Natural Traveler Magazine - Quarterly Cultural Magazine - Inaugural Issue, Winter 2018/2019

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

Henry Miller.

© 2019 Natural Traveler™,

LLC 5 Brewster

Street Unit 2, No. 204 Glen Cove, New York 11542

www.naturaltraveler.net

Welcome to Natural Traveler ™, the port of embarkation for those among us driven to humankind’s insatiable need to explore. Here we celebrate travel in its broadest sense, well beyond mere journal entries detailing jaunts around the planet, more an exploration of those interior journeys that inspire us to record, through the arts, what we have seen, heard and felt.

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

I have a distant memory of reading an article by Miller about Tahiti. My memory places it in Esquire, although a Google search turns up nothing. What memory serves (flawed though it appears to be) was that Miller, in his eighties at the time, was musing about those things he’d always wanted to do but realized were not going to happen. Tahiti was at the top of the list. He then proceeded to describe a Tahiti of his dreams so compelling I remember it to this day as one of my favorite travel stories, despite the fact that the man tells you, up front, he’s never been there. Or was it just that it was such a damn good piece of writing I didn’t care . . . assuming the story existed at all.

If that was simply my imaginary recollection of Miller’s literary lament about knowing he would die without seeing Tahiti, it nonetheless got me to thinking.

For a writer, traveling is a continuous loop, an endless exercise in research and discovery. I have friends who marvel how I could fashion a career around traveling. However, mine has always been a nuanced view of travel. During lazy summer evenings, at home in my backyard, listening to music on headphones and sipping a martini, while staring at the beautiful sunsets backlighting the copper beech in a golden glow, I have come to understand travel as a state of mind. It didn’t require that I venture further than a half-dozen steps out my backdoor to satisfy a need to explore.

Maybe watching insects bouncing off molecules in the light shafting through the coppery leaves wasn’t quite as dramatic as the sun-blurred clouds of mist I’d seen rising above the thunderous falls at Iguazu on the Argentina/Brazil border, but both were a manifestation of a primal need to explore, a natural impulse to fulfill a sense of wonder. To put it another way, I began to understand man/woman as a traveler by basic instinct, in fact a natural traveler. And the best of what we produce artistically is the result.

So, think of this magazine as homeport to an assemblage of writers, photographers, artists, musicians, poets, composers, essayists – people whose work I have come to admire over the years.

It is a place for them to drop their bags, stick around a while and let you in on their latest creations before they head back out to Tahiti or a martini in the backyard.

“Paris” Audrey Hepburn said, “is always a good idea.” My point exactly.

– Tony Tedeschi 1

Natural Traveler Magazine The Inaugural Issue Winter 2018-2019 Editor & Publisher Tony Tedeschi Senior Editor Bill Scheller Fiction Editor Lara Asher Staff Writers Ginny Craven Aglaia Davis Andrea England David E. Hubler Buddy Mays John H. Ostdick Pedro Pereira Frank I. Sillay Kendric W. Taylor Photography Annie Cappeller Katie Cappeller Buddy Mays Candy Tedeschi Art Sharafina Teh Web Master Will Rodriguez

2

Table of Contents Welcome to Natural Traveler

Page 1

Dedication

Page 4

Contributors

Page 5

Overtones Tony Tedeschi Les Paul Recording Guitar Frankie, The Bartender . . . Sorry, Mixologist Memoriam for Miriam . . . And Her Transgender Offspring The Vietnam War . . . Peace

Page 7

Email from New Zealand: Blue Grass in Kiwi Country

Frank I. Sillay

Page 14

Email from the Upper West Side: The Silver Club’s Early Retirement

Aglaia Davis

Page 16

December 7, 1941, A Date That Lived in Uncertainty

David E. Hubler

Page 19

The Bench

Buddy Mays

Page 22

When Trips Had No Advisors: Five Fleabags, and a Summer Night in Charleston

Bill Scheller

Page 24

City Streets . . . In Black & White

Photo Essay

Page 26

A Perfect Fit: A Marine Biologist’s Love Affair with the Coast

John H. Ostdick

Page 32

The Making of ‘American Road’ The CD That Almost Wasn’t

Pedro Pereira

Page 39

Any Time

Samantha Marie

Page 43

The First Day of July

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 47

Short Story

Anthony Germaine

Page 62

Who is Markus Fogg?

Page 64

3

Dedication Later in life, you begin losing friends with what seems like disconcerting frequency. Often you haven’t seen them in a while when you find out about their passing. That becomes even more difficult because attendant with the sorrow, memories begin flooding back and, in some special cases, you realize the friendship was a life-changing experience.

Joe Scott On October 12, 2016, aboard the Cunard Queen Mary 2 in the mid-Atlantic, the ship’s social director, Tommi Baxter-Hill, led my wife, Candy, and me to a special crew area near the stern of the ship. It was a somber moment for us. Joe Scott – my former business partner, a talented writer, author and above all a dear friend – had died in September 2016. Symbolically, his wife, Priscilla, had introduced us to Cunard and the transatlantic crossings, when she was VP of the company’s public relations in the 1990s. The memorial service for Joe was scheduled to occur while Candy and I were on our crossing, so we could not be there. Cunard made special arrangements for us to take part in absentia. On this, the date and during the time of the memorial near his home in Delaware, we said words to honor Joe, then each tossed a rose overboard. I always described Joe as the person you’d want in the foxhole with you. There was no way he would not have your back.

Don Bain I first met Don Bain in 1971, when he was contracted by American Airlines’ hotel division, where I was working, to help with a PR project that was beyond the capabilities of our small staff. Don got the assignment because he had worked in PR for American before he left to begin writing books. I knew him only by his reputation as a best-selling author. I was a young writer, with aspirations of following a path similar to the one Don had taken, but I had few creds, working full time at American and trying to establish a writing career in my free time. Despite the huge success gap, Don always treated me as a colleague, always valued my opinions equally with his own. His death on October 21, 2017 ended 46 years of our friendship. During that period, we collaborated on many projects. Nonetheless, I always considered him my benevolent mentor as well as my dear friend. His humanity was always front and center. By the time of his death at 82, he had written more than 100 books. Of all the successful people I have ever met, Don was the person least affected by his great success. A warm-hearted man, he was considered family by the members of mine. My daughters will each tell you they miss his hugs most of all. I miss everything about him.

Ave atque vale, Don and Joe, the world is lessened by your leaving. Natural Traveler is dedicated to your memories. You each would have found it a welcoming home for your art.

4

Contributors Blue Grass in Kiwi Country – Frank I. Sillay’s memoir of offering his talents as “a mediocre, but genuine Georgia banjo picker,” at the New Zealand National Banjo Pickers’ Convention in 1967.

Sillay who emigrated to New Zealand in the early ‘60s, was quixotically looking for some attachment to his southern U.S. musical roots, when he was drawn to a poster at a Wellington music shop, which eventually led him to the stage at the convention and a spot in the ensuing documentary of the event.

The Silver Club’s Early Retirement – Aglaia Davis’s poignant piece on her recovery from a painful and demoralizing riding injury and the rehab trail back to riding again via the most unlikely health club in Manhattan. “. . . when I needed the comforts of realizing that I had reached a new me: Disabled.”

December 7, 1941, A Date That Lived in Uncertainty – David E. Hubler’s essay about baseball’s role as a morale booster during World War II, after the initial uncertainty of whether there would even be a 1942 season after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hubler, the co-author of “The Nats and the Grays, How Baseball in the Nation’s Capital Survived WWII and Changed the Game Forever,” writes, “Baseball went on and did provide a needed morale boost just as FDR's green light letter said it would.”

The Bench – Author and Photographer Buddy Mays’s eerie story about a strange encounter with an old woman as he sat on a bench along the Pacific Coast Trail overlooking the ocean on a damp and windy day. “A memorial to some fisherman caught in a storm,” said the desk clerk back at his hotel. “Maybe the fisherman’s wife. She’d sit for an hour or two just looking at the ocean but . . .” he left to wait on another guest.

When Trips Had No Advisers – Senior Editor and Veteran Travel Writer Bill Scheller recounts his 27,000-mile carom around the United States, in 1980, researching the first guide to Amtrak’s routes and cities during the sunset era of the Great American Fleabag. “Most of the places I slept in had no chance of making it into the guidebook. The Miramar looked like a place Ralph Kramden might have taken Alice on their honeymoon.”

A Perfect Fit: Endangered Turtles and a Marine Biologist’s Love Affair with the Coast – John H. Ostdick’s in-depth look at the woman who has led the efforts to reestablish the nesting grounds for endangered sea turtles along the Texas Gulf Coast, especially the Kemp’s ridley turtles whose numbers had been decimated by poachers.

The Making of ‘American Road’ The CD That Almost Wasn’t - Creating a CD is an evolutionary process. For someone as talented and critically demanding as Pedro Pereira, committing to creating an album is an arduous decision, especially after you have gone through the process twice before. Nonetheless sometimes he just can’t stop himself as first one song, then the next begin to pull him along the road to “American Road,” a musical masterwork.

5

Any Time – With this exclusive sampling from her first collection of poetry, we introduce you to Samantha Marie, a gifted young poet at the beginning of a literary journey, whose beautifully crafted words we look forward to reading for years to come.

The First Day of July – Kendric Taylor’s stunning short story from the perspective of a young protagonist in the midst of World War I’s devastating trench warfare. Reminiscent of Hemingway’s finest war stories, Taylor writes: “He saw this with dreadful clarity, but it made no sense. He continued to move stiffly down the slope, the German machine gun in front working at the far end of the line, still not at the limit of its traverse.”

Who is Markus Fogg?

(See Page 64) 6

OVERTONES

By Tony Tedeschi

Arthur’s Guitar, Frankie at the Bar, Miriam the Car, the Vietnam War . . . Peace

Les Paul Recording Guitar Arthur clearly had a special relationship with this breed of guitar.

It was an odd request. I was selling my vintage 1971 Les Paul Recording Guitar. Les Paul had personally designed the guitar for Gibson and mine was one of only about 230 produced that year. He played it during his weekly gig at the Iridium club in Manhattan until he died in 2009, in his 90s. In addition to the half-dozen photos I had posted with my ad on eBay, Arthur Rodman, the prospective buyer, wanted me to send a photo of the area where one of the screws fastened the pickguard to the body of the guitar. I did so and he immediately responded that he was interested in buying the guitar.

Arthur’s home is in England, and although I had stipulated that I would only ship to a U.S. address, my wife and I had booked roundtrip transatlantic passage on the Queen Mary 2, to Southampton. The voyage was a few months away. Arthur said he’d have no problem meeting me in Southampton if I could carry the guitar with me on the ship. After paying for it, Arthur informed me that he would be staying with a friend in New York a few weeks later, and if I didn’t mind could he drive to my home on Long Island and actually play the guitar. I said, of course, and we met soon after. He told me that while my price was a fair one, these guitars were becoming more and more rare and the prices would continue to rise. I answered I was not playing it and was happy to sell it to someone who would appreciate it as much as he did.

But a questioned lingered. “A photo of a screw on the pickguard?” I asked.

7

“It’s where the first crack begins,” he answered. “Yours is the only one I’ve seen that wasn’t.”

Arthur clearly had a special relationship with this breed of guitar. So, I still offered to transport it in my suite aboard the ship, since that would be safer than his having to check it as baggage or try to stuff it into an overhead rack aboard a crowded transatlantic flight and he agreed.

As I sat in the lounge at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, waiting to board the QM2, holding the vintage case containing the vintage guitar, I was getting odd looks from a man across from my wife and me. It was one of those looks, from one of those people, with whom you are certain you don’t want to interact. To ward it off, I stared ahead blank-faced, speaking with Candy about anything that crossed my mind, interplay that she clearly found strange. Finally, he could contain himself no longer and asked: “You playing with the band?” I just smiled and shook my head. Having broken through, however, he pressed on. “I bring my puppet to the table for dinner,” he said, reaching into a carry-on bag and ferreting out a large, hairy hand puppet. “I entertain the folks sitting at our table.” Seldom at a loss for words, I wanted to reply, “that’s why my wife and I always reserve a table for two by a window,” but of course didn’t say that. I just smiled and said, “nice,” grateful that the call for my deck to board came over the PA system.

The guitar rested under the bed in our suite until we reached Southampton. We’d booked a day trip to Windsor Castle until the ship’s departure later that afternoon. I got some odd looks as I disembarked with the guitar case, but pressed on casually as if it were just another piece of carryon/carry-off baggage. Arthur and I connected via cellphones about timing and as the tour bus pulled into its spot in the parking lot near Windsor, I spotted Arthur, walking his dog around the lot, attracting adoring passersby. We chatted a while, could have chatted for hours, but Candy and I had to join our tour group heading for the castle. I handed him the guitar, we shook hands and Candy and I hurried off to join our tour group.

Months later, I got an email from Arthur, with a photo of what had become his collection of Les Paul Recording Guitars. (My former guitar is fourth from the right.) I’m not sure Les himself would have ever seen his beloved invention, in each of its variations, all in one place.

I play guitar for the sheer love of it, write songs because some inner force drives me to. Any number of my songs were composed on that Les Paul Recording Guitar. I met Les once, back stage, during a break in one of his gigs at the Iridium in Manhattan. A friend mentioned to Les that my father owned a nightclub in Queens, where Les had once lived, and my father had given Tony Bennett his first paying job. Les seemed legitimately interested. Asked the name of the place, he said he’d never been there, but didn’t let it drop at that. I told him my father had tended bar at any number of places in Queens and I named a couple until he said, “yes, I played there. I must have met your father.” The guy just kept at it until he could add something even warmer to my experience of meeting him.

When the time comes to part with a cherished possession, which has been a part of your life for some time, it is often the case that the money you can get from selling it is not as important as putting it into the hands of a new owner who will give it the respectful attention it deserves. Arthur was definitely the person for this particular cherished possession of mine. And we both agree, the process that transferred this beautiful instrument from me to him was every bit a unique story of its own as well.

8

Frankie the Bartender . . . Sorry, Mixologist ‘I have a big personality,’ he replied.

With an hour to kill before dinner and a Broadway play, my wife and I strolled along 47th Street until we were adjacent to Dutch Fred’s, “a Hell’s Kitchen Bar serving craft cocktails.” We liked the look of the place and the idea of a “craft cocktail.” The hostess ushered us to a seat about halfway along the vast expanse of a bar that looked like it could stretch across the lower 48.

The bartender sidled toward our stools from his prior position somewhere near the Kansas-Nebraska border and introduced himself as Frankie. “I’m from Long Island City,” he announced, as if we were somehow already in the midst of a conversation, then asked, “where you from?”

We said Long Island, but I explained I had been born and raised in Astoria, which at the time was also known as Long Island City.

That was good, Frankie averred, because Queens was the best borough. “People say Brooklyn,” he continued, “but Brooklyn’s not a borough. Brooklyn’s a brand.”

We weren’t quite sure what that meant, whether it might be metaphor more than simple declarative, but felt debating the issue would sidetrack a far more interesting discussion. We were sure, however, that we held no animus toward Brooklyn, be it metaphor, simple declarative or a brand.

Frankie poured my wife’s chardonnay. Conversation continued as he stirred (how unBondian) a Tanqueray Ten martini, straight up, very dry – a classic cocktail if there ever was one – pierced three olives, then poured every drop of the martini into its glass, filled right up to the rim.

“Impressive,” I offered.

“I have a big personality,” he replied.

Point taken.

He then recounted how he was a “mixologist.” He said he consulted on bar menu design, created his own craft cocktail concoctions, trained bar staff, was featured on TV programs and had won awards. One could get details of his services on www.theoleyway.com. Oley being his last name.

9

I told him my father had been a bartender, had his own place, had given Tony Bennett his first paying gig, since they were both from Astoria and Tony Bennett’s brother was hairdresser to the women in our family.

“Awesome,” Frankie said, as we drained what was left of our drinks. Frankie and I shook hands, we said our good-byes and headed off to dinner. I somehow felt my predetermined commitments were depriving me from one of those uniquely New York experiences, at least in terms of the uniquely New York subject matter. Nonetheless, theatre tickets costing what they do . . .

On the drive home that night, the play was already ancient history, while I kept thinking about the ways I had connected with Frankie from Queens, Frankie the bartender . . . excuse me, mixologist.

We’d had two connections I hadn’t thought about in years: my father the bartender and growing up in Queens. While I think of my father often, it’s usually of his later years when, as an adult, I wouldn’t make a major move without getting his advice. But that was long after his time as a bar owner and bartender. He’d even written a paperback book, in the late ‘40s, called, “Tending Bar Today,” with drink recipes of cocktails called sidecar, brandy alexander, stinger, even one called angel’s teat. He’d had it published by a friend who was a printer. I felt I should have mentioned that to Frankie. I know he would have found it awesome. My father was an amazing . . . bartender.

There weren’t designations like mixologist when he did his magic.

Then there was the Queens connection. I’d long since left that behind, as well. The denouement, or what I had thought had been the denouement, was a half-dozen years ago when I went to pay a visit to my boyhood home, across the street from Astoria Park, where I played Police Athletic League baseball as a teenager. In those days, the house had been bordered on one side by an empty lot that allowed for light through the facing living room window and into some of the bedrooms. But now the lot had been filled with a three-story rental property that had our old house pinned in so tightly I walked by it without realizing I had done so until my wife pointed it out: “isn’t that . . .?” It created such a can’t-go-home-again moment that I had effectively written off my childhood in Astoria until . . . there was Frankie.

Now the good times were flowing back: those baseball games where my triple in a key playoff game had put us in the finals; the early rock ‘n’ roll band I’d started with neighborhood friends; my grandmother’s Saturday morning prep of the meat sauce (excuse me, “gravy), so aromatic it wafted into my bedroom like the ultimate wakeup kiss; the sheer joy of living across the street from such a bucolic park setting it made the scenes of the crowded neighborhoods in Manhattan, Bronx and Brooklyn – yes, Brooklyn – nolo contendere for the title of best borough. Staten Island? In the late ’40 and early ‘50s, Staten Island may as well have been part of the Islets of the Langerhans. I seem to remember it had less than 20,000 inhabitants. And, anyway, we beat them in the PAL playoff tournament.

For years, I have come to realize I have become a writer, a memoirist, a journalist because, for some reason, people talk to me. And I have a sincere interest to hear their stories, an innate joy in what it is they have to say. It happens to me at bars, of course, but almost anywhere else, as well.

When I checked out Frankie’s website and watched him craft, I was sorry I had opted for just a martini. Oh well, next time in Manhattan for a play with some time to kill . . .

10

Memoriam for Miriam . . . And Her Transgender Offspring Of course, I am proud of him – or her – as always.

Photo by Annie Cappeller

A tow truck from Kars for Kids came on a chilly December morning and picked up the 1998 Toyota Avalon at the Cappeller house in Mineola, Long Island. Our granddaughter, Katie Cappeller, had named the Avalon Miriam when she started driving her after her mother, Annie, had finished with the car.

Candy and I had bought the Avalon new after a test drive, during which the ride was smooth as silk, so we stopped looking for any other car. We wanted a smooth ride for the hours-long drives from our home on Long Island to Newport-News, Virginia, where the Cappellers were living and our son-in-law, Eric, was an engineer at the Navy’s ship-building operation there. Staying connected with Katie and her parents was a major magnet for those drives, especially since Katie was our first grandchild, the first of more great ones to come.

After 102,000 miles, Candy and I moved on to a new Acura. In the interim years, the Cappellers had relocated back to Long Island and Annie took over the Avalon. She boosted the odometer to more than 200,000 miles before turning it over to Katie, who drove it until the night before that morning in December, including three years of demanding winters at the University of Vermont, from which she graduated, then moved on to New York Law School.

The Avalon ended up with just under 300,00 miles on it. So, a car we bought to go visit Katie and her parents, 20 years before, served three generations of our family, including the toddler we drove it to visit who became its adult driver for the final years of its lifespan.

To replace Miriam, Katie took over my 2007 Mustang, which she has named Roxy. After more than 10 years, I just discovered my muscle car is coming out as transgender. Of course, I am proud of him – or her – as always.

So, here’s to you Miriam. Candy and I will rejoin you some day to ride along that Heavenly Highway in the sky. We’re sure the ride will be every bit as smooth as that first test drive on Long Island.

11

The Vietnam War . . . Peace What made the experience extraordinary was a brief encounter with the hostess . . .

Last year during a visit to Scotland, my wife, Candy, and I stayed at the Waldorf Astoria Caledonian in Edinburgh, a lovely hotel. Suffering the expected effects of jetlag, we opted to not venture too far for our first evening’s dinner. The concierge suggested that the Galvin Brasserie de Luxe, on the ground floor of the hotel, would not disappoint. He was right. In no way did our unwillingness to wander afar diminish our first-night dining experience. The food and service were excellent. But what made the experience extraordinary for me was a brief encounter with the hostess.

A very personable young woman, she clearly had a command of her duties: the full extent of the menu, the specials, the wine list, her particular recommendations, etc. She said she was a foreign student in Scotland, earning her degree in hotel management, which would allow her to work and pursue her addiction to travel, while perfecting her command of English during her time in the UK. I complemented her on the latter and asked where she was from.

“Vietnam,” she replied.

Her answer caught me off guard. While her look was clearly East Asian, I was expecting something like “China” or “Korea.”

Almost reflexively, I answered, “I was an American Air Force officer, during the Vietnam War,” immediately realizing that was probably not the best subject to pursue.

Without any sense of animus, she said, “My grandfather was a general in the North Vietnamese Army.”

This beautiful, intelligent, articulate young woman was the descendent of a man who was once purported to be my bitter enemy.

“I was drafted into service,” I said almost apologetically. “I was commissioned as an officer, but never was sent to your country, so I never fired a weapon in anger.”

“That was a long time ago,” she said. “I wasn’t even born yet.”

“Yes,” I said, “It was a long time ago.”

“I’ll send over your waitress,” she said, with one of those smiles whose warmth you experience when it is sincerely offered.

Back in our room, I kept replaying the conversation in my mind, juxtaposed with memories of the fighter base in New Mexico where I spent most of my four years in the Air Force helping to train new pilots to fly combat missions in the F-100 Super Sabre.

12

“Jesus, Candy,” I said, “my job was to help train fighter pilots to go kill men like her grandfather.”

“I know,” Candy replied, “I was there with you, remember?”

“If my efforts would have been successful, in the case of her ancestor, that beautiful young woman wouldn’t have been standing there this evening.”

“I know,” Candy answered. “I was there, too.”

Throughout our week in Scotland, we traveled hither and yon in the lakes and highlands regions, marveling at the dramatic Scottish landscapes and sharing the experience with tourists from other parts of the world, while listening to guides whose love of country was infectious and drew you closer to Scotland and its people. The diversity of my fellow travelers only added an exclamation point to my experience with the Vietnamese hostess. After decades of travel throughout the world, I have come to fully understand the importance of the travel experience, not for the landscapes, no matter how dramatic, but for my interactions with people from everywhere. Wherever I have journeyed, I have always found those with whom I shared a sense of camaraderie, members of a kind of brotherhood/sisterhood, which knows no national boundaries. Travel as the great unifier.

Over the years I have sometimes expressed it this way: “I have been to Fiji. The Fijians treated me wonderfully. If the United States ever declared war on Fiji, I couldn’t fight the Fijians.” I know I have used this highly unlikely example, half-jokingly, to somehow mask an odd sense of vulnerability for my deeper feelings. Not anymore. There’s nothing about this sense of humankind’s international connection that is even half a joke. The encounter with the hostess was the bookend of my wartime experience, making my peace with Vietnam.

Rainy Night, Greenwich Village, 1969 13

Email from New Zealand: Blue Grass in Kiwi Country I found a homemade fretless banjo in a junk shop across the street from Parliament

By Frank I. Sillay

It is my good fortune to have been asked to write the “Email from New Zealand” for Natural Traveler and seems appropriate that I begin by introducing myself and explain how I came to be here.

I was born and raised in Atlanta and exposed to education at the Sewanee Military Academy and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. While at MIT in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, I had a student job, which involved my learning about computer programming. I found this a lot more interesting that what was going on in the classrooms and made decisions on that basis.

Skipping forward, I woke up one day in the Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego, California.

The Cuban Missile Crisis came and went, filling me with fear, excitement, disappointment and, eventually, relief. By the time the Vietnam was in headlines, I was very clear in my mind that we had no interest at stake in that unhappy country and my attention became fixed on my scheduled discharge date of 13 December 1965. A couple of months before that date arrived, all regulars in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps had our enlistments extended by four months. I had recently read “Catch 22,” by Joseph Heller, and while most people saw it as a work of comic genius, it provided me with nightmares for a long time.

I worked my MIT contacts and got job offers in London, Colombia, Venezuela and New Zealand.

The last of the World War II Marines, who had spent a lot of 1943 in Wellington, were coming up to retirement and when asked they told me it was like going to heaven without the inconvenience of dying first, so, having already been to London, I took a job with the New Zealand Ministry of Works, which was launching a project to start using computers. in engineering applications and was recruiting experience programmers.

That’s how I got here. How I accumulated a wife, two sons and four grandchildren. New Zealand citizenship may become clear over time.

Reconnecting with My Music In 1967 I found a homemade fretless banjo in a junk shop across the street from Parliament in Wellington. It probably dates from about 1870. It needed strings and a bridge, so I went to get

14

them from a little music shop in town, where I saw a poster for the “First National Banjo Pickers’ Convention.”

I had previously had a look around the live music venues around Wellington, and found people playing Bob Dylan material, Peter Paul & Mary, etc. which I wasn't interested in, and I concluded the old-time string band stuff I wanted to reconnect with was unknown in New Zealand.

When I saw the poster, I figured somebody had seen something similar in an American magazine, and thought it would be a good way of advertising their upcoming pop music gathering. On the offchance I was wrong, I wrote to them, describing myself as a mediocre, but genuine Georgia banjo picker, and sought further details. The organizers were as skeptical of my letter as I was of their poster, but I ended up traveling the 400 miles to attend, the first of the four New Zealand National Banjo Pickers’ Conventions.

The Fourth convention was immortalized on film by a guy who was both a jug band musician and commercial filmmaker. The film as you see it was broadcast on the sole (at the time) television channel and then disappeared from view. The filmmaker has since died and his widow descended into addiction, but another fellow who appears playing fiddle in the concert finale tracked it down, and got it to the NZ Film Archive.

Ten or twelve years ago, I traveled around and interviewed lots of people, gathered lots of photos, ephemera, etc., intending to write a book about the Banjo Pickers conventions, but couldn't get it going to my satisfaction, so have given it all to the National archive.

A friend forwarded me the link to the documentary, and asked me a few questions about the conventions, and it occurred to me that this link is an easier way to distribute the original film to anyone who might be interested: https://player.vimeo.com/video/158066261 Eighty percent of my friends today, I either met at one of the Banjo Pickers' Conventions, or met through people I met there. I first saw Meg at the first convention, though we didn't really get acquainted until we were back in Wellington.

I expect I look so young in the film because of my discovery of the fountain of youth here in New Zealand. But that would need to be the subject of another Email from New Zealand.

‘Writing is easy. Just sit in front of a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.’

Red Smith, Pulitzer Prize Winning Sports Columnist The New York Times 15

Email from the Upper West Side: The Silver Club’s Early Retirement The Silver Club – with its eccentric elder men and out-of-shape ladies – cradled me at a time when I needed the comforts of realizing that I had reached a new me: Disabled.

By Aglaia Davis

It was May 2017 when I had what I thought would be my last bad fall from a horse, breaking my scapula. A weightlifter by morning – religious as the rising sun – I was quick into devastation at realizing that my “good arm” (the other suffered – and healed from – a broken clavicle, also by way of riding accident, in 2012) would not support my pushups each morning. Undiagnosed for a solid week before the 4th Manhattan Orthopod I went to got it right, I dragged myself to the New York Sports Clubs locations that I frequented each morning on the Upper West Side – West 80th and West 73rd – and tried to force myself through modified routines. But the pain was searing – too intense, in fact, to even endure basic cardio routines – and drove me out of the weight rooms I haunted almost in tears. By the day after Memorial Day Weekend, diagnosed with a shoulder blade fracture that had crippled – but, somehow, not torn – my left Rotator Cuff, I was assigned to a sling and relative non-mobility for 6-8 weeks.

I have never been a truly compliant patient. In 2012, my Orthopod forbade me from doing anything at the gym that strayed beyond the confines of the recline bicycle, though my rapid recovery never betrayed that I was using the revolving staircase two days after my fracture – arm in a sling – and in the weight room doing modified lifting not long after surgery. Perhaps because I was younger then, my healing was uncomplicated and the strength in my right arm returned at breakneck speed.

But the 2017 injury – inclusive of the wear and tear I had given my body through years of athletics and no rest – was not so forgiving this time round. Though my Rotator Cuff was seen by MRI scan as unaffected, the harm it sustained from the scapula fracture – and, for at least a week thereafter, my unforgiving if forced use of it – told a contrary tale. I could no longer lift; could no longer do pushups; and, like a beaten dog, could no longer show my face in the weight rooms full of the guys I worked out aside every morning for years without emotional distress. The pain forced me to realize that, for as long as it took, the left arm had to heal and that I, hard as it was, had to let it.

I cannot remember the first day that I discovered The Silver Club. Mind you, that wasn’t its real name. Its REAL name was New York Sports Club West 76th Street at Broadway, in a theatre building where you could blink and miss the little sign indicating there was a gym there. Down the stairs to the basement level, there was a miniscule club with a very (emphasis on VERY) small weight area, scant weight machines, and, in the back, a string of very limited cardio equipment.

The gym was tiny, but almost never dotted with more than a few silver-haired members looking to 16

get in a late morning ablution at the same time. It sported one (ONE) personal trainer. Air conditioning was rarely functioning and, even if so, just as rarely utilized by those in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, who called the gym theirs and found temps 80 degrees and above comfortable.

But let me rewind. At some point over the summer, my Orthopod prescribed me Physical Therapy, hoping to ease the pain in my Rotator Cuff that made simple movements painful. I attended PT faithfully, and was assigned weightless movements – that’s right, weightless movements – that I was embarrassed to perform in the “real” gyms I used to haunt. For a woman who once bench pressed 110 lbs., suddenly lifting my left shoulder against nothing but gravity – or performing a “pushup” against the wall while standing – seemed like a fall greater than from the steed I’d been riding in May. Enter “The Silver.” Whatever the day, I happened upon it and realized – like Eyeore with his popped birthday balloon and empty honey jar – that its “no there there” offering was absolutely perfect for a body in need of rehab. No one was at the Silver to even see me do weightless exercises, save for the woman doing the same thing one morning and marveling that we were both in rehab. Sure, some days there would be activity in the weight area, but never anything that made me feel sorry that I couldn’t partake in the lifting activities of old. The Silver Club – with its eccentric elder men and out-of-shape ladies – cradled me at a time when I needed the comforts of realizing that I had reached a new me: Disabled. Not seriously disabled, mind you, but disabled to an extent that, at some point, I realized I would never truly recover from. Sure, I would lift again, but only my own body weight.

When my injury reached its maximum healing – and it did, slowly but surely – my left arm was no longer strong enough to lift more than 40 lbs., and its shoulder no longer youthful enough to tolerate more than a few pushups in a row before complaining. I accepted the reality that my days of lifting with the “big boys” at West 80th Street were behind me, much like a racehorse’s finest hour is lost the moment she crosses the finish line in first place.

And so it was. The beginning of my semi-retirement from weight lifting began my affair with the only gym that I truly loved in my 20 years of Manhattan gym-rat-dom. I withstood the insults I heard about The Silver Club from people at the “real’ New York Sports Clubs locations (“That place is a dump”); numerous days without air-conditioning; and aged carpeting in the locker room, all without complaint. The Silver became one of the highlights of my weekly workouts, and a club for which I often came up with slogans to one day advertise it by subway train (“Don’t Go Gray, Go Silver”), while concocting great ways to capitalize on its appeal to the retired set. After all, no other gyms in my neck of the woods catered to the “serviceably sound” crowd.

But The Silver Club – like my left rotator cuff – retired early. The rumors circling in September 2018 came to fruition in October, when a notice went up that The Silver would shutter its doors on Halloween night. In its final days, I visited as often as I could, overhearing the silver-haired set I had happily belonged to bemoaning which New York Sports Club location might be a distant second for them. I advised one such woman that there was no close second, because the reality was that all of the others in our area were “serious” gyms where the crowds donned workout shorts rather than jeans, and the weight room contained more than three (3) benches that could all be set up at once.

17

I bid farewell to New York Sports Club West 76th Street at Broadway on the last day of its existence, October 31, 2018. I snapped pictures of its empty weight room, me in it, to remind of the little gym that rehabbed me from my 2017 injury. I was even given permission to take a sign prohibiting cell phone use from the wall – a small something to remember it by. But I wouldn’t forget it.

In early 2018, I returned to riding. I have also since gone back to weight lifting – albeit to a modified degree – with “real” weights. In truth, I don’t regret my injury as I did when it happened, a little because it’s now a part of me, and a little because it taught me to slow down and learn to be satisfied with what my body could do. Oh yeah, and, at age 41, it gifted me with a membership to the only Club I would ever have chosen to be a lifetime member of.

R.I.P. N.Y.S.C. W. 76th a/k/a “The Silver Club”

Hot Dog My dachshund will trot some but mostly she stays nose down on the ground in the sun’s hottest rays.

And my dachshund gets hot sometimes by the heat vent under bed clothes she molds to a customized tent.

But my dachshund is not some meat roll you embellish with mustard encrusted in onions or relish.

While my dachshund’s so hot some think her dead where she lingers, if you move to remove her, she’ll tear off your fingers.

So when my dachshund’s that hot, son, don’t flirt with the morgue.

For ‘tis a fool who would cool off a very hot dog.

-- Artemis Boyard

18

December 7, 1941, A Date That Lived in Uncertainty The uncertainty surrounding whether there would be baseball in the new year. . .

By David E. Hubler

For most of us today, the Second World War was in black and white. But for those who fought the war it was in living color, often red. The war affected everyone.

From December 7, 1941, until the summer of 1945, one overriding emotion among all Americans, whether on the battlefield or listening to war reports on their Philco radios, was the smothering question, how will it end and when? The world had become a very uncertain place.

That uncertainty first became evident to me while I was researching my book, “The Nats and the Grays, How Baseball in the Nation’s Capital Survived WWII and Changed the Game Forever.” In Washington, D.C., the hub of the U.S. war effort, that bewildering unknown first manifested itself on an unlikely stage: the now longgone Griffith Stadium, which hosted the final game of the 1941 NFL season between the Washington Redskins and the Philadelphia Eagles.

Clark Griffith

The baseball season had ended in early October with a World Series triumph by the New York Yankees over the Brooklyn Dodgers 4 games to 1. Now, on that first Sunday in December, the 16 major league baseball owners were in Chicago’s Palmer House hotel for their annual winter confab. Among the main items on the agenda was Washington owner Clark Griffith’s request to double the number of night games each team could host from seven to 14. However, the uncertainty of the success of Griffith’s plan soon turned to a much greater uncertainly – would there even be a 1942 major league season?

At Griffith Stadium that Sunday, kickoff was scheduled for 2 p.m. By that time the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had already begun. As writer S.L. Price recalled in a 1999 Sports Illustrated article, “Bombs had already fallen on the U.S fleet, men had died, war had come. In the stands no one knew.” AP sportswriter Pat O’Brien was among the all-male press corps preparing to recount the details of a meaningless game on a cold, blustery winter afternoon. The Redskins were in fourth place, having lost their last four games and the Eagles were worse, losing all but three games that year, an improvement on their 1-10 record the previous season.

Just prior to the kickoff, O’Brien received a curt wire instruction from New York: keep the story short. When O’Brien queried the odd order, he received a second, less enigmatic message: “The Japanese have kicked off. War now!” Redskins owner George Preston Marshall promptly forbade the PA announcer from informing the 27,000 fans of the attack on the lame excuse that it would distract them from the game. But he couldn’t silence the many ensuing PA announcements that 19

soon cascaded down on the near frozen field, calling service personnel by name to report immediately to their duty stations.

As former Redskin quarterback Sammy Baugh later told Price, “We didn't know what the hell was going on. I had never heard that many announcements one right after another. We felt something was up but we kept playing.” (Tragically, for Eagles halfback Nick Basca, the game was his pro football finale. Basca enlisted in the army three days later. He was killed in action in France when a mortar shell blew up the tank he was driving on November 11, 1944, then called Armistice Day, commemorating the day when the guns of the First World War fell silent.)

In New York, a similar scene was playing a couple of miles north of Broadway at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. The New York Football Giants were hosting the now defunct Brooklyn Dodgers before 55,051 unwitting fans. Early in the second half, the PA announcer intoned, “Attention, please. Here is an urgent message: ‘Will Colonel William J. Donovan call Operator 19 in Washington immediately.’” Donovan, nicknamed “Wild Bill” due to his ball-carrying prowess as a standout running back at Columbia University, had been promoted to colonel and was awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism leading an assault on an enemy stronghold under heavy fire during the Great War. A 1917 Columbia Law School classmate of Franklin Roosevelt’s, Donovan had gone to London the previous June at the president’s request to confer with Britain’s leaders about that nation’s strengths in battling the Nazi war machine and to assess Britain’s urgent war needs. Now, as FDR’s national coordinator of information, he was being called upon again. For what, no one in the stands, including Donovan, knew precisely at the time. Was the PA request a coded instruction, telling him to call the White House? The War Department? A problem at home? Donovan hurried to find a phone. One year later, he would create the ultra-secretive Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA, which carried out espionage missions and aided resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The uncertainty surrounding whether there would be baseball in the new year – to say nothing about the game’s future for however long the war lasted – remained unresolved until the middle of January 1942. By then, several of baseball’s top players had already enlisted or been drafted, including Joe DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Ted Williams and Hank Greenberg.

On January 14, baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis penned a handwritten note to FDR asking the president if he thought the game should be suspended for the duration of the war. While the note seemed innocuous enough, it should be read with the knowledge that the two men despised each other. Landis, a dyed-in-the wool conservative Republican, hated everything the Democrat Roosevelt stood for and he publicly said so often. Roosevelt felt no love for Landis either.

With the U.S. entry into the war a little more than a month old, it’s difficult to believe the president had the time or desire to start a correspondence with one of his most vocal critics.

Kenesaw Mountain Landis

20

As I posit in The Nats and the Grays, we don’t know whether the president saw the letter as a trap to get him to kill the game and bring down the wrath of millions of American baseball fans, or even whether he replied personally. But he had the expert close at hand to do so in his stead. Landis’s query was best answered by his close friend and confidante Clark Griffith, first and foremost a lifetime baseball man. FDR's reply to Landis – which has become known as “the green light letter” – urged that the game continue because it would provide a good wartime boost to the morale of the American people. “Baseball provides a recreation which does not last over two hours or two hours and a half, [!] and which can be got for very little cost [!!],” he wrote. Then Roosevelt added, almost parenthetically, “And incidentally, I hope that night games can be extended because it gives an opportunity to the day shift to see a game occasionally.”

Could FDR have come up with that idea on his own? After all, the baseball owners had had no time to broach the subject at their Chicago meeting on December 7, much less bring it to the attention of the president in those manic first days of our entry into the war. With all FDR had to do, it’s likely he asked his old friend Clark Griffith, aka the “Old Fox,” to write the reply for him.

So, one of the war’s first uncertainties was answered. Baseball went on and did provide a needed morale boost just as FDR’s green light letter said it would. The last uncertainty was answered on September 2, 1945, when a Japanese delegation signed an unconditional surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. At Griffith Stadium on that Sunday, an overflow crowd of 30,143 fans saw the Senators and the Yankees split their double-header. Just as FDR had predicted, the longer of the two games lasted just 2 hours and 46 minutes.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again.

You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.

Joan Miro

21

The Bench

By Buddy Mays

‘ This is my bench,’ she said, as if I should have known.

Photo by Buddy Mays

I felt sorry for the bench. It was gray with age and neglect and sat way out here, all by itself, on the nail of a foggy, windswept, thumb of rock a hundred yards from the Pacific Coast Trail. With only the atonal squawks and shrieks of glaucous gulls and the grumble and swish of surf on barnacleencrusted rocks for company, I knew it must be lonely. I would have been.

When I got closer, I felt even sorrier for the bench. Battered and weather-beaten with two rusty, iron poles for legs, it reminded me of the battered and weather-beaten elderly folk who rambled by on the Coastal Trail every morning, canes clutched in arthritic hands, pulling their Chihuahuas, or bulldogs, or mutts — most of them as old as their owners — along behind. But no one visited the bench out on the point. It was too far from the path. The ground was too rocky, too uneven. For those elderly legs. For those elderly mutts.

I felt sorry for the bench because unlike the old folks on the Coastal Trail, it was immobile, deprived of the means to transfer its iron legs and chipped wooden seat to a drier, less-windy, nearer-to-civilization spot. There was no one out here to keep it company, not this close to the damp, windy Pacific. How long had it been since its paint-less seat had felt the reassurance of a warm tush? Or its rusty legs a stream of hot, steamy dog piss?

I felt sorry for the bench, so I did the humane thing and sat down. The wooden timbers creaked with contentment — I assumed it was contentment — but could only assume. I closed my eyes and let my tush warm the seat and listened to the surf grumbling and swishing against the boulders 20 feet away on the edge of the sea, and the gulls screeching from their perches nearby as they waited for handouts or opportunity.

“I beg your pardon!”

22

I jumped. There hadn’t been anyone nearby when I sat down. It was an old woman’s voice, creaky and insistent. I stood up, I don’t know why. Like a private stands up for a general. She was thin and wan and wore a ghost-gray hoodie. Her faded jeans stopped just above old leather walking sandals that looked to be from the time of Jesus. Strands of wispy silver hair snuck out from under the hoodie and a bony nose tipped with red coexisted comfortably with wrinkles and crimson spider veins on her face.

“This is my bench,” she said, as if I should have known.

“I didn’t know it belonged to anyone.” I found myself apologizing. “It’s out here by itself, kind of isolated. I didn’t think anyone ever sat on it. I know it sounds silly . . . but I felt sorry for it.”

Her face softened. “Oh he has plenty of company,” she said. “I sit here every day, sometimes for hours. It’s so peaceful. So inspiring.” She stared out at the ocean into the fog, moving her head slowly from side to side as though she were looking for someone. “I’m a painter you know.”

“I didn’t know,” I said, stupidly. “What do you paint?” More stupidity.

“Please make yourself at home,” she said, ignoring my question. “New company is always welcome. Besides I don’t feel much like sitting anyway. I think I’ll walk instead. Keep up the exercise, he always said. Live longer. Stay healthy.” She smiled softly. “Perhaps we’ll meet again.”

She turned and started back up the rocky path toward the main trail, a hundred yards away. I wanted to ask her who “he” was. I wanted to ask what she painted. But I didn’t. I sat back down and listened to the grumbling surf and the gulls. When I glanced over my shoulder, the old woman had disappeared into the fog. Like she was never there.

After dinner, I asked the desk clerk at the hotel I was staying in about the bench. She shrugged.

“Been there a long time,” she said, “memorial to some fisherman or other who got caught in a storm somewhere or other . . . out there . . . and didn’t make it home, least I don’t think he did.

Nobody ever sits on it because it’s too far from the trail. And windy too, way out on that point.”

I asked the clerk if anyone ever took care of it. “Brush off the rust or paint it or anything like that?”

She thought for a moment. “Used to be an old woman, a writer or an artist or something like that, who came every day. Maybe that fisherman’s wife, or mom, who knows. She’d sit for an hour or two, always by herself, just looking at the ocean. I used to feel sorry for her because she looked so lonely. Didn’t even have a dog. But she died a few years back,” the clerk added, and left to wait on another guest.

I didn’t go back to the bench. I won’t ever go back to the bench. It doesn’t need my company. It doesn’t need anyone’s company. I don’t feel sorry for it anymore.

23

When Trips Had No Advisors: Five Fleabags, and a Summer Night in Charleston The Miramar looked like a place Ralph Kramden might have taken Alice on their honeymoon

By Bill Scheller

I spent the spring and summer of 1980 on a 27,000-mile carom around the United States, researching the first guide to Amtrak’s routes and cities.

I had set out with a publisher’s advance, and with tickets provided by Amtrak. Since it was a small publisher and a small advance, my overnight accommodations on the trains were often more sumptuous than many of the hotels where I stayed. This was the sunset era of the Great American Fleabag, and most of the places I slept in had no chance of making it into the guidebook. That honor belonged to the few I splurged on – Chicago’s Conrad Hilton was nice, but I couldn’t keep spending $35 a night – or toured without checking in. But the fleabags live on, in journal notes and memory.

Since hotel websites and online booking were still unheard of, my method was to head for a library in each city on my route, check the yellow pages for the next city, pick out a likely cheapo, and turn up without a reservation. I doubt if anyone made reservations for these places, and they always had rooms.

That’s what got me to the West Court, on a cold May day in Denver when drizzle was turning to downpour. Ten dollars, seventy-five cents a night, bath down the hall. My room had a threadbare carpet, gray with faded roses, a drab green spread on the single bed, and a steam radiator that dried my clothes and suitcase in no time, but roasted me all night. The roaches liked it just fine.

I don’t remember my room at the Pioneer in Cheyenne, but I can still see the lobby, one flight up. There were deer heads and a Railway Express sign on the walls, big oak chairs upholstered in cracked brown leather, and an ancient black-and-white television. An old man sat sleeping with his mouth open. Another man was settled into a seat by the window, reading a hunting magazine.

Two faintly dangerous-looking young guys with whiskers bristling in every direction were parked like Gog and Magog in matching chairs on either side of the stairway. The only sound was the TV, which no one was watching.

The Miramar in Miami was recommended by a cab driver when I told him I planned to stay at another phone book find. “Don’t,” he said. “I stayed there one night and was afraid for my life.

Go to the Miramar – it’s where everybody went when they tore down the Y.” I took his advice and found a palatial hotel covered in flaking stucco. It looked like a place Ralph Kramden might have

24

taken Alice on their honeymoon. The Y crowd had nearly filled it – they had one room left, sixteen dollars, no air conditioning. Fortunately, there was a thunderstorm that July night, followed by a cool breeze.

At the DeGeorge in Houston, the elevator operator wore a revolver on his hip. His counterpart at the Midwest in Kansas City was unarmed, but – in only the time it took to creak up three floors – he told me he was the man to see if I liked to “step out with the ladies.”

But that summer’s most memorable lodging place wasn’t a fleabag, and I didn’t stay there. On an August evening, after rolling into Charleston on the Palmetto, I walked down to the Battery and stopped to admire an ornate white mansion. A faded sign at the garden gate said “Tourists.” I was already checked into a motel, but the place was too grand not to investigate.

I walked up the side steps of the verandah and saw two older ladies, one in a wheelchair. Her companion asked, “Are you looking for someone?” No, I said, just admiring the house. That brought the wheelchair lady into the conversation, and, after I learned I could have checked into her place for only twenty-five dollars, she somehow turned the talk to home remedies. “Have you ever had a charley horse? she asked. No, I hadn’t. “Well, if you ever do, when you go to bed at night, turn your shoes upside down. When you put them on in the morning, it will be gone.” Next came eczema, and ingrown toenails. “I want these remedies to be remembered,” she said. “They’ve been in my family for a hundred years.”

Alas, she had no home remedy for arthritis, which had put her in the wheelchair.

Train Trips: Exploring America by Rail ran through two editions, but it’s been out of print for years. I live in a small town in Vermont now, and every day I hear the Vermonter go by, southbound to Washington in the morning, northbound to St. Albans in the evening. But in my mind’s eye, it’s headed for the sleepy lobby of the Pioneer Hotel, for the faded old Miramar in Miami, and for a gingerbread porch on a hot night in Charleston.

Reflections of Evening, Flushing IRT, Queensborough Plaza, 1970

25

City Streets . . . In Black and White A Photo Essay by Candy & Tony Tedeschi

Via de’ Tournabuoni, Florence

26

Prince Street, Edinburgh

27

Bloor Street, Toronto

28

The Queens Walk, London

29

Columbus Circle, Manhattan

30

Americana Manhasset, Long Island

31

A Perfect Fit: Endangered Turtles and a Marine Biologist’s Love Affair with the Coast

By John H. Ostdick Photos Courtesy of the National Park Service

Donna Shaver, Chief of the NPS’ Division of Sea Turtle Science and Recovery For many people, life is a restless search for a particular place that fits.

Not so for Syracuse-born Donna Shaver. When she first came to the Padre Island National Seashore in 1980, the Student Conservation Association volunteer fell in love with her first taste of Texas coastal life and the notion of working to save an endangered species.

“It was a great match,” she says, smiling at the memory of her first day as a volunteer during undergraduate work at Cornell University. “I had never seen the ocean, and I had never seen a live sea turtle before coming here.”

The Gulf surf is thrashing as a spring storm front moves across Padre Island. Female Kemp’s ridley turtles, graceful as ballerinas in the water, lumber onto sand beaches, where they become awkward lurching creatures, pushed inland by nature’s primal impulse.

32

Despite an urban upbringing, Shaver grew up romping around in a nearby wooded area teeming with wildlife. She was close to her grandfather, an outdoor enthusiast who lived four houses away.

He kept pet birds, fed the neighborhood squirrels, and raised fish in salt and fresh water aquariums in his house. Shaver learned a lot from him and showed distinctly different leanings from her older brothers, who would become engineers, which baffled her parents.

Her first day on the job, she helped collect two live-stranded turtles and took them up to the nearest rehabilitation facility, the University of Texas Marine Sciences Institute. “My boss told me it was so unusual, but as they put the turtles in the tank and the turtles started swimming, I was hooked.”

And just like that, Corpus Christi, the largest South Texas coastal city at the mouth of the Nueces River on the west end of Corpus Christi Bay, became her forever home. In the process, an almostextinct turtle earned a staunch defender.

Suddenly, anywhere from the high tide line to the sand dunes, the turtles stop and start digging a hole with their rear flippers. They are virtually motionless for about 15 minutes as they begin dropping the smallest eggs of all the sea turtles — imagine about 100 ping-pong balls — into the nest cavity. They operate in a trancelike state for those 15 minutes, with their heads raising gently for breaths every so often. They’re oblivious to what’s going on around them.

Padre Island National Seashore, established in 1962, separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Laguna Madre, one of the world’s few hypersaline lagoons, and serves as nature’s resilient bodyguard. The park, which protects 70 miles of coastline, dunes, prairies, and wind tidal flats teeming with life, is home to more than 380 bird species.

“When I graduated from Cornell with this biology major — this of course was a long time ago — my father said, ‘Well, maybe you should apply for secretarial school so you’ll get a job somewhere.’”

She convinced him that she knew her heart.

The foundation of Shaver’s Texas Gulf Coast forever home traces back before her birth. In 1947, a Mexican engineer, Andrés Herrera, landed his Cessna on the beach in northern Mexico, and filmed an estimated 40,000 Kemp’s ridley turtles nesting in an arribada (Spanish for arrival at sea) in one day at Rancho Nuevo, Tamaulipas, Mexico. The film also captured images of people grabbing turtle eggs and nesting females.

Despite the attention the film attracted, widespread poaching of the eggs and turtles continued.

Even with the Mexican government passing legislation in 1966 to protect the beach at Rancho Nuevo and posting guards to stop the poaching, the number of Kemp’s ridley nests continued to plummet. By the late 1960s, the Mexico arribada fell to 5,000 Kemp’s ridleys.

In Corpus, a marine scientist, Dr. Henry Hildebrand, discovered the film in 1960 and founded a local herpetological community that began researching the ridley quandary, Shaver explains.

Biologists who began going down to the beach in Mexico found that the numbers of turtles nesting

33

in Mexico had declined precipitously, due to egg theft and the loss of juveniles and adults incidental to fisheries operations, primarily shrimping.

Hildebrand and a neighbor, Robert Whistler, chief naturalist at Padre Island North Seashore, helped galvanize efforts to deal with the Kemp’s ridley plight. The nesting beaches received protection. Other leading sea turtle experts and federal and state agency representatives from the United States and Mexico joined Whistler and Hildebrand to form the bi-national Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle Restoration and Enhancement Program.

The campaign and the program that guides it has taken a circuitous route in the years since Shaver joined the fight. She took on new responsibilities and grew with the effort, learning to write research grant applications and maximize sketchy resources.

As the Kemp’s ridleys proceed through the nesting process, they are completely vulnerable to predators — from humans to raccoons, skunks, badgers, coyotes, ghost crabs, or fire ants. When the turtles complete their tasks, they backfill the nests using their rear flippers while shooing sand back and forth with their front ones. They rock vigorously back and forth — boom, boom, boom — covering the nests. If you are standing there as the turtles are covering up the nest, you can feel the vibrations in the sand through your feet and up your legs. People who witness this stage often later tell seashore staff that they saw a turtle dancing on the beach. That’s a good way to describe their movements. That means there’s a nest there.

Padre Island National Seashore began efforts to save and recover sea turtles, which spend 99% of their time in the water and can travel thousands of miles, in the 1970s. The NPS led the formation of a bi-national program to restore the Kemp's ridley. The species, which once nested from Mustang Island, Texas, to Vera Cruz, Mexico, is the world’s most endangered sea turtle. Since the 1970s, staff and volunteers at Padre Island National Seashore have worked diligently to recover the Kemp's ridley. The program also expanded to include protection and conservation measures for the other four threatened or endangered species that occur along Padre Island (green, loggerhead, hawksbill, and leatherback). Today, more Kemp's ridley turtles nest at Padre Island National Seashore than at all other U.S. locations combined.

“A 1974 Padre Island National Seashore Resources Management Plan sought to reestablish nesting by Kemp’s ridleys at Padre Island National Seashore, where it is a native nester,” Shaver says. “The historical nesting range is from Mustang Island south, and so a part of this program was this experimental effort to form a secondary nesting colony here as a safeguard against extinction.”

Yet, from 1978-1991, only 200 Kemps nested annually. Research and conservation support, protection of nesting beaches, the installation of turtle excluder devices in fishing nests, and federally protected status has the Kemps showing signs of recovery, as nesting volume has slowly increased over the past decade.

National Seashore staff or volunteers near a nesting turtle follow their training — stay back, watch her dig her hole and lay her eggs. These turtles are masters of camouflage. As soon as she turns to leave, the watcher places a distinctive marker next to the spot immediately. It can’t be left to memory. Sand is blowing in the person’s eyes and moments later that sense of place vanishes. The tracks are gone.

34

Kemp’s ridley hatchlings facing the sun at a release An early morning darkness clings to the National Park Service’s remote Padre Island National Seashore offices as Shaver, who today holds the titles of chief of the agency’s Division of Sea Turtle Science and Recovery and Texas coordinator of the Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Network, shifts her light frame gingerly in her chair as she shares insights of her work and town. A flareup of a balky back — a byproduct of “too many years of picking up large turtles,” she jokes — makes it a strain to talk at length but she soldiers on because she is passionate about her 38-year connection to Texas coastal turtles, and specifically the Kemp’s ridley.

Turtle images are everywhere — dangling, tiny gold turtle earrings that complement Shaver’s NPS green uniform, decorative turtles climbing up a lamp, turtle magnets on a mini-fridge, wood-carved turtles on her desk, framed news stories of turtles and Shaver’s program throughout the office.

During nesting season, from April to mid-July, National Seashore staff and volunteers watch for nesting turtles on Texas beaches. They carefully dig up the eggs and take them to the NPS station, keeping the eggs in sand, in boxes similar to beer coolers, until they hatch.

35

The number of Kemp’s ridley nests reached a low point of only 702 worldwide in 1985. In 2017, the National Seashore staff listed a record 219 Kemp’s ridley nests here, and a total 353 statewide.

When the female turtles finish their tasks, they crawl awkwardly back to the water. They swim away and never come back to check the nest. The eggs are on their own to withstand the elements.

Survival rates are daunting — unless staff or volunteers search out and carefully mark nests that are later carefully harvested and taken to the National Seashore labs for incubation in boxes.

Last summer, Shaver’s group, the only division of its kind in the National Parks system, celebrated the 40-year anniversary of the Bi-National Kemp’s Ridley Project.

She is quick to deflect individual honors for her work, stressing that many people and cooperating agencies work on the Kemp’s turtle’s behalf.

“I speak for the turtles but I want to stress this work is done by many people.” Shaver says. “I’m basically a very shy person, and was really unnerved by public speaking at first. But I learned over time that I have to speak for the turtles because they can’t speak for themselves.”

In February 2018, the International Sea Turtle Society, a non-profit organization founded in 1996 to promote the understanding and value of sea turtles and their habitats, honored Shaver with its Lifetime Achievement Award.

“Currently, Kemp’s ridley sea turtle nests have sky-rocketed from an all-time low of 702 nests in 1985 to almost 27,000 nests in 2017,” U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Assistant Field Supervisor Dawn Gardiner said at the time. “I believe, without a doubt, that Dr. Shaver’s hard work and dedication has contributed greatly to this recovery.”

Shaver is quick to note that while the Kemp’s situation has improved, there is still much work to be done. “We had a good year in 2017, but what I tell people is we haven’t won the Super Bowl yet, you know?” she explains. “There’s still uncertainty of what the numbers will do in the long term.

We could have a year of decline next year. We don’t know. So, it’s important that we continue to monitor and we continue to protect the nesting turtles and the eggs, and that’s just what we’re doing with the help of many people in the state of Texas.”

While staff and volunteers spend the winter months training volunteers to help with the recovery of most green turtles suffering from cold stunning incidents that run from the first week of November through the first week of March, staff members start patrolling for nesting at the end of March, and watch for green turtles nests through early November.

Visitors can see the protection efforts in action in the summer.

“June is a great month for visitors because typically that’s when our hatchling releases start,” says Shaver, who figures she has participated in almost 750 such events in 37 years. “We have about 25 releases of Kemp’s ridley sea turtle hatchlings — June through mid-August, depending on when the eggs are laid — at Padre Island National Seashore that are open to the public free of charge.”

36

Rangers watching hatchlings moving to water The agency will list on its website when the eggs go into its incubation facility and the projected release schedule. “We advise people coming from out of town to plan a time when the hatchlings from several clutches are due to be released. This will provide a safeguard so that if some of the hatchlings go into a frenzy (a hyper-active state where they are scratching inside their box) in the middle of the night and we need to release them immediately.�

Once the hatchlings start, Shaver and staff will overnight in bunk rooms adjacent to her office, as will volunteers in a trailer on the grounds. All the public hatchling releases are done at 6:45 a.m., as light can disorient the young turtles as they make a beeline from their hatching boxes toward the surf.

Shavers schedules the releases 2 p.m. the day before, and then recommends that visitors check back to a Hatchling Hotline to make sure that all the hatchlings don’t frenzy in the middle of the night. As many as 2,000 people have attended a single release.

A crowd of diverse people forms in the semi-darkness outside of yellow-tape borders strung along the beach. The chatter rises and falls as park officials explain what is about to happen. At sunrise, the hatchlings are carefully lifted from boxes on the beach and placed facing the water in the sand.

They begin a slow, dragging procession to the surf, leaving an odd-patterned trail behind. A few of the hatchlings will be carried over to the crowd so that everyone can get a quick up-close glimpse before making their own break.

37

“I hear these stories at every release — adult women and men, with tears in their eyes, will tell me that this is something they wanted to see for years,” Shaver says. “They’ll drive all night to get here, or they’ll come from out of state or from other countries. It’s just so heartwarming because by the time these releases occur we’re already tired. I’m up most of the night before a public release to make sure everything is set, tiptoeing through the facility so that my activities don’t cause frenzies.”

The turtles will swim offshore and then they’ll enter into drift lines of seaweed or debris, and they’ll float planktonically for about the first one to two years of life before settling in to near-shore habitats, either in the Gulf of Mexico, the bays in the upper Texas coast or Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, Shaver explains. Some will even go out the Gulf Stream and up the Atlantic Coast.

For all the hardships and joys Shaver has experienced in all these years on the coast, the warmest of her memories deal with her long-time companion, her dog Ridley Ranger, and his first turtle nest discovery. Her only regret was that she was on a beach 30 miles south at the time.

Ridley Ranger, who died last year, was trained in the Kemp's ridley nest detection and protection program. The staff was searching earnestly for females laying eggs on a Kemp’s nesting day (arribadas often occur when it’s very windy or a front is passing, covering up the turtle’s tracks in the sand). Staff members had found signs of a female moving from the water to a spot on the beach but five hours of combing the area had been futile. They called Shaver’s husband and asked him to bring Ranger Ridley to the site. He was able to locate the nest quickly.

“I was so proud of him,” she said. “We trained him and aimed to have him do this, and on his first try he did.” The dog became quite proficient at the task, and somewhat of a celebrity in publications and news reports over the years.

When she’s not working, Shaver and her husband like to walk their current dog on the jetties at Packery Channel. “It’s our natural aquarium; you can see green turtles swimming all round.” They drive on the beach between the seawall and Packery, and then to south of Baw Paw Pier, relaxing and letting the sea take away the day’s rigors.

Not far from Shaver’s office, a cotillion of Royal Terns posts themselves at the edge of the surf, consuming what the receding waves leave them. A gentle sea breeze carries kisses of salty drops and grains of sand.

The scene drives home one of Shaver’s recent observations: “I love living by the water, and couldn’t imagine not being by the water now.”

38

The Making of ‘American Road’ The CD that Almost Wasn’t Songwriting combines my two loves – writing and music.

By Pedro Pereira

My CD “American Road” almost didn’t happen. Several times. Somehow after a few false starts, I managed to record enough basic tracks to send to my coproducer for instrument and vocal overdubs and the album began to evolve.

“American Road” is a collection of songs about journeys – physical, emotional and spiritual. Perhaps the most challenging of the journeys was the making of the album.

A journey that seemed to go on forever.

In the end, finishing the CD gave me a real sense of accomplishment. The songs conveyed what I wanted to say and I’d achieved the sound I had envisioned in my mind’s ear. The mastered tracks sounded better than I dared to hope only months earlier.

I’m a journalist by training and writer by trade. Songwriting combines my two loves – writing and music. As anyone with a creative bent knows, converting your vision into a final product can be an exercise in frustration and a test of commitment. So it was with “American Road.”

Released in January 2017, it was my third CD and the second I recorded as co-producer. This meant laying vocal and rhythm tracks for each song using a computer and soundboard in my basement in Plymouth, Massachusetts and sending them to my co-producer on Long Island, Bob Blatchley, to finish them in his studio.

Bob is the magician who makes it all sound good. He lays the bass and drum tracks, adds guitars, brings in other musicians, and fixes my flubs. One song, “Run,” was embarrassingly mistimed in several places. Because the song has a lot of pauses throughout the verses, I kept hitting guitar chords a fraction too early or too late. Bob fixed all that.

Solitary Affair Songwriting is an intensely personal and usually solitary affair for me. Most “American Road” tracks started as a single line bouncing in my head until I sat down and picked up a guitar to see where it would go. The track “American Road” started with the line “I left the desert behind me,” which became “I left my fears behind me,” and the song built from there.

39

I wanted it to be a burst of energy, with a relentless guitar rhythm and an easy-to-remember chorus.

The same four-chord pattern runs through the whole song. I wanted to be able to climb on a stage with musicians who had never played the track, tell them, “Play C, F, Am and G in two bars all the way through,” and they would get it immediately.

Another song started with the line “The higher you go, the closer to the gods you get.” It was taken almost verbatim from a travel show I watched on TV. I grabbed a guitar, started picking some notes, and within 10 minutes I had the whole song, “The Things I Know.”

The higher you go, the closer to the gods you get The closer to happiness Don’t lose your soul even when you lose your path Then you can find your way back It just so happened the song piggybacked nicely off another I had recently written, “I Touched the Sky.” It had a similar theme, so I decided to use it as the last track, a spot that was intended for “Sky.” “The Things I know” gives the album a perfect closing thought.

The CD starts with the escapist romp that is “American Road,” as the protagonist embarks on a physical journey that on the second track, “Somebody New,” morphs into a spiritual voyage before it becomes the purposeful quest of track 3, “Find My Way to You.” Interestingly, “Somebody New” was supposed to be tongue in cheek, but ended up more serious than I had expected.

Writing is infinitely satisfying when everything comes together effortlessly, as in “The Things I Know.” To complete a song in 10 minutes with verses, chorus, chords and melodies, is truly a gift.

This happened with several other songs on “American Road,” including “Somebody New” (though one of the verses had bounced around in my head for several days) and “Amount of Nothing.”

The latter came to me under sad circumstances. On the night of the Newtown school shooting, I was watching the news coverage with a bottle of whiskey and a guitar nearby. I picked up the guitar and started singing what I felt. Twenty minutes later, I had the song. I never changed a word or note from the time I wrote it.

When I recorded “Amount of Nothing,” I wanted to give it the weight it deserves, so I added strings using MIDI, a musical instrument digital interface, that I intended to replace later with real instruments. My friend Andrew White added a gorgeous violin part. It worked so well together with the synthesized strings that I decided to keep them.

Lights Out Although not every song reveals itself in a burst of creativity – some take weeks or months to finish – writing is the part that comes to me more naturally. When the time comes to record, it’s more of a challenge. Sometimes my voice doesn’t cooperate. Or some guitar part refuses to sound the way I hear it in my mind.

I tend to record late at night. I set up my MacBook, open Apple’s GarageBand program and connect it to a four-track mixing board to which I plug in a condenser mic. For most of “American Road,” I used a vocal mic for the acoustic guitars. The instruments sounded richer that way.

40

When laying vocal tracks, I often turn off the lights. The dark helps me tap the emotion the song demands. Sometimes I’ll listen to the track later and decide there’s too much emotion. Or not enough. Perhaps the delivery is too flat. So I’ll keep redoing it until I get it right.

With “Amount of Nothing,” the vocal is a bit flawed and mistimed in a couple of places, but I knew I would not be able to replicate the emotion conveyed in the vocal I had, so I left it.

Creative Ambivalence Looking back, I realize I was ambivalent about recording “American Road” for a long time. Only in the last six months, between April and November 2016, did everything finally come together and I felt good about the work.

During that time, I had a creative flash that yielded three songs, “Somebody New,” “I Touched the Sky” and “The Things I Know.” Without them, I don’t believe I would have finished “American Road.” The songs provided the ingredients that had been missing.

I previously had released two CDs, “Last Man on the Planet” in 2007 and “The Bayden Sessions” in 2013. I had intended the second one to be the last. People don’t want to buy albums anymore, preferring instead to download one or two songs at a time or sign up for a streaming service.

Streaming pays a pittance, which is one reason you see 75-year-old rockers still touring as if they were in their 20s. They can’t make money from sales, but touring is lucrative.

After “Bayden,” I had told Bob I’d send him a track or two occasionally, not to make an album but just to have the songs arranged, mixed and mastered – and perhaps I’d make them available as downloads. The first one I sent him was “Almost Heaven.” I had sped up and slowed the song several times, envisioning something a little grittier than what you hear on the album. But once Bob got his hands on it, the song became what it was begging to be, a beautiful ballad.

The sun grows bold behind the mountains Dawn breaks with a hint of light I wish I could bottle this feeling To keep me warm on winter nights The sky smiles on all its children And puts mortality on hold I wish I could safeguard this feeling And let it out as the day grows old Some time in summer 2015, Bob sent me the finished track. I didn’t send him anything else for a while, even though I had started envisioning a third album. Months later, Bob asked me when I was going to send him more songs. By then I had given up on making an album – for perhaps the third time. Or so I thought. Bob wouldn’t have it.

Figuring It Out Too many of the songs weren’t working. I had decided to discard several tracks, including the original title track, “Flies in the Honey.” Another song, which has been at the back of the song

41

drawer since I wrote it, “The Metaphor,” wasn’t happening either. I had attempted to record it for my first album, “Last Man on the Planet.”

“Find My Way to You” went through several versions, from acoustic funk to country rock to finally the bouncy pop rocker you hear on the album. It’s what the song wanted to be; I just had to figure that out.

Like some sand trying to become glass Like a new season redefining the past Like a stone that lay hidden in snow Or like sunlight looking for a window I will find my way to you Another song that saw multiple revisions was “You Don’t Mean It.” It originally had been written with the batch of songs that ended up on the “Bayden” album.

One day, I pulled out an instrument made by Seagull – originally called a Merlin but since rebranded as the M4 – and started picking some notes and strumming chords. The M4 is a dulcimer played like a guitar, and it is tuned to D. While playing it, I had the idea to use it on “You Don’t Mean It,” which is in D, giving it the unusual sound I believe is what makes the song stand out.

Track 5, “Punching Clocks,” wasn’t going to make it on the album, but my friend, Glenn Mori, kept pushing me to record it. So I did, but not before trying different rhythms and speeding it up to give it the energy it was lacking. It was reborn in the studio as a country rocker.

Guitarist Guy Pezzullo, who came up with the signature guitar riff on “American Road,” added some tasty guitar licks for “Punching Clocks” and my friend and fellow songwriter Rick Bonilla laid a harmonica track that makes the whole thing gel.

When Bob sent me a mix of “Punching Clocks,” I hated the vocals. This also happened with “Run” and “Find My Way to You.” So back to the basement I went to redo the vocals. It took multiple tries in each case, but I got it done.

Looking back, I realize creating “American Road” took less time to record than either of the previous two. If you discount the false starts of the previous two years or so, the bulk of the album took a mere six months to finish.

I am happy with the results. It was a worthy journey. Finishing the album was a homecoming, which perhaps explains the last two lines you hear on the CD:

If you go far, don’t forget where you come from So you can find your way home https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/pedropereira4 https://www.amazon.com/American-Road-Pedro-Pereira/dp/B01N21VYR5 https://itunes.apple.com/tt/album/american-road/1194713772

42

Selections from ‘Any Time’

By Samantha Marie

Playing dress up

Arranged In no order, On a glass tray, 18 perfume bottles Neighbor 9 colors Of nail polish Renting out The purple bowl I stole from The kitchen.

7 lipsticks Eager to call my lips home, Wait their turn Every morning, behind 13 brushes Preparing to begin the dance Up my carved cheekbones And around my undesirable jaw.

20 pairs of high heels Face forward in my closet, Whispering How much they adore The arc Of my calves.

I have all of these useless, crucial things To make me Feel pretty.

I have nothing That makes me feel pretty.

43

This Is Me Screaming Now

I was born a woman.

With two large breasts And a weakness between my legs, I am a woman.

With that, comes specific and mandatory obligations:

I have no choice but to look behind me when I walk alone.

To look behind me when I drive alone.

I must sit up straight and listen when my father tells me not to trust men.

A man.

I must apologize when I say no, but a man doesn’t hear me.

I’m sorry, I should have screamed.

I am the object of man’s desires.

He follows me.

He looks forward.

I look back

44

to all the women who were forced open and spread wide only to be slammed shut: Iron doors built and locked by men.

I am told to Relax.

I am pressured to Calm down.

To live in the ignorant little pink bubble blown from the lips of a man who didn’t hear me say no.

A man who doesn’t think That really does happen here.

“In this town?”

A man who doesn’t know any guys like that.

The doors of my home don’t have locks, locked by a man who didn’t hear me say no.

But Her doors do.

And so do Hers.

I can’t put my trust in the world.

Men told me not to.

Men were right about this.

From the Waitress’ Diary

My skin shifted around my bones like it didn’t belong to me while I served him his beer.

I wished To be able to unzip this costume disguised as me, but I spent an hour dressing its smile up this morning with blush, lipstick, and a skirt that twisted around my waist and squeezed Until my favorite color Red circled my hips If I could, I’d hang my flower petal flesh up in the closet and hide from the wink he lovingly branded into my nightmares “Thank you, Sweetie”.

My mouth filled up with insecurities like wet cotton balls were all I’d ever eat again, like I was no longer allowed to swallow another violent breath of air, only smile and spread for him.

I knew I had no time to grow wings and take off but Sir, please put my clothes back on, I watched you shred them in your mind.

Tell me, Sir if I were a man, serving you, would you touch my lower back again when you demand another beer?

45

Killing Sunflowers

I am the petal she plucked While she repeated your name.

You love her, You love her not.

Your name echoes with each kill.

He loves me, He loves me not.

I fell to the ground Alongside the other Torn, yellow petals

My small body laid withering, Loving him, Knowing there were more.

More just like me.

Breakable, Colorful, Beautiful.

A flower, no more.

46

The First Day of July

By Kendric W. Taylor

There was a moment of eerie silence, when they could plainly hear the birds, then the whistles sounded and the first waves of the British divisions rose up from the earth and began walking toward the enemy lines, the sun glinting off their bayonets.

The men sprawled quietly in long lines down the length of the sunken road. Dawn moved silently over the dew-covered meadow behind them. It would be another warm day, the first of July, and they looked forward to the morning’s heat after a night in the open. The men muttered and twitched uncomfortably, their equipment heavy and clattering, hobnailed boots furrowing the dirt as they pushed back against their heavy packs to stretch their legs. Most cradled a rifle across their arms; some carried various components of machine guns. The new issue khaki webbing over their shoulders held a collection of small ammunition pouches hung together vertically and a box respirator. Each of the men also carried a haversack, bayonet, entrenching tool, mess tins and rations, and other items of equipment.

The march through the night had been a long one, the dark tramping columns becoming lost several times, winding up to the front lines past pounded villages and blasted apple groves filled with rising green mist and burnt-out stumps, like black stinking cavities in a ravaged mouth.

The tired, muffled files of men passed endless supply depots and ammunition dumps spread across the squared fields on either side of the road. Some of the men turned their heads to look as they passed the big guns, seeing them lined hub to hub, the long barrels firing into the night, the

47

flash and echo blinding and deafening them. Further along tented Casualty Clearing Stations began to appear, orderlies outside digging pits by the light of dim lanterns. The men shifted their gaze back to the road. As they moved closer to the front lines, the wheeled traffic thinned out, then stopped. Finally, there was only the sound of the guns . . . and the silent, marching men.

Now, the night over, grateful to be off their feet, the men passed cigarettes and water bottles down the lines. Their sergeants crab-walked along the long rows, grunting last-minute instructions, checking equipment, growling warnings and threats. The officers huddled at the head of the column, pouring over maps, checking wristwatches by the rising light.

The young man sat among the others. He wished he might hear the waking birds over on the green meadow behind him. Dawn had come earlier, at 4:00 a.m., and now the noise of the bombardment, which had begun again in full force, shut out the tiny sounds of normal life, as it had throughout the night, as it had for the past week. He scratched absently at his leg wrapping.

Already the lice were at him, squirming in obscene wavelets in the lining of his sweaty woolen breeches and under the armpits of his coarse tunic. He could smell himself amid the odor of the others around him—unwashed bodies, unchanged clothing. He fingered his cartridge belt, checking yet again the ready clip for his .303 Lee-Enfield, adjusting the long bayonet scabbard at his side where it jabbed awkwardly into the ground. He looked ahead to the entrance of the communications trench, which led to the front lines up on the other side of the road. Over there crouched the unknown, a hell he could only imagine. Behind them, the guns continued to loosen an armada of shells that tore the sky above them with a terrible rushing sound, the deadly projectiles arching over their heads to impact a thousand yards beyond, exploding in multiple geysers, clods of dark, smoking earth and small rocks rising high into the air.

Down in the sunken road, the men could not see this, and quietly rested. The early light grew stronger. Over the noise he heard a bullfrog croak nearby in the lingering mist. It was a good sound, one that made him somehow feel safe. He felt surrounded by the men of his battalion, their familiar mud-brown uniforms, the heavy, round steel helmets covering their heads. It gave him a sense of familiarity, of solidity. And though he did not feel one of them, he felt oddly reassured nonetheless: Surely nothing could happen with all these men around him.

The young man watched as lines of soldiers from other units crunched down the middle of the road, crossing over into the mouth of the communication trench toward the assembly trenches and their jump-off points. He saw historic regiments: the Gordon Highlanders, their pipers silent for now, a glimpse of dark tartan under leather battle aprons. An Irish regiment followed, arm flashes identifying them as the Royal Irish Fusiliers. Up on the bank of the road, a cameraman set up his tripod and began to record the passing troops. The men along the roadbed looked at the lens curiously as the cumbersome box swiveled over to frame them. A few screwed up cocky grins, or waved their steel helmets. The rest smoked and waited. The older man next to him, following his gaze, nudged his arm: “Them’s the Buffs, Boy,” he gestured, his rummy breath ripe, gin blossoms spotting his nose. The fabled regiment moved past, led by a major with an imposing handlebar mustache. The boy nervously rubbed his own unit badge, a newly minted one of a Midlands Pals Battalion, raised to make up the terrible losses of the first two years of the war. He felt detached from it all, with only a dulled interest in the passing formations, just enough to maintain a grip on the present.

Reality was ephemeral with these men: the fact of what they were doing fading incrementally as they drew closer to the abyss of actuality. Each thought that none of it could be actually happening, certainly not to them. The boy felt feverish, his limbs aching as he stretched them, his eyes leaded with sleep. His mind drifted, seeking some warm corner away from the noise. The sun was already

48

slanting down the road, touching his face. He tilted his head back under the heavy helmet and felt the rays burn against his eyelids.

He was his mother’s son: slim, pale, light-haired, high-strung, with small delicate hands: a quiet person by nature, a follower. He had joined up with the others from his area, not really knowing anyone, not so much seeking comradeship, as not wanting to be the only one left behind in an ancient country town with all the young men gone. Fond of sports, he was not much good at them and preferred reading. His parents were older people—his mother married at a relatively late age in an era when girls betrothed right after puberty and bore children even faster. There had been a first child—a daughter—stillborn. His mother barely spoke of it, his father never. After the novelty of the boy’s birth, the father had returned his attention to work, which consumed all of his time and most of his resentments. He had little energy remaining for the boy: age, distraction, and lower class dignity imposing a faux majesty that hindered his movements when it came to childish romps. Once or twice he took his son outside on a lingering summer evening and taught him to throw knives at the dead tree just beyond the fence. The boy knew instinctively that the target bore images of demons only his father could see.

His mother was the one who filled his horizons, warm arms comforting after tumbles and scrapes, smiling and as cheerful as the Strauss waltzes she coaxed out of her gramophone—the wind-up instrument with the gilt leaf her one great extravagance. He remembered the first time he had been separated from her: She had gone over to the market town in the next valley with a friend, a day’s excursion. He had been left behind with the hired girl, inconsolable. He could have been no older than three, yet the memory remained vivid within him. He recalled too, his first day of school, his mother telling him later how she’d cried the entire morning during his absence.

Within a few years she was forced to find work, leaving him on his own, lonely games his diversion.

Evenings as the bells struck half-six, he sat on the stoop as the sun lowered, searching the lane for her, wondering what she would make for supper. During the long summer days, he’d fish the streams running down through the fields, a book at hand, his lunch wrapped for him by his mother in a linen square. The rod was a gift from his father—expensive, he knew—and provided only guilt for its extravagance. He prepared for no real occupation; as he grew older, a series of odd jobs provided his small contribution to the family’s welfare.

When his father had taken proprietorship of the stable in town, the young boy was readied for a career in the new family business. A morning with the hay and the huge, nervous animals triggered a terrible asthma in his immature lungs that not only ended his apprenticeship but also galvanized a move out of the drafty attached quarters to a comfortable stone cottage at the end of the village. Beyond the small backyard where his father tended a tidy vegetable garden, a muddy path led up into gentle hills overlooking the next valley. There the boy would sit, a towhead on a carpet of daffodils, a shabby Old English sheep dog his companion, gazing out over the valley at the hills beyond. He knew his father resented the move to the cottage; it could not really be as yet afforded, but the man said nothing. He knew also it had been his mother’s doing, a too-caring woman who could not bear hearing a small life lying in a narrow bed at night, damp with perspiration, lungs struggling for air. After an initial heady prosperity, his father was soon cursing the appearance of a few motorcars and lorries along the road, in a rural area already with too many stables. He’d glance about the smoky pub, picking out with a banker’s cold eye those who would be able to afford the new machines. They were the same men who made his living now. He’d lose them—the others didn’t matter. They’d never afford the new carriages, and many didn’t pay their bills anyway. Not that he would lower himself to ask. He’d return home for dinner, wash up, sit down before them in all his ominous dignity, and intone solemnly: “God Bless the Prince of

49

Wales and all the Royal Family.” He’d sit silent through the meal, jaws working, seeing the future deadly before him, grinding his enemies to pulp like the food between his teeth, a curling vein on his forehead pulsing.

The business began to cycle down inexorably: Outstanding accounts went unsolicited; creditors went unpaid. The family’s comfortable living shriveled and they began a progression back down through successively smaller houses, all too quickly ending in cheap, cramped lodgings.

A year into the war, the local brewery, fueled by the profits from pubs crowded with shift workers from northern Midlands munitions factories (undeterred by the new war-time drinking hours), purchased several enormous, internal-combustion, chain-driven behemoths to haul their huge barrels. Shortly afterward the father underwent what was termed a heart attack, which produced no ill effect beyond taking the fight out of him. He never worked again. The business failed officially, and horses and equipment were sold, leaving the family gripped by debt. Now he took long rambles along the country lanes, raising his derby hat with an ironic flourish to passing motorcars, poking at the sheep with his favorite walking stick. His father before him had been an agricultural worker, not even one of the yeomanry—with their tiny strip of hardscrabble—but a nomad of the seasons, tied to the landowners, unable to sign his name on his own son’s birth certificate. Nor could his father sign, nor his father before him. In the contemplative moments his furies allowed him, his thoughts stirred by a few pints of dark porter, his father would reflect back on the fact that he had been the first of the men of his name to read and write, and to have his own business. It took him off the tyranny of someone else’s land, and he was inordinately proud of what he had done. Now the poison of his loss seeped into his soul. The boy’s hope of attending any college disappeared, gone like the hired girl who once minded him. His attention in the secondary school in the next town wandered; his marks dipped as he daydreamed more and more.

As the pinch tightened, his father drank increasingly and grew nasty and abusive. His mother turned gray with care and chagrin.

The boy recalled a moment when he was small; his father had come to his room and sat on the edge of his bed next to him, under the tiny window framing the green hillside. He had put his arm around him, rubbing the boy’s head: “I heard you and mummy quarreling,” the boy said to him. “She wants you to stop drinking.

She was crying.” The arm dropped, and his father sat a moment, rubbing his knees with his strong, red hands. He turned and looked at the boy: “I told your ma, it’s not her business. I like to drink.”

“Won’t you stop for me, Pa?” “Nae, not for you, either.”

His father spoke quietly with some sadness, but the boy felt the wall rising between them and knew the man would never change his mind. He knew also his father would never sit with him this way again.

Rubbing his face now under the steel helmet, shifting his equipment vainly for a more comfortable position, the boy strained to remember his mother the way she was in the beginning.

His happiest memories were of her reading to him, popular childish things of the day, favorites he would ask for again and again. Soon she was trying Kipling, then Dickens, and Scott. He didn’t always understand, but the magic of Kim and Mowgli thrilled him; his throat tightened over tormented little Davey Copperfield and poor frightened Pip. Later, when he read these books on his own, with no less enjoyment; he would see the words, but they spoke to him in his mother’s voice.

In the beginning, she had despaired of his ever learning to read. When he was of age, he was dispatched to the local primary school, his dog walking him up over the dale to the single-

50

room building on a hillside under a solitary oak and then returning in the afternoon to wait for him by the gate when the last class dismissed. The others in his age level had already begun to read their way into small, simple primers, but it would not come to him. Then one day, he saw the words, saw them form sentences, the sentences forming pictures in his mind—and he could read.

He did well in the small school during those years.

As he grew older, he sat gazing, for months it seemed—stupefied by love—at a pretty, openfaced girl named Beatrice, staring at her pigtails, too shy to speak. One rainy, late fall day, he lurked in woods near her substantial stone house, just for a glimpse of her walking home. He took a chill for his vigil, which cost him a fortnight of school.

The schoolmaster was sympathetic to his reading, happy to lend books from his small library for the boy as he grew older, to take home to read along with his mother: Fielding, Trollop, and Thackeray, the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth. He was even allowed to read from the master’s pride: a five-volume set of the 1863 edition of Macaulay’s History of England.

Mother and son read together by the hiss of a dim lamp, she explaining those subtleties beyond his ken. Her family had left Yorkshire for Ireland in the late 18th century to work on the plantations in Ulster and had prospered, but the famine midway in the 19th century had reached even to farms in the north. The black potatoes dug oozing from the fallow earth forced branches of the large family to return to Yorkshire—as English as if they never left—where her brothers soon became drovers. It was there she met her husband, come north to buy horses. She was a woman of limited education, confined by standards of the day, which frowned upon much schooling for females, especially those of the lower classes. She felt this keenly, and sometimes too, her AngloIrishness, but she educated herself all her life and never bowed her head to anyone. She always had a book at hand, Jane Austen and George Eliot her favorites.

“I would always read to you on the small couch by the little bay window,” she’d tell him, referring to the cottage where they spent his early years.

“One day it was raining, the wind blowing it in sheets. For some reason, I got up and moved over to the chair by the fireplace and put you on my lap and opened the book. We weren’t there a minute when a huge branch came crashing through the little window! Enormous! Well! Glass went flying everywhere! You would have been blinded, I’m sure! At the very least.” She would pat his cheek, nodding to herself, the luster of her light blue eyes even then fading from tears.

“Something made me move!” She spoke in exclamation points and always concluded the story with the afterthought: “How it rained the night you were born.” He knew later that she spoiled to make up for the weakness of his father; her fears spawned from the memory of the girl that hadn’t lived. He was the child that would not be taken from her.

She had another story: of her new husband taking her to London when they were first married—a journey for a country girl akin to suddenly being plunged down in the midst of the Indian Kush. They stayed at the Waldorf and dined in the palm court (real palm trees!), and even more wonderful, a small orchestra played light tunes in the afternoon. She recalled the carriages drawing up along Aldwych Crescent and the rich swirl of the ladies silken gowns as they filled the lobby on their way to the theater. How she wished to return, just for one more afternoon—for one last waltz—she said.

So his mother spoiled him, to the annoyance of his father, to the boy’s guilt, endlessly embarrassed him by introducing him to acquaintances along the High Street or at the little shop where she worked for a few shillings a week selling trifles. At the same time, she was his rock and refuge. He had done so little to make her proud, ultimately winning no academic honors like the other boys. On the day he completed school, by evening his father had fixed him with a boozy stare:

51

“What’ll ye do now?”

“I dunno. Mum needs me.”

“More likely you need her—to keep spoiling you. There’s the army. The regiments are looking for volunteers.”

“You have to be 18 to enlist.”

“Some of the lads have lied and gone in at 15 and 16. I’ve heard they tell ‘t young ones to take a walk ‘round ‘t block and come back and say they’ve just had a birthday.”

“I’m not ready pa, mum needs me.”

“Weel, you barely put in enough for ‘yer feed.”

“There’s enough for ‘yer pub.”

“Ye leetle bastard.”

The last year or so, the son had been moody and distant when he should have been caring and open to her. Even seeing him in puttees and brass buttons did not offset the fact that the uniform was taking him out of her life, off to war and God knows what.

After training, on his only short leave before departing for France, he and his father had a conversation.

“Don’t say ‘na to her, but your mum’s taking this badly.”

“How do you mean?” the boy asked his father.

“Weel, for one thing, no young soldier’s safe walking through the village. Your mum’s right out there taking them in for sweets at Mrs. Taylor’s.”

“Why does she do that?”

“I asked her. She says she’d want maybe some other mum to do the same for her boy if he was alone.”

“Oh God.” “Bludy war.”

When the war had begun in August 1914, it had little effect on the family’s diminishing fortunes, one way or another. In the time it took for him to come of age, the conflict had swelled into a vast malignancy, eating away the regular forces, bursting over all of them. King and Country could wait no longer. He must do his duty. On a dark, January day in 1916, through rain dripping from the black branches outside the local post office, he had climbed the wet stone steps and joined the area Pals battalion. These were units raised by individuals and city councils so that neighbors and friends could serve together. Some were ethnic groups of Irish and Scots; others came from commercial groups, such as miners and railway men—the Glasgow Tramways Battalion, for instance. There was even a London stockbrokers unit and a Public Schools Battalion. All Pals together.

When his mob had finally switched from marching in civvies through the snow flurries, dummy rifles on shoulders, and had been issued uniforms and real equipment, it took only two days before his laziness was exposed: “That man there, last row,” the corporal bellowed across the square: “Learn the bloody drill or I’ll bash your flipping ‘ead in.” Then, turning to the rank of men, he added more conversationally: “Now lads, out at Mons in ’14, we fired five rounds a minute, rapid fire, with those there rifles, and Jerry thought we was bloody machine guns. Load, aim, and fire, boys; load, aim, and fire. Steady as she goes, and as fast as you can. That’s the ticket.”

Still, it took more than a dose of fear to get his full attention. The men had been issued stiff new ankle boots, hard, inflexible, unforgiving. With virtually no time to break them in, the old sweats said to club down the backs with their rifle butts to soften the leather. He ignored this

52

excellent advice and almost immediately had open sores blistering on each heel. He was given two days on sick call to heal, an ear-burning dressing-down, and cotton wadding to pad the boots. Then it was back to square bashing and literally a race to keep up. Fortunately, there were others who could not adapt to military life at all, and he was spared the full glare of exposure. He was used to anonymity, and came to realize that his faceless khaki oneness, among a thousand other faceless reflections, for once had value. They marched endlessly around the barracks square, the brown odor of the soft coal used to heat the buildings in their nostrils. He learned the drills and hid in the median. All the while he wondered on his situation – a member of a pal’s battalion without a chum.

On the last day at home, the small family attended services together, the boy awkward in his uniform and noisy boots, his father scrubbed and smelling of brandy. In their simple country church, on a sparkling Sunday morning, the doors and windows open to nature’s sounds outside, they sang ageless English hymns, his father’s voice deep among the others, the boys recalling without prompting the words from his childhood. In the afternoon, his mother packed several small articles for his kit, along with her miniature edition of The Mill on the Floss. She stood in the doorway as he walked down the street, smiling after him. He knew what the effort was costing her.

His father called to him from the door of the pub as he passed.

“Weel Boy, you’re off.

“Yes Sir.” “Does ‘tha have a lass, one of the village girls?” he asked.

“No, Pa.” “Ah, I didn’t think so, a mutt like you. Too shy and book-read. Still, you’re better off.

Worrying about some young baggage while you’re away is na good.”

“Yes, Pa.” ‘Well then, here’s my hand.”

“Good bye then, Father.”

“I reckon now I’ll have to go home and calm your mother.”

In the spring, recovered after a scare with Scarlet Fever that left him with a replacement draft, he embarked at Folkestone for the battalion in France. In Le Havre they lurched awkwardly down the ramp in the busy port and crammed into foul-smelling trains that wound around the ugly city and out into the green and brown farmland. At a distant railhead they unloaded—men and equipment—slung rifles, and began marching through the countryside. The land stretching flat and endless on either side was much like England, but here the young men were gone and the fruit rotted and the crops lay unharvested in the fields. On the far ridges they could see dense woods, while closer in birds called from a small copse of trees. In the heat of the afternoon dragonflies darted across the meadows. On the road the men struggled to adjust beneath their heavy loads as they marched between the tall poplars. They stopped for a rest break in a small village, where the men quickly gave away what items from their packs they didn’t need, to the bewilderment and delight of the inhabitants. Occasionally they passed a cluster of farm buildings along the side of the road, the sound of their boots echoing against the high stone walls. There were wide archways in the middle of the walls, and as they passed, the men peered through the high wooden gates at the stalls and cowsheds inside flanking the cobblestone courtyards. The smell of hay and manure was pungent in the warm air.

“Bloody fortress,” a man behind him observed.

“Mebbe Froggie’s scared ye’ll break in and mount ‘is ‘effers, Alf,” another man called.

The khaki lines turned southeast through fields rippling with late spring flowers, the troops singing occasionally under their still-heavy packs. They sang Tipperary and I’m ‘Enery the Eighth,

53

I Am, over and over, and Pack Up Your Troubles. Later, as they tired, they whistled There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding, the late afternoon sun slanting through the ranks, elongating their dark shadows along the roadside. Early in the evening, they halted at a small deserted village where the cooks were ready in the cramped main square with a hot canned beef and vegetable stew bubbling in large metal cookers. Afterward, they were directed to billets in the surrounding fields.

For the first time, they could hear the guns at the front, far off, like summer thunder. They lived in cylindrical tents, 12 men to each, sleeping on their ground sheets with feet pointed toward the center, their days devoted to endless practice for the battle ahead.

Late in June, they left behind their greatcoats, tied neatly in bundles of four, and took to the roads again. They moved almost directly south, still in the warm sun, the chalk dust of Picardy rising high in the air, then drifting back down to cover them with a fine white powder. The last two days they camped in fields and barns and marched at night, the men sloshing through the rain in the darkness, endlessly splashed by the welter of staff automobiles, horse-drawn wagons, lorries, and dispatch riders on motorcycles slopping and grinding through the mud down the middle of the road. Once, warning shouts came down the line and they spread out further along the sides to allow a troop of mounted cavalry to come trotting past, horses snorting among the jingle of equipment, lances stabbing at the rain. The great army conjoined at obscure crossroads, cursed and counter marched, then spun off to its assigned locations, its numbers increasing by tens and tens and tens of thousands. Within it was the cream of the new armies, replacing the regulars from 1914 : confident, keen to serve, marching toward the trenches and the white tapes laid on the ground among the poppies to guide them into the great battle.

In the sunken road, the young man sat quiet and solitary amid the maelstrom overhead, his mind clinging desperately to a spinning thread of reality woven with thoughts of home and his mother. Soon enough, his unit would take their place in the line. A light shower spattered the men’s helmets. They automatically covered over the firing mechanisms of their weapons with their arms but made no other stir. The rain stopped quickly, and he watched a brown rabbit ruffle its coat, then dart down a furrow.

At the great chateaux far behind the lines, red-tabbed staff officers, breakfast repeating discretely behind soft hands after an early mess, watched the minutes tick away toward zero hour at 7:30 a.m. Their bespoke uniforms resplendent above gleaming boots, they had produced cartloads of foolscap—the operational plan of the army—timed to the split-second, set down and disseminated in stacks of unwieldy manuals. The –nth Pals were in the second wave, set to go over the top at 7:40.

The barrage stopped at 7:30 precisely along the 13-mile front. At the jumping-off points, it took a few moments for the men to absorb this new dimension of their being. There was a moment of eerie silence, when they could plainly hear the birds, then the whistles sounded and the first waves of the British divisions rose up from the earth and began walking toward the enemy lines, the sun glinting off their bayonets. One unit kicked a football ahead of them. Back along the sunken road, the men rose stiffly at the orders of their sergeants, formed up, and moved diagonally into the communications trench. The boy was sweating profusely; his equipment seemed heavier and more awkward that it had ever been. A stocky, white-mustached staff colonel came down the road, calling out to them: “All right, Boys, this is what we’ve been waiting for. The barrage has done its work, the wire is cut, and the Boche will all be dead by the time you get to them. Even the rats have died. Best of luck, Lads. Wish I were going with you.”

“Bloody bollocks, you do,” one of the men muttered. Around him, the young soldiers grew excited, the voices pitching higher as they urged one another on, joking about what kind of flowers

54

they would lay on one another’s graves. The few veteran soldiers, brought in from other units for their steadying presence, said nothing. The men moved quickly under their heavy loads, turning up one communication trench before pausing in another that had obviously been there for many months. The stench swept over them, the filth seemed alive under their feet. He shrank from touching anything. On the way in, he thought he had seen a human hand—yellow and stiff like a chicken claw—reaching out from the earth of the trench wall. He had kept his eyes away. The brief shower had produced puddles amid the clay of the trench floor, the passing of the men chewing it into a mucous grayish-brown slop. His boots made horrible glopping sounds as the mud sucked at his feet. The man behind shoved him, and they began to move again, passing finally into the front line, this trench more like a ditch, dug below a sloping, grassy incline. The bottom was dry and littered with the debris of the troops but seemed almost fresh cut. They were bidden to halt, crouching next to the raw dirt of the trench wall. The tension pressed down on the men. His scrotum tightened and his bladder seemed to fill to bursting as their last few minutes ticked away.

He could not seem to hold a thought. He shut his eyes tightly to focus harder.

The air around them was sucked away in a colossal explosion bursting against their ears, shaking the ground madly beneath them, the blast louder and more powerful than anything any of them had ever experienced. He lurched against the man next to him, once, then again, as another mis-fired load of underground explosives went off very near to them.

“They’ve mined under the bloody ‘uns,” someone shouted. The first barrage from the German guns somehow passed through the opposite waves of British shells overhead and crashed down upon them, the pressure of the new explosions pounding against their chests like huge, deadly drums, the noise growing insanely around them.

The boy suddenly realized that he was dead. He was a tiny, vulnerable dot in the middle of all this. “I am but dust,” rushed unbidden, inanely, into his mind, something he had once read (Raleigh?), now jarred loose by the noise and terror. He knew with sudden, awful, dreadful certainty that he would die. Nothing could save him. Sweat pricked his armpits; his stomach lurched sourly into the back of his mouth; his throat felt filled with sand as he swallowed to push the gorge back, his breath shut off into short gasps. He saw red blackness in his mind where he wanted to see his mother, white hair, her face smiling at him, beckoning to him. He could not move. What did he know of war, of fighting, of armies and dying? He wanted to live. He wanted to see his mother; what would she do if anything happened to him? He wanted to see . . . wanted to see anything. Anything but this place. He did not want to die. Very much he did not want to die.

Oh God, please, he did not want to die.

The cannonading mounted as the Germans intensified their counter fire, the shells detonating just above them, the tack-tack of the machine guns now audible in the distance. The first wave had been sent, dressing right, as if on parade. Now it was their turn. The men stood up, adjusting their equipment, an almost palpable intake of breath racing down the trench. They grasped the parapet and ladders with one hand, rifles gripped tightly in the other. The boy still crouched on the trench floor, his helmet tipped down awkwardly over his face. The corporal scuttled over to him.

“Here’s a bloody lit’le coward. Get up, ya bleedin’ lit’le bastard,” he screamed. “Get up, or I’ll kill you meself.”

The Company Sergeant-Major moved quickly next to them, slinging his rifle. Above the embankment, the German bombardment crashed down on all sides, earth and pebbles dinging against their helmets.

“Get back to your place in line, Corp’l,” the sergeant said above the noise. “Now, Lad, get up, we can’t have this.”

55

The boy groaned softly. He could not stand, his rifle clattering to the ground. He sat slumped, legs crossed, ankle over knee at a right angle. His neck twitched uncontrollably, his head bobbed under his helmet. His intestines spasmed sickeningly. His hands hung limp at the end of trembling arms, the palms turned upwards. The sergeant hauled him to his feet, propped him against the parapet.

“Mother!” the boy cried inaudibly, tears squeezing from his eyes.

“Look, Sar’nt-Major, ‘e’s pissed ‘is pants, the fookin’ lit'le bugger. Want me to shoot ‘im?”

“Back in line, Corp’l,” the sergeant repeated quietly. “I won’t tell you again.” He stooped to pick up the boy’s rifle.

“Now, Lad, we can’t send you back,” he said, thrusting the weapon into the boy’s numb, yielding hands. “You’ll have to go with your mates. We’ve got one minute, and then it’s up and over.”

“Oh God, Mother,” the boy sobbed again, sliding back down onto his haunches. He could not get his breath.” He knew none of them; none knew him,” he thought. The noise around them grew in violence, the bright sun covered with drifting smoke, the explosions almost continuous, earth pelting down upon them. They heard screams and cries up beyond the trench as the bullets and shrapnel bit and ripped into the men of the first wave.

A subaltern scrambled over, whistle in his mouth, ready for the second wave. The Webley revolver he clutched tightly looked huge in his delicate hand. His blue eyes were wide with adrenaline. He was not much older than the boy, his face round beneath his helmet, cheeks flushed.

“Sar’nt-Major?”

“Lad’s a bit windy, Sah,” the older man replied. “Replacement.”

“Now, Private, this won’t do,” the officer said, crouching in front of the boy, looking into his eyes. “You must do your duty. The chaps are counting on you. What’s your name?” The boy told him.

The officer glanced at his wristwatch. “Thirty seconds, Sar’nt-Major,” he said, looking up toward the older man. He rose, touched the boy’s shoulder awkwardly, and trotted back down the trench, his shoulders hunched against the noise, the smoke and smell of cordite drifting across the sun.

The contact seemed to stir the boy, tears ran from his eyes. Again the CSM hauled him to his feet, turned him toward the attack, pushing him to the lip of the trench as the whistles blew: “All right, Lad, follow me. I’ll have my boot up your arse if you don’t.”

The boy clambered out of the trench to crouch on all fours, then rose slowly, fumbling his rifle to high port. He stumbled ahead, slightly behind the long line of men moving abreast into the smoke and noise. The barrage had moved beyond, and in the new silence the boy could hear nothing but a fierce, unrelenting howling that cascaded through his head. He felt no wound; there was none. It was just a hole in his mind, wind blasting through it. Thoughts appeared, senseless images taken up and buffeted, then blown away with a high piercing whine. He wondered if the screams were his own. At the same time, his vision was acute—brilliant, flashing images like sun off new snow. He stumbled and hopped through the wire fronting their own positions, a barb catching his trousers, cutting his hand as he pulled his leg free. The sergeant had gone ahead, and the boy trudged heavily forward on trembling legs, following the long khaki rows that stretched out on either side before him as if on parade. His boots—now finally broken in from the long marches— seemed detached from his body as they scuffled and crunched through a patch of dry heather.

Ahead was a vast open plain, green and yellow with clumps of wildflowers growing in the long grass. He had expected a terrible no-man’s-land of shell holes and twisted tree stumps,

56

pulverized ground that had been danced to death by the big guns. These fields were relatively untouched; no major battles had taken place here, the two sides a thousand yards apart, content until now to eye each other warily and fire an occasional harassment round. He saw an almost limitless plain covered everywhere with the brown lines of advancing infantry, fountains of greyishblack earth rising among them as the shells hit. Ahead of them the German positions shimmered in the summer haze, dirty-gray with smoke and explosion as the barrage continued to crash down upon them. Within the ranks, it seemed that, for every man moving, ten were now lying still in the grass. He felt reality drifting away again. He slowed under the weight of his pack. Directly ahead of him through the smoke and the perspiration burning his eyes he saw what at first he thought were bundles of faggots, tied off and left in neat rows for the harvest wagons. Then he saw the tartan— yellow stripe across the dark green. The Gordons, so strong and vital this morning, stretched out in long, regular rows, a kilt flipped, bare white buttocks twitching and bloodless, another on his side, pathetic scrotum sagging down his leg, obscene and lifeless. There was no blood; a single machine gun traversing down their ranks had cut their lives off at the waist.

He passed a man crawling back, who raised a bloody hand. His face was black and bubbling from an exploding shell, his clothes smoking, his feet shredded stumps. White eyes glared wildly at the boy, his jaw moving in the goo, his voice thick: “Aw, Jesus Christ, they’ve killed me. Oh God, look what they’ve done to me. Oh, the bloody bastards! Oh, the dirty bastards. Jesus Christ. Oh, Christ!”

He passed beyond the man, peeking at him from the corner of his eye; the terrible litany fading as the figure slumped in the grass. He was unable to look back, his shaking legs carrying him down the slight dip of the hill. The men ahead of him began to fall, by twos and threes, quietly most of them, unlike the shattered man. Blots of crimson appeared in the backs of their brown tunics, or helmets went flying in a red spray. They leaned forward and tumbled over, their equipment clattering. Some twisted to face him, eyes staring, then fell without words. All along in front of him he could hear the thunk and whump of the bullets smacking into the bodies, clanging into helmets. A fountain of earth erupted to his left and limbs ripped off and whirled away. Bullets and shrapnel flipped and hissed past his head. The row ahead of him continued to fall, sweeping from right to left, the bodies dropping one after the other, by the tens, the dozens, by the hundreds. The man directly in front flung his arms wide, the back of his collar a sudden red splotch as the bullet emerged and whipsawed past him in the air.

He saw this with dreadful clarity, but it made no sense. He continued to move stiffly down the slope, the German machine gun in front working at the far end of the line, still not at the limit of its traverse. The ground began to rise again; he felt it pull against his legs. The few other men near him began trotting up the slope toward the German positions, and he followed. This time they did not throw away their loads. He could hear them yelling, and he could see the German barbed wire ahead, untouched by the shelling, could see the orange wink of the machine guns.

The barrage had passed over the Germans and moved behind their lines, killing only a few. The Germans were dug in solidly; they were not dead, as the colonel had said. He could hear their bugles still sounding the alert. They had emerged from deeply fortified bunkers and were manning machine guns all along the line. Riflemen, and behind them the field guns, were firing in a deadly frenzy. It was his side that was dying; it was their side whose shells were dropping among the closely packed troops.

He looked around and saw how solitary he was. It had always been that way: God, I’m tired of being alone, he thought. His legs felt stronger and he had regained his wind. His pack thumped against his back and he shifted direction slightly to follow the men ahead, pushing to catch up to them as they approached the first line of German trenches. His mind cleared and he saw the

57

young subaltern look toward him for a moment, waving his pistol toward the troops funneling through a gap in the wire. Did he call his name? He felt a surge within him, steadying his limbs. He wiped the perspiration from his eyes with his sleeve, then gripped his Enfield tightly as he turned and trotted forward to follow the officer. He was aware of an enormous thirst, as if he had had nothing to drink for many hours. The machine guns began traversing back down the line, cutting into the men in the lanes.

The round that took him was not even aimed at him. It tipped the bayonet of a falling man diagonally ahead of him, altering its trajectory slightly upward as it tumbled faster than sound and thought toward his head, entering at eye level, just below his helmet, destroying his brain and most of his upper face. The impact jerked him backwards, and he fell slightly to one side, the width of his pack tipping him over onto his front, his legs twitching. He had no time even to realize the howling had stopped.

By 8:30 a.m. the attack had already failed—nearly 30,000 lay dead or wounded upon the field. By mid-morning, with 100,000 troops committed to the battle, it was apparent to everyone except the general staff far behind the lines that a holocaust had descended upon the army. As the sun dipped at the end of the long Saturday, the wounded that could still move began crawling back toward their own lines. Stretcher-bearers fanned out to meet them, passed beyond, gathering up the long rows like some unspeakable harvest, swamping the overburdened medical posts with bleeding, groaning bundles. In the evening, in the reserve trenches, the men listened to an unearthly sound rising from the battlefield—the moans and cries of tens of thousands of men, spread out in the grass, lying in shell holes, unable to move, hoping to live long enough for rescue, waiting to die.

All across the front, the role was being called among the living. The sergeants called the names, and if there was no answer, called it again. In a dusty support trench, not far from the sunken road where they had begun the morning, the soldiers of the –th Pals Battalion gathered quietly for muster. Put at ease, the few remaining men leaned back against the sides of the trench, or stood quietly, smoking cigarettes or pipes, silent and spent. When he called the young man’s name near the bottom of the long roll, the CSM raised his eyes as he repeated it, then, for some reason, paused for a moment longer, and asked: “Did anyone see this man?” Edmund Albert Fields?

“Which one was he, Sarge?”

At first, the reports had been of great successes along the Somme. The dispatches spoke of objectives gained, ground won, of strong points captured. Then in towns and villages all over England the casualty lists began to arrive. Page after page of local newspapers filled with photographs of young men killed, wounded, and missing. In his village, the telegrams began arriving from an overburdened Post Office, and soon there was not a street that did not have at least one house with its shades drawn. The church bells tolled all the day for its sons. On the channel coast of England, the boats began arriving almost immediately from France. The wounded were loaded quickly into trains, filling up hospitals all over England. The extravagance of the waste could not be kept a secret. On this single day in July, 60,000 men of the attacking British forces had fallen on the battlefield, 20,000 of them dead. It was a catastrophe from which even now England has yet to recover.

58

Well into the first week of July, still under fire, the wounded in the fields continued to drag themselves back toward their lines. Then gradually, movement in the fields stopped. The young man’s body lay out with the other dead in the long grass through the summer and into the fall while the offensive continued. Late in November, soft snow covered his remains, and in that cold winter of 1916, they remained undisturbed past Christmas and into the New Year. No man’s land continued to be that, empty of life, pounded by the guns as the battle lines moved back and forth, until finally, in the spring, there was no trace of the men that had fallen there, disappeared beneath the poppies forever.

In the city of Ypres, on the border between Belgium and France, a role of honor for the British Expeditionary Force has been chiseled into the granite archway over the Menin Gate, the beginning of the road that leads to the battlefields. It is dedicated and inscribed with the names of the thousands who died in those battles and who were never found. The young man’s name is there, one of the nearly 55,000 names of British and Commonwealth soldiers.

Each evening at five minutes of eight, buglers of the local fire brigade sound The Last Post of the British Army. The ceremony began in 1929, and was halted only once—from May 20, 1940, the day the German army occupied Ypres in the Second World War, until September 6, 1944, the day it was liberated.

Finally, he was not alone.

In the small village of his parents, his mother sometimes walked in the fields where her son had sprawled with his dog, where he had daydreamed through the long afternoons about life beyond the valleys and hills. She kept hope for him for many years, long after the armistice in 1918, long after the final missing who were coming home, returned from prison camps.

Gradually, her steps took her no further than the tiny backyard of her small dwelling. She sat, a book in her lap, her head craned over as she napped in the sun, her white hair a halo in the soft light. She slowly slipped away; her lovely smile still playing across her face whenever a stranger approached whom she thought might be her son. One day his father walked down the lane, through the village, and never returned. Some said he took ship for America.

In memory of 2n Lt. J. Lawrence McKeever U.S. Army Air Service 1895-1918

59

The War That Never Ended Kendric Taylor’s Recollections of the Family Quest, which Inspired ‘The First Day of July’

As a small boy in the 1930’s, one of my earliest memories is of riding next to my father in the front seat of our old Nash on our way to the stationery store to get the morning papers. It was a warm sunny day with a holiday feel, so it had to be either Memorial Day, or more probably the 4th of July. What is so vivid in my mind’s eye are the long lines of soldiers relaxing along the grassy meridian in our little village. Their uniforms had not changed much from World War One battle dress: still the wraparound puttees, high tunic collars and the round steel helmet. I’m sure this was a New York National Guard unit. An uncle had served in it as a major in the 102nd Engineers, and my sole photograph of him on maneuvers matches the memory. In those days, The Great War was still very fresh in everyone’s mind, and stories and remembrances from those years strongly echoed. Another uncle, an Army aviator, had been killed, according to family lore, while racing a train in Texas when his Jenny hit a telephone pole. Romantic to think so, but the sad truth was that he and another pilot died in a training accident, according to the Los Angeles Times of September 24, 1918, when their plane “went into a sideslip and crashed to earth at Love Field, Texas.”

My memory of the long ranks of men lounging along the green esplanade waiting for the parade to begin left me with two lifelong wonderments: an interest in learning about World War One and a great curiosity about my father’s family back in England, from whence we came. Would I have had any relatives in the British services in that conflict? I couldn’t ask my father, as he didn’t talk to his father, the one who had immigrated to America. My grandfather remained a stranger to me, even though he lived with my aunt’s family in Lake Placid, NY, not too far away. My father seemed little disposed to talk about his family anyway, and actually appeared to know or care very little about them. And, as I was later to understand, my grandfather was not noticeably informative either: he neglected to mention that he had left 9 (or was it 10) brothers and sisters back in England. (Your typical dysfunctional family: at the end of their lives, he and my grandmother managed to be buried on opposite coasts of the US, which seem to be carrying marital distancing to extremes). The few stories I heard came mostly second-hand from my mother, who knew him.

But as far as I can remember, nothing was ever said about the rest of the family. What other anecdotal information I have came to me later from another grandson.

Now grown, and despite having been to England any number of times, I still knew absolutely nothing about them; where they were from in Britain, what they did for a living. I tried to satisfy myself writing stories about them, including this short story, but it wasn’t enough and continued to gnaw at me.

60

It wasn’t until many years later – with the informational Godsend of the internet -- that two things happened almost simultaneously: I tracked down that cousin (whom I knew of, but not whereof, although we share the same first name), and I subscribed to a genealogy website.

And there it all was on my computer screen in flowing handwritten census rolls, birth notices and baptism entries dating back centuries. I saw that in 1881 my paternal great-great-grandparents, Kendric and Ann (née Bull) Taylor were proprietors of the Rose & Crown in Charleton Newbottle, a village in the English Midlands that has existed since the time of the Doomsday Book. Documents in the local Parish register reveal Taylors and Bulls getting born, being baptized and living right next door to each other in the 18th and 19th centuries, both sides with large families, all with almost identical given names.

For instance, I am named for my father and I found that he was named for his grandfather, who, with his wife, as noted, ran the Rose & Crown, which is still doing business today, I’m happy to say, with its own website. Although a long-ago relative married a Duke’s daughter, I must say the pub proprietorship impresses and delights me more.

The Taylor name itself I’ve managed to trace back to the mid 1770s, while the fine old English name of Bull goes back even further in the records to the mid-1500s and no doubt even earlier.

The young British soldier in the photo accompanying the story is Daniel Bull, Pvt., 1st Battalion, Duke of Edinburgh’s (Wiltshire) Regiment. He had survived the Battle of the Somme in 1916, only to be killed in action 30 May 1917 in Flanders, France. Born in Charleton-Newbottle, he was my second cousin once removed, as the genealogy states. His parents, William and Elizabeth Bull, had five sons: George, a private in the 1st Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment (29/36th of Foot), was KIA on 31 July 1917, near Cuinchy in Flanders, France. A third son, Albert Josiah, a private in the 2nd Battalion of the Wilts, was captured in September of 1914 in the Second Battle of Ypres, and was a prisoner of war in Germany until 1919. He claimed he never recovered from the bad food in prison camp, and died in 1930. As far as other family members who served: there are many more. Indeed, name of Bull in the British Army Index to War Deaths 1914-1922, runs for pages.

As I study my two-foot shelf of WWl books, I remember the several visits I’ve made to the actual battlefields (including a memorable stay with my two sons at a B&B converted from a rail station that served as a German HQ in the midst of the first day’s action), of wanting to write about it, and to finally discover a family tree that was a part of that conflict and whose roots reach back across the centuries in England, and whose branches hold dozens of families, both there and in the US. Standing quietly in front of those memorials that dot the countryside in northern France and Belgium, I had always wondered about my family, and if their names were there. Now I know a bit more, and have at last been able to put to rest most this curiosity that troubled me for so long.

As for the distant generations of families of the dead and missing in villages and towns all over England, the dull ache of those lost lives remains.

61

Short Story

The ones everyone called great he never understood.

So he took a course.

By Anthony Germaine

Art Simons was a successful copywriter for a big ad agency, but he hated writing copy for cosmetics companies. He wanted to write fiction. He wanted to publish a short story. He had been writing short stories for twenty-five years, without success.

He’d been reading them – seriously studying them – for longer than that, maybe thirty years. The ones everyone called great he never understood. So he took a course.

There were some wonderful writers in his class, unpublished but wonderful.

There was a young woman from England who wore leather clothes by Italian designers and an expensive Swiss watch. She wrote about Manhattan apartments and sailing in the Caribbean with her cat. She read her stories aloud with a beautiful British accent, which made everything she wrote sound lovely.

There was a New Jersey housewife, in her late sixties, whose stories were in a traditionalist style and she always had an elderly woman whom the other characters called, “old girl.”

There was a young man who had a very clean style. He did only the exercises – never what he would call a story – but his exercises always had a beginning, a middle and an end.

There were others: An under-nourished-looking, middle-aged woman who loved to write about running.

An older Jewish woman who wrote wonderful stories about elderly Jewish couples, who summered along the beaches of Long Island or in the Catskill Mountains and spent their winters in Florida. The men in her stories always worked as accountants or in the garment industry.

62

A partner in an importing firm wrote stories based on his world travels and his exhaustive research on each location’s history, customs, culture and contributions to the world at large. He wrote stories about skiing in St. Moritz and taking pictures in Nepal.

And there was the professor, a lady flowerchild from Berkeley and the Sixties, who had several anthologies in print and made helpful suggestions about how to improve a story. She was always very encouraging.

Art understood all their stories, so he assumed they could not be great stories and that explained, for him, why they went unpublished. He read for the class some of the stories he had written during the previous twenty-five years. The other students loved them, but Art didn’t care about that. He wanted to be published. So he wrote a story with enigmatic characters, interacting in an exotic setting, and no point at all: no plot resolution, no real character development, but twenty-three pages of the kind of good writing for which they had praised him throughout the course.

The readers, Art reasoned, will draw their own conclusions, fill in the blanks, make the story their own.

Art read the story during the final class. It left all his fellow students confused.

They said they didn’t understand it. He said he didn’t understand all those stories by famous writers that they and the critics had anointed as great. They said that was different; those stories were great.

Art Simons gave up writing short stories and became even more successful as an advertising copywriter, even winning a Cleo Award for a campaign he’d done on lipstick. One day he drove his Mercedes Benz into the concrete abutment of an overpass on the interstate. An obit writer did a short piece on Art. Art wouldn’t have liked it. The main character was not colorful at all, the settings of the story were less than exotic and Art would have had no trouble understanding the ending.

63

Who is Markus Fogg?

Fogg is the direct-line descendant of Phileas Fogg, who won a lucrative wager when he traveled around the world in 80 days in 1872, thereby assuring his descendants of at least some measure of wealth, should they carefully tend to his subsequent investments in Vanderbilt’s steamships and the lamplight potential for the black ooze that was forming the basis of J.D. Rockefeller’s new oil business.

Born to a mother who was consumed by the world-wise writings of the pseudonymous alter ego of Samuel Clemens, she first wanted to name her son Mark, but the two single syllables of the full name had a grunt-like tone she found unappealing, so, reluctantly, she opted for the more formal double-syllabic extension of the first name.

True to his names, Markus Fogg was born with an insatiable sense of wonder, traveling the world and writing about it, enabled by the versatility of the English language in all its embellishments: from straight reportage to a free-flowing, unfettered fiction, including a sequel to “Finnegan’s Wake,” an exegesis of “Paradise Regained” and a collection of short stories heavily influenced by the lugubrious writings of Flannery O’Connor.

Eventually, Fogg wandered into the attention of your editor, as this magazine was in its formative stages. He presented a portfolio that included his writings, photographs, sketches, some atonal sheet music, a range of poetry from silly rhymed ditties, using a half-dozen noms de plume, to a collection of near-indiscernible Ezra Pound-influenced cantos based on Middle Eastern and ancient Oriental formats your editor passed over with an affected “hmm,” lest he betray his ignorance of the artforms.

Fogg secured an assignment as reporter-at-large for the magazine, green-lighted to wander both near and far, returning to these pages in each issue from God-knows-where.

As he headed for the door, he touched the brim of his fedora rakishly, scribbled some lines in his notebook and mumbled something about rereading “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

“You read it, chief?” he asked, one hand on the doorknob.

“I remember disjointed phrases during a pot-induced fog in Greenwich Village during the ‘60s,” I replied. “Why do you ask?’

“Fog, hah?” he countered with an engaging smile.

“Oh,” I replied, “sorry.”

His smile broadened. He nodded and let himself out.

64

Natural Traveler MagazineTM is published quarterly each year as Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall issues in January, April, July and October.

A Web addition of the magazine will soon be available at www.naturaltraveler.net

La Paz Waterfall Gardens Nature Park, Costa Rica, Photo by Candy Tedeschi