Natural Traveler Magazine - Quarterly Cultural Magazine - Spring 2019

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

Henry Miller.

© 2019 Natural Traveler™, LLC

5 Brewster Street Unit 2, No. 204

Glen Cove, New York 11542

www.naturaltraveler.net

Natural Traveler Magazine Spring 2019 Editor & Publisher Tony Tedeschi Senior Editor Bill Scheller Staff Writers Ginny Craven Aglaia Davis Andrea England David E. Hubler Samantha Marie Buddy Mays John H. Ostdick Pedro Pereira Frank I. Sillay Kendric W. Taylor Photography Katie Cappeller Karen Dinan Buddy Mays Art Sharafina Teh Web Master Will Rodriguez

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Table of Contents

Editor’s Letter

Page 3

Contributors

Page 4

Fogg’s Horn: The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus

Page 5

Email from Dallas: Celebrating Natural Things on the Urban Prairie

John H. Ostdick

Page 9

Email from the Upper West Side: Confessions of a Wall-Mart Loyalist

Aglaia Davis

Page 14

Email from New Zealand: The Hurry-Up Happy Hour

Frank I. Sillay

Page 17

A Memoir: Salmon Fishery, Vancouver Island, 1981

Bill Scheller

Page 19

Nonstick Coatings: The Future-Proof Business Model?

Tony Tedeschi

Page 26

Photo Essay: Only in Iceland

Buddy Mays

Page 31

Question and Answer Session With a New York City Pimp Car

Aglaia Davis

Page 40

Theme Parks and Shopping Malls

Norman de Plume

Page 43

The Voice

Ginny Craven

Page 44

Photo Essay: Spring Semester in Italy . . . and Beyond Travels with an iPhone Camera

Katie Cappeller

Page 45

Hangar Flying

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 49

Key Largo

Anonymous

Page 55

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Editor’s Letter How One Company Has Made the World a Better Place

In 1970, barely a year into Whitford Corporation’s existence, Dave Willis, the company’s cofounder, made a trip to Crest Coatings, a new client in southern California, to deal with a problem with a Whitford coating for crepe pans. The coating was coming loose from the cooking surface and turning a chalk white. An analysis showed that the client’s engineer had under-estimated the heat on the surface of the pan by some 200° F, i.e. it was not a problem with the coating but the specification for the coating that was needed. Armed with the new spec, Willis returned to his company headquarters, in Pennsylvania, where his chemist, Paul Field, reformulated the coating to meet the new spec. However, just solving the problem and shipping the new formula to the customer would not satisfy Willis’s sense of how a customer should be treated.

“Dave and one of his engineers flew here and spent a couple of days with us to figure out how to make this material work,” Mike Erickson, Crest’s CEO, told me in an interview during my work on a manuscript that would become “The Whitford Way,” published by Amazon.

While the successful application of a nonstick coating onto a pan used to make crepes was never going to have a significant impact on how the world turns, the attention to solving the problem became fundamental to how Whitford does business, whether it was the six-person operation it was at the time or the worldwide company it is today. Whitford’s coatings are on everything from frying pans to the nuts and bolts on oilrigs, pistons in motor vehicles and air conditioners, molds for giant wind turbine blades, even fabric for athletic socks.

“If it hadn’t been for Whitford, the scope of fluoropolymer coatings would be a lot less than it is today,” Erickson explained.

As I began to transcribe Erickson’s words, I was suddenly stunned by what I was typing. I’d been at this writing project for almost two years by then and only because of that could I fully appreciate the significance of what Erickson had said. The super slippery goop that Willis had foreseen as something he could sell has, over the decades, contributed greatly to a smoother running world. If you just consider the positive impact Whitford coatings have made on the millions of pistons they have coated, minimizing untold tons of greenhouse gases spewing into the atmosphere, the world is indeed a demonstrably better place in which to live.

In a global economy where today’s must-have is tomorrow’s e-waste, Whitford manufactures a product necessary on a foundational level, in effect for any system with moving parts. Any system where corrosion decreases lifespan, where ease of release is a major factor. Even in a world of rapidly changing technologies, some basic requirements remain unchanged.

In the process, Whitford has managed to achieve what all companies which intend to be there for the long term seek to achieve but few manage to actually accomplish: a future-proof business model. How did all this happen? Some answers in “Nonstick Coatings: The Future-Proof Business Model?” beginning on Page 26.

– Tony Tedeschi

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Contributors John H. Ostdick

“I pull alongside the bobcat and stare at him incredulously,” Ostdick writes in his Email from Dallas, taking us through the disparate worlds of the urban prairie around the city, where he is apt to encounter all manner of wildlife, during his bike rides or just enjoying a drink on the back patio.

Aglaia Davis

Via her Email from the Upper West Side, Davis “confesses” how she became a Wall-Mart loyalist. In a separate piece, she conducts a Q&A with “Batmo,” her “bullet-riddled” black Nissan Maxima concerning life left out, night after night, on the streets of the Upper West Side.

Frank I. Sillay

In his Email from New Zealand, Sillay reminisces about his arrival in there in 1966 to find happy hour a hurry-up exercise via a law passed during WWI, ordering the bars to close at 6 p.m. “If you can’t get drunk by 6 o’clock,” one sot replied, “you’re clearly not trying!”

Bill Scheller

Scheller takes us back to his time on a Salmon fishing boat off Vancouver Island in 1981 and his success landing some arm-busting big ones.

Tony Tedeschi

In a world where today’s hot business is tomorrow’s forgotten enterprise, Tedeschi explores whether a future-proof business model is ever possible and finds the answer in an unlikely place.

Buddy Mays

Writer/Photographer Buddy Mays takes us on a photographic journey around the dramatic land- and seascapes of Iceland, animal life both wild and domestic.

Kendric W. Taylor

“Once even, I could remember every flight I had ever taken,” Ken Taylor relates as part of his lifelong love affair with air travel in “Hangar Flying.”

Ginny Craven

“I hear a voice, crying out in the velvet night,” begins Ginny Craven’s lyrically beautiful, achingly heartfelt poem, “The Voice,” shedding yet one more ray of light upon the soul-bearing movement: Me Too.

Katie Cappeller

Studying her spring semester junior year in Florence, Katie Cappeller uses her free time to travel about Italy and beyond, armed with her iPhone camera and a great eye for photos.

Anonymous

What is real? What are the scribblings in a notebook? . . . The answers, or not, in this short story, “Key Largo,” by . . . well, he’s . . . Anonymous.

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Fogg’s Horn The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus

What’s with That List?

I was sitting in a beach-side bar in Avarua, the principal port of the Cook Islands, when I found myself unable to avoid engaging in conversation – no, that’s not right; I found myself unable to avoid having my ear bent by one of those endlessly droning, obsessive drunks who, while found worldwide, seem to be particularly thick on the ground in the Pacific Islands and East Asia.

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This character, as near as I could make out, had been an engineer with the Union Steam Ship Company, which had its head office, slipway, and main workshops in New Zealand. Before the Second World War, the Union company was quite a large operation, and operated 40 or 50 ships, ranging from little 500-ton tramps to luxury ocean liners, serving ports all around the globe.

Workers were swarming all through the ship, when one of them asked the overseer . . .

It seems that one of the smaller steamships, which was employed in tramping around the Indian Ocean, China Sea, and the South Pacific, was known to have an inherent list of about 3 degrees to starboard; always had, as long as anybody could remember.

Eventually this ship was so far overdue for a general survey that it was emptied of cargo and pulled up on the slipway at Evans Bay in Wellington, New Zealand.

Workers were swarming all through the ship, when one of them asked the overseer what he wanted done about the timber bulkhead in the forward hold.

“What timber bulkhead?” was the response, but when he examined the artefact in question, which had obviously been undisturbed for many years, he gave orders to rip it out. When this was done, a large steam traction engine (in near new condition) was found behind it, which explained the 3degree list, allowed for its correction without resorting to ballast, but did not reveal a paper trail, or ownership of the engine, or where to send the bill for shipping said engine thousands of miles around the Southern Hemisphere for the preceding 20 or 30 years.

Since hearing this story, my dreams have been haunted by the image of a skinny figure, dressed in rags, sitting on a wharf in Calcutta, or Trincomalee, still waiting patiently for his traction engine.

What’s in a Name?

I was sitting in the bar in the Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen, discussing with a stranger the extent to which it matters what you call a thing. I can’t remember exactly, but I imagine this conversation was prompted by the peculiar name and history of our venue.

Consider, if you will, the “Hotel England,” except expressed in French and, during the war chosen by the Germans as their headquarters in Denmark. All that was lacking for complete Euroexpansiveness was an Italian-American named “Tedeschi,” as in Italian for “Germans.”

My companion was arguing the affirmative in re the importance of names, and it emerged that, when he was a young man he had been an enlisted man, or “digger” in the Australian division of the British Eighth Army in North Africa. At some point during the time they were being chased back and forth across the desert by Field Marshall Rommel, he and an older companion were given a small truck and a water trailer, with a capacity of maybe 500-600 gallons, and sent to get it filled with water.

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On the way back from the watering point, they discovered a little roadside speakeasy that had been set up by some enterprising Arab. Feeling that enterprise should be rewarded, they stopped in for a few bottles of the local brew, and when they staggered out, some hours later, they found that their water trailer was missing.

My interlocutor said he’d gone into an abject panic, and had visions of his productive years being wasted breaking rocks in a military prison . . .

My interlocutor said he’d gone into an abject panic, and had visions of his productive years being wasted breaking rocks in a military prison, but his companion, who, though only a private, had been in the army for 10 or 12 years, assured him there was no cause for concern. When they returned to their camp, the old grunt went straight to the company office and reported loss of his water bottle, what US forces call a canteen. After filling out numerous forms, he was told that his next pay check would be docked two day’s pay.

The duo then slipped the truck back into the motor pool, and made themselves scarce for the rest of the day.

To my friend’s amazement, the MPs didn’t turn up to arrest them and there was no further mention of water trailers.

Some weeks later, the old soldier went to the company office clutching a dirty, wrinkled piece of paper, and told the clerk that he had been sent with a detail change to routine orders 1992292/FS. To change the word “bottle” to read “trailer.”

Duck Hunting, New Zealand Style

On a visit to New Zealand some years ago, I spent several weeks staying on a sheep farm as a guest of a friend of my father’s. This visit happened to overlap with the duck hunting season, which is one of the highlights of the calendar in rural New Zealand. I had never been duck hunting before, am notably unskilled with a shotgun, and personally, prefer ducks on the wing to those on a plate.

But social circumstances dictated that when I started being invited to shoot on the land of my host, and that of several of his friends and neighbors, grateful acceptance was the only possible response to these highly coveted invitations.

I won’t bore you with details of the actual hunting, other than a broad general description, which will shed light on the meat of the story.

The prime hunting in this district was over flat scrub land around the edges of a large brackish lake that covers 30 or 40 square miles, without getting deeper than about eight feet.

Locals with property rights, or connections familial or friendly, build little camouflaged positions called “Mi Mi’s” (pronounced like a repetition of the possessive pronoun). They generally resemble positions for infantry defense, with particular attention paid to camouflage against aerial observation. Early, before dawn on a shooting day, shooters position themselves in the appropriate

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mi mi, with warm clothing, guns, and dogs. When ducks are shot, dogs are sent out to retrieve them, which they do with remarkable skill.

One of the owners of a local mi mi was a notorious skinflint named Bob, who was known to enjoy a drop of whisky . . .

These places are cherished jealously, and everybody in the district knows whose territory is where, even though boundaries may not coincide with those on a cadastral map.

One of the owners of a local mi mi was a notorious skinflint named Bob, who was also known to enjoy a drop of whisky to keep the chill at bay.

After a couple of days of shooting, when the sun was high and all the shooters had gone home with their spoils, my host picked up his best retriever, Ben (who was famous around the district), and an empty whisky bottle, and we drove to Bob’s mi mi, where my friend began tossing the empty bottle into the scrub at all points of the compass around Bob’s mi mi, from where it was instantly retrieved by Ben. It had the feel of a routine training exercise until my friend feigned throwing the bottle, but palmed it and slipped it inside his coat. Ben disappeared into the scrub, rummaged around, then came back out, and with his head cocked to one side, it did not take much imagination to picture a number of question marks piling up on the ground around him. He was sternly sent back to try again. This was repeated several times, until Ben duly appeared with a three-quarters full bottle of whisky, and was generously rewarded.

Street Artisan Sculpting, Florence, Italy 8

Email from Dallas: Celebrating Natural Things on the Urban Prairie Story and Renderings by John H. Ostdick

A crisp, on-its-way-to-gorgeous morning unfolds beyond the handlebars of my touring bike as I leave the two-mile warm-up stage of a long weekday ride with my frequent cycling buddy Don Knight.

We have the White Rock Trail, which tracks a 7.5- mile-portion of White Rock Creek in North Dallas, virtually to ourselves except for some screeching hawks, various songbirds, and buzzing insects above and to the side of us.

On my left on a bank above the trail is the back side of a strip of shops and restaurants, on my right a four-foot-high growth of brush and assorted small trees that stretch down to the creek below (a section that is mostly concrete side channels).

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As I stretch my legs out and push for a little speed, I catch a glimmer of what at first appears to be a large dog trotting along in the distance in front of us. I quickly realize, however, that its trot has a definite slink to it. As I gain on it, I see that it is a rather large bobcat gliding south.

I pull alongside the bobcat and stare at him incredulously. He doesn’t seem to mind sharing the trail for a minute or so, his fluid movements tracking the Tony Hawk has a quieting effect on the back yard. slowing spin of my wheels. He turns his head, looks at me earnestly, and then veers off the creek-side of the trail and vanishes into thick brush.

“Well, you don’t see that every day,” I say to Don over my shoulder. As he pulls up to my side, we exchange broad smiles and a simultaneous shrug. Later, during a mid-ride break we will comment that we do see something novel — animal, vegetable, or mineral — most every day we ride.

Pedaling by a field behind a Greek church one day, we see a hawk struggling near the edge of the trail. As we get closer, we see it has its claws in a just-killed jackrabbit, which is too hefty for the hawk to fly away with. The hawk tugs the carcass, a foot or two at a time, farther into the center of the field until it feels safe enough to tear into it.

Crossing the creek closer to White Rock Lake one day, I spy a beautiful great blue heron perched one-legged on an infinitely skinny stump sticking out of the middle of the creek. The heron is frozen in a diffused light, five-foot-plus wingspan fully extended, letting the persistent breeze of the day blow dry its blue-tinged feathers. It’s a wondrous sight.

And so on.

Dallas, situated on the rolling plains near the headwaters of the Trinity River, is mostly black-land prairies, midway between the Piney Woods of East Texas and the Great Plains. Its incredible, mostly northward, suburban growth in the past 40 years has overrun fields and pastures and swallowed up natural habitats. Yet amid a certain urban ugliness, nature here persists.

The creek itself, its bed composed predominantly of a tannish-white Austin chalk, is a study in survival. White Rock Creek — part nature respite, urban garbage pail, and urban filter — begins its

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23.5-mile southerly journey from just southeast of the white-hot booming suburb of Frisco north of Dallas to the Trinity River close to the city center.

(Its primary watershed is a narrow 100square-mile band stretching from its upper reaches in Frisco through Plano, Richardson and North Dallas into White Rock Lake). All along the urban watershed, vegetation and land have been stripped off to build houses, roadways, and shopping centers, eroding soils. The resulting urban storm water runoff is a smorgasbord of animal feces, fertilizers, and oil and grease from cars. What does not settle in its banks, travels along south in White Rock Creek.

A resident snapping turtle glides past.

(In an ironic environmental circle of life, the project manager of a 1997 dredging of a then-clogged White Rock Lake told me that the dredged material was pumped to a series of old gravel pits 17 miles south of the lake that originally gave up their dirt in the 1970s for highway projects to accommodate the rapid growth of the northern suburbs. So you had silt and sediment that streamed from northern expansion into White Rock pumped back to the gravel pits that had previously yielded materials used to build the infrastructure that supported that growth.)

Sometimes the creek’s banks are comprised of heavily wooded, undisturbed natural vegetation (cedar, elm, pecan, and ash trees being most prevalent, but including burr, Texas, and Shumard oaks, and an occasional giant sycamore), other times it is hardened against erosion by long concrete channels or stacked cages of riprap. During the spring, foliage and blooms brightened the expanse, hiding winter’s often gloomy post-apocalyptic visages of fallen trees and trash and plastic bags left behind, clinging to high branches after high storm waters recede.

My home is less than a mile from the head of the White Rock Creek trailhead. Although it is also a couple blocks from one of the busiest highways in Texas, it is partially shielded from the constant roar, resting in a sunken, wooded cul-de-sac with a White Rock Creek feeder running along my back yard. The creek mostly trickles year round but can rise and rage wildly during heavy storms.

A magnificent red-tailed hawk frequents our heavily-wooded block. We call him Tony Hawk.

When the squirrels hunker into hiding places, and our plentiful bird population abandons the backyard feeders and stops singing, we know it’s a cue to look for the golden flash of Tony swooping above (a red-tailed hawk’s wingspan can approach five feet). He often lights on a branch away from our back patio and just stares into the creek bed below, waiting for a careless mouse, rat, or squirrel to stumble into his crosshairs.

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Three large snapping turtles (Chelydra serpetina) live in a tunnel in a portion of heavily vined bank near our driveway. They are skittish when we peer at them from above. We seldom see more than one of them in the creek at a time, although it has happened. It is a touchstone of sorts for us every time we go out to our cars to look for the turtles.

The howls of coyotes sounding mating calls or working the creek bed and a resident barred owl’s series of six to eight “Who cooks for you" are familiar parts of the night.

A family of ladder-backed woodpeckers run tap-tap-tapping rings around a couple of large trees near the creek throughout the day. The male of these small black-andwhite striped woodpeckers bears a bright red crown, a la Woody of cartoon fame.

Migrating hummingbirds — predominantly ruby-throated — arrive starving beginning in mid-March, with a handful staying to nest for the summer before their return south in August.

The cast of characters changes over time.

Coyotes apparently have thinned the population of long-legged, scrawny jackrabbits that we used to have to chase off from munching plants in the yard. And we haven’t spied in a while the red fox that used to prowl around about dusk. (Not native, the red fox was imported to provide sport and training for fox-hounds, and Texas Parks & Wildlife notes that the entire red fox population of Central Texas probably descended from 40 foxes released between 1890 and 1895 near Waco.)

Viewing Dallas skyline from White Rock Lake.

White Rock Creek provides a north-south wildlife highway of sorts through the city.

The predominant destination is White Rock Lake, and eventually the Trinity River Forest farther to the south. The 1,100-acre lake is the city’s fitness epicenter as well as its soft soul.

According to the For the Love of the Lake organization, White Rock Lake Park is home to 33 types of mammals, including squirrels, rabbits, skunks, raccoons, possums, bobcats, red foxes, and minks. There are 54 varieties of reptiles, including rattlesnakes, turtles, lizards, and horned toads.

Twenty kinds of amphibians call the park home, including salamanders, toads, and frogs. There are more than 217 species of birds, including swans, pelicans, sea gulls, loons, double-crested cormorants, great blue herons, yellow-crowned night herons, great egrets, snowy egrets, mallards, gadwalls, northern shovelers, blue-winged teal, green-winged teal, red-tailed hawks, Cooper’s

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hawks, kestrels, red-bellied woodpeckers, white-breasted nuthatches, Carolina chickadees, American crows, eastern phoebes, American robins, northern mockingbirds, ruby-crowned kinglets, yellow-rumped warblers, dark-eyed juncos, song sparrows, fox sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, and various owls.

And there are more, often combining their songs into our personal symphony as we ride around the lake, sometimes with hundreds of our close Dallas friends.

And while nothing about these regular wildlife intersections will stir memories of Yosemite or the Great Smoky Mountains, they provide crucial moments of urban escape — whether while navigating a bike trail or a back patio martini.

Glorious sunset puts an exclamation point on the day.

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Email from the Upper West Side:

Confessions of a Wal-Mart Loyalist Local Shop Going Under? Blame Me.

By Aglaia Davis

Not long after Trader Joe’s opened on West 72nd Street, my father delivered the morose news to me that Fairway, 2.5 blocks north of it, was suffering an acute loss of business. “How horrible!” I decried, having loved Fairway as my “first” market when moving away from Maine and into the throes of New York City in 1993. I resigned to renew my patronage of the overcrowded Upper West Side grocer in a declaration of silent war against “big” Trader Joe’s. I had to save it.

That resolve lasted a few months. Every week, I would casually dot the isles of the Market between 74th and 75th Streets, weaving between the select few sales items to find a buy. My charges seldom rang to a tune greater than $20.00, and – lest there be any confusion – I continued doing all of my real grocery shopping west of the Hudson. Yes, the “normal” grocery stores in Little Falls and Clinton, New Jersey, had mini-novels of sale items in their flyers each week, as opposed to just two flimsy article-length “pages” (web-based) of items that were simply a little less overpriced than normal at Fairway; and, let’s face it, they were just way more pleasant to shop at.

I professed a great love for “my” stores – hitting Pioneer on Columbus for its sale items often, sometimes the bodega on West 94th, ShopRite in Little Falls, Trader Joe’s and Stop N’ Shop in Clifton. And, oh, yeah, and there was Wal-Mart in Secaucus.

“Wally World,” as it was christened to me years before by my brother’s best friend, entered my life in the slow-leak kind of way, starting out as a drip-drip and in time becoming more of a steady flow. I never hated it the way that my Middle Class friends did (“It’s so White Trash”), nor scowled at (or even noticed) the caliber of shoppers I rubbed elbows with. I appreciated it for the bargains on “staple” items (1/3 of the price of the grocery stores), and over time realized that its $3.96 “wife beaters” made upstanding workout shirts that withstood the test of time (and I dare say my closet still has many from a good 10 years ago).

But I was only casually dating Wally World before 2017. The bulk of my grocery money was spent at ShopRite, then Stop N’ Shop, then Trader Joe’s, and sometimes places in between. I shopped the sales, hitting seven (7) markets a week. I told many an unbending ear that I once was a faithful Pathmark loyalist, years before that chain folded, doing all of my shopping there until I

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realized that my weekly bills were only going up. At a certain point, I resigned to the reality that no one store could capture all of my weekly needs or else I would spend far more than I should.

But my devotion to shopping everywhere in lieu of shopping just somewhere almost unwittingly dissolved. In 2017, I started “buying out the store” at Wally World, spending far more there than I did anywhere else. It was my favorite store without a doubt. I could buy food of any type, household items, and clothing all in one stop. I could feel safe that the prices I was paying were less than the grocery stores unless there were sales (which I still courted). For a while, I persuaded myself that those sales were worth my shopping at the “normal” stores, and that I had not abandoned the grocery stores that I used to so adore.

Sam’s Club was next door to Our correspondent at Wally World Wally World, owned – of course – by the same family and, in 2018, I got a membership card and commitment to buying certain items in bulk. It quickly became another favorite. Soon I was spending the greatest amount of my shopping time each week between Wally and Sam’s Club, taking my time in each and increasing the bill every time.

‘Whatever I needed, I went to Wally.’

By mid-2018, I proudly called myself a Wal-Mart Shopper to friends and family, reporting that the only way in which I followed Middle America was in supporting a family notorious for conservative political leanings. It didn’t matter. Whatever I needed, I went to Wally. Seldom did it let me down and, when it did, I never lost my faith in it. I refused to even “cheat” on it with Target, which I considered too “upscale” for my liking. Eventually, I was driving to Stop N’ Shop and ShopRite out of force of habit, only to leave empty-handed.

In February 2019, I officially called it quits at the “regular” stores. I “came to Jesus” and admitted to myself and others that Wally World met all of my needs; that I needed only it to survive week by week.

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And so it ends, my love affair with the Fairways of the New York Metro Area that offer fresh fruit, decently monied customers, and clean shopping environs. I surrender to the check-your-receiptwhen-you-leave life that accompanies a department store where a wide swath of people attempt to – and do – walk out without paying. I push my heavy cart through a mass of grossly overweight people lining up at the “Mickey D’s” by the checkout lines Saturdays, and almost always return Sundays for the items that I “forgot” to get the day before.

It’s true, I proudly support Wally World, the only department store I have ever shopped in as an adult where you can buy milk and eggs as easily as makeup and auto oil. I look forward to my trips there almost as much as I do haunting my barn a few miles away from it and riding the horses there.

But it hasn’t all been without hiccups. A few days ago, my dear friend stopped me on a Monday morning to say, “Your favorite store just closed.” My life flashed before my eyes. In the millisecond of silence that ensured, my mind flooded with questions: “Wally World? I was just there yesterday. How on earth did I miss the signs and the sales? How could it go under?”

“Wal-Mart Secaucus?” I asked in horror.

“No,” said he, “the store on 79th Street where you loved to buy your work clothes.”

I sighed with the relief that only comes in hearing that a close friend or relative just got a clean bill of health after an acute scare.

“Oh,” I laughed. “Just that little place? Who cares?”

My words weren’t lost on me, folks. Next time you’re looking for something or someone to blame when your local business folds – maybe even when Fairway shutters its Broadway doors for the last time – feel free to drop my name.

We all know it’s my fault.

Proudly Yours,

Your Loyal Wally World Shopper

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Email from New Zealand: The Hurry-Up Happy Hour ‘If you can’t get drunk by 6 o’clock,’ the sot replied, ‘you’re clearly not trying!’

By Frank I. Sillay

Pubs in New Zealand in the ‘60s were unlike anything I had ever struck, and I had sampled in many drinking environments in my travels.

Beer has traditionally been brewed in a large vessel, which would take a week or two to ferment to the point where it was ready to be put into bottles or kegs for distribution, and then a fresh batch would be started, but some bright spark in New Zealand in the 1930s came up with a continuous brewing process in which ingredients were regularly added to the first of a series of interconnected tanks, and beer continuously flowed from the last one, at which point it was either bottled or placed in road tankers of the type used for delivering gasoline to service stations. Pubs were fitted out with gigantic tanks under the sidewalk out front, and the tankers would fill them up through fittings in the sidewalk. Behind the bar, beer was delivered under pressure through hoses with trigger-operated handpieces, similar to garden watering equipment. This made rapid beer delivery easy, but had the drawback that if the pipes and hoses were not kept clean, strange yeasts would continue to work, giving the beer (not too flash at the best of times) some pretty strange flavors.

When I arrived in 1966, there was still a law on the books that had been introduced as an emergency measure in WW I, dictating that bars were to close at 6 p.m. This imposed a certain amount of urgency in the after-work drinks. Most pubs were pretty Spartan places, with no provision for seating; presumably on the well-founded theory that a seated drinker might not know when to quit, where a standing one would simply fall over, thus removing the need for complex decision- making.

Typical public bar in the 1960s in New Zealand. Note several jugs are visible on the bar at the bottom of the photo, and a bartender's hand holds one of the dispensing handpieces.

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The social norm was for men (women, though not banned, were basically unknown in public bars) to aggregate into “schools.” Two or three to half a dozen friends would stand around a table with a top about 18 inches square and an ash tray recessed into the center. These tables were elbow high, and distributed around the floor on maybe four- or five-foot centers. Each member of a school would take it in turn to go to the bar and buy a set number of jugs (glass pitchers holding three pints) The ability to carry three full jugs in each hand without major spillage was a skill required of every New Zealand man. Everybody was equipped with a seven-ounce glass, and nobody was allowed to drink slower than the fastest drinker. All drinking was done in lockstep. I found this hard to understand, but quickly learned that this was a rule that could not be disputed, unless you were a formidable brawler.

‘Last Call and the bar would be cleared.’

At 6 o’clock sharp, “Last Call” was sounded, and at 6:15, the bar would be cleared. One bar in downtown Wellington had drains in the tiled floor, and the tiles extended up the walls shoulder high. At 6:15, the fire hoses were reeled out and turned on, thereby clearing the patrons and cleaning the premises.

The tanker delivery of beer to pubs mandated a one-to-one relationship between brewery and pub, and during the ‘60s, the big breweries were busy gobbling up their smaller competitors, until within a few years, there were only two breweries left. As is usual with corporate giants bent on world domination, the breweries set about eliminating any interesting, or attractive, or picturesque drinking venues and converting them to uniform chrome and formica. If social progress could be pursued with such ruthless efficiency, we would live in an earthly paradise.

After a few years of this regime, little craft breweries began springing up, mainly supplying local markets, using kegs and 12-ounce bottles, and the process has come full circle. Now, especially in places like Wellington and Lyttleton, every bar is a revelation: in décor, entertainment, and varieties of beer available, though the wonderful old 19th-century barrooms have gone forever, as have the tanker trucks.

When 6 o’clock closing was finally abolished, in ’67 or ’68, an enterprising newspaper reporter woke up a gabardine raincoat-clad drunk on a park bench to solicit his opinion of the change.

“If you can’t get drunk by 6 o’clock,” the sot replied, “you’re clearly not trying!”

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Salmon Fishery, Vancouver Island, 1981 A Memoir

By Bill Scheller

Nord Fjord is a stout and handsome fifty-eight foot white steel-hulled boat . . .

It is eight o’clock in the evening, broad August daylight, and the radio in the wheelhouse is tuned to a station in Vancouver. It’s the Forties Hour, and the voice of a young Frank Sinatra drifts out over Quatsino Sound. Nord Fjord, Halvor Bigset, skipper, is anchored just off the main channel opposite Kains Island. I am spread-eagled on the hatch cover of the fish hold, still bundled up against the cold Pacific winds we left behind when we rounded the point into the sound. The breezes here are light and mild, but I am still shivering with seasickness, which sun and torpor are just beginning to dispel.

Halvor has seen seasick deckhands before, has been a seasick deckhand in Norway in his youth.

Now, sixty and compact, his muscles and his light brown hair still with him though his chin-stubble comes in white, he knows that the nausea either goes away by the second day, or gets worse and drives the victim ashore for good. His last deckhand, a twenty-year-old Englishman, had it bad but did not know when to give up -- for six weeks he played the Spartan boy, with the fox gnawing his innards, until he signed off weighing twenty pounds less than when Halvor first put his name in the log.

When that happens -- or when a deckhand is disagreeable, drunken, or incompetent -- the harbor towns on the west coast of Vancouver Island will quickly cough up another. So I happened onto 19

Nord Fjord, and so I happen to be prostrate on the hatch cover, taking my turn with the fox.

Halvor suspects I will survive, and goes about the deck unconcerned. If he wonders about me at all, he probably wonders when I will get up and make dinner.

The evening is breezy and beautiful, and we are moored out of the range of the horseflies that bedevil this coast. Steep forested hills close around the blue sound. Sinatra is singing “Day by Day,” in a voice untouched by time and cigarettes.

“What a singer he was,” I say to Halvor. I am well enough now to sit up and talk.

“Ja, he was popular, that’s for sure.” Halvor has to couch his approval in practical terms; he will not say that Sinatra had a wonderful voice, but must remark upon the practical results of his having it. Halvor is a practical man.

“For dinner we have the halibut, ja?” Of course he is thinking of his dinner. I can think of it myself, now, without revulsion, and the halibut sounds good. Halvor has cut thick white steaks from the little eighteen-pounder I brought up on the bottom leader of my main line this morning, and we will bake them and eat them with canned corn and some of the brown rice left on board by the English deckhand, whose taste ran to natural foods, when he was capable of eating at all.

A wonderful thing, fresh halibut. But halibut is not the reason Halvor Bigset and I are at this mooring on Nord Fjord, listening to Frank Sinatra as the first intimations of dusk gather over Quatsino Sound, and the Kain Island Light begins to flash its warning that here North America begins. Our business in these waters is with a different fish, against which the lumbering, bottombound halibut seems an evolutionary joke. Nord Fjord is a machine for catching salmon: the plentiful pink salmon, called a “humpback” or “humpie” for its dorsal swelling at spawning time; sockeye, which leaps across the labels of millions of cans; the silvery coho; and the lordly spring salmon whose plethora of names -- Chinook, Tyee, and, for the biggest, “smiley” -- reflect its great desirability and legendary status among sport and commercial fishermen alike.

On Nord Fjord , Halvor and I pursue our quarry not with purse seine or gill net but by the artful and persistent means of hook and line. Halvor and I, in this summer of 1981, are trolling for salmon. In both the wholesale and retail markets, trolled salmon are superior salmon. Trollers, Halvor told me, always get a better price for their fish. The fish are in better shape; they are dressed more quickly after they are caught and killed, so that the meat is firmer and has better keeping qualities. Netted fish often die in the net, and aren’t dressed until perhaps several hours later, when the net is hauled in. If a fish isn’t dressed promptly, the blood along the spine congeals, turning to the consistency of pudding. I see this difference myself, between salmon I cleaned right away and a few that I left too long in the “checker,” the wooden box that stands before me in the stern of Nord Fjord , and into which I toss each fish after taking it from the leader. As the blood congeals, the meat gets softer.

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“A good buyer can tell net fish right away,” says Halvor. He speaks with the pleasure of a man whose fish the buyer would also recognize, for the better reason.

Winter Harbour lies on the Forward Inlet off Quatsino Sound, and is the northernmost of a string of fishing ports on the west coast of Vancouver Island -Bamfield, Ucluelet, Tofino -and the most tenuously connected, by land, with the towns that face east, along the Inside Passage opposite the British Columbia mainland. It is, in 1981, a town of about fifty people. Perhaps thirty or forty boats fish regularly out of Winter Harbour, although during the peak of the salmon season, there might be three hundred boats operating in the immediate vicinity.

Joe Tjernagel, captain of troller Quo Vadis (r) and Halvor Bigset of the Nord Fjord.

. . . I had no notion of how soon I would know her No electric or phone lines run into Winter Harbour. Everyone who lives there has a private diesel generator, and uses the radiophone as if they are fishermen out at sea. The houses are strung along in a line between the road and the water, with a boardwalk separating the yards and gardens (vegetable gardens are popular, since you could tie a knot in the carrots sold in the town’s only store) from the little wharves and fishing sheds where the locals keep their boats and gear. The big wharves are farther “downtown” -- it’s actually called that -- and belong to the fish buyers and the government. The buyers, BC Packers and the Co-op, have their storage depots and icehouses on the wharves. Smaller piers branch out from the wharves, and boats are tied up everywhere.

During the few days before I began working, I walked the piers and made a pastime of collecting the names of the boats. I recorded at least a hundred. April, Christine H , Miss Judy , and Peggy M suggested their owners’ attachment to home and hearth; Courageous, Ensign, and Ocean Challenger sounded as if their skippers were onetime Navy men; Svalbard I and Viking Rover were quick reminders of how many men here hailed from another jaggedly-indented coast (as I added Nord Fjord to this list, I had no notion of how well I would soon know her); and Merrimac made me briefly homesick for New England.

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Winter Harbour is so remote, so lost amidst tortuous deep waterways that lead inland to nowhere and outward to the immense Pacific, so imperviously surrounded by steep, dark-forested hills that plunge beachless into the cold sounds and inlets, that the fishing boats seem more than anything else like the true links with the world beyond. In Shirley’s Kitchen, the only restaurant in town, the latest newspaper is two days old. That was the last time Shirley’s husband went to Port Hardy. If he stays home for another week, that well-thumbed paper’s events will still have to serve as current.

Winter Harbor wasn’t an easy place for an outsider to sidle into. Under normal circumstances, getting a job on Nord Fjord or any other salmon boat would begin with knowing the skipper or being a coast local.

Ordinarily, you don’t start off green back east, take a train to Vancouver, and head out to the island wearing a clean shirt and an affected stubble. But a very old friend had fetched up on this wild coast after dropping out of graduate school at the University of British Columbia. When he wasn’t logging, he was Author with his big spring salmon fishing, and he insisted that I come out and try it for myself. He hooked me with a letter that read, in part, “It was crazy, Bill, each line had about a dozen flashers with little red hoochy lures on them and as fast as you could get them into the water there would be fish on them. ... And when you’re running your lines in and on your bottom plug there’s a forty pound spring, your heart jumps.

There are fish down there that break 80 lb. test leader and straighten size 11 hooks.”

And that was enough to hook me.

Nord Fjord is a stout and handsome fifty-eight foot white steel-hulled boat, a lord among the brightly-painted wooden gillnetters and fiberglass day boats (“Tupperware” boats, their detractors call them) that populate the salmon fleet. In this summer of 1981, she is eighteen years old.

Nord Fjord has beautiful teak decks, which Halvor says will last as long as her steel hull. They are a light ashen gray when dry, and a lovely chestnut brown when they are wet. The decks are often wet, either from the mist and dews and frequent rains of the Pacific Northwest, or from sea spray.

They must nearly always have been wet when Halvor took his boat 150 miles out to sea, fishing for tuna one year after the salmon season ended. That trip was easy work for Nord Fjord’s strong Caterpillar diesel, which Halvor says has never needed major work. Halvor climbs down into the engine room at four each morning to bring the beast to life, and, in my bunk six feet away, my deepest slumbers are finished.

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A modern trolling vessel like Nord Fjord is equipped with hydraulic winches called “gurdies,” three to a side. Each gurdy pays out 600-pound test steel line, and up to a dozen leaders hang at intervals from each line. Each leader has a bright artificial lure at its end. The leaders clip onto the line, which is reeled in hydraulically and stopped when the captain or deckhand sees a leader pulling taut with a fish.

The working heart of Nord Fjord is the open deck aft of the wheelhouse, where Halvor and I spend our days. Here are the gurdies, the checkers, and Halvor’s secondary controls and depthfinder screen; ahead, between the checkers and the wheelhouse bulkhead, is the hatch covering the insulated fish hold with its aluminum racks of salmon packed in ice. But the boat’s personality is in the wheelhouse.

Snug and compact, warm with varnished wood even Checker in stern of the Nord Fjord though Nord Fjord is a modern steel vessel, the wheelhouse is where we cook and eat and spend all of our non-working waking hours, and where Halvor sleeps for five or six hours each night.

The layman confuses the sound of the word “trolling” with that of “trawling,” although no two methods of catching fish could be more different. The trawler drags an enormous baglike net along the ocean bottom, scooping up fish with even less discrimination than the gillnetter, whose apparatus does just what it sounds like -- it snags salmon and whatever other species happen along by the gills -- or the purse seiner, who draws his vast pouch snug around a school of fish. The troller gives fish a choice. None of them have to bite, none of them are destined to end up neatly iced in the fish hold just because they were in a certain place at a certain time. It is a clever ruse, this trolling of flashing lures past the hungry, the curious, and the easily annoyed, but it may or may not work. And to make it more of a game, the gear is selected for its exclusive appeal to salmon.

Anything else that takes the lure -- except for the occasional halibut or red snapper, welcome on the wheelhouse table -- is met with curses and a toss of the gaff.

On an ice boat like ours, the fish hold is refrigerated to about thirty degrees Fahrenheit and stocked, at the beginning of each trip, with a ton or more of chipped ice. The catch is packed away each night, and both fish and ice keep nicely provided the trip doesn’t last more than ten or eleven days.

On a freezer boat, the hold is refrigerated to a far lower temperature -- as much as forty below zero, the point at which Fahrenheit and Celsius readings converge. The salmon, having each been “glazed” in a salt water solution to prevent freezer burn, are stacked below like cordwood. The duration of a freezer boat’s trip is limited only by the capacity of the fish hold, the amount of food and fuel on board, and the endurance of the skipper and crew.

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There are other boats that have no refrigeration at all. These are the “day boats,” so called because they can only make day trips and must come in every evening to sell their catch. Even in midsummer, there is little chance of a promptly cleaned salmon being any the worse for a day spent on board without benefit of freon. The air is cool out on the North Pacific, and the fish are kept moist with an occasional spritz of seawater into the dark, cool hold.

Halvor Bigset was not the first skipper I worked for on a salmon troller. I came to Nord Fjord a veteran of six outings on a day boat, a perfect training vessel for a would-be deckhand.

Weighing the catch

The charts all say, in small print, “Copyright Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada.” The chart we are using today is one headed “Cape Cook to Egg Island,” taking in a great swath of waters off the northwest coast of Vancouver Island, north and south of Quatsino Sound.

We’re tacking through fog towards Cox Island, nearest of the small chain that trails off from Cape Scott, Vancouver’s northernmost tip. There has been fog for most of the day, and wind, but the wind is dying down as we come into the lee of the islands.

We’ve been having a good day. It’s only one in the afternoon, and I’ve caught forty-two pink salmon, half a dozen coho, and my first big spring -- a true smiley, a female weighing between thirty and thirty-five pounds. If this were a net boat, I couldn’t have said “caught” with any self-respect, but I caught that smiley as surely as if I had been standing in a stream in chest waders and handling a fly rod. When she hit the bottom plug on my main line, I wasn’t sure whether she was a salmon or some bucket-mouthed scrap fish, but when she broke the surface as I eased the gurdy to a stop I saw that unmistakable dorsal fin, a full foot and a half from her jaw. I fought her for a good ten minutes. At one point I had her over the gunwale and into the boat, before she threw herself back into the water with one mighty arching flip and took off with the full thirty-six feet of the leader burning out behind her. The leader slotted right into the open salt ulcers on the insides of my knuckles -- I was trying to be a tough guy by not wearing cotton gloves -- but I had to ignore the stinging and concentrate on working my arm to shock-absorb the line and work the big fish in.

After I had recovered the full length of the leader and brought her within range, I landed her with one shot of the gaff, using both hands to heft her over the gunwale into the checker. When we sold our catch at BC Packers in Namu, this fish alone would be worth a hundred dollars.

At ten in the evening there is still a hint of daylight, and we are at anchor in San Josef Bay, just south of Cape Scott on Vancouver Island. We’ve just finished icing down the day’s catch –

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177 pinks, seventeen coho, and two springs, including my big smiley. I landed and dressed ninetyfour fish today.

Before I go into the galley to cook dinner, hamburgers and canned corn, with a bottle of Chianti to wash it down, we set four or five crab traps so that we’ll have Dungeness crabs to boil in the morning. Halvor likes to munch cold crab at breakfast and throughout the day, and I am getting to enjoy it myself. With a peanut butter sandwich and hot cocoa, it makes a nice way to start the morning. I’ve forbidden myself my usual coffee and orange juice, which are acidic and invite seasickness.

“You know,” Halvor tells me at dinner, apropos of nothing we’ve been talking about, “it’s funny, but people in the north of Norway don’t eat crab.”

“Are there crabs there?”

“Yes, but people don’t eat them. They don’t eat mackerel, either, because they believe that mackerel eat drowned people. It’s silly.”

A full moon has risen. I’m in my bunk by eleven, listening to Halvor snoring in the wheelhouse above, and the anchor scraping the rocky bottom of San Josef Bay. Nearly everything on board Nord Fjord suggests a slightly cramped but ultimately comfortable summer cottage where a lot of fishing goes on. All in all, it seems a cozy little world. But on a bulkhead near Halvor’s berth is a poster with a picture of a small boat in a vast expanse of ocean.

Beneath the picture are these lines of blank verse:

A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

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Nonstick Coatings: The Future-Proof Business Model?

In a global economy where today’s must-have is tomorrow’s e-waste, what if you manufacture a product necessary on a foundational level?

In effect, for any system with moving parts?

By Tony Tedeschi

In 2014, I was hired by Dave Willis, the CEO of Whitford Worldwide Company, to help with a corporate history. Whitford is the manufacturer of the world’s largest, most complete line of fluoropolymer coatings for a vast array of industrial and consumer industries. Whitford’s coatings are on everything from frying pans to the nuts and bolts on oilrigs, pistons in motor vehicles and air conditioners, molds for giant wind turbine blades, even fabric for athletic socks. The corporate history, I was to help write, would celebrate Whitford’s 50th anniversary in 2015.

Whitford is a company that impacts the lives of millions of people on a daily basis, but its coatings have little to no brand identity among end-users, even in terms of popular consumer items such as cookware and bakeware. The effects of its coatings reduce friction on the components of products in so many areas of our lives that the company has a demonstrably beneficial effect on how the world works.

As more and more aspects of the Whitford story began to unfold, I became convinced that it was much more than just a limited corporate history. I asked Willis to let me run with this for a while and see where it led. That came to involve more than 60 interviews with employees, former employees, suppliers, bankers, customers and media. The process took me deep into a company that managed to achieve what all companies, which intend to be there for the long term, seek to achieve but few manage to actually accomplish: a future-proof business model.

Countless white papers and business conference lectures continually caution successful companies not to get too full of their successes, even though solidified over a period of years. They warn against failing to recognize and react to competition creating a future, which all but assures the resistant company’s obsolescence. Where other companies, whose business models had worked well for their prospects today, by tomorrow had faded or died off completely, Whitford had managed to successfully navigate the global business landscape for decades, with a near continuous growth arc.

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At or near the top of all the recommendations for business longevity is anticipating, then adapting to changing markets. Some argue that the future depends upon an ability to step from one business model to the next, as if moving along a timeline from the fox trot to the cha-cha to the macarena to the . . . what do you dance to rap? Or perhaps the long-term answer is a collection of disparate business models, hedging the company’s bet, to deliver on whatever the future requires.

Upgrading the corporate infrastructure and the talent pool, however, can’t address product lines or services that no longer fit into the demands of an ever-modernizing business world. Think flip phones, film cameras, incandescent light bulbs.

But, what if you manufacture a product useful on a foundational level, so it is not negatively impacted by changes which occur beyond those foundations? In effect, a product necessary for any system with moving parts, where friction is a negative factor. Any system where corrosion decreases lifespan. Any system where ease of release is a major factor. Even in a world of rapidly changing technologies, some basic requirements remain unchanged.

Case in Point: Energy Generation

A significant market in Whitford’s business is the oil and gas industry, where its coatings reduce friction on moving parts in all manner of equipment and provide a high level of corrosion resistance, especially needed for equipment that is in or near the sea. As the world begins an inexorable shift toward renewal forms of energy, there is no less a need for the friction and corrosion reduction that Whitford coatings provide. Additionally, Whitford coatings increase ease of release, an important element in the molds for the giant blades of energy-generating wind turbines, some of which are two-thirds the length of a football field.

A tidal turbine awaits installation off the Orkney Islands.

An area of renewable energy, which does not get as much attention as wind turbines, is tidal power. In the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland, the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), is conducting tests and installing multi-ton turbines that generate energy from the ebb and flow of tides, which are particularly strong there. Here again, Whitford coatings are involved, providing corrosion resistance for the nuts and bolts that hold these giants together and anchor them to the ocean floor.

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So, whether energy generation moves from fossil fuels to wind or tidal power; oilrigs, wind turbines and tidal turbines all still depend upon corrosion-resistant fasteners in the battle against their hostile environments. Whether automobiles move from gas-driven engines to electrical motors, the smooth operation of moving parts throughout the vehicles will still be dependent upon friction-reducing coatings. If electronic “Instant Pots” are replacing traditional pressure cookers, the need to deal with the stickiness of rice or the ingredients in stews becomes even more pronounced.

Whitford World HQ, Elverson, PA

The chemistry of nonstick coatings, however, is not anchored to its own past. Intensive research and development are ongoing at company labs. The result has been a decades-long parade of new formulae, which continually advance the technology and open new markets throughout the business world.

A Visit with Dave Willis at Whitford HQ

Whitford Corporation is headquartered in Elverson, Pennsylvania, a tiny town of just over 1,200 citizens, set in the eastern part of the state, some 50 miles from Philadelphia. Once off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a visitor approaches the town down country roads, past rolling hills, thick woodlands, cornfields and houses, spotted here and there, until they congregate in small groupings around the center of town. Making a hard right turn off Park Avenue into the company’s parking lot, you confront Whitford’s stone-and-spired exterior, suddenly looming over you with the look of a chateau, as if in defiance of the glass-box shapes of modern corporations and manufacturing facilities. There is an immediate sense of swimming against the current.

If you have a few moments in the lobby, while the receptionist notifies your appointment, you are drawn to a wall display of products whose manufacture is greatly impacted by Whitford chemistry: applications for all manner of industries, an encapsulation of decades of innovation by a company whose employees are the embodiment of a bias for action, the practice of which begins at the top.

From a person’s initial contact with Dave Willis, it becomes apparent that he is a born salesman, but that initial impression also belies any image of a huckster just pushing a product at you. Willis is, first and foremost, a problem-solver. When he and, by extension Whitford, have taken a significant step at solving a customer’s problem, then the process moves toward finalizing the sale.

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Seated at his desk, Willis sketches, on a piece of paper torn from a notepad, a graphic explanation of a chemical transformation.

The exercise, in response to an interviewer’s question, is perhaps the antithesis of sophisticated, computer-assisted design, but the drawing, and Willis’s explanation, make a complex point easily understandable.

That’s not to say Whitford doesn’t have its complement of the latest technology. Down the hall from Willis’s office, on the second floor of the company’s headquarters, is a state-of-the art meeting room – the corporate “War Room” – that looks as if it could provide the wherewithal to plan and launch drone strikes.

Whitford labs and quality control departments around the world are equipped with an expansive array of state-of-the-art, researchgrade instrumentation.

Willis is quick to point out that while he is the cofounder of the company and has been its point man ever since, he credits many employees, both past and present, for having made the company the success it is today. A good deal of that success is a result of the company’s dogged pursuit of innovative products, and its emphasis on providing specific solutions to customers’ specific requirements. Long term, it is a matter of the professionals at Whitford recognizing opportunities that its competitors had overlooked or decided were not cost effective. Not surprisingly, this long journey really did begin with a single step.

Dave Willis at Whitford’s 50th anniversary celebration

The Innovation that Launched a Global Company

How often in the history of American business has a giant corporation ignored, downplayed or simply rejected a business opportunity, while the tiny start-up saw the possibilities? How often has the recognition of that doable opportunity provided the startup with the wherewithal to thrive?

Welcome to Xylan® 1010.

In the late ‘60s, early in Whitford’s corporate history, the company bought raw material from DuPont to make Teflon® molding compounds. Consequently, DuPont reps came calling, sometimes even bought lunch. At one of those sales lunches, the DuPont reps were ballyhooing the low coefficient of friction of the company’s newest Teflon formulation, which was the combination of a polymer called fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP) and a binder resin. While listening to the DuPont sales pitch, Willis was intrigued with the possibility of replacing the FEP with polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), which he felt could result in a superior nonstick coating. He asked the DuPont people if they thought it could be done. Their “no” was emphatic. And, since PTFE had been discovered by a DuPont chemist in 1938, the company was the recognized authority on what could or couldn’t be done with the chemical.

When Willis returned to his six-person company, he asked his chemist, Paul Fields, if the DuPont people were correct. When I interviewed Fields for the book, many years later, he said he agreed

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with the conventional wisdom, but he told me that a young chemist enjoys few things more than the more-experienced heads telling him something couldn’t be done. Despite his youth, Fields already had a great deal of experience working with fluoropolymers. So, he began spending days – and nights – in the lab, fine-tuning his focus into experiments beyond what had been tried and failed, including a unique ionization process. He eventually managed to create a matrix, a kind of “plastic alloy” that achieved exactly what Willis had speculated about. Christened Xylan 1010 the new coating had a coefficient of friction lower than anything yet created. Willis sold just $2,000 worth of Xylan 1010, in 1969, to a company that made valves for oil drilling equipment.

Nonetheless, his young company was off and running.

During the course of the next half-century, Whitford grew to a presence around the world, including R&D labs, manufacturing facilities and sales offices. The company’s thousands of variations on the original Xylan theme address the needs of a near-incalculable number of products. Simply listing the applications would fill pages and not account for new applications being developed as those pages were being written.

By mid-December 2018, with Whitford long established as a world leader in low-friction coatings, Whitford and PPG, announced they had reached a definitive agreement for PPG to acquire Whitford Worldwide Company. Established in1883, PPG, a global supplier of paints and coatings, is a Fortune 500 company, with 47,000 employees worldwide headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA. “Joining PPG is a giant step forward for Whitford,” Dave Willis explained. “In one fell swoop, we will have access to new technologies, diverse R&D facilities, strong financial support and global coverage in areas where we have wanted to expand but did not yet have sufficient resources. This is very good news for our customers and good news for our employees.”

The Whitford Way

Fifty years ago, a company was created, which began making for a world that ran more smoothly.

While it continually expanded its quiet presence in the world of the present, its products always pointed toward its ongoing relevance into the world of the future. And, most of us didn’t even know it was there . . .

Read the full story of “The Whitford Way,” published by Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Whitford-Way-Story-CorporateChemistry/dp/1539179222/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1545927797&sr=11&keywords=The+Whitford+Way

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Elves in Elf Houses, ‘Sagacious’ Small Horses, Walking Puffballs with Horns, Charlie Chaplinesque Birds with Technicolor Beaks . . .

Only in Iceland Photo Essay by Buddy Mays

The unruffled little country of Iceland lies 750 miles off Greenland’s southeast coast between the Denmark Strait and the Atlantic Ocean. I say unruffled because the folks who live there seem not to worry about much of anything, least of all the Arctic cold which during the winter settles over the island like an unrelenting fog.

Being an Icelander has never been easy. First settled by Gaelic Monks in the 8th century, then later occupied by Norwegian Vikings and finally by Danes, Iceland was belted back and forth across the net of foreign subjugation like a tennis ball for a thousand years until it finally declared independence in 1944. Early life on the island was based mainly on agriculture and fishing, but long, cold winters and perpetual inclement weather made both occupations challenging and often unprofitable. Relentless religious scuffles between Pagans, Catholics, and finally Evangelical Lutherans, often threatened civil war. Black Death arrived in 1402 and killed half of Iceland’s population, then returned in 1494 with equal ferocity to kill half of what remained. In the 1700s, smallpox, famine, and a devastating volcanic eruption reduced the island’s population once more, from 50,000 people to just 38,000.

Despite its historical difficulties, Iceland is one of the most hospitable and welcoming countries in Europe, hosting some two million foreign visitors each year, the majority of them from the Continent and the United States. It is also among the most sparsely populated countries on earth; about the size of Kentucky, the island is home to just 330,000 people, two-thirds of whom reside in, or near, the capital city of Reykjavik on the country’s southwestern coast. The remaining 100,000 or so—farmers and fishermen mostly—inhabit the other 99% of Iceland, living on isolated farms or in small, rural towns and villages along the coast.

Recently my wife, Stephanie, and I spent a couple of unscripted weeks driving around the very rural and very isolated southern coast of Iceland, gawking at the jaw-dropping scenery and feasting on the culture and magnetism of the region. These are some of our favorite places and things.

There were plenty of others.

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A Challenging Panorama

Iceland’s corrugated, lava-strewn landscape, dotted with active volcanos, snow-blanketed mountains, and glaciers the size of Yellowstone National Park, is perhaps the most beautifully bizarre subdivision of treeless, out-of-the-way volcanic terrain anyone could ever imagine. This rugged stretch of cliff-bound coast and black sand beach on the Dyrholaey Peninsula near the village of Vik, is typical of the island’s topography.

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The Hidden People

Icelanders are a fanciful folk when it comes to the inexplicable. According to a recent nationwide poll, at least half of the country’s population believes in, or at least doesn’t deny the existence of, Huldufolk, the Hidden People, mystical magical beings from a parallel world who make their homes in the rock-strewn Icelandic countryside. Yes, I’m talking about elves. Called Alfar in Icelandic, they are supposedly a handsome and often impish folk who are invisible to humans except on special days, most notably the Summer Solstice (Midsummer’s Night).

Alfar prefer living in or near rocky outcrops and boulder fields, and you’ll often see brightly painted miniature houses known as álfhól (elf houses) constructed by local residents especially for Alfar families. Icelanders say that Huldufolk typically keep to themselves, although anyone who fancies sitting at a crossroad within eyesight of four churches on Midsummer’s Night might be offered presents of gold, silver or food by local Elven clans. Acceptance of a gift results in immediate insanity; if you refuse and continue to do so until daylight, the Alfar disappear leaving the gold and silver behind.

Country folk in Iceland take Alfar very seriously indeed, by the way. Highway construction crews, for example, usually consult with local elf experts before routing a new road through a rocky area that might be elf habitat (elf habitat is usually marked by vertical piles of flat rocks). There is even an afternoon-long Elf School (Álfaskólinn) in Rekyjavik, where for about $65, you can learn everything you should know about Icelandic elves and their history. My wife and I spent a lot of time searching for álfhól and their occupants with limited success; lots of elf houses, not many elves though I did manage to photograph one in a blue jacket near the caves of Laugarvatn. Or not.

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The Courageous, The Sober and the Surefooted

Icelandic Horses were brought to Iceland by the Vikings sometime between 860 and 935 A.D. and, by government decree, are the only type of horse allowed on the island. Pony sized with shaggy manes, long, coarse tails, and forelocks that drape down over their eyes like hairy curtains, they are adorable and cuddly and friendly, but they are also tough as nails. “There is no more sagacious animal than the Icelandic horse,” wrote Jules Verne. “He is stopped by neither snow, nor storm, nor impassable roads, nor rocks, glaciers, or anything. He is courageous, sober, and surefooted. He never makes a false step, never shies. If there is a river or fjord to cross (and we shall meet with many) you will see him plunge in at once, just as if he were amphibious, and gain the opposite bank.”

I made the mistake of calling an Icelandic horse a “pony” at a farm near Hvolsvollur, and it did not go over well. The owner of the farm informed me tersely that calling an Icelandic horse a pony was like calling the Queen Elizabeth II a boat. “They may be smaller than American horses,” he said, “but they are strong-hearted and full of fire, just like the Vikings that brought them here in the first place.”

There are 80,000 of these sturdy little animals in Iceland, and they are often treated more like household pets than beasts of burden by their owners. Yet nearly every rural Icelander rides (though his or her feet may nearly drag the ground) and the horses are workers, used for everything from pleasure riding to pulling a plow to rounding up sheep.

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Church in the Wildwood

Robert Louis Stevenson said he never wearied of great churches. Icelanders don’t seem to mind them either. The island’s sparsely populated countryside boasts hundreds of them in fact, all Evangelical Lutheran, all of them open to the public, and all of them beautiful. Nearly every rural community, no matter how small, has its own little house of worship. Most are painted unblemished white with a steeply pitched, cherry-red roof and neatly manicured graveyard somewhere nearby. Each one is the epitome of orderliness and labor-intensive TLC. Oddly enough, most Icelanders aren’t particularly devout in the traditional sense and don’t attend church very often these days (you’ll have to ask them why), but the chapels are still well-kept and patently attractive. This one is the church at Oddi, on the island’s south coast. Locals claim that a church has stood at on this very site since Icelanders first adopted the Christian faith in 1000 A.D. The current chapel was built about 1924.

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Waterfall Heaven

In his book Tales of Iceland, travel writer Stephen Markley got it right when he said, “The problem with driving around Iceland is that you’re basically confronted by a new soul-enriching, breath-taking, life-affirming natural sight every five goddamn minutes. It’s totally exhausting.”

Waterfalls top the list of “most visited sites” on the island, mainly because there are thousands of them scattered across the landscape (the latest estimate is at least 10,000 permanent falls in the country, although who exactly took the time to count them is a mystery). Some, such as Gullfoss Falls on the Hvita River in the south and Godafoss Falls on the Skjálfandafljótare River in the north, are world-class cascades and will take your breath away. All of them, however, large or small, are splendid examples of what erosion, time, and lots of water — most of it from glaciers — can create. This is Seljalandsfoss Waterfall along the Ring Road in south Iceland; it falls 180 feet from the lava crest to the base pool.

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Life in the Ground

When the Vikings arrived in 847 A.D., Iceland was covered with birch forests. By the 15th century, however, almost every tree had been chopped down and hauled away for firewood, leaving island residents nothing with which to heat or cook. The only thing left to burn, in fact, was driftwood, and because there were no trees left to drift, it was rare. Early Icelandic homes like these partially underground “turf houses� at the ancient farming community of Keldur had no internal heat whatsoever, even during the sunless arctic winters. What fuel was available was used almost entirely for cooking in a separate kitchen structure. To stay warm, rural farm families, often ten or twelve people strong, lived and slept in one small room, heating the space with body heat alone. There were no deodorant salesmen in Iceland at that time. Life could not have been pleasant, at least from an olfactory point of view.

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A Nation of Sheep

There is precious little wildlife in Iceland except for seabirds, but the country has more than its share of a half-wild, walking puffball with horns, known as the Icelandic sheep. More than 800,000 of them inhabit the island, nearly three times the number of Icelanders, and they are direct descendants of sheep brought here by the Vikings in the 9th and 10th centuries. Robust and stocky, with bare legs and a heavy white, brown, or black wool coat that is seldom sheared, they surely fit somewhere between kittens and koalas on Mother Nature’s most adorable animal list.

At one time Icelandic sheep were the island’s predominant milk producers but today they are bred and raised primarily for meat. From June until September they run wild in search of water and grass, and because fences are rare in Iceland they range virtually anywhere and everywhere except onto the glaciers. In September local farmers join together in community drives and round them up on horseback or on foot. The sheep are then sorted out by ear tags as to which animal belongs to what farm, then penned up in barns and sheds until the following May when lambing season begins. Once the lambs are born, the sheep are released to run wild once more.

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Puffin Paradise

Perhaps Iceland’s most endearing creature, and one that almost everyone recognizes, is a curious little bundle of feathered Charlie Chaplin charisma known as the Atlantic puffin. Ten inches high with black and white plumage, stubby wings, and an oversized, Technicolor bill, puffins are the clowns of the bird world, almost as much fun to watch as Saturday Night Live. Sixty percent of the world’s puffin population-- six to eight million birds—nest and breed in Iceland annually. Arriving in April and staying until mid-August, mating pairs care for a single egg laid in a burrow dug into coastal cliffs. Puffin burrows are always within eyeshot of the sea. They are excellent fliers and can reach speeds of up to 55 miles per hour, but oddly enough they won’t fly unless they can see the ocean below them.

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Question and Answer Session With a New York City Pimp Car ‘Miss, your car is covered in bullet holes. Have a nice day.’

By Aglaia Davis

On November 21, 2018, I decided to have a “sit down” with a true New York City pimp car – a tinted-windowed, “bullet-hole” laden automobile that has spent “his” life on the Streets of Manhattan – to learn what the burdens and blessings (if there are any) are of “life in the fast lane.”

Q.

What’s your name and address?

A. My name is Batmo. I understand that it is short for “Batmobile,” though, frankly, it is a misnomer because I am personally not a Batman fan and neither is my mom [owner]. Little kids stop and admire me a lot because of my license plate [“BATMO”] and Batman symbol on my hood. My address is registered as 225 Central Park West, but the reality is that I am very rarely there.

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Q.

Where do you spend most of your nights?

A. That’s the thing about life in Manhattan, if your parent doesn’t pay for a garage: You never really know where you will be sleeping. But I have my favorite spots. I actually enjoy being parked kind of far from home, so that not everyone knows me. I can be found anywhere from West 73rd Street, basically, all the way up to West 91st Street. But, lately, I have been even further away than that.

Q.

What is the toughest part of living in New York?

A. For me, it’s the traffic. I know that sounds clichéd, but it is hard on my system to stop and start constantly. I know it is one of the reasons that I experienced a lot of wear and tear early in my life [Batmo is turning 11 in January 2019]. I really love getting out of New York with my mom on weekends and getting to “stretch my legs” on actual highways. However, I don’t ever get to go over 55 MPH. My mom is very strict about the speed because of the tickets [for tinted windows] in the past.

Q.

What is the best part of living in New York?

A. It’s hard to say. This is all I have ever known. I hear stories from cars overnight who are from out of the City, and it sounds like a nice life, honestly. If I had to say, it would be all of the friends I make on a regular basis. A lot of people and cars appreciate and like me for how I look. My mom says she is known by people in her building because of me.

Q.

What is on-street parking like?

A. Awful. There is no other way to say it. Sometimes we drive around, or sit, for hours, and that is not an exaggeration. It depends on the day, time, and location, but it can be really brutal. My mom is really good about never putting me in illegal spots, but I get banged up all the time from other drivers. Even though I have all this protection on my sides and bumpers, other cars bang into me all the time parking. It really pisses me off. I honestly dream of the day when I can be parked somewhere in peace.

Q.

What’s your favorite story of parking or driving in New York?

A. That’s a tough one. There are a lot of funny experiences when you look like me. One memorable one was when my mom and I were waiting for street cleaning to finish across from the [New York] Historical Society. She had just put on a whole row of new [fake] bullet holes. An offduty Ambulance was stopped at a traffic light [on Central Park West], and one of the guys got on the loud speaker and announced, “Miss, your car is covered in bullet holes. Have a nice day.”

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Q. What is one of the worst stories of parking or driving in New York?

A. For me, it would be the cop stops. I am a very kind and quiet car, despite my appearance.

Remember, I was born in Maine. This whole world was thrown at me at 1 year old. Anyway, it’s no secret that I have illegally black windows, chrome everywhere, and that I evidently look like I am about to take part in a major crime. As a result, unfortunately, we have been pulled over numerous times for no reason other than my appearance. I do not like dealing with the police; it scares me. I am an under-the-radar kind of car. For me, the worst of the worst was hands down the night I got towed. My mom left me safely parked across the street from where we live, and she checked on me several times in the days before. Out of the blue and for no reason, a police officer stopped by me one night, wrote a ticket for me, and had me TOWED to a scary place they call the pound. My mom did rush down the next day when she saw that I was gone, but it was the worst experience of my life to date.

Q.

What advice would you give to other cars coming to live in New York?

A. Be patient. Develop a tough skin. Do not think that just because we live in Manhattan we have a dream life. A lot of cars I meet are not treated well by their parents. They are left for days or even longer without being checked on. With a few rare exceptions, my mom always comes to check on me – frankly, more than I need or want, because it gets embarrassing. You have to learn to be very independent very early.

Q.

What are your hopes for the future?

A. I know it sounds clichéd, but to move out to New Jersey. I have been extensively to both Long Island and New Jersey because my mom rides [horses] on weekends, and I love the State of New Jersey. I am very comfortable and happy there. And it is a wonderful place to live, I hear. I am looking forward to the day my mom moves out there with me.

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Theme Parks and Shopping Malls

By Norman de Plume

When the backhoe of the future spades the dirt from o’er our time and disrupts the moldy suture that concealed our grand design, it will not reveal the magnitude conveyed by Chinese walls but instead a panorama of theme parks and shopping malls.

Next we trimmed it all in concrete put down ramps to come and go, through macadam lots where car fleets could meander to and fro.

Close inspection did show traces of where once old trees stood tall, but were swept off like erasures from the final plans of mall.

Great works of old are catalogued in archives where they await release as fitting epilogues to the times they celebrate, but when archivists the dust blow off the files down our old halls, they’ll uncover agéd photos of theme parks and shopping malls.

Then, to tease the intellection of what we did when free from work, there were shots in a collection of the planet’s finest perks: plastic logs that ran the rapids, rooms of lasered wizardries and oompah bands that roamed the stands in ersatz Germanies.

They’ll find shots of tetrahedrals, cubes of brick and glass galore and in place of the cathedral we’ve defined the anchor store, surrounded by the finest in cliniques, boutiques and such ‘neath a bubble that confined us where the real air never touched.

So ignore the art of Florence.

Pay no heed to England’s lit.

Be not moved by the sweet torrents from Vienna’s concert pit.

For when asked what, pray, endorses us the match of Versailles halls, we respond it’s our golf courses, theme parks and shopping malls!

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The Voice

By Ginny Craven

I hear a voice, crying out in the velvet night.

I strain to hear the strangled whisper in the dark.

It is a voice stifled by the shame of wandering hands – Choked by the ignominy of forced entry.

And, I struggle to hear it…but a faint echo…

It is a voice suffocated by stigma Disembodied by disgust and self-recrimination Yet, it is still there – rising beyond its tortured beginning.

I begin to listen intently – to hear the suffering that has been snuffed by self-reproach and fear, The pact of silence that denies the pain and pushes the filth to the side.

And the voice grows slowly louder – with the power of confession – My throat is raw as I cry out – Cry out for the little girl, whose terrified pleas were never heard, For the sultry teenager pretending at womanhood, And for the woman crushed beneath myriad boot heels.

My voice…Me too!

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Spring Semester in Italy . . . and Beyond Travels with an iPhone Camera A Photo Essay by Katie Cappeller

Selfie by a Lake in the Swiss Alps

Ravello, Italy 45

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Florence, Italy 46

Burano, Italy

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Cinque Terre, Italy

Lagos, Portugal

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Hangar Flying

By Kendric W. Taylor

Once even, I could remember every flight I had ever taken

The airlines call it hangar flying. Usually an employee bulletin comes around reminding deadheading flight crews and pass riders not to scare the pants off paying passengers by chuckling over favorite scare stories about horrible flights or events; which is funny, because flying today is basically boring. Cramped, but boring.

Still, we all do it, professional flyers or not. My favorite story was from the writer Ernest K. Gann, an old American Airlines captain who wrote of the pilot at the controls of a commercial DC-3 taking off with the wrong flap settings. This caused the aircraft to make a perfect 360 degree loop over the airport, bringing him right back to where he started. He managed somehow to land safely after going absolutely nowhere except for mostly straight up and over. If there were passengers aboard that flight, I forget, but I’m certain they wouldn’t forget: ferris-wheeling in an airliner was not the flight they paid for.

Gann was one of the early commercial aviation pioneers, and I like to think my godmother was one too – as a passenger. In 1927, she flew from Paris to London, an adventure in itself. It was even more so for Charles Lindbergh, who that same day in May became the first solo aviator to fly 49

the Atlantic nonstop. Her aircraft was a three-engine Handley Page, an offshoot of a WWl bomber converted to commercial passenger use. Hammering its way through the sky like some rattling aluminum T-Rex, the pilots sitting outside in the cockpit on the nose like Daenerys Targaryen on her dragon, the aircraft was operated by another pioneer, British Imperial Airways.

Inside, it was wicker chairs, no sound proofing, no pressurization, and trained nurses in cloaks as The venerable Douglas DC-3 flight attendants. She still had her in-flight program, which boasted of the first hot meal service, which BIA, a precursor of British Airways, had begun that month.

Plus another first – there was a bathroom!

Gann began his commercial career on a DC-2, graduating to DC-3s back when co-pilots helped load the US mail and baggage, He grew to love both aircraft, with good reason, as the wonderful DC-3 changed commercial aviation forever. They were so good in fact that there are probably any number still in service in smaller countries around the world. The DC-3 was still going strong for instance in India when I first visited in the 1960s. Settling into my seat on an Indian Airlines flight from Delhi to Jaiphur, I noticed the captain leaning over a few rows back, chatting with a blonde Frenchwoman sitting charmingly in an aisle seat. Glancing out the window, I noticed a shabby looking man in a red turban and what looked like an old Army overcoat gazing at the port engine.

After studying it for a few moments, he unscrewed a panel, took a huge wrench from his coat pocket, reached in, made a few adjustments, nodded sagely, closed the panel, and walked away. In the meantime, the pilot had returned up the aisle to the cockpit, and almost immediately the engines sputtered into life. In minutes we were roaring down the runway and up into a steep climb. In a flash, the wheels were up with a bang, and here came the pilot bounding down the aisle like a man on an icy hill. Skidding to a stop at the blonde’s row, he motioned her over to the window seat and plopped himself down next to her, taking up the conversation where he had left off minutes before.

On another DC-3, this one in Central America, a specification plate on the doorless cockpit wall proclaimed a service date as 1945. Here, the captain, after getting us up to altitude and all straightened out, then spent the rest of the flight reading the newspaper, glancing over occasionally to check on his very young daughter strapped into the jump seat. Obviously, its veteran status meant the plane could practically fly itself.

Despite, or because, of incidents like these, I developed -- like many people –a great fondness for the DC-3, figuring they could overcome anything. This regard especially extended to members of the armed forces. The Navy designated them the R4D, and I recall flying on one the first time in

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the winter of 1954, going home for a last leave before going overseas. My shipmate, Bill Donohue from New Haven, CT, and I, having completed communications school in San Diego -- like the three returning servicemen in “The Best Year of Our Lives” -- decided to stand by at the Long Beach Naval Air Station for a flight east. We made one, in a well-worn, stripped-down version, offering a row of bucket seats along both sides of the fuselage and little else, including no heat. We were TWA Lockheed Super Constellation quickly freezing despite our heavy pea coats. This was no Hollywood production; and if it had been, it would have been a survival film. Donahue, stocky and pugnacious (his favorite expression to any argument was “I’ll backhand you to parade rest!”), was airsick and frozen pale in the unpressurized cabin. Landing in St. Louis to refuel, we had had enough.

Learning we were to be bumped anyway, he propelled me toward the commercial terminal where we bought tickets on TWA to Idlewild in New York. In no time, we were luxuriating in the warmth and comfort of the huge Lockheed Super Constellation. An elongated, hump-backed swan of an aircraft, its four piston engines generated so much of a background drone that my ears buzzed for days afterwards.

Later, in the Central Pacific, I was back on the old R4D, a group of us flying from Guam to a new duty station in the Philippines. This one was not only unpressurized, but the windows had small rubber-ringed portholes that were open to the weather, the ocean breezes cooling off the cabin.

Many months later, coming home from the Philippines, it was the Super Constellation again, this one operated by the Military Air Transport Service ( MATS), the seating configured rearwards in case of ocean ditching. Our destination was Hickham Field, Hawaii (the wall of the mess hall there was still pocked with bullet holes from the attack on Pearl Harbor), with a midnight one-stop at Kwajalein for fuel – 5,600 air miles in two jumps -- try that flying backwards.

I was the first in my family to fly (both parents were born before there even were airplanes; but remarkably, later got to watch men walk on the moon). I made my first flight in 1953 from San Diego to New York. Connecting to the DC-7 flight east, I recall banking over Burbank looking down at the lights of the city and becoming hooked on flight forever.

Once even, I could remember every flight I had ever taken, and indeed saved all the ticket folders to pin them to the corkboard in my sons’ bedroom. There, at night, while falling off to sleep, they would play a guessing game based on the folders: Pan Am, TWA, Air Florida, North Central, Southern Airways, Piedmont; all gone now. All my children grew up to travel widely themselves:

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as I write this, my daughter is climbing to 40,000 feet out of Phoenix, heading home, and her daughter had been to both Disney’s, plus the White House, even before pre-school. That’s the norm for everyone now.

In the 1960’s, even before the DC-3 had begun to be phased out, the new and revolutionary Boeing 707 was the rage. It was advertised as being so quiet and vibration-free that you could balance a quarter on the tray top (yes, the same tray now shoved into your chest). Then, it was all white gloves and skirts and stockings for the ladies, jackets and ties for the gentlemen.

And the extras: world class cuisine, attentive cabin crew, blankets, pillows, and free cashews. My jet age began around then: on a flight to Chicago on a Boeing 727, an engineer sitting next to me began explaining how it was impossible for these things to fly because of centrifugal force caused by engines being in back -- or something. Descending toward O’Hare, the young woman on my other side, on her first flight, whispered that her husband had told her in an emergency to bend forward and put her head on the pillow in her lap. Should she do it now, she asked. The landing was as smooth as a feather, so I hope she kept flying.

I did, and even an occasional bit of nervousness never amounted to much and only added spice.

Like the time on a Pan Am 707 bouncing into Guatemala City, which is on a plateau at 4,951 feet and surrounded by mountains. Daunting enough in full daylight, flying in on a pitch black bumpy night became even more of a challenge. Eventually, the pilot got on the intercom and warned: “hang on everyone; this is going to be really rough.” I watched as the two Catholic priests across the aisle whipped out their rosaries, but like Flounder in “Animal House,” I thought: “This is going to be great!!” I might well have taken heed of Dean Wormer’s advice to Flounder in that movie: “fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.” Either way, we made it, thanks to an amazing pilot. A Pan Am purser on that same route once told me that he was in turbulence so bad that he lay face down in the aisle gripping the seat legs on either side so tightly for so long that they had to pry his hands loose. I wonder what the passengers thought.

Sleeping sitting up has always been a problem on outbound flights. Once on a long, long sleepless flight on an Air India 707 from New York to Delhi, sandwiched in between two overfed businessmen, in desperation I asked the flight attendant if I could climb into the overhead rack (they were not enclosed in those days), so I could stretch out. He was horrified: “Oh no sir, you can’t do that. Oh no.” Only the refueling stop in Teheran saved me, where I was able to walk around the airport in the fresh clean air and recirculate. On another, late, Air India 747 flight to Delhi, we were held up in London for hours while mechanics attached a fifth engine under the wing for delivery to Rome for replacement. This resulted in another airport walk-around while they unscrewed the guest engine. Then there was the TACA flight from San José, Costa Rica to

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Miami, which, 20 minutes out turned back to home base, creeping along with the port wing at almost a 90 degree angle, while we looked at the jungle just below us. Then, another with Pan Am, taking off from Cancun and never getting more than 500 feet from the ocean floor for the first hour. No reason was ever given for either incident. Fodder for hangar flying stories.

There was a period involving smaller aircraft and even weirder experiences: landing uphill on Fair Isle in the North Sea in the right seat of a lovely high wing BN Islander, offering an unmatched view of the crashing ocean below and the cliff dead ahead. Taking off downhill later that day was even more inspiring; especially when the aircraft drops off the cliff at the end of the runway toward the waves to gain speed. Taking off from a rainy jungle beach in a four-seat Piper Cub in Costa Rica was almost routine after this.

One of the most interesting people I ever met was in Peru, which led almost immediately to one of the most bizarre flights yet. Her name was Maria Reiche, and for more than 50 years she had studied mysterious lines on the desert there. Skirting the Pan American Highway leading along the coastal region below Lima, traced across the dry, sunbaked ground, figures and lines of geometric precision were etched on the valley floor thousands of years ago. Huge in dimension, they can only be properly seen and appreciated from the air: giant birds spread their wings for leagues across the dusty white soil; a hummingbird hovers, suspended in time for centuries, observed by a monkey with his tail curled up his back. There are fish and whales, a spider, a flower, dogs, and a lizard. Circles, squares and trapezoids, some up to 900 feet long, spread out over the plain and inch up the hillsides. Covering some 200 square miles of desert, they were first mentioned by an explorer in 1548, referring to them cryptically as “signs pointing the way.” Rediscovered in the 1920s, they have been the object of curiosity and speculation ever since. For decades they have sparked debate and generated theories concerning their origin, with guesses ranging from the work of Incan astronomers to their use as landing sites by ancient astronauts from other galaxies.

Wanting to see them to best advantage, I headed back to the tiny airport outside town. I walked over to the tour planes, a cluster of battered, oil-streaked relics that I think were Piper Cubs, surrounded by what I thought were a group of local high school kids dressed in jeans, T-shirts and sneakers, cutting school to gawk at the airplanes. The youngest of these detached from the group, and much like tour guides everywhere hustling tourists, asked if I wanted to see the lines. Five minutes later I was airborne next to this kid at the controls of a bouncing artifact. It would have been unsporting to ask for a pilot’s license. We strained up to about 300 feet or so (instruments were at a minimum) and the lines below began to take shape. Nodding my head that I wanted to take pictures, the pilot stood the little craft on its wing and we began a slow circle over this amazing picturescape, buffeted up and down like a condor in the hot air currents over the valley floor.

Gravity pulled at the camera secured tightly around my arm as I hung out the window, squeezing off a roll of film, wondering if it were possible for my stomach to actually leave my body for a trip down to the surface. My other thought was that the pictures better come out because I was not going to do this again. They did, and I didn’t.

Maria Reiche died in Peru in May of 1998, at the age of 95. For more than half of that lifespan, she had done that slow dance with time over the lines at Nazca. And although she had determined that hieroglyphics had provided local farmers information on the seasons, and the angle of the sun

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down the lines telling then when to plant and harvest, beyond that, she told me, she wasn’t sure of the meaning herself.

Eventually, I began working for an airline, with wonderful pass privileges, and I tried to take my children everywhere, every chance I got: California, Florida, Hawaii, and the Caribbean. The latter led to the business with the Albatrosses. Vacationing in the Virgin Islands, we piled into two Grumman Albatross seaplanes for the passenger flight across to St. Thomas from St. Croix. Both planes were packed, so while my two sons sat with me in one plane, one son up in the cockpit, their mom and our daughter were in the other, my daughter also next to the pilot. It can be very hard to get a seaplane off even in a slight chop, and on this day both aircraft were bouncing along, having a tough time of it taxing, when my daughter’s pilot began scolding her for leaving her side window ajar: “if you’re going to fly up here,” he growled at her, “you have to be responsible.” She was six. Not long after, the aging amphibians began dropping out of the sky, and the airline went out of business.

As an airline employee, mostly concerned with the freight side of the business (“Small packages are big business at American Airlines”), I was encouraged to ride in the flight deck of the airline’s fleet of air freighters, primarily Boeing 707-320’s. Buckled into the jump seat over the pilot’s shoulder, earphones clamped to my head, listening in to air traffic control, I was absolutely amazed at the view straight on, which passengers never see. Roaring down the runway, lifting off into cloud cover, and then gradually emerging into the sunlight was breathtaking, skimming along literally right on top of the snowfields the clouds resembled. Landings, especially at night, were equally awesome. Later, when American’s first 747 dedicated freighter had been built and delivered, the company’s photographer and I were on hand at LAX for one of its first flights, where we had the strange experience of being the only passengers on a hollowed-out jumbo jet: two first class seats rolled in and anchored to the deck for our comfort. I marvel now at the odd luxury.

Nowadays even the wonderful 747 is being phased out, replaced by larger, faster and more fuel efficient aircraft, even if, alas, more crowded. Gone are the days of the upstairs lounges, or the economy section where you could stretch across three seats and fly the night away. Security, of course, is now a huge factor. Absolutely necessary, but long lines and multiple inspections have surely taken a lot of the fun out of it. But the things you can see: the northern lights at 40,000 feet over the Atlantic, the deep green terraced rice fields of the Philippines, flying north along the magnificent snow-covered Andes, the precise squares of the English countryside, the endless plains of the American Midwest: it all beats an in-flight movie every time.

But one more story: my second favorite. At one point, American had equipped its DC-10s with an in-flight TV system operating from a nose camera, which allowed the passengers to observe takeoffs and landings in real time. This was a big hit for the hardcore flyers, among them a colleague of mine, a charming and interesting man, who made each takeoff and landing as if he was at the controls. In the LAX terminal bar, waiting out a delay in the flight back to New York, he had made friends with a woman waiting for the same flight, who after several toasts to the departure delay announcements, had become quite enamored of him. Finally boarding, he had the gate agents quickly switch her seat next to him. As takeoff commenced and the TV screens flickered into life, she reached over to whisper something into his ear: “Hold on,” he yelled, yanking her arm away, “Wait. I’ve gotta make this takeoff: Rotate!”

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Key Largo

By Anonymous

‘It makes for pulp fiction.’ she says. ‘I deal in reality.’

“Him,” I offer, with a sideways head gesture.

“Who?” she asks, then glances to where I’m gesturing. She studies him for a moment.

“What about him?”

Across from our breakfast table at the al fresco dining room of Meliá Cariari Hotel, on the outskirts of San José, the capital city of Costa Rica, is a man who looks annoyingly familiar to me.

“I make him very Boston-Brahmin, very white, light brown hair combed across his forehead in a Kennedy.” The target of my ersatz analysis is wearing a pale blue polo shirt, nestled around the pot of his belly, over yellow Bermuda shorts, the wide pant legs accenting the contrast of his spindly legs. “I just can’t place him.”

“So, why bother?” she asks.

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“But I know I’ve seen him before,” I respond, ignoring her comment.

It is a gloriously warm morning. The sunshine on my back and shoulders feels like a hot rock massage at one of those Swedish spas. The woman with whom I am sharing breakfast is editor of one of the magazines which publish my articles. She has spent the better part of a decade reducing my rambling writings to simple sentences, which the readers of her magazine might actually understand. But when she is captive in a social situation with me, she must suffer the unedited verbal versions of my literary flights of fancy.

“Perhaps on U.S. TV: a talking head, one of the regulars forever interpreting politics on those all-day/all-night political opinion networks. He wouldn’t attract hot women in his own environment, but resources and available women in this one equal an extended relationship.”

His companion is a beautiful mixed-race girl, skin color favoring black forebears. She has a striking face: dark eyes; angular features; full, maroon lips; the sense of near-perfection tempered by a band of acne over her nose and across her cheeks. Her hair is in tight cornrows. Her tight tank top seductively suggests sumptuous cleavage. She is half his age.

“He wears that smug look of having succeeded where others – me – will fail,” I go on. “Ply her with food, drink, trinkets, so he can feel he don’t got to pay for it. At least not in the age-old, straight-cash transaction.”

“Why are you doing this?” she asks.

“Well,” I counter, “this is Costa Rica and prostitution is legal.”

“So, why do you care what he’s got going on? Whether he avoids the straight-cash transaction to justify not having to pay for it? Why do you need to transform some observed reality into an alternative reality of your own making?”

“It makes for a far more interesting narrative.”

She sighs melodramatically. “It makes for pulp fiction.” she says. “I deal in reality. Facts, not unsupported interpretation.” She sips her coffee and seems to study me a moment, awaiting some sort of rejoinder. But I respond with a blank expression.

“Well,” my editor says, finally tiring of the word play. “See you Monday. Remember, it’s a straight travel piece. This country is the perfect destination for those among our readers who love to travel. I need your essay – operative word, “essay” – right after you get back, so I can begin the painful process of repairing it. And . . . pleeeeze, don’t get into too much trouble while you’re here.”

“Then why bother to waste a weekend,” I reply.

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She drains her cup, then lifts out of her chair. “A straight travel article. You follow? ‘I went here, I stayed at this hotel, I ate this for dinner.’ Straight-ahead travel article.”

I answer with a wry smile.

“Oh, gawd,” she says, her lips curling, a slow head shake. “You need an outlet for all this.

Get some underground publisher. Call yourself . . . I don’t know . . . ‘Anonymous.’ Yes. Call yourself, ‘Anonymous.’”

I furrow my brow, look at her quizzically.

Again, the head shake, more pronounced this time. “Monday,” she says. “Straight travel piece.” She turns, then directs her roll-along luggage toward a line of taxis just outside the main entrance of the hotel. ***** This is my third trip to Costa Rica, but this time I am out of synch. I am wrestling the longestablished sense that this is a place of needs-abatement, desires fulfilled. But, this time I’m not sure what my needs are, let alone how to satisfy them. I decide I do need to get in the middle of things however. Let that play. See where it takes me.

I have taken the ground floor, garden suite at Hotel Grano de Oro, a lovely, converted, turn-of-the-century mansion in San José. The room is furnished with a nod to the property’s past: beautiful, handcrafted hardwood furniture; a four-poster, wrought-iron bed; antique furnishings, prints and other accents. There are also accessions to the demands of modern travelers: cable TV, fast wi-fi and email connections. My bathroom is a huge, painted-tile affair with a soothing jacuzzi. A French door, in a sitting room off the bedroom, opens onto a tropical garden, where I can relax with a cool drink. Breezes billow the gauzy curtains that pirouette inside slatted windows opening onto still more fragrant gardens. It’s intoxicating. I am transported to a Latin America of another time, or into the pages of a novel by García Márquez, a poem by Neruda. What a place to get laid . . . except that the management has a house rule about inviting the local ladies back to the hotel, strictly enforced.

I need to reacquaint myself with the heart of the city. It’s an easy 20-minute walk from the hotel, a journey of run-on sentences, a stream of scenes in a Whitman poem. Sidewalk vendors are selling lottery tickets, boots, belts, baseball caps, knock-off watches, fruits and vegetables, Latino magazines, used books with tattered covers. The air is heavy with the smell of fried fish, of bad fish. Blanched slabs of meat are piled high in a butcher shop.

Crusty tubers in odd shapes overflow boxes in a grocery store. There is the glorious smell of ground coffee. Store after store displays cheap shirts, cheap shoes, occasionally some expensive looking jewelry. An elderly couple hobbles along, hand-in-hand; young girls hold schoolbooks to their breasts; little boys tote knapsacks, horse around. A man with a beet-red face is asleep on a ledge outside an office building, people walking by without interest. Further along the ledge, a man with no legs is begging coins. Children in school

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uniforms are on line at a Pizza Hut, making their joyful noise. Everywhere there are clots of animated conversation.

Within a few blocks of each other, in the heart of San José, are a half-dozen pickup bars in an area nicknamed “Gringo Gulch.” The most famous of these is Key Largo on Calle 7, just south of Avenida 3, across from Parque Morazan. Here prostitutes, part- and full-time, enact an unscripted floorshow. As a display of the human mating-dance, Key Largo never disappoints. Like Grano de Oro, Key Largo is also a converted in-town mansion, but there the similarity ends. While the ultimate nighttime destination in both places is the bedroom, the answers to with whom and what for are quite different.

I pass Key Largo. In the bright sunlight of late morning there is no visible activity. Shutters in the window facing the avenue are open and I can hear the faint sounds of workmen banging away inside. Men banging away inside. Irony? I continue my journey.

At the Hotel Del Rey, I walk through the casino, almost choke on the cigarette smoke, then into the Blue Marlin Bar. Three fat Americans are seated at the bar, their guts sagging over their belts, their shirtfront seams stretched to the very limits. All have goatees. All are sucking on bottles of weak and watery Bud Light, foreswearing the smooth, lovely taste of the local brew: Imperial. It’s five to eleven in the morning. The two men on either side of a loud one in the middle are hanging on his every word, noddingly endorsing his every inane comment. I have a feral urge to punch the loud one in the mouth.

Prostitutes are already working the bar. They are a hard-looking lot, heavily made-up, over-dressed in unattractive eveningwear, inappropriate for the late-morning sun. They seem a good match for the patrons at the bar, however, who nonetheless are riveted to a meaningless mid-season baseball game. I can’t get past the concept of sloppy seconds in this place.

I take a seat in a far corner of the barroom. A waitress looks up from her smartphone, approaches. I order an Imperial. Her smile shows her appreciation for my selection of the home brew. She heads off to get my beer. I take out my journal and begin to write . . .

. . . One of the harder-looking hookers notices my newcomer status. She groans an affected yawn in the direction of the talkative one at the bar, who stops talking. She turns and heads in my direction. The talker looks my way, frowns, then goes back to his story.

He is explaining to his two compatriots why they have lost at blackjack. Why the deck is stacked in favor of the house and how he has figured out a way to beat the house odds.

“You wanna date?” the hooker asks, as she arrives at my table. “Excuse me,” I reply, “I know what date it is.” She looks at me, first with confusion, then with a look of anger . . .

The waitress arrives with my beer. The hard-looking hooker at the bar glances in my direction, yawns, then turns back to the trio at the bar. With each swig, I more and more want to punch the loud-talking son-of-a-bitch in his fucking mouth. I gulp down my beer, close my journal and head back out into the blaring sunshine.

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I take a seat on a stone bench in Parque Morazan opposite Key Largo. There is a sexual energy here, even in the disruptive light of a bright sun. Two brunettes leave Key Largo, crisscross before me: maybe early twenties, one with a slightly over-ripe ass, shaped to her jeans; the other in black stretch pants measuring a perfect lower half. Both have jet-black eyes. My interest is rejuvenated. The women around here. Again I begin to write . . .

. . . Two young women stop, turn, look over in my direction. They say their good-byes, exchange kisses on the cheek. The one with the perfect lower half heads my way; the other heads in the opposite direction. “Your camera?” she says, pointing at the Leica M3 draped over my left shoulder. “You a photographer?” she asks in near perfect English. “Why do you ask?” I reply. “Your camera, it looks serious.” I study her a moment. “You stop for a drink at Key Largo this early every day?” I ask. She smiles. “I had some business to take care of.” “In there?” “Look,” she says, “I work as a model, but there’s not a lot of model work around here.” I shrug. “So,” she says, “you a photographer?” “My work gets published in magazines,” I answer. “You take pictures of me?” she asks. “For my modeling book?” I study her a moment. She smiles coquettishly “I’m sure we can work something out,” I answer . . . . . . The two young women, say their good-byes, kiss on the cheeks and head off in opposite directions. ***** After a late-afternoon siesta, I head out of my suite to join the intimate gathering in the dining room at Grano de Oro. I whet my appetite with a martini – straight up, twist of lime – then feast on filet mignon with a filling of gorgonzola cheese, which oozes out with each cut of the knife. It begs some sort of metaphorical analysis, but my breakfast companion is long gone. I go easy on the wine and forego an after-dinner drink. I have plans. In the pleasant coolness of the evening, I opt, again, to walk downtown.

Music and loud conversation spill out onto the stone path toward the entrance to Key Largo. The three bars, on three sides of the dance floor, are abuzz with activity. This evening, a three-piece combo – guitar, bass and drums – is playing loud, strident interpretations of “classic” British and American rock, including some of the worst covers of The Beatles I’ve ever heard. People are not here for the music. Well, maybe a few are.

Two couples are doing interpretative dances to “She Loves You.” Among them, is a skinny, bald-headed man with a hook nose and watery eyes, paired with one of the moreblatant whores, in skin-tight, white pants. He is performing a ludicrous shimmy, trying to stay with her. It looks like the death dance of an aging wood stork, which simply will not accept the limitations of once-responsive limbs. I am entranced by his orange sport coat and his fumbling footwork. What is he thinking? Then I feel a pang of guilt, because I’ve been known to drink and dance and it ain’t that much prettier. I decide instead of guzzling beers I’ll sip a rum and Coke. Sip. The bar-mistress slides the drink across to me and I take a seat.

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A woman with pale brown skin and a torrent of black hair – wet, just-out-of-the-shower look – positioned against the archway that opens onto the dance floor . . . makes eye contact. She purses her lips briefly. It’s more a quiver. There, then gone. Unexpectedly subtle and, in its ephemeral line, very provocative. I float a brief smile in her direction, but I feel mine wears foolishly. She smiles more broadly. I am not sure if she is mocking me.

I turn away from the dance floor, survey the rest of the room. A whore wanders in from the street, no doubt fresh from a rendezvous. She is a girl of maybe 25, with small breasts and large hips tamped into a sausage casing of a dress, her buttocks pressed so tightly together she has nullified the crease, the rise and fall that so enthralls a man. I imagine the explosive release that comes with unzipping her dress. It is comical.

On the opposite side of the bar, an American, too old for his long, curly-blond hair, is buying beers for two women in a heated back-and-forth conversation, he seemingly encouraging a friendly competition, perhaps a price war . . . perhaps a threesome. Cattycorner to me, three women are in animated conversation, alternately sizing up the customer base. One, whose incongruously light-blond hair belies her dark skin coloring, seems the central figure. Her abnormally round, silicone breasts appear anxious to burst free above the line of a silky, black dress, which dips to the borders of dark-brown areolae.

When she sees me glance over, she purses her lips; no subtlety with this one.

I glance back in the direction of the woman on the stool in the threshold. She does the lip thing again. Despite my nursing the rum, the smile is having its effect. She is a lascivious Mona Lisa. I feel the need to get in the game, or at least play for a while. I flick my eyes in the direction of the toilettes to the right of the dance floor, gulp down the rest of my drink, rise from my stool. I note her rise from her stool. Still got it, man.

The blonde-headed whore with the silicone breasts raises her right leg to impede my progress. She flashes the broad smile again, seriously gap-toothed; should have spent the money on dentistry. I stroke the synthetic surface of her hose, then push gently against her leg until it falls away. She raises her leg again, but I slide by. It’s a playful gesture, performed to extend the moment of contact, establish a back-up.

My follower joins me in the large anteroom outside the bathrooms. We retreat into a shadowy corner to negotiate.

“Hoondred dollar,” she says, bypassing any need to do the exchange-rate math. She runs a velvet hand across the back of my neck, embraces me in the crook of her arm. Sales promotion.

I run my hand down her back and over her buttocks. I can feel no elastic bands beneath her dress. I gaze into her smoky face, note the thin line of a scar, just off the center of her forehead: the mark of some African ritual, the strike of an angry boyfriend, a childhood accident. She has a slim, perfect nose; the high cheekbones of an Amerindian ancestor; the café-con-leche skin coloring of mestiza . . . but, those pale blue eyes, knifing into mine?

Anglo lineage? I am beginning to feel the effects of the rum . . .

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. . . emerging from the beautiful tiled bathroom in my suite, having washed and blotted the

smoke-infused sweat from my face. She is standing at the foot of the bed, her back to me.

Her dress is draped haphazardly across a valet stand by the armoire. She is in her bra and panties. Her hands are behind her back, fingers at the clasp of the bra. She unhooks it.

Her breasts swing free. She wipes the sweat from beneath them with the bra, then tosses it at the valet stand. It catches a corner, hangs a moment, then falls to the floor. She pulls the panties down to her knees, wriggles them to her ankles, removes her left leg, then kicks them toward the valet with her right leg. Not even close. She turns toward me. God . . .

Straight travel article? I went here, I stayed at this hotel, I did what? . . .

“Hoondred dollar,” the mestiza says, again, still awaiting my reply.

“No tengo,” I say, placing my foot on a wrecked barstool shunted away to the dark corner of this tawdry room. Directly the words have passed my lips, I am not comfortable with my lie, where lies are anticipated, expected. I have the money.

“No es mucho,” she counters, frowning.

“No,” I recover, “eez not too much.”

She smiles, the wrinkle in her lips just slightly more pronounced.

“Fee-teen minutes,” I say, to buy some time, free time.

Her smile crumples into a frown. I read it’s not my language; it’s the delay. She shakes her head and sidles off, back toward her seat between the dance floor and the bar.

I am embarrassed by the interaction. What is this? Since I speak lousy Spanish, I compensate by speaking broken English? Coo-ool.

A man with dense, curly-black hair and a thick black beard emerges from the men’s room, struggling with the final inch of his zipper. I watch as he recedes into one of the other bars.

I resume my place at the bar, my elbows on the wood surface, my body square to the barmaid, my back to the dance floor. I’m resisting. Impressive.

I feel the knifing blue eyes on me. Or is it my ego taking command, basking now in the anticipation of a major conquest? Scoring with a whore? And that issue isn’t even settled, yet. She will no doubt tire of me, my hesitation. I glance at her again. Now she feigns disinterest. The dance continues.

I fold into the dynamic around the bar. It is a less-interesting distraction. The barmaid has taken it upon herself to pour me another Cuba libre, replacing the watered-down glass on the coaster before me, taking a handful of colones from the money I have left on the bar.

This time, I swallow half the drink in one gulp. It is mostly libre, or whatever the hell they call rum in Coobre. The bits and pieces of conversation are inane. When first I visited

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here years ago, eaves-dropping was good sport. “That’s miles up the Sarapiquí, the dense jungle.” “The boat will be there at midnight?” “Get the two passports and considerate it done.”

I sense movement. She has sashayed over, attached herself to me, pressing her sex to my hip. The hard sell. Her body assumes the contours of mine, in a vertical rendition of nocturnal spooning. Her hair smells of ripe cantaloupe.

“Drink?” I ask. She nods, says something indecipherable to the bar-mistress, who takes another handful of colones from my stack, then returns with a glass filled with a cloudy white liquid. My . . . attachment smiles and takes a sip. I try to focus for a moment on the glass. Focus. Focus on . . .

. . . the glass sweating on the antique end table. Breezes blowing through the slatted windows billow the sheer drapes, carrying in the extracted scents of the tropical garden, just outside. She is naked above me, framed by the wrought iron of the four-poster bed. The wet-black strands of her hair tease her naked shoulders just above the angular outlines of her clavicle. Her breasts are the perfect curves of a young female, her dark nipples tightened and erect, a northern reaction to the southern connection. Her knees, her lower legs press against my haunches. A corner of the translucent drapes brushes across her face, forming a momentary veil, then falls back to the window. Her bottom rises and falls . . .

The aging, long-curly-headed American has made his selection, but the also-ran is engaging him in an animated conversation. Her victorious colleague rests her cheek on his shoulder, her look distant and disinterested, until the two-for-slightly-more-than-the-priceof-one discussion dissembles the first girl’s take for the night and she snaps her head erect.

She blurts a curt “no!” at her conniving colleague. The man, once again, is reduced to indecision. This threebie thing has him going. Clearly, this will take a while longer to sort out.

My head is floating in a cloud of bar rum. My creative instincts are taking hold, my inhibitions fading with the predicted effects of the alcohol. Suddenly, a chill runs through me. She is the most beautiful woman here. Possibly the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. And, now . . . she is gone?

I turn completely around in my chair and gasp in relief. She is there, once again on her seat in the archway, staring, over her shoulder, in my direction. Her head is cocked forward and turned obliquely toward me. She presents just a bit more curl in her lip. I smile. This time I feel I have gotten it right. She nods. She rises from her stool and heads for the exit. I take a deep breath and drain my glass. ***** United Flight from San José to Newark. I am in business class, sipping a Bloody Mary. I remove my journal from my backpack, open it, begin to read:

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“Oh, gawd,” she says, her lips curling, a slow head shake. “You need an outlet for all this.

Get some underground publisher. Call yourself . . . I don’t know . . . ‘Anonymous.’ Yes. Call yourself, ‘Anonymous.’”

I furrow my brow, look at her quizzically.

Again, the head shake, more pronounced this time. “Monday,” she says. “Straight travel piece.”

She turns, then directs her roll-along luggage toward a line of taxis just outside the main entrance of the hotel.

I study her retreat. It’s an appropriate descriptive: retreat. How she walks, rolling that luggage. A kind of slouch. Head slightly bent. Defeated. Retreating into . . . Straight travel piece? That’s it?

That’s all to show for your life as a writer? As an editor? I went here, I stayed at this hotel, I ate this for dinner.

Oh, gawd? Yes! Of course. The manuscripts in the attic, an old file cabinet in the basement.

The formulaic rejection letters. Defeat, where once there was promise. “Not what we’re looking for at this time.” At this time? At any time? Now, it’s how she gets back at the world. At me.

Reduce my art to a formulaic travel piece. Reduce me . . . to her. Look at the way she is standing there, waiting for the next taxi in line, her thoughts wrestling with . . .

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

John Milton ‘Areopagitica’ 1644

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

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Morgan Park Beach, Glen Cove, Long Island. Photo by Tony Tedeschi