Monthly Archives: February 2015

Places and Times, El Paso, 1961

In 1961, when I was fourteen, El Paso had a population of about 200,000. I was used to Des Moines, about the same size, but Des Moines was more a matter of our south side neighborhood, and was older and traditional, but not as modern. El Paso was new, with ranch style housing spread over the desert and with wide freeways, palm-lined avenues, and sleek shopping centers. It resembled southern California, wide open, and spread over the desert and up against mountains.

Our family would come to El Paso on holidays, driving in from Roswell in our station wagon, two hundred miles through the mountains and desert, passing through the pines of Ruidoso and past adobe small towns, Tularosa and Alamogordo, then on through White Sands Missile Range, turning left towards the chiseled mountains of El Paso. The sunlight was overpowering, causing the desert to glitter. New subdivisions were under construction everywhere, consisting of stuccoed, cinder block houses with attached car ports, each house surrounded by low walls of large, tan colored stones encased in concrete. High above was the sun, a tensor point in white, but you couldn’t look at it for more than a second. The light blue sky was always cloudless, streaked with a few contrails from Air Force jets maneuvering high above.

For me, El Paso offered the feeling of modernity and promise never to be equalled. El Paso was the next Phoenix. Frankie Avalon was singing on the car radio, or was it Paul Anka, Ricky Nelson, Dion, or Fabian, the honeyed voice saying “Venus if you can, …” “Just put a little, sunlight in my hand…” Cars are high finned and sleek and pastel colored, two toned, the burgundy and white Plymouths, Chevys, or the more compact Ford Pintos, Volkswagen Beetles, and motor scooters.

Overlaid on this beautiful, modern city of the American West was the wonderful Hispanic culture, with Mexican food being a major discovery to anyone living there. There were family shopping trips in Juarez, across the border. This was at a time when there was little middle class in Mexico and I saw abject poverty for the first time. it was hard to take. My first contact was walking along the market streets, with poorly clothed, unwashed children in torn shirts and shoeless, coming up to ask if they could have a handout or watch our car for a dime. These memories do not go away. Occasionally, we would go to bullfights, going afterward for mango and strawberry juice atop the Hotel San Martin across from Juarez’s central market. The southwestern evenings were bright and things cooled down. The mountains took on a purple hue.

Although the Dodds were spread all over El Paso, they were mostly concentrated initially around Montana Avenue, and they were a very close knit family, doing almost everything together. On Sundays, they would all go to the Christian Science Church at the Scottish Rite building downtown, then all go out to lunch at Luby’s cafeteria, where there would be fifteen adults and kids spread along the table.

There were the family’s favorite eating places. Ardovado’s Italian family restaurant, which had the best shrimp pizza imaginable, a fetish I have been chasing every since, with the jumbo shrimp fresh and only partially smothered in the cheese. Cappetto’s on Montana Avenue had great veal. And, there was Elmer’s, which had the best tacos ever, with lots of shredded lettuce and spicy, hot sauce over melted cheese and ground beef inside a crispy shell, each taco wrapped individually in wax paper and placed in a paper tray for carry-out.

My cousins and I spent the days riding their scooters, a Vespa and Moto Guzzi, with me on the back, around the circular “Oasis” drive-ins with car hops taking orders on roller skates. Or, we would ride downtown to the ornate Plaza movie theater, or cruise up and down Piedras and Paisano Avenues running north and south between our aunts’ houses, or down Dyer. It was the time of the early Air Force jets, and my cousin Mark lived near Biggs Air Force Base, where we used to crawl between the wires onto the airstrip and lay down on our stomachs just off the end of the runway in the sand dunes. The jets would come at us down the runway, at first dots on the purple asphalt, sometimes with an orange glow in the center where the jet engine was, then getting larger, and halfway down the runway, lifting off and swooping up and over us with a great roar of engines. The military police, in their jeeps, would chase us off.

My uncle Bob was the storyteller in the family, reliving a lot of colorful childhood stories, some of which I had heard before. There was a lot of family lore, stories about my aunt’s appendicitis in Osceola, Iowa, which led the family to Christian Science, about the banker who absconded with my grandfather’s savings, and my grandfather’s horse, Bill, who was purchased by William Jennings Bryan, and who my grandfather called over to him once when Bryan was riding down Pennsylvania Avenue. There were tales of Iowa tornadoes and caves, and trains crossing the farm in the night, and one tale about the hired hand who almost killed my grandfather with a claw hammer, and who was tracked down by one of my mother’s half brothers.

The Dodds were typical of the changing America, a Midwest farming family who migrated west after World War II, taking sales jobs, and eventually spreading out as society became more mobile with each new generation. Ties to Iowa were ultimately lost. One cousin ended up in Phoenix; others in Tucson, Idaho, North Carolina, and California. My family moved to New Mexico, leaving only a sole cousin in El Paso. But, for me, El Paso is always 1961, on the back of a Vespa, the sun ever present, on the way to grandma’s house.

On F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sitting on the top floor of the Davidson Library at UCSB, looking out at the Channel Islands, their low gray mountains concealed by gray mist. The ocean is a dark blue, but with a few light blue currents running out like channels on the surface. I see only one sailboat, running with the rough wind and current, bobbing, its sails flapping.  I am reading F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I love Fitzgerald’s short stories, the way he displays human emotions and youthful romance, and the way he expresses people’s dreams, which are, as Malcolm Cowley said, the handle by which Fitzgerald takes hold of his characters. My favorites are stories from his early success years, 1919-24, stories full of glitter of the Jazz Age and Flappers, full of high spirit. This was a time when Fitzgerald was the spokesman for the era, defining it, along with Zelda. “Winter Dreams,” is perhaps the best of the lot, set in Lake Forest, about a poor boy, Dexter Green, who falls for debutante Judy Jones, based on Fitzgerald’s infatuation with Ginevra King while at Princeton. Winter Dreams is beautifully lyrical: “the sun went down with a riotous swirl of gold and varying blues and scarlets and left the dry, rustling night of Western summer. Dexter watched from the veranda of the Golf Club, watched the even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver molasses under the harvest moon. Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet… There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the songs of last summer and of summers before that– songs from ‘Chin-Chin and ‘The Count of Luxembourg…”

“Absolution” is my second favorite, a fascinating psychological story, with interior monologues, about Catholic boyhood in North Dakota and a repressive father and society, and ending with a great passage: “it would be night in two to three hours, and all along the land there would be these blond northern girls and tall young men from the farms lying outside the wheat meadows, under the moon.” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” is about an Eu Claire girl in St. Paul, a beautiful portrait of the early 1919 era just after the war, as the Jazz Age is beginning, showing the old and the new, the modernist changes just starting to take place. “The Sensible Thing,” is about Scott and Zelda and their broken engagement and renewal of it, using the characters George O’Kelly and Jonquil Cary in Tennessee (vice Montgomery, Ala), where George, jilted, goes off to Peru and makes big money as a mining engineer, then returns for Jonquil. There is another great paragraph: George comes back and takes Jonquil for a walk, “…but a curious thing happened. George stepped aside to let her pass, but instead, she stood still and stared at him for a minute. It was not so much the look, which was not a smile, it was the moment of silence. They saw each other’s eyes and both took a short, fairly accelerated breath, and then they went on. That was all. Never would this April moment come again.” “The Jelly Bean” is another poor boy gets rich to deserve the rich girl to no avail story. Shades of The Great Gatsby to come.

Then I came to the second period of Fitzgerald’s writing, from publication of Gatsby in 1924, until Zelda’s first breakdown in 1930, stories of glamour and disillusionment. These are about the gaudy, rich age, and and how this age ultimately brought individuals down. The Lost Generation were victims of their time, of a historical moment. There are two short stories I particularly liked from this era, “The Rich Boy,” about a spoiled wealthy boy’s feelings of superiority and his inability to find love, displaying Fitzgerald’s curiosity about the rich and how their minds work, going to clubs for dinner with friends and living alone with a valet. “The Last of the Belles,” another story based on Zelda (Ailee Calhoun) and Scott’s courtship, this time set in a Tarleton, Georgia camp town, centers on the spoiled Ailee, against the backdrop of what they hear of the horrors of war going on. Fitzgerald drops one of those illuminating insights into the era and humanity: “As they danced on the floor, a three piece orchestra was playing ‘After You’re Gone,’ in a poignant and incomplete way that I can hear yet, as if each bar were ticking off a precious minute of that tune… it was a time of youth and war, and there was never so much love around.” Another illuminating paragraph: “And now the young men of Tarleton began drifting back from the ends of the earth, some with Canadian uniforms, some with crutches or empty sleeves. A returned battalion of National Guard paraded through the streets with open ranks for the dead, and then stepped down out of the romance forever and sold you things over the counters of local stores.” And, “it seemed she was bearing him off into the lost midsummer world of my early twenties, where time had stood still and charming girls, dimly seen like the past itself, still loitered along the dusky streets.”

Then the final act, (1930-40), as disaster comes to Fitzgerald, with Zelda in a sanitarium and Scott an alcoholic. This is a new type of story, more emotionally complicated, with less regret for the past, more dignity in the face of real sorrows. We see such tragedy in his most wonderful short story, “Babylon Revisited,” about a man named Charlie Wales, who is in Paris to see his daughter, but fails to regain custody as he recovers from alcoholism. It is a sad, touching story of a father’s love. Wales drops his young daughter off at his sister-in-law’s after a visitation day together. “All right, ‘good bye Dads, Dads, Dads, Dads,’ the daughter says. He stands out front and looks up at her window, waiting in the dark street until she appeared, all warm and glowing, in the window above, and kissed her fingers out into the night…” “Babylon” has beautiful lyrical passages of Paris: “Outside, the fire-red, ghost green signs shone smoothly through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon, and the streets were in movement; the bistros gleamed… The Place de la Concord moved by in pink majesty.”

Then there is Fitzgerald’s second novel, Tender is the Night, one of my all-time favorites. Like all his works, there is glamour, with a lot of underlying thought. The story is about the decline of Dr. Dick Diver, who becomes an expatriate in France after World War I, his wife, Nicole, who suffers from schizophrenia, and the young actress Rosemary, with whom Diver has an affair.

Tender is the Night has beautiful lyrical passages which evoke the European Riviera and the time: “It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark. It was pleasant to pass people eating outside their doors, … when they turned off the Corniche d’or and down to Gausse’s hotel through the darkening bands of trees, set one behind the other in many greens, the moon already hovered over the ruins of the aqueducts…” It is a novel of imagery and lyricism. “A false dawn sent the sky pressing through the tall French windows, and getting up, she walked out on the terrace, warm to her bare feet. There were secret noises in the air, an insistent bird achieved an ill-natured triumph with regularity in the trees above the tennis court; footfalls followed a round drive in the rear of the hotel, taking their tone in turn from the dust road, the crushed stone walk, the cement steps, then reversing the process and going away…” Even Hemingway admired Fitzgerald’s genius with words.

Fitzgerald is analyzing Diver’s decline, and looking at himself in the process a bit. Diver was corrupted by money and the times, and by his early successes and what people said about him, and he had some internal weaknesses going back to his childhood. He had been brilliant at Harvard and Hopkins, became a psychiatrist, and written some good early papers which got him attention from the Austrians. But, he was not perhaps serious enough, and succumbed to a young actress, and to his wife’s easy money, taking him out of the mainstream of his work, to the Riviera, to run a guest house. The conclusion seems to be that Dick Diver was never really solid enough, even though he attracted people with his charm and intelligence. He was a good psychologist at Hopkins, did a few good scholarly papers, but never advanced beyond that initial flash and was influenced by the admiration others showed for him. He practiced in Austria, met Nicole, his patient whom he married, got involved with the rich at Antibes, and fell for a young actress, who eventually moved on. Diver should have confined himself, as his wife’s sister said at the end, to his bicycle excursions on the Riviera. When people get out of their depth, they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up. He fell eventually to alcohol and dissipation. He lost himself, as he said at one point, he wasn’t the same person he had been. He couldn’t tell what hour or month this had happened. “Once he had cut through things… but, at some point the spear had been blunted.” His psychiatrist business partner in Austria put it best: “Dick is no longer a serious man.” Dick was a bit of a romantic fool, like Fitzgerald, charged by illusions and imagination, but also destroyed by them.

At the end, Nicole is recovered, from years of just existing and taking care of the kids, and she and Dick are separated. He is, she hears from his occasional letters and from mutual friends, living in the Finger Lakes region of New York, in an inconsequential practice, still working on an unpublished treatise, having relationships with younger women, and ending up in smaller and smaller towns in the region. “Perhaps, she liked to think, his career was biding its time again, like Grant’s at Galena.”

The story is haunting and autobiographical, reminding the reader of Fitzgerald’s early phenom success, followed by his drinking, Rivera and Hollywood years, a downward spiral that led to his final heart attack in 1940 (age 44).  This is a novel less of external action than of internal consciousness. It is narrated. Fitzgerald is telling, not showing, unlike Hemingway. But, it has greatness in it. It is about how people re-define themselves as they go along in life, how they are defined by others based on their successes and failure.

 

A Simple Bus Ride

I remember how clear the day was, how beautiful, no clouds, just golden hills all around. We were bivouacked on Mauna Kea, one of two volcanic mountains on the Big Island of Hawaii. The Battalion was offering rides down to the coast to those of us with leave slips. Two Army buses, school buses painted olive drab, were waiting in the parking area, one going north to Hilo, the other southeast to Kona. Both were scheduled to depart at noon.

I was sitting on the bus to Hilo, when word came down that our bus would be delayed for about an hour. On a sudden impulse, I jumped up, grabbed my bag, and ran over to the Kona bus, getting a seat to myself in the middle on the driver’s side. In the Army, you didn’t take chances with something as important as leave; if your bus was delayed, it could get canceled and you could get stuck on guard duty. Within a few minutes, the Kona bus started up, the driver pulled the door shut, and we were off, heading over barren, slightly downhill mountainside terrain of the Parker Ranch, on a ninety minute run to the Kona coast, escorted by an Army jeep with a driver and sergeant wearing short sleeved khaki uniforms.

We were riding for about thirty minutes as the road was getting a bit steeper, with more frequent curves, winding slowly down the mountain road. We went around a couple of curves, and I could see beyond the road guards to lowland pastures below. On our right side, there was only the wall of the mountain.  I was sitting there, looking out the window and daydreaming, but was at some point aware that the bus was picking up speed considerably, and something seemed to be not quite right. As our speed increased, the soldiers in the bus began joking about the driver’s driving skills. Some were making loud bravado comments that we going to set a record to Kona. As we went faster and faster, maybe 70 miles per hour now, widely careening around curves and taking up both sides of the road, the laughter turned to concern and a couple of voices shouted “slow it down” and “stop the bus.” I could see out the right hand window that the bus was quickly overtaking the escort jeep, which was veering out of the way, the driver and sergeant having perplexed looks.

At this point, the driver yelled above the noise that the brakes were out, and we could hear him slamming the brake pedal repeatedly to the floorboard with no resistance. The transmission in the rear of the bus started making a loud thumping noise, and the driver was unable at this speed to downshift. You could hear him repeatedly trying to grind the gear shift into third gear with no luck. The bus became deadly silent. The driver yelled, “get under the seats” as we went sliding around a curve, this time almost, but not quite, tilting on two wheels, still somehow holding to the road.

Everyone, as instructed, stated climbing under the bench seats. But a few remained sitting. Some were yelling at the driver with various instructions. I hesitated in my seat a bit, watching the Parker Ranch stretch by to the side and below, and turned inward, alone in my own thoughts, aware of myself and blotting out the surrounding chaos. I was thinking that the driver must do something, probably crash the bus into the right side of the road, into the wall.  Maybe he could scrape the bus on the right side against the mountainside, using friction to slow down. It seemed the best chance– even to crash and roll on the highway rather than careen off a curve over a cliff. I was hoping he would crash now, that my mental telepathy would reach him.  By now, our speed was such that tires were constantly squealing. The driver was no longer trying to brake or downshift, he was focused on making it around curves. The bad thing, I could see from my window, was that the zig zagging mountain road ahead became even more treacherous, and the curves sharper and steeper, as the highway winded down the mountain. We were no longer on a moderate grade. There were few straightaway stretches before the next curve.

It was at this point, looking out the window when others were under their seats, and seeing my face reflected in the window, that I had sudden, strong, and knowing fear of my own mortality. What you hear is true. My life began speeding past my eyes, like a tape on fast forward, stopping three or four times to focus on a few moments. It was more or less chronological. I remember seeing myself as a grade schooler somewhere in Kansas, sitting at the table with my mom standing over the stove in the kitchen. For the first time, I could bring up a clear image of my face and hers when I was young. Then, the tape sped ahead without stopping through high school and showing my grandmother in Des Moines. For a microsecond it showed me studying in my dorm room at college. It could have been any routine day, any of the four years there. The images were all just average moments in my life, not special events. While the dorm room scene was in front of me, the thought came clearly to me, why had I labored and stayed up all night studying for exams, when it would all lead to nothing. I had wasted my time. It seemed rather silly all of a sudden as I saw myself again in the glass. What were the college efforts and dreams all for? It didn’t make sense. I had another thought at the same time, why did I make the mistake of getting off the Hilo bus at the last minute. If only I had stayed on that bus, I could still go on living for a lot more years. Now, because of that one simple mistake, I would die. If only I could somehow manage to go back to the point where I was sitting on the Hilo bus. Is that  somehow possible, I strangely wondered?

My thoughts of death were interrupted by my quick movement to get under the bus seat. It was a strange feeling, being down there under the bench. I couldn’t see anything, just hear the tires humming over the pavement and feeling the swaying movements of the bus. I remember focusing on the chipped gray paint spot on the bench leg I was gripping. Now, I realized, I was in real danger and the next two minutes would decide my life or death. I said the Christian Science mantra, the Scientific Statement of Being, that man is spiritual, not material, and that he is connected to God at all times. The driver would be guided to make the right decisions by divine science and divine truth, or God, which are in him and which go before our bus. A second later, we were off the road and bumping down a steep hillside, with all of us being jerked violently forward and backward as the bus hit mounds and depressions on the landscape, and with some seats breaking loose and some people screaming. I remember the bus hitting with the front fender, then hitting with the back fender, as if we were bucking, but we were not flipping over. I felt I now had a chance of surviving. Somehow, the driver, it appeared, had not lost control of the wheel as we ran headlong down the mountainside. Any slight turn of the wheels at that speed on a downhill run, I sensed, would still be disastrous, causing the bus to flip over and roll. What finally transpired was a ninety mile per hour run down a forty degree slope, down the hillside, never flipping or rolling, but just bucking and hitting the front and back bumpers in repeated succession during the ride down. As we finally rolled to a stop and pulled ourselves out from under the benches and debris, we noticed that the front and back windows were missing and the side windows were shattered, and that benches were strewn around inside. Most of the passengers had some minor injuries, dislocated shoulders and cuts and bruises, and two were hurt so seriously, one with broken clavicle and one with a broken back, that we had to make stretchers and lay them carefully on the grass outside while we called in a medical evacuation helicopter. It seemed that the only ones who were not hurt were the ones, like me, in the middle of the bus where the benches had remained intact. As evening approached, we were still bandaging the injured and evacuating a few by helicopter. We didn’t get back to the tents atop Mauna Kea till late that night.

The bus was towed off, a total wreck with the lower part of the front and back smashed inward, and some of the undercarriage exposed. The driver, who was cut and in tears, and shaking after getting the bus stopped, was awarded the Soldiers Medal, the highest medal possible for those displaying life saving bravery in a non-combat situation. He got it not only for his driving skill, keeping the bus upright while speeding down a fairly steep slope at high speed, but because he had the courage and sense to realize that the curves became sharper and the precipices more steep the further we went. He made the quick and tough decision to deliberately drive the racing bus off the highway on a short straightaway section, swinging left off the highway and down a sharp hillside at 90 miles per hour, flying off the road on four wheels and landing hard but flat on the down slope. As it turned out, he picked the last possible safe spot to take us off the mountain road. Beyond that point, there was nothing but sheer cliffs off the left side for ten miles. Delaying would have meant a short, wild ride on two wheels, with the bus eventually flying off a cliff.

Strangely enough, I never thought much about the incident or of the driver for the rest of my tour in Hawaii, back at Schofield Barracks on the main island of Oahu. I figured I had survived, and forgot about it. I had, perhaps, been meant to survive. Then, on my very last day in Oahu, a year later, an hour or two before going to the airport to fly home for good, I caught a surprising glimpse of the bus driver walking alone down the street by the Post Exchange. The PX was near the motor pool where the drivers worked. But, still, what a coincidence, seeing him again for the first time since the accident just as I was leaving Hawaii, going on with my life. It was as though I was being given a farewell reminder of what might have been. I might have never been here at the PX, standing in the sun, saying farewell, going on with the rest of my life.  It might have all ended a year ago.  Go ahead, I was being told, but don’t be smug.  We are mortal and chance plays a role.

Places and Times: Germany 1967

It was the summer of 1967. Frankfurt was beautiful and warm and sunny, with clear light blue skies. Flying in, I could see the flat countryside below, a patchwork of golden fields alternating with forests, and a low ridge of mountains to the East, towards the nearby Polish border.

Mercedes Benz and English Ford taxis ran down narrow cobblestone streets, with exit lanes separated from the main lanes by a row of slightly elevated alternating black and white painted bricks. There were billboards advertising “Ernte” and other German cigarettes. Esso gas stations, tucked into street corners, displayed a Bengal tiger and the slogan also seen in America, “I have a tiger in the tank.” It sounded better in German, “Ich hab’ den tiger im tank.” Everyone seemed to use bicycles and pubic transportation. There were bicycle racks everywhere. The streets were full of streetcars and well dressed Germans in expensive fabrics.

At a stand-up sidewalk cafe outside the train terminal, I ordered a Knockwurst and a half liter of dark beer, which came in a glass mug. There were two kinds of sausages, bratwurst or knockwirst, which came on a white plate with a side dab of dark mustard and a small stick to spread it on the sausage. There was also a side of potato salad on the same plate, along with the wurst and mustard. The beer was a lot richer than its American counterpart. I had two beers, and felt a bit light headed.

I got all this, including the beer for a dollar and a quarter. That was partially due to the favorable exchange rate, four Marks to the Dollar.
While standing there eating, I saw that Europe was even better than I had expected it to be. It was so different.from the U.S.  And, everything seemed so well designed with an aesthetic sense.  I practiced eating continental style, as I watched the other diners, holding my fork face down in my left hand to spear and guide food to my mouth, while keeping the knife in my right hand to cut the food and guide it onto the upside down fork.

The air was full of the aroma of sausages and beer, mixed with the pungent smells of nature coming from nearby parks and gardens and trees lining the boulevards. The music, which you could occasionally hear on the streets, was light rock, English lyrics sung with German accents, and a touch of background accordion and an “um- pa-pa” beat. The catchy tunes were repeated over and over in cafes and on taxi radios, “Memories of Heidelberg are Memories of You” and “I’m Just a Puppet on a String.” While looking up at the tops of Medieval, beamed buildings and at Gothic spires, I could hear the “clank-clank” ring of the streetcar as it took off beside me, picking up speed with a winding sound on the tracks.

I left Frankfurt that afternoon on a dark green “fast train” which made only a few stops. It had white letters saying “DB” for Deutches Bundesbahn enclosed in a narrow white frame on the locomotive, and “Frankfurt-Hamburg” stenciled on the side of each car. The cars were divided into glassed-in compartments, each with two benches facing each other. I shared a compartment with a young German couple and a Turk going north as a “gastarbeiter” or guest worker, like me. I looked out the window, watching the fields roll by, then passing small towns with crossing barriers blocking traffic at rail crossings, the cars lined up and waiting, followed by train stations flashing by for a second with a roar, as we passed the buildings, “whoosh-whoosh-whoosh,” and then they were gone. I could see occasional church steeples, and country roads, lined on both sides by trees, paralleling the tracks and shooting off into the distance.  As I got off the train at Verden/Aller late that afternoon, sixty miles south of Hamburg, the German couple in my compartment gave me the slang “Tchuss” farewell instead of “auf wiedersehen.” They wished me “viel gruss,” or a good stay in Germany.  I was surprised that the family I was assigned to live with was not waiting at the station.

While waiting at the almost deserted station to give the family some time to show, I walked out of the waiting room to the platform near the the tracks. There were dark green wooden benches, the color of the trains, under a large round clock. Looking across the tracks, I could see part of the downtown area, with small shops and their neatly lettered logos, and cobble stoned streets, and a large Gothic cathedral in the distance. The signs on buildings indicated a barber salon, or “frisseur,” a flower shop, a cafe, and others I couldn’t’ t make out. The buildings were mainly red brick or stone, and gave the city an older, more traditional German appearance than that of Frankfurt. Even though Verden was small, about 30,000 inhabitants, it did not look provincial. There were red and white bordered posters and signs with horse motifs everywhere, saying “Reiterstadt Verden,” or “horse capital, Verden.”

While looking around, I noticed to my left, at the far end of the platform, two stocky German boys bullying a thinner boy who was not wanting to fight. There didn’t seem to be any Germans around to intercede, but an elderly German man wearing a beret appeared, hurriedly walking his bicycle over. The older man said something in an ordering tone to the two, with an elder’s gruff authority. The two bullies then turned their attention to the elderly man, grabbing his bicycle from his grasp and throwing it to the ground. I could see the surprise in the face of the older man as he stepped back from the two and put his arm up in defense, but the larger youth punched the elder in the face, not too hard, but enough to cause him to stagger back and bend down at his knees to the ground, wiping his bleeding nose.  Then the two turned and casually walked away, not saying a word, while he was searching on the ground for his glasses. He found his glasses, calmly picked up his bike, and he and the younger victim shook hands and walked off their separate ways. It was as if nothing had happened.

I had been unprepared for violence like that. The Germans seemed pretty rugged, and I wondered if the culture wasn’t a bit more primitive.  I was shocked at the openness of it, and the fact that that the boy hit an elderly man with his fist. I had a hard time seeing this happening in America, and knew this first impression of Germany would last a long time.

After waiting a while at the station and failing in my attempt to use the pay phone, I caught a taxi to the smaller village where I was to work, about 20 miles away, along a two-lane, winding country road. The highway was narrow and the small European cars came fast around the curves and over the hills. We were passed by drivers flashing their front lights behind us to tell us they were coming by. The countryside was lush and the grass green and thick, and we went over rolling hills, with fields to the side separated by stone walls and hedges. There were woods as well in the uncleared stretches, and it was beginning to get a bit dark with a red glow of the very low setting sun behind them.  I noticed the instruments lights of the taxi for the fist time.

When we got to the village, I discovered it was just an intersection of two country roads, with three or four farm houses clustered around it, plus a “gasthaus” or tavern on the intersection corner, and a couple of large storage barns nearby. Nearby, in the fading light, I could see another five or six large white farm houses beyond tilled fields. It appeared this was a small community of perhaps a dozen farm families, and Gasthaus bar and restaurant.

“Are all of these private farms, I asked, practicing my German?”

“Yes, but they share farm machinery and barns. Everybody works together in the fields of all during harvest, “ernte.” So that was what the cigarette ads meant.

“Do they keep their own profits?” I was thinking they might be a communal arrangement of some kind.

“Naturally.” The driver got out and asked at the gasthouse for the particular farm where I was to work, which, it turned out, was just next door.

When he got back in, I said “are they wealthy?”

“Who?”

“The farmers here.”

“Black on white,” the driver said, which meant clearly so. “Maybe not so rich,” he thought it over, “and times are hard for farming, but these are old farms and are valuable, and have pigs and horses, the best in Europe. See the new Mercedes” he added, referring to the car in the drive as we were pulling up to the farm house. “The car and the tractors are all diesel, and share the pump.” The driver rubbed his thumb across his upturned finger tips together, meaning a way to save money, pointing to a large elevated barrel in the drive, with pump handle and hose coming from one side, and meter on the other.

“Why is there a gasthouse in such an unpopulated area? Is there enough business?”

“There are lot of people here in the area, “in der nahe,” which meant fairly close, not in the whole county, but “in the close villages.”

My new German family, which was hosting me for the summer, and with whom I had corresponded twice, came out to the taxi to meet me enthusiastically. There was a mother and father of my parents’ generation, perhaps a bit older, and two adult children, a son and daughter in their late twenties or early thirties, I guessed.

That first night, I sat at the kitchen table with the family, and we tried to understand each other. I was surprised to discover that my two years of college German were not enough to get by well. The family spoke a German dialect, “Plattdeutsch,” which I could not make out. Fortunately, the son spoke high German and helped out.

Our  conversation was interrupted by the alarm that one of the bulls had gotten loose in the stall with the cows, and we all ran out to drive him back into a separate stall with sticks, the women swatting from behind the fence, and the men going inside. Fortunately, the bull, who didn’t want to leave, was not aggressive. They laughed at my inexperience on a farm, and said, laughingly, one of my jobs would be to drive the bulls down the country roads from one pasture to another. They said we had better get to bed, since we have to be up at 4:30 to milk the cows.

My German family, it turned out, consisted of the father, short and rotund, in his mid 60s, who owned the farm and helped out, but had stepped aside to allow his son, Friedrich to run things on a day-to-day basis. This seemed unusual, but it later became clear that the parents had the final say on things. The mother and her daughter ran the kitchen and did the housework. There was a frail grandfather, “Opa,” who didn’t come out much.

The son, Friedrich, who would be my boss, looked to be in his early thirties. He had a fiancee in town. Friedrich was very Saxon looking. He was about 5’11”, with straw blond hair, and was of strong build, with broad back and veins showing on his almost Popeye-like muscled lower arms. He had a rather square face, lively blue gray eyes, and was handsome and Nordic looking, and spoke in clipped sentences. Like most Germans, he was confident, serious, and very bright.

The family also had a hired hand of long standing, Ernst, who had a bedroom upstairs above the barn. Ernst was about Friedrich’s age, but looked a bit worn and blue collar. He was tall and thin and blond also, but kept mostly to himself. Ernst was a hard worker and strong, and he, Friedrich, and the father all worked well together. There was no socializing among them after work. Talking to Ernst after work, I learned that he was a communist

I got along very well the family and tried hard. Friedrich was protective of me, not letting me do dangerous duties, which were many. He complimented me one day for the way I literally ran everywhere, from errand to errand, as they did. He joked with affection “you are a good worker, but bad farmer, “du bist a guter arbeiter, aber schlecter bauer.”  I made a lot of mistakes, not knowing the difference between piles of hay and straw, and once running the tractor wheels over the stalks, instead of between the crops, ruining a strip of vegetables that had been planted. Friedrich was a bit strained that day, but didn’t make an issue of it.

I was gradually improving my language skills and becoming accustomed to hard labor. I enjoyed the feeling of farm work, of being out in the fields close to nature and weather, riding the tractor all alone, or taking care of the pigs, or grooming the show horses. I got used to getting up at 4:30 to milk the cows, then working the fields, and falling asleep at lunch for a nap like the others. I especially liked the mid-morning coffee break, or “coffee trinken,” in the fields, with the mother and daughter bringing out cold black coffee and fatty sausage sandwiches on dark rye bread. I enjoyed the dinners with boiled potatoes, thinly sliced prosciutto, and strudel for desert. I even enjoyed herding the bulls along the road from pasture to pasture, driving them with a stick. Neighboring farmers on tractors, in their German Feldsher uniform hats from the war, would see me in my surplus American khaki shirt, and we would wave at each other on the roads. The war was over, even though it was only twenty-two years behind.

The only problem was Friedrich’s father, who didn’t seem to particularly like me.  I learned from Friedrich that the father had been in an American POW camp at the end of the war, which could explain it, since the war between the Americans and Germans in Europe had been bitter. But, why would he hire an American? Maybe Friedrich, rather than the parents, made the decision, based on the fact that he was now running the farm and had to make a profit. He provided room and board, and wages of 160 marks per month, or forty dollars, for which he got an additional hand.

The family never discussed politics. They seemed very traditional and insular, and didn’t seem to interested in what was going on in Bonn and elsewhere. Friedrich seemed more open and liberal than the parents.

“Friedrich, I asked one day while we were working, “what was it like here during the war?”

Friedrich said he had been young and couldn’t remember much, but he could recall that “you could see the fires of Hamburg at night after the terrible British bombing raids.” It was nice, I thought, for him to single out the British for me. “And,” Friedrich said, “the children from the big cities were evacuated to the countryside.” Perhaps, I suddenly realized, I had over-estimated Friedrich’s age.  It sounded like he had been a small child then.  Maybe he was now in his mid twenties, but looked and acted older. His serious manner suggested that Germans grew up faster, like my father’s generation in the U.S.

“I heard that in this part of Germany, even the youth of twelve to fourteen years had gone to the woods and put up a fierce armed resistance to the British Army as it moved in,” I said to Friedrich,  having heard this from two British soldiers stationed in Verden.

“Not so,” Friedrich said. “It was youth brigades, military units, and not so young, maybe sixteen. They didn’t fight in the forests like partisans, but with regular army units in the cities and wherever.” I loved the last word, “irgendwo.” Something about the way Friedrich answered, however, averting his eyes, made me unsure of his answer.

“The people here,” Friedrich added, “were mainly exempt from the war because they were farmers and were needed to provide food.”

“Was your father treated badly as a POW?”

Friedrich thought carefully a second, realizing this was not an innocent question, but was potentially related to my relationship with his father. “No, treatment was normal,” Friedrich  said thoughtfully, selecting his words carefully. “He was only a prisoner at the end, when the war was practically over.” He used the word “vorbei,” or “past.”

“Naturally, there was disappointment over the losing,” he added after a pause, “and some unhappiness over the bombing. But, all that is past, and people no longer feel anger.” Friedrich said something general about war, or “krieg,” grimaced, and made a gesture with his hand like brushing it away. Friedrich seemed to be what was called the “good German,” part of of the younger generation with different attitudes. The older Germans of his parents generation, were often unrepentant so far as I could tell. They had no interest in me.

The family and I generally avoided discussing the war. Once, however, Friedrich, Ernst, and a neighbor’s son started talking with me about World War II songs as we were fixing a gate together. I initiated this, jokingly, starting with “don’t sit under the apple tree, with anyone else but me…” and “this is the army Mr. Jones, no private rooms and telephones…” The German songs, I quickly discovered, despite their laughing about them, were a bit more malicious, “an American, little American, lands in the army and gets a ‘springer-bomber’ that he brings over with him. Let him come, let him fall, let him be destroyed with all the others…..”  I could, for the first time, envision the anger of a German fighter pilot relentlessly firing at a B-17.

Ernst also sang these war songs, which was interesting, since he was still a communist, from the GDR, and theoretically should have had a distaste for German fascism. He, too, sang the songs, a bit too enthusiastically. Ernst returned home to the “East Zone,” near Leipzig, once a year during his vacation from the farm. I asked how he got home to his family, through the border, and he wouldn’t say, just that there were ways, places, to get in. To me, it was strange that the family would hire a communist as farm hand. Ernst just indicated that “they were all Germans.”

After a while, I started noticing “reunification” signs along the highways near Verden, Soltau, Celle, Viselsholde, and Luneburg, and other small towns on the Luneburg Heide, displaying a map of Germany divided into occupation zones by color.  The signs said “five parts, never!”

Living abroad for the first time, I had lots of new experiences, more in one day than I would have in the U.S. in a whole summer. It was an awakening. I would bicycle into Verden on Saturday mornings to go to the British forces “Toc-H” library, looking at magazines and books, then walk around the town, bicycling back in the evenings, occasionally dodging cars coming from behind with the blinkers on, riding into the ditch. These were, nonetheless, idyllic rides in the evening and night. There was nothing to fear except the cars, and the ride was peaceful, under the bright moon and amid the forests, smelling the humid smell of the grass and woods and fields. I would talk to the cows and horses along the fence as I passed. I was on the great northern European plain, and it was beautiful.

On weekends, Friedrich and his father took me to local shooting festivals, or “schutzenfest.” The Germans wore green felt jackets with their shooting medals displayed on the lapels. Or, we went to Luneburg, to horse shows. I joined the “landjugend,” or local 4-H club for farm kids, going to parties at their houses on weekends, plus trips to the North Sea and Harz mountains. Looking down from the Harz, I could see two villages on either side of a double strip of fence and watch towers, the border between East and West as it stretched across Germany, going over the hills north and out of sight. I could see people on the far side working fields and vehicles moving in the towns and people walking normally the streets. It was like looking at ant colonies in another world.

In early July, another American college student, another “gastarbeiter,” named Gene, arrived to work on the farm next to mine.  When we could get away on Sundays, we took trains to Hanover and Bremen, walking the streets all day, and returning late. These cities were much like Frankfurt, but Hamburg, on the other hand, was more Baltic and different. The nights were darker and colder, it had a northern feeling, even in the summer. The city was elegant, and seemed somehow English. There were sailing regattas, and finely dressed people sitting in sharp cafes and living in elegant Hansa homes, which looked Tudor, with manicured lawns reaching to the Alster. One felt separate from the rest of Germany which was far to the south. There were ships going to eastern Baltic ports.

Where I really wanted to be, however, was London. That’s where Ellen was, living for the summer.  We had gone to different colleges after high school, where she had met someone else and we had broken up.  I wanted her back, and sent her a postcard from the farm, which I dropped off in Verden, hoping to get a response. I thought about going to London, even if only to see her on the street, even if she didn’t see me.  I told myself that I just needed to see her again. The crossing point to England, Bremerhaven on the North Sea, was not far away.

One day on the farm, I noticed a letter with Ellen’s handwriting sitting on the mantel, and the mother said “you have a letter from England.” They knew it was from a girl from the handwriting . But, we never opened mail until after we had completed dinner, so I had to wait. After dinner I took the card to my room. Ellen said she was transferring to university in England, and the tone was casual and suggested friendship, giving her phone and address. There was no encouragement. I tried to put her out of my mind.

On the farm, relations with Friedrich’s father had gradually gone from bad to worse. He was increasingly put out that I had no farm experience, and valued being a good farmer more than being a good worker. He would shake his head at my mistakes and walk away, while Friedrich would take me around the shoulder and show me the right way. The father knew high German of course, but still refused, unlike Friedrich, to use it. By August, the father had developed the habit of making jokes at my expense.  One night at the “gasthouse,” the father got drunk and started pointing to me across the room, making loud derogatory jokes to his friends, who were also laughing. He called me to the table to say something rude that I didn’t understand. I objected to the father’s behavior, bringing the split into the open.  The father got furious that his employee talked back, and Friedrich interceded on the my side, and took me over to his table, apologizing for his father.

My standing with the family had begun to deteriorate. I imagined they resented my association with Gene, and our trips together on weekends, when I could have been doing extra work around the farm. Seeing the end of summer approaching, I was also interested in seeing a bit more of Germany in the few remaining weekends I had available, rather than chipping in around the farm on Saturday.

Things came to an end in early August, the first week of harvest, when the father and I got into a spat in the barn over the issue whether i could leave his employment a couple of weeks early, in late August, to see Europe.  The father was naturally angered that I would even consider leaving early, before harvest was complete, and stomped his feet, calling me a “short shit,” or “kurzscheisse,” even though I towered over him. The father even used clear, high German. I was probably looking for an excuse to leave, tired of working for practically nothing, and wanting to see more of Europe before my flight home.  I quit right there, packed, and took off with my suitcase down the road to the gasthouse where I called a taxi. In the driveway before I left, things had calmed down a bit, and I said goodbye to the family, including the mother and daughter. The father stayed in the house. Friedrich had sided with his father, but he and I had a cordial farewell.

I went on to tour Western Europe, with backpack and sleeping bag, hitchhiking, riding trains, and sleeping at the sides of roads and in doorways like the multitude of other American students in Europe that summer. I started by going back to Hamburg, where I stayed in the youth hostel near the Rapperbahn, rising to the sound of a loudspeaker saying “aufsteigen,” and helping with the kitchen work. From there I took a train to Berlin, then hitchhiked back to Munich through the East German corridor, which was technically illegal. I took the train to Innusbruck and on to Switzerland, where I spent my twentieth birthday rowing on Lake Zurich.  I somehow made it to Florence, staying in the youth hostel, which was a large villa, and then hitchhiked through Mount Blanc into France and into the Low Countries, and arriving back in Cologne, staying with German students, feeling back home. My German had improved a lot during three weeks of travel, and I was reading german authors, albeit slowly with English-German dictionary in hand.

In my travels, I seemed to be gravitating towards Germans, which showed that the farm experience had not hurt my love of Germany. Maybe it had something to do with Friedrich’s decency and the fact that my grandmother was of German descent.  Maybe it was the German culture and rich intellectual history that I admired. I particularly liked the German girls, but never seemed to get anywhere with them.

While traveling and talking to German students at the University of Cologne and other young Germans on the road, I discovered some interesting facts about my small part of Germany. I learned that the area of forests and marshes between the Weser and Elbe rivers, including the Luneburg Heide where my farm was located, was the site of the fiercest battles between the Roman legions and “barbarian” Germanic tribes, and the one area where the tribes couldn’t be conquered. I also learned that, during the Middle Ages, the area where I worked had also been the headquarters of the longstanding Saxon revolt against the Frankish Kingdom. Charlemagne had finally ended the revolt, killing four thousand captured Saxon insurgents over four days, beheading over one thousand per day on the trunk of their sacred tree in their sacred grove, near Verden.

On a visit to the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich, I was in for a bigger surprise, seeing a map of the Holocaust which showed the Bergen- Belsen concentration camp was located near the farm where I had lived, near Soltau. I was surprised on learning that I had been working near Belsen and no one on the farm had said a thing.

It was time to return to the U.S.

On my way out of Europe that summer, I had ticketed the “through train” from Hamburg to Frankfurt.  I had gone to Hamburg, planning to make a side trip to nearby Bremerhaven, where I could catch the ferry to England, but had turned around and returned to Hamburg instead.

At the Hamburg rail station, waiting for my train to Frankfurt and home, I picked up a copy of “Die Zeit” newspaper. Settling into my compartment on the train, I asked the porter passing in the hallway for a sandwich and dark beer. As the train headed south, I put down my paper, and looked out at Verden and the surrounding countryside as we passed by. I regretted the fact that I had not stayed on the farm through harvest.  But, my mind was on Ellen.