Natural Traveler Magazine Winter 2022

NATURAL TRAVELER ® M A G A Z I N E V O L . I V , W I N T E R

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Finding The Light In Darkness

Photo by Kasia Staniaszek

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

Henry Miller

© 2022 Natural Traveler LLC 5 Brewster Street Unit 2, No. 204 Glen Cove, New York 11542

Table of Contents

Editor’s Letter

Page 3

Contributors

Page 4

Fogg’s Horn:

Page 5

Finding the Light in Darkness

Kasia Staniaszek

Page 7

Dark Night, Bright Lights

Jan Guarino

Page 13

Dispatch from a Locomotive Cab

Bill Scheller

Page 14

I Used to be a Gandy Dancer

Bill Scheller

Page 19

Far and Wide

Buddy Mays

Page 22

Close to Home

Janet Safris

Page 28

Musing on a Time Travel Hobby

John H. Ostdick

Page 35

Upon Reflection, I Loved Lucy, Too

David E. Hubler

Page 39

Thoughts of the New Day

Jay Jacobs

Page 42

The Fire

Frank I. Sillay

Page 44

Nights in Key Largo

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 46

At Sea

Tony Tedeschi

Page 53

Snowflakes

Sharafina binti Teh Sharifuddin

Page 13

Photographing Birds of Many Feathers

Cover Photo by Kasia Staniaszek

Iceland, midwinter, midday light

Editor’s Letter Finding the Light in Darkness . . .

On a trip to Iceland, in

2018, I gained a new appreciation for daylight, which barely makes an appearance during the dead of winter there. Nonetheless, the low angle of the light, which filters through thin clouds, produces dramatic effects, especially in its relationship to darkness. Our guide took us across two icy streams to a cave with walls coated in clear ice. The contrast of the flat light filtering in through the open roof of the cave glistened off the ice-covered walls, partnering with the grayed darkness to create a sense that we were inside God’s cathedral, lit with His heavenly light.

Light’s relationship to darkness has been a subject of wonder since the beginnings of human interaction with our environment. In this issue, Kasia Staniaszek makes it the subject of a personal journey to find the light

in darkness. Since light and darkness are ever-present everywhere, she needed travel no further than her immediate surroundings to witness its effects, the messages conveyed and the elements of interactions that themselves are ever-present, but invariably overlooked.

Once, deep in an underground cave in the Appalachians, our guides turned off all the lanterns and we couldn’t make out any part of our hands in front of our faces. It was terrifying. We need to know there is some component of light in the darkness we experience on a daily basis and that is what Kasia set out to uncover. What is revealed is a discovery of the extraordinary in the ordinary.

-- Tony Tedeschi

Tanner Park, Copiague, New York Photo by Denise Hanson

Contributors “Finding the Light in Darkness, a photographic quest by Kasia Staniaszek begins on Page 7, taking her wherever her camera and sharp eye for detail leads.

Jan Guarino’s lovely watercolor, “Dark Night, Brights,” graces Page 13, Bill Scheller’s lifelong love of train travel is on display in “Dispatch from a Locomotive Cab” and “I Used to be a Gandy Dancer” – beginning on Page 14.

“Photographing Birds of Many Feathers,” stunning photo spreads by Buddy Mays – “Fare and Wide” – and Janet Safris – “Close to Home” – begin on Page 22.

John H. Ostdick writes of his obsession with photographing the multiple personalities of mannequins in, “Postcard: Musing on a Time Travel Hobby,” beginning on Page 35.

David E. Hubler admits, “Upon Reflection, I Loved Lucy, Too,” explaining how he circumvented his boyhood bedtime hour to watch the TV show everyone in the schoolyard was talking about the next morning. Page 39.

Jay Jacobs applies his poetic gift to take us to “Thoughts of a New Day. (Page 42) How it all happened is revealed in Frank I. Sillay’s short story “Fire.” Page 44.

The protagonist’s favorite bar is the locus of activity in Kendric W. Taylor’s “Nights in Key Largo.” Page 46.

A short-term romantic interlude drives the drama for a shipboard dance host in Tony Tedeschi’s, “At Sea.” Page 53 Sharafina binti Teh Sharifuddin applies her artistic touch to “Snowflakes. (Page 64) Photos by Karen Dinan, Denise Hanson and Chris Lang are sprinkled throughout.

Fogg’s Horn The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus

The Point of the Exclamation Point.

Why is it that almost every sentence in almost every digital communication I receive ends in at least one exclamation point? The exclamation point has become the new period in emails and texts. Or is it a matter of the writer emphasizing, “I meant what I just wrote – really!” So, if there’s just a period there, you only kinda meant it? So, the declaratory sentence no longer declares with just a lame-assed period at its conclusion.

The exclamation mark, !, also sometimes referred to as the exclamation point, especially in American English, is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings, or to show emphasis. The exclamation mark often marks the end of a sentence, for example: “Watch out!”

What better authority than Wikipedia, the ersatz Webster’s Dictionary for the digital age, to explain this. Wikipedia’s choice of demonstrating the mark’s use in a two-word sentence also serves nicely to warn us where

this modern alteration has taken us, in this case an appropriate use of the punctuation mark. Yet, the correspondence I receive must always reflect strong feelings given their closing punctuation mark(s)! Say, what the hell ever happened to the italics as one way to emphasize strong feelings?

A global search through the oeuvre of my ever-lengthening writing career has turned up few occurrences where the mark was used, although I’ve never considered myself a milder-mannered practitioner of the language.

So, if the exclamation point has become the new period, where is the period off to?

Well, I feel we all know the answer to that one: it’s the otherwise-known-as “dot” before com, net, org, edu, et al and how would we navigate through cyberspace without it there.

So, digital speech, I say, take this. And

this. And this. This. This. . . . . . . .

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Winter in Pink and Blue Boardwalk, Long Beach, Long Island Photo by Karen Dinan

Finding the Light in Darkness

By Kasia Staniaszek

Editor’s Note: When we are drawn to consider light as an entity in itself, it is frequently to its dramatic incarnations: sunsets, sunrises, sparkle on the waves, the backlit aura behind autumnal trees. Subtle nuances are less apparent, of course, but still attention-grabbing: nighttime windowlight shimmering on a lake; how your shadow drifts or dances depending upon your position relative to a light source. But if light and darkness are the two complementary forces that make up all aspects and phenomena of life, according to eastern philosophy, where does the coexistence of these complementary components allow for interpretation on the most personal level? That is the journey Kasia Staniaszek set for herself: her interpretation of the light in darkness.

‘Liminal’ Morning. Suspended between two worlds, I’ve departed from one but have not yet arrived in the other. Sleep still lingers in my eyes as the sun asks them to readjust. Light has made its introduction, but I have yet to greet it back. Maybe after this cup of coffee . . .

‘A Daytime Inversion’ What do you do when what once cast a light in your life, now casts a shadow?

When can light become a source of darkness? A promising relationship that has run its course, a fulfilling job that you’ve outgrown, those happy hours drinks with friends that have become a little too frequent. The transitory nature of life reminds us to let go, even of light.

‘Keep Reaching’ In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

-- Albert Camus

‘Alchemy’ When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When life gives you darkness, you light it up. And when you’re in the process of “lighting it up,” you may come to realize that, in fact, the darkness is needed for light to shine brightest.

‘The Long Way Home’ Sometimes taking the long way home has nothing to with changing location but changing perception. Shining a light on a new perspective, the familiar becomes mysterious. Suddenly, you’re looking through fresh eyes down the road you’ve traveled a million times. And you realize, now, you’ve never quite been here before.

Dark Night, Bright Lights © 2022 Jan Guarino

JanGuarinoFineArt.com | jan@JanGuarinoFineArt.com 631-368-4800 Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | YouTube Tutorials Classes: in Classroom and Live Online | Workshops | Art Adventure Trips

Dispatch from a Locomotive Cab ‘Every day,’ Ethan said, ‘is a good day on the railroad.’

Story & Photos by Bill Scheller

Six thousand horsepower, and we were still having trouble getting traction.

Engineer Rod Smith and Conductor Ty Kahler were also having a hard time agreeing on the beauties of late autumn in Vermont.

“This is my favorite time of year,” Ty said. “With the leaves down, you see things you don’t see anywhere else.”

Rod had a different take on the season.

“Fall,” he piped in, “is the worst time of year for an engineer. “The leaves on the track are like grease.”

You might agree with Rod about fall, if you’re in command of nearly three million pounds of rolling steel.

It was a graying afternoon on the first of November, when just about every leaf in Vermont had hit the ground, and the rails. Rod was perched behind his engineer’s console as we trundled up a nearly twopercent grade just west of Ludlow, Vermont. Ty and I sat on the other side of the cab. We were riding shotgun on the lead unit of three GP38-2 diesel-electric locomotives, a quarter-million pounds and

two thousand horsepower each. Train 264, The Vermont Railway System’s daily freight out of Bellows Falls, was bound for Rutland.

But first we had to get the train over the leaves.

I live, in Vermont’s White River Valley where some of the first tracks in North America were laid. We hear the almost melancholy note of the locomotive horn at night and at odd times of the day, and we hear the rhythmic pounding of steel on steel.

At eleven in the morning and seven in the evening, we know it’s Amtrak’s Vermonter, but in the wee hours it has to be a freight train.

An economy on rails Freight rides the rails, and much of New England’s economy rides with it. “The railroads,” a locomotive engineer named Rick Wool told me, “are the cheapest way of getting stuff around in bulk.”

My Train 264 consisted of 30 covered hoppers, traveling to where they would be filled with commodities like crushed limestone, talc, and cement; plus two carloads of flour for Westminster Bakers, the cracker company, in Rutland. As freights go, 264 wasn’t a particularly long one. Rod Smith’s personal record is a nearly mile-anda-half train of 118 cars, and he once captained a train of tank cars filled with ethanol pulled by nine engines.

Putting a freight train together is an exercise in planning and precision – “an organized ballet,” Vermont Railway executive James Mattsen told me, using an unlikely metaphor for an industry that is anything but light on its feet. Freight railroading is a realm of lugubrious charm, where even the sounds and smells are heavy: the throb of diesel engines, the steel slam of couplers, the thick creosote aroma of Georgia pine ties warming in the morning sun.

I’d started my day at place called the Interchange, on the outskirts of Bellows Falls, where every day the Rutland train’s “consist”

– its complement of cars – is assembled.

“We never know what other railroads will be giving us until it’s almost time to make up the train,” says Mattsen.

This morning, the New England Central had given us empty covered hoppers; we left empty fuel oil cars for one of their trains. As I rode in a switching locomotive with Rick Wool and his conductor, Tim Dumont, we passed cargoes of plywood, cedar siding and shingles, and snaky sheaves of rebar. A lot of it had come a long way, all by rail.

“See those cars?,” Rick said as he pointed to a siding. “Two or three days ago they were somewhere up in Canada.”

Tim, who a few minutes earlier had emerged from the engine compartment with a foil package containing an early lunch he’d heated on the diesel, set about the conductor’s job of checking off the cars we were picking up against his consist list. “That one there must be ours,” he said to Rick, pointing at the lead hopper on the track behind us. “I think it’s an empty.”

“Go lift it up and see,” Rick shot back.

The steel ballet was finished by early afternoon, and Rick lumbered off with his switcher. Now Train 264 belonged to Rod and Ty, and to the three locomotives that would take us to Rutland. Rod slowly opened the throttle as Ty finished his radio report to the VTR dispatcher in Rutland, rattling off the date and details of the train’s consist and motive power with the speed of an auctioneer. The words “no hazmats” caught my ear. “That’s important information,” Ty told me when he got off the radio. “If we were carrying anything hazardous, I’d have let the dispatcher know just where in the consist it was. That way, if there was an accident or derailment that might involve a spill, the cleanup responders would know just where to go.”

Ty’s in his mid-twenties and wears a neat chinstrap beard. He’d been with the railroad for just sixteen months and says this is “the

best job I’ve ever had.” Rod had a few more miles behind him. Trim and just past his middle sixties, with a big gray mustache that would have done a Victorian railroader proud, he, too, started out as a conductor – but only after a career as a different sort of engineer.

“My degree is in chemical engineering,” he told me as we eased out of Bellows Falls.

“I spent over sixteen years setting up pulp mills all over the world, and training people to run them. When I retired from that job, I thought I’d try the railroad for a while. That was twelve years ago.” It had been twelve good years. ”As we say around here,” Rod added, “where else could we possibly go to work where we get paid to play with trains?”

Like all the men I met on the railroad – and outside the office, they are all men – Rod and Tyler had an attitude that is rare and special in the world of work: they’re well aware that what they do is serious and important and quite possibly dangerous, but they do it with a great sense of enjoyment.

Work or play, it’s a big job in a small room. The cab of a locomotive is a gritty little office, roughly ten feet wide and eight deep. Climb the narrow steel steps and head through the door, and you’re standing almost nine feet above the rails. The cab is spartan but surprisingly homey, with a good heater and, usually, a small fridge. An exterior walkway leads to the even bigger space where the 16-cylinder diesel and generator are housed -- a diesel-electric locomotive is a rolling power plant. The engine runs a generator that sends power to electric traction motors mounted above the wheels. There is no rest room, but there is that exterior walkway, and a lot of nowhere along the tracks.

The engineer stays at his console, but the conductor gets around a bit more. Freight train conductors are “our eyes and ears,” as more than one engineer told me. That means getting out and guiding backups and

stops via radio, as well as setting “fusees” – flares -- at road crossings if the gates aren’t in operation. At ungated crossings, the whistle gives the warning.

Train 264 broke ten miles an hour only after we left the yard. Rod received regular radio advisement of daily speed restrictions for each section of the route. These aren’t necessarily the same as the track design speed, but depend on conditions that vary day to day. The design speed for freights on Vermont Railway track tops out at 30 mph, except for a stretch of welded rail between Middlebury and Burlington where trains can hit 40, if conditions allow. The rest of the system operates over “stick rail,” the bolted separate sections whose small gaps give the wheels that classic clickety-clack.

‘Ever hear of Phineas Gage?’

Just east of Ludlow, we passed through a narrow gap in a rock ledge. “This is the Cavendish Cut,” Rod told me. “Ever hear of Phineas Gage? This is where the iron rod went through his skull.”

I’d heard of Gage, and his famous skull, but I was never clear on just where and how the accident had happened. Rod filled me in: “He was a construction foreman back in 1848, when they were blasting to lay tracks through here. He was tamping blasting powder in a borehole, and it went off. The tamping rod went into his face and out the top of his head – but somehow, he wasn’t killed.” Gage’s accident, and his subsequent personality change, advanced the study of neurology, and the functions of different areas of the brain.

At Smithville, just east of Ludlow, we dropped off a hopper at a talc plant. Talc is a bread-and-butter item on Vermont rails, as is salt; 60- to 70-car salt trains are not uncommon as winter sets in.

And then there are the odd cargoes. For Rod, the most unusual was a shipment of wind turbine blades, so long that they rode twin flatcars. “They were secured at one end,

and held in a sling at the other, so we could make the turns,” he recalls.

Odd cargos, and odd sections of track: A couple of miles west of Ludlow, Rod announced that “this is the only railroad in the country that goes through a ski area.”

Sure enough, we were soon passing an Okemo chairlift, and ducking under an overpass that carries a ski trail.

‘Hamburger Hill’ Just before we reached the Summit, we saw a doe and fawn browsing alongside the rails. “Moose, bear, turkeys, coyotes – we see a lot of wildlife,” says Rod. The deer kept a safe distance, but many animals aren’t so cautious. Cattle sometimes come to a bad end when they wander through broken fencing. Modern locomotives don’t have cowcatchers – and even if they did, they would be a cow’s last catch. There’s a stretch of track north of Rutland that railroaders call “Hamburger Hill.”

Wildlife and livestock aren’t a train crew’s most nerve-wracking encounters. Just as bad are people who think they can share the track. Rod recalls an ATV rider heading towards him, and, another time, a Jeep – “the guy was either on something he shouldn’t have been on, or not on something he should have.” Fortunately, the freight’s slow speed and a good line of sight ahead kept things from playing out badly.

It can be a different story running wide open on a Class 1 main line, where speed limits are a lot higher. “When you’re going 60, things can happen fast,” says Rick Wool, a veteran of CSX and its 21,000 miles of track. “One thing I always worried about was going through an ungated crossing just before another train heading in the opposite direction. Drivers would see me go by, and then think the coast was clear.”

“You wouldn’t believe how many people try to run a crossing,” says Rod. I told him about my own experience with a duel between car and train – a duel that the train

always wins. I was riding on Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited , clocking 60 or 70 through rural Ohio, when the train inexplicably slowed to a halt. Passengers asked the conductor why, and he gave the grim answer: a teenage driver had tried to beat the Lake Shore to a crossing. The two halves of his car ended up 100 feet apart. He and his two passengers were dead. A train that size, going that speed, takes a mile to stop.

We won the fight with the greasy leaves and topped out at a place called the Summit, in the town of Mt. Holly. This is the height of land on the route. From here, our progress required Rod’s fine touch on the brakes rather than the throttle. “Train handling,” he told me, “is all in the brakes – and knowing your terrain.”

“The leaves are bad enough,” Rod maintains, “but some of the diciest situations involve winter weather. Years ago I was working this route as conductor. It was snowing, and the brakes weren’t grabbing on the way down from the Summit into Bellows Falls. When you get deep, fluffy snow blowing around the wheels and brake shoes, they cool down and you lose braking ability.

The speedometer showed us doing 28, in a 10 mile-an-hour zone. Snow was blowing all around us, and we couldn’t see. I knew we’d be OK, though, when we stopped picking up speed. When we hit flat track, the brakes caught and we started to slow.”

On this run, the leaf mash on the tracks didn’t get us into anywhere near as bad a situation. East Wallingford, Shrewsbury, and Clarendon slipped by, and dusk had turned to darkness as we slid into the Rutland yards.

Two-thirty a.m. is a beastly time for a wakeup call, but the northbound RDBD, the freight run to Burlington, was leaving at four.

I climbed into the warm cab of another GP38-2, one of a pair heading 53 cars – 29 filled with fuel, livestock feed, and plywood, and 24 empties. Engineer Aaron Hahn drew back the throttle and we started off in a light

rain, passing the sleeping Amtrak Ethan Allen as we inched out of the Rutland yards.

Rob Silva, our conductor, was at his flipdown desk, doing paperwork by the light on his hard hat. Rob was a 19-year VTR veteran; Aaron had just passed 20 years of service – “this is one of those jobs where once you do it, you don’t want to do anything else,” he says. Aaron does do something else, when he isn’t at the throttle. He plays guitar and sings in a country duet called Two Bit Cowboys. One of their albums is mostly train songs.

An owl coasted low above the track ahead, seeming to pilot us as we left Rutland.

We picked up speed through Proctor, and at Florence, we stopped so Rob could throw a switch, letting us back in to drop off 16 of our empties at the OMYA plant. OMYA, the railroad’s biggest shipper, produces calcium carbonate from Vermont marble.

An average of 30 to 35 rail cars a day enter and leave its Proctor plant.

I asked Aaron where all that calcium carbonate goes. He answered that it “goes everywhere” – as a calcium additive in baked goods, in polishes, and, as a slurry, for coating glossy magazine stock.

As we sliced through a meadow north of Brandon, Rob shared a deer season memory that could only be a railroader’s. “Here’s where I shot a big buck, years ago,” he told me. “I got him from the locomotive, and that’s how we brought him in. They don’t let you do that anymore.”

Clearing Middlebury, we were on a welded section of track where we could run at 30 mph. We even hit 40, zipping through farmland near the border of Chittenden and

Addison counties. We slowed as we slipped behind the Shelburne Museum, tracked through suburban South Burlington, and slid alongside Burlington’s bike path on the approach to the yards. The northbound RDBD had finished its run.

Monstrous repair shop As Aaron and Rob decoupled a car, I walked over to the locomotive repair shop.

Imagine a garage that makes your car mechanic’s place look like something out of Legoland: here are 35-ton jacks, four of which – one at each corner of a locomotive – can lift body, cab, engine, and generator off the trucks, so workers can replace wheels, and service brakes and electric motors. I saw pistons the size of wastebaskets, wheels over a yard in diameter, brake shoes and connecting rods of mammoth proportions. A young welder named Ethan Lawrence showed me around, explaining that engines are rebuilt after burning through a million gallons of fuel (that’s nearly 600 fill-ups, at 1,700 gallons to the tank).

The shop is a world of iron and oil and monstrous tools, the farthest thing imaginable from e-this and i-that, yet just as important to the way things work. I left Ethan standing alongside one of his locomotives, like a proud stableman with a big coach horse.

Smiling, he left me with a remark that explains why this hard, heavy, vital world keeps working. “Every day,” he said, “is a good day on the railroad.”

Just north of Brandon on that Rutland to Burlington run, we lumbered along a section of track that I knew well, because I had helped put it there more than forty years earlier. Working on the railroad wasn't the kind of thing you'd do, in the words of the old song, "just to pass the time away." I did it for a little under three bucks an hour.

I Used To Be A Gandy Dancer It’s more a matter of the body simply knowing what to do . . .

As we hit a stretch of track near the town of Brandon, I recalled my brief career as a gandy dancer. No. I wasn’t part of a Chippendales-style dance group. A gandy dancer is a member of a track repair crew on a railroad. If the term has an archaic ring, there’s a good reason – gandy dancers are extinct, their muscle power having been replaced by machinery. But on the Vermont Railway and other small roads, fifty years ago, they were still indispensable to keeping the tracks in shape and the trains running safely.

There’s no sure answer as to where the term came from. The “dancer” part probably has something to do with the

rhythmic motions of the men who levered the rails into their 4’ 8 ½” parallel position -not part of my job -- but "gandy" could have originated with anything from Gaelic slang to a Gandy Tool Company, of which no one can find any historical evidence.

In the fall of 1971, newly married and freshly located in a tiny Vermont town, I needed a job to tide me through till I could qualify for the resident grad school tuition rate at the state university. Our landlady’s father, who lived next door, solved the problem. He worked for the railroad and got me a job on a track crew. Just like that, I was a gandy dancer – and I worked the same

section of the Vermont Railway I would ride in a freight locomotive so many years later.

Railroad tracks haven’t changed much since the first trains chugged across the landscape. Steel rails are laid across wooden ties (concrete is now standard on high-speed intercity tracks), which are set into a bed of crushed stone called ballast. The rails fit onto steel plates, which are in turn spiked onto the ties. Since both rails and ties have a limited lifespan – about 40 years for rails, 30 for ties, although the tonnage they’re subjected to can cause considerable variations – periodic replacement of both components is necessary. Rail is so heavy that new sections had to be dropped into place by machinery even during my gandy dancer days, but our crew was still replacing ties by hand.

Every morning, we’d head out of the yards at Rutland for the section needing new ties. The six of us rode a little open-sided diesel jitney that scooted along the track, probably having replaced the seesaw-cranked handcars you see in old movies by only a couple of decades. The foreman was a Sicilian with a heavy accent, a wiry little guy who was probably stronger than any of us, even a couple of big lugs who prided themselves on their ferocious swings of the spike maul. During the time I worked, we were replacing ties up near Brandon, maybe fifteen miles north of Rutland, and it was a pleasant, breezy ride of a half hour or so.

The next time “pleasant” was an operative word, though, was the trip home.

The foreman told us where to start, and we began by prying out spikes with long iron crowbars. Since these were old ties, the spikes were often loose and came out easily.

Next we’d dig out as much as we could of the ballast surrounding each tie. Once enough ties had been detached from the rails and cleared of ballast, the foreman would place a ponderously heavy iron jack under a rail, in the middle of the loosened section, and

ratchet it up with a six-foot iron bar. Modern rail weighs well over a hundred pounds per yard, so it’s easy to see why the bar working the jack had to be that long – and why the Sicilian had muscles. Next he’d repeat the procedure on the opposite rail.

With the rails bowed up a few inches above the ties, we gandy dancers would get to work with big iron tongs, like the ones icemen used to use, and wrestle out the old ties. With the same tongs, we’d wrestle in the new ones, which had been dropped along the roadbed by a crew that had passed through the day before. When every tie was in place, and properly imbedded in ballast, the plates would be set to receive the rails. Now came the moment of drama – and danger.

“Everybody away,” the foreman yelled, and we had no trouble heeding his warning.

He’d trip the jack, and the rail would slam down onto the plates and ties with a force that would treat the strongest steel-toed work boot, and the foot inside it, like an aluminum beer can. Once more, other side, and it was time to start spiking.

A railroad spike is six inches of iron, a giant square-sided nail tapered at the tip, with its head offset so that the protruding lip grabs the base of the rail as the final thwacks of the hammer sets it into the tie. The head is maybe an inch and a half across . . . and so is the face of the spike maul. In other words, aim is everything.

But perhaps we’re talking about a realm beyond aim. Aim is a combination of decision – where you want to land your blow – and skill, the ability to land it there. Raising a spike maul, bringing it back over your shoulder, and swinging it downwards with enough force to cause a railroad spike whose head is the same dimension as the hammer face to penetrate a creosote-impregnated block of Georgia pine cannot, in this exgandy dancer’s opinion, be reduced to an equation of aim and skill. No. It’s more a matter of the body simply knowing what to

do, without thought or aiming. If you want to get nerdy about it, you can call it The Force, but I tend to think more prosaically in terms of what a good baseball pitcher does. Take Sal Maglie, the Dodger ace who got the nickname “Sal the Barber” because of his ability to place a fastball so close to a batter’s face that it all but gave him a shave. Did Maglie aim those pitches? Or were they aimed for him by some inner alignment of mind, body, and will?

Of course, Maglie did hit a few batters – forty-four, to be exact, over the course of his career. And even a seasoned gandy dancer, let alone a rookie, will miss the spike sometimes. What do you hit when you miss the spike? Almost always, it’s the rail.

Remember those cartoons where a character swings a hammer, bat, club or whatever at a hard, immovable object and starts to vibrate from his hands to his shoes? I don’t think Chuck Jones or Tex Avery made those scenes up. I think they watched gandy dancers take mighty swings and hit the rail. I can feel my fillings rattle just thinking about it.

On a good shift our crew of six would replace maybe sixty ties. Railroad ties are generally a shade under twenty inches apart, so figure that we put a firmer footing under a hundred feet of rail each day. At that rate we’d cover less than a mile in two months, but that’s not entirely accurate because there were stretches where the existing ties weren’t quite ready for replacement. There must have been other crews working other stretches of track, but still, it’s easy to see why

there aren’t any more gandy dancers. The machines railroads use now lift the rails, cut ties in half and yank the pieces out from either end, slide in new ones, and smack in spikes with unfailingly accurate blows.

Concrete ties, of course, are another matter altogether, and there aren’t any spikes – and even on wooden ties, curved steel clips are often used instead of spikes.

At the end of the long day’s shift we would climb back onto our little jitney and clank back home, usually starting off with the indefatigable foreman’s cheery suggestion, “Let’s ago getta fock.” Fock, hell. We were almost too beat to lift a fork. As for me, I lasted less than three weeks. It wasn’t lugging out the ties and spiking new ones that got me – it was the day the boss in Rutland assigned me and another guy to the tie-dropping train, where we’d ride a gondola behind a slowly creeping locomotive, lifting ties from a pile and heaving them over the side for our gandy dancer friends to attack in coming days. By the time we got to the bottom of the pile, we were lifting ties over our heads and barely clearing the high sides of the gondola. That did it. Unless you’d been a college athlete in those days, you weren’t fit for that kind of work. No one I knew, myself included, went to a gym, or lifted weights. And railroad ties were weightier than most of the weights you’d lift at a gym.

I punched out at five that day and didn’t go back.

But I was once a gandy dancer.

-- Bill Scheller In All Directions

Join award-winning travel writer Bill Scheller as he gets lost in Venice, bicycles the length of Canada’s Prince Edward island, hikes England’s Peak District, and follows Columbus’ route through the Bahamas. These are just a few of the adventures that await in this selection drawn from Scheller’s thirty years on assignment for some of America’s favorite travel magazines.

Available on amazon.com

Photographing Birds of Many Feathers

By Two Masters of the Artform Human fascination with the beauty of birds has been recorded in art dating back millennia. It’s as if every conceivable color has somehow managed to appear in the plumage of some bird, somewhere. That collectors of this art are willing to pay vast sums for examples reached a pinnacle in 2010 when John James Audubon’s Birds of America netted over $10 million at auction, making it the world’s most expensive published book. “The 19th century masterpiece, replete with — count ’em — 435 hand-colored illustrations, has long been considered a crucial document about U.S. natural history,” Time reported. “The winning bid of $10,270,000 went to an anonymous collector bidding by telephone.”

Today, everyone with a cellphone camera is a photographer.

Photographing birds, however, is a particularly demanding enterprise, requiring camera cameras, with long lenses, the knowledge of where to go look, a great deal of patience and, of course, the eye of a practiced photographer.

The photograph spreads that follow are by two photographers who check all those boxes. They are examples of the ubiquity of birds and how accomplished photographers can turn that into photographic art: photos by Buddy Mays of birds from far and wide; photos by Janet Safris, all shot near her home in Iowa.

Buddy Mays “A few years ago, after many seasons of wishful thinking, I finally purchased a true ‘bird lens’ for my camera,” Mays explains. “It was a 600 mm, sharp-asa tack, put-you-in-the-poorhouse, kind of lens that allows me to examine the auriculars of a two-inch-long hummingbird, or the tinted tongue of a keelbilled toucan, up close and personal.”

Denying any official “Birder,” relationship as “one of that enthusiastic breed of homo sapiens who eat, breathe, and dream about our feathered friends 24hours a day, Mays admits, “ I can barely tell a northern flicker from a fricasseed chicken, but I love them all the same, all 18,000 species. They are a principal part of Mother Nature’s world – and consequently my world – and there is nothing I would rather do than lurk on the bank of a river, or in a copse of aspen trees, or on the edge of a steep-walled desert canyon somewhere, anywhere, watching for flashes of movement or color. Or listening to the twitters and murmurs and screeches and songs. Of birds.”

Mays shoots with a Sony RX 10 Mark IV with a 600mm Zeiss lens.

Keel-Billed Toucan, Western Costa Rica

Brown Pelican, Intracoastal Waterway, Florida

Laughing Gulls, Biloxi, Mississippi

African Crowned Crane, Aberdare National Park, Kenya, East Africa

White Tern, Bird Island, Seychelle Islands, Indian Ocean

Janet Safris “For as long as I can remember, my grandparents, father, mother and brothers have been interested and involved in photography,” Janet Safris explains. “It has always been a part of my life. When I was a little girl, I have memories of my grandfather feeding the birds, the sound of mourning doves cooing outside my window in the early mornings. My parents have always had bird feeders outside the kitchen widow. This tradition carried through to my life, as I feed the birds. The interest that came to me later in life was, I wanted to capture and show people what they couldn’t see with their naked eye.

The beauty of birds.”

Des Moines, Iowa and surrounding areas provide all the geography Safris needs to capture stunning photos of a wide variety of indigenous and migratory birds.

“The majority of my photos are taken within five to ten miles of my home,” she says. “I will sit anywhere: bogs, sloughs, prairies or flooded cornfields. The visitors that fly through Iowa are pretty incredible: storks, glossy faced ibis and crested caracara, just to name a few.”

Raptors are particularly rich subject matter for Safris’s photography.

“One of my favorite spots to photograph raptors is the Sax Zim Bog, about two hours north of Duluth, Minnesota,” she says. “During the winter months, It is also a gathering spot for owls looking for mates.”

In addition to birds, Safris, has photographed many other forms of wildlife, mink, to badgers, snakes to spiders, coyotes, to name just a few. “When you are sitting in the field, you never know what might walk out or fly in,” she says. “For me, it’s the anticipation of the unexpected that keeps me going out day after day.”

Safris works with a Nikon platform, her camera a D500 with a Nikkor 600mm f/4 lens.

Tundra swans grooming, Saylorville Lake, Johnston, Iowa Selected and displayed at the 2020 Iowa State Fair.

Great Grey Owl, Sax Zim Bog, Northern Minnesota

Great Grey Owl, Sax Zim Bog, Northern Minnesota

Northern Hawk Owl, Sax Zim Bog, Northern Minnesota

American Bald Eagle, Saylorville Dam, Johnston, Iowa

American Bald Eagle, Saylorville Lake, Johnston, Iowa

American White Pelican (Breeding Plumage), Saylorville, Lake, Johnston, Iowa

Sandhill Cranes (Mating Dance), Platte River, Kearney, Nebraska Displayed at the Iowa State Fair, 2019

Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams Exhibit Brooklyn Museum

Postcard: Musings on a Time Travel Hobby Photographers and artists throughout history have interpreted these voiceless objects in various ways.

Story & Photos by John H. Ostdick

My wife Michelle and I like to cast off occasionally and time travel. Sometimes we launch from a location down the road. Other adventures take us far and wide.

While dawdling in collectible shops with the central mission of joy and inspiration, we let go of time and pick about in other people’s sense of what is memorable or historic. In our younger years, this exploration might have been acquisitional in nature. As the things attached to our walls, lurked in our storage spaces, and/or cluttered the floors, that is seldom the goal for our travels today.

During one such journey to Miami’s Tropicana Flea Market in 2005, I ran across

several intriguing faces to photograph. Their expressions, and particularly their eyes, seemed to speak to me in ways I didn’t quite understand. They were mannequin heads. A character I called Sweet Pea was my first capture. Over the years, she has acquired a lot of company. Full-body subjects seldom interest me. I’m looking for frozen emotion, time-stopped expressions that someone else created to evoke a response from people like me. Or not.

I realize I am not the first person to find the topic interesting. Photographers and artists throughout history have interpreted these voiceless objects in various ways.

Perhaps you had the regrettable occasion to

witness the 1987 move, “Mannequin,” (more on this later). I feel for you, as actor Andrew McCarthy probably does as well today. I am not pretending that I am creating high art, either. I shoot only with existing light, and never remove the subjects from their surroundings.

Strange images to collect? Perhaps. But I dare you not to be at least a little bit captivated. And sometimes how a shop owner presents, decorates, or displays a mannequin is almost as interesting as the face itself.

Mannequin fascinations galore Apparently, the subject attracts a following. Even a quick dive online provides more than anyone could ever digest about mannequins. There is a Facebook page on Vintage mannequins. Smithsonian magazine has done a “history of” feature in the past and a page of mannequin images in its ongoing reader photo contest, available via the Smithsonian’s photo contest weblink with tag mannequin.

There are blogs on the subject. Etsy (a vintage 1960s French art deco advertising model mannequin head for $442.22) and eBay (a vintage Adel Roostein Syoko Yamaguchi full mannequin, $5,500) offer mannequins for sale. Pinterest offers pages to ponder.

The word mannequin apparently comes to us from the French (“an artist’s jointed model”) via the Flemish word manneken (“little man, figurine”) as a description of the Middle Ages practice of male pages modeling women’s clothes in Flanders. The first female mannequins (made of papier mâché) appeared in the mid-19th century in France.

The figures evolved, first into wax creations and then, some time in the 1920s, into plaster.

Today, the images are forged from various materials, most commonly plastic and fiberglass, which although not as durable generally seem more realistic.

All Things Mannequin Here are a few mannequin nuggets, both head and full body, from my online dive: Although the reference is clouded, Judy is the name most often used for a female dress form and James for a male version.

The average lifespan of a mannequin is seven years, either through wear and tear or going out of style.

Mannequin use is sensitive to market swings. When the economy is performing well, retailers splurge on wigs and makeup for realistic mannequins and the labor for maintaining them. When times are tougher, expect more headless and featureless mannequins.

A 2014 Herald & Review story dates the oldest mannequin back to 1350 B.C. When archaeologists opened King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, they found a wooden torso bearing the king’s likeness near a chest containing the young pharaoh’s wardrobe. It is considered the oldest-known forerunner to modern mannequins. The bust was likely used to model Tutankhamen’s elaborate garments and jewelry, providing a stationary figure matching the king’s specific

measurements to assist with clothing design and adjustment.

And speaking of the 1987 film Mannequin, IMDb reports that director Michael Gottlieb got the idea for this woeful film when he was walking by a store window and saw what he thought was a mannequin move by itself. He realized it was an illusion, caused by a combination of lights and shadows, then began to wonder what would happen if a mannequin did come to life.

Originally, the lead was written as an older, lonely storekeeper, with Dudley Moore in mind. Someone must have realized that was a little too creepy, though. When Andrew McCarthy came on board, the character was changed to a young artist.

Before filming this movie, actress Kim Cattrall, then 30, spent six weeks posing for a Santa Monica sculptor, who captured her likeness. Six mannequins, each with a different expression, were made. According to IMDb, “Cattrall later recalled, ‘There’s no way to play a mannequin except if you want to sit there as a dummy. I did a lot of body building because I wanted to be as streamlined as possible. I wanted to match the mannequins as closely as I could.’”

(While I think Rotten Tomato critics were being generous, here is their take: “[Splat] 20 percent. Mannequin is a real dummy, outfitted with a ludicrous concept and a painfully earnest script that never springs to life, despite the best efforts of an impossibly charming Kim Cattrall.”)

That’s a Lot of Frozen Stares According to a Fact.MR (a global leader in market research and consulting) in its “Mannequin Market Forecast (2017-2022)” — yes, there is such a thing — projected global sales should reach $13 billion by 2022 year end. That’s a lot of blank stares and frozen flexes.

In 1937, retail displayer Lester Gaba dressed up Cynthia, a mannequin, in the latest fashion and sashayed her to various

New York events — the theater, Bergdorf’s, a private dinner party, and even her regular hair salon — to promote business. Gaba later wrote in “The Art of Window Display” that the evening he first brought Cynthia home with him, the famous milliner Lilly Daché stopped by for a visit. Daché was so intrigued by his mute girlfriend that she encouraged Gaba to bring Cynthia to the opening of her new salon the following week. (Alas, Cynthia apparently suffered irreparable damage in transport, ending her 15 minutes of fame.)

And so it goes. Please forgive the digression. Although interesting, none of that really matters to me. I just enjoy the emotional capture of my little hobby. It never becomes a fixation. I never “go hunting” for a mannequin moment. The joy is the discovery in the natural flow of our time traveling.

Perhaps you share the Leslie Jones character’s freaked-out response to an unclothed mannequin in “Ghostbusters III.” I’ve never had one bust a move on me, but their gaze continues to lure me in.

See you out there.

Upon Reflection, I Too Loved Lucy

By David E. Hubler

“I Love Lucy,” which is now being remembered in two recent biopics, was TV’s first mega-hit, attracting an astronomical weekly audience of about 11 million families in 1951-52, its first season on the air; this at a time when there were only 15 million TV sets in the entire country, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

But for me, “I Love Lucy” was an anguishing time in my childhood. At least until I saw the light and wised up.

“I Love Lucy” aired on Mondays at 9 p.m., a half-hour past my bedtime. And my parents were not about to let that nightly curfew slip even by 30 minutes, especially “on a school night.” And so, I usually fell asleep on Mondays to the laughter emanating from our new TV and to the dread that awaited me on Tuesday.

This unbendable parental edict made my Tuesdays a living hell in school because that was when all my friends and classmates reviewed the previous night’s episode,

laughing and giggling at Lucy’s antics and zany dilemmas. “Wasn’t it funny when she . . . ?” How about when she tried to. . . .” All the while I, a garrulous and often funny schoolyard participant, was struck dumb.

I had nothing to offer. All I could do was smile, nod in silent agreement to their comments, and imagine what they all had seen that was so hysterical: Stomping on a vat of grapes in her bare feet before falling into the tub; trying to keep ahead of an accelerating conveyor belt spewing out chocolates for packaging; rapidly becoming inebriated drinking an alcohol-laced health concoction while making a TV commercial.

In fact, I had never viewed the inside of the Ricardos’ New York apartment, where so much of the hilarity had its origins.

As the second or third season (I forget which) of “I Love Lucy” was about to begin, I knew my days of faking it were ending. I had been getting funny looks from my classmates all through the previous season. My ah-ha! moment came about suddenly, without warning as do many great solutions to dilemmas.

How did I pull off one of the early miracles of early television? To know how, you need to know the layout of another New York City apartment. Mine. On the small side, our apartment was shaped a bit like a semicircle with all the rooms opening on a central hallway. No room was totally hidden from the others.

With my bedroom door open, I could see a portion of the living room across the hallway. The television was at the far end of the room between two windows, way out of my line of sight. The set (as TVs were generally called then) was positioned there so that the cable to the antenna on the roof could easily be attached to the TV in our apartment three stories below.

On the opposite wall of the living room closest to my bedroom and visible to me, was a large wooden cabinet with a radio and

phonograph inside and room for 78 rpm records. When not in use, this piece of furniture (today it would be called an entertainment unit) was adorned with two large, glass-framed photos on swivels and a joining base. The sepia-tone photos were of my father’s deceased parents, Jacob and Dora.

Although they died before I was born, their likenesses were the critical element in my brilliant scheme to watch – not just hear -“I Love Lucy.” Like so many of the world’s greatest inventors before me – Edison, Bell, Mme. Curie, for example – I came across the solution purely by accident.

A Strategic Repositioning At some point in the weekly housekeeping at the end of the summer, the positioning of the two aligned photos atop the cabinet had been altered, unintentionally I’m sure, from their normal position parallel to the wall behind them.

Instead, they were now at slight angles to each other, reflecting the windows on the opposite wall clear into my bedroom. The brightness of that sunny afternoon gave birth to a brilliant idea, one that I immediately intended to guard like a state secret. I quickly realigned the pictures correctly so as not to give away my new-found stroke of luck. I maintained my silent vigil of my grandparents’ images every day until it was nearly lights out for me on that Monday evening in late September.

Just prior to my bedtime and Lucy’s airtime, I quietly angled one of the two sepiatoned photos so that I could see the reflected image on the TV screen from my bed. With the audio as usual loud enough for me to hear it, I had the immense pleasure of actually watching the show.

Of course, what I saw was a mirror image of the show, but I didn’t care. Edison’s elation at his first working light bulb was nothing compared to mine.

I watched the entire season that way and the next one, too. I am certain I am the only one of those millions of viewers whose view of “I Love Lucy” was backward.

Indeed, in the notoriously funny episode when Lucy and Ethel take jobs in a chocolate factory, the conveyor belt filled with chocolates for packaging sped across my screen from left to right; everyone else saw the candy whiz by at ever increasing speeds right to left.

Also, on my jerry-rigged mirror TV, Lucy’s real-life husband Desi Arnaz entered the Ricardos’ faux New York apartment stage

left, where he made his iconic announcement, “Lucy, I’m home!”

I revealed my secret to my parents years later when they arranged for Goodwill to pick up the radio/phonograph unit that had not worked for years. I was in college by then and old enough to choose whatever I wanted to watch. Once it was gone, my grandparents photos went into the hall closet.

I still have them all these years later, but I don’t know whatever happened to that marvelous swivel frame.

Along the Charles River, Cambridge, Massachusetts Photo by Chris Lang

Photo by Janet Safris

Thoughts of the New Day

By Jay Jacobs On the morning porch I sit observing the early world.

Heavy with rainbow dewdrops, a glistening spider web spun between the railings reflects the new day’s light.

Enticing unwary airborne and terrestrial commuters into its mesmerizing embrace, it beckons, a sparkling invitation to be consumed.

Walking through the shadowy, damp woods, our thunderous footfalls alert scores of vibration sensitive earthworms to our presence.

Emerging from amongst the soggy forest detritus, slithering far faster than their sluggish city cousins, slimy, ropy bodies slide down the hillside en masse, a living landslide of squirming bird food.

Intent on their respective missions, chipmunks, squirrels, moles, and other small creatures announce their presence as they rustle, scamper, climb and scurry about with purpose to fulfill the important tasks that nature has assigned them.

Singing their euphonic or cacophonous daylight welcome song, birds flit from branch to branch, or hop and peck in the yard.

By chance, one drops its gift on the bill of my cap; good luck or misfortune, depending on one’s point of view.

Walking along the grassy shoulder of the two lane road, we encounter the contradiction of flat snakes, the latest victims of steel tonnage, belted rubber, and unyielding blacktop.

Farther along, incongruous splotches of bright orange shout the presence of young salamanders that have ventured out from their hidden lairs; a skull and crossbones warning to hungry birds, and yield sign to morning hikers.

Deliberately tossed from moving cars and trucks, unwanted donations from the inconsiderate litter the roadside drainage ditch.

A blight of beer bottles, soda cans, plastic cups empty cigarette boxes, and containers of varying size, shape and material grow more numerous by the day, contrived weeds choking the lush greenery.

Morning stroll and dog business concluded, we climb the hillside path to the back door, and a hot, welcome cup of black coffee with toast, kibble and cooked chicken for Maddy.

Good morning, all.

The Fire The wind was blowing steadily towards the Clark house . . .

By Frank I. Sillay

I’ve lived here on the farm literally all my life. I was even born in this house.

There was a time when it was bustling with people; Mum, Dad, and all the kids, but now there’s only me, and I’m an old woman now. I never married. I always did everything I had time to do, but what with helping with the younger kids, chores on the farm, and looking after Mum and Dad as they got older, there just never was room for romance, or a family of my own. I don’t know how my whole life just slipped away without my noticing.

There are only two houses on this road, mine, and the one next door, where the Clarks used to live. Because we’re so far from the main power lines, with no other houses on the way, the cost of hooking up electricity was always prohibitive, so I’ve always operated with kerosene lamps. The Clark house is only about thirty yards away, and back when both houses were full of life, it had the feeling of a little village, but

nobody lives there now. Jim Clark still owns the place, but he uses the land for offseason grazing for the cows on his big dairy farm down on the main road, and sometimes he has a few sheep on the place. The house has been used for storing hay for the last twenty years.

You’ll understand how the fire was such a shock to me, living out here on my own.

Jim Clark was setting up to dock the tails of the year’s new lambs. There were only two or three dozen of them, and he had put them in an improvised pen between the two houses. He’d set up a little charcoal burner to heat the iron for cauterizing the wounds where the tails had been cut off, and he’d just got the fire going; hadn’t even done the first lamb, when the dry grass caught fire. Well, you should have seen him! He was so upset, rushing around, trying to decide what to do, then trying to do it.

It only took a moment for the fire to catch strongly, and the wind was blowing steadily towards the Clark house (thank goodness!). He turned the lambs loose, and they scattered to the four winds. I expect some of them are running yet. Next, he took the bucket he had set up to collect the tails in and used that to take water from the rain barrel next to his house to try to fight the fire. I’ve never seen an old man like him move so fast. He worked so hard to try and put out the fire, but nothing he did helped.

It almost seemed like he was making it worse. Once the house caught, he turned over the rain barrel – by then half empty – but it didn’t help. He ended up just standing helpless, watching his childhood home go up in flames, which it did in a remarkably short time. By the time the volunteer fire brigade arrived, there was very little left to burn except for the remains of the hay bales stacked inside.

Bob Gort, the fire chief, who also sells insurance, had a lot of questions that he wanted to ask me after Jim had gone, and fortunately, I was able to tell him the full story, as I’ve told you here. It was just a tragic accident, and Jim fought bravely to save the day, but failed.

. . . It took careful planning. The wind needed to be in the right quarter, and it had to be a day when that silly old cow next door was at home, twitching the curtains, and sticking her nose into everybody’s business except hers. It worked perfectly, that old bastard Gort tried his best to disallow the insurance claim, but thanks to her nosiness, he didn’t have a leg to stand on. And I made sure she didn’t see me the night before, when I floated a couple of gallons of kerosene on top of the rain barrel.

Winter in Iceland Photo by Tony Tedeschi

Nights in Key Largo The scene in the bar grows more feverish

in the late night heat.

By Kendric W. Taylor

“Do we have to listen to this morbid little pimp much longer?”

We were in Key Largo, the finest bar in Central America, my favorite of any bar, maybe of anywhere I’d ever been. In a lifetime of bar-flying, this is where I’d land, where I’d return time and time again, the place I’d head for as soon as I was in Costa Rica.

My name is Thompson, and I had been bouncing around down here in Latin America for what seemed like forever, trying to support myself as a freelance writer, or tour guide, or whatever else borderline legal I could turn my hand to in hope of

earning a few dollars, or pesos, or reals or sols -- anything with a picture of some old guy with a beard and some numbers on it that I could cash.

“Hell, it’s too crowded in the other rooms, Mike,” I said, “Let the kid sing. At least he’s chased everyone out of here so the air can circulate.”

“Well, he sucks.” Mike grumbled, “I’m going outside to the main room and look around.”

Located in the capital city of San José, Key Largo squats perspiring in the hot tropical night, frequented by losers and the lost, potheads and drunks, real estate hustlers, scam artists, gunrunners and tourists.

Lining the long mahogany bar back in the 1980s a few male patrons actually still wear white linen suits, their conversation across the wide countertop hushed and furtive, their eyes shifting and darting, the deals endlessly discussed and seldom made; the unattached females eyed but not pestered, the occasional working girl tolerated, but not encouraged.

We filled a corner under an open window in one of the cavernous back rooms, a group of sketchy travel agents from the states I’d been hired by a millionaire resort owner to herd around while they were attending the travel Bolsa here in the city.

Beer bottles sweat interlocking rings on the greasy table as we peer through the gloom. Grateful for the slight breeze picked up by the slowly twirling ceiling fans, I’m doing my best to ignore the whining post-flower child torturing his guitar up on the stage, trying to keep the conversation going with my weathered group of so-called tourism professionals. This is one of several evenings during the week at Key Largo dedicated to spotlighting musical groups touring Latin America. All were welcome here -- good, bad or indifferent. They come and play, singularly and in groups, unbooked and unbidden, pass the straw hat and depart unremembered for the border -- any border -- sometimes right from the stage. This musical imposter had been performing for about ten minutes, long past polite forbearance, finally succeeding in propelling Mike and most of the audience from the room.

I know what Mike is looking for -- he’s been itching after it the whole trip. We had just come back to San Jose after two days in a jungle camp in southwestern Costa Rica. From the highway, we had followed a single track in, little more than a path really, muddy, holed, and slashed by fast shallow streams, leading ultimately to a rugged tourist outpost perched uneasily on a sloping verdant hillside. We were doubled up in small rough-hewn cabins clinging to the gullied slope around a communal bathing hut, and aside from a few limited explorations outside the camp we had little to do other than enjoying the fecund serenity of the rain forest. While the others were off dodging snakes in the rain forest looking for butterflies, I had been contenting myself with sitting on the side of the pool chatting with the lovely blackhaired executive of the airline that had flown the group down from Florida, playing underwater footsie with her while planning a rendezvous on her next trip down. It was like living in an erotic travel poster.

Later, in the evening, after a buffet dinner by the pool, one of the drivers called me aside: “Don Tom, Señor Mike is asking for drugs and women.”

“Where the hell does he think he is? We’re in the middle of a jungle,” I explained needlessly. “Sorry Pepé. Tell him to restrain himself until we get back to

the capital. Maybe taking these outdoor showers with just that thin bamboo partition between us and the females agitates him. It does me.”

“I know,” Pepé nodded slowly, “I see you look at the airline senorita at dinner.”

On our last morning, relaxing with my cabin mate on the porch under dripping eaves, he gazes at an orange frog hopping past in the muddied clearing ,and murmurs: “Ho-hum, another day in the jungle.”

It was time to go back to San Jose.

Once a fine colonial mansion, the Key Largo sits ample and solid halfway down Calle 7, near midtown, across from a shaded park. Its façade is now faded and peeling, decades of tropical sun and rain leaving their mark; tall, weathered shutters frame the wide windows. A modest patchy yard surrounds the house. Behind the wrought iron gates, a slate walkway leads beneath a bower of palms up to a wide, plantfringed step and a heavy wooden front door. Inside, minimal renovation has been done over the years. It’s as if its former residents had pulled out one day – just up and left -- carrying musty trunks and cracked family paintings a quick-step ahead of their creditors; their heavy furniture dragged through the large rooms and piled outside onto the back of a pickup, the whole creaking pyramid pulling away with white-haired Grandma clinging on the top in a rump-sprung easy chair, nothing remaining in the echoing rooms but a few framed sepia photographs of aunts and uncles in white linens, gazing down at the rolls of dust and the scraps of unpaid bills.

The highly polished bar occupies one wall of what once was the front parlor.

Fan-shaped planter’s chairs cluster by the windows; small cafe tables and wire-backed chairs crowd in upon one another in groups. There were several other large rooms on the main floor, dimly lit by guttering candles, the stale beer-soaked air churned by the tired ceiling fans. The patrons drink and dance, play cards and toss darts. I’ve never seen anyone eat anything here. The present owner, an American -- from Indiana, he claims -- lives on the top floor in a modest apartment with rattan furniture and a cluttered rolltop desk. Opposite, French doors open onto a sparse patio rimmed with yellowing potted plants. At sunset a striped awning flutters in the rising breeze above the few sun-faded deck chairs.

Right now though, my business is not at Key Largo, certainly not at mid-day.

No, I am headed for the Blue Marlin, a dark bar at street level beneath the Hotel del Rey. I am looking for another member of the group, a bad-tempered alcoholic from California. I had unwittingly urged a friendly beer upon him that first day, at a memorable lunch at a commune in the hills near the capital to sample the unique cookery of a group of middle-aged Yuppies dedicated to vegetarianism and Native American cuisine. He accepted the beer with a resigned shrug; quickly drained it, then another, and kept on drinking throughout lunch. Now sporting a 30 degree list, he came back to town with us, and then disappeared.

The meal was quite good actually, centered around heaps of potatoes and corn, and after, the group’s leader, a former banker from San Francisco, a stocky Caucasian with a brightly colored headband, long gray pigtails, leather chaps and beaded moccasins, got up to pow wow, regaling us at great length about how the commune emulated the tribal way in every detail of their lives, sounding like someone in a 50s B-Western. After what seemed like many moons he wore down, and was

asked by one of the group if he was apparently so keen on following native American Indian ways, wouldn’t it be more authentic to live in . . . say . . . North America?”

“Jesus, get real, Man!,” the answer snapped back. “Do you know what rents are like in the States?” Ah, good old American horse sense.

A day later, breakfasting at an outdoor café across from the Opera House, our missing group member suddenly looms up, nastily drunk, insults my dark-haired companion, ignoring the fact that she had flow him here gratis, and disappeared again down the street.

So, this left me no choice but to search for him the following day in the only place I could think of, the last refuge for deteriorating North American white males – the Blue Marlin.

Once there of course, out of the sun and adjusting my eyes in the smoky gloom, I realized that asking for a fat, drunken American was like looking for a stoner at a Grateful Dead concert. Most of the men in here – no – all of the men in here -were in Costa Rica for one reason -- women.

Middle-aged and older, widowers or divorced, lonely, broke, dumb or stupid, they were here because they have heard that the Ticas were young and beautiful and favor older Norte Americanos. Partially true: Many Ticas (as female Costa Ricans are called), do like Americans, particularly their money. The women respond to ads placed in the English-language Tico Times advertising for guides, or secretaries, or companions -- matrimony the unstated but ultimate object. The women, young and generally attractive, queue up with their dueñas to be interviewed for the positions.

The men were mainly interested in only one position – the prone. The females in turn, search closely for signs of advancing age and diminished capacity. The eager male questioners quickly find that major life insurance and sufficient income to support the prospective bride’s extensive family were a prerequisite. The women just as quickly discover that many of the men have only small, fixed incomes, modest pensions, or Social Security, and couldn’t get additional insurance any easier than they could maintain an erection -- one a minus, the other a plus for the young ladies.

Disappointed but undaunted, the women send their aunts and uncles back to the farm for another day, and the Americanos drift down to the Blue Marlin where the hookers aren’t so picky.

Soon I’m talking to Phil, a filthy old felon with white hair, potbelly, and four day’s stubble on his face. “I’ve got plenty of money,” he brags to me, “own a box factory. Got too old to scare up anything decent, so I sold the factory, dumped the second wife, came down here to buy me a young chippie. I tell ‘em about my boat, send a car for ‘em, take ‘em sailing, they think I’m Errol Flynn. Been doin’ that up north for years, and it always gets them. Dumb bitches. But now I got cancer. I spend my days getting drunk and taking one of these bimbos here upstairs at night when I can get it up. Then one morning I don’t get up. Get it? Great, huh?”

Better you than me, brother.

I head back to Key Largo for a talk with Jimmy, the owner: “Thanks for letting me come upstairs,” I tell him. “The group was really impressed meeting you the other night. Actually, I told them you were Robert Vesco.

You know, the fugitive financier, the securities fraud guy that’s on the lam. You look a lot like him with that moustache.”

“How do you know I’m not?”

“Um, Jimmy, listen, downstairs in the bar? C’mon, how many drug deals go down there every night? Arms deals too, I bet?”

“I never heard any.”

“Oh. Well. Listen, one of the travel agents has gone missing. Been a couple of days now; well, actually, he’s been gone for a week. I keep hoping he’ll turn up. Got any ideas? I’ve looked in the Blue Marlin.”

“Ha. I’d say check the morgue, but you’ve already been there. Those people in the Blue Marlin are already dead. They oughta keep them in roll-out cabinets in the wall.”

“OK, I just thought I’d ask. You always know everything that goes on around here in the capital.”

“Ah, you can’t tell about boozers, especially on a binge. He’ll turn up, or he won’t.

“By the way, you’re not thinking about doing one of your stories about me, are you,” Jimmy says, staring hard.

“Not based on what you’ve told me.”

“I hope not.

“Listen,” Jimmy explains, “these guys in the bar downstairs are a bunch of scam artists who couldn’t make in it the States. Half of them are real estate speculators down here selling each other underwater pecan groves. OK, once in a while an arms deal involving 1903 Springfields or World War One Enfields might get bandied about: not a Kalashnikov in the bunch, so it usually falls through. These bums -almost all of them -- are about one step away from being three-card monte dealers in Times Square. Or probably dead like your drunk. C’mon down to the bar, Tompkins,” he says, getting my name partially right, while grabbing my arm, “I’ll buy you a beer.”

Downstairs the bar is throbbing. It’s a packed house. Jimmy spots me a pilsner and leaves me with a nod to the bartender, glad-handing his way past the regulars. I wave to a group of river rafters here for the Travel Bolsa. One of them told me he’s looking for financing to take the first group of rafters down the Yangtze River in Communist China. I’m ready to sign on. Only the fact that he’s just returned from the banquet tonight attired in his idea of formal eveningwear -- a tee shirt with a necktie painted on it -- gives me pause. I have visions of him negotiating with gimleteyed Chinese communists in that getup.

Key Largo buzzes with conversation, cigar smoke drifts out the open windows on the heavy tropic air. In the next room, an Afro-Caribbean calypso band from Limón throbs into the night.

I’m going there tomorrow. It’s completely different from San José. While everyone up here is light skinned and speaks Spanish, with a certain old world formality, Limón is Afro-Caribbean: humid, unpaved, tumbledown, laughter and music bursting out of windows and along the muddied streets. Workers from various Caribbean islands, along with Chinese and Italians, were brought to Costa Rica in the mid 1800’s by the United Fruit Company to build the railroad from San José to the coast, to haul bananas from the highlands down to the Caribbean ports.

The following day, I take the famous Jungle Train down to Limón, part of a side hustle, accompanying a red-haired journalist with the alabaster face of an Italian masterwork, who needs a guide. This is a favorite road trip for me, not only for the wonderful scenery, but the area is supposed to be loaded with sloths, a creature I’ve always longed to see.

We have a wonderful morning’s ride past coffee plantations, the rich brown earth bursting with green rows, packed fields of tall yellow corn, modest homes with tidy yards, cars parked under the portico, clean, smiling children waving along the tracks. Although there is a special tourista coach, I take my companion into the regular cars with the daily commuters: families and school children, book bags and parcels spilling out into the aisles, produce stuffed into string bags. It’s a typical day: in the luggage rack several chickens are tied together clucking irritably, an old man sits dozing, a cage full of small parrots on his lap. The Ticos love to show off their country, and today is no different. Several people insist on giving up their seats so we Gringos can sit on the side with the best view.

As we walk around the port city sightseeing, nothing seems changed from my last visit: streets pinched and potholed, the alleyways littered, municipal services sporadic. The one hotel I see is unthinkable; we’re not planning to stay anyway. But on the corners, down by the bus terminal and around the park, these marvelously mixed people laugh and strut, their voices floating lightly with an inherited Caribbean lilt bubbling in the ear. And why not? I don’t think people can starve in this fertile country (Costa Rica means rich coast): I mean, throw seeds out the window and tomorrow there’s a banana tree.

Later on, waiting for my Renaissance Madonna in the gazebo in the town square, I suddenly realize that while we have been enjoying ourselves, we’ve missed the last bus to the capital – there is no train. I quickly check my peso balance when I gradually realize that what appears to be a three-toed sloth is clicking imperceptibly past on its long nails, sniffing the air curiously, tail curled neatly behind him: finally -the living embodiment of my lifestyle. Happy, satisfied, I lazily return to counting up my currency, praying for enough to hire a car back to the capital. The sloth tiptoes on, and on, and on, followed, to my amazement, by the missing travel agent, who is coming up on the outside of the creature, lurching across the square like Bogart in “The Treasure of Sierra Madre,” looking for a touch. With a nauseous twist of his head, he recognizes through his alcoholic mist that it’s me in that gazebo, and before I can react, disappears down the street, never to be seen again. And, what might be considered an even worse thing, the sloth is gone as well.

I finish counting my pesos, wondering idly if what just took place actually happened. This fantasy is interrupted by my companion returning from her shopping excursion, and I take her in search of the produce market. We’re in luck -- a local farmer is driving up to the capital tonight and will take us.

Now safely returned to Key Largo, relaxing over an ice cold beer, amusedly watching a group of American tourists sidle in, impatient for service, thrilled and apprehensive to be in this notorious place of international intrigue and romance and danger.

The scene in the bar grows more feverish in the late night heat. Even the rum bottles lining the shelf behind the bar seem to chatter to each other. The bartenders

rush to fill demands, conversation flits between English and Spanish. I take my beer and drift through the foyer into the room across the hall, where several American college students are playing darts. One takes out a small packet of customized missiles, screwing in the steel tips like a pool hustler. He’ll get hustled himself here: some of the local players never leave this room. The parlor beyond is dark, couples sitting quietly at tables, talking, touching, oblivious to their surroundings. I find a deserted space and sit in the open window casement overlooking the street. The evening crowds swirl by under the streetlamps.

It’s nice to relax; it’s been a busy time here recently – election time, with flags of the two main political parties everywhere. Everyone takes to the boulevards in the evening in blaring cavalcades, loudly proclaiming their chosen fealty. But that’s past, the tourist season will soon ebb with the coming rainy season, and things will quiet down at Key Largo. I chat distractedly with another Gringo in a grimy seersucker jacket. Too late, I realize he’s telling me about a pecan grove he has for me, down in Guanacaste province on the Pacific shore. I can make a fortune with it -- with only a very small investment.

Another night passes at Key Largo.

Firepit Martini, December 2021

As a journalist, wherever life takes me, a story awaits.

Sometimes reality morphs into fiction, but the crossover becomes impossible to discern, then where you end up is . . .

At Sea

By Tony Tedeschi My romantic interlude with Mrs. . . .

Two-thirty in the a.m. I love reading the time on the Longines. I feel like I do it every few minutes just to look at the watch. Handsome watch. Only the time and a tiny window for the day of the month. Love the minimalism. Two grand, not so minimal.

In the jewelry boutique on the Promenade Deck. Duty free.

Powerful light out there. Searching in a sweeping circular motion, as if scanning the seas for U-boats or the sky for the Luftwaffe, enemies long confined to history.

Tonight, it’s only disrupting the ruler-straight line of the horizon. A tanker or cargo vessel. No lights strung across the decks, ala the lacy look of this, the Royal Princess, one of the court ladies in Royal Cruise Lines fleet of a dozen ships. It’s the end of the first full day of an Atlantic crossing. The fog earlier in the day has evaporated into a starlit night. Luscious, lightly salted sea air wisps across my face and insinuates into my nostrils. I love the serenity here on the veranda outside the crew quarters. “Restricted Area.” No groups of passengers jockeying for space, whenever there is something to see, although the gawkers have thinned to just a straggler here and there, since we departed Brooklyn and sailed beneath the Verrazano Bridge through Lower New

York Bay and out into the Atlantic, bound for Southampton in the UK. Already, I can see that I will love the solitude on this veranda. The night shift crews are out of their quarters and on duty; day shift’s asleep. Just me, alone in my thoughts.

I’ve just spent my first night as a dance host on the Princess for an article I’m writing to service travel sections in two dozen newspapers, for which I’ve selfsyndicated my work. Having done many cruises, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to serve as one of these affectedly debonair dance hosts, whose job it is to fill in for absent husbands, among the mostly elderly women who love cruising, once with, and now without, their significant others, dead or otherwise departed. Since I’ve always been a decent ballroom dancer, I felt I might be able to pull off this hosting gig, with the imprimatur of a cruise line looking for the publicity.

“I could run through all the possibilities you are likely to encounter with the ladies,” explained G. Andrew Cross, the social director, as part of my crash course in becoming a dance host. “But if you’ve been on all the cruises you claim and seen the dance hosts in action, I’m sure you could draw up that list on your own. This time, however, as opposed to simply being a passenger, when you find yourself looking for a place to run or a corner in which to hide, you are required to play nice and make the ladies feel special. Extra special.”

Predictably, I could have used some of those dark corners with my dance partners for the show tonight. Sally from Westport, whose feet spent more time on top of my feet than dancing between them. Pat from Cherry Hill, who seemed determined to cull me from the other hosts like a sheep dog culling her flock. Glynnis from Chicago, who really was quite a dancer and stood impatiently tapping her feet at the edge of the dance floor, each time I tried to work my magic with less than magical material, Glynnis trying to determine if it were permissible for her to cut in. I put an end to her anxieties by asking her for a second dance, once I’d been through the roster of others.

I ended the night with Miranda from Baltimore, who after one dance, spent the rest of her ballroom time swallowing martinis as if they were after-dinner cordials instead of before-dinner, well martinis, dammit Fortunately, Miranda’s cabin steward took over from me, when he saw how I was struggling with her coming down the corridor to her suite.

I take a final deep breath of the cool, clean sea air and turn to head back to my cabin to scribble some notes before the Mirandas from Baltimore or the Pats from Cherry Hill seem simply the exaggerated memories of some overnight dream sequence. * * * * * Andy Cross and I had agreed to meet for a late afternoon drink each day to talk about how it was going for me, whether I was getting the material I needed for my article and/or if there were anything he could do to help.

“Well,” he said, “It sounds like you got a representative cross-section right out of the gate.”

“Not quite as bad as pretending I could handle a horse for a story on the annual buffalo roundup at Custer State Park in South Dakota,” I replied.

Cross laughed. “Well, you’re still here and any accidents in South Dakota don’t seem to have diminished your quick-step.”

“Broken collarbone, long healed. My quickstep? Say, you been spying on me?”

“I have to make sure that agreeing to this will not cost me my job.”

“Then, if you know the potential players, who should I be especially prepared to encounter?”

He paused a moment, pondering my question, then said, “The one to be aware of is Lucy Blakely. Not that she is anything but lovely and gracious.”

“So why the warning?”

“It’s not that she would be any kind of trouble, but she is our best customer. Very wealthy, ergo known to everyone at the top of our corporate ladder. Just want to make sure you understand the delicacy of any interaction with Lucy.”

I studied him a moment. “Where have I heard her name before?” I asked.

“The supermarket tabloids? The society pages? Married to Alan Blakely?

Investment banker?”

“Starting to come into focus. He in the messy aftermath of an affair. They in the middle of a contentious divorce. A lot of money involved in any settlement. That Lucille Blakely?”

“One and the same. This crossing is the first leg of our world cruise. Lucy does it with us every few years. This time is her first time as a soon-to-be ex-wife, with possibly even more money to spend with us. Told our CEO she really needed to get away, this time. Free herself from the tabloid pages. Free of the social circles that, for years, have done everything at the behest of Alan Blakely.”

“And I should be concerned, why? I can’t imagine she would have any interest in a dance host on a cruise ship.”

“Right, mostly. But she is a very gregarious woman, very charming. And we’re all confined here for the next seven days with no ports of call until we reach Southampton. Your paths may cross. And, you’re a journalist, a member of the enemy from which she has fled.”

“Someone like her would definitely enhance my article, but I try never to be exploitive and will definitely respect her space. I’m sure I despise the paparazzi almost as much as she does.”

“Good enough,” Cross said. “Well, your little drama is only one of many I need to tend to, so I’ll take my leave.”

“Tomorrow? Same time, same place?”

“For sure,” he said, signed the check for the drinks, then rose from our table and left.

I headed back to my quarters to get some rest before dinner and my that night’s performance. * * * * * On the third night out, we were in heavy seas. An Atlantic hurricane had been tracking north from the Caribbean, skirted any significant North American landfall, and was pushed out into the Atlantic by a powerful high-pressure system pushing west across a cooling continent. The continent’s good fortune became our bad one, as

remnants of the storm created pitch and roll, which had passengers bouncing off walls.

There were just a few takers at the ballroom, and each bailed after one dance. I was nursing an after-dinner bourbon and trying to focus my blurred vision on the band, which was going through a perfunctory set, as if there were anyone left on the dance floor, except a few dance hosts chatting with each other and a smattering of wifeless men among the rows of tables using the enforced solitude to have a drink undisturbed.

“Lucy Blakely,” she said over my left shoulder, then came around to face me head on. She held out her hand.

I took it, of course, “Nick Melfitano. A pleasure, Mrs. Blakely.”

“It’s Lucy,” she replied. “I’ve never enjoyed the pretentious formality of being Mrs. Blakely. No matter how much Alan did. And, in any event, I’m soon to shed the official Mrs. Blakely title. I’ve been replaced, this time, by a twenty-two-year-old intern, just out of university. All of which you may know already, if you’ve read any of New York’s yellow journal tabloids.”

She smiled and paused for just a second or two, as if to allow the last comment to sink in.

“Oh,” I replied, “that Mrs. Blakely.”

She nodded, then said, “May I join you . . . Mr. Melfitano?”

“It’s Nick,” I said, motioning her to sit down. “Yellow journalism, hah? I haven’t heard that term in decades. You don’t look that old.”

“Flattery will get you –” “Nowhere?” I replied.

“Don’t underestimate my wiles. You could get lucky. If you believe the tabloids.”

“I tend to ignore them.”

“That may place you at a disadvantage here.”

“In that case, what can I get you to reclaim my advantage. Soften the edges.”

She smiled. “They know what I like.”

“But I don’t. Just curious.”

“Bushmill’s, neat. Gaelic heritage.”

I waved toward one of the waiters. He just nodded and headed toward the bar to order her drink.

“Impressive,” I said.

“Not really,” she replied. “Just dozens of trips on these ships.”

The waiter brought her drink and we clinked glasses.

“You’re one helluva dancer,” she said, raising her glass in a mock toast.

I studied her a brief moment. “That was just me trying to maintain my balance on a pitching dance floor that was doing my dance steps for me.”

“I’m not talking about tonight.”

I crinkled my eyebrows. “So, that was you who’s been taking notes, each night, up in the dark seats, way in the back?”

She couldn’t restrain a laugh. “You’re good at this repartee, aren’t you?”

“I’ve had a lot of practice.”

“Really.”

She paused a moment, took a swallow of her drink, then, “Why are you here?” she asked.

I let out a laugh. “What? Are you the only one who can take some time off to cross the Atlantic with no good reason other than to enjoy it? How elitist.”

“Touché.”

“I write business books, OK? Almost always under contracts with companies or their senior executives. They pay me good money, then hand out the books to company execs, key clients, the business press, that sort of thing. When I’m done with one of those, I take some of the money I’ve earned and do something I’ve always wanted to do.”

“Have you written anything I might have heard of?”

“Minimal general exposure outside of the markets represented by my subjects’ companies. If any crossed your desk, the most likely would be ‘Live Via Satellite,’ about the company that produced the first viable communication satellites. It made some of the business best seller lists.”

“I do know that book,” she replied, a bit of delight in her voice as if she had just gotten the answer right on some TV quiz show. “Only because Alan created a mutual fund with companies involved in that satellite venture.”

“I made some real money with that fund, but now I’m reluctant to ask you to thank him for me.”

She smiled and nodded. “So,” she continued, “we are both here for the same reason. Spending someone else’s money on something frivolous.”

I laughed and shook my head. “You’re something, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I am.” She drained the rest of her drink. “Want to find out how ‘something’ I really am?”

“Wa-what?” I said, astonished.

“Suddenly you’re stammering like a little boy. Don’t disappoint me, Nick. Finish your drink and let’s get out of here.” * * * * * “She was asking about you yesterday.”

Andy Cross and I were having our afternoon cocktail session. The seas had calmed significantly. “I told her what you told me about writing business books. That was OK, right?”

I nodded, my head still a bit hammered from multiple, high-end drinks in her suite.

“Yes, thank you.”

“So, you met her?”

“Yeah. Yes . . . yes. We had a very pleasant conversation. Last night at the empty dance hall.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Well,” he said, “that didn’t take long. I mean her finding you, as I had predicted.”

“Well, now I know you sicked her on me.”

“Oh, no. But when Lucy Blakely asks, we answer, and she asked about you.”

“No worries. As you said, ‘gracious, very charming.’ Next time, I’ll go looking for her.”

His wry smile betrayed an understanding of Lucy that was way above my pay grade, but after the previous night, I didn’t give a damn.

He signed the check and left. * * * * * When you’ve been at this as long as I have, you find the best articles all but write themselves. Aside from the ladies, who, for the most part, were just on board for this transatlantic segment of the world cruise, my more significant subjects were my fellow dance hosts, most of whom were here for the duration, more than three months circling the globe. Although their employment did not include a salary, there was free room and board and a chance to see a good deal of the world. Some had settled into this as a nice retirement pursuit, funded by lifelong contributions into their pension plans. Some were younger men, who signed on for segments of the world cruise as a lark. All were one kind of story or another. As individuals, they were a string of dancing planets orbiting the gentleman-hosting center of my article’s solar system.

The one who captured most of my interest was Charlie Selfridge, a former English professor at the University of Nebraska. Born a cornhusker, Charlie could not have been more out of place in the Midwest prairie. He had spent most of his life there yearning to experience cultures throughout the world, but never having the level of resources to do anything but short-term experiences between semesters. Although the hosts were expressly forbidden contractually from having any kind of romantic, let alone physical, relationships with passengers, Charlie’s other colleagues were all over describing how their dance partners came on to them, either subtly, suggestively, or even blatantly, thereby allowing them to reclaim some measure of their restrained sense of machismo. Often there was alcohol involved on the part of the ladies.

Charlie, however, played no hand in that game.

Charlie’s longer-term cohorts were convinced he was one of those rare asexual individuals. He could form emotionally intimate attachments with other people, but never sexual relationships. Given that he didn’t play the braggadocio games, Charlie’s acute powers of observation were of far more interest to me. Also, given how many years he had remained a fixture as one of the ship’s dance hosts, I considered him my best source of material that would make it into my article. If Charlie was never interested in any kind of sexual interaction, nonetheless I found, he was always interested in conversational interaction. He was a particularly astute observer of Lucy Blakely and he liked to talk about her. His interest in her was partly because so much of what he observed in others was superficial, while he considered her genuinely true to herself and thereby an engaging conversational partner.

“She’s as gracious and lovely as any of us who know her long term will tell you she is,” he said over before-dinner martinis in the cocktail lounge, “but . . .” He let the connective word just hang there and didn’t finish the sentence.

“But what?” I asked.

He just smiled and took a sip of his drink.

“What is this an exercise in one of your English classes about discovering the metaphorical component driving the plot’s surface reality?”

“Well said, Nick,” he replied. “You are definitely a potential A in this course.”

“What I am definitely potential for is what comes after that ‘but’.”

“I like Lucy Blakely. Don’t get me wrong. I like her a lot. We chat often and she’ll always find some evenings to share a dance with me. It’s just endlessly fascinating watching how she maneuvers through life.”

“Maneuvers?”

“Oh, come on, Nick. You don’t become one of the richest women in the world without knowing how to ply dangerous seas.”

“Now with the nautical references? For Christ’s sake, Charlie, you’re from Nebraska.”

“Yeah, but I been a mariner for years, matey.”

“Groan. Back to Mrs. Maneuverer, please.”

He took another sip and studied me for a moment. “You’re not going to write anything nasty about Lucy, are you?”

“Why? Are there nasty things to write about her?”

“No,” he replied without hesitation. “There are not.”

“Besides,” I countered, “the tabloids have covered, pretty extensively, what they find particularly nasty.”

“True, but I’ve read nothing about her onboard maneuverings.”

“Again, with the maneuverings?”

He laughed. “What I can tell you, based upon sharing many voyages with her, she is an extremely intelligent individual. On a world cruise, we become a neighborhood.

For three months there is a lot of interaction between staff and the passengers who remain on board for the full circumnavigation. And she has done the world cruise multiple times, going back to the earlier years in her marriage. I’ve shared a number of those voyages with her. We have had many conversations about many subjects.

She is extremely well read. She and I have had multiple discussions about English literature that no one, without a degree in the subject, could handle as well as she does.”

“So, your interest is purely academic subject matter?”

Again, he studied me quietly. “Is this how the crack reporters work? Hammer away at a poor interview subject until he opens up on what you’re really after?”

“Just making conversation here . . . maty. Just trying to hold my own with you.”

“I like you, Nick,” he replied, “but I don’t really know you at all. I’ve had very little experience with journalists. Academics, yes. Journalists, no. I don’t want to say something that hurts someone I care about, someone who is the subject of so much nasty press.”

“I don’t write those kinds of articles, Charlie. Besides, the women on board are of only passing interest for my purposes. It’s you guys who are my real subjects.”

“So, you will say nasty things about me?”

“Absolutely.”

We both had a good laugh and finished our drinks, then headed to the staff dining room for dinner. None of our colleagues were present, which left Charlie and I to a bit more uninterrupted conversation and I was not quite finished picking his brain about Lucy Blakely.

“To your point, Lucy approached me during that terrible weather, when there were so few people in the ballroom, and we had a brief conversation. My reaction now is she was all the nice things you’ve been saying about her, but . . .”

“Uh-oh. Look out, Nick. That’s how it starts.”

“What? How what starts?”

He paused a moment. “The Austrian prince on the first world cruise. The son of the German industrialist on the second.”

“And me? No known pedigree?”

“I’d place you in the category of the handsome Filipino who was a crooner with the orchestra a few years back.”

“And?” “She just likes you.”

“And? Has any of that ever made it into the tabloids?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“I’m miffed. Why hasn’t that stuff?”

“From my observations, I’d guess discretion is the essential membership requirement among the super-rich elite, including Austrian princes and the sons of German industrialists.”

“Jesus, wouldn’t this be an intelligence gold strike for her husband’s lawyers to use against her in the divorce suit?”

“Hey, don’t even think about going there. That could be very destructive on so many levels.”

“My writing has nothing to do with lawyers, Charlie. Just wondering.”

“Then I’d advise not just wondering about it, even to yourself.”

I let out a deep rush air. “My work is exhausting, Charlie, but someone has to do it.”

He stared at me a moment, then said, “I’ve said enough about Lucy. I fear what I’ve said, and left unsaid, will become too interesting for you not to pursue.”

“Not to worry. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in merely observing what’s happening around me, I feel like everything is a story. But I don’t do that kind of story and never will.”

“I see.”

I stared at him a moment; then suddenly was hit with a realization I didn’t see coming. “You are writing about all this, aren’t you? What is it, your great American novel? All these voyages, all these people morphing into characters in your opus.

Lucy, of course. Now even me.”

“So,” he replied, “what looks good for dinner?” * * * * * When you’ve had a romantic interlude, facilitated by copious amounts of alcohol – God love it – alcohol makes all of it seem so right. But then, you can never be quite sure how your next interaction with the party of the second part is going to go. And, since I was on a cruise ship, albeit with some fifteen hundred fellow passengers aboard, it was still a small community, given that there were only nine decks and perhaps a dozen public rooms, indoors and out, wherein to hide yourself. And so it was that I opted for the cocktail lounge as my morning retreat, feeling just a cup of coffee and my notebooks would provide all the companionship I’d require, and a cocktail lounge would be a safe haven away from all those piling it on at the breakfast

buffet. Alas, she found me, anyway. By now, I would have to accept that as the ersatz commander of the staff corps, she would have intelligence outposts throughout the ship. I would have guessed even my cabin may have surveillance cameras.

“Ah, there you are, Mr. Melfitano,” she said as she approached my table. “It appears you dropped your bowtie outside my quarters when you were kind enough to escort me back there the other evening.”

“Oh,” I replied, “I was wondering what happened to that. It’s my favorite. Thank you for your kindness. Can I offer you a cup of coffee and some sweet rolls?”

“A cup of tea would be fine,” she said, at the same time motioning to the attendant, who already started brewing some for her. She took the seat opposite me.

I closed my journal and placed it on the table between us.

“Another business book?” she asked.

“Nope, just some observations for my best-selling novel.”

“Do tell. What are some of your other novels? I’ll have some serious down time over the next three months. Perhaps you have one or two you can lend me.”

The waiter came over with her tea and placed it on the table before her. She blew lightly on it and took a sip.

I looked at her, smiled and shook my head.

“So, how are you, Nick?” she asked. “I’m feeling pretty well, myself, should you want to inquire.”

I couldn’t resist a broad smile. “Who the hell are you?” I asked. “And what planet are you from? You’ve given me plenty to last me for the final few days of this voyage, but lo, here you are again.”

“Enough to last? Are you filling some kind of quota?”

“Of course not. But I’m guessing you have an ability to create experiences that somehow seem unreal. Unreal, but absolutely lovely. Am I wrong about that?”

“Wow,” she said, “lovely. Are you sure you should confine your work to business books? Boring old business books.”

“Excuse me,” I replied. “Nothing I ever write is boring.”

“I’m sure.” She took another sip of her tea. “How the hell are you, Nicholas? May I call you Nicholas?”

“Absolutely not, Lucille. I’d rather the Lucy/Nick nomenclature we settled on.

And to answer your question, I’m doing fine, Lucy. And you?

“Couldn’t be better.”

“I’m happy,” I said, smiling warmly. “You sure know how to make a guy’s evening.”

“It only works when I’m with a special guy.”

“OK. I throw myself on the mercy of the court. If you’re trying to make me feel any better than you have already, I’m not sure I have the energy to resist.”

“Pity,” she said, “for I do have some free time after the dinner at the captain’s table this evening. And I see you, too, are on the guest list.”

“Right, and it does relieve me of my dancing duties tonight.”

“So . . .”

I smiled. “Well, these past five minutes have been all the time I can hold out from your offer to get together.”

“Then, see you at dinner.”

She took a few more sips of her tea, rose from the table and departed. I went back to my notes. * * * * * And then she started to get strange on me. I have found women tended to do that, especially women with whom I have had intimate contact. With Lucy, it began during that same afternoon, when I saw her and Charlie Selfridge talking, while sharing tea, in a small lounge adjacent to the first class dining room. As I stood in the entryway surveying the room, Lucy looked briefly in my direction, seemed to note my presence but made no gesture for me to come join them. In fact, she rearranged her seating position to turn her back toward me. I did an about face, a bit awkwardly, and left.

That evening, when I entered the dining room for dinner, as I neared the captain’s table, Lucy stood up abruptly, announced she was suddenly feeling ill and excused herself. She walked briskly by me, without acknowledging me in any way. After dinner, I called her suite and left a message inquiring how she was feeling and asking if I could be of any help, but she left no return message. When I tried to approach Charlie to see if he knew what was troubling her, he found reasons to be unavailable.

By the remaining full day of the voyage, I was chalking up my brief Lucy Blakely experience as just another of the inexplicable encounters I have had with women over my decades of wandering. Nonetheless, this turn of events was bothering me more than others. I didn’t expect my experience with Lucy to amount to much more than a brief interlude, a warm friendship we had had during one of those Atlantic crossings, which provided fodder for so many stories by so many writers I admired during the days before jet travel badly diminished the crossings. And then, as I passed one of the doors, which opened out onto the Promenade Deck, I saw her, leaning against the railing and staring out at the ocean, her hair slightly bouncing about a bit in a light breeze.

I approached, moving one of the deck chairs between her and me, to make just enough of a sound so as not to startle her when I got close. She turned from the railing, saw my approach, then shook her head ever so slightly.

“What is it?” I asked. “How have I offended you?”

“You said you wrote business books. You didn’t tell me you wrote newspaper articles and were writing a syndicated piece about your experiences on this trip. And, we know, don’t we, that one of your quote ‘experiences’ is me.”

Now, I shook my head. “I see. So, Charlie has filled your head with his take on what I am up to.”

She said nothing, but her lack of rebuttal was enough.

“I should have pegged him for a world-class gossip. He defined you as, and I quote, a ‘maneuverer’ but that was to throw me off the scent, while he fomented a drama of his own creation. For one of the very few times in my life, I let my naiveté get the better of me. When he spoke about you, I have to admit I had a very keen interest, but my interest grew more personal than anything I would do professionally.

Lucy, yes getting to know you really has given me what would be material for perhaps the yellowest journalism . . .” I paused a moment, “that I am never going to write. Not happening.”

She looked at me with the slightest hint of a questioning expression.

“Please, Lucy. I’ve got to believe that even in the short time we’ve been together we’ve gotten to know each other well enough to form character judgments.”

A smile formed at the corners of her mouth.

Finally, she said, “After Charlie quote, ‘let it slip’ about the article you’re writing, I’ve been running the movie reel in my head of the time we’ve spent together. While it includes some scenes that could be very damaging for me, you bear not the slightest resemblance to the tabloid reporters who have hounded me.”

“Thank you.”

“Can I trust you not to betray my feelings nor the intimacies we’ve shared?”

“Of course you can. I am a journalist. The call of my profession is to seek out relevant stories and place them before the public to evaluate. But part of the code, which many of my unscrupulous colleagues seem to have forgotten, is we don’t betray a trust, in my case even an unspoken trust. I won’t do that, Lucy. If you like, I’ll sign a nondisclosure agreement.”

She smiled warmly again. “No,” she said. “That won’t be necessary. I don’t need one more reason to see my attorney.”

I returned the smile but held it a bit too long.

“What is it?” she asked. “I’m sorry, I don’t know you that long, but I do know that look when I see it.

I laughed. “This could make a wonderful story someday, don’t you think?

Camouflaged as fiction. With your permission, of course. All names changed to protect the guilty.”

Her smile widened. “Well, guilty is a role I have been accused of by batteries of Alan’s lawyers.”

“A character in a work of fiction, a first for you, yes?”

“On the contrary. Many times, according to my soon-to-be ex-husband.”

We both laughed.

“So, you’re intrigued. I can see it on your face,” I said, my smile brightening. “It’ll be a reason for us to keep in touch.”

Her smile widened to challenge mine.

We paused during one of those lulls, when all that needed to be said has been said.

We regarded each other with a warmth that had been a leitmotif since we’d first met. I broke the brief silence.

“There’s nothing in my terms of agreement that prohibits me from being the one asking for a dance.”

I opened my arms. She folded into them. We began to dance to the silent music of a slow foxtrot.

“Your hair smells wonderful, Mrs. Blakely, just a hint of sea salt.”

“Well then, thank you, Mr. Melfitano,” she said.

“Well then, thank you, Mrs. . . . [ CTL Find] Bartlett [ CTL Replace] Blakely . . .

Artwork by Sharafina binti Teh Sharifuddin

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

Photo by Karen Dinan