Holding Ground in the Tar Heel State

I thought I could make some money selling the stamps I collected as a kid when the American Philatelic Society National Exhibition came to Chicago in 2006. I just knew my American and British Colonial stamps that had been safely tucked away in wax envelopes for years had appreciated in value. They hadn’t. What appreciated on the spot at the exhibit was my rekindled interest in collecting stamps again.

First Day Cover of Scott 797 with hand- colored cachet by Torkel Gundel

Sticking out of the stamps I failed to sell was a canceled souvenir sheet with a facsimile of the 1934 National Parks ten cent issue, reprinted to celebrate the Society’s convention held in Asheville, NC in 1937. Staring at the vignette of Smoky Mountain National Park brought to mind life and times in the Tar Heel State of North Carolina.

First Day Cover of Scott 765 with hand- made cachet by Georges Laffert

The handmade map by Georges Laffert on my rare first day cover of the Smoky Mountains stamps, part of the Farley imperforate National Parks special printing of 1935, provides me with a visual cue for my wanderings around the state. North Carolina gets its nickname from those resistance fighters during the Revolutionary War who held their ground, aided by tar and pitch from the state’s expansive pine forests that they applied to their heels. The rich diversity of geographical landscapes is well worth defending. They include the coastal Outer Banks and their barrier islands, eastern Gulf Coastal Plain, central Piedmont Plateau, and western Appalachian Mountains.

The summer I graduated from a high school in Norfolk, Virginia, my brother and I went car camping on Cape Hatteras National Seashore. This landscape spends half its time in the air. Picket fences strung along the barrier islands to control the wind-blown sand still can’t keep meandering dunes from burying telephone poles up to their necks. Grit in our camp meals testified to winds believed to have ship- wrecked many a Spanish fleet off the coast. The light beam that pours out of the second oldest lighthouse in the U.S. on Ocracoke Island has to be as yellow as Spanish doubloons that still lie spilled all over the continental shelf.

A freshly minted college graduate, I returned to the state explicitly to backpack the Smokies on my way to Florida to visit my brother, then a lieutenant in the Navy, stationed in Jacksonville. It was June, and the summer rains were pumping trillions of fresh green plant cells plump with osmotic pressure. My degree in botany made the climb through numerous ecological zones to the summits a taxonomic thrill ride, because countless plant species had been cornered here by the last ice age’s walls of advancing glaciers. The biodiversity index is off the charts, and every ten paces required stopping to marvel with my ten-power lens at some new, exotic inflorescence.

N Menard http://red-dragon-goodness.deviantart.comartFirefly-Forest-82096168

The night before ascending the green-cloaked hills I was enchanted outside my tent by a silent, blinking Disney dance of dainty dervishes. This Tinker Bell firefly display sent my mind into a rhapsody that hopelessly distracted me from my reading Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way in the light of my Hope candle lantern.

The Eckerd Foundation of Clearwater, FL hired me to counsel kids with emotional difficulties in special therapeutic wilderness camps, and I jumped at the opportunity six months later to help open new ones in North Carolina. The first, near Hendersonville below the Smokies, opened in the dead of winter. Since I was slated to help prepare the next one near Candor in the Piedmont, I wasn’t put into a therapy group; rather was sent on errands such as driving a Kubota tractor down to Candor and returning with supplies.

Time off when your residence is your workplace and your room and board is your primary pay can be challenging in winter. An $8 room with a water heater the size of a pumpkin limited one weekend’s relaxation to an episode of the Donnie and Marie Show, accompanied by pretzels and a quart bottle of beer. Finding college campuses more affordable and more interesting places to crash, I got out of my sleeping bag in the snowy graveyard behind the chapel at Warren Wilson College near Asheville one Sunday morning and wandered into the service. Students were leading the liturgy, and an absolutely gorgeous girl gave the sermon. Using the need to patch my backpack where a squirrel had gnawed a hole in the side, I set up a repair service next to the table in the student lounge where I found her later with friends. The gnarly guy with the adventure stories and romantic employment eventually got the girl, well, almost. Her romance with another student was a nuisance, but for the next year and a half, she put me up in her apartment on time off days in exchange for serving as court raconteur, regaling her with tales from the outback.

I felt bad for those kid’s first taste of camp life, waking up in their hand-made tents in frigid subzero chill. We were trained to recognize, however, how much kids cared for their tents, which they never vandalized, because they built them themselves, learning basic math and writing according to the curriculum that lay subversively hidden behind the need to get the job done. Had they been told they “were in school,” they would not have been so cooperative. I felt quite proud of one made by Chimptas, one of my therapy groups, that was pentagon in shape, a first in Eckerd history. I heard that it confused the canvas cutter and sewer back in Clearwater due to the irregular specifications.

First order of business when the Candor camp opened that spring was getting the new campers out into their first month-long canoe trip. We chose the Haw River to put in, which fuses with the Cape Fear, the primary drainage channel into the Atlantic of that portion of the Piedmont Plateau. Kids lugged canoes and gear over an eighty foot-high coffer dam of strewn boulders, tumpted canoes in rapids, pitched tents in stinging nettle, and ate cold dinner out of cans due to spending twilight singing sleeping bags to get them dry in the campfire’s heat. Alleged therapeutic benefits justified the serial sets of ordeals. Then a severe spring storm blew in. The torrential downpour pelted our lean-to’s on an island all night long. In the first light we saw only the tips of the canoes jutting out of the water like miniature ice burgs, made vertical by their moorings twenty feet below the rising water. I stripped nude and, like a burlesque pirate with a buck knife blade in my teeth, dove down to cut the lines. The river was rising fast. Yanking everything in the campsite and dumping it into the canoes, we made it to high ground, where we waited days for the flood waters to recede.

Weeks later back in camp, stories after the chuck wagon meal lived up to their tall tail trappings. A roly poly eleven-year-old, infamous for running away from programs previous to ours by hot-wiring cars and making his get away while eying the road through the steering wheel, proudly recounted his group’s rescue off their river. They had hit five-foot standing waves after the storm, and all canoes tumpted. His pinned him to a tree, and no amount of yanking could dislodge it. Being years before cell phones, a counselor had to hitch to town to alert the sheriff’s department, who failed also in their attempt. The river was rising, and the other counselor, hospitalized later for acute hypothermia, was having trouble keeping the kid positioned so as not to drown. Finally a helicopter from the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg was called in to wrench the canoe free. The pudgy camper, insulated from the cold like a harp seal, was no worse for the wear.

Trips from the scooped out creek beds of E-Ku-Summee’s pine- wooded 800 acres in the rolling Piedmont to the UNC campus at Chapel Hill for furloughs took me through the heart of Tobacco Road. Every stage in tobacco’s labor-intensive growing season was visible at some point. I’d see migrant workers topping shucks, ridding them of suckers and pests, pulling their leaves, or binding them to hang in open-sided barns for curing. Chapel Hill was a major stop during my years as a college town crasher. I tried to pick up girls in cafes along Franklin Street, such as the Carolina Cafe, while looking the part of a Southern Ivy League intellectual. I’d be reading Chaim Potok’s novels about young Jews coming of age in modern society, or else investigations of sudden personality change in the then epidemic of religious cults, or especially Kierkegaard, and I would strike up conversations with them. Then I would offer to buy them a beer at Spanky’s. On the road back to camp, I’d make it as far as Chatham Mill’s embroidered patch factory in Pittsboro, once being let in to marvel at the intricate machinery needed to weave them. Before it closed in 1996, it was the largest producer of woven labels in the world. I would crash in my little Fiat with the driver’s seat flattened, with just enough time the next morning to relieve my fellow counselor so he could take his leave for a day and a half.

There would be further adventures on the trail and river with those kids before leaving the Tar Heel State. One trip took us down the Savannah River for a month in a makeshift raft, the Yellow Submarine. Another trip got us on huge Lake Murray behind the the 1.5 mile-long Saluda Dam in South Carolina, which was an engineering feat in its day. The dam, using the native red clay soil and bedrock, was the largest earthen dam in the world when it was completed in 1930. The lake behind was once the world's largest man-made reservoir. I must recount one critical decision I made one windy day in our canoes along the southern shoreline. The gale-force winds were blowing from the south, threatening to side swamp the canoes unless we did something. So at a critical point in camp time, I signaled to the other two canoes to head downwind north, which would send us zipping with the wind across the fourteen miles of the lake. I was breaking in a new counselor at the time, who sat cargo in a canoe. Devout, he was reading the Bible, probably the passage in which the disciples are entreating their Master to calm the winds over the Sea of Galilee. Surfing the whiteheads, we made the opposite shore in record time.

In camp, the primary order of business was tent building. Each group site required four sleeping tents, Chief's sleeping tent, chuck wagon large enough for ten campers plus chiefs to sit around a center table, tool tent, and latrine.

The time frame for constructing a complete set was about eighteen months, the average stay of a camper. Then tents would, one-by-one, be torn down and rebuilt. Each camper thus participated in a complete cycle of camp building.

I had earned the $1,500 stipend for sticking with Eckerd for at least two years by an August, but stayed on for awhile longer as the counselor for the transition group of camper graduates close to being discharged, who spent time in a camp learning resource center and at home with their families on weekends. It was November. The leaves were falling. My exit from the Tar Heel State was, again, by way of the Smoky Mountains. I had no idea what to do next with my life. A week solo in the mountains would be a retreat to gather clues.

I met no one else on the trail. I had the Smokies all to myself. I needed them. You see, there was this girl in Urbana, Illinois I had been chasing for three years. I had been just smitten with her. Unsure of my future and of her, I braced myself against the winds and huddled over campfires in the empty huts on the Appalachian Trail. I felt the solitude of a lone black bear rustling in the fallen leaves for food. A storm pelted me in a flimsy plastic tube tent. I stripped to ford a raging stream, swollen from the all night rain, pack held high over my head. I had to test my resolve one last time regarding her, but lingered in the mountains, not wanting to give ground in the Tar Heel State. My heart had been shaken to its foundations once before with her, and the years on the road had been, in part, a response to that experience. My odyssey had been in her name. With my letters to her recounting my adventures, I had wanted to impress her. Like Odysseus, I wanted her to be my Penelope, to whom I would come home to drive away the suitors. It was times like those when I learned that I wasn’t truly the master of my fate, the marcher to my own drum. The silence of those Smoky Mountain miles told me I had bidden her to share in molding my fate. Unbeknown to her, she was.

My Scott 749 Plate Block with Selvage Number

 
Smoky Mountains by Michael Mancil manifesting accurately the vignette of the 1934 commemorative 10 cent postage stamp



My Scott 765 set of arrow blocks from an uncut Farley sheet

Auto American

Inventor Karl Benz in the first automobile

There are few baby boomers who can’t say that the auto holds a central place in their psyche. It certainly is smack dab in the middle of me, a ‘50’s boomer who can list every make and style he's driven in what the sociologists say is the primary personal metaphor with which to show off one’s status, a status traceable to rising affluence in the years following WW II.

So I’d like to cite a few milestones and tell a story about some experiences with this probably marvelous, possibly malevolent, metal fashioner of minds, especially minds molded by middle class American means.

This past November, for instance, marked the 30th anniversary of Blondie’s 1980 release of Autoamerican, in which lead singer Debbie Harry satirizes the pivotal position of the car in American society.

"Based on the desire for total mobility and the serious physical pursuit of religious freedom, the auto drove mankind further than the wheel and, in remote areas even today, is forbidden as a device too suspect for human conveyance. This articulate conception has only brought us all more of the same, thoughtlessly locked into phase two gridlock, keyed up, on it's rims and abandoned on the expressway."

Then there’s my rare, handmade first day cover by artist Dorothy Knapp, franked by a plate number block of stamps commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the American Automobile Association. These stamps were issued in 1952 while I was gestating in my mother's womb. The event anticipated my birth into the height of the auto age.

The auto might be a quintessentially American devise, but I learned basic auto maintenance driving Fiats, starting in 1977 with a white ‘68 model 124. The Italians do know how to fashion beautiful designs for vehicles. I drove a used Karmann Ghia in high school, a Volkswagen for which they designed the sleek body. But the 124 was a real ugly duckling. I bought it because I liked how it sounded like a Ferrari. Well, the engines of Farraris are also built by the Germans. It seems that the Italians can’t figure out how to engineer worth a damn the vehicle itself. Oil leaked from the 124's faulty rear main seal onto the exhaust manifold, sending a stream of smoke in the car’s wake. I had a stoner and fellow botany major friend of mine fix it at his new Corvallis, Oregon garage, the Rainbow Repair. Then it sat on blocks for months until a windfall student aid disbursement enabled me to replace the rusted rear discs, which had caused them to scrape against the pads, heat up, and expand until braking without my consent ground the car to a halt along with my status as an Auto American.

The windfall refund happened at the time of my graduation from Oregon State. Fixing the Fiat was the prerequisite for hitting the road. I replaced the head gasket and water pump myself. My roommate taught me how to time the tappets with feeler gauges, a needed task when cam shafts weren’t over the head like they are today. I kept the car tuned by hand all the way to Florida to visit my brother, once checking the point gap in an abandoned shed in the pouring rain. Once in Florida, a sudden summer rain squall soaked the pavement, and I slid to a stop under the lights at an intersection. There I was met by a Ford LTD that couldn’t stop either on the slick pavement, so it wrapped my Fiat around its huge front end.

I promptly replaced it with another Fiat when a used car dealer ran after me and threw a deal hastily scribbled onto a scrap of paper onto my lap as I was driving away from his dealership. It was a deal I couldn’t refuse, a shiny white 128 model with only 65K miles for only $800. Yea, it had been freshly painted, and the engine compartment had been spray painted black to hide a multitude of sins. First order of business was to replace the velocity joints, because the protective boots had cracked, allowing Florida sand to enter and grind the gears to nubbins. I had borrowed the price of the car from my brother, so I thought I’d pay him back by means of a quick summer job. But I was hired long term by a foundation that served troubled youth, and I had to return to Oregon to arrange my affairs. This necessitated another couple of trips across the country, this time in this lemon of a Fiat.

The belt tensor loosened on every major bump in the road, and I was underneath the car many times with a wrench tightening it. The 128 was Fiat’s attempt at a front-wheel drive four -banger for the masses, so the redesigned transmission, of course, gave out crossing over the Sangre De Cristo Mountains in New Mexico. I limped into Colorado Springs where an uncle lent repair money. When the rusted stabilizer bar broke free of the body in the Cascades of Oregon, I had to grasp the steering wheel like a vise to keep the car from lurching into the oncoming lane of traffic. The welder who fixed it failed to inform me that I needed an alignment, so the new tires I got in Reno on money borrowed from my folks while at their time share on Lake Tahoe were rubbed bald by the time I got back to Florida. At least that damn Fiat got me to Vegas where I caught a show performed to the Eagles new hit Life in the Fast Lane. It served as a theme song as I barreled down the Front Range into Denver, thinking I could save on gas by coasting the car in neutral up to 80 mph, while forgetting that a jury rigged weld job giving out would have put an end to this Auto American's life in the fast lane.

But I loved that Fiat, even though everything on that car except the engine gave out. It had no radio until I could afford a tape deck with speaker boxes I had students I was counseling build. It leaked rainwater, so I fiber-glassed sealed the air intake vents, thinking that’s how the rain got in. On a winter cross country trip home to my parents in San Diego for Christmas, I wrapped myself in blankets, because the heater didn’t work. In the mountains south of Mount Lassen on a trip to Reno to look for work during the winter of the ‘82 recession an unlucky jackrabbit broke the electrical wire to the fuel pump that hung like gonads between the rear wheels. There I was under the car and an unreal star-studded sky in the pitch black night fumbling to reconnect it. Later I had to run a wire directly from the battery to a toggle switch I stuck into the dash and then back to that electric pump. Flick the toggle or the car didn’t start. I wore out the brakes coasting down national forest dirt roads after a month volunteering with Summit Expedition, a climbing and stress-camping program in the Yosemite. I put in new pads and replaced that now gummed up fuel pump while overhearing the program’s director appeal by phone for new clients. Turning into the driveway after a 600 mile trip back from canoeing in the Boundary Waters, the steering wheel suddenly spun like a top. Zero steering. My partner and I sat there shocked by the notion of how fortunate we had been. So even the rack and pinion steering had to be replaced. I self-deceptively rationalized that each new repair would restore for good my freedom as an Auto American.

I was more than happy when making enough money allowed me to invest in a new pick up, and a "For Sale” sign eventually drew a dad needing a cheap car for his teenage kid. It still amazes me how I survived that Fiat. The funny thing is that I sold it for only $300 less than what I had paid for it eight years earlier. That price plus the repairs came to just over $3000. $375/year plus gas seems to me today to be a cheap price to pay for the freedom of an Auto American.

Most people have an intuitive understanding that the golden days of Auto Americans are coming to an end. A world power cannot perennially remain one when it runs on foreign oil. And the impact on the fragile biosphere must be taking its toll, especially given the growth of that impact. Passenger cars in 1960 numbered 61,671,390. Passenger cars in 2008 numbered 137,079,843, a 221% increase. The number of registered vehicles in 2008 was 255,917,664, or 0.83 vehicles per every man, woman, and child in the country (DOT statistics). When a typical vehicle puts a pound of carbon dioxide into the air every mile it is driven, contributing big time to the nine billion tons of additional carbon per year that until our age sat sequestered as fossil deposits dating back to the Carboniferous period in geologic history, an effect has to be on its way, if it isn’t already. As a science teacher I have taught a unit on rapid global climate change every year since 1989. It makes me a little uneasy facing students with the realization that their generation gets to figure out what to do with the consequences of mine, a generation that gave rise to the golden age of the Auto American.

Stacked Spirals of Stardust

 

October 2, 2010

After witnessing the dedication of the luminous stacked spirals of Stardust, which now hang forever in memory of Esme Louise Kenney at the new School for the Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati where she attended until she was taken from this world, I found myself seeing metaphors in kind everywhere. I heard a poem read about stacked layers of hot Earth and cold ground laid out and looking up at  the Milky Way, arms spiraling from its center, just like Stardust. After the dedication, I watched a stack of prone admirers under the memorial gazing up, legs spiraling from their center, just like Stardust.

At Spring Grove Cemetery later in the day I saw an ant with a dark abdomen and red thorax and head emerge with wings from its nest on the spot where angelic Esme’s gurney had been rolled. It crawled around in the grass, not sure what it was supposed to do with its newly sprouted wings. Then it suddenly took off and spiraled, just like Stardust,  around the nest opening before flying away from its wingless neighbors, a terrestrial creature now an angel too, telling stories about flights to heaven and back.

If there are trees in heaven of which the ant can speak, then I’m sure they include trees like this memorial one that adorns “Esme’s Spot” where I saw the ant in Spring Grove. A weeping variety called Higgins cherry, it serves as an enduring, yet growing, changing symbol of her organic spirit, its branches weaving, elongating throughout her survivor’s memories of her and reminding them that her light can help them grow too, just like leaves in light that serve as windows into the souls of trees. I couldn’t help but notice also how its branches seemed to spiral from the trunk, just like Stardust.

After this I was witness to a prone supplicant during a long, wet, and windy night gazing up at Star Tower, the red beacon blinking slowly atop its highest point like a metronome as it marked the hours the supplicant spent in the lonely and terrifying stack of invasive shrubs behind the reservoir where Esme was killed, its bowery brambles spiraling, just like Stardust.

And on the lonely trek back to Chicago, astonished by what I had seen and felt that weekend, I stared awestruck up at a stack of cumulus clouds over an Indiana wind farm that stretched from horizon to horizon, the turbines of each mill slowly spiraling, just like Stardust.

Treachery in the Wild

My wife was on maternity leave with our first-born, and I was hired to help fill the void of her absence at the nature center in central Illinois. It was high summer, very hot and humid. So I wanted to stay inside making pen and ink drawings for brochures, figuring out an artsy way to render the calendar of public events, and illustrating labels for jars of locally gathered honey to be sold in the gift store. But I knew enough about nature to lead public hikes on the preserve’s upland oak/hickory woodland acres. That’s when I ran into mimicry and murder during the annual courtship amongst fireflies.

Crystal structure of the bioluminescing enzyme lucerferase

Firefly displays intrigue anyone who has ever witnessed them on hot, humid nights in the eastern seaboard and also here in the Midwest. The mesmerizing blinking is due to cool temperature chemistry called bioluminescence, and is used to attract mates in the sex-crazed high summer nights of July and August. Roaming males of the genus Photinus use one pattern of flashing, recognized only by females of its species, and those of the genus Photuris use another. The male recognizes the correct duration of the interval between his flashing and the female’s single blink response, and zeros in on her where she hides with her expensive cache of eggs.

Unfortunately, Photinus males often zero in on the consummate femme fatale. The carnivorous Photuris females have evolved to use the same duration pattern. When crooning Photinus males reach these females, they’re lunch. That’s because Photuris females can use a defense chemical that male Photuris fireflies make. This molecule, lucibufagin, proves an effective chemical defensive against certain spiders and other enemies.

Such trickery, committed during a perfectly innocent attempt at a romp in the grass, is common in the insect world. Still sounds like a solid basis upon which to make a complaint. “But officer, my alleged date ate me when I went to pick her up!” After I told this tale of woe to one group of fascinated folks on an evening’s stroll, they stood in stunned silence before finally offering hesitant applause.

Lest it appears that the natural world is the only culprit concerning conspired means to lunch on unsuspecting others, I list below a running tally of terms I’ve compiled for similar occurrences in our world.

Billed, infected, charged, arrested, fined, tricked, stalked, interrogated, ambushed, investigated, ripped off, targeted, sued, assaulted, held liable, put under surveillance, burgled, suspected, wire-tapped, gypped, broken into, penalized, foreclosed, stung, fired, sneak-attacked, drag-netted, dismissed. The list can be extended.

We all have our stories. Administrators do things that impinge on others. Lovers do it. Politicians do it. Revenuers do it. Even children in their sandboxes do it. Interactions between living entities in any world are often just plain hostile.

For instance, I pay a hefty annual “wheel tax” to the city in order to park on the street in front of my own residence. But I better not forget to go out to the curb to move my car. Street sweeping occurs on the south side of the street on Tuesday, and the north side on Wednesday. The parking Gestapo likes to cruise immediately after 9 AM for easy pickings. It’s the city’s Department of Revenue to whom the parking police answer. The street sweepers often don't even show up. I’m sure that the steady rate of income from parkers who just can’t always remember where they left their car is built into their budget. I’d swore that this summer I wouldn’t get hit. But I did, once. Happens to the best of us. So add ticketed to the list above. I wouldn’t put it past the city to deliberately hire administrators with a background in Biology.

Hubert

Everybody stopped what they were doing when Hubert came to town. Memories of my meeting this cavalier German in Corvallis, OR, and a crazy road trip I took with him to New York City are fixed like ants in fossilized amber and just as visible through the yellowed years.

Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main

Hubert was a graduate student at the University of Frankfurt at the time, studying the ways the artist Edward Hopper captured the alienating forces of modernity that were reaching their zenith in the 1920’s and ‘30’s. And, like many young transcendental romantics from crowded Europe who imagine wearing cowboy boots and ten gallon hats, Hubert was smitten by the American West. Its wide open spaces, lacking in Europe, offered decompressing relief from the constipating effects of post industrial consumerism in the modern western nation states. “Howdy, podner,” he began a letter to me once.

My friends became Hubert’s mentors of American culture when he attended Oregon State University as a foreign exchange student. Helping to fuel his dry wit, they taught him the meaning of American colloquialisms. He asked about the expression “so and so ‘got screwed,’” for instance. After being told, Hubert peppered his rollicking language with this deprecating remark to which he added the postscript, “only slightly though.” My friends adored him.

I finally met Hubert when I flew in on a few weeks furlough from a wilderness camp counseling stint in North Carolina. A party lasting three weeks had taken us for a day to the Oregon coast. I’m on the left in the picture below. Hubert is kneeling.

Some years later Hubert flew from Frankfurt to New York and then hitched across the country to Corvallis. It was during a time of tumult and general disaffection in my Corvallis crowd. Old cohabiting couples were breaking up. My friends in Iron Rose, a loose confederation of anarchists, were pamphleteering patrons of the coffee counter cultures at Sambo’s and the Big “O” restaurants to rally behind waitresses and other oppressed wage slaves, but were growing disillusioned with the lack of public response. Others belonging to the “lumpen intelligentsia” were feeling growing pains and spoke of trying out new intellectual and artistic horizons in Portland and New York City. But Hubert’s arrival forced a freeze frame in the film followed by a frolicking free-for-all that lasted two weeks. He just had a way of doing that.

Inside the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt

Toward the end of his stay, Hubert described to us over beer at Squirrel’s Tavern in downtown Corvallis how he had found a way to get to the east coast for free before boarding a plane back to Germany. He was going to drive a VW bug belonging to a professor who was soon moving, along with his family, to Princeton, New Jersey. The owner had just given him $300 to pay for expenses, beginning with, I suppose, the cost of a round of beer as Hubert announced his intentions. I stopped and stared at the bar table, the conversation becoming a dim rumble in my ear, in my sudden realization that I was going to get into that car with him. I had incentives. The degree in science education I had returned to Corvallis to earn wasn’t producing any job offers that fall. And, like the protagonist played by Matt Damon in the movie Good Will Hunting, who leaves job prospects in Boston for Palo Alto, California, I had “to see about a girl” in Illinois with whom I had been corresponding.

Playful mockery of bland mainstream status quo society quickly became the modus operandi of our cross-country boondoggle. We decided to document our journey on yellow legal pad paper at rest stop coffee counters, which quickly received copy write status,

HUBERTANTICS ©

For instance, we cut up the ticket a cop wrote when he busted Hubert in a Safeway parking lot for peeing in the bushes, and pasted its parts into our travel log to especially document the number of people the citation stated Hubert had offended with this behavior. The officer had "reasonable grounds for believing that said offense against ordinance 841.7-1, Urinating in public, was committed by the Defendant against the peace and dignity of the City and County of Denver, and the people of the state of Colorado.” The demand for justice on the part of that many people necessitated in no uncertain terms that the rights of the Defendant be protected. So we checked 846.5-4, Unlawful to give false information, and role-played the following scenario.

“Seeing a strange looking foreigner wearing a red bandanna around his neck, Levi’s, and leather boots (‘Howdy, podner’), the cops, on inquiring as to the identity of said person, were told he was Hunter S. Thompson. Defendant then pulled rank by shoving a card into their faces, which said, ‘Bonzo Journalist.’ Defendant stated that his partner was his attorney, who told both cops that they would be turned over to the governor if they didn’t clear out pronto.”

“We continue to journey into the core of the Great Amerikan Mistake,” Hubert wrote. “There’s Dwight D. Eisenhower’s boyhood home. He symbolizes the ’50’s, the enormous decade of monstrosity revisited, which leaves us helpless, helpless, helpless, of course....starry night auf der Autobahn and sticking human bodies into that metallic apparition dependent on combustion. Corn, corn, prairie, cattle, gas station, billboard, irrigation madness, grain elevator reinforced by church without steeple, rising to the point of burnt eyes, burnt stomach, burnt cigarette, you betcha.”

Lawrence Kristina Dodge building Kansas City Art Institute

Hubert wanted to hang out with the painters who were pulling an all-nighter in their studio at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Ironically, 27 years later, my recollection of such an intense commitment to their art, and recognition of that same intensity in one of my students at the Chicago Academy for the Arts, helped get her accepted there. “I watched students at KCAI in all night studio marathons. She'd fit right in,” I wrote on her behalf.

In Columbia, MO, our bonzo journalist bought a tape recorder. At a local diner, he orally observed the following.

“The tension has risen to the point where the employees keep dropping the china and overreact by madly polishing the chrome stools. The hostess has just started to take off her clothes. We are determined not to take such bullshit, and give her that ‘Hey, that’s kind of you’ grin, which makes her considerably nervous. She starts punching absurd codes into the cash register only to make it spit out coins, and yells, ‘Jackpot! Jackpot!’ Amused, we munch on the half-and-half containers like jelly beans until the creamy drooling is all over the place, and try to figure out the relationship between chrome, jelly beans, and the presidency.”

On the campus of the University of Missouri, Hubert introduced himself to a group of art majors painting watercolors on the lawn, and gave a lecture. One of them, “Lisa,” reluctantly mentioned that she had a boyfriend. “Sad Lisa. Oh Lisa, Lisa, sad Lisa, Lisa...”

On the way to St. Louis, we discussed the popular genre of literature about post-apocalyptic survivorship and personal redemption, retelling on tape the dystopia tale  of the The Time Machine by  H. G. Well’s, of the reluctant hero Max Rockatansky, played by Mel Gibson, who attempts to save a surviving remnant from marauders in The Road Warrior,  and the Nebula Award-winning novella of A Boy and his Dog.

 

St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri

Hubert’s left-leaning eye triggered a litany of one-line commentary. Seeing the St. Louis Arch, Hubert suggested that, “There’s got to be more,” because, like the Golden Arches © in our consumer culture, “Two is better than one.” Visiting the St. Louis Art Museum, he remarked on seeing a cherub holding a compass, a protractor, and a plumb bob, “Yes, implements of the technocratic imperative.” Gaudy paintings of Americans clad in flowing folds of Greek garb symbolized “Manifest Destiny.” Hubert quoted a bumper sticker clandestinely stuck to a trash can in the hallway, “Death to Corporate Capitalism.” He was quick to notice a statue of Siegfried of the great Nordic myth, who represents the human (er, German super) race, which, at the dawn of history, is just coming into its own in ascendancy over the gods. Later, commenting on a skewing of class identity, Hubert remarked that soccer in Europe is a sport of the lower classes, while, here, he noticed suburban middle and upper class youth everywhere playing the game.

"Uh oh. Dave's getting nervous," Hubert said. The “girl” I had to see about lived in Urbana, IL, and the road sign said it was near. We were to stop by before she and her date were to see a movie. “Her date?” asked Hubert. “Sounds like her fruit. Hey, don’t worry about the trauma of crashing her date. See, over there? Trauma Center.”

We sat on her living room floor. She eyed me as I recited the time I gave Dave Foreman, co-founder of the radical environmental group Earth First! a ride to Eugene, Oregon for a recruiting lecture, and continued politely to sip her wine with her date. Little did either Hubert or I know that I would eventually be married to her for twenty years.

On the way to Chicago, Hubert suggested that I acquire a little “patina” by downing some Jack Daniels we got when leaving Urbana, which smoothed the way out of the “trauma” of interrupting her date, and helped facilitate the distracting relief of a half hour drunken recitation of McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show.

For Hubert, going to see Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks at the Art Institute of Chicago was like embarking on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

An American friend of his attended the Art Institute. We crashed the place that she and a rabble of international roommates literally were crashing themselves rent free, an old, abandoned warehouse with broken windows that somehow never had the heat turned off. So they weren’t paying for the heat, either. They had no furniture, slept on the floor, each separated by walls that were just two-by-fours without drywall, and ate out of electric frying pans on the floor. We all went shopping after midnight to prepare an elaborate international meal that we ate at 3 am. German, American, Irish, and Scottish partiers laughed, drank, and told stories, reminding me of Kierkegaard’s The Banquet in his great treatise of a proposed sequence in character development, Stages on Life’s Way.

It was my first time visiting New York City as an adult. We stayed with Corvallis acquaintances, a couple consisting of an Oregon State English professor on sabbatical to write novellas, and his wife, a student at Pratt Institute. Their apartment was over the Good Luck Grocery along Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. I quickly learned that the bustling streets there can be dangerous places when I pulled out my buck knife to punch open a pop can with a broken tab. People on the street froze and stared. Even the coin laundries had burly changers who were there actually to guard the change.

Over a period of four days, we migrated between Manhattan and Brooklyn, each day ending with a hard crash at 5 am. We hung out at St. Mark’s and Washington Squares. Hubert and I wandered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum, home of Hubert’s beloved Hopper. We drank Rolling Rock at the Red Bar near Cooper’s Union, admiring the early ‘80’s new wavers with their Hitler cuts or swept back long hair, shaven on both sides, and peg legs. We waited until 1 am to hear the main act at the Peppermint Lounge, The Jim Carroll Band. People sported t-shirts with the logo of the band The Dead Kennedy’s. The sound system’s base capabilities made us resonate down to the nuclei of our molecules.

But you better get ready
If you're going to Freddy's
If you're going to Freddy's store

We saw the film Badlands on the upper east side, starring Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen, and attended opening night of an off-Broadway Sam Shepard play, True West, starring John Malkovich, at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village.

Hubert returned to Frankfurt, and I took a bus far enough west into New Jersey so that I could start hitch hiking back to Oregon. The makeshift sign I posted for drivers-by read, “Urbana, IL.” There I stayed with my future wife for a week before getting back on the road. The match between us may have already been struck, but the trip, replete with a hitch across the country to Oregon identical to Hubert’s, was like an enzyme catalyzing a too-slow chemical reaction by lowering the activation energy needed for it to flame up at low temperatures.

I’ll blame that on Hubert.

POSTSCRIPT. It is late February, 2012. I just got word of Hubert’s premature passing, apparently of an accidental overdose of a sleeping medication. It is a time of mourning. My resolve is to commemorate my friend and how he changed my life with a fitting memorial the likes of which I am sure you can guess..............In the words of Jim Belushi of Animal House fame:

ROAD TRIP

Penance in a Two-Room Carriage House

Saturday January 31, 2004

The kids are with their mother, and I am in a two-room carriage house, separated, alone. The pipes have frozen in the winter chill. I wash my face with cold running water and ease back into the chair, draping my Denali expedition sleeping bag with its three pounds of down over me.

I think this is it. I’ve hit rock bottom. I can do nothing but pop another dollar rental video from the library into the VCR for the third night in a row. Such addictions of escape are in the making because there’s nothing else that I feel like doing.

WHERE ARE YOU? I suddenly cry out, like I did on a hike at that state park along the Illinois River, alarming her in front of our kids. What good are you towards whom I scream prayers only to be met with dispassionate legal steps in the drawn out continuum of divorce…and silence?

I give up. I am sorry. I really am. All she had to do was forgive me. But she couldn’t.

I think of the wonderful places I’ve been, the events I’ve witnessed, the thoughts and feelings I have had, and try in desperation to have these remembrances mitigate my feelings of loneliness and despair. There was a soothing bath, for instance, in the hot spring leading up from Kaweah Canyon below Mt. Whitney during a contiguous five week solo journey from Giant Forest to Yosemite without leaving once to replenish provisions. There was the refreshing spray on my face from Multnomah Falls along the Columbia River Gorge and puffy white clouds banging into Mt. Hood up from Camp Howard in which I taught high school kids to interpret nature for sixth graders at my soil resource station. Oh, and there was that bubbling creek sending sparkling drops flying below Mt. Goddard in the terrifying “terre incognita” of the south fork of the San Joaquin River. And I remember late night epiphanies at coffee counters in Sambo’s and the Big O Restaurant during my town freak days in Corvallis, Oregon, such as during an eight hour stretch reading Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript for the first time.

It is winter, and it is dark. So I think of light, waiting for the light. I think, for instance, of the “aha” light of sudden understanding in the faces of so many students over the years. Then what occurs to me is a centuries-old corn cob I found lying on a floor in an unexcavated Anazazi granary in Canyonlands and the heart-stopping sunlight striking the deafening silence of the canyon bed below it. I remember details of the light reactions of photosynthesis that only a fitful dream while sleeping beside her in my early years as a teacher could piece together correctly for the benefit of my Biology students. There are also the brilliant washes of pthalocyanine blue and alarizon crimson on the 100% cotton rag of my watercolors, now in storage.

We all have an innate understanding of the difference between right and wrong. Do not steal, for instance. Everybody knows that. But the penniless will steal to feed their families. The true oppressor that must be vanquished is hunger. So it is right to steal, sometimes. Forgiveness depends on the case. The movie Magnolia I am watching tonight, for instance, depicts a cop who judges the fitness of each case for forgiveness on his beat, letting some people off, even helping them make restitution, and busting others. The law, both secular and divine, is not black and white. Becoming one flesh that no one is allowed to tear asunder, for instance, cannot be taken at face value.

You call everyone to yourself. You are relentless. If nudges don’t work, then you use a two-by-four, a friend in Oregon told me recently. The stronger is the temptation, the blunter is the two-by-four. “Knock, knock. Do I have your attention yet?”

You came to seek the lost, those who would become as children and would respond like children of a parent. A child is helpless, weak, lost without the parent, rather, a guiding Teacher, as Kierkegaard wrote in that treatise. Failure can conjure up in men and women the teachable child at their center. So you do lead into temptation, situations involving right and wrong that demand a choice, in order to carry out your divine purposes, don’t you? My Oregon friend told me I am being tested. You are testing my soul, aren’t you? She said I have been called to a graduate seminar.

My friend spoke of an acupuncturist/healer who takes in internists. To work with him is a privilege, she said. I told her of the student teacher who, after observing me, said that she had yet to observe a teacher “of my caliber” in any other classroom. So I was an excellent teacher. I treated teaching as a calling. I loved it and used everything to achieve success at it. But my church challenges me to consider that there are only two divine callings: ministry or marriage. My calling had really been my marriage. Teaching was an interesting way, a way of "right livelihood" that made use of my interests and talents, to effectively put food on the table in order to feed the object of my true calling.

So here I am In my little hovel in despair, reaching rock bottom, not knowing what to do with myself. I can’t read. So I feel. I cry. I write. It’s the heart that keeps count, not the mind, right? Wait and watch. Lord God, heavenly king, the father, the almighty. What are you going to do now?