently, this spring and summer in my home here in southeastern British Columbia.

I say intermittently because real life, including "real" work, has a way of intruding on my literary labors when I'm not happily in Mexico on my annual working vacation.

What's more, there's play, as well as work, involved in the real life I share with my beloved partner. Periodically, my wife "nags" me into getting off my butt and out into the surrounding mountains with her for said play.

April and I happen to belong to a hiking club, which every other week or so gets us, along with our fellow members (most of whom are, like us, retired, and therefore free to take off in the middle of a given week), into one of the West Kootenay's prime, and more or less easily accessible, wilderness areas. Recently we spent two days and nights up in nearby Kokanee Glacier Park, enjoying the amenities of the Alpine Club of Canada "hut," really a splendid lodge, on Kokanee Lake at its elevation of some 7,000 feet. And just a week ago we hiked into Monica Meadows, in the alpine north of Duncan Lake, which was the highlight of our high-country excursions this summer.

Above is a view of Monica Meadows. We'd like to hike up there once more before the snow flies.

Meanwhile, tonight is chilly enough that we've made a fire in our woodstove.

Summer is definitely over.

Hola from Yelapa

2008-01-25T11:07:00.000-08:00

About time I wrote from our winter retreat in Mexico. We’ve been here in Yelapa, just south of Puerto Vallarta, since 13 December and only lately have we begun to experience tropical warmth. From late December until the beginning of this week, daytime temperatures were pleasant enough, but at night it dipped into the 50s and we huddled under two heavy blankets at bedtime. Old residents here said they’d never experienced such cold, even around Christmas, when you expect it to be a little chilly. Global "warming"? Probably. Anyway, it’s finally beach weather during the day (not that we go to the beach that much), and the nights are warm enough now for us to sit comfortably on our back balcony without having to wear a jacket or sweater and play cards. Whereas just days ago we had to close ourselves up in our "guest" bedroom and burn candles for a little heat. At last, the kind of weather we came down here for.

This is our fourth winter in Yelapa and we’re now accepted as bonafide members of the gringo colony here. This was impressed upon us when, a couple of weeks ago, we were invited, along with the rest of the colony and a number of locals, to the wedding of a North American resident and his longtime Latina partner. And a muy grande wedding it was, with a reception on the patio of the couple’s waterfront palapa, followed by the nondenominational service and champagne for toasting. We then adjourned to the Yacht Club (a restaurant and disco, not an actual yacht club) for chicken cordon bleu and pieces of the giant wedding cake. Then dancing into the wee hours, from which we excused ourselves about 11.

The other event we’ve enjoyed since arriving this year was a quinseanera (the traditional "coming out" of a Mexican girl on her 15th birthday), which we attended on my 73rd birthday, at a rancho upriver from the central village. The corral there had been swept clean of horse and cattle dung and tables and chairs set up around the perimeter. An awning festooned with balloons was strung over the corner of the corral nearest the path up from the village, and here we found the proud mother sitting with her female relatives and friends. Across the corral a couple of young men were putting together the sound system, from which presently ear-blasting Mexican music would emanate. To the left of us, just off the corral fence, two or three older men were working around half of a 50-gallon drum, cut lengthwise to form an oversized brazier, setting it up and building a fire in it to form the coals over which seasoned, delicious strips of beef would be roasted to be served along with rice and vegetables and tortillas after the coming-out ceremony. There would be a bottle of tequila on each table, and Coke or Pepsi for mix or drinking alone.

I should say we’d been invited to the affair by the girl’s mother, who knew April from having cut her hair last year, when she stopped to chat with her on our way to the waterfall upriver with our son and his family during their two-week stay with us. And I should say also that we met an interesting older couple at the affair, a documentary filmmaker named William (‘Bill") Livingston and Guadalupe, his Mexican wife. We’ve since visited their palapa up in the jungle above the playa (the beach) and have watched DVD copies of four of his documentaries, lent to us by Bill, on my laptop computer. The best of them is an award-winning National Geographic documentary called "The Great Indian Railway"—about the railroads in India. The others are on Mexico, Italy and Russia, all enjoyable. He’s quite a character, has traveled the world over and made lots of money, I gather, which is rapidly dwindling, he says, because of the falling stock market. Guadalupe ("Lupe") is a photographer in her own right and Bill’s assistant. She’s beautiful, from Mexico City, where she still has family.

The quinseanera ceremony was touching. Six young men dressed in boots and straw sombreros escorted the girl around the corral (it was dark by now, but a couple of flood lights somewhat lit the place), and at one point lifted her up for the crowd of us hundred or so onlookers and passed her from hand to hand over their heads like a prize to be shown off.

Earlier a platform of boards had been laid on the dirt of the corral, and now the girl was seated in a chair on the platform for the symbolic exchange of her girl’s flat-soled shoes for a woman’s high heels—in this case, a pair of fancy boots. The girl’s mother, I think (the lighting made it difficult to tell), performed the change of footwear, while soft, romantic music played out of the speakers behind her.

Then the girl stood in her grownup boots to dance with her father, then her godfather, and any number of uncles, cousins and friends of the family, each cutting in to the other. This was still going on when the food began to be served. We sat at a table with the filmmaker and his wife and tried to talk as we ate, but the loud music had started up again and we gave up. We left together about 10, the fiesta starting to crank up, and walked by flashlight back to the village. We parted with the couple where they began the climb to their casa after instructing us how to find it and inviting us to visit sometime.

April and I went on to the Yacht Club where, at April’s instigation, I was treated to a pot-banging announcement of my birthday, a group singing of "Happy Birthday," and a big piece of delicious cake on a plate decorated with flowers and a candle, compliments of the management.

A special day in this special place.

Going South

2007-11-22T14:22:00.000-08:00

Last night I said to April, "It’s getting so cold here. I wish we could go south for the winter."

She looked at me for a second, then burst out laughing. Because, you see, we are going south, just two weeks from now, to the sunny west coast of Mexico, for our fourth consecutive winter in Yelapa. This year, our son and his family will join us for the first two weeks.

"Aren’t we lucky?" April said.

Yes, we are. We’re extravagantly lucky. There’s no other word for it. It’s compensation for growing old, I guess, our reward to ourselves for making it to retirement, for somehow having the means (though just barely) to go south. But we’re doing so out of selfishness.

We’re being selfish—we’ve had to face it—because, rather than putting our daughter through college (she was accepted this year into the music program at the University of Victoria and is attending on a student loan), and maybe helping our son out financially to establish himself in business, we’ve elected to keep most of my just over six-figure inheritance from my mother for ourselves. We’ve invested it so that it adds modestly to our monthly pensions, and so, since 2005, we’ve been able to escape the Canadian winter.

Our rationale? Our children are young adults. They have their lives ahead of them, during which, with luck, they’ll somehow establish themselves to the point where they, too, might enjoy the fruits of retirement and travel. We, on the other hand, have our lives mostly behind us. The trouble with retirement, as I say to younger people who express their longing for it, is that unless you make a fortune beforehand, you have to get old before you can retire. It’s a state a little like being more or less comfortably on death row. It can be pleasant, but there’s no hope of your sentence being commuted.

Anyway, we might have put my less-than-large inheritance into a trust fund for our kids, let them draw on it as needed, and stayed put in our little homemade house, on our 9.2 acres of land, into our declining years—a house and land (the land, anyway) that the kids will inherit someday, for whatever they or it may be worth. Our hope is that it’ll be worth something.

So, selfishly, we’ll again go south this winter—and for as many more winters as we’re allowed in our increasing old age.

Wind Dummy

2007-08-22T20:01:00.000-07:00

Here's another long (and probably unpublishable) piece, written out of memory and a little research for the record.

WIND DUMMY
Memories of Early Hang Gliding

One afternoon in early July of 1974, as I sat in my office as assistant registrar of the now-defunct Notre Dame University of Nelson (Nelson, British Columbia), I saw an amazing sight: reflected on the glass front of my office, through the window behind me, was the familiar mass of 2,200-foot Elephant Mountain, which rises across the narrow West Arm of Kootenay Lake and overlooks the town, and the tiny figure of a man on top of the "elephant’s" head with what looked like an enormous kite. Turning around to look directly out the window, I saw the man lift the kite, run with it off the mountain—and fly!

He took off parallel with the Arm—into the wind, I supposed—tilted into a turn, straightened, and began to glide over the water. His delta-shaped kite, painted yellow and black, was like a giant butterfly. I stood at the window, watching his slow flight, until he arrived above the sawdust flats along the shore of the Arm, went into a downward spiral (what I would later know as a diving 360), came out of it alarmingly close to the ground, I thought, then tipped the nose of his kite upward and landed, on his feet, as neatly and gently as a bird.

What I’d just seen, I gathered, after checking the current Nelson Daily News, was a competitor taking a practice flight off the launch site in preparation for the Canadian National Kite Flying Championships to be held in Nelson that weekend. It would be the first event of its kind in Canada, a result of the growing enthusiasm for this latest daredevil sport that had found its way north from California, where it originated.

Sixty flyers competed that weekend in Nelson. I missed Saturday’s action, but my wife, April, and I were in town on Sunday to join the crowd at Nelson’s small-plane airport for the finals and watch as a helicopter, in several trips, lifted fliers and slingfuls of their folded kites to the top of Elephant Mountain. Through binoculars I watched them assemble their kites up there, and then, one after the other, take off, all trying for the target on the flats, a square of canvas with a 30-foot bulls-eye painted on it. Most of the flyers landed, more or less skillfully, within five minutes, the best pilots, a couple of them flying prone (eventually the only way to fly), on the square of canvas or on the bulls-eye itself. One or two landed in the lake, and at least one, wildly off course, put down on the roof of somebody’s house in the uphill section of Nelson.

Later that hot afternoon several of the best fliers put on a demonstration of ridge soaring, for as long as half an hour, in the updrafts along the face of the mountain.

It was all too exciting. As a farm boy in Minnesota, I’d watched redtail hawks soaring above the fields and had longed to fly as they did. Now I could, if I had the nerve and what I supposed was considerable skill. I doubted my ability to learn the required skill, and I wasn’t too sure about my nerve either. Nevertheless, after learning the name of the instructor in town and that he charged a modest $35, I signed up for a week’s lessons in hang gliding.
* * *
Humankind has wanted to fly since who knows when? There’s the legend of Icarus, who in wings made of feathers and wax flew so close to the sun that the wax melted and he fell into the sea. There are drawings from the sixteenth century by Leonardo da Vinci of batwing flying machines, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sketches of gliders that may or may not have been tested. So far as we know, glider flight was first achieved by an American, John J. Montgomery, and by a German, Otto Lilienthal, in the years around the turn of the last century. Montgomery flew as early as 1883, Lilienthal in 1891; both men were eventually killed in crashes, Lilienthal in 1896, Montgomery in 1911. Meanwhile, there were other pioneers of flight, England’s Percy Pilcher, killed in 1899, and America’s Octave Chanute, who flew countless times off sand dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan in the 1890s, and survived.

Then came the Wright brothers, who first experimented with hang gliders between 1900 and 1902 before achieving powered flight in 1903. After that, powered flight was all the rage, and hang gliding was lost to history—until an engineer named Francis Rogallo, in the 1950s and early ‘60s, patented designs for a "limp"delta-shaped wing, a kind of parachute reinforced with metal tubing, that NASA considered as a device for gliding space vehicles after reentry into the atmosphere back to earth. NASA ultimately rejected the Rogallo wing, but it led, in 1964, to the "Bamboo Butterfly," a bamboo and polyethylene adaptation of the Rogallo by a daredevil named Richard Miller, who learned to fly with it off California sand dunes. Soon other crazies were running off hills and dunes under various contraptions made of bamboo and plastic, and hang gliding (called "skysurfing" at first, suggesting seaside launches and the initial low-level flights: "Never fly higher than you care to fall," was an early adage, soon ignored) was reborn.

The first modern hang glider meet reportedly was held in 1971, in California. At this and at subsequent gatherings flyers swapped experiences and the practical knowledge they’d gained—often the hard way. Refinements to the Rogallo wing were introduced: notably the swing seat and the triangular control bar (also called the trapeze bar or A-frame), developed in Australia along with probably the first true Rogallo hang gliders and brought to the U.S. by Aussies Bill Moyes and Bill Bennett. Moyes had served as a test pilot of Rogallos built by John Dickenson, an Australian engineer, for towing behind speedboats. Moyes eventually realized that by taking off a height of land you could fly free, without a tether. He started performing at fairs in Australia.

His friend Bill Bennett, another hang glider barnstormer, went to the States in 1969 and did stunt flying with the Rogallo. Moyes followed him in 1970 and also put on hang gliding demonstrations, once flying into the Grand Canyon, another time having himself lifted by an airplane to some 8,000 feet before releasing.

The swing seat and A-frame control bar made obsolete those early gliders strenuously and rather awkwardly guided by hanging by your armpits from parallel bars and shifting your weight by throwing out your legs or sliding back and forth on the bars. The swing seat gave you a comfortable ride, and with the control bar, you shifted your weight simply by pushing or pulling on the bar, or cranking it to the right or left, to easily increase or decease your speed or effect a turn.

Flights with the Rogallo wing in Canada were first made off ski slopes. Willi Muller, manager of a ski hill outside Calgary, Alberta, watched a skier fly off a hill at Lake Louise in 1971, started building kites for himself and then for others, flew off various ski hills in western Canada, and eventually competed in meets with the likes of Bob Wills, Chris Price, Dick Eipper and Dave Cronk, early heroes of the sport.

In 1973, Willi and his brother Vincent formed Muller Kites, Ltd., in Calgary, and soon after bought land on Cochrane Hill, west of the city, for use as a launch site. The open slope there and Alberta’s prairie winds made it a great place to hang glide, and many, if not most, of the flyers who competed in the Nelson meet in July 1974 were graduates of Cochrane. Many, if not most, flew Muller kites. The organizer of the meet, Leigh Bradshaw of Nelson, was himself a Cochrane graduate, and he was the guy, it turned out, who would teach me, and others in the Nelson area, how to fly.
* * *
Exactly a month after first seeing men fly like birds, I was one of a small group of would-be hang glider pilots who gathered one evening on the lawn in front of our instructor’s house in Nelson. We were there for a "ground school," preliminary to practical lessons. Nose down on the grass for our inspection was an assembled Muller hang glider. It was a delta-wing made of Dacron sailcloth and aluminum spars, and standing beside it was Leigh Bradshaw, who turned out to be a gangly youth with a bandaged arm. He’d been flying that day and crashed, skinning his arm to the elbow.

He took our names, checking them off the list he held. Then he asked our ages, eighteen being his minimum for instruction. A couple were boys just out of high school and precisely at the minimum age. Most were in their twenties. I was thirty-nine, which made me the "old man." Leigh himself was twenty-four.

The kite before us had a twenty-foot wingspan and weighed forty-two pounds, Leigh said. He had each of us take a turn at strapping on the swing seat, hung by nylon ropes from the kite’s central spar, its "keel," and grasping the control bar to lift the kite up and get the feel of it. It wasn’t easy keeping it balanced. When taking off, Leigh said, you grabbed the control bar and lifted the kite over your head to the extent of the seat’s ropes, then ran with it as hard as you could. "You keep running," Leigh told us, "lifting the nose of the kite up slightly to fill the sail and as you lift off, you pull the bar in slightly to dive a little and reach flying speed. That’s fifteen miles per hour with a Muller. Then you level off and you’re flying!

"Thumbs up, though, on the control bar," Leigh warned. "Know why? Cause if you crash with your thumbs around the bottom of the bar, you’ll break’m. Snap! Just like that."

Lessons would start that Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. (agreed on as the time we’d all be off work) on Leigh’s "practice hill" in Krestova some ten miles out of Nelson. We were to come in long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and bring gloves. Helmets weren’t mentioned. Few wore them in those days.
* * *
Two days later, from the rim of a little "bowl" in the hills around Krestova, we "fledglings" started the humbling business of learning to take off and land with Leigh’s "trainer," a somewhat battered old Muller. We took turns with it, lifting it over our heads and running down the slope with it, "goat jumping" into the air at first, despite Leigh’s yelling at us not to, and falling back in a stall on the kite’s tail or crashing headlong into the dirt—eating the dirt, driving your face into it, tearing your shirt sleeves, wrenching your back.

One poor bespeckled fellow broke his glasses his first or second try down the hill. It was awkward running while strapped to the swing seat and trying to balance the heavy kite over your head. The trick, as Leigh kept stressing to us, was not to run and then jump into the air, but rather to keep running until the kite itself lifted into the air and took you up with it.
My first go was a classic failure: I "goat jumped," let my legs stretch out in front of me, and sat down hard on my rump. "I broke my tail-bone that way," Leigh commented.

My second attempt started out fine. In a sharp wind, I took off like a bird (my light 120 pounds under the twenty-foot kite gave me an advantage) and sailed out over Sandy, our assistant instructor, who yelled "Stall!" I pushed on the control bar, the kite tipped up, then heeled over in the wind and came down on one wing, which held me up for an instant, dangling in the swing seat, until the wing’s aluminum spar buckled and I fell to the ground. That ended our lessons for the evening.
* * *
The next evening, our painful lessons resumed: slogging up the training hill with the heavy, awkward kite on your back, swinging it into the wind at the top, trying to balance it, hold it steady, as you wait for the right aerodynamic (the right psychological) moment before starting your run down the hill and, hopefully, taking off. You crash. Then puffing, sweating, hurting, you slog up the hill again. You’re like a penguin trying to be an eagle.

We were helped, at first, with "keel-assist" takeoffs. Leigh or his assistant would grab the kite’s tail and run with you, tip the kite’s nose up for you to fill the sail, and give you a last push into the air. That sometimes worked to lift you off.

But then you went back to unassisted takeoffs. I bombed twice unassisted after a successful keel-assist, the second time really hard, wrenching my back. Then, third try, I tripped while running, "fell" into the air, and actually glided down the hill before landing, more or less successfully. "Good," Leigh said, "but you’ll need more lessons before I let you fly off a mountain."

That next week, after a day of sedentary work at my desk, I’d leave for more physical punishment at Krestova—more painful attempts, more humiliating failures, to fly.

But then, on Thursday of that week, I flew!—and flew again that Friday, repeatedly, running down the hill at Krestova and taking off to glide to the other side of the bowl, the sails luffing behind me as I dove before flaring the kite to achieve a landing. The sensation wasn’t at all like one’s dream of flying. Hanging in your seat below the kite, you felt the air’s power, an invisible force that held you up and carried you over the ground as if being swung from a crane, while the kite itself, constantly in need of control, didn’t let you feel much like Peter Pan.

That weekend, I "graduated," off Mount Hardy, outside Grand Forks, B.C.
* * *
Grand Forks is a former mining town in the idyllic-looking Kettle River Valley, some seventy-five miles west of Nelson. It’s in B.C.’s Boundary Country along the U.S.-Canada border, a region of semi-desert where the bare hills outside town are perfect for flying off because of their steady updrafts and the absence of trees to crash into, and because the agricultural fields in the flat valley are ideal for landing. With other members of the club we soon formed and jocularly called Acrophobia, I would fly many times at Grand Forks during the long, benevolent fall of that year and into the following summer.

At Grand Forks, that graduation weekend in late August, I mostly waited—waited on top of Mount Hardy for my turn to fly in a state of controlled anxiety, wondering whether my legs would buckle when I started my run to take off. Mount Hardy was a lot higher than the training hill at Krestova: 700 feet vertical, Leigh said. (Actually it was 1200 feet above the valley floor, but he didn’t tell us that until afterwards.) Watching others take off from it was almost unbearably exciting—and not a little frightening—especially as there were a couple of very bad takeoffs and one potentially fatal stall.

One student crashed on takeoff, just over the edge of the mountain, breaking his control bar. Another flew through bushes and bounced off rocks before sailing out over the valley. Another took off all right but stalled maybe a hundred feet above the ground, sideslipped into a dive, and pulled out just in time to make a rough landing in a bean field. Another executed an ugly, heart-stopping takeoff, banging into a rock and losing his grip on the control bar. He got hold of it again but lost so much altitude he barely cleared the power lines along the road in front of our designated landing field. The day ended before I’d had my turn at risking disaster.

My turn came, finally, the next day. By that time, after tensely waiting until late afternoon, I was as scared and yet ready to go, I imagined, as a paratrooper the night before D-Day.
It had been a hot day, the thermals building, making lots of lift and by the afternoon some turbulence. I bent under the trainer and strapped into the swing seat. Leigh said to wait. A downwind tipped the kite forward. Another student pulled the tail down and held it. Squatting under the sails, I winked at April, standing nervously nearby. Then Leigh said, "Okay."

I stood up and adjusted the seat, straightened the ropes, lifted and angled the kite into the wind.
"Go," said Leigh.

I ran down the shallow incline and off the edge of the slope and into the air. It was that easy. I pulled the bar in and picked up flying speed. The sail began to rap in the wind. Behind me Leigh whistled, my signal to turn. I turned, swung around the hill and started down, down the mile-long glide to the landing field. I was flying at incredible speed, it seemed (maybe forty mph), because I was diving all the way, as instructed, to avoid stalling. (After yesterday’s student mishaps, Leigh had gotten nervous about stalls.) Vaguely I was aware of the town of Grand Forks, off in front of me, and of the ground below me. Once I looked directly down and was struck with vertigo at the sight of a house the size of a child’s toy block under my dangling feet. The kite bucked and the sails snapped in the afternoon’s hot-air turbulence. I watched the angle of the nose (again according to instructions), watched it pitch and yaw as I fought against its tendency to tip upwards, leaning into the A-frame and holding the control bar in tight against my chest. The feeling was a little like surfing (sky surfing, yeah!), though more like a toboggan ride, fast, bumpy, as you slid down the hard, invisible air. Leigh had said to do S-turns to lose altitude as I approached the field, so as not to overshoot it, so I wrenched the kite back and forth, sideslipping, the control bar wanting to tear itself from my hands.

I cleared the power lines by some fifty feet, then saw the field rushing up at me. I pumped the bar out a couple of times to slow the kite; then, as my feet neared the ground, I pushed out and up into a stall and settled to earth. "Wow," I said. And again, "Wow." I could hardly wait to try it again.
* * *
I didn’t fly again, though, except for a couple of little practice flights off a small hill near my home, until mid-September, during another weekend at Grand Forks. The week before, word reached us that a flyer from Calgary, Bill Taylor, had been killed at Hope, B.C., near Vancouver, after taking off from a cloudy peak and, no doubt becoming disoriented in the fog, crashing back into the mountain. He was the first hang-gliding fatality in Canada (one of fifty worldwide in 1974). That was grim news, but it didn’t deter me or my comrades. Hang gliding, like flying generally, was a calculated risk. You accepted the risk for the absolute thrill, the transcendence, of flying like a bird.

There were more accidents—one spectacular one—my second weekend at Grand Forks. Like most of us in our club, I kept a flight log. Here is my entry for September 14:

Mount Hardy. Four flights, the first three in the used Muller 18 Wayne and I bought from Leigh for $200, the fourth in Leigh’s new 18. All lovely flights. I was more relaxed, learned to "trim" the kite for the best glide angle. Got lift and accepted it. Can fly now without coaching.

Three accidents, though, two of them horrendous. Andy, a fledgling starting his second flight, dove too steeply, crashed just below the launch site, and suffered a broken shoulder and cracked vertebrae. (He was taken by ambulance to the Grand Forks hospital.) Cam stalled on takeoff and has cuts and bruises. Wayne, on his graduation flight and in our kite, took to fooling around in the air and flew into the power lines. The kite looped around the wires, shorted out the electricity in Grand Forks, and he was shocked unconscious. I had taken off right after him and lost sight of him until, after landing, I turned around to see him and the kite hanging upside down from the wires. He’s dead, I thought, as I approached, but then he came to and pulled his head up. Suffered burns on his legs and one side of his body and the Dacron on our kite is singed all along the wing spars, one of which is bent. He hung up there in the wires for 45 minutes, beginning to freak out after the power went back on, before being rescued by West Kootenay Power workmen, who arrived from Grand Forks with a cherry picker. The second ambulance that day took him to the hospital, where he was given a tranquilizer, treated for burns, and released.

As the ambulance carrying Wayne headed into Grand Forks, the power boys stayed behind to deliver a lecture. "You shouldn’t be flying over these wires," we were told. They carried 2400 volts and our friend was lucky to have survived. One man pointed to the high-tension lines in the distance, going down the slope of Mount Hardy only a few hundred yards from our launch site. "You fly into those and you’ll be incinerated."

To allay their fears for us, to show that Wayne’s accident was a fluke, we had them watch as three or four of us drove up the mountain and flew off to glide over the lines with a couple of hundred feet to spare. That so excited the workmen they were ready to take up hang gliding themselves.

Wayne, acting on the same principle that a rider, after being thrown by a horse, gets back on the beast, flew again the next day—twice. Then he gave up hang gliding, though not flying altogether (opting for powered flight, he got a pilot’s license about a year later), and not without leaving a cautionary image of himself hanging from the power lines at Grand Forks in our broken kite (Leigh took the picture and sent it in) that appeared in the accidents section of the January 1975 issue of The Flypaper, the official organ of the Alberta Hang Glider Association.
* * *
Following that weekend, I called in sick one day to fly with Leigh and some others off Buchanan Lookout, 4,500 feet above the town of Kaslo, up the shore of Kootenay Lake from where I live near the ferry landing at Balfour. Didn’t land in the lake, as I wrote in my flight log.

Flew twice that day, long, ten to fifteen-minute flights, including, on my second, a soaring lift above the Kaslo golf course, situated on a knoll overlooking the town, which provided a sudden bump of air as I passed over it. Stalled and lost my stomach. But such lovely smooth flights overall, the wind flowing audibly through your sail, your wires faintly humming, your wings slightly flapping (like a bird’s!) as you float, intensely alone, some thousands of feet above the earthbound world. You’re buzzing, all your faculties are engaged, you’re entirely in the here and now. Still nervous on takeoff, I told my flight log. Have to psych myself up to it. The launch at Buchanan is off a ledge below the Lookout, out of the wind with the kite’s full weight on your back as you run off the edge, trusting that you’ll fly. You drop, your sail fills, and you’re flying!

After our last flights that day, Leigh asked, "Wanna fly Lavena?"

I knew about Mount Lavena, just north of Kootenay Lake, above the farming and logging community of Meadow Creek. At 5,880 feet vertical, it was maybe the highest peak one could fly off in the West Kootenays. While still taking lessons, I’d watched Leigh and his previous class of students fly off it about a month earlier.

"Sure," I said.

"How about tomorrow?"

It would be my eleventh flight—and was almost my last.
* * *
Leigh organized the flight, arranging with a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation maintenance crew for the four of us—Leigh himself, Ted ("Terrible Ted," a onetime professional wrestler), Brian (a B.C. Hydro employee), and I—to go up with them in the early morning to the top of Lavena where, along with a forest lookout tower, there was a CBC relay station. I called my office to say I was taking another half day off and that I’d probably be in for the afternoon.

It took an hour and a half in the crew’s 4x4 van to reach the top of Mount Lavena. Switchbacking up through the forested lower slopes, we were lost in the trees until, above tree line, we came out on the bare summit and got our first unnerving look at the valley floor, more than a mile below us, over which we would launch ourselves. "Your mouths dry?" Leigh laughed, then passed sticks of gum around. "Little trick," he said. Chewing gum did work up some spit in your mouth.

At the lookout, the CBC guys parked their vehicle and helped us unload our kites. Then they stood watching as we carried our kites to a narrow point of rock jutting out into sheer space just below the lookout. The air was chilly at that altitude, and much too still. I had a sense of unreality and started to tremble from the cold and, yes, with cold fear as I assembled my kite. We were up so high! You could look across, level with us, to the snowy field of a glacier on top of the opposite range of mountains; look down through wispy clouds, as if from the stratosphere, to the little patchwork of Meadow Creek, five miles away yet seemingly right under our feet.
It was difficult to tell where, exactly, to face into the wind. There was no wind, only whiffs of air now and then that your telltail, the nylon ribbon on the nose of your kite, told you were as often at your back as in front of you. We waited, crouched under our kites and strapped to our swing seats, for the air to settle.

It was scary. I was so scared, in fact, my hands were shaking as I gripped the triangular sides of my control bar. Then the air stopped moving. Leigh said, "All right, guys. It’s now or never."
Ted went first. He was a powerful, stocky fellow weighing over 200 pounds whose philosophy when taking off was "Do or die!" He did, running the short length of rock (hardly a dozen feet) to literally dive off the edge and sail out into the emptiness with a warning shout back, "Little updraft, boys!"

I should have noted that as, the second to go off and thoroughly spooked now by the stillness (I felt every one of my eighteen-foot Muller’s thirty-eight pounds as I lifted it, felt I would drop like a stone instead of fly), I raised the kite’s nose to "grab" for air as I ran and at the edge, consequently, struck the updraft as if it were a wall and hung there, suspended, one foot on the rock and the other in space.

I tried stepping back but couldn’t. Tried pulling down the nose of my kite and pushing off with my one leg still on the rock: couldn’t. Finally, I did push off, dropped and felt the tail of my kite crash sickeningly against the rock, then the kite begin to tip over toward the forested slope, some two thousand feet below me. This is it, I thought in that dreamy state of dissociation, as if "it" were happening to somebody else. I’m going to tumble into those trees.

But it wasn’t my time, as my Catholic mother might have said. Instead of somersaulting into space, the kite slid with a grinding sound off the rock—and I was flying! Astounded, I looked back to see my tail wires still miraculously intact, though with part of a bush hanging from them, and the dumbstruck faces of Leigh and Brian staring after me as I flew away. Then I was out over the valley, in perfectly smooth air, standing still, it seemed, over Meadow Creek. The town seemed gradually to move away from me as I lost altitude; then, at a certain level, the illusion disappeared and I was definitely gliding toward it. Relaxed now in my swing seat, I was enjoying the flight.

Even in the "dead" air of that morning, without any lift at all and with the Muller’s low four-to-one glide ratio (a drop of one foot per four feet of horizontal glide), my five-mile flight to Meadow Creek took a glorious, almost twenty minutes. I passed over Duncan Dam, over the Duncan River, over Meadow Creek itself. I might have practiced a hammerhead stall, something Leigh liked to do, in which you pushed up on the control bar to cause a stall, then had the bar slap you in the chest as the kite went into a steep dive and you lost your stomach. I had the altitude for it, and I knew the kite would pull out of the dive almost of itself. But I was anything but a stunt flyer. So I flew straight on, passed over a line of trees, and landed perfectly in a cow pasture.

A man appeared with a movie camera and shot pictures of me as I nosed the kite over, unhitched my seat belt, and stepped out from under the wing. A teenage boy helped me fold the kite up and carry it out to the road. "How do you learn to do that?"he asked excitedly. "You think I could do it?" It struck me that I was like a barnstorming pilot out of the 1920s. But I was shaking. My adrenalin had stopped pumping and the reaction had set in. I kept hearing the grinding crash of my kite hitting the edge of Mount Lavena and seeing myself tumbling, over and over, into extinction.

I looked around for Ted, but he’d come down, I learned, on the other side of town. Then Brian passed over, shouting wildly, "Which way is the wind?"

"There isn’t any!" I called up to him.

Then, as he landed, I noticed a back wire dragging from his kite: one of the four wires, front and back, that attach to the control bar and help hold the kite together. Jezus. He’d taken off clumsily as I had done, he told me, snapped the wire and had anything but a relaxed flight as he crabbed the weakened control bar, pondered his weakened wing, and wondered whether his kite would collapse if he hit turbulence. But he made it down okay.

Then Leigh swooped by overhead to land perfectly on the road. We were all down then, all safely back on mother earth, having flown from the highest launch point that most of us would ever experience.

I was sleepy suddenly, and slept in the back of Brian’s car all the way into Nelson. But by the time I was dropped off at the university, I felt rejuvenated, and I worked through the afternoon with that powerful sense one has, after staring death in the face, of being marvelously alive.
* * *
That long, mild fall of 1974 in southeast British Columbia, I racked up 32 flights, flying as late as early December. A great thrill during Octoberfest in Nelson was to fly with fellow members of Acrophobia off Elephant Mountain, recreating in our minds the championship meet in July in Nelson that had inspired all of us to take up hang gliding. Like the competitors in that meet, some dozen of us were helicoptered to the top, where the view of Nelson, some two thousand feet below, wasn’t so breathtaking as Meadow Creek from Lavena or Kaslo from Buchanan Lookout, but it was exciting enough. There was a good wind, and our takeoffs were easy. I had lift until I was over the water of the West Arm, after which I glided across to arrive some hundreds of feet above the sawdust flats, when I put my kite into a diving 360. I spun down, leveled off, and landed upright. Felt a wave of confidence; felt I knew now how to fly.

The next weekend, still feeling confident, I drove to Kaslo with April and flew alone off Buchanan Lookout. It was my 17th flight, and I had another close call.

Before going up to the Lookout, an hour’s steep drive, I stopped in Kaslo to check the wind. It was very windy on the beach by the Moyie (the last paddlewheeler on Kootenay Lake, installed as a museum on shore) but a little less windy along the wider stretch of sand by the city park. Decided to land there.

Up at the Lookout, there was virtually no wind at all, just a gentle updraft at the edge of the cliff below the lookout tower that barely moved my telltail. Strapped in and ready for takeoff, I had second thoughts. Should I do this? Could I? There was no one to push me (April stood quietly behind me, assuming I knew what I was doing), no fellow flyers around to lend me the courage of camaraderie. I faced into the wind, such as it was, took a deep breath and expelled it, lifted the kite and positioned the nose slightly down, leveled it as I ran toward the edge—and flew off. I turned in my seat and waved goodbye to April. She stood on the ledge and waved, somewhat half-heartedly, after me.

The three-mile flight to Kaslo was exhilarating. I got lift a couple of times, got the usual lift over the Kaslo golf course, where a twosome of tiny golfers looked up at me as I flew over them, still at least a thousand feet high. I sailed toward the lake and, above the sawmill’s teepee burner, its smoke bending horizontally in the wind, I was able to hover directly over it and look down into the flames. Then I turned downwind to start a diving 360, changed my mind when I saw the altitude I lost, swung back into the wind, then back and forth, S-turning, trying to lose altitude. The kite wanted to soar, and I wrestled the control bar, S-turning, until abruptly the kite flipped over and I peeled off like a fighter plane toward the lake. The water rushed up at me and I expected to crash into it, be knocked unconscious, drown. But then, cranking at the control bar, I pulled out, still some fifty feet up. I was over the water and flying again, but when I turned downwind, toward shore, I quickly lost the rest of my altitude and just managed to turn into the wind once more to land on a gravel spit at the mouth of the Kaslo River. It must have been pretty to watch.

"Where in the hell did you come from?" the man standing there, fly fishing, asked. I’d flown right over him before touching down.

Flight log: Learned another lesson. A strong wind near the ground is dangerous. You can stall. So keep your nose steady, come straight in and keep your speed up.
* * *
We were all learning such lessons through raw experience: learning by our mistakes, by surviving accidents and near-accidents; learning that up in the air you were out of your element, really, and that you had to be careful, you had to be focused. Somebody else said it: The Rogallo wing is a beautiful butterfly with a deadly sting. You never forgot that.

The wind! It was a flyer’s friend. But it was also frightening at times and could be your enemy. The wind could slam you against a mountain. It could cause you to soar. It could tip you over. It could catch you in a downdraft, invert your sail, and drive you into the ground.

When the wind was uncertain, we flipped a coin to see who would be the first off. That flyer, who would test the wind for the rest of us, was the "wind dummy." We were all wind dummies, now that I think of it, in those early, trial-and-error days of hang gliding when, as a Nelson helicopter pilot, who’d several times had the "grisly" job of picking up injured or dead kite flyers after they’d crashed and thought the sport was crazy, put it, "Basically [these guys] are jumping in ignorance and hoping they’ll reach the ground alive." There was truth in that.

In fact, most of us were completely ignorant, at least at first, of aerodynamics, of weather and air currents, of the dangers of flying off a place like Buchanan Lookout, where three valleys converge and the air is often turbulent. Dan Poynter’s Hang Gliding: The Basic Handbook of Skysurfing offered practical information on the sport, and there were tips in every issue of the Alberta Hang Glider Association’s monthly Flypaper, of which I was now a member: how to achieve a level 360 without stalling; how to tell, in mild air, the direction of the wind in order to make a good, upwind landing. There were warnings about checking your kite for kinked or metal-fatigued spars, frayed wires, bent or cracked bolts, particularly for damage to the kite’s center bolt, the so-called Jesus bolt, which would cause the kite to collapse were it to break in flight. But there was nothing like up-in-the-air, hair-raising experience to teach you things you couldn’t get from your reading.

Rank stupidity was something else. Drinking and flying, for instance, which was a habit of many flyers. (Not me, though a beer certainly tasted good after a physically and emotionally draining day of flying.) Worse: doping and flying. Somebody asked me once, "You ever get high before you fly?" My response: "Are you kidding? Flying itself makes you high!"

Yet there were those for whom smoking a joint offered enhancement of the experience or perhaps eased their nervousness before flying. Marijuana was probably involved in the case of a pilot who, in 1977, launched himself off Buchanan Lookout after failing, or forgetting, to attach his prone harness to his kite. He and his kite separated, and he fell a thousand feet to the rocks below.

Flight Log: Buchanan Lookout, 20 October 74. 20th flight. Met Ted at his place in Kaslo and we went up in my truck. Ted’s girlfriend drove it down.

As windy on top as yesterday. I went off first, sailed out, and was tossed around like a leaf in the wind. Not so scared this time that I’d I lose control of the kite, but I had to fight the control bar. At times it seemed I’d be blown out over the lake. Once the wind pushed me into a steep dive and I lost my stomach; made me yell. Leveled off within a hundred feet of the trees. Finally came in low over the last ridge and saw I wouldn’t make it across the bay to the public beach. So I S-turned down, over the highway, over the power lines, and landed on the dirt road by the boat harbor. Ted sailed over me, crossed the bay, and landed on the beach.
Didn’t fly again (I’d been spooked), but Ted went up and soared for 15 minutes. Beautiful to watch.

I flew a dozen more times with fellow Acrophobes before winter closed us down (some who knew how to downhill ski tried flying, with some success, off ski hills), lovely, silken flights most of them, off an old mine above the town of Ymir (1200 feet vertical), off Buchanan Lookout, off Spencer Mountain (1500 feet vertical), a new site out of Grand Forks, during which I felt no fear of the wind anymore, only a healthy respect; felt almost no fear at all, only an awareness of the risk, in that instant before takeoff, which I likened, romantically, to the bullfighter’s "moment of truth" before he lunges at the bull to plunge his sword into its heart. It was Terrible Ted’s moment of "Do or die." You felt it in your crotch.

My twenty-third flight, at Ymir, I crashed into a tree.

What happened was that after takeoff I experienced so much exciting lift I decided to take a tour of Ymir’s narrow valley, flew into the shadow of a mountain, got caught in a downdraft, and ran out of air, as we called it, which felt like the hand of God was pushing me toward the ground. Below my feet, getting closer by the second, was a whitewater river, and beside it a railroad track lined with power lines, neither of which looked like a good place to land.

Then I was out of the downdraft and flying again, but I’d lost so much altitude I doubted I’d make it to the field now. Nevertheless, I tried—almost made it. But then, as I was about to clear the last of the trees before the open field, I hit a rotor, the kite suddenly dipped, and I slammed into a tree—was thrown against the ropes of my swing seat, then left hanging, without a scratch, some twenty feet from the ground, my kite bent like a pretzel. I unbuckled and climbed down.

With help, I got my kite out of the tree and carried it home on the roof of my car. My wife met me in our driveway. "That’s it," she said. "You ready to quit now?" No. But I had to replace both wing spars.

I wasn’t the first, I heard, to crash at Ymir. The weekend before, as windy as it had been for me, two flyers flew into the trees, one almost exactly where I put down, and a third landed in the river. Live and learn.

My last three flights that year were off Spencer on December 8. With 32 flights recorded in my logbook, I was eight away from "advanced" standing, had managed to live and learn without crippling or killing myself, and felt I knew now most of the risks of hang gliding. But I was still largely ignorant of the ways you could reduce risk by learning about atmospheric conditions and how you could gauge them by studying the sky; how you could determine wind currents and where there were liable to be crosswinds, wind shear (a sudden change in wind speed or direction—or both at once), or rotor (caused by obstructions—trees, as at Ymir, hills, mountains. Think of water in a stream curling over a rock or eddying against a bank and your kite as a wood chip caught in the swirl). You could anticipate the flow of air by the look and location of the peaks and valleys, by the look of the clouds, by an educated study of the terrain. I did some meteorological reading that winter. Then spring came, and another flying season.
* * *
Mount Hardy, 23 March 75. Three good flights, my 33rd through 35th. Erratic weather but a nice wind. My second flight Leigh had to hold my nose wires before takeoff. Walked me to the edge, then let go and jumped aside as I stepped off and was immediately lifted, up some 50 feet above the ridge, to hover for almost four minutes, Leigh said. What a thrill. Our last flight, the bunch of us, Leigh, Cam, Blair and I, saw a snow shower approaching that had all of us scrambling to our kites. We flew into it, just for the hell of it, dry, hard little flakes that stung your eyes and had you flying blind for a few moments. Another thrill! No fear anymore, just excitement.

There followed in April a series of flights off comparatively low launch sites: Duncan Dam Lookout at the head of Kootenay Lake (150 feet vertical), and an outcrop above Notre Dame University of Nelson and the Kootenay Forest Products sawmill on the edge of town (only 500 feet vertical) that we dubbed Red Sands for our beach landing down the shore of the West Arm. I racked up seven flights off Red Sands, a tricky place to fly from because of its shifting winds and the fierce crosswind along the Arm that you flew into after diving between the trees on the slope. Being so close to the university, though, I could fly on my lunch hour or right after work.

One Saturday, after the appearance of a group of jolly flyers, I let myself be talked into leaving the student whose examination I was invigilating for a quick flight off Red Sands. Locking the student in my office after telling him I had an errand to run, I left him, flew happily without mishap, and returned to find the student still intent over his exam and the university president, who happened to live next door, outside my office with a troubled look on his face. Where had I been? Why had I left the student? I talked fast, and somehow avoided being fired.

In May, the warm weekend of Kaslo May Days, I set out with two members of the Kaslo Hang Gliding Club to fly for the first time that year off Buchanan Lookout. We were driven up the steep, gullied road by somebody in a 4x4 until we ran into a couple of feet of slippery snow. From there we waded through the snow, carrying our kites, for more than a mile to the Lookout.

At the Lookout we found a pair of hikers, a man and his wife, who followed us excitedly to the launch site to watch our takeoffs.

We assembled our kites and waited. The conditions were chancy: updrafts and downdrafts, crosswinds, swirled around us. Over where the Kaslo River comes out of the mountain pass between New Denver and Kaslo to empty into Kootenay Lake, we saw changing weather coming in: snow flurries even. The air turned cold. Downdrafts chilled the back of our necks.

There was a lull. The two Kaslo flyers, one after the other, lifted their kites and ran off. The first flyer got out beyond the slope of the mountain and began what looked like a bumpy ride toward town. The second sailed out, smoothly at first, but then his kite tipped violently sideways, nearly throwing him out of his seat. That gave me pause.

Alone now (except for the couple behind me, waiting impatiently, I thought, for my takeoff), I knelt under my kite and watched the weather deteriorate. Finally I unbuckled, stepped out from under the kite, and folded it up.

With the man helping carry my kite, I did what flyers had to do sometimes. I walked off the mountain.
* * *
Later in May I flew off Ymir, three good flights, and in June off a new place, Silver Dollar (2,200 feet vertical), near Salmo, where the ridge lift was so great that Jim, a teenaged Acrophobia member who flew prone in a Seagull, a bigger, better kite than the Muller, was carried swiftly up another thousand feet above the launch site to soar back and forth, whooping, above those of us still on the ground. We stood marveling at him for a couple of minutes (such soaring ability was new to us then; later, as gliders improved, it became commonplace), then rushed to get into the air ourselves. Somebody else in a Seagull rose up to Jim’s altitude, but the rest of us, in Mullers, had to settle for more or less rough glides, through gusting winds, down to the valley.

My second flight I crashed on takeoff, plowing into the brush on the gradual slope just below the launch site. Unhurt but humiliated, I struggled with my kite back up to the launch site and tried again. Took off correctly this time, flew out into the turbulence and soared a bit, came in high over the landing field, circled it, then S-turned down to be further humiliated when I landed too fast, nosing over in front of my wife and our friend Sheena, who’d watched me fly that day for the first time.

That was the end of my fiftieth flight—and the end of hang gliding for me.

A couple of weeks later I fell out of the sleeping loft to the first floor of our cabin and suffered compression fractures of two vertebrae. That grounded me for the rest of that year. By the following spring, however, I was ready to fly again and thinking of buying a new kite, one with a better glide ratio than my old Muller.

Meanwhile, my wife and I had applied for adoption. That led her to declare, assuming we were to get a child (which we did, the following year), that she didn’t want "a cripple" for a father, nor to find herself a widow and a single mother. So I allowed her to clip my wings, gave up flying, in fact, with a kind of relief, as something I no longer had to pump myself up to on weekends, no longer had to prove to myself I could do. I had done it. So now I could relax, and get on with the rest of my life.

And yet it was hard to let it go. To paraphrase what Hemingway once said of his obsession with bullfighting, for a whole year hang gliding filled my inner life. That summer after my accident, I visited old launch sites, saw old comrades and new faces, felt estranged from their brotherhood of daring.

Acrophobia membership rose to include at least one daredevil female over the next year or so, and then fell. Enthusiasm for the sport waned after that except among the happy few who could afford it and keep at it as hang gliding faced regulations and kites became more sophisticated, more expensive, and certainly a lot safer. Flyers dwindled, I think, to a dedicated cadre whose skill with their high-performance gliders made them something like professionals. Gone were the reckless, amateur days of hang gliding that I had known. By the 1980s the simple Rogallo had become a true gull-or hawk-like wing, with glide ratios of 10-1 or better (14-1 is now common) that gave pilots the ability to soar for hours, climb to cloud base, fly across country for more than a hundred miles.

Accidents ended flying for some I knew. Young Jim, at Grand Forks, trying to land on the ridge he’d been soaring over in his Seagull, had the wind catch his kite and roll it, slamming him against the ground and breaking one of his hips. Ken Greene, brother of Olympic champion skier Nancy Greene, whom I met once in Kaslo, died from massive internal bleeding after crashing into Mount Swansea at Invermere, B.C. Leigh Bradshaw quit flying and quit instructing, I heard, after seeing too many of his students crash and not wanting to feel responsible if one of them was killed. Others, I think, just quit after they got older, maybe wiser, or like me developed responsibilities that made risking one’s life and limbs kind of foolish, if not selfish.

My kite still hangs in our shed, a relic of those dumb, early days of hang gliding and a reminder that I was part of them. I took it down once, some years after I’d put it away, to demonstrate the sport, in brief little flights off fifty-foot Duncan Dam, to a young aspirant, who suddenly lost interest. He was a wind surfer and decided to stick to that sport. "Water’s a lot softer than the

ground," he told me.

In my seventies now, I probably couldn’t foot launch anymore, and besides, my old Muller with its probably fatigued aluminum spars and dried-out, brittle Dacron would be much too dangerous to fly. In fact, all Rogallo wings, slow to respond, their "limp" Dacron sails prone to inversion in turbulence, are relics now, no longer flown.

At times I think excitedly of owning an ultralight airplane. For around $5,000 I could order a kit and over the winter build a plane in my shed, as a former schoolmate of mine has done, several times, in his barn in Minnesota. But that’s just an old man’s fantasy. I’ve accepted that I’m permanently grounded now, a victim of caution as well as age.

And yet to this day, I watch soaring birds with something like an educated eye, and in summer or early fall, I can’t drive past a rocky peak or a high outcrop or a high, bare slope in these mountains without seeing it as a launch site.

"Look!" I’ll exclaim to my smiling wife. "What a place to take off from! What a day to fly!"

19 July-11 November 2004
10-12 November 2006

Intimations of Fall, Preparations for Winter

2007-08-21T13:06:00.000-07:00

Rain, finally. Yesterday it rained a good part of the day, afterwards putting clouds of condensing moisture in the air and mostly clearing it of smoke. This morning we hear no fire-fighting helicopters. The sky's partially cloudy, alternately sunny, the temperature comfortably cool. One feels fall's intimations.

A couple of days ago my wife, whose Spanish is adequate to the task (mine isn't), arranged by phone to rent our favored place in Yelapa, on Mexico's west coast, for what will be our fourth winter stay there. Last night, via Expedia, I booked our flights to and from Puerto Vallarta. We'll fly there December 12, spend that night in Vallarta, and next day take a water taxi the 22 miles down the coast to Yelapa, where we'll settle in for another three-month stay. We're scheduled to fly home from Vallarta on March 19, which means our stay will be closer to three and a half months. I hope to get some writing done while there.

We look forward to a Mexican Christmas, something we haven't expererienced since our winter in Oaxaca, 38 years ago. Look forward to meeting the friends we've made down there, some of them permanent residents, most winter escapees like ourselves.

Our son, his ex-partner and their six-year-old daughter, our only grandchild, will fly down for a two-week stay with us in December. We'll miss our daughter, who'll be in Victoria, enrolled in the music program at the University of Victoria -- she went down with us last year for two weeks -- and probably won't see her until she and her boyfriend come back to Nelson for a visit next summer. We might, however, make the nearly 500-mile trip to Victoria to see them before we leave for Mexico.

Meanwhile, my son and I have the next three months to fill our woodshed for winter. We heat with wood, and though we'll be far away in the south this winter, our son will be here, staying in and looking after our house.

Just heard a helicopter fly by. So summer's fires are still burning. . . .

The Waning Days of Summer

2007-08-10T11:53:00.000-07:00

Seems like only yesterday it was the first of June and I was just back from a successful promotion of my book in Minnesota and we had the whole summer ahead of us. Now here we are in the middle of August already and summer's definitely on the wane, signaled by the singing of crickets at night (they come to life as summer is dying, it seems) and the end of July's record-breaking heat and tinder dryness that caused a rash of forest fires and filled the air with smoke and the sky with helicopters and water bombers these last couple of weeks. Meanwhile, since August started the nights have been getting cooler and the mornings colder. We've had some rain, finally, though not enough yet to put out all the fires. Anyway, there are streaks of snow now on what had been the bare summer peak of Mount Irvine. Looks like both summer and the fire season are about over.

Many people look forward to fall, and I admit that I enjoy it myself -- October's golden days, anyhow. There's a quickening in the fall air ("Football weather," Scott Fitzgerald called it, ackowledging its excitement), but there's a sadness in the season, too, because after autumn comes winter. And I, for one, have never looked forward to winter. Winter is a dead time, the long, long wait for spring and then another summer, which always passes too quickly.

Many people look forward to winter, especially skiers and other hardy outdoor types, but I've always preferred swimming to skiing or hiking through the snow, and being able to enjoy the outdoors in jeans or shorts and a tee-shirt rather than all bundled up. I grew up in Minnesota, after all, where it was mostly below zero Farenheit in the winter and our house was uninsulated and the pisspot under my bed sometimes froze in the night. I got my fill of those cold Minnesota winters, and have gotten my fill of the milder, though darker, winters here in B.C. after thirty years.

Still, I don't dread the coming of winter here anymore because my wife and I are snow birds now. Now when the ospreys disappear from Kootenay Lake and we know they've flown south for the winter, we also know we'll soon follow them.

The Festival Season

2007-07-23T16:21:00.001-07:00

My wife and I spent this past weekend at the Starbelly Jam music festival in Crawford Bay, B.C. Crawford Bay is across Kootenay Lake from where we live. You catch the ferry, the big Osprey 2000 or the much smaller Balfour, at Balfour (two miles from our house), and cross the lake to Kootenay Bay. It's a pleasant little voyage of some three miles ("The longest free ferry ride in the world!") and takes about forty minutes. This time of year the line of vehicles at both ferry landings is long, and you often endure a two-ferry wait. When there's something like the Starbelly Jam going on, it can be a three-ferry wait, as long as the usual wait down on the coast to cross from Vancouver to Vancouver Island. What helps is that, with only the Osprey running at night and big lines of waiting cars on both shores, the captain sometimes opens the boat's throttle, cutting the crossing time in half, to twenty minutes or less.

This is the season for festivals -- mostly music festivals -- throughout North America, if not in Europe and the Northern Hemisphere generally. They seem to have started (I don't think they existed when I was a youth in the 1950s) in the 1960s with the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, which was also the year of the Summer of Love in San Francisco (and the summer of the race riot in Detroit, during which I was a mail carrier in the inner city) and reached their zenith with Woodstock in 1969. In between those two events, and for a while afterwards there were many lesser events called Love-Ins or Be-Ins, here and there, where hippies, semi-hippies, bikers, college students -- Sixties youth, in short, disaffected and otherwise, being young together -- gathered to smoke dope, make out, and listen to the funky good music of the era.

Here in the Kootenays of British Columbia, as elsewhere, I'm sure, such festivals remain alive and well, drawing old and new hippies, ex-hippies (like ourselves, I suppose), and just folks, though I must say they've become rather less wild, more controlled, than they used to be. At Starbelly this weekend I saw a beautiful young woman nurse her baby, then unabashedly leave her shirt off while her male partner gave her a haircut. Nobody seemed to notice; or rather, people noticed, as I did, and accepted (and perhaps secretly applauded) it as part of the scene. It harked back to the Flower Power 1960s, but had this been sometime between 1967 and 1971 or so, there would have been more than one topless young woman in the crowd, many of them lined up and swaying in front of the bandstand. The Sixties, one remembers, weren't only political; they were sexy.

It occurs to me now that the Sixties never died, and in fact are enjoying a revival as Iraq becomes every bit as messy and controversial as Vietnam was and we face the undeniable evidence (though deniable still to world leaders and the profit-mad corporations they serve) of Global Warming.

More than ever, it seems to me, Dickens's opening sentence in A Tale of Two Cities applies: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . ."

Aspirations IV

2007-07-19T10:25:00.000-07:00

Yet another apprentice story, also eventually published in that littlest of "little" magazines The Archer. Another early example of my writing, as a rank beginner, about the things I knew.

REBIRTH

Everywhere there was dust. It hung in the air like gray fog, under a hot sun that was like a gray plate in the sky. Ma could not hang her wash outside on the line stretched between the trees on our lawn because of the dust raised by cars passing by on the gravel road. The trees all along the road were gray, and the corn was dry and brittle in the field in front of the house and the grass in the cow pasture below the barn was brown. There were growing cracks in the ground. Standing on the porch, looking out over our fields and pasture to the height of land a quarter mile away, what you saw was a landscape like in a black-and-white movie. Pa and I looked out from the porch every day. Dinner eaten, we would step onto the porch and see the land dying before our eyes, every day a little more.

Today was even hotter than usual, and windy, the air filled with dust. A car roared by and the heavy cloud swirling up behind it caught the wind and raced across the fields. It seemed the world was ending.

"Two months," Pa said. "Almost two months without a sprinkle."

We stood on the porch, hating the wind and the dust and the heat.

"We’ll have to buy hay this winter," he told me. "Our second-crop alfalfa is burned up."

"Two whole months," I said. "Jeese."

"Aren’t you going to Martinsville this afternoon?" Ma called from the kitchen.

"Yeah, I suppose so," Pa answered.

"Well, get two loaves of white bread, and—oh, I might as well write it down. You’ll forget."

She came out on the porch with a slip of paper. She handed it to Pa, and he stuck it inside his shirt pocket. He turned to me. His voice was low and toneless.

"Get the mower hitched up and cut the alfalfa on the flat. Cut it close. Try to get some hay out of it."

I nodded.

Pa walked across the brown and dying lawn, got into our almost-new, ‘49 Chev, and drove out of the yard and down the road, dust rising and sweeping away across the fields.

I walked across the yard to the machine shed, hating the wind that pushed against me and tore at my eardrums. I ground my teeth and felt the tiny hard particles in my mouth.

Inside there was shelter from the wind, but it buffeted the walls and caused the sliding door to bang in a steady rhythm. I greased the mower. Finished, I drove the tractor around from the other shed and hitched the mower to the drawbar. Then I eased the tractor and mower slowly outside and around to our bulk gas tank, where I filled the tractor and checked the oil and water. When I walked to the barn for a pair of pliers, I noticed the wind had subsided. The cows were in the yard, as they had been all day for many days now, lying there and staring patiently out at the brown pasture, not eating, looking gaunt and tired, their udders small and shriveled. No milk again tonight, I thought.

I took a long drink at the pump house, swishing the water around in my mouth till it grew warm, then spitting it out and taking another, this time gulping it down. The metal seat was hard and gritty as I put the tractor in road gear, opened the throttle, and drove fast out of the yard. The dust rose all around me, and I stood up, squinting through the haze.

Where the height of land leveled off, I turned into the hayfield. It lay on the flat top of the height of land, along the eastern edge of our farm.

The wind had almost died. The sun went behind clouds, but there was no relief from the heat. Sweating, I lowered the sickle blade and checked it. The sky took on a yellowish tinge. The earth seemed to hold its breath.

For almost an hour I cut alfalfa. The tractor hummed monotonously, the mower’s sickle blade clacked back and forth, and I went round and round the field, each circle smaller than the last. Suddenly the blade hit something and jammed. I stopped the tractor, backed up a little, then stepped down to clear the bar. I had run into a tuft of dirt jutting up too far for the bar to clear it, and one of the sickle blades was bent, a rivet snapped. I went to the tool box on the drawbar for a hammer and chisel, and I was pounding and swearing quietly, trying to snap the remaining rivet so I could remove the damaged blade and replace it, when I looked up and saw what was coming.

It was a huge black thunderhead, roiling in from the southwest. A wild excitement took hold of me.

That cloud could hold a tornado, I knew, but I laughed and heaved the mower blade into the raised position and secured it. Then I jumped up to the tractor seat and looked back and saw that the church steeple in Martinsville, three miles away, was blotted out. The storm was sweeping toward me, a driving column moving fast. You saw a stand of trees with that dark column approaching from behind, then the trees disappeared and the thing was coming—a wall as high as the sky.

I drove out of the field in road gear, standing to keep from bouncing off the seat. On the road I kept weaving the tractor back and forth, from one shoulder to the other. I yelled and laughed at the same time. There was a delightful thickening in my throat and I could not keep still. I kept looking back at the oncoming darkness, glancing at the road in snatches, watching the column pursue me with a crazy, almost unbearable tightness. It looked as though it would strike before I reached home.

I was turning into the driveway when it hit. There was a rush of cold, damp wind, then sudden, blinding rain. Sudden, blinding, beautiful rain.

I skidded around to the left and burst inside the shed, almost going through the wall and out the other side. I switched the engine off and started for the house, yelling and laughing. When I reached the porch my clothes were heavy and clinging. Still laughing crazily, I pulled off my shoes, then ran back into the rain. The first sudden rush had ceased, and now there remained a steady downpour. I held my face to the sky, feeling the sting and laughing.

Pa drove into the yard, grinning through the side window of the car. He stopped before the house and got out and in a moment was soaked. He came up on the lawn, still grinning. He walked across the lawn, stopping often to gaze out over the fields, keeping that grin on his face. I could hear Ma yelling at us to come in before we caught cold. Then I heard her laugh and she came out and joined us.

We stood there in the rain a long time. It stopped, finally, and everything seemed to come to life. The lawn turned green before our eyes. The sparrows in the trees back of the house were chattering in a shrill volume.

"You can forget about cutting the rest of that hay for a couple days," Pa told me.

"Yuh," I said, smiling. I could not stop smiling.

"We’ll get some hay yet, Missus Miller." He grinned again and gave Ma a pinch.

"Feeling your oats already, huh?" Ma said.

"You bet." Pa laughed and pinched her again. He turned to me.

"C'mon, Carl. Let’s get those chores done early for a change." Then, to Ma again, "We’re going out tonight, Missus Miller."

"Where?"

"I donno. Out to eat, to a show maybe. Just be ready when I come up from the milking." He motioned to me and we started down toward the barn.

That night it rained once more. The folks went out and I stayed home, allowing them, without realizing it then, that time together. I fixed my own supper, then went to bed early and lay awake, the covers pulled up to my chin, listening to the drops of rain hit the roof and roll down the incline to splatter softly on the ground beside the house. I’d forgotten how nice that sounded. I guess it put me to sleep finally.

1955

Aspirations III

2007-07-17T12:51:00.000-07:00

For the record, this is one of my earliest stories, written in my off-duty hours as a 20-year-old U.S. Navy sailor stationed in Hawaii. Specifically, I was a Navy journalist, working in the Public Information Office at the headquarters of ComSubPac (Commander Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet), on the subase in Pearl Harbor, which gave me access to the office at night and on weekends when I wasn't standing watches on the "quarterdeck" of the headquarters building every fourth night (four hours on, eight off, like at sea), which was part of the routine at SubPac. I was on a four-year enlistment in the Navy (four seemed to be the ruling number), and SubPac was my first duty station, where, in my spare time, I was setting out to become another Jack London or Ernest Hemingway. As Hemingway had done, I was starting out by writing as simply and directly as I could -- writing like Hemingway, in short.

Incredibly, this little story was eventually published, in an obscure, extremely "little" magazine called The Archer.

THE NEW GIRL

Gladys was next. She got up in front of the room and we all leaned back expectantly, waiting for the new girl to speak. She was the third person to give their speech, and so far the class had gone well. Miss Anderson was sitting on the edge of her desk, smiling at Gladys. Gladys looked scared.

"Ahhh . . . " Gladys said.

Miss Anderson smiled encouragement. The class waited.

"This is my first speech. I can’t remember anything."

"Did you prepare your speech?" Miss Anderson asked.

"Yes, but—"

"Well, then. Don’t be frightened. Remember to look at your audience and stand still and you’ll do fine."

She looked into our faces, eyes wide and frightened, sweeping the room, staring right at you so you had to turn away.

She was a big-boned girl, with big features. Her nose was large and her chin firm and square, with hair long and straight and clipped in bangs across her forehead. The whole face was coarse, like a man’s. And her body was a man’s body; the muscles stood out from her arms and her legs were thick and stout. "There’s a girl for you, Tommy," Jack had said to me, her first day at school.

"When I was a little girl my mother used to tell me . . . Ahhh . . . She used to say to me . . . Ahhh . . . and my father would always get mad and— "

"Stand still, Gladys," Miss Anderson said.

"Ahhh . . . "

Her face began working. She looked wildly about. She looked over at Miss Anderson and Miss Anderson smiled. She kept looking at us, looking through us, and everyone held their head down and glanced sideways at each other and grinned.

Miss Anderson was frowning now.

Gladys looked ready to cry.

The room was still. No one whispered or laughed, but they kept their heads down and looked sideways at each other and grinned. No one looked at Gladys.

"Ahhh . . . " said Gladys.

The room was heavy. A breeze drifted in through the two open windows in back of the room, smelling of spring and of the outside, lifting a paper from someone’s desk and clapping it down on the floor. Miss Anderson said nothing. The class continued to look down at their desks, but for a long time now there had been no grinning. I found myself reading the names etched in the wood before me: Phil. Jerry. Jo Anne. Cal & Janey. Once or twice I looked up, but then quickly returned to the names on the desk. I kept my head down, knowing the others were doing the same, wanting to look into her face, into the faces of those around me, wanting yet wanting not to, playing with my fingers and waiting. Finally a student dropped his pencil.

"Maybe you’d better sit down, Gladys," Miss Anderson told her.

Suddenly Gladys burst out crying.

"I knew it! I knew it this morning!" she sobbed.

The new girl returned to her seat and laid her head in her arms and continued to sob. Everyone looked at her and then at each other and then at Miss Anderson.

Miss Anderson called somebody else, and the class looked at him hopefully. Presently Gladys stopped crying but remained with her head cradled in her arms. Every little while someone would look over at her, unsmiling, then quickly turn back to the speaker.

The bell rang and we all rose and began filing out of the room. Miss Anderson went over to Gladys and laid her hand on the girl’s shoulder, talking softly.

The hall was airy and full of high school students, rushing past to their lockers. And there was nothing to do but join them.

1955

Aspirations II

2007-07-14T09:21:00.000-07:00

Here's another of my early, unpublished stories. You'll see it owes a huge debt to Ernest Hemingway. In fact, it's my attempt at something like "Hills Like White Elephants," his bitter little story about a couple's estrangement in romantic surroundings. The sensibility in his story is so youthfully romantic, as it is in mine.

TO THE WORLD’S END

The Alcove had always been a good place to meet because it was close to his paper and close to the office of her magazine. It was close to everything they knew between the hours of nine and five, but now it was after six and the last light was lovely against the tall apartment buildings that rose like twin towers of Babel on the river front. She had arrived late, and now she pushed at her hair and stared at passers-by on the sidewalk as she waited for her beer.

She was beautiful, he reminded himself, more beautiful than any of the other young women in this sidewalk bar on this summer evening. Her hair was short and curled prettily into the corners of her eyes. Her skirt too was stylishly short and her legs, in seamless stockings, were extremely fine. The man, who sat with his beer in front of him, was himself as sleek, as sharp-looking as any other man here in his buttoned-down collar, his thin tie, and his tailored suit.

"You know, I’ll kind of miss this place," the girl said. She took a deep breath and folded her hands on the table. "Because, of course, I won’t be coming here after you’re gone."

"Why not?" he wondered.

"Oh, you know. Too many memories."

"Oh."

Her beer arrived. She sipped at it and stared at the twin towers.

"We’ve watched them go up, haven’t we," she said. "A year."

"Yup," he said, "a year. I hated to see them finish."

"Oh, they’re not quite finished," she said.

He caught the waiter’s eye and raised a finger. "Want another?"

"Not yet."

The waiter brought him another beer. He poured some into his glass and drank it off. Then he poured the rest and finished it.

"How many is that, Eddie?"

"Two."

"Liar."

"All right, four. No more."

"You’ve certainly taken to drinking since we met."

"I guess I have."

She picked up her purse and began playing with the leather handle, twisting and pulling at it.

"Your stuff all packed?"

"Yeah. I leave at eight. Have to rise early."

"That’ll kill you." She smiled.

"Naw. I’ll be starting my travels," he told her. "I’ll be excited."

"Where will you go first?"

"London. There’s a place, a pub, somewhere in London that I heard about from somebody. Called The World’s End. I like the sound of that. I’m going to look for it. After that . . ."

"Sounds lonely," she said. "A lonely quest."

"Come with me. It won’t be lonely then."

"You know I can’t."

"I know."

He lifted his eyes to the twin towers and saw the evening light seeming to burn at the tops of them. Once he had been stirred by the sight of the sun against the high buildings of this city, and that first cold beer at the end of the working day, and by this girl, who finally was as exhausting as the rest of his life here. It was all exhausting. Everything was exhausting, but now, after a year and a half of it, he was leaving. He was leaving the whole white-collar, nine-to-five scene, that stultifying, soul-destroying wad of commitment and responsibility you were asked to swallow when you worked as a reporter for "the world’s greatest newspaper" (by its own admission, he and his fellow reporters always added, which always got a laugh), a paper whose chief concern, finally, was not to report the news but to maintain the status quo, to attract advertisers, to make money. He was done with that, done with wearing a buttoned-down collar and knotted tie that was like a noose around his neck. He was finished, too, with that midnight anguish when, after too much drink and empty conversation, in an upsurge of false hope, he’d abruptly, almost frantically, feel the need to make up for lost time, to stop wasting time, to begin again, now, this instant, when really there was nothing to do but stop drinking and take the El home to bed so that you could get up in the morning and go back to work. But he was through with it now. He was through with the white collar. No more white collars, or rather he could wear a white collar now, or a blue collar, or no collar at all, because now he was free.

He raised a finger.

"Don’t have another. Please."

"Yes," he said. "Just one more."

"You’re drinking yourself into a breakdown."

"Precisely. Going all the way. To the world’s end!" he cried and raised his empty glass to the glory of the twin towers.

"I love you," he told her. "I love you, Susan, do you believe that? But I’ve got to leave."

She looked away.

"Come with, why don’t you."

"The only reason you offer that—for the second time, by the way—is that you know, you know, I can’t possibly."

Of course. She had an invalid mother. Wasn’t that convenient? Her mother was a nice-enough old lady, uncomplaining but virtually helpless, and of course demanding in her nice way. Susan had an older married sister and a well-off married brother, but she, the youngest and unmarried, had been delegated, it seemed, to look after their mother. The entrapment of that. That loving, dutiful entrapment. It was Eddie’s warning not to get involved. But then he had.

"You could leave her," he told Susan, after their first time together. It was upstairs in her mother’s house, with her mother asleep (they hoped) downstairs. "Let your busy sister and her asshole husband or your rich brother and his smug wife take over now. "We could go away," he told her.

Now he said again, "You could leave your mother. Let your brother or sister take a turn."

"We’ve been over that,"she said. "And you’re drunk. Our last night together, and you’re drunk."

"I’m sorry, baby, I really am." He really was. "I’m so sorry. But I have to get out of here. I hate this goddamn town."

"You don’t hate it."

"No, that’s the trouble. I really love it. I love you."

He looked fervently at her, to show how much he loved her, and abruptly she leaned toward him across the table, her face intense, her eyes shiny.

"I’ll go then," she said.

"What?"

"I’ll go with you."

"No you won’t."

"I will, I will," she told him.

"What about your mother?"

"I’ll let somebody else take care of her. I want my own life," she said. "I want a life with you."

"You mean it?"

"Yes. Yes," she said.

Her hand was gripping his. He took a swig of his beer. It might have been the beer, it might have been nervous exhaustion, it might have been the light gleaming golden on the twin towers, on those proud, cold, elegant monuments to something or other, but whatever it was, he was crying. Okay, maybe not crying exactly, but there were tears in his eyes, as there were in hers, and he put down his beer and ran his hand up the firm softness of her arm.

"Oh, Susan," he said, "sweet Susan. You can’t, you know you can’t. You leave your mother and you’re selfish goddamn brother and sister will put her in a Home. Won’t they? You can’t leave your mother any more than I could leave mine, if I was in your situation." That was a guess; he wasn’t sure what he’d do in her situation. "She needs you, after all, we both know she needs you," he told her. "You have to stay. And I have to leave, don’t you see?"

"Yeah, I see." She reached over and touched his face.

"Christ," he said. "You’re so beautiful."

"Don’t go," she pleaded. "You can find another job. We’ll get married."

"No," he said. "I don’t want another job, and I don’t want to marry you—not the way things are. I’m not worthy of you," he told her.

"Bullshit."

She dropped her hand. He drained his beer. He was trying to remember something, something he’d read sometime ago. Then it came to him.

"‘A system of restless wandering . . . ‘" he quoted. He stared hard at his empty glass. "'Detachment . . . a means of passing through life without suffering and almost without a single care . . . invulnerable because elusive.’"

"What’s that?" she asked.

"Conrad. Wrote about exile. That’s me, I guess. An exile."

"You filthy romantic," she said. "Would you excuse me a minute? I have to pee."

She rose with her purse in one hand and with the other smoothed the front of her short skirt. Her exciting body, her tough, lovely face: it was all there in front of him and his belly contracted, suddenly, with hunger for her.

"We going to your place later? Please," he said.

We’ll talk about it when I get back."

But fifteen minutes later she was not back, and at length he realized she might never come back. She must be waiting it out in the ladies room, or maybe she’d slipped out when he wasn’t looking.

"Waiter!" he called.

The waiter came over. He was smiling.

"Another round for the gentleman and his lady?"

"No, thanks. The check, please."

The waiter began writing out the check and the man looked over at the door marked Ladies. He felt suddenly fiercely proud of the girl and was sure now that he loved her. He loved her, and yet he was so relieved, so grateful to her for helping him, in this way, to end it.

"Would you tell the lady, if you see her," he said brightly, thinking of her and how much he loved her, "that I couldn’t wait? And tell her it was all my fault."

Then he paid the check and walked away down the sidewalk. At the corner he stopped and turned around. If she comes out now, he thought, if she comes out by the time I count to ten, I’ll go back. If she comes out by the time I count to twenty. He counted to thirty, to forty, but she didn’t come out and he didn’t go back.

Finally, he turned the corner and it was all behind him.

1963

Aspirations I

2007-07-04T12:31:00.000-07:00

This is the first of a series of early stories of mine that never made it into print. So I'm posting them here to get them out, anyway, into cyber space.

CROWS AND INDIANS

The woods were a green wall beyond the farm, the wild edge of Carl's world. It was where the crows lived, where they roosted at night and set out from on their raids of farmers’ fields every morning. Carl knew to stay out of the woods – You'll get lost! – but he was with his father now and Oscar. His father carried his shotgun.

"Corn's comin' along," Oscar said in his lilting, resonant voice that was like the mouth organ he played.

"Yup," Carl's father said; his voice was thinner than Oscar's, quick and excited, "if the crows don't get it." He pointed his gun at the sky. "Think it's high enough yet to cultivate?"

"No-o," Oscar said. "The shovels'd bury it still."

They were crossing a field still soft from spring planting, stepping over the corn rows, the new plants so intensely green they seemed to glow against the black soil. There were tracks in the soil that Oscar pointed out, the toed prints of crows and pheasants, little hand prints of raccoons, and a line of cloven hoof prints, like a heifer’s, Carl thought. "Deer, by golly," Oscar said. "I thought they was all hunted out."

Carl looked back. The farm was a kind of island among the rolling fields. There was the circle of buildings around the yard and the metal windmill poking up, its silvery blades arrested above the shade trees around the house. He saw the cows, strung out from the barnyard, heading for pasture after the milking. It was a calm, early summer evening, still light at eight o’clock.

"Keep up!" Carl's father called. The men had walked on, and Carl ran to catch up with them.

They reached the woods. There was an absolute division here between the thick growth of trees and the open field, as if the field of young corn were a dark, weedy pond and the trees grew heavily down to the water. His father said, "Watch your eyes, Carl," and the men pushed through the curtain of leaves. Carl followed, and found himself in another world.

. It was hushed and contained, secret, like the inside of an empty building, empty and yet alive. The trees stood like columns, not crowded together as they appeared from outside but spaced, with park-like regularity, the big trunks going up and up to the spreading branches and the roof of leaves. There was a concentrated smell of damp earth and moldering vegetation.

"Say, this looks like virgin forest," his father said.

"Ya," Oscar said. " Larue, he left it be. This here was his sugar grove."

"Yeah, a lot of the French around here made maple syrup, I guess. Like back in Quebec."

"Syrup and sugar both," Oscar said. He looked down at Carl. "You ever taste real maple sugar, Carlie? It's the sweetest candy there is."

Carl tried to imagine the kind of candy could come from trees. Oscar said, "Lucien, he still tapped maples, back when I started work for'm. That pasture where the crick runs, below the Martin barn? That was all maple trees once."

"What happened?"

"Well, Lucien, he wanted his first car, you know, that old Dodge sitting out back of his corn crib now. Got the money for it by selling off his maple trees, for lumber."

"He would," his father snorted. "The quick buck!"

Carl realized, uneasily, that they were talking about his grandfather. Grandpa Martin with his cracking, smoker’s laugh and his big nose peppered with blackheads. The merriment in his eyes until Grandma scolded him for sneaking uptown to the tavern.

"Ya, well Lucien was no farmer," Oscar said. "None of the Martin boys was, not like old Charles. He owned an entire section at one time, did you know that? Give his boys each a farm when they got married, but they all pissed what they had away. Lucien, you know, got the home place."

"Yeah, and now that's pissed away," Carl's father said. "Christ. Why couldn’t I have inherited a farm? His father grinned at his hired man. "Whattaya think, Oscar? I make a farmer?"

Oscar looked carefully at Carl’s father. "Ya-a," he said. "You ain't afraida work, I’d say, and you seem to know how to manage."

Carl's father grinned once more and sniffed the air. They were deep in the woods now, walking among the quiet trees. The ground was soft with rotting leaves, crunchy with fallen twigs. Spindly seedlings brushed Carl’s face as he passed, and there were trees and fallen logs with half-circles of cork-like growth on them, like the growths on a horse’s legs – what his mother called "artist’s easel." The deer flies bit savagely at him. He kept snagging his face on invisible spider webs.

"Look here," Oscar told Carl. He showed him the moss on a tree, a smudge of dull green on the trunk. "The moss always grows on the north side," Oscar said. "You know where north is and you can find your way out of the woods."

Carl wondered how that applied – how knowing where north was could tell you which way to go.
"Hey," his father said. "Here's an old fence."

"Ya," Oscar said. "That used to be your line – Larue's old line – till he bought up this next piece to make your eighty."

Then Carl saw the rusted barbed wires draped like vines between the trees, and how they passed right through the trees as if growing from them.

"You see that, Carlie?" Oscar said. "The trees grow over wire like that, like scar tissue."

His father tugged at the wire. "When ya think that fence was put up, Oscar?"

"Oh, maybe thirty years ago," Oscar said.

"Now that was the time to go farming," said Carl's father. "Well no, I suppose the best time was back when the Martins first came here from Canada."

"It was all woods," Oscar told him. "Like this. Or brush or grass prairie that a plow couldn't turn over in those days. Not to mention the sloughs around the lakes that were only good for the wild hay you could get off'm. When my grandfolks first come here from Norway, all they did for a coupla years was clear."

"Yah, but dammit, Oscar. Goddamn it, I'd like to of been here when this country was just opening up."

"Plagues of grasshoppers," Oscar went on. "Grass fires. All kinds of sickness. People went crazy. Then too in those early days there was still the Indians to worry about."

"That's right! You ever hear Lucien's story about how, during the Sioux Uprising, I think it was, the Martins and their neighbors all packed up and made for Fort Snelling and his mother — she was a little girl then — fell out of the wagon and broke her arm? Just think." Carl's father looked happily around him. "These big old trees must've been standing here when all that happened."

"Ya," Oscar said. "A man should keep his eyes peeled. You can still find old arrowheads, things like that."

"Daddy ..."

"Well," his father said, "my granddad was a pioneer. On my mother's side. Homesteaded in Dakota Territory and ran a dray line out of Sisseton. Then he moved up to Saskatchewan, when that country was just opening up. I was born up there. Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. My dad was a CPR engineer! I barely remember him, though. He was killed in a train wreck when I was younger than Carl here."

Carl knew that story. There was an old, gilt-framed photograph of the grandfather he never knew on the wall in his folks' bedroom. His fading likeness grinned from the seat of a wagon on a flat prairie. His long-barrelled "goose gun" lay across his lap, and he held the reins of a team of horses whose heads didn’t show in the picture. He looked vaguely like Carl's father. Will Miller. He was a mighty hunter, Carl's father said, a great wing shot.

"So how'd you wind up down here?" Oscar asked.

"Come down looking for work when I was sixteen. Hell, I rode the rails like you did, Oscar!
Wound up in Minneapolis and took any job I could get. I mowed lawns, I caddied at country clubs. Pumped gas. Then I met Carl's ma and started going out to the Martin farm and I thought, hell, why not try farming? I could see Lucien was letting his place go, and I might have taken it over, but I wanted my own place. I’ll say this for old Lucien, though. He vouched for me at the Martinsville bank so I could get a loan."

"Then I come back from Kansas and now here I am working for you instead of the Martins."
"That's right! You might say I inherited you, Oscar."

"Daddy ..."

"What?"

His father was striding ahead now, jaunty, his shotgun in the crook of his arm. His black hair shone under the trees. Oscar followed, his graying, sandy hair sticking out of his cap, stooped yet still taller than Carl's father.

"Daddy ..."

"What, I said."

"There still ... Indians in here?"

The two men stopped and grinned at each other. Oscar said, "No, Carlie. The Indians're are all gone now."

"Where'd they go?"

Oscar looked at Carl's father. His father said, "They're on what they call reservations now, Carl. Those are places set aside for them where they can hunt and fish all year around, just like they used to."

"Ya, " Oscar added, "and they don't even need a license, like we do."

"How come?"

Oscar looked at Carl's father again, and his father said, "That's a long story, Carl. Maybe you'll learn about it in school."

"But how come Indians don't live here anymore?"

"Because. They had to move. They couldn't live here after people like us came here and settled."
"How come?"

"Because." His father took a breath. "The Indians lived different from us. They didn’t use the land like we do. They mostly just lived off it. Oh, they raised corn, I guess. But they didn’t clear the woods and plow up the soil and make farms and towns, like we did. You might say the Indians lived wild, and we live tame, Carl." He turned to his hired man. "Ain’t that about it, Oscar? Maybe the Indians had the right idea."

Oscar grunted. Carl thought about the Indians living wild in the woods, in these woods, and felt scared and excited.

"Daddy?"

"What."

"But can't I ever see a Indian?"

"Sure. We'll go up to Red Lake sometime, to the reservation."

"You won't have to go that far," Oscar commented. "There's plenty on Washington Avenue."

"Where's Washington Avenue?" Carl asked.

"In Minneapolis," his father said. "We'll go there, too, sometime, though the Indians in Minneapolis ain't like the Indians we're talking about."

"What kind are they?"

"The kind that hunt bottles," Oscar said.

"What?" Carl said.

"That's enough questions," his father said. "And Oscar, we better not go into that." He lowered his voice. "We better be quiet now. The crows'll be coming."

It was getting dark in the woods. Carl knelt between Oscar's knees, in the warm pocket of his smells – manly smells of sweat and tobacco and the barn – while his father crouched beside them with his shotgun. They were all crouched in the hole where a big tree had uprooted. Above, through the break where the tree had stood, was the deepening sky.

Oscar slapped a mosquito. The deer flies circled their heads and they all swatted at them.
"Bugs ain't too bad yet," said Oscar. "Wait'll July."

A bird called, sweetly trilling among the trees. Then a squirrel chattered. Carl saw it, crouched on a branch, its jerking tail, its tensed little body.

His father pushed a shell into his gun. He worked the lever on the chamber, then loaded more of the fat shells into the magazine. Then he aimed at the trees. "C'mon, crows," he said. "I'm waitin'."

"That a Browning?" Oscar asked.

"Damn right. Twelve-gauge Browning automatic. Best shotgun in the world." His father handed the gun to Oscar. "Made in Belgium. I bought that gun when I was nineteen years old. Took all my savings."

Oscar held the gun up and Carl saw its beauty. He saw the scrollwork etched into the blued metal above the trigger guard, and the walnut stock, and the rubber cushion on the butt. The gun's kick, his father said, would knock the snot out of Carl's nose. His father kept his gun in its sheath in the closet of the folks’ bedroom, and Carl was never to touch it. The sheath itself was beautiful, soft buckskin lined with rawhide.

Oscar handed the gun back to Carl's father. "Sittin' in this hole reminds me of the war," he said. The first one."

"Yeah, you were in it, weren't you, Oscar. Think we'll get in this one?"

"Ya-a."

"Well, I just hope I don't get drafted. I shouldn't. I'm thirty now and on a farm and I got a family."

"They might draft me," the hired man said dully.

"Naw. You're way too old, Oscar! How old are you, anyway?"

"I'm fifty."

"You're all right then. Anyway, another war should pull us out of the Depression. The price of milk could go up. We could make some money!"

People talked of the war now. It was like a storm, away off across the ocean somewhere, maybe heading their way.

"Daddy ..."

"Quiet now. I hear'm."

At first Carl heard nothing, just a rush of wind through the treetops and then a squeaking noise, kind of spooky. Oscar whispered, "That's the trees rubbing together, Carlie. Listen."

Carl strained to listen. It was like the creaking in an empty house or a ticking clock surrounded by silence.

"There," Carl's father said. "Hear'm?"

Carl strained to hear. Then he tried to see the crows, as he saw them most evenings from the farm, that black, undulating line of them, flapping toward the woods where Carl was now. But he only saw the sky, and the yellowing clouds, through the break in the trees.

Then: CAW! Sharp and alarmed. Then a rush of calls, CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! and dark shapes above the trees, whistling wingbeats and wheeling flight, and his father raising his gun and BANG, a crow crashed through the leafy branches, then BANG BANG, and BANG, and another and then another crow broke through the leaves overhead and bounced when they hit the ground. His father scrambled out of the hole and aimed up through the trees. BANG, and Carl saw the smoking shell eject from the gun. Then the crows were gone. Carl's ears were ringing. And faintly, like sprinkling rain, the spent shot fell back through the leaves.

His father was jubilant. "Christ. You see me hit those last two, Oscar? It was like shooting geese!"

Carl ran to where a crow had fallen. It lay crumpled among the dead leaves with its head up, following Carl with a furious eye. Its beak was open. It was panting.

"Watch out for the beak!" Carl's father called.

Carl reached down and the crow clamped its beak over one of his fingers. "Ouch!" he said, more startled than hurt. But when he jerked his hand away, the crow hung on so that Carl lifted it from the ground. "Ouuuu!" he cried, the crow hanging from his finger. Ouuuuuuu!"

Carl's father strode up. He squeezed the crow's neck and its beak opened. Carl pulled his finger away. Then his father grasped the crow’s head, twirled its body, and the body dropped to the ground. There it jumped and flapped just like a headless chicken.

"Stop crying," his father said now. Then, softer, "Let's see your finger."

It was pinched and sore, but the skin wasn't broken. It was okay.

"That poor crow was just defending itself, Carl," his father told him. "It was being brave."

Oscar came over, swinging a crow by its legs. "Here, feel this one, Carlie. It's dead for sure."

The dead crow was floppy, still warm, in Carl's hands. All its strangeness, the black sheen of its feathers, its wicked beak, its closed, tiny eyelids – he held the wild, lifeless, now harmless thing in his hands and tried to fathom its strangeness, its mystery. Blood dripped from its open beak. You could see its pointed little tongue.

"Crows're smart, you know," Oscar said. "You catch a young one and slit its tongue, it'll learn to talk." He took the crow from Carl. "Ed, you wanna show this one to your missus?"

"Naw," Carl's father said. "Helen wouldn't appreciate it."

Then Oscar pulled a wing feather out and stuck it in Carl's hair. "Now you're like an Indian, Carlie."

But Carl's hair wasn’t long enough. The feather fell out and he picked it up. He put it in his shirt pocket.

Walking back through the dusky woods, they nearly collided with the old fence. "Watch out!" his father said. He handed his gun to Oscar. Then he lifted Carl over the fence. Finally they pushed out of the woods into the open field.

It was a relief stepping out into the open. The circle of farm buildings was like a fort across the corn field. The barn and the sheds were dark, but there were lights showing warmly in the house. That’s where Carl's mother was, and his little sisters. He’d been far, far away, it seemed, and gone a long, long time.

His father stopped and looked back at the wall of trees. "The land's fairly level in those woods," he said. We could maybe clear to Larue's old line and extend this field."

"That'd give you another eight, ten acres," Oscar said. He smiled down at Carl. "You wanna ride on my shoulders, Carlie?"

Carl looked up at Oscar, then over at his father. "No thanks," he said.

The dark woods stood behind them now. Carl thought, When we’re back at the farm they’ll still be out here. He wondered where the crows had gone. Would they ever come back?

He wished there were still Indians in the woods. He would see some, though, in Minneapolis or up at Red Lake.

He felt for the feather in his pocket. It was still there.

1983-2001

That Winter in London

2007-07-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

In the gray November of 1963, I crossed the North Atlantic to England on a British freighter, the S.S. Bristol City, one of only five passengers on the ship. I'd boarded the ship in New York after a brief correspondence with the Bristol City Line and payment of the $154 one-way fare, and after quitting my job as feature editor of the National Bowlers Journal, in Chicago.

I'd discovered this adventurous way of escape, the winter before, while covering the annual American Bowling Congress tournament -- "72 pin-clashing days," held that year in snowy Buffalo, N.Y. -- for AP, UPI, and the 60 regional newspapers that subscribed to the magazine’s press service. The press room’s Western Union operator, a sweet, middle-aged spinster who regularly took trips on freighters, lent me her copy of Freighter Travel, an exciting little paperback that soon had me writing off to various shipping companies.

I was setting off now, with $1200 in savings, on something like Henry James's passionate, or D.H. Lawrence's savage, pilgrimage. James and Lawrence were my literary heroes then; their disparate lives, more than their disparate writings, alternately inspired me – though truth to tell my preferred model was Lawrence, whose sojourns in exotic places like Italy and Mexico, whose turbulent life with the lusty Frieda (never mind his lifelong struggle with ill health, the tuberculosis that killed him at age 44), was the stuff of dreams for the lonesome, horny young man I was then. Still, what I might have to settle for, I feared, was a latter-day version of James's sort of literary bachelorhood. That would be all right, I thought, so long as I achieved something of his success.

Of my fellow passengers on the Bristol City, three were composed of a plump, thirtyish, smart and very funny Marxist history professor, lately of Monteith College in Detroit, then an experimental branch of Wayne State University, currently unemployed; his attractive young wife, formerly his student; and his wife's younger still, equally attractive sister. The fourth was a chipper little Englishman from Crewe, returning home after the breakup of his marriage in the States. The Englishman and I shared a cabin. He was British working class, like Lawrence, I noted, while the ship's officers, with whom we shared meals at the captain's table, were definitely upper class, like the Anglicized Henry James. Their dry, merciless teasing of their fellow countryman was my introduction to the British class system. The poor chap's American car, for instance, part of our cargo, was a constant worry to him, and he was made to dash from the table one stormy evening when the officers impishly hinted it had broken loose in the hold.

We were at sea for ten days, wallowing through gale-driven waves all the way across to the Old World. Though an ex-Navy sailor, I got seasick. So did the other passengers, except for the younger sister, who never missed a meal. Presently we all had our sea legs and spent the remainder of the voyage quite pleasantly in the ship's lounge, reading, playing cards, talking about our lives. By the end of the voyage, we (that is, we fellow Americans) were intimate friends. Moreover, I was in love with the younger sister.

I was in love with her voice, its sweet alto. I was in love with her English-looking beauty, like the young Virginia Woolf’s; her shyness that was like my own, I thought. She was quietly intelligent, vaguely mysterious – there were depths in her I wanted to know. Still, she was far too young for me, not yet eighteen, while I was soon to turn twenty-nine. Besides, she was an inch or so taller than I was.

The evening before we disembarked, November 22, while steaming up the Bristol Channel, the awful news reached us over the ship's radio: President Kennedy has been shot. Then: The President is dead. The professor's reaction struck me as callous, almost gleeful: "This could mean revolution!" My own uncertain feelings were those of a bookish, apolitical, but essentially patriotic American. I was shocked by the fact that a man as important as the president of the United States had been murdered. Having absorbed a little of the professor's radical view of history, however, I imagined myself an exile now, one who, after leaving his flawed native land, looks back to see it in flames. With something like pleasant melancholy, I brooded on whether I would ever return.

The next morning, having docked at midnight in Avonmouth, the port for Bristol, we passengers were visited on the ship by Customs and Immigration officers, who inspected our luggage and interviewed us in the lounge. They were severe, it seemed to me, with the little Englishman, as if his expatriate years in the United States had been somehow a disloyalty to the Queen.

Questioning us Yanks, however, they were merely stiff and officious. After a few grave inquiries as to why we'd come to the United Kingdom and how long we intended to stay, they stamped our passports with three-month, renewable visas and allowed us to step ashore.

The Englishman said goodbye to us and headed north to Crewe. But we four, reluctant to separate just yet, explored Bristol together and then took a bus tour of Somerset, visiting Wells and Cheddar, among other places. We rode on top a double-decker through England's West Country with its rocky outcrops and enclosed little fields, its close little towns (at times the bus came near to scraping the eaves of medieval houses as it negotiated the narrow, crooked streets), and found it all wonderfully quaint to our American eyes. Everything we saw, the landscape, the buildings, seemed on a miniature scale compared to America. The phrase "tight little isle" came to me. This tightness included the masses of people that crowded all the towns and cities, and the droves of vehicles, odd-looking little cars, motorcycles, scooters, mopeds, which created incessant traffic jams and sent clouds of petrol fumes into the cold, drenched air.

After three days and back in Bristol, we boarded a train for London and there, outside Paddington Station, after three weeks of camaraderie and shared travel, I said goodbye to the professor and his wife and his wife's sweet younger sister. We promised to keep in touch, of course, to contact each other once we were settled, but I expected we'd all lose ourselves in the vastness of the great city and never see one another again. All at once I was alone, and already lonely, as I began my London winter.

I looked through newspaper classifieds and visited various parts of the city for their postings on neighborhood kiosks of places to rent. Most seemed too expensive, and those I viewed were extremely dismal; one especially, deep in the bowels of a sub-basement, invited suicide.

Within a couple of days, however, I found a tiny but adequate – and affordable – "flatlet" in South Kensington, an area within equal walking distance, I discovered, of richly hip Chelsea and somewhat grungy hip Earl's Court. Down the Old Brompton Road was an Underground station, where I could take "the tube" to Piccadilly Circus or, with transfers, to anywhere else in the city. I rented a typewriter, supplied myself with paper and envelopes, and settled in to write each morning and to explore the city each afternoon. I had James’s example, his first lonely days in London a century earlier, to inspire and sustain me.

As dark and wet November passed into even darker and wetter December, I played at being the expatriate writer in London. "The great grey Babylon," James had called it, and in my daily forays by tube or on foot – mostly on foot, armed with a map, and clad in a trench coat against London's penetrating damp – I searched out the places where James had lived in the city. His earliest abode, in Bolton Street near Piccadilly, no longer existed – indeed, the street itself seemed to have disappeared – but I found the location of his flat, identified by a plaque in front of a block of flats, at 34 De Vere Gardens, where James lived, obliquely across the street from Robert Browning, in the 1880s. It was said they occasionally waved to each other from their windows. Knowing such anecdotes, being on the scene, was intensely satisfying to me. It helped me to feel part of what they represented. It eased my loneliness.

And I was writing – at least in those first days, spurred on by my loneliness and James's productive example. I revised a couple of old stories and submitted them, unsuccessfully, to Stateside little magazines. I wrote a couple of new stories, immediate reactions to my new surroundings, and sent them to British publications, hoping by some miracle to crack that market. (I didn't, not then or ever.) I also, somewhat dutifully, forwarded the letters of introduction I had from my old boss in Chicago to managers of Brunswick Ltd. and AMF Ltd., affiliates of the American bowling firms, with requests for interviews as a journalist. I got my interviews, received tours of two or three of the new bowling centers in and outside London and, again somewhat dutifully, wrote a series of articles for my old magazine on "Bowling in Britain." The modest payments I received from the Bowlers Journal – plus a short stint writing publicity for AMF and being paid under the table – eased my anxiety about my thinning book of traveler's checks.

Freelance journalism, though, took time away from my serious writing; but then hadn't James himself boiled the pot with travel pieces, literary essays, book reviews? And wasn't I indeed (despite pub crawls in Soho and Earls Court, hanging out at my "local" or various coffee bars, in the vain hope of connecting with one of London’s "birds" in their short skirts and Avenger boots) becoming a literary bachelor like James, probably doomed, unlike Lawrence, to celibacy? James, therefore, must be my master; while Lawrence was a writer whose sensual experience would be forever, it seemed, beyond my yearning grasp.

Then, one particularly lonely evening in my boxlike room (I'd written a letter home, cheerfully disguising my homesickness, and was now disclosing my true feelings in my journal), the phone rang in the hall outside my door. It was the professor, inviting me to dinner. They'd found a place in Camberwell, across the Thames from me in southeast London, and would I come?

That was the first of many such invitations. I became a regular guest and then a hanger-on of the professor and the two sisters (the professor called me, an ex-Minnesota farm boy, "Huck Finn in the city," a label I very much liked the sound of) during the remaining months of that drafty, educational, completely memorable winter in London, until – after traveling with them through England's "Black Country" and across Scotland on a speaking tour of the professor's; being put up by "the comrades" and talking socialism in the pubs; accompanying them that spring on a month-long tour of continental Europe; finally joining with them the circle around C.L.R. James, the late West Indian writer and Marxist intellectual, and taking part, as a Red "fellow traveler" (I had strayed that far from the writer whose mind was too fine, T. S. Eliot said of Henry James, to contain an idea), in the writing of a socialist pamphlet called Negro Americans Take the Lead (Facing Reality Publications, Detroit, 1964) – I was deemed "family," and the younger sister and I were considered a couple. We were a couple, but only in the Jamesian platonic sense, though the worldly comrades assumed otherwise.

In May 1964, after six months in Europe and everybody broke by then (besides, I, anyhow, was suffering twinges of patriotism from an overexposure to the comrades’ blanket anti-Americanism: I could no more totally reject my native country than I could totally accept the Gospel according to Marx), the four of us, via economy class Icelandic Airlines, flew home to an America turned restless after the Kennedy assassination. We landed at the former Idlewild Airport, now Kennedy International Airport, and began to learn of the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, the rising of a counterculture, psychedelic drugs, and the government's escalating involvement in Vietnam.

We lingered in New York, the professor's hometown, where he and the two sisters lodged with his mother, in Brooklyn. I stayed, as I had before boarding the Bristol City, in Brooklyn Heights with my old friend from our days together in journalism school at the University of Minnesota; took in the World's Fair with the younger sister; toured Central Park and Coney Island and various museums and other New York City landmarks with the professor and both sisters.

I followed them to Detroit, where I met the professor's circle of colleagues and former students and the sisters’ parents. The professor found me a billet near the university campus in a student communal house, where I watched a boy take peyote (my introduction to the Sixties drug scene) and promptly throw up. Before that I'd spent my first night in town in the basement of the sisters’ parents' house in east Detroit, from which I heard the younger sister being grilled about me upstairs by her mother. Her mother was a brisk former Girl Scout leader, her father a stern Ford Company foreman. Both regarded me with beady eyes.

Finally, after a week or so of mooning about, I took a bus to Chicago and then a bus to Minneapolis, where my mother met me at the station. I was given a room in my parents’ house outside Minneapolis and worked that summer on the golf course my father had built on what remained of our old farm. (On a wall in the house, beside iconic pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, my devout Catholic mother had hung a photograph of the martyred John F. Kennedy; later, after JFK’s rampant sex life had been revealed, the picture disappeared.) The younger sister and I corresponded.

That fall, ostensibly on my way to Mexico (I had Mexico in reserve), I swung by Detroit and found myself, after a couple of cautious, reacquainting days, agreeing to stay. For in a swoon like Gabriel's at the end of Joyce's great story "The Dead" (my imagination persisted in being literary), I had happily yielded my Jamesian celibacy for Lawrencian carnal knowledge, and my platonic affair with the younger sister was platonic no longer.

The following spring, we were married. And so we've remained.

Return of the Native

2007-06-15T12:44:00.000-07:00

I guess you could say my recent trip back to my native Minnesota, to promote my book about growing up on a Minnesota dairy farm, was a success. I had three readings in the area where I grew up, along with an appearance at the tiny, former Hamel, Minnesota, branch of the Hennepin County Library, now a heritage building in the village named after my maternal great-grandfather, that I used to ride my bike to from our farm, three miles away, to check out as many books as I was allowed.

I started my Minnesota "tour" with eighty copies of my book, bought at the publisher’s forty percent discount, and sold them at the price on the jacket cover—sold all of them except the four I gave away—one to the little Hamel library to add to its local history collection, three to possible reviewers—and thereby made just enough money to pay for the trip. The cost of the trip included the books I bought and had sent by University of Toronto Press, my publisher’s distributor, to where I stayed in Minnesota, my airfare, and the two-week rental of a car.

I stayed with my sister and brother-in-law in Mound, on Lake Minnetonka, the town west of Minneapolis where I attended my first two years of high school. Took them out to dinner one evening by way of thanks for their hospitality, as well as for all the work they’d done in preparation for my visit: the venues they’d lined up, all their phone calls to folks who might be interested in seeing me and hearing me read. Most of the faces I looked out upon during my readings—at the Hamel Community Center, the Plymouth Creek Community Center, the Bookcase in Wayzata—I recognized, though I failed to remember a lot of their names until I was reminded with forgiving smiles. I saw surviving aunts and uncles, old and young cousins, old friends, old schoolmates, old neighbors. All I could do was accept their warm appreciation, smile back at them, sign the books they bought with this or that personal note, enjoy the fifteen minutes (all right, the hour or so per "event") of the fame they gave me.

By now I’ve lived more years in Canada than I did in the country where I was born. I joined the Navy and left home, the farm I write about in my memoir, at twenty, and apart from the two and a half years I lived in Minneapolis while attending the University of Minnesota on the GI Bill, after my release from the Navy, the two years I lived and worked in Chicago, the three years I lived and worked in Detroit, and finally the two years my wife and I spent in Minnesota before emigrating to Canada, I’ve been away from the place that made me except for yearly visits between 1987, when my father died, and 2004, when my mother died. So this trip back to where I came from to promote my book about the place was indeed some kind of triumphal return of the native. Oh yes, I basked in it. At the same time, knowing how much better my book might have been, I was humbled by its, and my, reception among people I grew up with, and quite a few with whom I didn’t—strangers, people of younger generations. Little did they know . . . One was touched by their enthusiastic, uncritical response.

Apart from the above, I was touched, as always, by the country, that south-central Minnesota landscape that nurtured me and that, as you drive west out of Minneapolis, out into what is no longer farmland but a region of mansion-like houses, partially or completely hidden in leafy woods, outside of which, in what once were cultivated fields, you see pastures in which the owners’ riding horses are grazing—that country is still beautiful.

It’s still the country of my heart. And yet, standing in it not long ago, I couldn’t remember the last time I heard the tinkling call of the western meadowlark. It was the sound of summer mornings on our old farm some fifty years ago, and now it’s gone, like the farm itself and those of our neighbors.

Not that I miss the farm, really, which I left, after all. What I miss are all the birds that once surrounded us, that were part of our world, that gave us the idea we were sharing theirs.

Back to Where I Came From

2007-05-13T13:01:00.000-07:00

I’m going back soon to Minnesota, specifically to the formerly rural, now suburban, area just west of Minneapolis, to promote the book I’ve written about growing up there on my family’s dairy farm. It’s going to be a profound experience for me, I think, as, sitting here at my computer in the funky little house my wife and I built in the 1970s as "back-to-the-landers" on our 9.7 acres of mountainside in British Columbia -- some fifty years and 1500 miles removed from that time and place -- I contemplate my trip back to where I came from.

It’ll be sad in a way, as well as profound, sad because the place and most of the people I’ve written about (my folks and grandfolks, my aunts and uncles and my sister Joyce, and not least the little sister we all lost on the farm) are gone.

So from my point of view the "triumphal" return of this native will be a little like going back for a funeral. And reading from my book there will be a kind of eulogy.

My Book Launch

2007-04-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

"If I’d known fifty years ago, when I started writing, that it would take fifty years to reach this point . . . I might have stayed on the farm."

Those were my rehearsed opening words from the podium at the launch last week in Nelson, B.C., of my memoir, Leaving the Farm, after being enthusiastically introduced by my friend, the artist and writer Judy Wapp, and as I looked into the crowd of attentive faces before me, waiting to hear me read from my book. Over the sixteen years it took to complete the book (after fourteen drafts!) and see it published, I’d read many times before in public—most often from the work in hand when it was a work in progress—and had grown used to it, had graduated from abject, bowel-disturbing fear at the prospect of standing figuratively naked in front of an audience to a rather pleasant nervous excitement, but this time was very different. I was reading not from a manuscript that was far from finished, whose eventual publication seemed remote, if not impossible, but from a printed book, my book. Success! Recognition!

The experience was a little dissociating, to say the least. In other words, I had the odd feeling, like one gets when "watching" oneself about to have an accident, that I was somehow removed from the proceedings. Someone else stood in front of this audience, reading from someone else’s work. I was a bystander, or rather a spirit, floating above and a little behind the person at the podium.

At the same time, I was also astounded, flattered, humbled by all those good folks, friends and relatives, acquaintances and strangers, who’d turned out to hear me read and, in gratifying numbers, to buy my book. Nelson is certainly one of the best small communities for a writer, or any other kind of artist, to live and work in. You’re not alone here. You’re supported. You feel yourself (and especially now that you’ve finally produced a book) a member of what Margaret Laurence called "the tribe"— and of what I like to think, in my more grandiose moments, as that august company composed of all the writers who have ever lived and left written evidence of their having been here.

Of course most of what gets written, and published, disappears—winds up on remainder tables or gathers dust on somebody’s or some institution’s bookshelf or lies begging on a giveaway table at a garage sale. But what the hell. Don’t most of us strive for expression in one form or another in the face of eventual dissolution?

Sure we do, and forgive that last sentence. Reminds me of the Saturday Night Live comedian who used to do hilarious skits called "Deep Thoughts."

Back in B.C.

2007-04-10T13:30:00.000-07:00

We’re back in temperate Canada, back in our little house on Laird Creek above the West Arm of Kootenay Lake in southeastern British Columbia, and tropical Mexico, the village of Yelapa just south of Puerto Vallarta on the west coast of Mexico, is now just a pleasant dream we had for three months this past winter.

We came home last week to find bright, early, chilly spring weather here (chilly to us; not so for folks on the streets of Nelson, many going about without jackets). Though the weather continued warm (it’s since turned cold again), it took a couple of days before we ventured out in our spring, rather than our winter, jackets. Yesterday (or was it the day before?), April put on shorts and lay comfortably in the hammock on our front deck as if she were still in Mexico. I sat in the sun nearby, and read, as if I too were still in Mexico.

My book is out. My free copies, and additional copies I’ve ordered at the publisher’s forty percent discount, are on their way to me. My book launch, in Nelson, is April 20. In May, unless something intervenes, I’m off to my native Minnesota to flog my book there, where the boyhood I describe in my book, Leaving the Farm: Memories of Another Life, happened. It’ll be strange reading it to people there – in many instances, I’m sure, to people I grew up with, all of whom doubtless have their own memories of that time and place of more than fifty years ago.

I have few illusions about the reception of my book. Its readers will be limited, I’m sure, on both sides of the border, and the best I can hope for are a few positive reviews and enough sales to justify its publication. It’ll make a small splash, I suppose, locally if not elsewhere, then sink, like most books do, quietly, even quickly, out of sight. Still, I’ll have the book to keep; I’ll be able to hold it in my hand. I may even reread it from time to time, and no doubt cringe at parts of it, marvel that it was ever published. My relatives will read it. Some folks back in Minnesota who knew my parents and remember our farm and maybe me as a boy will read it and get a laugh or two out of it. That’ll be enough. I wrote the book, finally, and finally it was published, and now I can look to other things – try to write, among other things, another book.

Mornings in Yelapa 8

2007-03-17T11:20:00.000-07:00

These few precious days . . . We have just over a week left in Yelapa; fly home on the 29th. These three months here themselves have flown.

We`ve learned more, I think, about the community this third winter here, met some new people, renewed friendships or acquaintanceships with others. Gained a little more understanding of the Mexicans here. Learned that the integration of Mexican and gringo in Yelapa is, to a large extent, superficial or nonexistent. I`m not speaking of expatriates who have "married in" here; they enjoy a special relationship, it seems, are accepted as "converts" to the culture. I`m talking about gringos like us who only spend their winters here -- November to April, generally -- then go home to California, New Mexico, Alaska, Canada (Canadian snowbirds are a numerous migratory species in Yelapa), thus avoiding Yelapa`s tropical, hot and humid rainy season.

We, that is we seasonal residents, are more tolerated, it seems, than accepted. We`re tolerated, let´s face it, because we bring money into the community, money the native residents have come to rely on after more than thirty years of invasion by us gringos. This is in line with what I`ve said earlier about there being something like parallel universes here, two cultures, living side by side under friendly circumstances.

Anyway, this may be my last posting from this Mexican paradise. I`ll no doubt add to some or all of them after our return to Canada, including uploading some pictures we`ve taken with our digital camera. Until then, adios.

Mornings in Yelapa 7

2007-03-04T08:57:00.000-08:00

Here we are in Puerto Vallarta after spending the night following the grand opening of the Vallarta Bontanical Gardens, outside the city. April and I took out memberships in the Gardens last January after our first visit there -- for an affordable $20 apiece -- and so we were able to walk into last night`s proceedings and enjoy the drinks, food, and entertainment essentially for free. Entertainment included the Vallarta Chamber Orchestra playing several classical pieces, a women`s choir from Santa Barbara, California, and dancing afterwards to swing era recorded music. Bus service back to Vallarta was also free, and we left rather early. We`d booked a room in our favorite budget hotel in old town, the Hotel Villa del Mar, where I left April last night to see a strange movie, Perfume, at the nearby theater. Got out of it at 12:30 p.m., and walked through the fairly quiet streets at that time of night to the hotel.

Today April is attending a ^breathing^ workshop in Vallarta while I`m sitting here at my favorite Internet place. We`re to meet in mid-afternoon at the John Huston statue on the Isla Quale (a quiet and pleasant refuge in the midst of the city), where I`ll read (currently I`m into Nabokov`s Lolita for the first time, if you can believe that) until she arrives. Then we`ll catch the bus to Boca, and then a boat back to Yelapa.

With any luck, we won`t have to come into Vallarta again till the end of this month -- and the end, alas, of our stay this year in Mexico.

Mornings in Yelapa 6

2007-02-21T12:05:00.000-08:00

The longer April and I stay here, the more we realize that the two cultures in Yelapa exist like parallel universes. The oldest gringo residences here know quite a bit of what`s going on in the native community while having to shrug their shoulders at some aspects of it. Even those who have married into the culture, I suspect, don't know all its ins and outs. It's kind of like the mysteries one experiences of the opposite sex -- compounded by the various degrees of culture clash. Then there are gringos like yours truly, whose command of the language is virtually nil. My wife knows quite a bit of Spanish, though it's probably only enough to communicate in what must sound to a Mexican like babytalk. Me, I speak in one-word or single phrase "sentences."

One material aspect of Yelapa's gringo-Mexican clash has to do with the handling, or mishandling, of garbage. There's been some attempt in Yelapa, led by gringos and some enlightened natives, to compost and/or recycle waste. But the burning of waste goes on, including the burning of plastic (plastic has long since replaced the native shopping baskets women once carried to market as containers) with its noxious, carcinogenic fumes. Respiratory ailments are common, particularly among the children. Attempts are ongoing to outlaw the practice. Yet, as in the United States and Canada, convenience often rules. There's the inconvenience of having to haul one's garbage to the pier or to the beach for pickup by the boats that will haul it to Boca de Tomatlan for compacting; besides, there's a charge for the service. Why spend money when you can simply burn your waste, including your plastic, in your back yard?

There may be a partial solution to this problem after the February 25 benefit to raise money to create a job for someone in the native community to collect garbage for periodic disposal. Tickets for the benefit, which reportedly will include a delicious meal, have been selling for two hundred pesos. That cost, of course, will insure that few natives will attend. Nevertheless, the word is definitely out about the importance of garbage disposal (has been, in fact, for years, but awareness had lapsed) and the health hazards of burning plastic. Funny thing is that Mexicans tend to be very clean personally, keep their houses neat and clean, wash the cobbles or wet down the dust in front of their houses, etc., daily, and yet, throughout Mexico, there`s this indifference, this acceptance of litter outside one`s domicile.

You may wonder why I`ve posted no pictures from Yelapa. Believe me, I`ve tried. But the dial-up connections are simply too slow to upload pictures, so unless I haul my laptop into Vallarta, where there`s fast Internet, I`ll have to wait until I`m back in Canada, sitting at my desktop computer, to add pictures to these foreign postings.

Not that I`m looking foward to the end our Mexican sojourn. That`ll come soon enough, and I can wait.

P.S. Since writing the above, I've returned to Canada and my desktop computer and have added some pictures to these postings.

Mornings in Yelapa 5

2007-02-15T13:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the annual Valentine Day's celebration in Yelapa, including the windup, I think, of the croquet tournament at Jerrod's place, Los Naranjos, and the costume ball last night at -- this year -- the Oasis upriver (traditionally it's been held at the Hotel Lagunita on the beach). The ball is a ball. Virtually everyone in the gringo colony participates (we've obstained so far), coming out in really crazy, inspired costumes. There's a contest, in which contestants prance before the judges to hoots and hollers from the onlookers, and prizes of up to 25,000 pesos (US$250) are awarded to the winners. Top win last night went to a group of gay, nearly naked young men, dressed spectacularly in masked helmets, feathers and boas (they looked like tropical birds) and calling themselves ^Fag Team Wrestlers,^who engaged in a mock wrestling match as the delighted crowd nearly raised the palapa roof off with their cheers.

There was disco dancing afterwards that had April and me on the floor for a wild number or two; then we pulled out our flashlights and headed back through the darkened village to our apartment up in the jungle. Got home about 11 p.m. The party went on, I think, until after midnight.

The night before we'd attended the birthday party of one of the old hands down here that, for crazy dancing, rivaled the Valentine's Day shindig and Wednesday and Saturday night disco at the Yacht Club. Truly wild, man. These Yelapinos indeed know how to party -- most of whom are aging Baby Boomers, some ex-flower children, all still capable of wiggling their asses.

So the good life continues here. This morning was, oh God, the start of another beautiful day in paradise.

Mornings in Yelapa 4

2007-02-07T10:59:00.000-08:00

We´re in Vallarta today, mainly for me to see a doctor about my infected hand. Get a cut or abrasion here in the tropics and, unless you treat it as already infected, almost certainly it´s going to get infected within a day or so. I had the misfortune to fall while climbing down a steep jungle path in Yelapa a week ago -- a week ago! So the doctor I saw this morning took one look at my hand and told me it was "very infected" and prescribed penicillin twice a day for five days by injection. Then I went to a farmacia and filled the prescription at a cost of some $35 US. The visit to the doctor cost about the same. Mexican health care, by the way, is reportedly one of the best in the world.

Our weather has wonderfully improved. Yesterday there wasn´t a cloud in the sky, it was gloriously hot and sunny, and we went to the beach. But because of my injured hand, I couldn´t go swimming. Ah well. Just basking in all that heat and light after a month of mostly cloudy weather was enough: what we came here for.

Little by little, through talking to Yelapa residents, we´re getting a feel for the community -- its pros and cons, family squabbles, environmental concerns -- what lies beneath the surface, in short, in what appears to the day-trip tourist as a paradise without serpents. Paradisal Yelapa has its serpents, all right, but it remains a paradise to us gringos.

Mornings in Yelapa 3

2007-02-04T11:41:00.000-08:00

We've been in Yelapa a month already; two more to go. I've wanted to post regularly in my blog, but the Internet connections here are primitive, to say the least. Painfully slow and infinitely frustrating when they're working, and often they don't work at all. Periodically we go into Puerto Vallarta, where you can find fast Internet connections on almost every block, and where you often find a fellow Yelapino sitting at the machine next to you, enjoying the splendid service as much as you.

January's cool, cloudy weather seems to have left us, finally, and we can perhaps look forward to normal, dry season weather now -- that is to say, beautiful weather, what we came here for. Keeping my fingers crossed. However, there's no doubt (just talk to the old expats, the natives, down here) that so-called climate change is a reality. The fishing has noticeably deteriorated in the three years we've been coming down here.

Anyway, my wife and I are keeping busy. I write on my novel every morning, and April practices Qgong. She's starting a class in it this Thursday morning, and I'm reading Thursday afternoon from my about-to-be-published memoir (the opening chapter, all I have with me in hard copy), thanks to my wife's proud promotion of her husband. We'll both use restaurants as our venues, April at the Pollo Bollo on a day it'll be closed, me at the Vortex after its 4 p.m. closing for the day. We'll put up posters around time later today.

So it goes here. We gringo residents offer our services and/or talents to one another when and how we can, often for a modest fee (April will ask for donations to teach Qigong; I, however, must read for gratis. What the hell).

So long for now from paradise.

Mornings in Yelapa 2

2007-01-20T13:41:00.001-08:00

The days slide by here. They´ve been taken up, so far, with showing visitors around. First our daughter Alicia, whose two weeks with us have passed; we put her on a plane back to Spokane, and thence to home in Nelson, on Thursday. During her time with us we also had my brother Mike and his Mexican wife, who´ve since gone back to their home in Cabo. Now we have his twin brother Mark and his Columbian wife, staying in Vallarta this month but out here in Yelapa with us for the weekend. All of this has prevented me from writing much, but starting Monday I should be on track.

Last night April and I, with my brother and his wife, were at the Oasis, enjoying the music in that outside restaurant, when the power went off (a frequent occurence in Yelapa), and we had the adventure of making our way across the darkened pueblo with flashlights (everyone carries a flashlight here when going out at night) to our casa. Climbing the stony path our casa, it began to sprinkle, then, just as we made it under our roof, it began to rain in earnest, really pour, though this is supposed to be the dry season. Must have rained for a couple of hours as my brother and I sat on our back balcony and talked until midnight. This morning we woke to a cool freshness after the rain and a greener jungle, washed clean of its dust. The day has remained cool and cloudy, though, and we look forward to the sun´s return tomorrow.

Yesterday, before the rain, the mouth of the Tuito, the river that empties into Yelapa´s bay, was closed -- by the sand washed up by the breakers -- and the lagoon, consequently, was flooded. Then last night, on account of the rain, I guess, the river broke through again, making a wide, deep channel into the sea and emptying the lagoon. So it goes. The sea will again dam up the river mouth, and again the river will break through. When the river is flowing into the bay, you have to wade across it to reach the beach, the playa. Just another adventurous aspect of living here.

Adios for now.

Mornings in Yelapa

2007-01-10T13:13:00.000-08:00

Finally getting to my blog since arriving in Yelapa, Jalisco, Mexico, last Saturday. We're well settled in by now, comfortably set up in the Casa Emilio where we have the same little apartment above our landlady's house in the jungle above the village that we rented last year. It feels like home; that we never left it.

Our 20-year-old daughter Alicia is with us for two weeks (one week almost gone already), and she sorely misses her boyfriend Adam, whom she left back in Nelson, B.C. Spends a good deal of her time on the Net, emailing him, and in addition spends her money on phone cards so they can hear each other's voices.

Almost from the moment we stepped onto the pier in the central village we began to meet old friends and acquantances, gringo and native alike. Everybody friendly, everybody welcoming. This is our third year here, and we're beginning to feel like, and be accepted as, Yelapanos.

The weather's fine, warmer than last year at this time. As the season progresses, of course, it'll get warmer, until by the end of March, when we're ready to leave, it'll be good and hot.

But I've titled this Mornings in Yelapa, and they are lovely. At the inkling of first light, the roosters start up all around us. We try for more sleep until about eight, when it's completely light and the sun is peeping over the mountains. Then we throw open the doors to the front and back balconies and prepare and eat our breakfast on the back balcony, where we have a little kitchen, including a new four-burner gas stove this year (replacing the two-burner electric hotplate we had last year). Then we pull open the trap door that shuts us in at night, so that my wife and daughter can climb down the ladder to the ground and sally forth to what and wherever while I stay home and write until lunchtime.

We eat our first two meals "in," then the evening meal, usually, "out" -- that is, in one of Yelapa's several restaurants, where often there's music provided by the several musicians in town.

Back at our casita, all three of us write up our journals, then read for a time before turning in to the sound of insects in the jungle, barking dogs and yowling cats periodically, and sometimes very loud Mexican music.

The above picture is of part of the central village as seen from the pier.

My Father Behind Me

2006-12-30T14:14:00.000-08:00

I turned 72 yesterday, and today I've been thinking of my father, who died, at 76, in 1987. As the saying goes, I hardly knew him, though we worked on our farm together, in the barn or in the fields, nearly every day when I was growing up.

Almost the last time I spoke with my father, by phone, from our respective homes in British Columbia and Minnesota, he expressed disgruntlement at not being able to work anymore. He'd worked hard physically all his life, and now, like a betrayal, his body was failing him.

I'd been talking to my mother when I asked how Dad was. After a couple of years of ignoring chest pains and breathlessness, he'd finally gone to a doctor. That led to by-pass surgery and a few months’ respite. Now, he was suffering angina, having to pop nitro-glycerine pills, and finding his prescribed aerobic walks a daily torture. Just walking down the block in my parents’ suburban Minneapolis housing development exhausted him.

"He's on the other phone," my mother said. "Why don't you ask him yourself?"

"Hello, son," he spoke up now--from the bedroom, I guessed.

"How are you, Dad?"

"Aw, I'm not worth a shit anymore."

His voice was weak, gravelly.

"I'm looking forward to seeing you, Dad. I'll go out with you on your exercise walks. We'll be able to talk."

I was looking forward to some talks together, and maybe he was too—the kind of talks a father and son never seem to have while the son is growing up, talks my father could never have had with his father, an expatriate American and a CPR engineer, who was killed in a train wreck during a blizzard on the Saskatchewan prairie when my father was five. My father’s widowed mother, then, with his two brothers and a sister, had moved from Moose Jaw to Minneapolis to live with her aged father.

"I hope so," he said.

A month later--and two weeks before our scheduled flight to Minnesota for a two-week visit—he was dead.

What I remember now, what seems to typify him, was the rolled-up wool sock he'd stuff into his left shoe to replace the missing half of that foot, lost to the instep in a farm accident. There's a snapshot of my father on crutches, taken a month later, just home from the hospital, that notes the date: Sept. 8, 1943. He’d spent his 33rd birthday in the hospital, fighting gangrene (one of the new "miracle" drugs, penicillin, saved him). I was eight, and in the Catholic school in a nearby town that frightful day of his accident. I remember my regret at having missed it.

He might have bled to death that day, might have gone deeper into the knives of the machine that took corn stalks, chopped them into bits and blew them into the silo, if my uncle Gerry (he and my father were farming together) hadn't been there to think quickly and reverse the machine, then run to the house for my mother and my folks' car. My uncle had driven to the doctor, my mother rigid and silent in the front seat beside him, my father rocking and silent in back, white but conscious, gripping the towel wrapped around his mangled foot.

I remember his shoes, the left one turned up at the instep, which together with his slight limp always told of his accident. A year after he was dead and in his grave, I found a pair of his dress shoes (his church shoes) in the trunk of my mother's car, the one shoe turned up like his mark left in the world, and felt my throat tighten, felt his loss even more than I had at the sight of him laid out in his coffin. What moved me then, as I stared down at his body, were his hands, his gnarled, working man’s hands, crossed on his chest.

I think of him now when I'm working outside, working with my own hands. I feel his eyes on me as I strike a nail. I sense his presence as I wield an ax, use my chainsaw, split firewood that will keep my wife and me warm in the winter. All those years we worked together and I tried to keep up with him and seldom could. I still want his recognition. I still work for it.

Paradise Revisited

2006-12-28T13:04:00.000-08:00

This very long piece, which began as a travel article for a Canadian newspaper and got away from me, is somewhat dated now. Call it a historical document.

During the five-and-a-half-hour jet flight from Vancouver (it took 13 hours from San Francisco, by prop-plane, my first time over), I waited for that magic moment I’d first experienced as a 20-year-old U.S. Navy sailor and now would know again after 43 years—the sight, after hours of flying over nothing but water, of that sudden, thrilling curve of lights in the nighttime void of the Pacific, the lights of Honolulu, isolated in the middle of the world’s largest ocean. It was, and was again, like reaching some far galaxy in the emptiness of space.

Beside me my wife, April, and my 12-year-old daughter, Alicia, shared my excitement, though they couldn’t know my innermost feelings. It was the night of May 18, 1998, and here I was, back where I’d been the night of May 13, 1955.

I was still a kid then, fresh off a Minnesota farm and stuffed from books and movies with the romance of the South Seas. Later, after 22 months of duty in Hawaii, the romance would be tempered a little by "island fever." That’s the claustrophobic condition, akin to "cabin fever," suffered by mainlanders who, after too long in the islands, begin to feel marooned. The so-called Paradise of the Pacific can become "The Rock" to the disenchanted.

Still, Hawaii had remained gorgeous in my memory, truly a dream of paradise; it was a place I’d been to when I was young and expected never to see again. Now, no longer young, I was here once more to see how Hawaii had changed in more than four decades and to see some of what I’d missed my first time around. The ghosts of those literary figures who’d preceded me, Herman Melville and Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London and Somerset Maugham, seemed to peer over my shoulder.

My first intimation of how things had changed in Hawaii, or anyway in Honolulu, came when, after disembarking at the airport and passing through customs and immigration, my family and I stepped outside into the balmy air to hail a cab. At once we were assaulted by the thundering, interchanging traffic on and around Lunalilo Freeway and impressed, while riding along Nimitz Highway toward downtown Honolulu, by the high, massed, concrete feel of a big city. Of course I hadn’t expected to find the low, mostly wooden, tin-roofed tropical town I remembered from a time when Hawaii was still a territory (it achieved statehood in 1959, two years after my transfer to the New Orleans Naval Station). I’d seen enough pictures of modern Honolulu with its high-rise hotels and business skyscrapers to know it resembled Miami now, but I was hardly prepared for the gross reality, to find the town so built-up and noisy, so completely urbanized, so utterly overdeveloped. And yet ... this was Hawaii after all, and I’d come back to it finally.

After checking into the budget-priced Polo Inn on Ala Moana Boulevard, where we’d reserved a double (it was close to one a.m. by now, Hawaii standard time, or four in the morning by our biological clocks, but we were too excited to sleep), we strolled up Ala Moana to Kalakaua Avenue, the main drag of Waikiki. I remembered it as a rather nice, even rather modest strip of classy bars and shops and restaurants; of four or five luxury hotels, including the venerable Moana and the Royal Hawaiian; of attractive and doubtless expensive bungalows lining the quiet, shaded side streets off Kalakaua that people might rent for the season after sailing over on the Lurline. What I saw now was virtually another place: towering piles of glass and steel that all but obliterated Hawaii’s famous landmark, the extinct volcano called Diamond Head.

The next morning, though, across from the public beach I remembered and where, way back when, I tried and failed at surfboarding, I found the pink little stucco building, now part of a larger edifice, that used to house Harry D’s, my favorite bar in Waikiki. I wrote a kind of tribute to it once, an apprentice (and mercifully unpublished) story called "The Night I Saw Jack London at Harry D’s." The place was something else now – what, I didn’t bother determining.

Other sights were familiar: native beach boys stood by to offer surfboard lessons and, perhaps as in the old days, their services as gigolos to wealthy female haoles. Figures, wobbling on surfboards or holding tight to the gunwales of outrigger canoes, rode the moderate waves into the beach. Swift catamarans still sailed like bright-winged birds offshore.

Later, on the beach at Ala Moana Park, among mostly locals, we basked (lathered in sun screen) in the tropical glare, in the caressing breeze, in intermittent rain so light there was no need to take shelter. The trade winds were brisk that day, blowing moisture over the clouded Koolau Range to this leeward shore of the island. Doves, the small spotted or necklace variety and tiny zebra doves, cooed among the shade trees off the hot sand. If there is a tropical island sound in my mind, other than the clatter of palm fronds and crashing surf, it’s the gentle cooing of doves.

Mynah birds too, bold and handsome, like a larger variety of starling (introduced, by design or accident, like much of Hawaii’s flora and fauna, from elsewhere – in this case, from India), called raucously from the trees or stalked the park’s Bermuda grass. I remembered them fondly from my last time here. Much had changed but enough, it seemed, had remained the same. To be here again! It was a pleasantly eery sensation, like stepping back into one’s past or, alternately, like waking from a Rip Van Winkle sleep to find the world both vastly different and yet still recognizable.

* * *

That afternoon we flew to Hilo, on the Big Island, for the bulk of our three-week stay in Hawaii – and where we found, as I’d hoped, essentially the Hawaii I remembered.

As a sailor I’d visited the island of Hawaii, the so-called Big Island, twice: once in 1956 off a submarine, which tied up in Hilo for a weekend to hold open house for civilians (as a Navy journalist attached to the headquarters of the Pacific Submarine Force, I rode the boats occasionally for the experience), and again about a year later when I flew to Hilo and was met by a fellow sailor who was marrying a local girl on the island. He drove me up to the plantation housing community of Olaa (gone now, like the island’s sugar industry, I would learn), on the cool slope of Kilauea, to stand as best man in his wedding. His girl was "Por’ Rican," the daughter of sugar plantation workers.

Now, as a tourist come back to Hawaii with my family, I’d chosen to mostly avoid crowded and overdeveloped Oahu, to skip favored but much-developed Maui, to pass on even lovely Kauai (another time, perhaps), and take us to the Big Island as the largest and most varied of the islands (93 miles long and 76 miles wide, or 4,034 square miles in area, more than all the other Hawaiian islands combined), as yet uncrowded (its population variously reported as from 121,000 to 135,500 residents, or some thirty people per square mile), and still mostly rural, still mostly undeveloped. By comparison, Oahu is only 44 miles long and 30 miles wide, or 594 square miles in size, with a population of 840,000 residents (most of whom live in Honolulu) and a daily average of 100,000 tourists.

Lifting above sunny Honolulu, we flew over the blue, white-flecked sea, over brown and green Molokai and Maui, and into the mass of gray clouds that marked the Big Island’s windward side. Rain began to splatter the plane windows as we descended, and we landed at Hilo’s General Lyman Field in a pounding, tropical downpour. It was shortly after five in the afternoon and almost as dark as night.

"Welcome to Hilo," the friendly woman on duty at the Dolphin Bay Hotel said as she handed us umbrellas. We might have just arrived in London, except for the humid warmth and tropical foliage. We would find that it rained here, between glorious intervals of sunshine, every day, and soon learned to carry umbrellas every time we ventured out.

Hilo, in fact (population 46,000), is the rainiest city in the United States, averaging 133 inches a year. It’s also the orchid-growing capital of the country and one of the most lushly tropical places in all Hawaii. I kept thinking of Somerset Maugham’s "Rain," his famous story of lust and hypocrisy in the South Seas. It’s set in wet Pago Pago, on the island of Upolu in Samoa, but Hilo might have served Maugham as well.

The Dolphin Bay, a small, pleasant, non-luxury hotel in a quiet area within walking distance of downtown Hilo (quiet except for the periodic roar of jet planes from the airport), became our base on the Big Island, and John Alexander, the hotel’s droll proprietor, our guide to the area. Our unit, like all in the hotel, included a kitchenette, which greatly reduced our eating out; as for breakfast, every morning there were sweetbreads and coffee in the hotel office, free, as well as mounds of fresh fruit for the taking – papayas, bananas, lychees – from John’s "jungle," out back of the hotel.

At a store nearby, I bought a pair of zoris or Japanese slippers, those flip-flop rubber sandals that used to be the most common island footwear (you see people wearing runners now), and we all got into shorts and light shirts. Then, armed with umbrellas, we set out to explore the town.

We visited the Mamo Street Markets, more simply called the Farmers’ Market (Wednesday and Saturday mornings), for vegetables, more tropical fruit, and fish (delicious ono or mahi mahi in $3 or $4 packages; almost everything else in bunches for "a dollah"); strolled Kamehameha Avenue along Hilo Bay, wide and curving, with waves splashing over the distant breakwater (before the jet age, ocean liners put into Hilo and the town must have bustled, periodically, with tourists; now it’s somewhat off the tourist track and more truly Hawaiian for that reason); and walked the quiet side streets past faded wooden buildings, old store fronts, tiny ethnic restaurants, most of them weathered and rundown, "quaint."

There’s high unemployment (and a drug problem) on Hawaii now with the recent collapse of the sugar industry, once the Big Island’s main business (vegetable farming, cattle raising, flower nurseries; fruit, coffee, and macadamia nut orchards remain important; tourism is being pushed), and you could see it in the several empty buildings downtown, in the uncomfortable presence of panhandlers, in the guardedly hostile eyes of some young locals.

I tried to imagine being young and local here, poor, and visited by comparatively rich tourists like ourselves. The faint undercurrent of resentment one detected sometimes beneath a surface politeness or genuine smiling friendliness, coupled with the existence of "pidgin," an Asian-Pacific dialect that, in effect, forms a private language between locals and is the equivalent, maybe, of urban Black English on the American mainland (a store clerk will speak in regular English to you, then shift happily into pidgin with a native customer; you might catch the drift, but it’s mostly unintelligible to visiting haoles), reminded me, just faintly, of being white in the American South in the early 1960s. The urge was to try to fit in as quickly as possible, to shed one’s pale haole look by acquiring a tan, and to dress native. But of course nobody’s fooled.

* * *

On our shoestring budget, we resisted renting a car at first and instead rented bicycles at a little shop in Hilo run by a transplanted Californian.

Enjoying the freedom of self-propelled wheels we rode east along the bay, past the boat harbor and the Suisan Fish Market (we would rise early one morning to watch the daily auction there when food store and restaurant buyers bid for fat, five-foot tuna, streamlined marlin, and pails of smaller fish), to the hugely tree-lined Banyan Drive and the Japanese-style Liliuokalani Gardens Park. (The beautiful Hawaiian language can be a tongue-twister; basically, you pronounce every letter.)

On the way we crossed a wide grassy space (empty except for a few trees and a statue of King Kamehameha I, the Hawaiian warrior king who conquered and united the islands at the end of the eighteenth century) where tsunamis (tidal waves) struck in 1946 and 1960 and repeatedly destroyed what was then the center of downtown. (I vaguely recalled the look of the place before the 1960 devastation.) Some 200 people were killed in the two waves. After the second, it was decided not to rebuild the area and so now it stands open, like a big vacant lot.

In the humid sunshine our second morning in Hilo, we peddled five miles out of town, on the road toward Kilauea, to the small Panaewa Rainforest Zoo, which featured tropical animals from Hawaii and other parts of the world (monkeys and a tapir from South America, for example, along with Asian peacocks that were allowed to stroll the premises; there were also representatives of the endangered Hawaiian hawk and Hawaii’s wild pigs). It had been a sweaty, uphill climb on our bikes to reach the place, but then we enjoyed a coasting, refreshing ride all the way back into Hilo.

Bus service on the Big Island (which we’d hope to use) is infrequent and inadequate, so our third day in Hilo we yielded to the inevitable: rented a car, and set out to explore the rest of the Hilo area and the rest of the island.

The two main tourist attractions out of Hilo are Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, where you can see active volcanoes at work, visibly enlarging the island, and the top of Mauna Kea, up almost 14,000 feet, where the thin air is perhaps the clearest on the planet and at night the stars seem close enough to touch. We would visit both, but first there were more places to see in and just outside of town.

We searched out the Lyman Mission House and Museum near downtown (the elegant frame house, an early missionary’s home, dates from 1839), and got a mostly positive view of what others see as the culturally destructive and, ultimately, exploitative arrival of Christian missionaries in Hawaii. (The historical fact seems to be that by the time missionaries arrived, in 1820, the Hawaiians already had suffered depopulation and cultural ruin during the previous 42 years of foreign contact.) In the museum building adjoining the mission house were informative displays on the islands’ complex history and Hawaii’s many and of necessity cooperative ethnic groups, diverse populations of Asian and Oceanic peoples, Portugese and Puerto Ricans (most originated as imported plantation workers), as well as island-born or immigrant haoles, people of northern European stock. Reportedly, no single ethnic group dominates island politics.

My plant-loving wife took us to Nani Mau Gardens, twenty acres of tropical flowers and plants outside Hilo, and later to Big Island Tropical Gardens inside the city. We saw Rainbow Falls, within the city limits, and Akaka Falls up the Kamakua Coast.

Five miles along the bay, southeast along Kalaniana’ole Avenue to just short of where the pavement ends in a jeep track, you come on Richardson Ocean Park, which one guidebook calls the finest beach in the area. (We found a better one eventually, or anyway better for us amateur surfers, at Honoli’i Beach Park, just north of the city.)

At Richardson the black sand beach is lined with cocoanut palms and ironwood trees. There’s a protective lava outcrop. It looked like good surfing offshore, and you could snorkel in the quieter waters. We took our first real ocean dip here, introducing our daughter to Pacific waves, their lift and tug, the insistent push and pull of them as they draw back, build, then roll frothing onto the beach. A sign warned of riptides that could take you out to sea, with instructions as to what to do if caught in one: in brief, don’t panic. Don’t try to swim against it, but with it, parallel to shore, until it dissipates or you’re out of it. Across the bay the slope of Mauna Kea lifted to disappear in the low clouds that hang inland on windward Hawaii, more or less perpetually, at about the thousand-foot level.

We met a woman at Richardson, a transplanted Canadian originally from Ottawa, who seemed happy to learn we were Canadians ourselves. She’d been living on the Big Island for several years and had contracted the so-called island fever. She was ready to move, to "change islands," anyhow, adding, "I’ll probably go to Maui. There’re more jobs over there."

At the Farmers’ Market the next morning, we met another interesting, and interested, former mainlander, a woman originally, like me, from Minnesota. She and her mother were at a booth selling the cookbook she’d written and vegetables from her farm upslope in Mountain View. That was the town I remembered going to for groceries when I was staying with plantation workers at Olaa, more properly Ola’a, back in ‘56. I was told that Ola’a no longer exists as a settlement (there’s now an Ola’a Rain Forest, part of Volcanoes Park), and gathered that its people were scattered and its houses torn down sometime between the last sugar planting on the island in 1994 and the last harvest in 1996.

This woman was an environmentalist, active in the fight being waged by native Hawaiians and many expatriate mainlanders against overdevelopment and destruction of the islands’ fragile ecosystems. Related to the environmental movement here are the preservation and/or restoration of native language and culture, native agriculture and native crafts, and dedication to what Ka’u Landing, an independent monthly journal based on the Big Island (now defunct, replaced by the Hawaii Island Journal), called "community collaboration and a sustainable future for the islands of Hawai’i."

A sustainable future is a concern that strikes islanders in the face. An island is finite (like the planet itself, in fact, as we’ve come rather belatedly to realize), something stone age Polynesians understood very well. Though they could be as destructive of habitat as we are today (Easter Island, its forest reduced to desert grassland by the Polynesians before Europeans found it, is a case in point), in general they protected their islands, nurturing the limited resources and reacting to overpopulation by, initially and most adventurously, launching ocean voyages in search of new islands and, most harshly, by practicing infanticide and periodic warfare that included cannibalism.

Today, apart from humans themselves, two domestic animals turned feral are perhaps the hardest on the islands’ environment: pigs and goats. (Only two mammals, the hoary bat and the monk seal, are indigenous to Hawaii; the islands’ fauna was mostly birds and insects; as for its flora, even the cocoanut palm was introduced – by the Polynesians.) The pigs are ancestors of the big, tusked European animal turned loose on the islands by Europeans for hunting and the smaller native variety brought to Hawaii by the first Polynesian settlers. They roam wild on the forested slopes, rooting in the thin volcanic soil and damaging island habitat by destroying indigenous plants and spreading invasive ones. Consequently, they’re hunted year around, and "Kailua pig," along with poi and other native fare, is offered in restaurants.

Feral goats, descendants of animals let loose on the islands – notably by Cook and Vancouver in the eighteenth century to provide meat – destroy natural vegetation and cause erosion.
Then there’s the weasel-like Indian mongoose which, since its introduction in the 1880s to control rats in the cane fields, has devastated Hawaii’s unique, ground-nesting birds. Equally destructive of native birds are feral cats, descendants of domestic cats kept on board the old sailing ships to control rats.

Now there’s an even worse threat: the brown tree snake, a voracious predator that reached the southwestern Pacific island of Guam from northern Australia in the 1940s and has since eradicated its native bird population. There have been a half-dozen or so "documented" arrivals of the snake on Oahu—by air from Guam—Since 1981, and the state of Hawaii, which has no indigenous snakes except a harmless blind species found in caves, and whose bird population – including its few remaining native species – could go the way of Guam’s, is now dedicated to preventing a brown tree snake invasion. Officials use trained dogs to sniff out snake stowaways in cargo arriving from Guam.

In line with all this, it occurred to me that from the environmental point of view, the end of sugar’s dominance on the Big Island ("dropping world prices and rising costs" is the official explanation for the plantation closings – costs, I’m sure, that included island workers’ hard-won union wages when cheap labor is still available in such places as Taiwan and the Philippines) ultimately might be a good thing – for island ecology, for the eventual development of a more diverse economy – but meanwhile, what of the laid-off Hawaiian workers? Their plight and confusion, their resentment, must be similar, say, to that of B.C. loggers, who feel themselves caught in the middle of the crucial fight now over conservation versus exploitation of the province’s forests.

* * *

Armed with directions and a hand-drawn map from the woman we met in the market for exploring the Puna District south of Hilo (for my money, one of the most interesting areas on the island), the next day we headed up Highway 33 toward Volcanoes Park, then turned left on Route 130 and traveled downslope, past anthurium and orchid farms, to the village of Pahoa. Once the "marijuana capital" of the district, it’s still a haven for old and latter-day hippies. Weathered clapboard buildings line the main street, and there are funky little houses with pretty gardens along the dirt side streets.

Driving down a side street we passed a group of locals preparing what looked like a traditional luau, a native feast (it was the Memorial Day weekend), with tropical fruit laid out and a pig being wrapped in ti leaves for roasting in a fire pit. By way of contrast, the movie theater in Pahoa was presenting a tribute to the recently deceased Frank Sinatra by showing a series of his films.

In the center of town the unmistakable pungency of marijuana wafted from an old Volkswagen bus in which sat a couple of longhairs out of the 1960s. There were other cars parked along the street, but the dilapidated wooden buildings and the green lushness everywhere lent the feel of a nineteenth-century tropical backwater. A beautiful native girl, evidently having just finished a swim in a nearby stream, sat on a store veranda combing out her long, lustrous black hair. Gauguin might have painted her.

South of Pahoa you drive through forests of huge ohia trees to Lava Trees State Park. Here you’ll find weirdly shaped rock columns among the trees, volcanic "molds" of trees surrounded and burned out by a lava flow some 200 years ago. They’re the reverse of those hollowed spaces in the solidified volcanic ash at Pompeii in Italy that, filled with plaster, revealed the shapes of ancient Romans killed in the 79 A.D. eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

Beyond this park, on Route 137, is the sea and Isaac Hale Beach Park where the waves sweep excitingly into a narrow inlet. Here there were wooden shanties and tents under the trees that formed a little community of squatters who lived, it appeared, more or less in the old way, by picking fruit off the trees and fishing in the ocean. A big friendly man, bronzed and bearded, who sat on the cement quay like the very model of an ancient Hawaiian chief, warned us of the riptides and told us where we might surf without danger. Yet another transplanted Californian spotted us as newcomers and came over with more warnings and to chat.

We found the ocean water both cool and abruptly warm in places, evidence of hot springs on the bottom. I paddled out on one of the used boogie boards we’d bought in Hilo to show April and Alicia how to body surf – to show off, in short. A boogie board is an abbreviated surfboard that facilitates body surfing; you spread the upper half of your body on its three-foot-or-so length and kick with your flippers as a wave approaches. I’d last body-surfed, minus a boogie, in 1970 off the Mexican west coast, so I was a little out of practice. But after three or four tries I caught a wave that swept me right up to the tangle of shore growth (no real beach here, so you have to turn back into the wave before being washed against the trees). I broke out of the wave and stood up in the shallows only to be thrown backward into the trees anyhow by the next wave. That was enough. A lot of years had passed since Mexico and my early Hawaiian days, and after some exhaustive paddling, against the waves and currents, back to the wharf, I was content to sit there and watch native boys gamboling like seals in the turbulent water.

The road past Isaac Hale continues along the coast to become a tunnel-like lane through a jungle of tropical vegetation, mangos, ironwood, hibiscus and bougainvillea. It’s called the "red road," supposedly because of the red soil, oxidized lava, along its route, but its name as well, since the road leads that way, could refer to the fiery flows from the Kilauea volcano, which has been erupting continuously since 1983, adding acres to this youngest island in the Hawaiian chain. In fact, the road ends after a dozen or so miles where the lava has buried it and where the town of Kalapana used to be. (It was destroyed in 1990.) Here you can park your car and walk up onto the lava fields, a rolling black desert of hardened magma that stretches away to the ocean. Far off you see the plumes of steam and smoke that signal where molten lava is pouring into the sea. We started to walk toward the smoke that evening, only to realize it would be a miles-long hike.

Some days later, equipped with food and water, flashlights (for the return trip in the dark), walking sticks and detailed and witty instructions from John at the Dolphin Bay, we took Route 130, rather than 137, which ends a couple of miles farther on into the lava fields. Then we walked, four miles in the late-afternoon heat, over the rubble of the bulldozed road that continues across the lava (it provides access, by 4x4, to a few houses left stranded on the devastated slopes and is interspersed, in exactly four places, with short sections of intact paved road) to within half a mile of the erupting flow. We reached the flow just at dusk – and just as planned. The smoke turned red in the growing darkness, and up on the slope a succession of lights appeared, as if there were cars or a town up there; in reality, they were vents in the lava tubes, breaks in the subsurface flows where the hot lava gushes and glows in the night.

We joined a small party of other spectators (they would give us a ride in their pickup truck afterwards, saving us the long walk back, in the dark, to our car) to stand on a cliff above glistening black sand and the crashing sea within a hundred yards of the hissing, spewing lava pouring red and yellow and black, like molten steel, into the waves. What a show! Small wonder that Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire, was, and is still, worshiped by the natives, and that this smoking island (probably the first reached by Polynesian voyagers, evidently from the Marquesas, perhaps as early as 400 A.D.; voyagers from Tahiti arrived considerably later) is revered as the most sacred of the islands. As a native woman who was born and raised on Hawaii and had returned to the island after working for years on Oahu told me, "The Big Island, she the real Hawaii."

* * *

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, created by Congress in 1916, is centered at Kilauea Caldera, 28 miles from Hilo and 4,000 feet above sea level. It was jacket cool when we went up there, misty and rainy, with gusting winds in places. I had been there before, as a sailor, but had seen little else except the main crater.

We were charged $10 at the gate for a car sticker, good for seven days. As it turned out, we spent only the one day in that high, scorched, steaming world. Others, we were told, vulcanologists, fascinated tourists, roam the park for days or weeks.
At the Volcano House Hotel, across the road from the visitor center, you can look out over the huge maw of Kilauea Caldera. (A caldera is a volcano’s collapsed summit, within which there may be smaller craters.) Standing above that desolate landscape is to have an inkling, despite the mist and venting steam indicating an atmosphere, of what it’s like on the moon.

Driving the 11-mile loop of Crater Rim Drive, we stopped at the Halemaumau Crater, which last erupted in 1982. This is where Pele is said to live, and where you’ll find little arrangements of fruit and flowers and maybe a bottle of Gordon’s gin along the rim of the crater. They’re like placements on graves but in fact are offerings to Madame Pele. The crater’s sides are yellow with sulphur, and steam and gas lift into the wind, carrying sulphur’s hellfire smell to Christian nostrils but which to pagan islanders, I imagine, was only Pele’s breath.

Another sight along Crater Rim Drive is the short Devastation Trail, where a 1959 eruption buried a forest of ohia trees. Now it’s a landscape of grown-back forest interspersed with desolate openings strewn with volcanic waste, disintegrating fallen timber and cinder cones, low mounds like scale-model volcanic peaks. You’re advised to stay on the trail here, to protect native growth and because it’s dangerous. I learned of the danger when I stepped into the woods to relieve myself and nearly fell into a fissure, a volcanic crack in the terrain like a glacial crevasse, almost hidden in the vegetation.

Our final stop along Crater Rim Drive was to see the Thurston Lava Tube, a walk-through tunnel in the dim bottom of an overgrown pit that I recognized as the "fern jungle" I’d visited in 1956. A tube is formed when the outer layers of a lava flow cool while the inner flow drains out. There are lava tubes and caves all over the Big Island, in some of which have been found evidence of early human habitation and bones of Hawaii’s extinct flightless birds. Without predators during their long, isolated development, these Dodo-like creatures must have been easy pickings for the first Polynesian settlers.

* * *

It was time to see the other side of the island. We wanted relief from the daily (and nightly) rain on the windward side and some desert heat and sun. So, exactly a week after our arrival in Hilo, we drove north of the city, past vegetation-choked gulches, verdant cliffs, and grassy abandoned sugar cane fields along the Hamakua Coast, to the old plantation town of Honoka’a. Then up through misty forests and grasslands to Waimea, on the Parker Ranch, and finally down to the leeward Kohala Coast, north of Kona.

It was a 90-mile trip, giving one a sense both of the island’s large size and its utter diminishment by the huge, encircling ocean. On the slopes as you pass from the windward to the leeward sides, from wet to dry, the division is sharply drawn, a definite vertical line, like the horizontal snow line on mountain slopes in Canada. The rolling, open pastures on the 250,000-acre Parker Ranch (said to be the largest privately owned ranch in the United States) could have been Canadian, except for the low clouds. At Waimea’s 2,600-foot altitude they hang very close to the ground – as clouds tend to do in the highlands of tropical islands.

Introduced cattle gone wild once inhabited these misty uplands (they were released on the islands by Captain Vancouver in the 1790s) until John Parker, a sailor who had jumped ship on the island in 1809, started rounding them up, about 1830, with the help of Mexican or Spanish cowboys, called paniolos (derived from Espanols) by the Hawaiians. The vaqueros taught some of the natives how to ride and use the lasso, how to drive cattle, and these Hawaiian cowboys in turn are called paniolos. (There has been a strong Mexican influence on Hawaiian music. The guitar was introduced to the islands by the Mexicans, and Hawaiian falsetto singing is a native version of Mexican singing. Another musical instrument linked with Hawaii, the ukulele, came with the Portugese.)

We camped at Spencer Beach Park, at the bottom of the road down from Waimea. It’s next to the Pu’ukohola Heiau, the massive remains of a temple built by King Kamehameha in 1791 and a national historic site. An heiau is basically a lava stone platform. They’re found throughout Polynesia.

Spencer had been recommended by John at the Dolphin Bay as his favorite campsite on this side of the island. It was clean, lovely, and cheap (a county, as opposed to a state, campground with the fee set at $1 per adult per night; children under eighteen free), on a beautiful bay with a white sand beach (a quarter-mile walk along the wooded shore takes you to a more secluded beach where nude bathing is allowed) and an impressive stone pavilion built as a WPA project in the 1930s. Stray cats were everywhere, inspiring my daughter to feed them, as well as slinky mongooses. The snorkeling was excellent, particularly in the early morning calm when you might, as April and Alicia did, swim with green sea turtles that come inshore at that time.
At night we were lulled to sleep by the gentle wash of the sea and the insect-like chirping of geckos, those tiny lizards you see skittering up walls in the tropics and subtropics. We stayed three nights at Spencer (and met a young woman there from back home, Nelson, B.C.!), and returned for another two days just before flying back to Honolulu.

South of Spencer on Route 19, on the way to Kailua-Kona, the deep-sea fishing capital of the islands and where there’s a small and rather attractive tourist enclave (it reminded me of the Waikiki I knew in the 1950s), you drive along Hawaii’s Gold Coast, so called because of the luxury resorts that have been built on the lava there. It’s a region that appears to be nothing but lava wasteland, but developers continue to pulverize the cindery terrain, haul in topsoil, and plant tropical vegetation along the white sand shores to make desert oases.

This is where millionaires and movie stars hide out in private retreats too expensive for us ordinary folks. Public access, nevertheless, must be allowed to the beaches, and so you can walk in and around the lavish hotels as if you owned the joints. On the extensive grounds of the Mauna Lani Hotel, we saw a prehistorically inhabited cave and aboriginal petroglyphs, rock carvings, as well as ancient fishponds that are still in use. The old Hawaiians created these ponds to provide a ready food source.

South of Kailua is Kealakekua Bay, famous as the place where Captain Cook landed after discovering the Hawaiian Islands (he called them the Sandwich Islands, after one of his patrons) in 1778, and where he succeeded in angering the Hawaiians and was killed by them in 1779. The Cook Monument, near the place where the explorer was clubbed to death and, out of the Hawaiians’ fear and respect, ritually eaten, is at the entrance to the bay, which is inaccessible except by water or a strenuous hike. There are expensive boat tours out to the Monument from Kailua, but we opted for two kayaks ($75 for the day), rented from yet another young mainland expatriate who runs his little business in the bay by word-of-mouth.

The water in Kealakekua Bay is a deep, pure peacock blue, like water in the Gulf Stream off Florida. Spinner dolphins congregate here, and we saw several of them close up, leaping out of the water around us as we paddled across the mile-wide bay to the Cook Monument.

The Monument itself is a simple white concrete obelisk, constructed, as I recall, in the mid-nineteenth century. Snorkeling off the rocky shore here is probably the finest on the island. We’d brought our gear, and pushed off into the transparent water, above the colored reef and myriads of colored fish. Climbing out, though, was tricky, with the swells threatening to slam you against the spiny urchins in every crevice in the rocks.

At least as exciting to me as the splendid snorkeling were the old constructions of lava rock in the woods along the shore. Everywhere were remnants of rock platforms or fallen walls. Some were temple sites, perhaps, others partitioned-off areas for houses or gardens. The ruins were unmistakable evidence of the ancient and once-populous settlement on this bay.

North of our Spencer camp, on Route 270, we rounded the point of North Kohala, passing from gray leeward to green windward landscape in an instant, and reached the former plantation town of Hawi (pronounced Havi). Just past the town is the birthplace of King Kamehameha. It’s lush and lovely here, though reportedly very windy at times. For that matter, it was windy at our camp on occasion; we came back to find our tent blown down one day.

Some six miles past Hawi is the end of the road. There’s a lookout here, over the uninhabited Pololu Valley and the wild Kohala coast. This is anybody’s dream of a South Seas paradise. Abrupt green cliffs line the shore. The sea breaks against the island in a white line. The valley below is like a door into paradise, opening out from the surrounding green slopes to a black sand beach and waves of white surf.

We donned our hiking boots and climbed the steep trail down into the valley in twenty minutes. There was a party of four or five young people on the beach; otherwise we had it to ourselves. We’d left our swimming suits in the car, but my daughter, not to be denied, ran into the surf with her clothes on.

Wonderful seclusion. The sand like black powder. A sluggish stream cut through the valley, its floor a flat expanse of grassy vegetation like in an alpine meadow. Back in the ironwood forest, a faint path led toward the far ridge and the next valley.

Pololu is one of seven valleys along this shore, all uninhabited (wild horses claim some of them) except for the largest and southernmost, Waipio, beyond which the highway around the island resumes. We drove up from Hilo, later in our stay, to see Waipio, but declined the more strenuous hike down into it. Parties of campers in 4x4s were heading into or climbing out of the valley as we stood marveling at its beauty from the Lookout.

Waipio is paradise on a larger scale than Pololu with a mile-long black sand beach, fields of taro, scattered native houses, and surrounding thousand-foot cliffs laced with waterfalls. Only about fifty people live in the valley now – the tsunamis of 1946 and 1960 virtually emptied the place – but it once supported about 4,000 Hawaiians and is steeped in native mythology. Here, it’s thought, is where caskets containing the remains of ancient Hawaiian chiefs, "stolen" in 1994 from the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, have been returned to their ancestral home and secretly reburied.

Of course, while based in Hilo, we drove to near the top of Mauna Kea, up 9,300 feet to the Onizuka Visitors Center. At that altitude, above the clouds, we shivered in the forty-degree Fahrenheit temperature after sunset but enjoyed the video show and displays inside the heated building and, guided by the astronomer on duty, stargazed outside through a powerful telescope. With a 4x4, you can drive to the 13,796-foot summit of Mauna Kea, where the observatories are, ten of them including the Keck, the world’s largest telescope (there will be thirteen observatories on the summit, we learned, by the turn of the 21st century), but where the lack of oxygen can cause altitude sickness. At that height one’s vital organs are affected, and children under sixteen, who could suffer permanent damage, are advised not to visit the summit. From December to April there’s snow on the top of Mauna Kea, and good tropical-latitude skiing on the mountain’s bare slopes. Hedonists, who reportedly make the downhill runs in bathing suits, presumably can suffer both frostbite and sunburn in one fell swoop.

* * *

We flew back two days early to Honolulu. I had a couple of sentimental excursions to make before our flight home to Canada.

Flashing my Navy discharge card, I booked us for the night of June 6 into the noisy but convenient Airport Holiday Inn at the "service rate," a flat $99. We would take off for Vancouver just past midnight, June 8.

From the hotel, it was a short bus ride along Nimitz Highway to Pearl Harbor. Alicia, with little interest in my military past, chose to stay in our hotel room while I took April out to the base. I showed my service card at the gate and we were waved through by the young sailor on duty. It was early afternoon, a Saturday. There was a Navy frigate nearby that we might have toured, but down the road I could see the 120-foot Escape Training Tank that pinpointed the submarine base. "That’s where we’re going," I told my wife.

We passed a recreation center and Navy housing units; a playground, populated by Navy or Marine Corps "dependents" – wives and children; several young men and women, undoubtedly service personnel, although nobody was in uniform. This was different from my day when, unless you were going on liberty, you wore your uniform on base.

We reached the subase, my old duty station. The gatehouse was still there but unmanned. We walked right in. I was disoriented at first, then recognized the old exchange building (the "ship’s service"), and the back of my old barracks. Just past the gate was a monument to the U.S. Navy’s "silent service" during the Second World War, the detached conning tower from one of the fleet type submarines that sank enemy shipping in the Western Pacific, the kind of diesel and electric-powered boats still in use during my tour of duty here.

Amazingly, once past the new high-rise apartments for enlisted personnel and into the core of the subase, I found essentially the place I remembered. There was the three-story, three-sided barracks I knew, like a squared cement horseshoe defining one side of the inner court of the base. There was the pool where I used to swim almost every day after work, and there was the three-story ComSubPac building, Pacific Submarine Force headquarters, where I once worked in the public information office. Everything had been repainted, refurbished, and the headquarters building enlarged to take up most of the old parking lot where I kept the Model A jalopy I’d owned forty years ago, but it was all still here, though slightly changed and somewhat smaller than I remembered, as if I’d come back to a place where I was a child.

April had to smile at my excitement as I pointed to the "second deck" of the barracks, where I used to bunk; to the third deck of "the building," where I worked; to the raised entrance of the building, the "quarterdeck," where I stood watches.

The original wharf or "sail" had been chopped off and there were no submarines docked there now. Instead, over toward Ford Island and the Arizona Monument, there were a couple of modern atomic submarines tied up, dark, streamlined hulks like mechanical sea monsters. The biggest change, it seemed, was the landmark Escape Training Tank itself, which since 1932 had trained submariners in escape procedures and which, in my day, had been a showplace for civilians touring the base. (Navy divers used to demonstrate their prowess for visitors by going to the bottom of the clear, 100-foot column of water while holding their breath for three minutes; once an excitable guest, unconsciously not breathing along with the divers, fainted.) A plaque informed us the tank had been drained in 1983 and the top chamber converted into a "crow’s nest" conference room.

We visited the base chapel where, as a good Catholic boy, I’d attended mass every Sunday. Standing across the street in front of the base theater, I drew the attention of the man at the ticket counter. He stepped out and asked, "Can I help you?"

"No," I said. "I used to be stationed here, and I’m just looking at the place where I could see a movie every night for a dime."

"Well," he said, "it’ll cost you three dollars now."

* * *

Our last day in Hawaii we declined a costly tour and took the regular, Circle Island bus ($1 each adult; 50 cents for children) around to windward Oahu and back. The trip didn’t actually circle the island but took us, in about two hours, up its center, past Schofield Barracks (of From Here to Eternity – book and movie – fame), the Dole Center and pineapple fields in Oahu’s red volcanic soil; then along the windward coast and back over the Pali to Honolulu. After the Big Island, Oahu struck us as small and overpopulated, but the windward side is still "country" and lushly beautiful. Confined to the bus route, we missed seeing Bellows, now a park, once an air field and later a military rest camp, where my buddies and I used to surf and where I spent a week’s leave in 1956. Kaneohe and the whole East Shore was still a vision of the South Seas, and going over the Pali was lovely, too, though it’s a brief trip and less spectacular than I remembered, since a tunnel cuts through the mountain now, below the original, high and windy road, where I believe there’s still a lookout. You still see ribbon-like, paradisiacal waterfalls among the fluted slopes.

We toured downtown Honolulu our last afternoon, including Hotel Street in Chinatown, my old sailor haunt. The clip joints I knew are gone, and it’s no longer crowded with servicemen; instead there were derelict citizens on the almost deserted street that Sunday and some rough-looking bars. The place looked more like skid row than any sailor’s Mecca.

That evening we ate Thai food in the huge Ala Moana Shopping Center, then strolled down to the Hilton Hawaiian Village (it was being built, as I recall, by Henry Kaiser in 1957, my last year in Hawaii) for a drink and some typical island entertainment. Our daughter was served a fancy fruit cocktail. My wife and I had – what else! – mai tais as we listened to a couple of Hawaiian singers in the languidness of the open-air lounge.

* * *

Then we were flying home. Taking off after midnight, almost the time of our arrival three short weeks before, we missed a last daytime look at Diamond Head and leeward Oahu through the plane windows and only saw the lights of night-time Honolulu once more, now receding into the darkness of the vast Pacific.

We’d seen a lot and missed a lot on this trip to one of the most beautiful, most unique, and most threatened places in the world; nostalgically, I’d seen most of the things I remembered from all those years ago when I was a young Navy sailor, and much I hadn’t seen before. Much, I was pleased to find, had remained intact.

Thinking back now to my two stays there, separated by almost half a century and involving very different circumstances and lengths of time, I have an abiding sense of Hawaii’s dreamlike strangeness, its farawayness, which only contributes to its appeal and goes much deeper than the fact of its being the most isolated archipelago in the world. When I was there in the military, Hawaii was "overseas," an exotic duty station. Now as America’s fiftieth state, with all that nation’s amenities, it’s still exotic, a place that even mainland Americans go to as to another country.

We slept during the night-long flight to the coast. From Vancouver, after clearing Customs, it was only an hour’s flight to Castlegar, where we’d left our car. Then driving along the Kootenay River to Nelson and on, up the West Arm of Kootenay Lake, to our house on a slope near Balfour, we were treated to a mountain landscape that, after weeks of rain in our absence and now under a warm sun, was as green and lush in its temperate way as the Eden-like tropical islands we had just left.

We had gone, it seemed, from paradise to paradise.

June-August 1998

Light in Darkness

2006-12-15T11:52:00.000-08:00

Here we are, early in the 21st century and on the brink, some say, of a new dark age. Global warming, depleting resources, the American Empire under the Bush Administration doing its best—and worst—to make the world safe for corporate business. The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The disintegration of family and community. Religious and/or political fanaticism fostering hate and murder. And Yeats’s words still resonating after sixty some years: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

And yet, we push on. Life remains good. Or, as D. H. Lawrence put it so beautifully when he was dying of tuberculosis: "For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos."

Mexico Bound

2006-12-13T10:56:00.000-08:00

Early in January my wife, April, and I will leave for an extended stay in Yelapa, Mexico, once a "primitive," now a rapidly developing, coastal village just south of Puerto Vallarta. When we first encountered this idyllic place, during a one-day visit in March 2002 (our perk for suffering through a time-share sales pitch somewhere north of Vallarta), Yelapa was just getting electrical power. An indication of this was the new refrigerator, lashed across the bow of the open boat that was taking us there, being transported to a young gringo couple's palapa in the village. (Yelapa can only be reached by boat, unless you have a 4x4 vehicle and care to drive over a narrow, bulldozed road through the jungle to where it ends on a ridge above town.) The overall sense of the place, once our boat had put us ashore and we'd walked its cobbled streets, was that this was it. This was where we would stay the next time we went to Mexico.

In 2005 we spent a month in Yelapa; in 2006, two and a half months; and this winter we'll spend a full three months in this "paradise," as one year-round resident, a retired lawyer-turned- mystery novelist, has called it. After all, the sad feeling among its longtime North American residents is that Yelapa will be a "little Puerto Vallarta" in about five years, so we'd better enjoy it before that happens.

It's a village of some 1,000 inhabitants, of which maybe 100 are non-native, people mostly from the States and Canada, many of whom spend half the year in Yelapa and a few, like the novelist just mentioned, all year, enjoying both of its tropical seasons, dry and rainy, the one sunny and warm, the other cloudy, hot and humid, when all the little beasties come out of their holes and crawl through the streets and into the houses. Some of Yelapa's expats have lived there for 30 years or more. Needless to say, the old hands speak fluent Spanish, though it is possible, we've been told, to get by in Yelapa without knowing the language. Still, you're more accepted if you have at least a working knowledge of Spanish, and anyway, you feel better about being in their country. Of course the longer you stay there, the more you learn. And you honor the people, I think, when you can speak their language.

The town's gringo colony gives Yelapa the kind of mixed racial and cultural atmosphere that I suppose you can find in other expatriate strongholds in Mexico, San Miguel de Allende, say, or Chapala (neither of which I've visited). Some might wish for a place more purely Mexican, as the village of Animas Trujano, outside Oaxaca, was for us more than 30 years ago. We loved it there then, but we were awfully isolated, and our isolation took its toll. My wife and I broke up during that stay, ending our stay, and though we eventually got back together, it took a troubled year or so before we'd reconciled.

We both like the mix of gringo and Mexican in Yelapa, the mixed couples, the sight of kids of both races playing in the streets together, rattling off to each other in Spanish. The feel of Yelapa is both exotic and homey. We like that. We feel at home there.

Anyway, we'll soon be there again. Meanwhile, the pictures show what we're leaving and where we're going.

Old, First-Book Author

2006-12-12T12:25:00.000-08:00

I am in the happy process of becoming a first-book author -- an author, finally, at age 71 (I'll be 72 when the book comes out) after some 50 years as a mostly failed writer. The book is a memoir, called Leaving the Farm, and will be published by Oolichan Books, a small Canadian house, in March 2007.

I was a junior in a Minnesota high school when, after reading a biography of Jack London, I decided that being a writer must be the most exciting, most satisfying thing a guy could do in this world. Never mind that London, once the most popular and highest-paid writer in America, died, diseased and disappointed, at 40 -- probably by his own hand. His tragic end hardly registered with me when I was 17. What did was London's determination and discipline, his ultimate success as a writer.

I started writing seriously (that is, submitting to magazines) after joining the Navy at age 20 and gave myself the four years of my enlistment to achieve at least a little of London's success. During those years, in my off-duty hours as a Navy journalist, I wrote some 50 stories and actually published seven of them -- admittedly in obscure magazines, although one "sold," for $35, to Adam, an early Playboy imitator, and another, published in a small literary quarterly, later won a $300 award for fiction from the still-extant, I think, Longview Foundation.

The Longview Foundation's letter and check reached me the month after my release from the Navy, and when I'd cashed their check and it didn't bounce, I thought I was finally on the verge of becoming a writer. Naive is hardly the word for it.

That was in January 1959. I was already in college -- the University of Minnesota, majoring in journalism on the G.I. Bill -- and immediately after graduation, in 1961, I went to work as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Then full-time employment, courtship and marriage, homesteading here in B.C., childrearing -- all intruded, overwhelmed, as the years went by and I began to think of myself as a failed writer. Of course, I lacked the discipline, the absolute dedication, the unwavering belief in oneself, and, yes, the selfish drive, in the face of life's temptations, its appeals, its obligations, to sit before a typewriter (eventually a computer) every day, without fail (except Sunday, perhaps, to pay attention to one's wife and family), if only to stare at the empty page, the empty screen, for a couple of hours. At times I tried getting up at five every morning, to write for two hours before work; tried writing at night after supper. But I didn't stick to either regimen. Too many diversions, too many chores -- too many excuses. And yet I dreamed, at first, of eventually freeing myself from the frustrating nine-to-five treadmill through my writing. I got over that after I married and realized I would have to buckle down now and make a living for myself and my family.

Still, I never stopped writing -- never stopped trying. I'd dropped out as a working journalist after only three years, but I kept my hand in as an occasional freelance. I wrote some pieces for the Chicago-based Bowlers Journal, my employer for a year after leaving the Tribune, and later, in Canada, became a regular, freelance book reviewer for the Calgary Herald, as well as a movie reviewer for the online Nelson Observer. But I published no fiction after moving to Canada until 1997, when Event, a literary quarterly out of Vancouver, accepted a story set in Mexico called "Gringos," and even paid me for it, a nice $350. I've published no fiction since, though I'm still writing it.

Since my retirement in 1998 from Selkirk C0llege -- I worked in student services on the Nelson campus; before that I was the assistant registrar of Notre Dame University of Nelson for the last five years of its existence -- I've been able to write full time (mornings only, you understand; there continues to be both inside and outside chores to attend to: my wife and I garden, and in the fall we must gather firewood to keep us warm in the winter). But there were other times, in my younger years, when I was between jobs and enjoyed intervals as a full-time writer.

In 1963-64 I spent six months in Europe, mostly in London, a wonderfully romantic time for me during which I wrote very little but courted the girl (yes, girl: she was 17 at the time) I'd met on the ship going over and who became my wife a year later; we two were introduced to Marxist politics that winter in London, became "fellow travelers," and we've been Left-leaning ever since, easy enough to do in these ultra-conservative times.

Then, while living in Detroit, after working as a high school janitor and later as a mail carrier, and following a brief return to journalism (a four-month stint as a copy editor for the Detroit Free Press that ended when I was fired for being too slow at poring over reporters' often slapdash stories and writing snappy headlines for them; it was like correcting student papers for eight hours every night, not my "cup of tea," as the managing editor told me; I was immensely relieved to be let go), I was allowed to stay home and write that winter of 1967-68 while my wife supported us by working at Sears. I turned to the commercial market, namely the raunchy men's magazines, and found I could write publishable stories for them -- found I could write about what I knew, farm boys and girls, so long as I stuck in a couple of graphic sex scenes. I soon tired of that genre, however, despite that an agency specializing in commercial fiction invited me to join its stable.

Then my wife and I moved to my native Minnesota, where I worked for the next two years on my family's golf course (built by my father on what remained of our family farm). It was a seasonal job -- I was laid off from November to March -- so I had my winters to write. After our second season on the course, the winter of 1969-70, my wife and I went to Mexico -- spent four months as the only gringos in a village outside the city of Oaxaca, where I wrote every day, imagining myself a latter-day D. H. Lawrence and my wife a latter-day Frieda in that exotic setting. Produced a couple of unpublished stories and an unfinished novel.

After that we moved to Canada, where eventually I had my 15 minutes of fame when I won first prize in the personal essay division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's annual literary competition for 1990 for a piece called "Leaving the Farm," now the first chapter of my book-length memoir. (I got the call to say I'd won in my division from Robert Weaver on Christmas Eve that year.) The prize included $3,000 and a professional reading of the essay over national CBC radio early in 1991, and as I say made me something of a celebrity for a while. It led to a Canada Council grant that enabled me to take a nine-month leave of absence from my job at Selkirk College to do research and begin expanding my original essay into a book. It also led to teaching writing, part time, at the Kootenay School of the Arts in Nelson, which, like copy editing for a daily newspaper, turned out to be not my cup of tea, either. I felt like such a phony as a writing teacher, standing before all those wannabes who thought I might have something to tell them, when all I could say was, "Read. Read and write. Write and read." Sure, I could show them a few tricks, a few shortcuts. But I'm a self-taught writer, after all, with no gift for teaching others. All I could impart to my students was that they, too, might teach themselves.

Meanwhile, I'd made little progress on my book. Instead I kept going over and over what I'd written during my leave of absence, striving for some shape, some focus, not sure what to put in, what to cut. That's the difficulty when writing any kind of book, I suppose, and particularly when writing a memoir, where you have a lifetime of material and must somehow extract a portion of it, give it theme and structure, know what you can, must, leave out.

It wasn't until after my retirement that I managed to finish a first draft; then a second and a third; then a fourth and a fifth (Oolichan accepted my 13th draft, following which I wrote a 14th). Once I had a "finished" draft, I began to send out queries with an outline and samples of the writing, followed by, on request, the complete manuscript. I was lucky. Not counting Douglas & McIntyre, who after asking to see it turned down my very rough, unfinished first draft, my book was rejected by only four other publishers, over an eight-year period during which I kept revising, before Oolichan accepted it (I've heard of writers whose first book was rejected 15 or 20 times before finding a home) -- accepted it after I'd begun to despair of ever publishing the damn thing unless I did it myself.

That I haven't had to resort to self-publishing seems like a miracle to me. In fact, during all these years I've more or less "played" at writing, "pretending" to be a writer in order to keep at it -- and so to have a book accepted after all these years, about to be published, is nothing less than an impossible dream come true.

Now, maybe because of my age, I seem to be accepting my good fortune almost matter of factly, as only my due, in fact. I never really doubted myself, or my modest talent, through all my years of rejection, and never quite gave up on the idea that I'd eventually succeed as a writer if only I kept trying. (The critics might question my success, once my book is out; as for ultimately making a living as a writer, it's far too late for that, just as it's far too late to quit.)

Anyway, I've written a book in my old age, a book started in my middle age, and, my God, it's going to be published! I may never write another book, let alone publish it, in what's left of my life; but I'll have this one to pass on to my survivors.