Natural Traveler Magazine - Quarterly Cultural Magazine - Summer 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

Natural Traveler Magazine Summer 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

Email from the Upper West Side: Hugging it Out – Batmo’s First Accident

Aglaia Davis

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

Page 6 Page 9

Trips: A Carfree Week on Grand Manan

Bill Scheller

Page12

The Human Within

Pedro Pereira

Page 14

A Nebraskan Wedding, September 19, 1964

Anthony Germaine

Page 17

Speaking of Iceland

Frank I. Sillay

Page 18

Photo Essay: Over, On, Under and Beyond the Boardwalk

Karen Dinan

Page 24

Little House on the Pacific

Bill Scheller

Page 31

Impressions of a New Yorker’s First Visit to Niagara

David E. Hubler

Page 35

Chemistry

Tony Tedeschi

Page 38

The Monkey’s Fist

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 57

I was in the doctor’s office . . .

Norman de Plume

Page 59

Essence of Place in Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexico

Tony Tedeschi

Page 62

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Editor’s Letter Over, On, Under And Beyond The Boardwalk at Long Beach Except for four years as an Air Force officer during the 1960s, I’ve lived all of my life on Long Island. Having spent decades traveling the world, and therefore possessed of many points of comparison, it still fills me with pride every time I return to the place my wife and I warmly call “our island.”

We have lived in the City of Glen Cove, on the north shore facing Long Island Sound, for the past quarter century. At the turn of the 20th century, the area was so attractive to newly rich Rockefeller oilmen and Manhattan-based WallStreeters, they built their weekend homes here to escape the big city’s oppressive summer heat. Today, the properties of the zillionaires, now long-gone, have been compressed back toward their manor houses by developers buying up and building on their former landholdings.

Long Beach, 1959. John Street Boys: Beanpole Robbie, Eddie Mo, Footer, Klepto Georgie, Johnny DiBen . . . me.

Despite endless ongoing development, however, the island is still possessed of an inherent beauty that cannot be sublimated, even when its natural world abuts the man-made incursions. One dramatic example is the 2-1/4-mile boardwalk that restrains – just barely – the towers of the City of Long Beach from pushing onto the soft, sandy beaches of the island’s Atlantic-facing south shore, left by the receding glaciers of the Pleistocene era.

As a teenager, I made summer excursions with friends, journeying on the Long Island Railroad from my home in Queens to a last stop, which was walking distance from the boardwalk at Long Beach. For 25 cents, we could each pass under that boardwalk.

Alternately, we would fry ourselves on blankets our parents considered no longer suitable for the nightly sleeping ritual or cool off in the luxurious surf that roiled ashore.

Sometimes even a pretty tumble of arms and legs might roll out of a wave at my feet. We got hamburgers, fries and a Coke for 50 cents at a stand under the boardwalk, turned our radios to the Yankee, Dodger or Giant games, and everything was right with the world.

How did all this survive the last 60 years? Karen Dinan’s superb portfolio, beginning on Page 24, provides an answer, one better than I could ever have imagined.

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Contributors Aglaia Davis

Kamilla didn’t mean to hit my car; she just miscalculated, Davis explains in her latest Email from the Upper West Side: ‘Hugging It Out’ – Batmo’s First Accident (Page 6).

Bill Scheller

“We’re forgetting a cardinal rule about motoring: use the new car for vacation, and the old one for going to the post office,” Scheller writes about a trip to Grand Manan island, Canada, in a new feature we call “Trips,” double entendre intentional (Page 12).

He also takes us on a detour during a California trip, with “Little House on the Pacific, 1971” (Page 31).

Pedro Pereira

Pereira explains the real reason to fear robots in the age of AI in his examination of, “The Human Within.” (Page 14).

Frank I. Sillay

Sillay describes an Iceland before it became a must-see tourist destination, when he served there with a US Marine unit during the mid-‘60s, in his memoir, “Speaking of Iceland” (Page 18).

Karen Dinan

A portfolio by Dinan, provides a strong case for why you don’t necessarily need to wander far from home to create stunning photos, in this case, “Over, On, Under and Beyond the Boardwalk,” near her home in Long Beach, Long Island (Page 24).

Dinan also created the photo which graces our cover.

David E. Hubler

It’s axiomatic that New York Cityites often overlook the wonders of the rest of the state. So Hubler, born and raised in The Bronx, seeks a fix with “Impressions of a New Yorker’s First Visit to Niagara Falls” (Page 35).

Tony Tedeschi

A misinterpreted interlude changes the course of two lives in Tedeschi’s short story, “Chemistry” (Page 38).

Kendric W. Taylor

When is a “Monkey’s Fist” a cause for panic? Taylor explains (Page 57).

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New Book by Buddy Mays Available on Amazon

In the course of traveling far and wide, over a period of more years than I shudder to admit, I have met many talented writers and photographers. Most have been either writers who also take photos or photographers who also write. Among that rare breed who do both at the highest level of accomplishment is Buddy Mays. (See his surrealistic story “The Bench” in our Inaugural issue and his photo essay on Iceland in our Spring issue.)

The most recent case that makes the point is Buddy’s newest book: Cowboys, Indians & Hermits, Some Off The Grid Westerners, 1970-1985, published by, and available, on Amazon.

The book is vintage Buddy Mays, with black and white photos that address both the subject matter and the time frame. The work is further enriched by his inimitable writing, which ranges from probing journalism to literary essay to lyrical poetry. To wit, the following passage:

There is only one road to Shakespeare, New Mexico; a narrow ribbon of blacktop and dusty gravel that follows a line of minimal resistance through the low, nondescript desert hills sixty miles north of the Mexican border. It skirts the deepest of the many rain-washed gullies along the route and fords those that are not quite so eroded. Like backcountry roads everywhere in the American Southwest, this one is pocked with abysmal chuckholes, each awaiting an opportunity to annihilate whichever tire that rolls into it.

What you can expect when you buy a copy: “During the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, the American West, especially the “lower” states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and the western part of Texas, was a remarkable place in which to live and work,” Mays writes. “The possibilities for photographers and writers were infinite. Colorful and interesting individuals seemed to be everywhere, many of them willing, even eager, to share their time and stories. From smelly commune hippies to cave-dwelling hermits, from wizened ranch cowboys to Native American Indians . . . they were a vibrant, eccentric, often flamboyant bunch. Blended with the incredible beauty and variation of the landscape itself, this union of people and place resulted in an exceptionally savory—and photogenic— slum-mulligan cultural stew.”

-- Tony Tedeschi

https://www.amazon.com/gp/ product/1092733876/ref=ppx _yo_dt_b_asin_image_o00_s 00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

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Email from the Upper West Side: ‘Hugging It Out’ – Batmo’s First Accident Kamilla didn’t mean to hit my car; she just miscalculated.

By Aglaia Davis

In college, my favorite story about my beloved Woody Allen was by a former NYC cab driver who recalled getting hit by a limousine around Washington Square Park and a raving Allen springing out from the backseat, cursing him. (And the cabbie looked at him and said, “You haven’t made a decent film since 1973.”) I figured that my reaction, should anyone ever hit my beloved Batmo, would be something similar to Woody’s, plus a lot of tears. I never wanted to find out.

Batmo, after all, was and is my most precious material possession. The sun rises and sets over and behind “him.” When I am depressed, driving, sitting in, or merely seeing my pimped out Maxima can make me feel happy inside. I smile when passersbys point out and stare at the car’s bullet holes and vanity license plate.

Because of my deep adoration of it, for twelve of the car’s twelve-year life, I had placed and put collision and comprehensive auto insurance on the vehicle. Even as the miles climbed to over 100,000 and Batmo’s book value fell, I could not imagine dropping full coverage on him. I flirted with the idea once, based on the logic of it – Batmo’s Blue Book value was never as high as my subjective one (Priceless) – but it never actually allowed me to stop paying premiums that would have no real benefit.

And so it was with a heavy heart that I called Geico in or about May 2019, after my dearest friend had a crash in his bruiser of a car and was left without collision coverage, and (gulp) asked about removing all but liability coverage on Batmo. I was begging – and I mean begging – for the agent to talk me out of it. Telling her that I had read online that paying for full coverage on an old vehicle was a waste of funds given that insurance would value my car at a measly $1,500; I would pay a $500 deductible; and they would total rather than repair it, I was waiting for the agent to implore me to keep the coverage just because I loved my car. “I mean, if it gets hurt, you won’t pay me to fix it, will you?” I asked rhetorically.

The agent did not take the bait. “Your car is very old,” she said. “Here at Geico, we want to save you money. It is best to remove full coverage.”

And so I did. The moment I removed full coverage on the car on Route 3 West, almost at the 46 merger, I was certain something would happen. After all, I had driven Batmo in and out of New York City for a solid 11 years and never had a crash on the roads or vandalism on the streets at night. . . . But Sunday, June 9, 2019, was just a bad day. It started with me waking to my alarm, springing to action, and rushing to ride at my barn in New Jersey before having to jet off to a bar mitzvah that afternoon. When I arrived at an ungodly (early) hour for me, I discovered that a horse at our barn had killed itself that morning by landing on his head, and a pall was cast over the place.

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After a long and drawn out day, Batmo and I turned east, flying magically over the Helix and through the Lincoln Tunnel without stall. On the New York side of things, there lay a five-lane, one-way exit through which one could either turn right (two righthand lanes), go straight (middle lane), or turn left (two left lanes). We had traveled the road more times than we could count, and our normal route was to go right to 8th Avenue.

Dutifully, I put on my right signal light, looked back, and moved over into the second most right hand lane. To my shock, an older woman in a new car drove right aside me after I had achieved the lane change, battling to get in front of me to cross to the left lanes. She was an inch from my car and her course was unchangeable.

The impact was unfelt, the noise inaudible, and the result unmistakable. Though I had made eye contact with her, the woman insisted on sticking to her “cross to the left” course, hitting Batmo in the process.

I laid on my horn and stopped the car. I jumped out in the middle of traffic – knowing better (based on years of defensive driving for insurance discounts) – and the other driver reluctantly slowed to a halt ahead of me. We both went to the right side of Batmo, where I found damage that was worse than anticipated. I knew it would be a $2,500 job to replace the front fender.

“I can’t believe you hit my car!” I exclaimed.

She denied being at fault, claiming that she was in her lane.

I answered, “Clearly you were not, because you cut me off and are in front of me now, but if you deny it, I will call 911 and we will wait for the cops.”

“Fine,” she said, and we both returned to our vehicles.

I did call 911, reported the hit to my car, and waited. And waited. And waited. We most certainly caused big delays behind us – something I thought would be mortifying to do – but I was determined to get a police report reflecting the resting places of our cars. I called 911 again after 15 minutes and was told this was not high priority. We were last on the list.

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Finally, the tortfeasor exited her car and approached with insurance card, registration, and license in hand, raised like a white flag.

“What should we do?” she asked meekly from outside my cracked window.

I got out of the car – she being very concerned that I not get hit by oncoming cars – and I told her I would call Geico to see if we were allowed to leave. The agent told me we could exchange information, take photos, and go our separate ways.

The two of us then helped one another take photos of each other’s vehicles, and snap pictures of all of our information. As I helped her with her phone (me judging her to be in her 60s), I immediately liked her sweet disposition and motherly demeanor.

“I am sorry we had to meet under these circumstances,” I said. “But it happens.”

Before departing, I gave the woman a big hug — twice. I told her to call my mobile so that I had her number, which she did. We parted with sweet goodbyes.

I, of course, did report the accident and started the claim with both her insurance company and mine because, one way or another, Batmo had to be repaired. “She is such a sweetheart,” I told the representatives, “but she did collide with my vehicle.”

The next day, I sent 8o-year-old Kamilla a text message, letting her know that I set up an estimate for the damage to Batmo, and asking her to let me know how her car turned out.

And I reiterated it was very unfortunate that we had to meet under those circumstances.

My almost-foe and now friend texted me immediately back. “Your mother raised you amazingly well,” she told me. “You are so kind and loving. I want to take you to a very expensive meal for all the trouble. Thank you for everything.”

We exchanged pleasantries and agreed to meet when her work schedule cleared up.

And that was Batmo’s first (and hopefully last) accident. No, I didn’t rage like Woody Allen down at Washington Square, and wasn’t close to crying. Kamilla didn’t mean to hit my car; she just miscalculated.

And, all said and done, I was “struck” by a pearl of wisdom: When all else fails and the cops don’t come, just hug it out.

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Fogg’s Horn The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus

Island Hopping in the Hebrides ‘So, what do you do here for excitement?’

One of my favorite means of travel is by ferry, especially around one of my favorite locations -- the Scottish Islands. Strung out in the Atlantic off the northeast coast of Scotland, they are remote places of stark natural beauty where economics, history and rock-ribbed traditions have ensured that their intriguing charm has been relatively unchanged over the centuries.

This particular trip of which I write was undertaken there for my usual reasons – ferryhopping and shopping: to Harris for hand-woven tweeds and to Islay to order a generous supply of single malt whiskies. This time however, never one to miss an opportunity to do something weirdly exciting in a small aircraft – a typical Fogg failing -- I decided to fly out from Shetland to Fair Isle, a green and brown tufted rock famous for its birds and handknitted multi-colored sweaters. This was a chance not only to land uphill (landing instructions warn of moss growth on the dirt runway making it slippery when wet), but even more fun -- taking off downhill and swooping off a cliff and out to sea at the end of the runway.

Once on the ground at Fair Isle, the landing in the high-wing Islander everything I had hoped for, after a look-around I was soon being measured at one of the Fair Isle knitwear locations, picking out my color and pattern. I also got to meet the person who would knit the actual garment. And it was then, with her, that I stumbled into one of the strangest and most disturbing conversations I’ve ever had.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Having completed most of my island-touring among the Inner and Outer Hebrides, my tweeds and whisky ordered, the RoRo ferry now snugly docked at Shetland, I had driven my rented Land Rover down the ramp at Lerwick right into one of the island’s annual Up Helly Aa festivals, an ancient Norse celebration that literally has to be seen to be believed. For me this mostly consisted of drinking in a pub sardined between axe-toting bearded men wearing chest plates and helmets with horns sticking off either side, all the while flirting with the local island lassies that were pissed at 9

them for excluding females from the processions. Surviving that, it was on to the main event on this wind-swept island: burning a full-size Viking Longship in a gigantic nautical bonfire, showering a sparkling cloud of floating embers over the spectators while phalanxes of the same horned helmet-wearing, torch-waving would-be Vikings marched past, bellowing Norse chants into the night air. And that just was the pre-party!

Leaving with a mild case of the shakes -- half hangover, half PTSD – I was now on my way to Scapa Flow at Orkney, to dive on the almost pristine wrecks of the Imperial German High Seas Fleet of World War One, which had been scuttled there in 1919. Standing at the rail of the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry with its distinctive red stack, watching the treeless hills of the Hebrides glide by, once again that conversation on Fair Isle rose up toward me from the depths like the Great White Whale coming for Ahab.

My knitter that day was a tall, big-boned woman, with long, wild blonde hair. As she took my measurements, I asked in my wittiest manner: “So, what do you do here for excitement?”

“Well,” she replied, “I wave at the cruise ships.”

“You what?”

“You know,” she explained, her eyes fixed on me, “in the afternoons, in good weather, I lean on the wall outside the hut out of the wind, and when the ships go by, I wave at them.

But the old man inside yells at me.

“I couldn’t stop now: “What old man? Why does he yell?”

“The husband’s father. He doesn’t like me waving. Says it’s bold. He sits in the kitchen and yells out the window that I’m shaming them.”

Hoo boy . . . tension on Fair Isle. * * * * *

Advantage Spitfire ‘ . . . the technician opened his attaché case, took out a pair of snips . . .’

Some years ago, I was having an after-work drink with a colleague when we were joined by his father, who, after a couple of pints, got on to the topic of his time flying Spitfires in the Battle of Britain. Both sides were continually seeking to gain any advantage, however slight, as the smallest difference could affect the outcome of a dogfight. At the time in question, the Spitfires, as configured, had a slight performance edge on the ME 109s flown by their main opponents.

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One day they found that the Luftwaffe had modified the ME 109s and the slight advantage the RAF had enjoyed now lay with the opposition. Good pilots were getting shot down in circumstances that they would previously have found relatively secure.

Urgent enquiries went up the chain of command, and before too long, a technician arrived from Rolls Royce, the maker of the Merlin V-12 engines powering the Spitfires. This fellow, dressed in a three-piece suit, and wearing a bowler hat, drove up in an open-top, single-seat Morgan racer with the handbrake out on the running board. British racing green, of course. He spoke to the squadron commander and cautioned him that the alteration he was about to make would void the warranty and sought authority to proceed.

The incredulous officer remarked that the manufacturer’s warranty was pretty low among his pilots’ priorities, so the technician opened his attaché case, took out a pair of snips, and proceeded to cut the governor wire, which restricted the movement of the throttle on each aircraft.

“There,” he said, “that should do it.”

But Mr. Kokoraleis, now 58, 300 pounds and mostly bald, is not just any resident.

– The Times, April 21, 2019 We are in complete agreement.

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TRIP

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A Carfree Week on Grand Manan Avis wasn’t renting that week.

By Bill Scheller

As the ferry pulled away from the New Brunswick mainland, we looked ahead towards the craggy shores of Grand Manan and enjoyed that wonderful sensation of leaving all our troubles behind, even if only for four days. Unfortunately, we had brought one of them along. It had more than 100,000 miles on it.

“Let’s take the Pontiac and give the Mercury a rest,” my wife Kay and I had decided. We were forgetting a cardinal rule of motoring: use the new car for vacation, and the old one for going to the post office.

After we had settled into our motel on the island, I set off to take our son, Dave, to a history slide show down at the town hall – always a dicey proposition with a seven-year-old, but I wanted to work up gradually to the really exciting stuff, like a visit to the kelp sheds.

A mile down the road, the Pontiac lurched and died – right in front of a garage.

The garage owner was there, but the mechanic had gone home for the day.

“Leave it here,” the owner said. “We’ll have Lyle look at it in the morning.”

Another customer, an older gent with that classic Canadian mustache you see on Mounties and retired colonels, offered to drive us home and added, “Lyle’ll take good care of you.

Big, tall fellow.” Good, I thought. I like tall mechanics. He also volunteered that it might take time to get parts. “It’s an island, you know.”

I called around and found that nobody had any cars to rent, although our hopes were momentarily raised when the motel manager said that “maybe Avis might have something.”

Avis! Why hadn’t anyone mentioned Avis? “Avis Green, she’s our taxi driver. She has two cars.” But Avis wasn’t renting that week.

I called the garage in the morning and got Lyle himself. “She started right up,” Lyle reported in his big, tall voice.

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“Well, what was the matter?

“Can’t say.”

I decided to go over to the GM dealer on the mainland and find out just what was wrong.

Kay and David would still have their vacation among the cliffs and meadows and fogshrouded lighthouses of Grand Manan, even if mine was going to spent in a showroom reading back issues of Motor Trend. The motel lady loaned us her old Buick, and Kay followed me to the ferry, just in case. Good thing. The Pontiac died again, three miles up the road. We drove back to the garage and asked about a tow.

“Wade Dakin has a tow truck,” we were told, “but he’s helping his dad set herring weirs this week. You can call his mom and leave word.”

While I was waiting for Wade, I came up with my own diagnosis. A year earlier the same thing had happened when the car’s computer failed. I knew I was taking a hundred-dollar risk, since electronic parts are non-returnable, but I called the dealer and ordered one.

The computer took two days to get out to Grand Manan. Then, when it arrived at the garage, the courier wouldn’t let go of it because Lyle’s boss didn’t have enough cash around to pay for it. So the next morning, just four hours before we were to leave on the ferry, I began tracking down the owner of the courier service.

“Call his brother,” the garage owner’s wife suggested. “He usually knows where he is.” I pictured myself rowing out to the herring weirs.

I finally got the courier on the phone, and he said I could drop off the check at the bank, where his wife worked as a teller. Easily done. And just as easily Lyle slid out the old computer and popped in the new one. I turned the key in the ignition. The Pontiac made nary a sound.

Nothing left now but to call Wade and have him tow us onto the ferry. There was someone on the mainland who would be all too happy to tow us off, for another hundred dollars. But Wade wasn’t around.

“He’s out on the herring weirs,” his mother told me. “But he’ll be back in time for your ferry, don’t worry.”

And indeed he was. He turned up just as we finished transferring our baggage from the borrowed Buick to the Pontiac, and everything went smoothly from there. Back on the mainland, I learned that the culprit was something called the crank sensor, which I would have thought was a device that knew when I was in the car.

By five that afternoon we were on our way.

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The Human Within The real reason to fear AI and robots

By Pedro Pereira

Will the machines take over? That’s the uneasy question hovering over most discussions about artificial intelligence (AI). Visions of highly disciplined robots trampling humans underfoot, seizing power and enslaving us are enough to produce night tremors. Even the U.S. government has quizzed AI experts on the likelihood of such a scenario.

Alarmism? Perhaps.

Right now, AI systems are pretty limited. They can do some things well – guess your next online purchase or sound an alarm if a wearable medical monitoring device senses you’re about to have a heart attack or a stroke.

These are good things. Nothing to fear here.

So why all the fuss? One reason is some folks conflate AI with robotics. The image of the robot is the thing that personifies the fear. But there is another deeper reason. It’s something that isn’t really talked about – human nature. Deep down, we are afraid the

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machines will let the basest instincts of human nature – greed, envy and prejudice – overshadow our best qualities – compassion, generosity and understanding.

But let’s put a pin on that for a moment. First, let’s understand the difference between AI and robots. They’re related but not the same. A robot needs AI to operate but AI doesn’t need a robot. The robot is to AI what the human body is to brain function. Many AI systems will operate quietly in the background on computers and servers doing what they are programmed to do. Unlike the human brain, they don’t need a body (or robot).

For AI systems to accomplish anything useful, they have to consume a lot of data. They learn by “observation,” much like babies learn human behaviors from grownups. The more data you feed the AI beast, the more it learns and the better it gets at performing its task. Every time there is a change, new data is generated. AI then has to figure out whether the change is an anomaly or the refinement of a pattern. The process of learning is infinite – just as it is for humans.

Let’s consider a relatively mundane example: You’re a dull shopper. Every week, you log on to your favorite retailer’s website to buy the same two items. An AI engine soon enough won’t need you to take any action. It knows what you want and simply does it for you. And it will know enough to make targeted recommendations for other items you might like.

But say you throw the system a curveball by placing a completely different order one week.

The AI engine absorbs that information to determine if it’s an anomaly. It will need the following week’s information to figure that out. You might revert to your usual order, reorder the items from the previous week or go in a completely different direction again.

This creates more work for the AI engine, and its recommendations for a time may not be as precise as when you were being a predictable, boring shopper.

Not so fast

If you think AI systems that need that much teaching are about to take over, take a breath.

They may become that good eventually, but not in the immediate future.

The same can be said of robots. With robots, you not only have the AI challenges of achieving deductive skills – and even sentience – but also the refinement of motor skills.

Robots are going to need more than opposable thumbs to replicate human movements.

They’ll need hand-eye coordination and other sensory and motor functions that humans possess.

Right now, robots are pretty clumsy compared to humans. But that is not to say they can’t do some tasks well. If you visit an Amazon warehouse, you might see robots pushing carts and lifting packages. Their strength and stamina compared to humans is no contest. In other settings, you might see robotic arms executing scripted or guided movements in operating rooms or assembly lines.

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Robots still have a long way to go. And they won’t get there on their own. Humans still have to design and build them, and equip them with a power source. Until robots can procreate and propel themselves, we’re safe from a robot takeover.

But make no mistake, AI systems and robots are going to steal some jobs from humans.

There’s been a lot of discussion of self-driving vehicles and AI systems that can replace human tasks. Whether the trucking and taxicab industries will ever rely entirely on autonomous vehicles is questionable, but AI is already playing a role in employee recruiting and hiring, financial investing and cybersecurity.

AI and its first cousin, machine learning, can spot trends and anomalies invisible to the human eye, which makes them particularly good at repetitive tasks that require inhuman levels of concentration. So they’ve got us beat in that department. But, again, they can’t achieve any level of usefulness without receiving a lot of data from people. Humans build the algorithms that drive AI and machine learning, and humans feed them new data and refine the algorithms as needed.

AI systems need to be “trained.” So while it’s inevitable AI and machine learning will steal some jobs from humans, they also are creating new types of employment. Of course, that will require retraining and career development programs for the humans who work with AI systems, something government, industry and academia need to seriously address.

Now, let’s get back to the issue of human nature and how it fuels imagination and fears around AI and robots. Humans throughout history have demonstrated a penchant for applying amazing discoveries and creations for evil.

From the time Prometheus gave us fire, we’ve never ceased to find ways to employ our best advancements in destructive ways. We shot fiery arrows at enemies. Invented gunpowder so we could blow up adversaries. Split the atom and created the most devastating weapon known to humankind. Built the internet to communicate and interact, then quickly turned it into a medium for spying and disinformation.

Along the way, we’ve done a lot of good, too. Invented penicillin to fight disease. Learned to harness power from wind, water and fire to power factories and feed and clothe people.

Challenged the birds by propelling ourselves into the air. Then set our sights on the stars by adding points of light to the heavens.

With each step toward the good . . .

With each step toward the good, we take a step toward the bad. And that subconsciously is what afflicts us about the potential for creating machines that could match us in sentience and motor skills.

Consider what happened with Microsoft’s Twitter chatbot. Chatbots are AI-powered computer programs that can converse with you. They learn with every conversation, banking data for use in subsequent interactions. When Microsoft introduced a chatbot

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called Tay to Twitter, the software colossus promised the chatbot would get smarter from its interactions.

Within 16 hours, Microsoft pulled the plug on Tay. Why? Thanks to an orchestrated effort by alt-right Twitter users, Tay quickly became a racist scoundrel that got a kick out of spewing all kinds of hateful venom.

Tay is a rudimentary example of AI. Systems will get much more advanced in time.

Imagine what a group of well-organized low-lives can accomplish by taking over advanced AI systems or robots. Imagine what one nation can do to another. I could paint you a scenario, but doubtless you can fill a mental canvas with your own versions of unspeakable horrors.

And that brings us back to the original question: Will the machines take over? It’s possible but unlikely. But if it ever happens, what we should fear most is ourselves. As we create machines in our image, we should fear the human within the machine.

A Nebraskan Wedding, September 19, 1964

By Anthony Germaine It was Sunday afternoon And it was raining in Nebraska Big drops Beat big leaves drooped down And bounced and slid To the ground The young couple were married Earlier that afternoon And they were the picture of happiness Soft happiness Settling like the frothy dew Among the rolling hills of Nebraska Rugged Nebraska American Nebraska They were descendants of Daniel Freeman

First to homestead Nebraska Having hewn a house of old timber And thatched a home of tall blue grass Who drew life’s fluid from The slow moving puddles of Cub Creek And anchored his cabin with Rare unearthed creek stone The sun does not shine for Greater lengths in Nebraska But the ground knows how to Hold its warmth I have lived all my life By east coast waters And I love the rain and Sundays And weddings in Nebraska.

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Speaking of Iceland A Memoir ‘. . . 150 Marines to provide security, of which I was one.’

By Frank I. Sillay

[Author’s Note: After reading Buddy Mays’ excellent photo essay about Iceland in the Spring Issue, I started remembering things I hadn’t thought about for decades.]

During the height of the cold war, I spent March 1964 - March 1965 in Iceland as part of the US Marine detachment looking after security at the US Navy/Air Force base at Keflavik. I haven’t travelled to Iceland since, but have read a lot of recent fiction and some non-fiction from there, and things do seem to have changed.

Outside of a few specimen trees in Reykjavik, the only trees I saw in Iceland were stunted little shrubs marking graves in country graveyards. I’m pretty sure the only stretch of paved road outside the towns in the ‘60s was from the air base at Keflavik to the port at Reykjavik, maybe 40 miles, paved during the war, and that stretch was notable for the fish drying on wires alongside the road.

The farmhouses were nearly all built of sod and I was under the impression that they were thus easier to keep warm. Sheep in those days were identified by modifying their horns.

Farmer Magnusson’s sheep might have the right horn sawed off, and the left one painted sky blue, while farmer Gustafsson’s would have the right horn painted red, and the left one yellow, etc.

Every motor vehicle in Iceland in those days was either gray, with “U S NAVY” painted on the door, or a Mercedes-Benz. The Icelandic government had struck a deal with Mercedes granting exclusive rights to import vehicles in return for reduced pricing. This deal had the added advantage of simplifying parts inventory. It’s the only place I’ve ever heard of having made such a deal, and I think it’s brilliant, especially for a place with a small population, though political resistance could be expected from those who regard automobiles as objects of desire, rather than means of transportation.

A Historical Digression

A historical digression is in order here. During the period before Pearl Harbor, when Roosevelt was busting to get into the war on the Allies’ side, but unable to do so, transatlantic convoys were only escorted by the US Navy to the territorial limit, after which they were fair game for U-boats until they came within air cover distance of the British base in Iceland. Some sea-lawyer noticed that a neutral country (as the US was at the time) could provide naval escorts to convoys supplying its own troops overseas, so using a bit of circular logic, US Navy Seabees were sent to Iceland to construct fuel tanks for the escort

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vessels that would cover ships taking supplies to the 6th Marine Regiment, whose troops were sent to Iceland to protect the Seabees. Being Marines, they were simply a “Naval Landing Party,” which international law allowed to be put ashore in a pretty ad-hoc manner. By some happy coincidence every convoy crossing the Atlantic from then on had at least one ship carrying supplies to the Marines in Iceland, and so had a full escort from the US Navy.

Hvalfjordhur Camp

At the end of the war, the British pulled out, but Iceland joined NATO, and the US maintained a presence there. The overall strength was approximately 1,500 Air Force, 1,500 Navy and 150 Marines to provide security, of which I was one. An interesting side of the arrangement was that Iceland didn’t have any military forces, and we agreed to provide them. Some 150 Marines, by any calculation, is a pretty small national army, so our duties included taking groups of sailors and airmen out in the lava fields and teaching them to shoot an M1 rifle, throw grenades, etc. These exercises tended to run the full range from pathetic to hilarious.

The main base was at Keflavik, southeast of Reykjavik, and was the location of the international airport. There were a couple of outlying camps – Grindavik, where there was an electronic establishment of some kind – and Hvalfjordhur, or Whale Bay. Marines were only allowed to spend one month at a time away from our mainside base, for fear that we might otherwise go feral. The remote postings were highly prized, so anybody who blotted his copybook didn’t get a second chance. I spent one month at Grindavik, and five at Whale Bay, with the alternate months mainside.

Tough Duty at Whale Bay

Whale Bay was 80 miles from mainside and was in a deep fjord where the shore whaling station was located. It was also the site of the wartime British submarine base, and the fuel tanks built by the Seabees. Our camp was the one occupied by the Seabees in 1941, and the ostensible purpose of our presence was to guard the fuel tanks. They had been empty since 1945, and were collapsing into ruins, but the fact was that a couple of miles along the road from the camp were lakes that provided excellent trout and salmon fishing, so we maintained the camp as an active base (with its accommodation for about three times our strength), so that in the season, people from mainside and Grindavik could come out for a spot of R&R.

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Whale Bay was the happiest time I spent in the Marine Corps. After my first trip, I always stood Corporal of the Guard watches, which kept me warm and cozy in the gatehouse, handy to the coffee in the mess hall. The Whale Bay contingent consisted of the Officer in Charge, usually a Marine 2nd Lieutenant, although we had a Navy Ensign for a while.

There was also a Navy cook and two messmen, a corpsman, two or three Seabees, and 10 or a dozen marine of other ranks. I was always the senior enlisted Marine.

Processing the whale catch

About a half mile from the camp was the shore factory that was the base of the Icelandic whaling fleet. The fleet included four or five hunter ships, about the size of a commercial trawler, which would go out three or four days at a time and tow their kill back to the shore factory to be hauled up the ramp onto the factory roof, where it was cut up and dropped through holes into the factory for processing.

Baleen, Whale Oil and Whale Steaks

A whale’s baleen (the filtering medium from the mouths of non-toothed whales) was the stuff that had previously provided the “whalebone” for corsets. It was as if a quantity of nylon fishing leader a millimeter or two in diameter was laid out parallel and bound together with some medium that would hold a polished surface, and thus formed into plates maybe a half an inch thick and a couple of feet wide. These plates grow from the upper jaw in lieu of teeth, arranged with tiny gaps between the plates. The binding material is worn away on the inside of the mouth until each plate is reduced to a rough triangle, often several feet long, with the stubs of the individual fibers exposed on the inboard side to form a continuous filter to catch the krill and plankton, as the whale ejects a mouthful of water.

Since baleen was no longer required for corsets and the meat went to dog food, the oil rendered down from the blubber was the only saleable product. But it was still the country’s second biggest foreign exchange earner, after fishing. At the time, the numbers of whales were dropping so drastically that there was real concern about whether the industry was still viable. There was talk locally about the fact that a couple of the ships were at the end of their lives, but it was not feasible to order replacements.

We sometimes used to get whale steaks from the factory, to cook up in the mess hall. The meat (which I had previously eaten at The Blue Ship Tea Room in Boston) was very

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coarse – the muscle cells were sometime visible – and up to six inches long. The taste was like beef, except stronger, tougher, and completely without fat.

The country between the factory and the tank farm was littered with baleen, vertebrae, jawbones, etc. Sperm whale teeth were extracted and sold in the local shop for the equivalent of a couple of dollars. I used to buy them and carve them into various shapes (like cavorting whales) or polish them up and scrimshaw them. I still have a few intact ones.

Mostly Sunshine or Mostly Not

The winter was quite an experience. We were a couple of hundred miles from the Arctic Circle, so we didn’t get the six months of sun, six months of night. In midwinter, the sun would appear just above the southern horizon for an hour or two of twilight at lunchtime.

By midsummer, the sun circled the horizon, just dipping below in the north for a short while around midnight, for 24 hours of afternoon-like light. I was bemused by the fact that we had been issued with two blankets in San Diego, but only one in Iceland.

The flag was raised at 0800 every morning and taken down at sunset (which might be anywhere from lunchtime to midnight) and this was done in a formal manner, though we didn’t have a bugler. In the winter, we used a storm flag, which was about 36” x 18”, heavy duty nylon, with a rope sewn into the edges of the flag. One day we were putting up a brand-new storm flag, with two men handling the rope, and one handling the flag, when the wind took matters into its own hands. Within seconds, the flag was at the extreme end of the rope, 20 or 30 feet horizontally from the top of the flagpole, and it was a week before the wind dropped sufficiently for somebody to be able to snag the rope and bring in the flag. By this time, it was frayed all the way back to the blue field.

The mess hall was a Butler building: steel frame gable, covered with corrugated iron. Like most of the buildings, it had guy wires over the roof, anchored into the ground at six-foot intervals, to keep the roof from blowing away. One night, I was returning from waking the next watch, which involved using crampons and ski poles to get from the barracks to the mess hall (50 yards), through the mess hall, then 30 yards to the guard shack. A gust caught me, and took me off my feet, and as I blew past the corner of the mess hall (next stop the waters of Hvalfjordhur) I managed to snag the first guy wire (a 3/8” wire rope) and spun around into the lee of the building and slid down the wire rope to safety. The next morning, when I went to the corpsman to get stitches in my knee where I hit the building, he was curious about the details, so we went and had a look. We found a dent in the corrugated iron siding where my knee hit the wall 8’ off the ground.

Celestial and Terrestrial Colors

During the winter nights, the Northern Lights were often spectacular. Sometimes, it would be a localized effect; sometimes the entire sky was involved. It might look like the smoke rising from a cigarette in still air, complete with the sudden twitches, as if from a brief air current. Other times, it might be like multi-colored stage curtains, again with random twitches and upheavals. A moment later, it might look like an abstract psychedelic watercolor. The sudden movements and “twitches” – that really is the best word – 21

would have been understandable if the scale of the whole thing was the size of a dinner plate, but when you consider that the picture was spread across hundreds or thousands of miles of upper atmosphere, the speed of the apparent movements was truly astonishing.

About the time I got orders to Iceland, there were reports on the The volcanic birth of Surtsey Island. news of a volcanic eruption off the southern coast. This began the formation of the island of Surtsey, which was just far enough from the main base at Keflavik that the ash cloud wasn’t visible. When we flew to London for Churchill’s funeral, the pilot flew a couple of circuits of the island so we could take pictures.

The camp at Whale Bay was right on the main road that circles Iceland, though I believe a tunnel has since been built across the mouth of Hvalfjordhur, allowing the main road to bypass the whole area. At Hvalfjordhur, I spent lots of my spare time wandering the surrounding hills, weather permitting. In the spring, I noticed that sometimes a grasscovered hillside, maybe 300 yards away, would show a pale pastel tint, maybe pink, or yellow or blue, as if a thin wash of watercolor had been laid over the top. As I walked closer, this pastel effect would gradually fade out, until when I reached the actual hillside, it had disappeared altogether. Only when I dropped to push-up position was I be able to see the millions of tiny flowers, on the scale of one or two millimeters, nestled under the grass.

High Jinks and Icelandic Girls

Part of the summer routine for single Icelandic girls was to hitchhike around the island in groups of two or three. Icelandic girls in those days dressed in ski pants, with the stirrups over white socks, high heeled shoes, and topped off with hand-knitted sweaters. Very odd.

But attractive to us, nevertheless!

Early in the summer, we would offer them the hospitality of our barracks, (purely in the spirit of NATO cooperation) as well as the bar and the movie theatre. This went along to the satisfaction of all concerned, until the Marine Lieutenant who had been Officer in Charge at Whale Bay went back to the States for discharge and was replaced by an eager beaver idiot, straight out of Officer Candidate School, who declared an end to stray women sleeping in the barracks. Our solution was to set up a tent camp in the pasture just across

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the road from the gatehouse, where the Corporal of the Guard held court and business carried on pretty much as usual.

The weather was mild, and with daylight 24 hours a day, recreational activities of many varieties could be observed at any time of the day or night. One memorable night, the Corporal of the Guard (not me, I hasten to add) had wandered over the road and was talking to some of the revelers. We got European beer for 15 cents a can. The price in town was four or five dollars, so the visiting girls tended to let their hair down. Suddenly, one of our beer-fortified lady guests grabbed the corporal’s 1911 Colt out of its holster, somehow managed to get a round in the chamber, and started blazing away at random.

The corporal managed to get the pistol back from her before anybody was killed, but he was then faced with a problem. When he came on watch, he had signed the logbook affirming that he had received not only the pistol, but also five rounds of ammunition, and would need his relief to make a similar statement. The handover was invariably made with the magazine out, and lying alongside the cleared pistol, so that the bullets were visible.

Using the initiative that the Marine Corps takes pride instilling in all hands, he took the key from the gatehouse, and went up the hill to the magazine to replenish the ammunition. A couple of the girls accompanied him, eager to see what kinds of weaponry we had locked away. By whatever means, they came back down the hill with not just 5 rounds of .45, but 50 or so; plus a few fragmentation grenades. After a brief reign of the Lords of Misrule, peace was restored, and by some miracle, nobody was hurt.

During the winter, the locals basically pulled a chair up to the fire for four or five months.

Playing of chess and drinking Brennivin (the local schnapps) was the order of the day.

When the sun returned, social appetites came with it.

A truck would make the run down to mainside every two or three days for mail, fresh vegetables, and to exchange movies. In those days, movies came on 16-mm celluloid film, in large round tins, and there was a movie exchange in the port at Reykjavik, where passing ships would swap their stock of movies for a fresh selection, and the various NATO facilities also participated. At any given time, we usually had two or three movies at Whale Bay. However, on one occasion when we were snowed in for three weeks, the only movie we had was Elvis Presley’s “Blue Hawaii.” With other entertainment options severely limited, by the time the roads were passable, we could all recite the dialogue in unison, while throwing beer cans at the screen.

The last time I looked at Google Earth, traces of the tank farm were still visible, if you knew where to look, but all vestiges of the Hvalfjordhur camp and the buildings are gone, covered by a farmhouse that wouldn’t be out of place in the suburbs of Dallas.

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One of the principal motivations for traveling far and wide is the dramatic photos you come home with. Just point a camera – or more likely an iPhone – at just about anywhere in Paris or Rome, in the direction of wildlife in Africa, or at the geologic wonders of Yellowstone and you have yet another portfolio for your digital albums, with a few prints to frame for prominent spots on the walls. Neighborhood or hometown photos are, well . . . badly underappreciated. Let the following portfolio put that notion to rest.

Photographer Karen Dinan lives in Long Beach on the south shore of Long Island, New York. Her photos on the following pages were all taken, as we note: “over, on, under and beyond the boardwalk,” which runs just 2-1/4 miles along her city’s beachfront. It’s a powerful argument to consider never leaving home . . . or at least never taking for granted where you live.

Kite Surfer

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Even the gull is impressed.

All in a day’s surf.

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The silver tones of failing light.

Emerging from the battle.

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Contemplation.

Undeterred by a chilly day.

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The eastern sun sets in the west.

Lights of evening wink on.

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All photographs in this Photo Essay Š 2019 K. Dinan Photography Prints available for purchase at: www.karendinan.com

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Little House on the Pacific, 1971 We still had no idea what they meant by ‘a place on the ocean.’

By Bill Scheller

The girl was pregnant, which must have made it especially uncomfortable to sleep on the floor. Her boyfriend, like her maybe twenty or twenty-one, nestled alongside. Their sleeping bags together were a dull green lump in the dim light of the church basement.

Jim Dixon and I were zipped into our bags a few feet away. It was one of those nights when every bone in your body is having an argument with a surface not meant for sleeping, and all night I had twisted on the linoleum from one side to the other, awake mostly, looking around to take in what I could of the place and the rest of its clientele.

The basement of the church of Saint Whoever It Was had been set up as a homeless shelter, though you didn’t hear the term much in 1971. You didn’t hear “homeless” much, either; the catchall term hadn’t yet come into vogue. Whatever – if anything – they were called back then, their numbers included a good-sized contingent of young wanderers, many if not most of whom did have homes somewhere, with softer places to sleep.

We fit the last group the closest, with the qualification that Jim and I weren’t on an open-

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ended escapade. Ours was a trip of a planned length, though with most of the details filled in as we went along. We’d headed to California, of course -- California and especially the Bay Area, still in ’71 as much of a magnet for the footloose as Italy was for an 18th century Grand Tourist. The reason our bones were having it out with the linoleum (there was more of the sore-hipped than the hippie about us that night) was because, after a posh stay at my Uncle Ralph’s house in the suburbs and its antithesis at the Berkeley Youth Hostel, we had driven to Mill Valley to look in on a college friend from Jersey who had become, as they were called then, a “Jesus freak.” He was running the shelter at the church and had invited us to spend the night. It wasn’t Uncle Ralph’s, but it was free. That was a dollar less than we’d spent for bunk beds among the meth heads in Berkeley.

The lights went on around seven: up and at ‘em, whatever ‘em were. While we were rolling up our sleeping bags, and turning our pillows back into packs, we struck up a conversation with the couple next door. She introduced herself as Layla, and this was years before the Clapton song. He was Peorio; as to whether he’d taken the name of his home town and moved it into the Latin second declension, he didn’t say and we didn’t ask. She was pale, you’d almost say wan, with lank dark hair and little extra flesh except where the baby had insisted on it; when she pulled a shift over the t-shirt and jeans she’d slept in of course it was a batik print that came almost to the floor. Peorio, too, had a health food pallor, and the sparse goatee of an adolescent mandarin. He was dressed like Layla, except for the shift.

They told us they lived in a place on the ocean north of Mill Valley, and that they’d hitched into town the day before for Layla’s monthly prenatal checkup at the free clinic. They were going to hitch back. We were going to drive over to the coast, so we offered them a ride.

We drove up Route 1, the coastal highway, in a ’67 Chevy wagon the driveaway agency in Chicago had arranged for us to pick up in California. Somewhere along the way, Peorio said we were welcome to spend the night at their place if we didn’t have other plans. We didn’t – other than to eventually head down to LA by way of Big Sur – so we said sure.

We still had no idea what they meant by “a place on the ocean.”

Route 1 loops up along the coast, sometimes in view of the Pacific, sometimes snaking inland among the hills. It was on one of the seaside stretches, along the top of a brushcovered bluff, that Peorio pointed to a pulloff on the opposite side of the road. “There,” he said. “Swing over and park there.”

If we’d pictured a snug little house by the sea, we were mistaken, although, real estate being what it is and was around there, that wouldn’t have been the kind of place whose occupants hitchhiked to free clinics. Where the hell did they live? All we saw, when we got out of the car, was a break in the brush that marked the top of a trail. The trail led down the face of the bluff, into a layer of fog that blocked any sight of the ocean. But we could hear it down there, slapping against the rocks.

“Down the trail,” Peorio said, and down the trail we went. It was steep and rough, and

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soon we were in the fog bank. Just as soon, we were out of it, and we two Easterners had our first sight of the Pacific. But we still saw no sign of a human habitation.

The rocks had hidden it. Built hard against the largest of them, the shack stood on the only open ground set back from the surf. It wasn’t much more than a big wooden box with a metal chimney. Peorio called it a “fisherman’s shack,” although I couldn’t imagine any fisherman other than a subsistence surfcaster living there. Without any possible mooring for a boat, it couldn’t have been even a part-time home for anyone trying to make a living off the sea. What it looked like was the shack of a hermit who liked to fish, some saltwater Thoreau far less partial to passersby dropping in than Thoreau himself was. When Layla and Peorio heard about it, it was abandoned. They were squatters, and I doubt if anyone cared.

There wasn’t much to care about. Layla opened the door to reveal a single dark room with a two-tiered bunk along one wall, a big stone fireplace on another, and a table and chairs that looked like they’d finally drifted onto shore only after a long submersion. A five-gallon water jug, which I was glad I hadn’t had to carry down the path, stood in a corner. And there was a dog. Try as I might, I can’t remember if the church shelter took in dogs. If it did, then he was with them all night and rode with us to the shack. If not, he must have spent the night alone in the shack. I hope it was the former.

There were no windows. There was no source of light and no place for cooking except the fireplace, which they fed with driftwood and was somehow connected to the metal flue.

It was late February and not all that cold, but Layla got a fire going to ward off the ocean damps. Peorio asked us guests to help him build up the driftwood wood pile just outside the door, and when we had enough good dry stuff to last the night Dixon and I drifted in the opposite direction from the wood, heading west to where the ebbing tide had made it possible to walk a few yards out to a jagged jumble of rocks that would have been an island a few hours earlier. I stood on the rocks with arms outstretched, a Jersey Balboa agog with the mystical fact of the ocean extending toward the wrong horizon. When we got back to Jersey, Dixon told our friends, “You should have seen Scheller discovering the Pacific.”

Back at the shack talk turned to dinner. Talk should have turned that way when we were in the car, or before we left Mill Valley, because there wasn’t enough in the place for four

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people to eat. I don’t remember if there was enough for two people to eat, particularly if one of them was pregnant. There was rice, of course -- the ubiquitous brown rice, which even back then I was unregenerate enough to think of as a nice side starch, nothing more.

So Dixon and I volunteered to climb back up to the car and find a store. “There’s one on the way up to Bolinas,” Layla said. “They have organic.” Without thinking about it for too long, I decided that meat would be an unwelcome suggestion. The dog might have disagreed; I don’t remember what he ate.

We found the store, and they had organic. Along with carrots and onions and celery, I found a bin of plump white mushrooms, which I figured would at least give a meaty bite to a one-pot vegetarian meal. (I’d seen, as soon as we got into the shack, that there was exactly one pot.)

It was getting dark by the time we drove back, parked on the pulloff, and threaded our way down the path to the sea. Driftwood crackled in the fireplace, throwing strange shadows on the bare plank walls, and Layla had the rice going in that solitary pot. Dixon took out the Buck knife he always carried and cut up the vegetables. I tossed them in handfuls into the rice, and it all bubbled into dinner.

It was strange in those days to be doing anything, at anyone’s house, eating a meal or whatever, without listening to music. I don’t even know if it was listening; maybe “absorbing” is the better word. But here there was no music, not even a battery radio, just the sound of the tide lapping back in, maybe thirty feet from the door.

We set our cracked plates on the edge of the hearth and sat in the fully-gathered gloom as the fire died down, talking about I can’t remember what. But I eventually set Dixon up for the line of the night.

“You know,” I said to Peorio, “you could get a kerosene lamp.”

“There’s a lot of things you could get, “ Dixon piped in, “if you were into getting things.”

You’d think I had suggested they go out and buy a diesel generator and a color TV, so they could watch “Bonanza.” Or maybe a thirty-dollar Buck knife. Ah, Jimmy, you dear departed friend, you’re lucky I liked you.

We crowded into the upper bunk, fell asleep to the sound of the waves, and ate cold rice stew in the morning. Up the bluff we climbed, and off we drove. Two nights later we were in LA staying with my Aunt Doris, who baked a hell of a pie.

And where is that baby, perhaps shack-born, now crowding fifty?

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Impressions of a New Yorker's First Visit to Niagara

By David E. Hubler

‘. . . it was time to see some of the rest of New York's 30.2 million acres.’

If you were born and raised in any of the five boroughs, you’re a New Yorker, no need to expand on that; few will ever question whether you mean City or State. In fact, it might jar your sensibilities to hear someone actually refer to New York City when speaking of Gotham, the Big A or Manhattan.

Now, after many years of bearing up to hear out-of-towners (anyone with less than three decades living in a New York apartment) speak of "New York City," I felt it was time to see some of the rest of New York's 30.2 million acres, especially as I no longer live in the City.

As a long-time lover of trains, Lionel and IRT, my wife and I took Amtrak’s Empire Service to Niagara Falls, Ontario, one lovely autumn day last year. It was just about as far as

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you could travel by rail and remain in New York State and the U.S. The next major stop is Toronto.

For the uninitiated -- that includes the many Manhattanites who rarely venture off the island -- there are actually two Niagara Falls, one in the U.S. and the other just across the border in Canada.

After a slow-moving line to clear Canadian Customs and Immigration, for which we needed a U.S. passport, while still in Manhattan we boarded the train at Penn Station. So much for the historic “open border” between the two North American allies. Times have indeed changed.

Unlike air travel, business class tickets on Amtrak put you and some dozen or so other passengers in the rear end of the last car of the train, the club car. It’s done by design because soft drinks, coffee and tea are complimentary for those of us willing to shell out a few additional bucks. The concession attendant can easily distinguish us from the 150 or so other passengers because only business class travelers can approach him from that end of the train.

Clearing the Labyrinth of Tunnels

Once clear of Penn Station and the labyrinth of tunnels under the city, we emerged in the Bronx on the edge of the Hudson River. The tracks run parallel to the river all the way to Albany, passing through the northern edge of the Bronx, aka Riverdale to the locals, who insist on estrangement from the only one of the five boroughs that is actually connected to the mainland. Well, why not boast a bit? The Bronx is home to the nation's first public golf course adjacent to Van Cortlandt Park, where the NYC Parks Department once erected the only ski slope within the City limits. Alas, it did not make the cut as a Winter Olympics venue.

Around Poughkeepsie the river widens dramatically. No wonder that that stretch of the Hudson was the site of the annual Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships in the 1920s and ‘30s. It was a huge sport then, eclipsing collegiate football and basketball attendance, perhaps because spectators had unobstructed views of the length of the race lanes. Railroad flat cars running parallel to the course equipped with temporary bleacher stands carried the most avid rowing fans from starting mark to the finish line and back again, like being in an outdoor, movable Madison Square Garden.

It was on this stretch of the Hudson that nine members of an upstart crew from the University of Washington won the 1936 IRA Championship and earned a sail to Germany, where they beat Hitler's pride but not so much joy in the Berlin Olympics (The Huskies' triumph is recounted in Daniel James Brown's riveting book, The Boys in the Boat.)

At Albany the train makes a left turn and we head northwest into the heart of Upstate New York, making stops at Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo. We had hoped to catch the fall

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change of colors around the Adirondacks area, but autumn was going to be late this year.

Everything was still lush and very green.

Several hours later, we made the final stop in the U.S. at Niagara Falls, N.Y., where we were all told, “We'll be here for a while, folks, might has well get off and stretch your legs.”

The stop turned out to be longer than those at Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo combined.

When we all reboarded and got underway, the last leg of our nearly nine-hour journey was all of ten minutes when we pulled into the Niagara Falls, Ontario, train station. You can’t see (or hear) the Falls from the station, a small disappointment. Seeing and hearing the roaring falls in films and on TV, they sound like thunder, audible for many miles away.

But we were greeted with a small town silence like arriving in Ottumwa, Iowa, at 4 a.m. in a non-presidential primary year. I was surprised too that no one was there to check our passports, and then I remembered the long, early morning line at Penn Station.

What is it about water that drives us to it? Sure, water is necessary to sustain life. But that's the existential answer. There are other, often unfathomable reasons why we love to be near water, to erect homes beside water that can turn into mighty flood waters in a minute and wash a lifetime away. In a few words, water fascinates us, calms us and mystifies us, perhaps nowhere more than at Niagara Falls.

Falls Viewing from All Sides

We participated in just about every Falls-related attraction available, viewing it from above in our hotel room, on the water decked out in plastic raincoats, behind the falls in dank, hollowed-out stone viewing areas and even on the serene shoreline of Lake Ontario in the village of Niagara-on-the-Lake before the placid water gathers speed and plunges some 167 feet into a roaring, roiling, mist-rising gorge. The world's largest natural jacuzzi.

I'll admit, the Falls mesmerized us. We couldn't stop looking at what basically was simply water falling off a cliff. Of course it had been doing that for countless millennia. Breakfast, lunch and dinner – all meals enjoyably eaten before an unforgettable vista.

Not a bad way to get out of the City for a few days.

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In the distance, small islands seemed clumps of blue-gray clay in the mist that ran to the edges of the horizon. An overturned canoe languished in a patch of grass, its fiberglass underside growing a crystalline white crust in the heat of the sun. . . . . I closed my eyes, tried to empty my mind and conjoin with the natural environment. Then I felt it. The intrusion of her presence.

CHEMISTRY

By Tony Tedeschi

Siobhan Leary met Joe Dalton, in the summer of 1959, at a dance in Williamsburg not far from her hometown on Virginia's Tidewater Peninsula, during the summer after each had finished high school. Joe had crashed the party by tagging along with a friend whose family had moved to the Tidewater Peninsula from Boston. He had spent the night before boozing in Manhattan with another expatriate Bostonian whose family had an apartment in a high-rise just north of Greenwich Village. Then Joe headed south the next morning in his brand new Ford Crown Victoria, a gift from his father, Joseph senior.

Joe was the latest in a long line of Boston Brahmins, who traced their ancestry back through congressmen and senators to a limb in the Adams family tree. His car could have been one of those nifty two-seaters, with the “gull-wing” doors, Mercedes had just introduced, had Joe acceded to his father's wishes and entered the pre-law program at Harvard, following in the footsteps of all the first sons before him. Instead, he chose a mechanical engineering major at MIT. But Joe loved getting his hands greasy and he preferred the lines of the Ford – the bold chrome strip over the roof, the way the profile reminded him of a speedboat – no matter how pedestrian his father found both the car and his son’s work-a-day choice of profession.

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“MIT ain’t too shabby,” Joe had said to his father when he’d made his decision known to the old bastard.

“Isn’t,” the senior Dalton corrected.

Siobhan was the ideal accessory to Joe’s diminution in family status. She was the daughter of Irish immigrants who ran a barely solvent bed-‘n’-breakfast in the tiny hamlet of Providence Forge, catering to redneck hunters and fishermen, instead of the busloads of tourists who poured into nearby Colonial Williamsburg throughout the year. And she had just a trace of that Irish lilt to her voice, an accent the Anglo Bostonians would find particularly grating.

I met Joe when we were both rushed by the same fraternity. I had acceded to my father’s wishes that I become an engineer, despite the fact that all I ever wanted out of life was to write about the Yankees for the New York Daily News and to one day buy a used Crown Victoria. I especially cultivated, for me, the romantic notion of wandering about the sidelines during spring training in Florida, on those cold February days back in New York, when the dank, gray snows had encrusted to particularly unattractive icy formations, outside our apartment in Queens, New York, where, inside, on the black-and-white TV screen, late of a Saturday afternoon, the bright light I took to be from a sun the color of one of those Florida oranges was shafting across the late innings of a Florida ball diamond.

My father repaired TVs for a company called Play-Rite. The owner had gotten a two-year certificate as an electrical technician from a trade school in Manhattan. My father was a high school dropout who was smarter than the guy who ran the place, but did not have the credentials. He did, however, have something to crow about when first his son made the prestigious Brooklyn Technical High School, then graduated tenth in a class of fifteen hundred on his way to MIT. I liked giving my father something to crow about, because he was a really nice guy and he was very good to me. But, I did get him to accept that chemistry would be my particular scientific interest, not electricity.

Nonetheless, I immediately had problems with the curriculum. I was part of a group randomly selected for an experimental calculus class with which I was wrestling, and the rearrangement of the math curriculum seriously compromised my ability to do physics problems, which required the more traditional math I would not be studying until later in the semester. Furthermore, I found the more confusing problem/solutions of organic models far less to my liking than the inorganic chemistry I had aced in high school, largely because the latter followed far-fewer complex paths from A through B to C. I found my favorite freshman course was a catch-all the Institute called Humanities, a conglomeration of English Lit, Western Civ, Psychology, Philosophy, et al, added to the freshman curriculum so that MIT students would be able to engage in meaningful intellectual conversation in social situations with female students from other universities. I was acing the term papers in Humanities and loving that, doing poorly at just about everything else.

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“Nick, what the hell are you doing here?” Joe asked after I flunked the first of a string of freshman physics exams. “Let’s face it, you ain’t no chemist and this ain’t no fucking place for a writer.”

“Isn’t,” I countered with my chin in my shoes, “isn’t no fucking place for a writer.”

Joe was inexplicably drawn to me, despite the fact that I was never completely comfortable in his presence. I was intimidated by all that old family money, that waspy American last name. What do you want with me? I’d always wanted to ask. You’re smarter than I am.

You’re so much richer than me. You know how to act in situations I have never even encountered. And you’ll leave here to enter a life laid out before you, no matter how much you buck your old man. I was sure “fuck the buck of my old man” would be his answer, but I doubted he’d ever walk away from his inheritance. I was wrong. Siobhan had done him in. She batted the lashes above those emerald greens at him at the post-high school dance he’d crashed and he’d had no choice but to ask her to do the slow one that was playing. Once she’d pressed that incredible chest of hers to his and nestled that sweetsmelling cheek into the curve of his neck and shoulder, he’d been drawn into the first battle of a war he was destined to lose, complicated by the fact that he fell hopelessly in love with her, then and there.

Siobhan followed Joe north to Boston at the end of that summer and took a job waitressing at one of those beer-and-burger joints in Back Bay, where the waitresses dressed up like medieval wenches and spoke in bad attempts at cockney accents. (In her case, she just let her Irish accent play.) She was a big hit with the clientele, what with that great cleavage, that red hair, and that genuine accent. She never forgot the slightest nuance in an order and often had a quippy comment to make as she dropped a burger plate in front of a customer or slid a stein across the table. For lodgings, she hooked up with a couple of Boston U coeds who were waitressing for some mad money. The three of them took a furnished, one-bedroom apartment, with Siobhan opting for the sofa-bed in the living room rather than share the bedroom, which made it reasonably private when she brought Joe back with her, unless one of her roommates got up to pee when they were right in the middle of it.

Siobhan became a fixture at our Saturday night house parties, most of the time appended to Joe’s right or left arm. Damn, she was a beauty with that raging red hair, those penetrating green, green eyes, that milk-white skin and that incredible bod. It was easy to see how any man would lust after her (I was sure a half-dozen rednecks-in-waiting put shotguns in their mouths and blew their heads off when she left southern Virginia for the center of the Yankee universe), but I was just as sure that Joe loved her, would have if she were not the least bit attractive. You could see it in his eyes whenever he looked at her.

Hell, it was in his eyes when he was looking just about anywhere, with her appended to either his right or left arm. It was a connection thing with him. He told me, early on, that he saw her as one of those people who would throw herself at life and wallow around in it.

Something he had always wanted to do, while growing up in a family that lived simply to critique life. He felt Siobhan would show him how to live.

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Me, I had mixed feelings about Siobhan. I could see that joie de vivre, which so captivated Joe, but I could also see that gleam in her eye, which he was either oblivious to or chose to ignore. It was hard to imagine her as a wife with little redheads tugging at her skirts, one of those raw-boned women, scrubbing clothes against a washboard like in those 1940s blackand-white movies set in Ireland. She had the gleam that never dies out.

As our freshman year drew to a close, I was completing an academic recovery, second semester, from a first semester that almost resulted in my flunking out. I hated the Institute. I hated the work. I really had loved chemistry in high school, when coming up with the right answers was more like winning at a quiz show. But now, I couldn’t see myself behind a test tube for the rest of my life. I’d only agreed to stay on there after my dismal first semester because I did not want to devastate my father, so we agreed I would give it one more shot. It was more a matter of proving I could succeed at “The Toot,” than a heightening level of interest in the subject matter. It merely delayed the inevitable.

Joe was wrestling his own problems, as well. His father was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer and was given but a short time to live, so Joe was spending every weekend at the family’s enormous manse in the Brookline suburb of Boston. Given the tension that arose after the family’s first and only encounter with Siobhan, whom Joe had brought to dinner one night shortly after she arrived in Beantown, he found it more diplomatic to leave her behind during this difficult period. In fact, he chose to not even mention her name. He told me he could sense in their completely avoiding any mention of her that they were sure he would come to his senses about the “Irish Firebrand.”

When he was away those weekends, I got to chaperone Siobhan. It was no easy task because Joe was right about that throw-herself-into-life thing. Siobhan was a party animal.

The life of the party. The brothers loved her. She could toss back beers with the best of them, was the only one, save a brother from Georgia, who could throw down a whole glass of beer without any of it hitting the back of her throat. I was nowhere near her league in matters of alcohol and felt unfulfilled because of it. She’d arise on the Sunday mornings after, from less than an hour’s sleep on the couch in the game room, looking like she could go another day and night or two. I’d be in the bathroom on the second floor puking my guts out.

“Don’t you fret, Nicholas,” she told me, “it’s an Irish thing. We’re born with beer in our veins – and damn sight better beer than this American piss water – and, you see, our stomachs learn to ignore its presence.”

It was the third straight Saturday night Joe had been away. I was nursing a bourbon – sour mash, actually – from a bottle of Jack Daniels the Georgia brother had given me. He said it was the best bourbon made but since it was not made in Bourbon County, Kentucky, it could not be called bourbon. He felt the explanation was required because he could see I didn’t like the sound of sour mash. He’d said my problem with booze was not a matter of quantity, but quality and he’d taken it upon himself to upgrade my intake, low-sounding name notwithstanding.

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Anyway, that night Siobhan bore a look I’d not remembered seeing before; in fact, it was more a demeanor, a head-to-toe kind of posture. She almost glowed. There was a flush to her cheeks, a softness to her eyes, a gentleness in her tone of a voice, a TLC quality in her body language. It was communicating something physical, attaching to me.

“You’re a softie, Nicholas,” she offered, “and I don’t mean that in a negative way.”

“Thanks,” I replied, not really sure what I was thanking her for. Damn, I loved that lilt in her voice. And, I loved when she spoke about me. I was seldom part of the conversation when she was chugging beers with the brothers and never the subject. But we were alone now, seated with our backs against the wall on the single bed in a small room, two floors above the core of the festivities. It was the room of one of our senior brothers, one of the few single rooms in the house. Its occupant had gone home to Rhode Island for the weekend. (He did that often.) Siobhan had guided me to it. Clearly, it was a place she and Joe had visited before. Now, it seemed a place she viewed as an escape from the world, even if the world were not that far away and in a partying mood. She, however, wanted to talk. And she’d been talking about Joe and her exasperation with his family’s attitude toward her. It was obvious she needed someone to let this out with, someone other than Joe. She’d said a number of times how much he thought of me, which I could not figure out because I felt Joe and I didn’t even talk that much, if truth be told. But now, she was talking about me. It was an odd turn in the conversation.

“I like the soft side of a man,” she continued. “I guess people don’t know that about me.

They see only the brassy side.”

“I never thought of myself as soft,” I offered lamely.

She smiled tenderly. She’d had quite a few beers and now was drinking a tall scotch and soda. “I’m embarrassing you,” she said. “Your face is getting redder.”

It did that, my face.

“I wouldn’t say I’m embarrassed,” I countered, “I’m . . .”

Her smile dissolved momentarily, then returned. It was a gentle smile. She was not mocking me, not intentionally exposing a vulnerability I found uncomfortable revealing.

“You shouldn’t be distressed by your feminine side,” she said. “All those guys downstairs trying to grow hair on their chests with alcohol and hootin’ and hollerin’ like a group of cats marking their territory, I don’t find the least bit –” “Feminine side?” I sputtered, the high-quality booze having worked its way through my brain and out my lips. Now, she was touching a nerve, whether she intended to or not. I’d grown up in a working class, Italian-American neighborhood, where guys gained respectability in street fights. All except me. I never fought. And my friends never seemed to expect me to. I was the block scholar. But this whole dynamic had me growing up

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doubting my courage, sometimes even questioning my masculinity. And now, somehow, she was reading this. And now, somehow, I was realizing she was not focusing on something I had been shrinking from for years but was connecting with this element she saw as special in me.

Siobhan placed her drink down on the desk adjacent to the bed, where we sat, and shuffled closer to me. She took my glass, placed it alongside hers, put her soft hand, still chilled from the glass, on the back of my neck and gazed into my eyes. The cold touch of her hand should have caused me to flinch, but it did not. I was, instead, frozen by her eyes.

What happened next was the defining moment of my life. Actually, what transpired during that brief period – less than an hour – was the experience that assured I would never find fulfillment with a woman, ever again, certainly not ever with either of my two ex-wives. Not that it was their fault. They were competing against an image, an ideal. I don’t know if it was the alcohol, my almost total lack of experience, Siobhan’s obvious abilities, or some combination of all of the above. Perhaps it was the fact that I was – had been – more in love with her than even Joe had been. Perhaps she’d had that effect on many men.

Whatever. But, if this was what connecting with a woman was about – connecting body and soul – well, then perhaps it was meant to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

When Joe returned on Sunday evening, he was looking particularly gloomy. I asked if his father had taken a turn for the worse, and he answered, “you might say that,” almost flippantly. Reading my confusion at the tone of his reply, he said he had told his father he was going to ask Siobhan to marry him. “I didn’t want him to die without knowing that, to not know who would be bearing his grandchildren,” he went on. “I felt it would be dishonest to sneak her into the family after he died.”

He paused for a moment, although I did not feel it was to await a response from me. “It was a mistake,” he continued. “A big mistake. It upset him in a manner I had seen many times before, but it was clear my mother and my sister found it much more disconcerting this time, given his condition. My mother looked at me as if I were the cause of my father’s terminal illness. My sister just smirked and shook her head.”

Given what had transpired the night before, between Siobhan and me, it was clear Joe was having a rough couple of days. I wasn’t too clear-headed myself. However, despite the haze that enveloped me for days after my encounter with Siobhan, I never doubted that she would marry Joe, irrespective of the cost to his family connection. It seemed to me preordained, no matter how much his family would try to prevent it. I knew then that she and I would never be more than that less-than-one-hour in that tiny room of the fraternity house, with the brothers banging on the door, shouting: “Nick,” then, “Siobhan, you in there?” But I don’t think a bomber attack would have had an impact upon us. I had had that one-time encounter with the most beautiful woman in the world.

The smile she gave me every now and then, the sparkle that danced across her eyes, said we had shared something special, something I would not desecrate by divulging it to others, even though having her pelt would have elevated me into the stratosphere with those

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hootin’ and hollerin’ assholes who were trying to grow hair on their chests. I would have been silent about it even if Joe did not hold me in such high regard.

Joe’s father died shortly thereafter, but it was enough time for him to write Joe out of his will. He left everything to Joe’s mother and sister and, while nothing in the will prohibited them from sharing some of the wealth with Joe, they held fast to his father’s wishes, especially when it came to “the Irish girl.”

“Fuck ‘em,” Joe said to me when he returned from the funeral. “I don’t want any of his money, even if I have to work my way through the rest of this curriculum. I can make a damn good living with this level of education.”

But Siobhan had plans, and they would take capital. She needled Joe to contest the will, insisting he hold out for at least the million dollars she felt the family would spend to stay out of court and out of the tabloids. She was right. The day after the family's attorney turned over the check, Joe and Siobhan eloped.

My remarkable academic recovery during my second semester at MIT had deluded me, momentarily, into thinking I could enjoy chemistry as my life’s work, but by the middle of my third semester, I was sure thermodynamics and I were not bound for a lasting relationship. At the end of that semester, with my father’s blessing, I transferred to NYU as a Liberal Arts major. I kept in touch with the Daltons and a couple of my fraternity brothers for a few more years, until my pledge class graduated, then pretty much put the MIT episode of my life behind me, save for a few chance encounters with brothers here and there . . . until Joe dropped me a note thirty-two years later. He’d found my home address through the fraternity mailing list. His letterhead included a phone number in Vermont, with a couple of zeroes at the end of it. He said he’d be on Long Island, near where I lived, for a few days on business, a few weeks hence, and would truly enjoy seeing me. “And, yes,” his note ended, “I am thin on top and thick in the middle, so don’t sweat your loss of youthful appearance. Siobhan sends her love.”

My God. I shook the cobwebs from my brain.

When I punched in the number he’d written, an operator answered, “Lake and Mountain Inn.” She said Mr. Dalton was out of town, would I like his voice mail? I said yes and she connected me to a recorded voice I would have recognized had I spoken last to Joe the day before. I left a message, including my phone number, and he called that evening. He said he was in Washington at a hotelier’s convention but would love to see me when he was next in New York, those few weeks hence. “It’s been too long, Nick. How could we let more than thirty years separate two good friends?”

Actually, I’d not given him much thought during most of that time, but I had to admit to myself seeing him again would be . . . interesting.

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“My wife said she would have loved to accompany me down, but she’s been having a hell of a time with the new addition to the hotel, and she doesn’t expect she’ll have a handle on it by then.” He stated that matter-of-factly, as if I would know what he was talking about, but, of course, it was Siobhan I was thinking about and wondering if the years had been good to her. “Anyway, she said to give you her love. You know she thinks the world of you, Nick . . .”

“I . . . And I her.”

Joe and I met at a restaurant not far from my home on the Island. He’d driven over from the posh Garden City Hotel in a rented Lexus. It was early spring, a damp, cold evening, and I found I couldn’t shake the chill. Part of it was the sheer strangeness at seeing him again, the reinforcement of how little he meant to me, the instant recognition of how much his wife had altered the way I viewed life, the fatalistic attitude our encounter had created for me. We exchanged stories about families. They were childless; his problem. I had had two boys by my first wife, a girl by my second, all grown and pretty much out of my life, except for the obligatory holiday visits.

He was very impressed with the fact that I had had articles published in dozens of newspapers and magazines, and had written a couple of light-selling business books. I told him not to be too impressed, that my inability to earn any serious money had played a major role in both my failed marriages. He related how just about everything in their lives revolved around the hotel, which Siobhan had turned into a real showplace. He said he had practiced engineering at a couple of firms for a while, but hated it, mostly hated working for someone. After a few years, he tried to marry his interest in science and engineering with her love of the hotel, but mostly his operational concepts were either meddlesome or downright impractical. Now, he served pretty much as the hotel’s ambassador to meaningless industry functions.

“We’d like you to come and stay with us for a few days,” he said. “Hell, stay as long as you like.”

“I can’t get away for too long,” I fudged. “I’m working on a couple of projects and the deadlines are running up on me.” I couldn’t imagine what I would do for more than a few days at the hotel, while Joe and Siobhan went about their regular duties.

“Come for a long weekend,” he pressed. “Stay at the hotel a couple of nights, then out at our house on the lake for a couple more. Wait until the weather warms. We’ll go out in the boat.” He paused for a moment, then, “she’s done remarkable things with the hotel,” he said, then paused again. We were into our second bottle of zinfandel and I could sense he was about to open up a bit, go down a road I might not find comfortable.

“It’s not my real interest,” he said, “the hotel. After a while, it all comes down to changing towels and bed linens and fielding phone calls from pissed-off patrons in the dead of night.

But Siobhan, she has blossomed with the place. Wins awards. Has our hotel on the ‘best’

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lists in all the best guidebooks and travel magazines. First name basis with the governor, both senators.”

“What . . . ?” I took another swallow of zin. “What do you do with yourself all day?”

He looked at me and just shook his head. Then, he raised his glass of wine, held it up to the table lamp a moment and admired its rich, red color. “We have definitely upgraded the booze since Boston, haven’t we?” he said finally.

“You mean it ain’t Rock ‘n Rye, a bottle o’ Bud back?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. His face lit in a full smile. “Dems was da daiz, weren’t dey?”

“Yeah,” I slurred. “The good ole days.”

“See you in a few months?” He knew he had me now.

“Why not? It’ll be good to see Siobhan again, now that I’ve seen your sorry ass,” I answered brazenly.

He insisted upon picking up the check, despite my protests that he was on my turf. We shook hands outside the restaurant and headed for our cars. Even during the short ride home, I had enough time to ponder the irony of Siobhan, a successful hotelier – highly successful – while Joe, an MIT graduate, and I, an NYU grad, were still flopping around trying to find ourselves. It couldn’t even be ascribed simply to the intense focus of her vision. I was doing exactly what I’d always felt would make me happy, even did a piece on baseball spring training for an airline magazine. Joe had started out in business doing what he’d always wanted, then, in essence, must have had to deal with whether that was, in fact, the case, or whether what he thought he had always wanted was just a matter of rebelling against an over-controlling father.

So what was I looking at here? Meeting Siobhan after more than thirty years, with my lessthan-impressive resume. Perhaps I could gain some measure of dignity by presenting myself as doing a piece for some travel magazine or the travel section of one of the newspapers that bought my stuff from time to time, then drop back out of their lives.

Some unanticipated, fairly lucrative assignments kept me at home for several weeks longer than I’d anticipated and in the process provided me with some conversation pieces. So, it was not until late August, a hot and dry Wednesday, that I drove up to Vermont, leaving my home well before dawn so as to make it to the hotel in time for a late lunch, as Joe had suggested. The plan was for me to stay at the hotel Wednesday and Thursday nights, relocate to the Daltons’ home on Lake Champlain for the weekend, then head back to Long Island on Monday.

From the moment I drove into the parking lot, then under the overhang beneath the façade, it was clear that the hotel was a work of art, clearly lavished with love. A bellhop

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had my bags out of the trunk within seconds of my popping the lock and deposited at the front desk a moment later, then disappeared before I could even consider tipping him.

The principal design feature of the main lobby was the highly varnished hardwoods throughout, huge structural timbers and beautifully carved accents strategically positioned along the walls and the ceiling. The front desk was the cross-section of a gigantic redwood, polished to a sheen via coats and coats of lacquer. The walls were papered in hunter green and hung in impressionistic-style paintings of woodland scenes. Beautiful sculptures in stone and metal were positioned about and wood carvings and pottery pieces stood on just about every horizontal surface. A fieldstone fireplace dominated the public room just off the main lobby. There was a small bar off to one side of the fireplace that advertised an afternoon tea service, via an elegantly lettered sign resting on a brass easel.

The desk clerk said that Mrs. Dalton had left word for me to get checked in, then I was to notify the front desk and she would meet me in the lobby for lunch in the dining room. I did as I was ordered. A different bellhop led me to a room, beautifully furnished in large mahogany pieces, a giant four-poster bed, an antique chifforobe and two beautifully handcarved end tables, one on either side of the bed. A fireplace with a supply of perfectly aligned wood chunks in a wrought-iron cradle conjured up images of dancing flames on a cold winter’s night. By contrast, the bathroom was a thoroughly modern affair, including a whirlpool that would have accommodated two comfortably. If I were not so anxious to see Siobhan, I would have had difficulty leaving the room, but instead, I stowed my gear then headed back to the desk, whereupon the clerk rang Siobhan’s office.

I took the seat, suggested by the desk clerk, in the oversized chair next to the fireplace, now merely hinting at its winter coziness in the heat of the mid-summer afternoon. Siobhan glided into the room less than ten minutes later. She was as striking as ever, her beauty little tempered by the three decades that had separated us, save for the predictable crows’ feet around those devastating green eyes and the closer-cropped, carefully coiffed taming of that great mane of red hair. She had put on a bit of weight, but I could tell by the way she still moved with such an undeniable grace and rhythm that it had been distributed in all the right places.

“Nicholas,” she said, in that voice that passed through me like a velvet X-ray, “where have you been hiding?”

“Obviously, in all the wrong places,” I said, taking the hand she offered, then boldly kissing her cheek.

She smiled broadly. “Joe is in town, running late at a meeting of his engineers group,” she said. “He still likes to keep his hand in, but he said not to wait lunch for him.”

She ushered me across the lobby to the dining room, built onto that part of the hotel furthest from the front entrance, atop a grassy area overlooking a small duck pond. A series of floor-to-ceiling glass panels let in the bright summer light, filtered through gauzy,

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off-white curtains. Glass doors opened onto a wide patio, which even I could see would make for wonderful outdoor affairs, weather permitting.

“Joseph and I haven’t been doing real well, in recent years,” she said before I’d even settled into my seat. “I know he didn’t tell you that on his trip to New York, or in subsequent phone conversations, because he was afraid you’d decide not to come.”

I had no idea how to respond. Fortunately, the waitress was standing alongside with the menus, large leather-bound affairs more suited to an elegant dinner than a simple lunch.

“I’m sure he’ll tell you about it when he gets here,” she continued after the waitress had left and Siobhan had placed her menu alongside her table setting. “Try the seafood bisque and the cold lobster salad. They’re exquisite.”

I still hadn’t said a word since we’d entered the dining room, it occurring to me that I was one-on-one with the woman who had created the most incredible moment of my life – in a singular situation with her for the first time since that moment – and she was telling me that she and her husband – ostensibly a good friend of mine – were having marital problems.

“I’ve had two failed marriages,” was all I could muster, finally, as if that justified their impending breakup, or perhaps to show that even if they did split up, they’d still be one failed marriage behind me.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, with that sincere concern in her voice and that wonderful softness in her eyes, as if now, suddenly, my problems needed more attention than hers.

“Oh, it was for the better in both cases,” I replied, “and besides, both were years ago.”

Sadness darkened the softness in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “You deserved better, Nicholas.”

No, I thought, no, I did not. I’d fucked up in both cases; examining the relationships in retrospect made that clear. What was it with her and her husband and their unshakably positive opinions of me, based on no good evidence?

“Maybe so,” I said finally. “Maybe I did deserve better, but I really didn’t do much to force the issue.” I shook my head, gazed at her a moment, even more amazed at how good the years had been to her. Even the added roundness to her face had a softening effect, seemed to broaden the natural blush to her cheeks. “I mean look at you,” I said, then added quickly, “look at all you’ve accomplished.”

“Yes,” she answered, her tone softening further, “all I ever wanted in life.”

We were both silent a while, then, “Why am I here, Siobhan?” I asked.

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She dropped her gaze to her fidgeting fingers, uncharacteristically avoiding eye contact, then she raised her eyes again and said, “Joe seems to think it can help. That you will be good for us.”

The comment was one more absurdity in what I had always considered a strange relationship; for me, in neither case, a real friendship. It might have set me off on some potentially embarrassing diatribe to that effect if the waitress had not arrived to take our order. I took the soup and lobster salad; Siobhan some standing special order of greenery and mineral water.

“And you, Siobhan,” I asked when the waitress had retreated, “what do you think?”

I guess there must have been still a lingering edge to my voice. Her frown told me she was less convinced than Joe that I could help, or perhaps she didn't like the question. “I don’t know,” she said, feebly. “I’m sure it can’t hurt.” The comment described the less-thandramatic effect I had had on so many things in my life.

I stared at her a while. I wanted to ask if that tangle of naked limbs that had, for one brief and, for me, shining moment, defined our relationship had also, with some sense of irony, made me uniquely qualified to help her and her husband rebuild their marriage. But, of course, I did not.

The lunch was every bit as exquisite as Siobhan had promised, but that did not surprise me. And things lightened up somewhat when she said, “Oh hell, Nicholas, enjoy your stay here. This is a great spot, especially this time of year. Let’s hoist a few brews like in days gone by and forget the fiddle-dee-dah life serves up.” She smiled broadly, an infection that spread to my face. “Now, tell me about some of the good things you’ve done.”

There were some, of course, and it felt good to share them with her.

When Joe finally caught up with me, he said nothing about his problematic marriage, nothing; and I just assumed Siobhan had advised him that she had taken care of that unpleasantness. While I was a bit on edge about the subject coming up the first couple of times Joe and I were alone together, the anticipation dissipated as I spent some time with myself, merely enjoying the surroundings. There was a wonderful, heated indoor pool and, on Thursday morning, I did some laps, then just relaxed with long, languorous strokes, followed by some sunning on the patio. After lunch, the hotel masseur kneaded the knots I’d been building up at the base of my neck for years. That afternoon, on an impulse, I bought a book on northeastern birds in the hotel gift shop, then took a walk in the woods behind the hotel and even identified a rose-breasted grosbeak and a red-bellied woodpecker.

There was a renewed gaiety when the three of us got together, that night. It was great hoisting a few brews, as she had put it, at the bar in the pub in the basement of the hotel, which even reminded me of the game room in the basement of the fraternity house. I accused Joe of having had it designed that way. He blamed Siobhan and she flashed me

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that gleam. We spent a couple of hours Friday afternoon batting little white balls around on the pitch-and-putt course in back of the hotel and getting sillier and sillier with each beer we fished out of a cooler we dragged around the course with us. That night we went for a hayride and told stories of the years that had separated us. The sky was a lacework of stars I had forgotten existed outside the New York metro area, where an electric haze obscured all but the brightest natural elements of the night.

I sensed they had not done much of any of this lately, perhaps not in years, at least not unless it fulfilled some obligation to their guests. So, perhaps my presence was having a therapeutic effect on their marriage. Perhaps it was a catalyst for a renewed look at the more pleasant aspects of life. Perhaps, that’s what I was: a catalyst in other people’s lives.

Never a principal player, never even a part of the solution, just someone who disappeared once the parties had concocted their special chemistry. Things were beginning to focus for me, during those hours in the seams, when Siobhan and Joe went about their duties; this horrible sense that I had been simply an observer, someone lurking about the edges of life.

Hell, it was what a writer did; well, a writer like me anyway. Perhaps other people sensed that what reflected back off me would somehow make things clearer for them, and they fed off that, used it.

After the hayride, I went back to my room, retrieved the bags I’d packed earlier, tossed them into the back seat of my car, then followed their car out to their home on Lake Champlain. The house had been the summer place of a lawyer Joe knew, who sold it to the Daltons when his marriage unraveled. Siobhan had been the instigator on the deal, having fallen in love with the location, while her mind raced through all the designs of interiors and exteriors she would implement to create her dream home.

They’d left the original house in place, but gutted it completely and turned the space into three large, open rooms: a dining room that stepped down into a living room, forming the perfect combination for entertaining groups from a single couple to a small crowd; a den/Florida room, set off by a wall, with only a small archway, its major feature an expansive entertainment center with all the bells and whistles; and the largest kitchen I’d ever seen, with restaurant-class appliances. Four bedrooms were added along the west side of the original structure, each with plenty of space and its own bathroom. All the bedroom windows opened onto the lake, and, with their westward facing, took full advantage of the sunsets. A deck ran around all sides of the house, except for the front.

“How about I stir up a pitcher of martinis?” Siobhan suggested, after showing me about the house. We had the drinks on the deck with a selection of cheeses and fruits. I slept, that night, like someone taken off life support.

The following morning I awoke to the smell of frying garlic, splashed some water on my face, pulled on a pair of cotton slacks and a polo shirt, slipped into a pair of Docksiders and went out as she was sliding a delicious smelling omelet onto a serving dish. I poured myself a cup of coffee and joined the Daltons for breakfast. They said they needed to tend to some scutwork at the hotel but assured me I had the run of the house. “Relax. Take a dip in the lake,” Joe suggested. “Just hang out. Whatever.”

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After my hosts departed, I sat in an Adirondack chair on the deck behind the Daltons’ house that Saturday in August, mid-morning, taking inventory of my life. I found there had been other Joes, other Siobhans, people I had met along my many seemingly aimless routes through life, somehow sensing this strange power I had to create, or reflect back, the answers they were seeking, the solutions they required. Even that fateful episode with Siobhan, that unquestionably, uncommonly participatory less-than-one-hour with Siobhan, seemed, in retrospect, merely to have provided her the final push into Joe’s arms. My big moment had only been the catalyst for his bigger moment and my unwillingness to talk about it, even with my co-participant, had forever consigned it to the fate of a non-event. I mean did she even remember it? Should I ask? There was an unquestionable element of confrontation should I decide, after all these years, to nudge this long dormant issue back out into the light of day, and confrontation was not something I did. I just wrote about when other people did it. And that was that. You did not opt for such a sea change this late in the journey. At least, I didn't.

I sat, my mind suddenly blank. It was a comfort. No analyses. No strategies. No ulterior motives. No objectives. No . . . thoughts. Except for the sensory experience that was the landscape before me. The beautiful panorama before me.

It had been an abnormally dry summer in the northeast, with the preceding four weeks devoid of any rain, save for a barely measurable trace here and there. The drought had dropped the level of the big lake to where you could see stretches of the rocky shale bottom, in areas normally submerged under several feet of water. The thin, vertical sheets of shale looked like records in an old Wurlitzer, their sharp edges looking quite menacing.

They said look, but don’t venture forth. In the distance, small islands sat like clumps of blue-gray clay in the white mist that ran to the edges of the horizon. An overturned canoe languished in a patch of beige grass, the boat’s fiberglass underside growing a crystalline white crust in the heat of the sun. Just beyond the deck, between two Adirondack chairs that gazed out toward the lake, a cluster of black-eyed Susans waved in the intermittent breeze, the petals darkened to a burnt orange by the crackled air. I considered a swim but did not want to negotiate the mean-looking shale; considered a spin in the kayak, dismissed it. Sat, motionless.

Ask her.

The thought rang out for a moment, then faded into memory like a muffled drum.

A ray of light swung through the shadow of the eave directly before me, a hair-thin pendulum of liquid silver, then dissolved in the sunlight just beyond. It drew my eye back to the lakescape before me and the Zen-like quality of an emptied mind.

Ask her.

A moment later, the liquid thread captured my interest once again. This time, I would not let it hide in the light, stayed with it, followed its length to the tiny, gray-brown ball at its terminus. A spider was knitting a web across the tall heads of some withered daisies in a

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wooden flower box that ran the length of the deck. He seemed determined to finish this gargantuan project within some predetermined timetable and he went determinedly about it, swinging back and forth, like some ape riding vines through the jungle canopy, attaching lines as he went. When he’d decided he had completed his task, he dropped a line straight down, landed upon my sandal, stayed a moment, as if trying to get his bearings, then raced away along the deck.

With the rising heat of the summer day, the thought of the morning shower I had been putting off had become more and more irresistible. Just outside the door to the hallway that ran between the house’s master bedroom and the guestroom where I was staying stood an outdoor shower, an L-shaped barrier combining with the exterior of the house to provide a measure of privacy. It was a small luxury Siobhan had decided the house needed, after luxuriating in one at a resort hotel in the Caribbean. When she’d showed me it during my intro tour about the house, she’d gone on about the unexpected pleasures of taking a shower in the outside air, and she said she took her morning shower in it as long as the warm weather permitted, sometimes pushing it right up to the days when overnight freezes left a coating of hoarfrost on the deck. They had blown the water pipe three times during hard night frosts, Joe told me.

I pushed myself out of the chair and padded off to my room to slip out of my clothes.

After dinner that night, Joe seemed introspective, said little, grew more taciturn with his second martini. Slurring his words during the third drink, he shared the news that he had gotten a call that day from his sister, whom he hadn’t heard from in years, that his mother was gravely ill. Doctors felt she had no more than a few days to live. “My sister said, despite my self-imposed exile from the family all these years, my mother wanted to see me.” His tone was lugubrious. “My sister has her way with the facts,” he added, with as much irony as his drunken, hesitant speech would allow. “Perhaps it would ease my mother’s final moments if I told her Siobhan and I were splitting up. It would close the circle I’d opened when my father died.”

He lowered his gaze to the thin-stemmed martini glass in his right hand, raised the glass and took a sip. I studied him a moment, trying to ascertain if he were finally opening up about his marriage or merely toying with some allusion to his fucked-up family situation, but he had let go of the subject and betrayed nothing more of his feelings.

“I need to drive on over to Boston tomorrow,” he said, “early. So I’ll excuse myself. I’ll be spending a night or more there, in a hotel of course, so I’ll probably not see you again before you leave, Nick. I’m sorry.”

“No need, at all, to apologize,” I said. “I understand completely.”

He rose from his chair. “You must come see us again, sometime,” were his parting words.

“I will . . . see,” I answered, but his back was to me and he was already retreating down the hall to the master bedroom, sliding a hand against the wall to steady himself.

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Siobhan and I finished our drinks, making only small talk. It was clear that if she wanted to unburden herself further on this whole family thing and the more critical issue of her marriage’s future, tonight was not the night she would do that. I helped her clean up, then went to bed.

Sunday, they were both gone before I arose. I needed to get away, so I spent the day visiting art galleries and antique shops, had lunch at a sandwich shop in a tiny town whose name escaped me, then circled back toward the Dalton house and had dinner at an outdoor café in Burlington.

When I got back to the house it was empty, so I took up my familiar position in the Adirondack chair on the back deck, now in the light of early evening, watching the sky deepen to purple and the clouds capture what light was left in undersides of salmon. I was trying to get myself back into that blank mindset I’d begun to find so strangely fulfilling, when I heard the slap of the screen door against the doorjamb at the front of the house.

Immediately thereafter, I could hear sounds coming from the kitchen and was expecting her momentarily on the back deck, with a hello and perhaps one of the martinis we had become so fond of during my visit. Instead, the kitchen sounds ended abruptly and I was returned to the insect buzz of the thickening night. I considered getting up to go find her, but I knew she knew that I was in the house or about the grounds and that she would find me when she was ready.

The darkness had brought an orange glow to the porch lamps, which were mounted atop poles at intervals along the deck rail, sensitive to the falling light. Far out in the lake, a full moon began to peek above the islands. A screech owl made its presence known from within a dense stand of hemlocks. The natural sounds of the night were interrupted by the rush of water from the head of the outdoor shower and the splatter of the spray hitting the deck floor. Within a few moments, the timbre of the shower spray altered as the course of the water was redirected by her body. The cool flow of that cascade, the cleansing foam of the soap dissolving the sticky, oily residues of a hot August day must have felt luscious, in the midst of this hot, windless night. My recently vacant mind was now filled with images of the water running over the marvelous contours of her body, pushing the clusters of soap bubbles before it, adding a fresh liquid sheen to her flesh. I was consumed by the changing tone of the water force, the sounds of the spray, the soft clap of it against her body, the occasional plop as she swept water down her breasts and over her abdomen. And then the water music was gone, with that finality of a closed spigot.

A few minutes later, I could hear the falls of her wet feet as she stepped around the wooden barrier, the slap growing louder . . . as she approached the corner of the deck where I sat, now a faint shadow in the grayness, all but hidden in the muted lamplight. She was walking in a direct line toward the back door to the kitchen, holding a bath towel loosely around her, unaware of my presence. Then, “Oh!” she said, the towel falling away, as she started. “Nicholas. I didn’t see you there.” She fumbled to retrieve the towel and pull it back around her, holding the edges together with her left hand behind her back.

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“I’m sorry,” I answered. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but I felt whether I said something or not, either way I might frighten you. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right. I should have come to find you when I got home. It’s just that it’s so hot and I was dying to jump into the shower.”

“Yes,” I replied, “the sound of the water was very inviting.”

The corners of her mouth curled into the hint of that sly smile, which just sent shivers up my spine. It was downright coquettish. “You should do it,” she said. “It will un-rankle you.”

I didn’t know I sounded . . . rankled, but . . . perhaps I did. “I think I will,” I said.

“Take your time,” she answered. “I’ll fix us a pitcher of martinis.”

“Wonderful.”

I made my way to my guest bedroom, undressed in the darkness and wrapped a large bath towel about me, then headed down the hall past the master bedroom, out the door at the end of the corridor, then around the barrier and into the shower. I draped the towel over the barrier, turned on the water, adjusted it to a refreshing temperature and stepped into its soothing rush. There were still streaks of soapsuds along the walls and bubbles still clinging to the bar of soap in the dish. I picked up the soap, almost reverentially, applied it directly to my body and began working up a lather, stuck on the thought that she had done the same, mere minutes before.

I let the cool torrents run over me, wash the lather over the length of my body. As she had suggested, it took my “rankles” with it. It was such a soothing process; I felt I could stand there forever, but finally turned off the water. I reached for the towel, pulled it down from the barrier and rubbed myself vigorously, then ran my fingers back through my hair to get it out of my eyes and into some semblance of order.

A breeze rustled the trees and fingered through the slats in the shower barrier, brushing over the remaining moisture on my skin and making me feel about as cool and refreshed as I had ever felt in my life. I draped the towel back over the barrier and just stood there breathing in the naturally scented air and letting the soft wind continue to do its thing with my body. It was having the effect of nullifying any tensions that remained, especially from this whole confusing encounter with the Daltons and the numbing effects of trying to understand my role in this strange process. I closed my eyes and tried, as I had done earlier, to empty my mind and conjoin with the natural environment. It was a glorious feeling.

And then I felt it. The intrusion of her presence.

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“Why is it all so wrong, Nick?” she said. She was standing there, beyond the opening to the shower, naked, the glow of the porch lamps scribing the thinnest rim-light around her form. “All the pieces are in place. So why is it so very wrong?”

I’m sure my eyes had widened and my jaw had gone slack, but she was totally nonplused by her nakedness and mine. “I don’t know, Siobhan,” I said. “I don’t know.” I wanted to say, why would I know? In my life, seldom have even a few of the pieces been in place and yet, what she was telling me, in so many words, was that my life had not turned out all that different from hers.

She was staring at the floor, now, shaking her head barely perceptibly. I was riveted to the spot. If anyone had described this improbable scenario in advance, an inability to move from the spot, close the distance between us, embrace that lusciously naked woman before me, would not have been the outcome I’d have predicted. Then, as if only at that moment realizing she was naked, she picked up the towel from where it lay on the deck at her feet, draped it across the front of her body and sat down on the deck bench opposite. She was sobbing softly.

I took my towel from over the shower barrier, wrapped it tightly about my lower half and tucked the edge into the waist to keep it closed. Then I went and sat alongside her, leaving enough space for propriety’s sake. She sobbed a short while longer, then fought it to a stop. But she said nothing, just continued to stare down at the deck between her feet. I could think of nothing appropriate to break the silence.

Finally, “Nicholas,” she said, “why did you not . . .” The words trailed off.

“What?” I muttered.

She raised her head and looked me full in the face. “Why did you not come to me?

Then. In Boston.”

My brow furrowed, my mouth fell open. “I . . . You . . . You were Joe’s . . . sweetheart.”

She shook her head slightly, held her gaze to mine. “No,” she said. “Certainly not after that night.”

“But?” Then I was speechless.

“I never was his. I am not to this day. I left Virginia because there was nothing for me there and Joe was a fun ticket out. We made no promises to each other, beyond enjoying a mutual friendship. Even when we had sex, it was casual, light-hearted, two young people experimenting with each other’s bodies. I thought that’s all it would ever be, with anyone.

Until that night with you.”

“W-we were drunk, Siobhan, plastered. I thought we had simply fallen under the spell of the alcohol, made a big mistake, at the expense of my friend and your lover.”

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Sadness began to infuse her eyes. “Then, did you not feel it?” she asked.

I didn’t know how to reply, having carried that moment around in my heart for all those years. “That was such a long time ago, Siobhan,” was my sorry answer.

The sadness in her eyes deepened. “I had never felt such a connection before,” she replied. “Never since.” She shook her head. “I had only prayed that you had felt the same. Perhaps it was merely my pathetic need to have had you feel as I did. My belief that I could not have experienced such a connection if you had not as well.”

I was dumbfounded. She stared at me a moment longer, then her body stiffened as she prepared to rise. I placed a hand on her shoulder to stop her and I could feel the tenseness go out of her. In that instant, in the sultry heat of that August night, with the thin layer of perspiration beginning to coat the contours of her body and the sweet smell of her perspiration joining with the aromas of the land and the lake, there and then, I wanted her more than I’d ever wanted anything before . . . or since. In that instant, as my eyes met hers, all that we were feeling for each other passed, wordlessly, between us . . . and then was gone.

She rose from the bench, an instant after I envisioned the great sense of loss, the irretrievable loss of well-being that would accompany her doing that. She tightened the towel about her and said, “I’ll get the martinis.”

“Great,” I replied. I knew we both realized that, unlike the uninhibiting effect of all that alcohol that long ago night in Boston, this round of drinks would bring to a close the moment that never was. I watched the lovely rhythm of her movement disappear behind the swinging screen door into the kitchen. The night that lay before me now was just a collage of formless elements, a series of dull and meaningless grays.

Fire Island, New York, 1981 56

The Monkey’s Fist

By Kendric W. Taylor

Nautical Term: A monkey's fist or monkey paw is a type of knot, so named because it looks somewhat like a small bunched fist/paw. It is tied at the end of a rope to serve as a weight, making it easier to throw –Wikipedia.

For young sailors being shipped from one duty station to the next, a US Navy transit barracks is not a good place to be. The Navy does not want its low rank enlisted men sitting around with nothing to do – hence – the Master at Arms, to my recollection a nasty 20-year veteran looking for what he would consider malingerers – which to him meant everyone.

These latter were to be used to make up what they called working parties, designed and designated for all the dirty jobs on the base. For a small group waiting on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay in early 1954 for shipment overseas, the word “island” meant no place to hide. Located under the Oakland Bay Bridge, it had been the site of the Golden Gate International Exhibition of 1939: the World’s Fair. Taken over by the Navy in World War Two, it had served as a shipping point of men and material to the Pacific ever since.( The view of San Francisco was spectacular, better than Alcatraz even, since there were no bars on the windows).

There were six of us: we had completed Radiomen’s School in San Diego, then a top secret communications technician school in Imperial Beach, followed by an even more classified specialist school up north in the Napa Valley, where we learned to operate highly sophisticated communications equipment. Because we were a small elite within our particular branch of the armed forces, no matter where we were assigned thereafter we always found friends. There were only a few thousand of us in the entire Navy at any one 57

time, and we were not allowed to ever discuss what we did with anyone – ever – even among ourselves when outside our work area; we were pretty much separate from the rest of the sea-going establishment. These crusty deep-water sailors not only considered us not part of the so-called “Fleet,” but not even part of the Navy. This only made them dislike us even more: especially if they had heard of someone asking questions about what we did and who then disappeared: e.g. the poor sap that came into our Quonset hut one day in the Philippines and shouted: “Hey, what are you guys up to? We just opened a crate of your typewriters by mistake, and they‘re all in Russian!”

Gone the next day.

So there we were, a year in the Navy and never even seen a ship, when the Master at Arms nabbed us for our first working party. We were taken over to the local Navy supermarket to carry groceries out to cars for the wives of officers. I spent the afternoon petrified I’d see some girl from home. (“Oh yes, I saw him, he’s a bagboy at the commissary in San Francisco! What secret mission?”) The next detail was better: we were taken down to the dock area, fitted with rubber boots, handed huge pneumatic drills, and pointed to small rafts floating along the hull of a cargo ship. The next thing I knew I was bouncing up and down on the greasy water, shirt off in the hot sun, drilling away at the rusted paint on the hull, feeling like a hero in a ‘30’s movie (James Jones wrote about how much fun a jackhammer can be in From Here to Eternity).

However, these relatively benign tasks led to the final terrible – and I suppose funny – moment, where several of us were shanghaied once again, this time to help handle mooring lines for an incoming aircraft carrier from the Seventh Fleet. I believe this was the 32,000ton Oriskany, with a flight deck extending 60 feet above the surface. We so-called sailors stood rooted to the huge wooden pier, craning our necks back to look at that flight deck looming far above us, when the bosun’s mate in charge of us shouted, “OK, here she comes.” A monkey’s fist shot off the bow, trailed by a huge, wooly brown hawser to be looped around the pier stanchions. Although I had a general idea what was expected of us, at the sight of this giant lasso, looking as big around as a man’s waist scaling down at us, I didn’t hesitate – I joined the others running for our lives. The hawser landed with a splintering thump next to the red-faced, screaming bosun, who leaped high into the air, threatening us with court martial and death if we didn’t return. We ran back in confusion and fear, all the way the old salt cursing us vilely, asking over and over what navy we were in. I spent the next few days hiding in the base library until we departed.

A couple of years later, some of us on our way into town in a liberty launch passed close by the Oriskany swinging at anchor in Manila Bay, and, as I gazed up at that awesome flight deck, once again I hoped no one would recognize me.

By then I had learned the Naval Security Group had long served with distinction through wars hot and cold, both aboard ships, submarines, aircraft, and behind enemy lines.

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‘I was in the doctor’s office, steeling myself for the worst.’

You know how when you’re having a lie-in on a weekend, sometimes you’ll get the pillow into a position where you can hear your pulse? One Saturday morning, 30 years ago, I was in this contented state, when my mood was shattered by the realization that my heartbeat was not following the expected sequence, but: o.o..o.o.o…oo etc.

My immediate reaction was “Well, I’ve had a good run; the mortgage is paid off, the kids are grown and almost launched on life, and I’ve been hugely fortunate in marriage, as in everything else in life. I can’t complain.”

Monday morning, I was in the doctor’s office, steeling myself for the worst. When I poured out my story, he listened to my heartbeat, and said “yes, there it is.” Instead of the inspirational words that I expected, he asked me “How much coffee do you drink?”

I replied that I had recently cut back drastically: I was down to 10 or 12 cups a day. He allowed that I might want to consider cutting back a bit more, then proceeded to tell me a story to illustrate how dangerous my habit was to my health.

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He had started practice right at the end of the Second World War, and one of his early patients was a man of hugely advanced age. As the doctor gave him a general check-up, he noticed an irregular heartbeat very similar to mine and commented on it.

“Yes,” replied the patient, “that kept me out of the army.”

The doctor, shocked, asked “What on earth were they doing, trying to call up a man of your age?”

Came the reply, “It was for the Boer War.”

– Norman de Plume

Sometimes the most unlikely photographs end up in the least likely of places . . .

Peter Island, British Virgin Islands February 1985

Peter Island, British Virgin Islands 60

Travel & Leisure Caribbean Section November 1985

Off-Street Parking In the late 60’s, the New Zealand Ministry of Works was putting the first section of the Wellington Urban Motorway through Thorndon, the colonial residential suburb which adjoins the quarter where high rise buildings house the main government departments.

Many of the civil servants who inhabited these buildings liked to include a lunchtime constitutional in their daily routine, and the occasional episodes of demolition and construction were highlights of the unfolding show.

One day in Hawkestone Street. a substantial crowd of office workers gathered around noon to supervise the unloading of a medium-sized bulldozer from its low loader. When this was accomplished, the large Maori driver, who looked as if he would not be a stranger to aggravation, domestic or civil, carefully positioned the machine athwart the footpath in front of a neat looking cottage with a rose-bordered path leading up to its front door, set his hard hat at a jaunty angle, took his seat, and to the admiration of all his audience, roared straight up the path, until the machine was buried in the wreckage of the house, right up to the controls, whereupon he turned off the engine, stood up, doffed his hard hat, and announced: “Mum, I’m Home.

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‘ . . . the shafts of light, the sense of time suspended, the frozen moment, then and there connecting me to O’Keeffe forever . . .’

Essence of Place in Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexico

By Tony Tedeschi

Anyone who has taken a flight across America can’t help but notice how all those green squares across the middle of the country give way to shades of brown as you approach the Rockies. As the flat earth rises into mountains, the terrain displays variations in shape and color, but still betrays a forbidding landscape, begging the question, how could anyone choose to live there? Nonetheless, for decades, the part of that dry earth in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico, has attracted artists, writers, musicians, jewelry designers and assorted other craftsmen, along with movie stars and a complement of millionaires. I had journeyed here determined to find out why.

I knew from working on my master’s in English Lit that D.H. Lawrence had a ranch in Taos. George R.R. Martin, author of “A Song of Fire and Ice,” adapted for TV’s “Game of Thrones,” lived in Santa Fe. Acclaimed opera stars performed at the dramatic, open-air Santa Fe Opera. Ansel Adams shot his famous black-and-white photograph, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico,” just north of Santa Fe. Georgia O’Keeffe painted hundreds of her works in and around her home in Abiquiu, an hour’s drive north.

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When O’Keeffe died in her 99th, year on March 6, 1986, Edith Evans Asbury wrote in The New York Times: “As an interpreter and manipulator of natural forms, as a strong and individual colorist and as the lyric poet of her beloved New Mexico landscape, she left her mark on the history of American art and made it possible for other women to explore a new gamut of symbolic and ambiguous imagery.”

I was intrigued by the description of O’Keeffe as the landscape’s lyric poet and by the comment about the ambiguity of her imagery. It seemed that if you could decipher O’Keeffe; somehow see, even feel, what she saw and felt, you could understand the magic of this place, feel the pulse of the earth here, strip away the clutter to its very soul.

Each year, my wife, Candy, a nurse practitioner in women’s health, lends her considerable talents to train medical personnel for the Indian Health Service. I tag along, when I can manage it, this year determined to dig into O’Keeffe.

I’d always been drawn to the artist’s work, the dominant spirit reflected there, representative of a woman with the courage to live amidst these badlands. O’Keeffe went wherever her spirit pointed, despite admitting, “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”

Perhaps there is something in the rich soil of the heartland, places like Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, where O’Keeffe was born in 1887, that infusion of spirit that keeps its offspring pressing toward some sort of ultimate discovery, even if the forward motion occurs while you are, inexplicably, rooted in a place. I knew for O’Keeffe the locus of that world was Abiquiu, but it would require some grounding in the resultant artwork to begin to understand her sense of place.

At the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, I was drawn to the similarities of style between O’Keeffe’s work and those of other artists whose paintings hung near hers, concluding that her influence on their work was obvious. But the dates on the paintings of the other artists either preceded O’Keeffe’s arrival in New Mexico or were contemporaneous with her early period there.

Then, why O’Keeffe as lyric poet of this landscape? Was it the volume of her output, hundreds of paintings over many decades? Was it the celebrated status she brought with her, a result of exhibitions at the prestigious 291 Gallery in Manhattan, where her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, showcased her work? The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, a short walk from the Museum of Art, would surely provide some direction.

Immediately apparent is the boldness of her work, those gaudy colors: pink, beige, salmon, maroon, in the geological layers of the mesas and mountains, a sense that she is trying to penetrate the spirituality beneath a kind of surface tension. In one painting of the flattop mountain opposite her home, “My Front Yard, Summer, 1941,” the mountain seems almost an airship, hovering above a valley dotted with trees. “It’s my private mountain,” she wrote. “It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.”

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“Easter Sunrise, 1953,” is even more intensely spiritual: rays of sunlight forming a cross above a road that snakes below her home, past cottonwoods, whose limbs appear upraised in acknowledgement of the light. Those cottonwoods were the subject of numerous paintings, indicative of O’Keeffe’s not having to leave her home to create great art. It took years for her to convince the previous owners – the archdiocese of Santa Fe – to sell her the house, but the inspiration she drew from the location, from the moment she set foot on the property, made her need to live there imperative.

Where her art has generated recurrent controversy it is in the perceived sexuality depicted in some of her paintings, particularly her treatment of flowers. In paintings like, “White and Blue Flower Shapes, 1919,” there is little imagination required. However, O’Keeffe left such interpretations to observers, who simply, “took the time to notice my flowers [and] hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don’t.”

For me, such depictions were examples of O’Keeffe trying to bore into the essence of a subject; flowers being something people simply lingered over for a moment, drawn briefly to the color or aroma. Whether it were a mesa or a flower, O’Keeffe sought to see it beyond the reflected light of a simple definition.

It all demanded a visit to O’Keeffe’s home and studio in Abiquiu. A tour of the grounds reveals a garden where she grew flowers and vegetables, a courtyard where she let ambient light play on the walls, rooms large and small with divergent design themes and an expansive studio opening onto a vista depicted in a great deal of her work.

“She would wrap herself in a blanket and wait, shivering in the cold dark of a sunrise to paint,” Asbury wrote in The Times, “would climb a ladder to see the stars from a roof . . .”

In one small room, I felt the intense sense of an otherworldly connection. Something about the assemblage of elements, the blanched skull with the great antler rack, contrasting the muted grey of the wall where it hung, ninety degrees from a weathered exterior door, the cracks in the ancient wood directing shafts of sunlight onto the floor. One of those rare, frozen moments in time. The room, the shafts of light, the sense of time suspended, the frozen moment, then and there connecting me to O’Keeffe forever.

“When I think of death,” she said, “I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore . . . unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I’m gone.”

Thoughts of that moment still give me a chill.

Editor’s Note: This story originally ran in our favorite travel webzine: www.neverstoptraveling.com.

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A billow of breeze flaps the cloth at her knees the angular light warms her cheek the salt-scarred terra cotta licks her feet equilibrium

Tortola, British Virgin Islands. Photo by Tony Tedeschi