My Black Angel & Ana Mendieta

“I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is … a return to the maternal source. Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth…. I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body.”  –Ana Mendieta

In 1961, as part of a covert U.S. government action called Operation Peter Pan, twelve-year-old Ana Mendieta and her older sister were flown from Havana to Dubuque, Iowa. In all, 14,000 Cuban children were evacuated in response to their parents’ fears of Fidel Castro’s Communist regime. The sisters were lodged at St. Mary’s Orphan Home[1] in Dubuque and then, for the next four years, were shuttled between foster homes in Cedar Rapids until Ana graduated from Regis High School. She studied at the University of Iowa from 1969 to 1977, earning two master’s degrees and jump-starting her career as a ground-breaking multimedia performance artist. One of her performances would happen at a locally famous site in Iowa City’s Oakland Cemetery.

This year, on the last night of August, as a crescent moon was rising on the eastern horizon, my friend and I walked one block from her house on Brown Street into that cemetery. We commented on how dark it had suddenly become – no streetlights, no house lights, no headlights, and large trees blocking out the city around us. We were soon engulfed by the sonorous call-and-response of a choir of tree frogs. Walking deeper into the cemetery, we could see a glimmer in the distance. As we approached the light, we realized it was a lamppost illuminating the Black Angel, likely placed there by cemetery staff to discourage acts of vandalism or bacchanalian gatherings.

The Black Angel is a popular attraction, a statue commissioned by a mother to look down on the grave of her son, who died at the age of eighteen. To the left of the angel stands his headstone, a sculpture of a ragged tree stump with an ax head buried in it to symbolize a life cut short.[2] The unusual color of the angel, combined with the overactive imaginations and superstitious tendencies of college students, has led to a plethora of urban legends about curses of all types, which enwrap the statue in a patina of mystery and might explain the offerings left at its feet.[3]

I’ve walked and biked past the Black Angel many times. When I arrived in Iowa City in 1975, my first apartment was two blocks away on Reno Street; then in the 1990s, I would bike by it on a shortcut from my home on the east side of town to my job on the north side. I’ve admired it, studied it, but always respectfully kept my distance. It is rather foreboding – the angel, her enormous wings raised, towers thirteen feet above ground level and has been blackened by the natural oxidation process of the bronze.

But that night I felt emboldened, perhaps because my friend was with me, perhaps because no one else was in the cemetery. I climbed atop the four-foot-tall pedestal, using the tree stump gravestone to give me a boost. I sidestepped the day’s offerings and, with little room to do anything else, looked up at the Black Angel and hugged her around the waist. I never realized how attractive she is. Her long sheer gown clings, revealing the figure of a young woman. When viewed at ground level, her facial features are enshrouded by hair that hangs down around her face. But from my vantage point, I could, for the first time, see her face clearly. Although her eyes were closed, I felt her tenderly looking down at me. Some artistic vandal had smeared her lips with red lipstick, which somehow made her look more beautiful. Graffiti had been scratched into the bronze of her upper torso, but the accretion of patina was slowly obscuring those marks. A swarm of paper wasps had built a nest in her left armpit. Smitten, I hugged her longer than seemed proper, and then carefully climbed down.

The Czech Bohemian woman who commissioned this statue,[4] Teresa Doležal Feldevert, immigrated with her son, Eddie, to the nearby Goosetown neighborhood in 1878 and found work as a midwife. After Eddie’s death in 1891, she moved from city to city, eventually settling in Eugene, Oregon, and remarrying. When this husband died, Teresa inherited his cattle ranch and used some of her wealth to build this monument. On the base of the statue, beneath the raised letters “Rodina Feldevertova,”[5] are engraved “Nicholas Feldevert 1825–1911” and “Teresa Feldevert 1836–” They are buried beneath the large stone slab that extends in front of the sculpture. She died in 1924, but no one was left to add her end date. 

In 1975, Ana Mendieta, performed one of the early iterations of her earth/body sculpture series Siluetas[6] at the Black Angel site. According to Jane Blocker,[7] Mendieta filmed herself lying face down on the stone slab, arms outstretched, dressed in black, then rising to sprinkle handfuls of black pigment powder to form a body outline, adding a pile of red pigment powder in the area of her heart and a large black X over the entire silhouette, and finally looking directly at the Black Angel and swinging her leg in a wide arc to sweep away the silhouette. We can offer many interpretations of this performance: an act of commemoration, an identification with maternal grief and the immigrant’s pain of displacement, a ritualistic enactment of death and rebirth, a healing ceremony. Perhaps it was all of these, and more.

My friend and I continued our walk. We headed back toward her house, taking a different route, picking our way through an unfamiliar corner of the cemetery that borders Church Street. The large oaks, hickories, and pines intensified the darkness. The nineteenth-century gravestones leaned off-kilter, rimed with lichen. At one point, I came to a stone border that demarcated a narrow paved lane no longer in use as a cemetery entrance. I looked down in the dark and estimated that the lane was at most a foot below where I stood. As I stepped down, I realized I had gravely misjudged the distance and was stepping into air, unsure when I would land. I was falling, but it felt like slow motion, like an unseen hand had reached out to help me down.

When I was a child, one of the few framed artworks in our house was a small reproduction that depicted a guardian angel hovering over a boy and girl at play unaware of their proximity to a precipice. The scene gave my mother some reassurance as she sent the ten of us out to play beyond her reach and sight. The actual distance of that step down was three feet. I tipped forward, breaking my landing with my hands and right knee, while my left ankle scraped against that stone border. My friend said I just disappeared from sight in front of her. That misstep earned me a few scrapes, but no blood, no broken bones, not even a bruise. Some might say my fall was the Black Angel avenging the liberties I had taken with her. I prefer to think she was protecting me.

On September 8, 1985, the Cuban-American feminist artist Ana Mendieta fell to her death from her 34th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village. Many believed she was pushed, whether intentionally or accidentally, by her husband, the artist Carl Andre, in the midst of a heated argument. I want to believe an angel was with her, perhaps not to save her but at least to hold her hand as she flew to the earth, filling her with peace in that last moment of her life.

Footnotes:

[1] Run by Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, the facility shifted its mission in the 1960s to serving “hard to care for children.”

[2] The last three lines of the headstone’s inscription: “I was not granted time to bid adieu / Do not weep for me dear mother / I am at peace in my cool grave.”

[3] Such as Norway spruce cones, a pair of tea roses, a guitar pick, a beaded star brooch, a couple of dollars folded under a piece of pink quartz, small piles of quarters and pennies, and two unexpired credit cards!

[4] The sculptor was a Czech-American artist, Mario Korbel, who also sculpted the Alma Mater statue located at the entrance to the Universidad de La Habana, which young Ana Mendieta may have seen.

[5] Czech for “The Family Feldevert.”

[6] The Stanley Museum of Art is now showing a piece of hers documenting three other Siluetas, as well as two films she made during her years in Iowa City.

[7] See her essay “The Black Angel: Ana Mendieta in Iowa City,” published in The Latino/a Midwest Reader, University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Rough Carpenter (Jobs of My Youth #3)

Mike, Jon, me, and Brother Ralph standing in front of the modular home factory we helped build

“It’s not just that you’re an adolescent at the end of your teens, but that adulthood, a category into which we put everyone who is not a child, is a constantly changing condition; it’s as though we didn’t note that the long shadows at sunrise and the dew of morning are different than the flat, clear light of noon when we call it all daytime. You change, if you’re lucky, strengthen yourself and your purpose over time; at best you are gaining orientation and clarity, in which something that might be ripeness and calm is filling in where the naïveté and urgency of youth are seeping away.”  –Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

When my county road crew gig wrapped up at the end of the summer, I got ready to start my next job, one for which I received no financial compensation. In the last semester of my senior year, I decided to postpone college and commit to doing volunteer work with my classmates Jon and Mike for a Catholic order called Glenmary Home Missioners. Although I attended a college prep high school, I don’t remember anyone from the counselors office asking me about my college plans, and my parents never broached the subject.[1] Maybe this lack of initiative on my part indicated I wasn’t ready to make that step. In any case, when I heard about Jon and Mike’s plan to take what is now called a gap year, I jumped at the chance to join them. By September 1972, we were driving east on the Penn Turnpike toward McConnellsburg, a south-central Pennsylvania borough located in Big Cove Valley, amidst the Ridge and Valley section of the Appalachians. We were on our way to help out with Glenmary’s Project HOPE (Homes On People’s Energy). 

More precisely, we were helping Brother Ralph build homes for and with the families that lived on The Ridge, a segregated Black community located a mile outside of town. Brother Ralph became our mentor and friend. Raised on a farm in southern Indiana, he was a man of saintly simplicity, as easy-going and tender-hearted as they come. One of our favorite interchanges went something like this: Ralph would be kidding one of us about something. We’d say, “Brother Ralph, are you making fun of me?” He’d reply with a chuckle, “Shucks, I can’t make fun of you – the fun’s already there.” We never tired of that joke.

Brother Ralph was a skilled master builder. Thanks to his patient guidance, we learned how to lay cinder block, drive a sixteen-penny nail, toenail a rafter beam into place, mud sheetrock, install windows, doors, and electrical outlets. We experienced the exhilaration of nailing together the two-by-fours that became the frame of an exterior wall and then raising it, the four of us together, into place. 

I enjoyed the construction work – the pleasures of learning the craft and using what I learned to build something as essential as a home. I also enjoyed building friendships with the tight-knit group of families on The Ridge. That fall we sometimes lent a hand to a local roofing outfit run by Bob Wolford and Harvey Kneese. They were funneling their roofing business profits into a project to build a modular home factory. The agreement was that, in exchange for our donated labor, Bob and Harvey would offer discounted rates to families on The Ridge who wanted to buy one of their homes. 

Jon, Mike, and I helped them replace a few lovely old gray slate roofs with asphalt shingles. They didn’t let us up on those high steep-pitched roofs, but we’d serve as the ground crew, tossing the pieces of slate into a dump truck, lugging packets of shingles up the ladder to the crew. We also spent a couple of beautiful autumn days on the low-pitched roof of an auto dealership on Lincoln Way[2] at the east edge of town, preparing the roof for fresh shingles by prying up the old ones with roofing spades. We would occasionally stop, take a deep breath and a long swig of water, stretching our aching backs as we looked east to the wooded slopes of Tuscarora Mountain or west toward town and Sheep Meadow Mountain beyond. Then we’d get back to it. 

Our nine-month stint in McConnellsburg was not all work. Brother Al Behm, director of Glenmary’s volunteer program, occasionally visited us. Late that fall, the four of us drove to Glenmary’s retreat house and youth center in Fairfield, Connecticut, for the weekend. He engaged us in some deep discussions about “life’s big questions.”[3] And I got my first taste of Manhattan when we took the train down to the city. We caught the newly released movie Sounder, featuring the great actor Cicely Tyson and a soundtrack by Taj Mahal, and saw our first Broadway play, Joseph Papp’s production of Two Gentleman of Verona.

By late fall, the six of us – Bob, Harvey, Brother Ralph, Jon, Mike, and I – had begun constructing a 50-by-100-foot sheet-metal building in a sheep pasture on a wind-bitten hillside west of town. When the site was being leveled and dirt needed to be moved, I learned how to use a stick shift ... while learning how to drive a dump truck, pretty much killing that transmission. 

I gained respect for any construction work done outdoors in the winter. Because of the need for precision when framing a steel building and the unforgiving nature of that material, we did a lot of standing around before we wrestled a steel column into the bolts of a concrete pier or persuaded two roof trusses to meet at the ridge with the help of a log loader. Handling the steel was miserably cold work – I had not yet learned the perfect practicality of Carhartt coveralls. 

By March we were helping to construct the first modular home, its two halves efficiently built side-by-side on flatbed platforms that would then be hauled out through the large sliding doors by semi trucks. And not long after that, we were back on The Ridge, putting the finishing touches on a sturdy two-story house for Bebe and her four kids, painting the interior and exterior walls, installing cabinets and sinks and toilets, laying carpet and linoleum flooring, and replacing the temporary cinder block steps with an inviting front porch. When Bebe and her family moved in, we joined the rest of The Ridge in a huge housewarming potluck. Bebe, the tough matriarch who rarely cracked a smile when she worked alongside us on the house, could barely stop beaming.

By the end of May, Jon, Mike, and I[4] were saying goodbye to Brother Ralph, our friends on The Ridge, our second-floor apartment overlooking Lincoln Way. We were driving home in the blue 1952 Chevy Impala that Ralph had used to transport us all to work sites and then sold to me for one dollar. The tail fins of that Impala felt like wings slicing through air as we drove west toward Ohio and the next chapter of our lives.

Footnotes:

[1] My father had gone to Marquette University on the GI Bill after World War II, my mother never attended college, and they were probably too busy raising my younger nine siblings to think much about this.

[2] U.S. Route 30, also known as the Lincoln Highway, which follows the route of the 18th-century Philadelphia-to-Pittsburgh Turnpike.

[3] The following year, Brother Al included two of my poems in his 12-page booklet titled “I Never Met a Bad One,” which began “...but I have met some of you who have been confused, looking for the thing that will make you happy, and that doesn't always mean what feels good.”

[4] By then, we were known around town as “the church boys.”

Road Worker (Jobs of My Youth #2)

Four Brothers, Hudson, Ohio, 4 June 1972

“You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally. Youth is a high-risk business.”    –Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence

The words happen and happy both derive from the same Old Norse word, happ, meaning “good luck.” I sometimes reflect on how my life has unfolded, and the relationship between what has happened to me and my happiness. I know the latter had something to do with luck but also with finding a measure of contentment among those “simple twists of fate.”

The photograph introducing this piece is worth an explanation. This portrait of brothers – from left to right, Jon, Jim, me, Michael – was taken at Jim’s home the evening of our high school graduation. We were basking in the warmth of our friendship and the spotlight of our achievements. Jim shared the photo with the three of us at the recent reunion of the Walsh Jesuit High School Class of ’72. Studying this fifty-year-old photo, one can almost foresee the trajectories of our lives. 

Jon – in my opinion, the leader of our class – instead of facing the photographer, turns to the rest of us, more interested in our reactions to the moment, already preparing to become the empathetic school psychologist. Jim offers his wonderfully engaging smile. He would eventually apply his gregariousness, love of global travel, and facility with languages to a career with Rail Europe. His signature lighthearted chuckle often punctuates things he’s said, part amused by his statement, part sheepish about his amusement. Michael, at first blush a ball of red-haired energy, is an unexpectedly gentle and soft-spoken man. We are both introverts, writers, poets, who for portions of our lives shared our love of literature with students, Michael at the college level, me at the high school level.

We were fully aware that we stood on the cusps of our lives. Behind our good front of bravado and self-confidence, something else was brewing. One only need notice what we were doing with our hands – well, not Jon’s self-assured cowboy pose, thumbs tucked in his belt, but the hands in pockets, hands in fig-leaf pose, crossed arms – to see that we were unconsciously signaling our understandable anxiety about the future.

Within a week of graduation, I started a job working for the Summit County Roads Department, tending the roadways in rural Twinsburg Township, north of Hudson and east of what would later become the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I had my father to thank for this government job. He was a liquor salesman, which meant he spent his workdays schmoozing the owners and bartenders of one restaurant or tavern after another. His goal was to persuade those people to put his brands in the well, but he knew the best way to do that was by building relationships. He truly enjoyed getting to know people, telling stories and jokes, talking with them about their businesses. Through all this, he developed the kind of connections that could land me a summer job taking care of the county’s roads.

This was my first time working on a crew. The road maintenance garage we worked out of was home to a dozen full-time workers. I quickly learned who the chiefs were and the pecking order of the rest of the outfit, an order decided mostly by seniority but to some extent by charisma. I was one of three summertime workers, but the only rookie, the others being college students returning for their second or third season. I did what any newbie should do – watched, listened, took mental notes, put up with teasing that seemed a kind of initiation, and learned how to fit in. I dutifully laughed at the jokes, sensing from the reactions of others that they’d all heard the punchlines before. 

Road work is manual labor of course, at times physically demanding, and I sometimes finished a shift exhausted. But I followed the lead of the full-timers, who showed me how to pace myself, and reminded me with their looks that I would gain nothing by showing them up with my youthful energy and enthusiasm. I was grateful for these tips; certain members of the crew took me under their wings in a way that felt paternal or at least avuncular. I learned how to handle the scythes and beat-up mowers we used to trim the grass around guardrails. I learned how to wield a wide-scoop shovel, reaching into the back of the bright orange dump truck for a shovel-load of gravel and slinging it so it spread evenly over fresh tar. I also learned how to lean on that shovel so it looked like I was doing something when there was nothing to do.

This was also my first time punching a time clock. Punctuality was required; I was no longer a high school student, and being late resulted in harsher consequences than a frown from one’s teacher. I’d punch in and then join the crew, who would invariably loll around sipping bad coffee and swapping stories for a half-hour before we hopped in the trucks and headed off to some work site. There was a side benefit to this job: One of the other summer workers was dealing a little pot on the side. A few times that summer, we’d slip away near the end of lunch and meet at his car so I could buy an ounce from him, something the full-timers would’ve never condoned.

During those three months in the employ of the county, “chipping up rocks for the great highway,” I came to appreciate the pleasure of doing a hard day’s work. I took a particular pride in the muscle-tiredness from eight hours of manual labor, the tan lines of being outdoors, and the calluses of working with my hands. I was also given a glimpse into the mind-numbing routines of such work and how it could wear on a body over a lifetime.

Paperboy (Jobs of My Youth #1)

One of my favorite jobs from the early 1980s - apprentice printer at Coffee House Press. Me on the left getting ready to ink the clamshell platen press, Allan Kornblum on the right running the ATF Little Giant flatbed cylinder press.

A week ago, my neighbor Loren stopped by to ask if I could lend him and his cousin Quentin a hand with pouring a backyard patio slab. I said I’d be glad to. So, early Monday morning, as a concrete mixer chugged up our quiet side street, I finished my bowl of granola and hustled over to his house. I was the youngest guy on our crew, so I wheelbarrowed the concrete from the mixer on the street to the slab form behind the house. Loren pointed where to drop each load as they adjusted the rebar and leveled the surface with a two-by-four screed. The work brought back memories of my days as a hod carrier for a brick crew in Butler County, Kentucky, and other honest labor I’ve performed for hire. I began to write about jobs I’ve held, hoping for more than a pleasant swim through nostalgia, hoping to get at what the work taught me.

In 1964, at the age of ten, I landed my first job. My friend Mike Keller had signed up for an Akron Beacon Journal paper route and asked if I’d like to help him. He had ninety customers, so it would’ve been a challenge for one kid, especially on Wednesdays. Loaded with advertising inserts, the Wednesday paper was so big I could barely fit thirty in my canvas bag, carrying the last fifteen in a precarious stack atop them. I’d put the strap of the paper bag on my head and lug the load that way, leaning forward a bit as I walked, reaching under my left arm to pull out a paper when I got to a house. Except for Sunday’s six a.m. edition, it was an afternoon paper. After school, I’d pick up my papers at a pallet near Kent Road, where the bundles for four other routes would be dropped off. Across the street, a drugstore with a soda fountain was our refuge if the Beacon Journal truck was late. We’d sip vanilla or cherry phosphates while keeping an eye out for the truck from our swivel seats.

Before long, Mike and I lucked out when a condominium apartment complex, Silver Lake Towers, was built within the boundaries of our route, doubling the number of customers. Mike decided to divide the route in two. No surprise, he took the condominiums, leaving me the rest – a few apartments on Kent Road, then Sycamore Drive, Gorge Park Boulevard past the cemetery, Patty Ann Drive, Lake Road, and up and down Englewood Drive. I was able to arrange the route so I finished just a few minutes from home. I got used to the routine of delivering the news, rain or shine, in the snow of winter and the heat of summer.

On days when the edition was smaller and the weather was favorable, I developed the skill of folding the newspaper – holding the paper so the fold pointed up, slipping my index finger into the center of the left edge of the paper, folding over the first two inches of the right side of the paper, folding that again, then tucking the folded right half of the paper into the center of its left edge. I could fling a properly folded paper twenty feet without it opening in mid-flight, and land it softly on the porch, right at the front door.

A few customers took care of their bill through the office, but most paid me. Some paid four or five weeks at a time, but more paid me weekly. I’d collect on Saturday mornings, knocking on doors, getting to know my customers – the Greenwalds, Domingos, Wynns, Huscrofts, Mariolas, Cardones, Rubels. During most of my paperboy career, from 1964 to the fall of 1969, the cost for a weekly subscription was sixty cents. Folks would hand me a dollar, and I’d reach down to the coin dispenser hooked to my belt – ching, ching, ching, quarter, nickel, dime – and hand them their change. I’d stop halfway at Isaly’s, a diner and ice cream shop on Kent Road, to sit in a booth and treat myself to lunch while I updated my books. I was a bona fide businessperson. 

I paid my bill once a month. The district manager would meet up with the paperboys in the basement of a church on Graham Road. We paid him in cash. What was left over was profit, and I was able to save enough to pay my tuition at Walsh Jesuit High School.[1] For the most part, I liked my customers, and they liked me. One customer on Gorge Park, Mr. Taylor, ran a ceramics studio out of his basement and began to hire me to do odd jobs. Besides clay mixers and kilns, his basement was filled with endless shelves of ceramic molds. People would take classes there, learning to paint, glaze, and fire sugar bowls, coffee mugs, vases, statues of cats with long eyelashes, all manner of dust-collecting bric-a-brac. When I handed down my route to my brothers Joe and Tom, I started working for him regularly, raking endless piles of leaves in the fall, sweeping out his studio, unloading pottery molds and large bricks of earthenware clay, loading boxes of ceramic pottery into customers’ cars.

By this time, I had also started caddying (or as we called it, looping) at Silver Lake Country Club. The country club was only a mile and a half from my house but a far greater distance by income bracket. I looped for lawyers and doctors and investment bankers – the upper crust. You wanted to caddy for golfers who hit the ball long and straight, who actually enjoyed their time on the golf course, who didn’t drink during their round or throw their putter at you when they missed a tap-in, who tipped well – that was a rare combination. I sometimes crept onto the course late at night and swam around in the water hazards, salvaging the expensive Titleists the duffers I’d caddied for, whose hubris lent them an unreasonably high regard for their golfing prowess, had deposited there.

The caddy shack was another milieu entirely. Most of the loopers were older than me – guys in their twenties who would loop a double (carry two bags) before lunch and then take another eighteen-hole loop in the heat of the afternoon. I tried to steer clear of these guys – they viewed younger kids like me as fresh meat – and never joined their card games, where a day’s wages could be lost in the blink of an eye. One reason I caddied was that it gave me the privilege of playing the course for free on Mondays, when it was closed to the public. But more importantly, looping at the country club allowed me to appraise the world hidden behind the facade of those expensive homes and expansive lawns I biked past on my way to Silver Lake to go fishing.

Overall, I grew to appreciate the rhythms of working, the discipline it required, the camaraderie it offered. I wore with honor the newsprint ink that covered my hands after delivering papers, agreeing with Van Morrison’s sentiments about work: “What’s my line? I’m happy cleaning windows.”

Footnote:

[1] I was a “scholarship boy” my first year. (Entering its fourth year of operation, the school freely distributed scholarships to recruit students.) The tuition the next year was $350, increasing to $700 by my senior year.

Finding a Way Home: On Homelessness

My son Jesse and me in Austin, Thanksgiving 2019.

Friday, June 17, one moment in a sixteen-day road trip I’ve just returned from, some tame version of the journeys of my late teens and early twenties. Even in those days, for all the pleasure I took from the act of vagabonding and hitchhiking, of going where the climate suited my clothes, I appreciated the value of home, which by the time I turned twenty-two had become Iowa City. 

On this trip taken in my sixth-eighth year, I was always able to make a temporary home somewhere – in Louisville, the home of my girlfriend’s brother and sister-in-law; in Roanoke, the home of my daughter and two grandsons; in the Long Island town of Centerport, the home of my high school girlfriend and her husband; in Columbus, Ohio, the home of one of my sisters. In all these places, I was blessed with the comfort and security that home represents.

Lately, I’ve been troubled by a world that forces some to live without that comfort and security. In the last fifty years, the withering of government funding for social services, mental health care, substance abuse programs, and low-income housing has resulted in the tragic fact that over a half-million Americans now experience homelessness every night. In March, I watched a documentary film, Lead Me Home,[1] that introduced me to those who reckon daily with housing insecurity, and with the arbitrary twists of fate that landed them in such circumstances.

As I watched the film, I kept thinking about my youngest son, Jesse, who recently lost his home and is living on the streets of Austin, Texas. A talented cook, he began to suffer from bipolar disorder in his early twenties while living and working in New York City. His condition undiagnosed, he self-medicated the extreme mood swings, which led to an alcohol addiction. When my wife and I learned of this, we invited him to move back home, and encouraged him to seek help, with mixed results. Over the last fifteen years, various stints in rehab have offered glimpses of hope followed by relapses.

That Friday, I drove Interstate 81’s compass-precise northeast route, 360 miles nearly nonstop, following the Roanoke Valley, James River Valley, and then Shenandoah Valley from my daughter’s home in Virginia to Locust Lake State Park in eastern Pennsylvania. The lake and camping area of the park were nestled alongside Locust Mountain in the Appalachians’ Ridge-and-Valley range, an oasis of second-growth forest and wetlands surrounded by land first mined for coal in the middle of the 19th century. These forests were harvested to build and support the mines and tanneries but have been untouched since.

By 6:30 on one of the longest days of the year, I’d found a campsite, set up my tent, and scrounged for dinner at the camp store. (One apple was all that remained from the food I’d started out with that morning in Roanoke.) I sat at a picnic table edged with moss, pieces of sunlight filtering down on a slant, illuminating the west side of gray tree trunks. Streaks of light green foliage angled toward the ground, against a backdrop of darker green shade. Sixty feet up, through a canopy of northern red oak, chestnut oak, red maple, eastern hemlock, tulip poplar – blue sky.

I was surrounded by an understory of mountain laurel in bloom, of ironwood and sassafras saplings. Good Sir Chipmunk, with his handsome stripes, wandered through my campsite to see if I had anything for him. I tasted the sassafras leaves, a childhood favorite, chewing one into a creamy mush, conjuring up memories of its earthy aromatic flavor.[2]

After finishing a long rehab in Austin four years ago, Jesse seemed to be making peace with his life, but a double charge of DUI and DWOL landed him in jail. One of the terms of his probation was that he wear an ankle monitor and report his sobriety via a breathalyzer, those items costing him at least $600 a month to rent, a heavy burden for anyone trying to get back on their feet.

In the past year, unable to keep up with the rent of an apartment he shared with a friend from rehab, Jesse was asked to move out. Since then he’s been living in his tent in various spots around Austin, relocating when the scene got too volatile. Spending a single night camping, by my choice, in Pennsylvania woods, I think of Jesse doing that night after night, by necessity, in Austin. We’ve been corresponding by email, my small attempt to be there for him, and to be with him. His dispatches are both heartening and heartbreaking:

Met a girl named Deseree. She gave me a dollar. Well, two. Followed me into the Home Depot parking lot. Shared stories about life and her cigarettes.

I told her my name. She had bad memories of Jesses and told me the stories. Reaffirmed my belief that there can be only one. As a pacifist I guess I just have to outlive them all.

Been a long time since something like that has happened. Sitting on the curb, talking, smoking her menthols. Said she had never done anything like this before.

I have, but not with you. So, I guess I haven't either.

The camping area was quiet, just two campsites within view – a young couple and another couple nearly my age. The lake was a half-mile away by trail, and I could hear the faint sounds of children laughing and squealing with delight, while nearby birds intoned vespers, the last songs of the day. I made dinner with what I’d found at the camp store: Round Top white bread, Kraft American singles, mayo. I thinly sliced the apple to add some crunch to my sandwich while sipping from a waxed carton of green tea brewed at Guers Tumbling Run Dairy, located in nearby Pottsville, home of Yuengling Brewery, which has been in business for nearly 200 years. In 1930, the brewery survived Prohibition by opening that dairy.

Dude threatened me tonight. –“You got a problem with somebody?” –“You think you can just walk by me?” Snatched at my pockets. –“What you got?” 

Walked away and stole a bus ride. It ain’t safe no more. Makes me sad. Feel that there should be unity amongst the desperate despite disparity. Common bond for fuck’s sake. 

Off to sleep in an alley behind a church. Help them in the morning. I like helping. And because 7 bucks is 7 bucks.

I welcomed sleep, although in the middle of the night, I awoke to the sound of an animal heavily treading on dead leaves outside my tent. As the first rays of sunlight peeked over the mountain, I studied a wood thrush’s flutelike two-part call moving from tree to tree through the woods. Packing up my tent, I discovered, beneath the dead leaves, moss completely covering the ground.

Surrounded by native prairie which is sort of sanctioned to not be fucked with. ’Cept they mow it. Which seems not right.

Still full of native flowers. I wear them in my hair. Not that I need adornment, but shit, I will wear my environment like a boss.

Out of the campground and down the mountainside past religiously segregated graveyards – this one for German Lutherans, that one for Byzantine Catholics – and into Mahanoy City, a five-by-twenty-block coal mining town squeezed into a narrow flat stretch along a creek. Before getting back on the road, east toward Long Island, I stopped at the 123 Cafe for breakfast. After requesting flapjacks and coffee, I overhear three women at a nearby table all order scrapple with their eggs, and realize I missed a chance to try that local specialty.

I woke up this morning thinking of you. That I should tell you what is going on and how I am doing. I’m back to work through a temp agency. That’s sort of adjacent to what I wanted to tell you.

Life out here is strange; I need to get out. I know that I got myself where I am and am the only one that can change that. I am surrounded by people who blame others for their situation and expect someone else to get them out of it. That mentality doesn’t work. So they just get angry. It’s a hard environment to live in.

Although homelessness has reached crisis status, there have been successes addressing it. In the last ten years, Houston, Texas, has reduced its homeless population by 63 percent, thanks to its “housing first” program, which has moved over 250,000 people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, not with the prerequisite that they’ve been weaned of drugs, or completed a 12-step program, or landed a job, or found God. 

I try to find magical shit in life to keep me moving. There are good people and I try to help them. The sky last night at dusk: clouds torn to shreds and ribbons, layered, glowing pink and orange. It was beautiful. I told the other people on the bus to look out the window at it. None of them looked up from their phones. I saw it and I hold it with me because ... fuck, it was beautiful. I can’t help the people who don’t want to see something so magical.

Couldn’t sleep that night because there were gunshots and a lot of strangers around. Apparently some cop was involved and is now suspended. Meth, ice, clear, whatever you want to call it is an epidemic here. I don’t even know what it is now; it’s like a mystery drug that everyone is on because it’s dirt cheap.

It’s hard to stay positive surrounded by so much negativity and complacency. I guess that’s what the clouds are for. I never forget that there is so much that is wonderful in this world. I have so much to say and no one really to say it to, so I’m trying to write it down.

Be well, Papa

The documentary Lead Me Home ends with Angel Olsen’s song “Endless Road”:  “Well, every road I see/ Leads away from me/ There’s not a single one/ That leads me home.” Still, I hold out hope for Jesse, and for all homeless people, that they may find a way home.

Footnotes:

[1] The 2021 film by Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk was an Oscar nominee in the documentary short category. It’s available for streaming on Netflix.

[2] Dried and ground sassafras leaves are the main component of filé, used as a spice and thickener in Louisiana Creole cooking.

4 May1970 / 30 May 2022: On Gun Violence

Minutes after the Ohio National Guard opened fire on protestors at Kent State, Mary Ann Vecchio kneels over the body of Jeffrey Miller.

Every year on May 4th, I stop for a few moments and go back to 1970. I was fifteen years old, living in Stow, Ohio, six miles from the Kent State University campus, when four students were killed and nine others wounded by National Guard troops during an antiwar demonstration. When I taught at Cedar Rapids Washington High School, the song I’d choose to play between classes on that date would be Neil Young’s “Ohio,” and sometimes the song would provide access to a teachable moment. 

I came of age during the Vietnam War. It was one of the issues my father and I would butt heads over at dinner, to the discomfort or boredom of everyone else at the table, from my mother down to the youngest of my nine siblings. However, through these clashes with my father over the war and the protests against it, I not only sharpened my argumentative skills but also began to define my personal ethics.

I took the not unusual position that the war was wrong. No one had been able to persuade me that the United States should be militarily involved in a civil war taking place in a small Southeast Asian country. The domino theory seemed the concoction of paranoid minds. I didn’t know whether I could claim to be a pacifist, but when my dad took me on his annual Thanksgiving morning hunting trip after I turned fourteen, I refused to fire the .22 caliber rifle he’d handed me. When they flushed a deer from a thicket and Dad yelled, “Shoot, Dave!” I couldn’t, squeezing back tears. And the next Thanksgiving my parents decided to start a new tradition: a family hike followed by touch football. 

In 1968, Nixon won the presidential election after a campaign based primarily on scare tactics, claiming he alone would be able to “lead us in these troubled, dangerous times,” pledging to “rebuild the respect for law,” and promising “we shall have order in the United States.”[1] He also vowed to scale back U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but that wasn't happening. On April 30, 1970, he announced on national television that the United States had invaded Cambodia, expanding the war. The next day, Friday, May 1, protests erupted on college campuses across the nation. At Kent State, on a large, grassy area in the middle of campus called the Commons, an antiwar rally was held at noon, featuring fiery denunciations of the war and Nixon. Another rally was called for Monday, May 4.

Between 1964 and 1973, nearly 2 million men were conscripted into military service so they could travel halfway around the world to fight a war that made little sense to them. In 1969, the Selective Service System held its first draft lottery, a random selection process. (In previous drafts, the method had been to draft the oldest men first.) Born in 1954, I wouldn’t be eligible for the draft for another three years. But I knew by heart Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” Phil Ochs’ “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” And I’d absorbed the antiwar messages of e.e. cummings’ “next to of course god america i” and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

That Friday night after the rally at Kent State, anger seethed in the Water Street bars and eventually spilled out into the downtown streets, escalating into a confrontation between protestors and local police. Store windows were broken, and beer bottles were thrown at squad cars. The next day, Kent’s mayor asked Governor James Rhodes to send in the Ohio National Guard.[2] By Sunday, nearly a thousand soldiers occupied the campus, lending it the appearance of a war zone. Rhodes flew to Kent and, at a press conference, scolded the protesters, promising to apply the full weight of the law in dealing with them.

As was true of everyone, the war had touched me. I had a cousin who died in Vietnam on April 5, 1966, at the age of 19. The previous five summers, his family and two others would join us for a week, jam-packed into two rental houses a block from Lake Erie beaches. My next-door neighbor Jimmy Flowers went to Vietnam and returned radically altered – as Jimi, wearing a scruffy beard, shoulder-length hair, and a thousand-yard stare.

Although Kent State officials had informed students that the May 4th rally was prohibited, a crowd began to gather, and by noon, the Commons was filled with 3,000 people. About 500 core demonstrators were gathered around the Victory Bell at one end of the Commons, another 1,000 students were supporting the active demonstrators, and an additional 1,500 students were spectators standing around the perimeter of the area. Across the expanse of lawn stood 100 National Guard soldiers armed with M-1 rifles. The students were ordered to leave. When this had no effect, several Guards hopped in a jeep, drove across the Commons to tell the protestors to disperse, but quickly retreated when their command was met with angry shouting. 

I was a student at Walsh Jesuit High School in Cuyahoga Falls. The Vietnam War came up often as a topic of discussion, especially in our Theology classes. One of the leading antiwar activists and pacifists at that time, Daniel Berrigan, was a Jesuit, and the majority of the Jesuits at Walsh supported his efforts. Brother McDonough, my 20th Century American History teacher, would later persuade me to canvass for the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern, the liberal Democratic senator from South Dakota. The 26th Amendment of 1971 had corrected a gross injustice by granting eighteen-year-olds (being drafted to fight in Vietnam) the right to vote, but my first vote didn’t alter Nixon’s landslide victory.

The National Guard troops locked and loaded their weapons, fired tear gas canisters into the crowd around the Victory Bell, and began to march across the Commons to break up the rally. The protestors retreated but then counterattacked with yelling and rock throwing. The Guard began retracing their steps until they reached what was known as Blanket Hill. As they arrived at the top of the hill, 28 of the more than 70 Guardsmen suddenly turned and discharged their weapons. Many shot into the air or the ground. However, some shot directly into the crowd. Altogether 67 bullets were fired in a 13-second flurry.

The victims were all a football field or more away from the National Guard when they were hit. Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause were active demonstrators. William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer were killed as they walked to classes; Schroeder was shot in the back. A photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen-year-old runaway screaming over the body of Miller, appeared on the front pages of newspapers and magazines throughout the country.

A number of our classmates lived in Kent, and news of the shootings quickly spread through the school hallways. We spent much of the rest of that week, first, in informal discussions about the event. Then the dam burst and the discussions spilled over into a range of topics, including education in general and our school in particular. One session got especially heated. As we expressed our grievances and declared we should be educating ourselves, Father Anderson slowly nodded, smiled, and said, “That’s exactly what you’re doing.”

The Walsh Jesuit High School Pioneer newspaper staff in 1970. I’m the curiously proud one in the left middle of the group.

Three hours after the shootings, the university was closed, not to reopen for six weeks. I was a cub reporter for the Pioneer, “published by and for the students of Walsh.” One of the juniors on the staff proposed we bypass the roadblocks that had been set up by taking back roads into Kent. I didn’t have a driver’s license but offered to ride along with him. I’m not sure if we were merely curious for our own sake or hoping to get a news scoop. In either case, that curiosity would not be satisfied. The campus was deathly still, 21,000 students suddenly gone, leaving no evidence of Monday’s tragedy.[3] Every non-essential downtown business was shuttered. Stoddard’s Custard, the Kent Road drive-in where my Little League baseball team went for soft-serve treats after every game, win or lose, was boarded up.

Looking back, I can’t help but compare that tragic event[4] to the world we live in today. Was it a forewarning that the double-barreled pressure of fear and hatred in an environment of widespread gun ownership would inevitably result in gun violence? Our frequently irrational and always inflated fears about personal safety have fed a gun epidemic. There are now more guns than people in the United States, and gun owners firmly believe this fact makes them safer. The students and teachers at Ross Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, didn’t feel safer. Nor did the shoppers at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York. Nor did the 17,798 Americans who have died of gun violence this year, as of Memorial Day.[5]

Gun violence is a multifaceted problem, and gun control isn’t the sole solution, but most Americans agree that universal background checks would be a positive step, and many agree that semi-automatic assault-style guns should be banned.[6] Lawmakers need to stop listening to the gun industry and NRA and start listening to the people. Upon watching the breaking news footage of the Kent State massacre on TV, Neil Young walked off into the woods and wrote “Ohio.” The haunting outro refrain memorializes the “four dead in Ohio.” To commemorate the thousands of victims of mass shootings in the U.S. since then, the song would have to go on for a long time.

Footnotes:

[1] These quotes from his televised campaign ads pandered to voters shell-shocked by recent events such as the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobbie Kennedy, the race riots and antiwar protests in U.S. cities, and the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

[2] Reluctance to serve in Vietnam had led many young men to join the National Guard, aware that they would not likely be sent to Vietnam.

[3] We didn’t see the bullet embedded in Solar Totem Number 1, a steel sculpture on the Commons. At the request of the artist, Don Drumm, the bullet is still there, a quiet memorial.

[4] This would not be the only mass shooting on a college campus that month. Eleven days later, city police and state patrol officers opened fire on Jackson State University students, killing two and wounding twelve.

[5] Per Gun Violence Archive data.

[6] Per The Pew Research Center’s Key Facts about Americans and Guns.

On the Road in 1980, Part the Last

Caye Caulker, Belize, in the late 1980s

Wednesday, 16 April. Before catching a small skiff from the Belize City docks to Caye Caulker, I exchanged travelers cheques for Belizean dollars[1] and bought some fruit. A one-hour trip skipping across Caribbean waves brought us to a coral island twelve miles off the coast, five miles long, north to south, and one mile wide. The island was situated just east of the 190-mile Belize Barrier Reef, the second longest coral reef system in the world.[2] That first day, I fell in love: the water was mildly choppy at best, pristinely clear, just cool enough for comfort, and teeming with tropical fish. I walked in up to my waist and dove, swimming underwater, kicking my legs like a frog, gobsmacked by the rainbow of small fish flitting around me.

Caye Caulker was a laid-back paradise, explaining the number of young North American and European travelers who had washed up on its shores, drawn by word of mouth. On the island’s windward side, the fairly steady trade winds kept the mosquitoes and sand fleas at bay. I settled into the idea of becoming a beach bum – whiling away my days doing a little swimming and snorkeling … a little sailing and fishing … cooking meals, playing music, getting high with friends … kicking back and letting go.

By Friday, I was hatching a plan with Bruce, Cheryl, and Ruth to rent a house on the island. I’d caught a truck ride and then skiff ride from Punta Gorda to Caye Caulker with Bruce, and I’d crossed paths with Canadians Cheryl and Ruth in Livingstón and Punta Gorda. We scouted around and soon located a house on the southern tip of the island renting for $25BZ a week. It had the basics – stove, refrigerator, indoor plumbing, beds. We bought a supply of vegetables and fish from the local co-op, where freshly caught red snapper and jack crevalle sold for $1BZ a pound, and started cooking. The house was located in a coconut palm grove, so we were using coconut milk and/or meat in all our dishes. And I’d begun constructing a percussion drum from coconut shell halves. The four of us got along well based on our shared appreciation of coffee, music, and marijuana.

We were living on island time. My Rastafarian friend Charlie just happened to sail up from Punta Gorda and settle in nearby. The notes of his wooden flute came floating from his camp on the beach. At the hostel where I stayed the first two nights, I’d found a copy of John Irving’s The World According to Garp. The opening fifty pages had been ripped out, likely used to help start some traveler’s campfire, but I was enjoying rereading the last 550 pages. Common yellowthroats, little warblers known as yellow bandits, hung out by our back doorway, eating flies and sand fleas, flitting about, even hopping into the house. 

On Monday, I made coconut bread – using the milk, meat, and oil of the coconut[3] – and added the finishing touches to a chowder Cheryl had started with fish caught by Charlie and his friend Freddie. On Tuesday morning, I made another loaf of the bread at the request of my housemates, and cooked up a breakfast slumgullion for six, frying an onion, adding apropos leftovers from the fridge, and scrambling in eggs. I was completely out of B-dollars, but others supplied the food and I did the cooking, taking pleasure in serving as cook and housekeeper for our improvised family.

It would rain most nights and then clear up during the day. I had gotten used to the occasional hassle of the fleas and mosquitoes; the others not so much. By midweek, Bruce, Cheryl, and Ruth had moved on. Another Canadian, Marcos, moved in with his Belizean girlfriend. Then two Swiss guys, Pascal and Alain, joined us. Charlie had settled into a nearby house, but spent most of his time at our place, sometimes good energy, sometimes exhausting. He had found a way to hustle every pretty girl on the island.

On Thursday, after breakfast, a couple of us got high and walked into town, went for a swim, and were soaking up sun and coconut oil on one of the piers when we learned that Paulo and George, two local fishermen, were taking folks out on their sloop. We joined the group, sailing out to a spot on the lee side of the reef and dropping anchor. Masks and flippers were available, so I dove to get a close look at the amazing variety of colorful fish darting among the coral. After an hour, we got back on the boat and sailed into deeper waters near the southern end of the reef. When Paulo and George went diving for conch, many followed to watch, but I headed a different direction toward the reef. As I was admiring a beautiful school of yellow-finned goatfish and fluorescent blue triggerfish, I happened to notice a shark, about five-foot long, slowly patrolling the waters three meters below me. A bit spooked, I swam directly back to the boat. When I later mentioned my sighting to Paulo, he laughed, “Ah, Caribbean reef shark – you kids always find the sharks.”[4]

As the expiration date of my Belize travel visa loomed, I faced the realization that this three-month trip had run its course. I began to think about my return to Iowa City and what I would do when I got there: Help wrap up the issue of Police Beat, the lit mag I was co-editing. Start a bagel street vendor business. Take classes at the university – Spanish, French, film, poetry workshop. Reconnect with the crazy music-making of my Pink Gravy friends. And reconnect with Pat and little Sierra, see if there was still a place for me with them. It felt like my life was waiting for me to rejoin it.

Syd’s Restaurant & Bar on Caye Caulker

My last night in Caye Caulker, I made a hearty rice-veggies-cheese casserole for our household, then strolled down to Syd’s Bar to raise one last glass of stout and bid goodbye to my friends, especially Freddie, who’d become a good pal and who still owes me 5 B-dollars. Next morning, I caught the Mermaid, the seven o’clock boat to Belize City. As we approached the harbor, I asked the skipper for directions to the airport. He took it upon himself to call Kimba International Airport, found a TACA[5] flight leaving for Miami at 10:40, and called a taxi for me. I sailed through the morning traffic to the airport, bought a ticket, passed through immigration and customs, all in a blur. My first plane ride, I was enthralled by the dance of the flight attendants demonstrating how to use the life vests and oxygen masks. We soared over the blue Caribbean and its pattern of reefs and islands, then the green Everglades, then Miami International Airport.

Back in the US of A, I walked out of the airport, got my bearings, and began hitching north, excited to be back but also disturbed by the jarring reminder of this country’s superfluous affluence. I thought back on how the trip had begun, my commitment to “the interior voyage … to trace that path.” I had promised to pursue this inquiry: “Are the things I do and say equivalent to my feelings, my emotions, my convictions?” I couldn’t say I had returned a changed person, but I had come to know myself a little better.

When I now reflect on this trip, The Barr Brothers’ song “Defibrillation” and these lines come to mind: “Where would you wander? / What would it mean? / There might be saviors, but no guarantees / … It’s not my nature to pretend / That any one road leads to any one end.”

Footnotes:

[1] At an exchange rate of $2BZ for $1US.

[2] To preserve the biological diversity of this coral reef, UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site in 1996. Although Belize has taken notable steps to protect it from bottom trawling and offshore oil drilling, the reef is still threatened by oceanic pollution and global warming.

[3] To process coconut oil, shred coconut meat, soak it in water, strain the milk from the meat, and cook the milk at a low simmer until the oil separates and rises to the surface.

[4] Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws, released five years earlier, had left all us kids with an unfounded fear of sharks.

[5] Transportes Aereos del Continente Americano, a Salvadoran airline now known as Avianca.

On the Road in 1980, Part 8

El Cerrito del Carmen, site of a hermitage on the northern edge of sprawling Guatemala City.

“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other [people] with common curiosity and pleasure…. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.” –G. K. Chesterton

Martes, 8 de abril.[1] The package of literary magazine submissions finally arrived that afternoon. I was staying in Guatemala City at Pensión Luna, impatient to move on. I bided my time by wandering the crowded, rackety streets, hiking to Parque Minerva, on the northern edge of the city, where I shot baskets with a kid at a beat-up hoop and watched a local semi-pro baseball team practice. Atop a nearby hill, I came upon the quiet gardens of a beautiful old church, La Ermita del Carmen.[2] Following the cloister’s winding path, I thought about the next stage of my journey: down from the Highlands, northeast to Puerto Barrios and the Caribbean coast.

I started that 300-kilometer trip the next morning, walking far enough to get out of the city and quickly hitching a ride from two friendly foresters driving a flatbed truck, who took me almost halfway, to the town of Santiago. The day warmed up as we drove down into the lowlands and along the Río Motagua. I soon caught another ride from two guys transporting a truckload of sandias. I gently clambered atop the pile of melons and settled in for the ride, the last sixty kilometers growing tropical lush, the road lined with orchards of mouth-watering sapotes, papayas, guayabas, mangos, tamarindos.

Arriving in Puerto Barrios at four PM, I located a pensión and then went down to the docks to suss out information for the ferry to Belize. The ferry crossing Bahia Amatique to Punta Gorda would depart at dawn the next morning. I had enough quetzales for the ferry ride but not for the Oficina de Migración’s exit fee. Rather than waiting for the next Punta Gorda ferry, I decided to take the first ferry after the banks opened, which would take me across a smaller segment of the bay and the wide mouth of the Río Dulce to Lívingston, still in Guatemala.

While I was at the docks, I watched a departing ferry and two Aussies missing the boat by seconds. I got to talking with them, horticulturalists from Canberra collecting tropical plant seeds for their farm back home. We all had an evening to spend in Puerto Barrios, so we smoked some of their hash and drove around in their rented car, winding up at a whorehouse, where we drank too many beers and engaged in friendly banter with the Belizean sex workers. Port towns are always lively and captivating, but I was hoping Lívingston would be more laid-back.

On the ferry ride the next day, I met Liz, a charming Brit from Salisbury. We got off the ferry at the dock, both of us looking for a place to stay, and were led by a young kid to a pensión that offered a single room with two beds. We just looked at each other a minute and said, “Why not?” After unpacking, we headed out to explore the town, almost immediately running into two American girls I’d met in Antigua. I had to extricate myself from an awkward moment, since they knew me as David and I’d just introduced myself to Liz as Francisco. All good though.

The next day we rented a cayuco[3] and paddled across the wide mouth of the Rio Dulce to an isolated beach. Although the water was choppy and the cayuco tippy, we crossed without incident, enjoying each other’s company as we shared tales of our journeys and a picnic of sandia and aguardiente.[4] Liz was a social worker in Edinburgh, a gentle heart, with the wisdom and sensibility of an experienced traveler. When we returned late in the afternoon, the wind had picked up, as had the waves. The cayuco capsized twice, but after a few false starts and a lot of bailing, we learned how to balance the counteracting forces of river current and sea winds to keep the craft upright, laughing afterward about our little fiasco.

I was smitten by Liz – tall, lithe, athletic, adventurous. In my mind, she fit the mold of intrepid British explorer-travelers such as Gertrude Bell and Beryl Markham. Our last night together, I finally proposed joining her in bed. A bit shy about such things, never wanting to assume, I’ve always had a hard time distinguishing between the signals for friend and lover. Liz laughed, “I’ve been wondering when you’d ask.” We spent a sweet night together before she headed toward Antigua and I caught the ferry to Punta Gorda.

The quiet Punta Gorda waterfront. The craft in the foreground is a cayuco.

Formerly known as British Honduras, Belize had been a British Crown Colony for over a century. The name change had occurred in 1973, but the country wouldn’t gain its independence until 1981. Punta Gorda, the southernmost coastal town of Belize, was a small fishing port. I found a place to stay at Madman’s 5 Star. Trust me, the five stars of the name were aspirational at best, but Madman offered a cozy restaurant – a single long table with benches on his enclosed front porch – serving wholesome food in robust portions, and behind his house a palapa,[5] where I hung my sleeping hammock.

I had finally found the seclusion I needed to read and comment on the eighty submissions to the literary magazine I was co-editing with Michael Cummings, which we had decided to call Police Beat.[6] When Mrs. Madman heard about my project, she loaned me a spare table that I repaired and set up as my desk. After three days of editorial work, I sent off the letter that included my notes on which pieces should be included in the issue.

The first and only issue of Police Beat. The postcard on the cover had arrived mysteriously at my address two years prior.

My first afternoon in Punta Gorda, I befriended a gregarious dreadlocked Rastafarian named Charlie, who had spent time in Canada, the U.S., and the military, but who now tended a field of ganja somewhere in the backcountry and lived on his sailboat. We met two Canadian girls whom Charlie invited to go sailing with us, but I wasn’t much of a first mate, and we never got out of the inlet he’d been anchored in. Instead, we hung out on the boat and got high while Charlie played his guitar. On shore later, as we walked through town, Charlie accosted a young British soldier, all the enmity toward the colonial oppressors seeming, at least to me, to explode out of nowhere. 

On Saturday night, I gave in to Charlie’s nagging and let him introduce me to a food vendor on a dark side street who dished up “ground food” – yams, potatoes, plantains, all cooked with pigtail and lots of grease, served on wax paper and eaten with our fingers. The bars in Punta Gorda sold good stout in plain brown bottles. Everyone cooked with coconut oil and milk. Sweet coconut bread buns were sold by little girls who walked the grassy lanes of Punta Gorda, carrying baskets covered with tea towels, almost too shy to show me what they were selling.

Punta Gorda was a trip. The beaches weren’t great, but I still went swimming among the jellyfish. Walking back, I chatted with some young guys gathered under a large spreading ceiba that they called “the learning tree,” and later went with a Rasta named Soul to a shanty on the outskirts of town to buy a spliff and get high right there on a Gospel Sunday afternoon. Folks spoke English to me, but when they conversed with each other, I heard an incomprehensible blend of English, Belizean Creole, and Spanish. Besides fishing, not much work was available. When people needed something, they were so laid back they’d just ask for it. Thanks to this custom, I was able to present a pair of pants I wasn’t wearing to an old man. The town was inhabited by a mix of Creoles, Garifuna, Maya, and peachfuzz-cheeked British soldiers.[7] The music was good – lots of reggae, and the funkiest U.S. music.

Madman had his finger on the little pulse of Punta Gorda. When he heard a truck transporting empty bottles would be stopping in town on its way to Belize City, he let me know I could catch a ride with it. Just one road meanders the 270 kilometers north to Belize City, and I’d heard that the hitching could be painfully slow, so I decided to take him up on the offer. It turned out I wasn’t alone. 

That night, two other Americans – Bruce and David – joined me on the “empties express,” which stopped for the night in Big Falls. After sharing canned mackerel and crackers for dinner, we crawled into our hammocks, rising at four AM to be on our way. From the back of the truck, we got a good look at the dense tropical forest we were passing through. Most houses were mounted on stilts; churches adhered to the English Colonial style. We helped load the crates of empties as we stopped in shantytowns – Hellgate, Bella Vista, Georgetown, Santa Cruz, Silk Grass, Bocotora, Hattieville. By noon, we were being dropped off at the Belize City docks, where the three of us found a skiff going to Caye Caulker, 30 kilometers northeast into the Caribbean.

Footnotes:

[1] Tuesday, April 8th.

[2] The Hermitage of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the patroness of the Carmelites, one of the first religious orders of Christian hermits.

[3] A shallow dugout canoe carved from the trunk of a palm tree.

[4] Literal translation, fiery or burning water, made from fermented sugar cane mash.

[5] An open-sided dwelling with a palm thatch roof.

[6] After an unintentionally funny column in the University of Iowa’s student newspaper, The Daily Iowan.

[7] The Creoles are descendants of enslaved Africans; the Garifuna are descendants of Maroons (Africans escaped from slavery) who mixed with Native Arawak and Carib people.

On the Road in 1980, Part 7

One of the many alfombras (sawdust carpets) created for Antigua’s Semana Santa processions.

Miércoles, 2 de abril.[1] The first half of Semana Santa in Antigua was relatively quiet, giving me a chance to get to know the city. I attended the velaciones, or vigils, held at Iglesia San Francisco El Grande on Tuesday evening and Iglesia Escuela de Cristo on Wednesday evening. Large alfombras had been laid out before the altars of those churches by hermandades.[2] These “carpets” were intricately designed using sawdust dyed in a rainbow of bright colors, and then surrounded by a cornucopia of offerings: fruit, vegetables, flowers, candles, specially shaped loaves of bread. People came to pray, admire the alfombras, and then partake in the festivities outside on the church’s plaza. It became a bit too much – a mí me gusta la tranquilidad.[3] But I did get to taste a delicious Guatemaltecan pastry called mollete, a kind of custard-filled French toast.

Although I’d come to Antigua to witness the spectacle of Semana Santa, I grew to appreciate more the effect those ceremonies had on the people. On Wednesday night, I watched (not for the first time) the movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon and was moved by the story of Saint Francis of Assisi. I was drawn to the perfect simplicity of his life – working with his hands and renouncing all material attachments, living like the lilies of the field and becoming “an instrument of peace.” The next day, I gave away some of my clothing to Antigueño street beggars. To be honest, I did so mainly because I’d bought other clothes and didn’t want the extra weight, but the giving still felt good.

I awoke early on the morning of Holy Thursday. The kitchen of my landlady, Doña Marina, was a beehive of activity. Her two daughters, and a playful swarm of grandkids, had arrived to help prepare her annual contribution to the festivities: 600 empanadas de flan. I joined in the work: patting out dough into flat round disks, adding a dollop of flan, folding the disk in half, and crimping the edges with a fork. After we were done and while the empanadas were frying, Doña Marina invited me to join them for breakfast.

On Good Friday, the week’s activities came to a somber climax. At dawn, men on horseback, dressed as Roman soldiers, rode through the streets while beating on drums. It was a sunny morning, so I walked to the top of Cerro de la Cruz to step away from the hubbub and get a bird’s-eye view of the city and, beyond that, Volcán de Agua. Many Antigueños had been up all night working on the alfombras – most made of colored sawdust, some of pine needles and flower blossoms – that stretched through the main streets of the city. I ran into my Québecoise friend Michelle from San Cristóbal de las Casas, and we strolled around, discussing and admiring the artistry of the alfombras.

The death sentence of Jesus Christ was proclaimed at Iglesia de la Merced. And at noon, a reenactment of the crucifixion took place at Escuela de Cristo. After that, the procession began, and the men shouldering the andas trampled underfoot the beautifully crafted alfombras. Parque Central was packed with people, vendedores everywhere selling food, drinks, craft items. A shoeshine man, maybe five feet tall, got some business from the guy sitting beside me on a park bench: un lustre por 25 centavos.

Kaqchikel Maya weavers of San Antonio Aguas Calientes, using backstrap looms.

On Saturday, restless, searching for something, like young Francis of Assisi, I took a bus out of Antigua to nearby San Antonio Aguas Calientes, famous for the bright intricate textiles woven by Kaqchikel Maya women on their backstrap looms. It felt good to escape the crowds. I walked dirt roads to San Miguel Duenas, six kilometers to the south, and then another six kilometers farther to Alotenango, where I stopped at a Franciscan monastery to watch friars bless the water the farmers would need to irrigate their fields.

I climbed a steep hill past fields of corn and beans and lush café fincas.[4] As I did so, I composed a little song – “Café, café / Café, café / En las montañas de Guatemala / Hay mucho café, mucho café” – my voice ringing across the valley. To the east loomed Volcán de Agua; to the west, thin trails of smoke drifted from the twin volcanoes of Fuego[5] and Acatenango. Later, back in Antigua, the skies still perfectly clear, I could see all three, blue and formidable in the twilight.

* * *

Reflecting on the events of that week, I can’t help but think about what else was then happening in Guatemala. In San Pedro La Laguna, we talked about the dangers of traveling in certain parts of the country. The standard piece of advice was to avoid the Petén Basin, the northernmost region and home to a wealth of Maya ruins, including the pyramids at Tikal. A rumor was circulating that some young gringo travelers had disappeared in that area, but it was never confirmed. 

What can be confirmed is that 1980 was the beginning of some of the most brutal years of that country’s long civil war. The Guatemalan army, with the help of right-wing death squads, had begun to implement Operation Sofia, whose goal was to wipe out the leftist insurgency led by the EGP (Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres[6]), which sought to overthrow the repressive military government. This act of genocide is now widely known as the Silent Holocaust.[7]

The people of Antigua performed their annual reenactment of the death of a man who was crucified for leading a popular revolt against the religious and secular status quo. Rome ruled Judea, but washed its hands of the Jesus case, handing him over to the Jewish leadership. The U.S. government, having quietly shored up Guatemala’s corrupt military government for so many years, looked the other way when the latter government silenced the protests against it.

In 2018 I taught one of the most challenging and rewarding classes in my years at Cedar Rapids Washington High School, an LA 10 class that included a large number of ELL students, among which were three very quiet but hard-working Guatemaltecan immigrants. As I got to know them, I learned they were all from Santa María Nebaj, a small town in the El Quiché department, deep in the Highlands east of Huehuetenango. Nebaj was part of the Ixil Triangle, three Ixil-speaking Maya communities that were especially targeted by the state-sponsored terrorism of Operation Sofia.

It hurt my heart to imagine what their parents endured to survive. It hurt my heart to know that ICE was harassing those families and none of those students would finish the school year at Washington. It hurt my heart to realize how oblivious I was in 1980 to the tragedies unfolding around me.

* * *

At midnight, flutes and drums resounded across Antigua, announcing the Easter Vigil mass, but I wasn’t able to pull my Brother Body out of bed. I did get up at dawn when the bells of San Francisco sounded the news of Jesus’ resurrection. Lit up with candles and decked out in flowers, the church was filled with the uplifting joy of our voices singing Alleluia! As the sun rose, it poured through the three deep windows behind the altar, silhouetting the statues of saints gazing down on our congregation. 

I climbed Cerro de la Cruz again to lay in the warm sun and begin reading the biography of Saint Francis I’d picked up at the English-language used bookstore. Monday morning I would leave Antigua for Guatemala City to pick up the literary magazine submissions. I had decided to change my name, something I occasionally did as I traveled. Me llama Francisco.

Note: My former colleague at Washington High School, Jim Burke, has led a number of student service teams on trips to Antigua during school breaks. Through the nonprofit organization ImagininGuatemala, these students have helped Guatamaltecan families build better housing for themselves while experiencing another country, culture, and language. If you'd like to support the work of this non-governmental organization, I encourage you to go to their website to make a donation.

Footnotes:

[1] Wednesday, April 2nd.

[2] Church brotherhoods or fraternities.

[3] As for me, I like the peace and quiet.

[4] Collective coffee farms.

[5] The Kaqchikel Maya call it Chi Q’aq’ (“where the fire is”).

[6] Guerrilla Army of the Poor.

[7] For more information, see Yale’s Genocide Studies Program’s report on Guatemala.

On the Road in 1980, Part 6

San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, on the shores of Lago de Atitlán, at the foot of Volcán San Pedro.

Domingo, 23 marzo.[1] I had made camp on a hilltop overlooking the valley through which the Pan-American Highway snaked, eighty kilometers into Guatemala. I was excited to be there, under the brilliantly green long-needled pines of the Guatemalan Highlands, an extension of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas. My first impression of the people was positive: They were friendly but self-possessed, paying only as much attention to me as was necessary. From a respectful distance I was falling in love with the Maya women, with the shy smiles on their broad faces, with the long thick braids of their black hair.

That day had started with a late-morning hike out of San Cristóbal de las Casas and then a ride from two California dudes headed for Panajachel on Lago de Atitlán. I crossed the border with them, paying two quetzales for my visa stamp and twenty for an “inspección.”[2] But the more time I spent with those guys, the more troubled I was by their bogus carelessness, their jive disdain for the land they were passing through, their mean-spirited jokes about “those little Indians in their silly costumes.” Even though I was considering Panajachel as a stop-off, I had them let me out five kilometers past Huehuetenango, the first city we happened upon.

As I prepared my dinner, I thought through an itinerary: I had a week until Palm Sunday, the beginning of Semana Santa, enough time to stay a few days somewhere on Lago de Atitlán before arriving in Antigua for its famous Holy Week celebrations and ceremonies. By then, the package of submissions for the literary magazine I was co-editing should have made its way from Iowa City to Guatemala City.

The next morning I hiked into Huehue to exchange a travelers check for quetzales and check out the market. As I wandered around, a gray-haired man approached me, asking if I wanted to buy a camisa he pulled out of his satchel: an old, tattered cotton shirt, white with blue stripes and a wide collar embroidered in a design of red and blue. I was so taken by the serendipity of the moment, and by his claim that this was his shirt, that I promptly bought it, thinking I’d try to mend it. I later learned this was a traditional shirt worn by the men of Todos Santos Cuchumatan, a Mam-speaking Maya community forty kilometers northwest of Huehue, deep in the Highlands. 

By Tuesday afternoon I was in San Pedro La Laguna, sitting on a rock at the edge of the water at the edge of the day. Fishermen oared out onto the lake in their flat-bottomed boats. A boy told me that in the language spoken by the Maya people of San Pedro, the word for pescado is ch’. Heavy clouds hid the volcanic peaks surrounding the lake, but that didn’t stop me from imagining them.

The previous day I’d caught a bus out of Huehuetenango to Chimaltenango, 200 kilometers southeast toward Antigua. I got a room at the first pensión I happened upon and grabbed dinner in the market. Early the next morning I took a bus from the main plaza to Antigua and proceeded to look for lodgings for Semana Santa. Once the capital of Guatemala but abandoned in 1773 after being destroyed for the second time by earthquakes, Antigua was eventually rebuilt, preserving enough of its Spanish Baroque architecture to earn a designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

All the hotels and pensiones in the city were fully booked; tourists coming for the popular Semana Santa festivities had beaten me to the punch. But I chatted with a young gringo on his way out of town who recommended a home where he’d rented a room. His sketchy directions didn’t lead me to that home but instead to the home of Doña Marina, who had a room to let with a private bath. I made a down payment on eight days’ rent and caught that same bus returning to Chimaltenango, where I met a young Swiss traveler on his way to San Pedro La Laguna. I tagged along with him, catching another bus to Panajachel, where a lancha that ferried passengers across the lake to San Pedro departed on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. We had just enough time to sit down at a little lakeside restaurant and enjoy a bowl of fruit and granola swimming in yogurt, first hint of the gringo influence there.

If Panajachel was teeming with gringos on vacation, San Pedro was jam-packed with hippies who’d slipped out of the mainstream. The greeting party that came down to the landing when the boat arrived was a colorful mixture of Tzʼutujil Mayas and flamboyantly garbed hippies. It took a minute to distinguish the two groups; many of the latter had established semi-permanent residence in San Pedro and were striving to assimilate into the culture. My Swiss friend and I found a place to stay at Casa Felipe – fifty centavos a night for a petate suspended by ropes from a wooden frame. [3]

The next morning began with a bracing bath in Lago de Atitlán, as I scrubbed my skin with the volcanic pumice stone found along the shore. I savored a sixty-centavo breakfast: another big bowl of yogurt with healthy toppings, un café con leche y pan dulce. Fortified by this meal, I hiked toward Volcán San Pedro, walking past milpas and cafetales,[4] past men lugging bundles of cooking wood strapped to their backs. I met a man who explained to me the four Mayan languages spoken in the vicinity. That night, I had dinner at Michel’s, a restaurant featuring fine cuisine prepared by local Guatemaltecos who had been trained by French travelers. Thirty of us – almost all French or Quebecois – enjoyed our Bisteks Milanese at long outdoor tables under hanging lanterns. Later, back at Casa Felipe, I capped the evening with Felipe’s rich dark café, locally grown and roasted, un pan con chocolate, and a Payaso bummed from another traveler.[5]

After three days in San Pedro, I planned to catch the Friday lancha back to Panajachal, but as I got ready to board, I discovered my little money purse was missing. An hour earlier I had been sitting by the lake and getting a lesson in Tzʼutujil from a rambunctious bunch of boys. Here are a few of the fifty words I wrote down in my journal:

perro [dog] - pak’pik’pes

gato [cat] - mix

pájaro [bird] - tsik’in’chok

lago [lake] - ya’

volcán [volcano] - jayu

sol [sun] - kij

luna [moon] - ic

señor [mister] - achi

señora [missus] - ixoc

It turned out the boys had taken a fee for their language lesson by lifting my bolsita while I was busy transcribing the words in my journal. Honestly, it was well worth the price. Another traveler loaned me a quetzal so I could catch the late boat back to Panajachel.

Iglesia de la Merced in Antigua. The bell towers are shorter than is typical because of the risk of earthquakes.

I made it to Antigua by Saturday, in time to witness Palm Sunday events the next morning. After morning mass at the Iglesia de la Merced, a procession began that traveled through the city: children in purple robes and a girl on a donkey led by a young man, preceded by men playing traditional Maya music on wooden flute and drum, and followed by a lively brass band. At three o’clock a series of andas, or floats (although that seems the wrong word for something that eighty men had to shoulder to keep aloft), started out from La Merced. The largest one I named Jesus Carrying the Cross through Clouds with Angels Blowing Trumpets. Antigueños dressed in purple robes lined a route carpeted with pine needles, waiting to take their turns. A smaller anda followed – the Virgin Mary Standing over a Large Heart Stabbed with Knives – and even smaller ones for John the Beloved Apostle and Mary Magdalene. This procession went on for seven hours.

At one point, a young Maya girl let me hold her up so she could see over the crowd, the highlight of my day. I also ran into a mellow Aussie I’d hung out with at Isla de la Piedra six weeks earlier. Antigua was in a festive mood: a marimba band played near Parque Central. According to the cars parked in side alleys around town, people had come from all over Central America. 

On Wednesday morning, I took a bus to Guatemala City to see if the package of manuscripts had arrived at the post office. The city was tense; soldiers shouldering automatic weapons patrolled the streets. The repressive Guatemalan government was fearful of a growing insurgency movement led by university students and Maya campesinos. Just nine days earlier, Archbishop Óscar Romero, an outspoken critic of the Salvadoran army and right-wing paramilitary groups in that neighboring country’s civil conflict, had been assassinated while saying Mass. 

Although no package was waiting for me, the ride back to Antigua offered its own reward, as recorded in my journal: 

This bus steers the streets of Guatemala City

the same Blue Bird bus of my grade school days

but tricked out in the bright benedictions of patron saints

and the passengers miraculously transformed

We have filled the seats and overhead racks

with all the clamor and packages of the marketplace

but now the bus gathers speed as it heads for the highway

The travelers bow their heads

in anticipation of reaching their villages and

as if certain temporal weights could be released by sleep

they all begin to act from other impulses

swaying heavily with the curves

Maya-black heads nodding

arms and shoulders jerking crazily

as the bus turns off the highway

and jolts over dirt roads

All these strange somnolent gestures

to which I am the only witness

the humor and pathos of a people at home in their skin

leaning casually against one another

sombreros falling off the heads of old men

tomatoes and oranges leaping from the mothers’ baskets

and rolling across the floor of the bus

One young Kʼicheʼ girl rests her face on my arm and dreams

as the ticket-taker squeezes his way down the aisle

collecting the forty-five centavos for a journey

worth far more than that

Footnotes:

[1] Sunday, March 23.

[2] In 1980, the Guatemalan quetzal matched the value of the U.S. dollar, one indication of the undue influence of the U.S. government. Guatemala was the quintessential banana republic.

[3] A petate is a mat made of woven palm leaves.

[4] Cornfields and coffee plantations.

[5] Payasos (i.e., Clowns) are a popular non-filter Guatemaltecan cigarette.

On the Road in 1980, Part 5

The communal courtyard of Posada del Abuelito in San Cristóbal de las Casas. I spent some time at that table, eating my home-cooked meals and writing.

Miércoles / 12 marzo.[1] I arrived that night in Ciudad de Oaxaca, joining forces with Charley, a freckled-faced Canadian kid I met on the bus, to find a cheap hotel. Walking around the mercado near the bus station, we met some French travelers who took us to their place, the Hotel Pasaje, well-kept and low-budget, populated by lots of young gringos. After Charley and I booked a room to share, we went off with nos amis français to meet up with their friends at another hotel and get high.

The next morning, I awoke to the calls of the hotel’s songbirds, proceeded to the bustling Mercado Benito Juarez, and sat down on a bench to enjoy the hubbub while drinking a big bowl of sweet brown café con leche into which I dunked my pan dulce. All the competing aromas of the panaderías and carnicerías, the freshly ground café and cacao, the ripening plátanos, naranjas, and piñas.[2] A man sat down next to me, a pajarero[3] with a stack of cages displaying a kaleidoscope of native songbirds – doves, parrots, toucans, buntings, finches.

Note: this letter was forwarded to Oaxaca from the Mexico City lista de correos. It contains a conceptual drawing of an airplane by Sierra, who had just turned three.

On Friday I collected two letters from the lista de correos, one from Pat and one from Theresa, lifelines thrown from worlds I’d left behind. Pat’s letter made me both happy about where she was at and wishing I were there:

I’ve missed you a lot. Sometimes I get lonely, wanting someone to hold me without having to ask them to. But I also feel a growing strength inside, a connection with myself…. It’s like I forgot how to depend on me when you were here.

I also got a letter from Michael Cummings, with whom I was co-editing a literary magazine in Iowa City. I’d promised to read and appraise the submissions during my travels. His letter explained that the package of submissions wasn’t ready to send yet, but would be by the end of the month, so I instructed the Oaxaca post office to forward my mail to the lista de correos in Guatemala City, where I felt confident I’d be in two weeks or so.

The bolsa de hombro (shoulder bag) I bought in Ciudad de Oaxaca.

I spread around some of my pesos at the Mercado de Artesanías, just a block from the hotel: a handwoven cotton hamaca, lightweight and brightly colored; a dark blue guayabera shirt (as most of my shirts had become threadbare); and a woolen bolsa de hombro. Charley had moved on, as had our French friends, but my closest friend, Rico, a chill and clearheaded dude from New York, was still around. The hotel continued to host a revolving cast of vagabonds, including a number of excellent musicians. Taking advantage of a spell of sunny weather, we’d gather on the hotel’s roof terrace. Someone would produce their stash of embroidery thread, and we’d get high, tie five long threads to our big toes, and then weave colorful friendship bracelets while digging the impromptu jams.

By Monday, though, grown weary of the constant partying at the hotel, I continued my journey. After recovering the 1,000 pesos I had loaned to a mellow (and trustworthy) Danish couple who’d been ripped off, I set out for parts east. I’d heard talk of a good campground by a river and waterfall south of the Maya ruins at Palenque, but resisting the idea of landing at another place crowded with young gringos, I headed instead for San Cristóbal de las Casas and then Guatemala. 

At the end of that day, I was 200 kilometers down the road, camping on a hilltop, basking nude in the warm dry mountain air, drinking up the last hour of sunlight, and regretting the loss of my pocket copy of Psalms and New Testament, which Charley had walked off with. I’d gotten a good ride from a semi driver going to Salina Cruz, but as we drove across the eastern flank of the Sierra Madre del Sur, he pulled out a bottle of mezcal and proceeded to get stinking borracho, pressuring me to join him in his boracchi-tude. With a couple of hours of sun left, I discreetly hopped out when he stopped to build up the air pressure in his brakes. It felt good to be camping in solitude under a full canopy of stars.

The next morning: after a couple of short rides and a few kilometers of hiking, a ride to Jalapa de Marquez, midday in the tropical lowland savanna of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Then, a young, zealous Toronto couple on their way to Nicaragua stopped their VW van to give me a 400-kilometer ride to San Cristóbal. Their destination was an orphanage in Managua, where they’d be supporting the efforts of the socialist Sandinista National Liberation Front.[4] We stopped for lunch and then drove on into the state of Chiapas, spent the night in the busy city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, where we had dinner, shared a hotel room, and then ate breakfast the next morning before continuing on to San Cristóbal, all paid for by the government of Canada, muchas gracias!

The last fifty kilometers climbing into the pine-oak forests of the Central Highlands of Chiapas were breath-taking. We passed many Maya villages, the women wearing long black wraparound skirts and beautifully embroidered white huipiles.[5] Some women sat on the porches of their homes, handweaving with their backstrap looms. San Cristóbal de las Casas is a mid-sized Spanish colonial city tucked away in a valley 2,200 meters above sea level and surrounded by mountains. Its popularity among travelers stems from the fact that the city and the surrounding mountain communities are inhabited predominantly by indigenous Tzeltal and Tzotzil people.

When my Toronto friends dropped me off, I ran into some compañeros from the Mexico City hostel, a German guy and his Italian girlfriend. We compared notes from the road. Then I met a beautiful Veracruzana, the epitome of that region’s striking blend of Afro-Caribbean and indigenous features. She was staying at the place recommended to me in Oaxaca, and kindly accompanied me there. The Posada del Abuelito was a charming, low-key hostel, offering a cozy courtyard, cooking privileges, and a bed for 40 pesos a night (less than $2 US). This would be a good staging area for my passage from México to Guatemala.

That first night there, I ran into Alain and Christine – French voyageurs I knew from Oaxaca – and we eventually wound up in their hotel room. In a darkness lit by a single candle, Alain rolled a huge spliff, and we got crazy high, me barely clinging to the caboose of their conversation en français. After that evening, I lay low and went domestic, buying lots of fresh food to make breakfasts and dinners, laundering everything in my backpack, talking with other travelers passing on their way to or from Guatemala.

On Friday, I crammed into a bus for a dusty, thirty-kilometer, two-hour ride to Tenejapa, situated among steep mountain cliffs northeast of San Cristóbal. The entirety of the Tzeltal community was out in force for the fiesta of El Señor de Desagravio.[6] I wandered around and visited the church, but then, exhausted by the trip, I began hiking back to town with Michelle, a Québécoise friend. A pickup soon stopped to give us a lift, offering a much less obstructed view of the terrain than the bus ride had. On Saturday I caught a transporte returning from the mercado to the Tzotzil community of San Juan Chamula, a short ten-kilometer ride in the back of the truck among beautiful smiling Maya faces. The women wore lots of blue – blue rebozos and blue huipiles with almost no embroidery. The Tzeltal women of Tenejapa, in contrast, wore white huipiles richly decorated with red embroidery. 

In my journal I attempted a sketch of the tall crosses found at street corners and on the plaza of San Juan Chamula: green with a white design of stylized corn plants and flowers symbolizing the four directions. The churches in those two villages lacked pews or chairs. The dirt floors were covered with pine boughs and needles. The people lit candles placed on the ground, burning copal incense and leaving offerings of eggs and bottles of Coca-Cola. The many statues, wearing mirrors around their necks, some fusion of Catholic saints and Mayan gods, reflected their syncretism of customs and beliefs.

I was ready for Guatemala, the next stage of this journey. Although I know my experiences in no way compare to theirs, as I reflect on that 3,000-kilometer journey from the Arizona frontera to the Guatemala frontera, I can’t help but think about the grueling exodus now being made by so many desperate immigrants from Central and South America.

Footnotes:

[1] Wednesday, 12 March.

[2] Bakeries and butcher shops; bananas, oranges, and pineapples.

[3] A traditional occupation dating from pre-Hispanic times, usually involving a family who shares the work of capturing, acclimating, maintaining, and selling the wild birds.

[4] The Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional had cobbled together a revolutionary government after ousting the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship the previous year.

[5] Short, blouse-like tunics.

[6] Our Lord of Relief or Vindication.

On the Road in 1980, Part 4

Playa Las Monjitas, a few kilometers up the coast from Acapulco

In Mexico City, I had been making plans to head southeast toward Oaxaca City on my way to Guatemala, but at the student hostel, I learned of another hostel near Acapulco owned by the same company. So I decided to take a detour due south to the coast, “Goin’ to Acapulco.”[1] The hitch started off well: a bus took me to the outskirts of that vast metropolis,[2] and one short ride put me in pinewood mountains and blue skies, out from under the city’s heavy smog. On a lovely Sunday in early March, the highway was packed with traffic: a ragtag cavalcade of cars filled with families escaping the city and parking at random spots alongside the road for picnics. 

I got a ride from three UNAM[3] students from Michoacán, out for a joyride. We stopped along the way to smoke some mota, and then drove to Cuernavaca, a city of narrow streets decked out in a bright palette of purple, red, orange, and yellow flowers – the vines of jacaranda, bougainvillea, madreselva, llamarada,[4] poinsettia. Cringing in the backseat as my newfound friends trolled the streets and whistled at the chicas, I asked them to drop me off at the market so I could buy some provisions and tactfully bid them goodbye. I hiked into the hills outside the city and camped there, sleeping soundly after the previous night’s spirited partying in Mexico City. 

The next morning I got a ride from Cuernavaca to Acapulco (nearly 300 kilometers) with three Hare Krishnas – an Argentinean husband, his Californian wife, and their Venzuelan friend – vibrant in their saffron robes. We followed the nerve-wracking hairpin turns of the mountain roads while listening to cassette tapes of Indian ragas, calming ourselves to the meditative sounds of the stringed instruments, flutes, and drums. We stopped for lunch and later for a swim at some cascadas near Xolapa, arriving in Acapulco in the heat of the afternoon. A six-kilometer bus ride up the coast on the Carretera Pie de la Cuesta brought me to the student hostel.

It was a fiercely beautiful place – built into and out of rock on a high cliff overlooking the Pacific surf crashing on a narrow beach accessible only by means of a steep trail. A system of interconnected grottos comprised the hostel’s living and sleeping quarters. I moved my sleeping bag out under the moon and stars, where it was cooler and more refreshing, waking at sunrise, another day along the way.

That first night, only three others were staying there – two Swedish men and Susanna, a smart and strikingly vivacious Italiana from Bologna. We all went into Acapulco the next day to lounge on the beaches and buy food at the market to make a huge salad for dinner back at the hostel, a Pacific sunset serving as our backdrop. Later, three German guys and two Mexicanas arrived and joined our cozy group. We asked the hostel owners for permission to use the kitchen facilities, and on Wednesday night we collaborated to make a grand meal of grilled huachinango, rice, fruit salad, tuna salad, and palomas.[5]

I returned to Acapulco on Thursday with Susanna and Analuisa, another Italiana who had just arrived, to walk around the city and buy some necessities. The three of us shared the leftover rice and fruit salad for dinner. I left Acapulco the next day, stifling some pangs of regret about saying goodbye to Susanna, who had taken ill but was in good hands with Analuisa. I headed down the coast toward the beach towns of Oaxaca. Traffic was sparse but I was able to catch rides in the back of cargo trucks, arriving at the Río Quetzala, near the Guerrero–Oaxaca border, late in the day. I swam in the warm, broad, shallow river, washing off the dust of the road, and camped nearby. The next day, another cargo truck ride that would’ve taken me to Puerto Escondido went awry. When the driver stopped to give a dump truck a push start, he ruptured his radiator and bent his fan. Patching up the engine in the midday heat, he got it running, but I somehow got left with the dump truck and its bad carburetor. After failing to help get that engine working, I apologized to the driver, cut my losses, and caught a ride from a passing camper with Colorado plates.

Puerto Escondido was overrun with young gringos brazenly flaunting Mexican mores with their open nudity and pot-smoking, while Federales patrolled certain sections of the beach in an attempt to defend those mores. One look at the campground and I headed far down the beach to camp on my own. Lugging my backpack and walking barefoot on the sand, I badly stubbed the middle toe on my right foot on a rock. I awoke the next morning to a throbbing toe and a wave of loneliness and tristeza, thinking of those far away – Susanna in Acapulco, Theresa in Santa Cruz, Pat and Sierra in Iowa City. Always the challenge of traveling: “Wherever I have gone, the blues are all the same.” But I went into town for lunch, found a sunny table in the market and enjoyed a plate of pescado. The señora brought out a large mango – beautiful in its skin of green, yellow, and red – and offered it to me: “Seis pesos.” What a pleasure! And like that, I was back in the moment.

I moved down the coast to Puerto Ángel and its quiet and pristine Playa de Zipolite. Many hippie gringos there too, but more respectful of the culture and people of Mexico. I shared a palm-thatched-roof cabaña with Oscar from Mexico City, un hombre simpatico who shared his little stash of mota with me. I finally got hit with Montezuma’s Revenge, virtually unavoidable as one rubs shoulders with the bacteria of México. I felt bloated and had some diarrhea – not terrible, but I was in no mood to go anywhere. I fasted from solids all day, and the señora of the cabañas brought me a pot of té de manzanilla,[6] which was so sweet and helpful.

The next day I felt well enough to move on. I broke my fast with a bowl of sopa de avena[7] in the Puerto Ángel market as I waited for the bus to Ciudad de Oaxaca. I was looking forward to the change of pace and hoping mail would be awaiting me at the Oaxaca post office’s lista de correos.[8] I started thinking about where to spend Semana Santa,[9] perhaps in Guatemala, as I looked out on the cozy sun-drenched bay of Puerto Ángel. This from my travel journal:

Many hours on the bus

to escape the heat of the coast

climbing the Sierra Madres

over rutted dirt roads

twisting higher through verdant forests

tall bodies of pine shading our way

aroma of coffee beans drying

the bus a parade of cracked brown faces

diesel pulling us through the clouds

its thin roar following

Other side of the mountain

we stop for dinner

in a pueblo on the edge of

the dusty high plains of Oaxaca

last breath of twilight

the bus half-empties

into a quiet side street

where the roasting of cacao beans

pervades the night air

and a blind man slowly boards

smiling evenly into his darkness

plays harmonica

his song drifting out the windows

into the Mexicano night

a babe softly sobbing

mama hushing it

all else silent

He serenades our dreams

bittersweet as raw chocolate

while night slips its arm around the town

and shuffles the length of the bus

clinking his cup of pesos

Footnotes:

[1] Jim James of My Morning Jacket sings Dylan’s song, from Todd Haynes’s film I’m Not There.

[2] Mexico City is now the fifth largest city in the world.

[3] Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, one of the most prestigious schools in Latin America.

[4] Madreselva: honeysuckle. Llamarada: trumpet vine.

[5] Huachinango: Pacific red snapper, a popular and delicious food fish. Palomas: tequila, Jarritos grapefruit soda, & lime.

[6] Chamomile tea.

[7] Oatmeal.

[8] General delivery.

[9] Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter.

On the Road in 1980, Part 3

Madonna, Mexico City (1980) by Graciela Uterbide

I stayed two days in Guadalajara. On the train ride to the city, I met Rafael, warm and talkative, coming from Los Mochis up the coast to find work. We ended up looking for a place together, Rafael leading us into a neighborhood I might’ve steered clear of on my own, between the train station and Plaza de los Mariachis, where we found a cheap room with two beds at the Hotel Cinco de Mayo. My first night, waiting for an order of tacos from a street vendor, I was approached by a girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, ripped sweatshirt and blue jeans, dark hungry eyes, tongue slowly licking her lips, indicating that her boombox needed batteries. She spoke in a rush; I didn’t understand half of what she said but knew what she meant. Facing a force capable of pulling me out of myself and into a state of thrilling danger, I replied, “No, gracias.” I was not averse to risk, but I could see how badly it might all end, both for me and her.

I did get my Mexico travel visa replaced in Guadalajara, but the American consulate could provide no help with my “lost” passport. The second night, Rafael went on a bender, staggering into our room two or three times, a bottle of mescal in hand, inviting me to join him. He never made it back that night. I awoke the next morning to the warbling of the hotel’s lovebirds. When I left, I was stuck with the whole bill. 

It felt good to get back to hitchhiking – swinging my rucksack up on my back, sticking out my thumb, waiting for something to happen. I let my rides dictate my meandering easterly route across the Mexican Altiplano, through Jalisco and into Guanajuato – Tepatitlán de Morelos, San Juan de los Lagos, Lagos de Moreno. My last ride of the day took me to the eastern edge of León. I hiked across fields of corn and green onions and into the foothills of a mountain range, camping among saguaro and nopales. settling in for one of those “Long Nights” of tranquilidad. 

As I was reviewing my dreams in the first streaks of dawn, a campesino passed by and began a monologue I understood little of. A half hour later, I chatted with three men and a gaggle of kids. Then one Rosalio Rocha stopped to invite me to his home for a breakfast of un café and sopa de frijoles con chorizo. I was welcomed into Rosalio’s adobe home, his wife cooking over an open fire on the dirt floor, two shy niños hiding behind her skirts. It was a beautiful moment – I was amazed and humbled by their heartfelt generosity.

A young mining engineer named Ángel gave me a ride from León to Guanajuato. He and his younger brother Ramon invited me to stay in a spare room in their apartment, and I did so for two days. I hung out quite a bit with Ramon, an amiable and mellow law student. Ángel was willing to share more than his apartment; after he brought home a woman from the disco and they had engaged in some rather boisterous sex, he knocked on my door, offering her to me. I respectfully declined, explaining I was tired from wandering the city all day. I had other reasons for refusing a gift that wasn’t his to give. But I truly had been wandering that colonial city, enchanted. My journal contains the following appreciation: [1]

There is a city I know. A subterranean street runs its length, passing beneath the public buildings that withstand like monuments. The road and its walls, its arches and ceiling, are constructed of large blocks of stone the people had discovered in the mountains above the city.

The city nestles in canyons under the shadow of these mountains, arms of houses stretching to the left and right of the main thoroughfare. Alleys so narrow that but one person can pass at a time descend the hillsides by means of steps, emptying the various pockets of the city.

The homes are washed in colors of aquamarine and lavender, tangerine and canary. Their shapes exemplify the strictness of the right angle, and considerable use is made of the flat roof space. During the day, this is a delightful place to be – lines of white clothing wave in the sunlight, wives whistle their unique language to each other across the rooftops. Families take their midday meals here, feasting on the panorama, acknowledging the passersby on the highway that hugs the hillsides like a shelf, encircling the city.

This peculiar form of speech I have encountered – how to translate its code of sibilants? An afternoon stroll is punctuated by the casual hissing of greetings. And the sounds of the morning market – an aviary awakened! This idiom adequately serves the city, though it preserves neither the vocabulary of philosophy nor any sense of a future tense.

In the evenings, the people gather to fill the gardens of the many plazas, listening to the final daysongs of the mockingbirds that nest in trees trimmed to form geometric designs. There is no public lighting – the entire populace dresses in white (even the beggars and shoeshine boys) and the city is graced with a perpetual moon that strikes the meeting places luminous.

Above the city is an old palace inhabited by a collection of mummies buried a century ago and maintained by minerals in the soil. From behind glass cases, they reflect gaping-mouth wonder, as if amazed by death, or by the lives they left behind. 

When night does fall, it is complete. I walk in utter darkness, the silence broken only by the occasional exclamations of lovers. The cobblestones of each street have become as familiar as the knuckles of my hands, yet I have found no true road leaving this city.

I did leave Guanajuato, though, hitching to San Miguel de Allende, camping outside the city along the sandy banks of a stream. I hiked into San Miguel to check out the Instituto Allende, a well-known visual arts college popular with American and Canadian students. Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and other Beats spent time there in the 1950s, but the scene no longer seemed interesting. I walked out of the city to a dry plateau, camping behind the roofless ruins of a small chapel. Desert twigs for a cookfire, empty open spaces, coyotes yelping at the roar of a plane. Whether in a city around people or hanging out with myself, I learned something either way.

The next morning I hitched a ride to Querétaro, where I stopped for a lunch of café con leche and pan dulce, then leaped the 200 kilometers to Ciudad de México in two quick rides. A woman in the train station in Guadalajara had given me the address of a student hostel, so I decided to check it out. It was near the Bosque de Chapultepec, in the Zona Rosa,[2] only 70 pesos per day for a dormitory bed and a breakfast. But I needed a student card, which cost me an additional 150 pesos, including the ID photo. The cost was not considerable in terms of US dollars ($6.50), but my goal to travel for at least two more months was dependent on my frugality.

View of the Pyamid of the Moon from atop the Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacán

I spent four days in Mexico City. One was devoted to visiting the Mesoamerian archaeological site at Teotihuacán, a 50-kilometer bus ride northeast of the city. I climbed the Pyramid of the Sun and surveyed the broad valley stretching far to all sides, imagining what this must’ve looked like at its height some fifteen centuries ago, when according to population estimates, it was the sixth-largest city in the world. 

After spending an entire morning cutting through swaths of red tape at the US Embassy, I was finally able to get a new passport, thanks to my voter registration card, of all things. And once I had that new passport, I visited the Guatemalan Embassy and obtained a travel visa for that country. 

That glazed look on my face - weariness from battling American consulate bureaucracy.

The multilingual and multinational array of young travelers at the hostel offered its own entertainment. My last night there, a group of us went out on the town, traipsing from bar to club to private party, dancing and drinking cuba libres. We headed back to the hostel long after all public transportation had shut down. Laughing and goofing, our motley and besotted crew skipped down the middle of the normally busy Avenida Paseo de la Reforma, giving each other a boost so we could sneak in through an unlocked window at four a.m.

Footnotes:

[1] The piece was influenced by Italo Calvino’s Imaginary Cities, published in 1972 and translated into English in 1974.
[2] That trendy boho neighborhood was nearing the end of its heyday.

On the Road in 1980, Part 2

Mujer ángel, Desierto de Sonora (Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert), 1979, Graciela Uturbide

By mid-February I was crossing the border into Mexico. My circuitous route from Iowa City via San Francisco to the border took four weeks as I eased into the flow of travel and recalibrated the balance between getting somewhere (making miles) and being somewhere. After spending a wild week in Tucson with my old friend Tony Hoagland,[1] I hitched down to Nogales and easily crossed into Mexico. I checked out the buses and trains going south, taking a bus simply because it departed sooner, a six-hour, 400-kilometer ride due south to Guaymas, the first good-sized city on the Gulf of California.

When I left San Francisco over two weeks earlier, I hitched just 100 miles down the Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Cruz. I located my friend Theresa from Iowa City, who had just moved there and was living a couple miles outside of town up a dead-end canyon road. Like some nymph of the redwoods, Theresa and her sweetness kept me lingering in that mellow beach town for almost a week, but I also yearned for the regimen and introspection of the road. “Society, … I hope you're not lonely without me.”[2] On my way to Tucson, I wrote in my journal, “Beginning to look forward rather than back. Paying attention to my actions and transactions. Are the things I do and say equivalent to my feelings, my emotions, my convictions?”

I passed the time on the bus to Guaymas in conversation with my seatmate, using the opportunity to brush up on my conversational Spanish skills. He was a friendly guy, buying me tamales and guayabas from the vendors who crowded the bus in whatever dusty Sonaran village it stopped to take on or discharge passengers, passing their wares up through the windows. When I got to Guaymas, everyone I met was directing me to nearby San Carlos, mistakenly assuming I wanted to be where all the gringos were. Nevertheless, I took their advice, catching a local bus that took me there in a half-hour. Faced with the growing darkness and weary from traveling all day, I quickly found a quiet spot on the beach and set up camp. The next morning I discovered I was surrounded by beauty, situated on a lovely little bay backed by scrub desert and beyond that the craggy mountains and canyons of Cajón del Diablo.[3]

I also discovered my passport was missing. After frantically ransacking my backpack, I went back to Guaymas and checked at my two stops there – the taquería and the bus station – but it hadn’t turned up. The more plausible explanation for my passport’s disappearance implicated my amiable seatmate, who was likely making plans to put it to good use before it expired in five months. I gave myself a stern talking to about not being on my game and not keeping an eye on my essential possessions. On the other hand, I felt good about having perhaps facilitated his immigration plans.

While at the station, I met a young simpatico Norwegian guy, Per, who was preparing to catch a train south, but after I’d mentioned the beach I was camping on, he decided to join me. Meanwhile, I contemplated my options for replacing my passport: retracing my steps to the States, going directly to the American consulate in Mexico City, or traveling at my own pace and accepting the risk of getting stopped by the federales sin papeles.

We stayed just one more night on the beach in San Carlos. When the weather turned cloudy and windy and cool the next morning, we agreed to pack up and head south. We scoped out our options: trains or buses down the coast toward Mazatlán or ferries across the gulf to Baja California. While at the bus station, we met Kathy and Diane, down from San Francisco for a little getaway vacation. After chatting a bit, we bought a six-pack of Pacifico and found a quiet spot down by the harbor where we could drink and continue our conversation. By the time we finished another round of beers at their hotel room, they had persuaded themselves to go with us to Mazatlán. The purposes of our journeys were quite different, but neither Per nor I had any qualms about letting them join us for a while. They were fun to hang out with, and Kathy did speak fairly good Spanish. 

By midnight we were catching the train from nearby Empalme, and as the sun rose the next morning we were approaching Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, two-thirds of the way to  Mazatlán, a lively Pacific seaport of over 200,000 people. It hosts one of the best Carnaval celebrations in Mexico, a week-long street party that would be just kicking into gear the day of our arrival. On the train, we met Bill from Montana, a rangy, knowledgeable guy with an easy-going drawl, who joined our little entourage and recommended we all head for Isla de la Piedra.

After disembarking in Mazatlán, we quickly sussed out the scene and found our way to the docks, where we caught a ferry launch across the mouth of the harbor to Isla de la Piedra, actually a long peninsula that sheltered the harbor. The ferry took us to a small fishing village, from where we hiked about a kilometer to a beautiful beach sheltered by a grove of coconut palms stretching southeast for miles. The only buildings were a few open-air thatched-roof restaurants, one run by a Mexicana named Linda, who catered especially to the gringo hippies camped there. The current assemblage included Americans, Germans, Swiss, Italians, Brazilians, Swedes. 

I was delighted to join this international gathering. We made our campsite near others scattered along the back edge of the beach. Bill was particularly handy as we rigged up a shelter of coconut palm fronds and tarps to protect us from the midday sun and the steady northwest winds that picked up with the new moon. I romped in the sea, body-surfed, gathered freshly fallen coconuts for drinking, and played bocce with German Siegfried and Swiss Catherine, using empty coconut shells. At night we’d gather around a bonfire on the beach, smoke pot, drink rum and Kahlua, drum on improvised percussion instruments, and sing and howl at the moon. It seemed much farther from Mazatlán’s Centro than a half hour by foot and ferry. 

On Saturday night, a group of us went into the city to experience Carnaval. Mazatlán’s version is much tamer and more family-oriented than Rio’s Carnaval or New Orleans’ Mardi Gras.[4] But it was still a wild scene. The boardwalk at Paseo Olas Altas filled with laughing people. A parade with florid floats and pretty girls all dolled up. Fireworks erupted throughout the night. Bandas and gruperas played lively music on small stages. Mariachis roamed the streets. Folks carried plastic Coca-Cola bottles containing as much rum as coke. Beer stands on many streetcorners. Lots of drunkenness and a simmering undertone of violence. But Carnaval was mostly a joyous escape from the everyday grind. Young boys and girls flitted about, throwing confetti in each others’ faces as a kind of flirtation. As I awoke the next morning, I was still shaking colorful bits of paper out of my hair. 

On the last day of Carnaval, I decided to move on. That evening, at the height of the festivities, I caught a bus to the train station. Many others seemed to have the same plan – the bus was jam-packed, not another person could’ve squeezed on. The old vehicle was laboring. Its shocks, such as they were, had been pushed to their limit, the bus scraping bottom whenever it hit a pothole. Making a right turn, it tipped precariously. Everyone was laughing. Finally, the bus just died in the middle of the road, and we all staggered off into the night. 

I got directions to the station and continued on foot. When I got there, I leaned my backpack against a pillar to form a backrest and napped a few hours, ignoring the hubbub. At midnight, I caught a train south through Nayarit and then inland, slowly chugging through rugged mountains and teetering over stunning ravines, across Jalisco toward Guadalajara, where I hope to resolve my passport problems.

Footnotes:

[1] One night, Tony, his friend Lynn, and I dropped acid, hopped in his VW Bug, drove west into Saguaro National Park, and wandered among the strange desert cacti – saguaro, jumping cholla, prickly pear, fishhook barrel – until we were hopelessly lost and howling with the coyotes at low-flying planes.

[2] When I read Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild and watched Sean Penn’s movie adaptation and listened to Eddie Vedder’s soundtrack, I identified with Chris McCandless’s amazing and tragic journey, undertaken ten years after this (1990-1992).

[3] The Devil’s Drawer, a Special Biosphere Reserve.

[4] However, it’s true that at Mazatlán’s 2017 Carnaval, Sinaloa’s Secretariat of Health distributed 80,000 condoms to combat the spread of STDs.

On the Road in 1980, Part 1

Mission Dolores Park on the western edge of the Mission District, San Franciso

After an exhilarating year performing with Pink Gravy and the Eggthings, I ducked out of the local rock ’n’ roll limelight to hit the road again. My plan was to return to Mexico and go farther south this time into Central America. The semester before I left, I took classes in Intensive Spanish and Ethnology of Mesoamerica to prepare myself. This trip also put on hold a slow-developing relationship with Pat and her son Sierra, who would turn two in a month. Pat and I toggled back and forth between being good friends and lovers. I would sidle up to the idea of entering a committed relationship, but then my attention would be diverted. I was smitten with a cute, quirky, blonde-haired girl[1] in our Undergraduate Poetry Workshop class, Theresa Love (yeah, hard to make up a name more apt), who would leave me handwritten notes: “Meet me at four o’clock by the nut butters at the co-op.” Pat dismissively referred to her as “Jams & Jellies.” I didn’t leave Iowa City on a drizzly overcast January day[2] to extricate myself from this messy love triangle, but I was admittedly over my head and welcomed the chance to step back a bit.

Four days later, I was in one of my favorite cities, San Francisco, on a beautiful warm Saturday morning. I was drinking coffee in Jim’s Donut Shop on the corner of Mission and 29th, all the lively street traffic brushing past my shoulder on the other side of the plate glass window. I basked in the sun, marveling at the strange and unlikely happenstances of life. 

An hour earlier, I had been walking up Mission Street, smiling and digging the sunshine vibes, when I was attracted by a low whistle from a cab driver across a busy pocket park. I walked over and began talking with Karen, an attractive Black cabbie who, in a seductively husky voice, invited me to climb in and go for a ride. Without a thought – my mind as foggy as those of the Greek sailors enchanted by the sirens’ song – I did, and we did. An hour later, Karen was dropping me off at that same little park on Mission, a cab ride I’d never forget. She gave me her phone number – still legible in my travel journal in her neatly penciled handwriting – but I never did call her. Not sure why, perhaps I didn’t want to sully the serendipity of that moment with something intentional or anticipated.

In that booth at Jim’s Donut Shop, I took my first deep relaxing breaths since I’d left Iowa City. I’d been planning to head south on I-35, but when you get on the merry-go-round, you grab the ring, no matter where it takes you. I’d grabbed a two-day, 1,400-mile ride from Des Moines to Winnemucca, through the cold high Wyoming Rockies and the barren Utah and Nevada expanses. My companion for this long stretch, libertarian Dennis from Oregon, shared the sleeping accommodations of his van when we’d stop for the night. By Thursday night I had made it from Winnemucca to rainy Reno. I walked into a glitzy neon casino near the highway, sat down at the bar to have a beer, my backpack leaning against the barstool, and before long was befriended by Chuck, a middle-aged guy who offered me a warm, dry place to crash for the night. Ignoring my misgivings, I accepted his offer and, for the next seven or eight hours, held off Chuck’s relentless advances, patiently explaining that I didn’t swing that way, trying to catch a few winks in between. Afterward, I wondered whether I should’ve just let him have his way with me so I could get some decent sleep, but I don’t think I was comfortable enough with myself and my sexuality to do that.

Chuck did drive me out to the I-80 entrance ramp the next morning, my “virginity” intact, and I soon caught a ride through Donner Pass and into the verdant Promised Land of California. When I got to San Francisco, I looked up my old high school buddy Michael, who was living in the Mission District, working and student-teaching. I would end up spending nearly a week there, talking about life and literature with Michael, hanging out with him and his friend Abbe, wandering around the city, and writing in my journal. Looking through that journal, I was intrigued to read this preface of sorts on its second page:

I’m not interested in documenting the visible events of this journey as much as what’s going on inside, the interior voyage. To write when I have the time and urge, to explore my feelings and emotions, to trace that path. But also to celebrate the simplicity of life as it happens, not to lose myself down metaphysical rabbit holes. To combine musings and prose, the mundane and the spiritual. And to be honest and straightforward.

I was setting a high bar for myself, but I’d done enough traveling by this point in my life to know I needed a challenge to make this journey meaningful. Riding a streetcar to Golden Gate Park, I overheard a conversation between two young punks, decked out in leather, studs, and spikes. One said, as we passed through Haight-Ashbury, “This is where the whole flower-child thing started. My parents were here in the middle of it.” Thus, the punks as offspring of the hippie movement, both continuing it and trashing it. 

Another day, I kicked back on a slope in Mission Dolores Park, waiting for the sun to warm up the city and clear the fog to reveal a far view of the towering monuments of downtown commerce, occasionally the horn blasts of container ships steaming in and out of San Francisco Bay, nearby the clacking of trolley cars. The Beaux Arts bell tower and facade of Mission High School, the gaudy rows of Victorian houses. Children playing in the park, mothers and fathers keeping an eye, joggers getting exercise, dogs walking their owners, old men with burlap sacks poking through trash, teens drinking beer from paper bags, sleepers in repose on benches, others reading or thinking or observing. Palm trees, walls covered with graffiti, Free Puerto Rico, CIA Killed Angel, a statue of Don Miguel Hidalgo, leader of the Mexican War of Independence. The intimacy of living in close contact with all this. I opened my arms to the city and embraced what it had to offer. “I’m ready to give everything for anything I take.”

I wanted to become sharp, my senses ready, prepared to react, not wasting energy trying to place myself in the center of what was happening. At that moment the earth moved, buildings rocked and rolled, reminding me of the crazy geological pressure we were sitting atop, that political fissure, that fault. I could feel the urge – it was time to move on, see something new, meet people I’d never met, feel something I’d never felt, speak something other than English – time to continue the journey.

Footnotes:

[1] See Manic Pixie Dream Girl

[2] January 15, 1980

My Days in a Rock ’n’ Roll Band, Part 2

If we’d ever made an album, this could’ve been the cover art. Cf. the Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow album cover.

… or, How I Became a Monos’lab [1]

1979 was an interesting year to be listening to the latest music. That summer, Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago signalled the beginning of the slow demise of that musical genre. Punk music had been banging its head against the wall of that sound. New music coming out that year certainly had punk leanings but had also moved on. In 1978-79 we were listening to the debut or second albums from the B-52s, Devo, Talking Heads, Prince, Gang of Four, Pere Ubu, Elvis Costello and the Attractions. This music had energy and vitality. It was raucous but also honored the beat. It felt smart and fresh, ready to both take on and make fun of the world.

That year, in Iowa City, our newly formed band, Pink Gravy, was vibrating with creative energy, and our small nascent fan base was eager to hear and see what we would come up with next. [2] On September 22, we played one of our most interesting gigs: an outdoor show as part of Iowa City’s dedication of its new ped mall, four downtown city blocks converted from car traffic to foot traffic. We set up our stage by the new fountain at the center of the mall, within a stone’s throw of a half-dozen bars. The show took place on Saturday night after the annual Iowa-Iowa State rivalry football game. Football fans, some still drunk from pre-game tailgating, were hitting the bars hard. Almost everyone was wearing their colors – their fierce alliance represented by either the bumblebee black-and-gold of the Iowa Hawkeyes or the cardinal-and-gold of the Iowa State Cyclones. It was an uneasy commingling of warring camps.

And our band of sarcastic misfits and agitators was in the middle of it. We might cover Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking” or Graham Nash’s “Our House” to appease the audience, but by the time we’d finished mutating those songs, they were barely recognizable. We attracted a range of baffled looks and blurry heckling, and tolerated an incident involving “drunken fools who happened to climb into the fountain and spray the crowd with water [and] damaged the public address system,” [3] but we managed to give as good as we got. Our dumbfounded audience was invited to consider the possibilities that we were due for a “Nuclear Accident,” that it was “Eggtime,” that “Everybody Is a Monos’lab.”

When we played the Beaux Arts Costume Ball at Maxwell’s on October 29, Thomascyne decided to alter our performance wear. Since the audience would be in costumes, she made long pink hooded robes to replace our usually outlandish stage outfits. We looked vaguely liturgical, like nine monos’labic monks. By early December we had earned a two-night weekend show at Gabe’s, which would always be our favorite place to play.

We merged these new sounds we were hearing with the older music we loved. We each shared our personal favorites with the rest of the band: The Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Patti Smith, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Fela Kuti and Africa 70. I kept checking out the double album An Evening with Wild Man Fischer from the Iowa City Public Library. To annotate the quality of the vinyl discs, a librarian had dutifully but aptly and perhaps facetiously affixed a warning label: “Warped But Playable.”

Many wanted to categorize us as new wave, a catch-all term bandied about to explain whatever was coming after disco and punk. We adamantly rejected any attempt to pigeonhole us. Everybody in the band was writing songs – at least fifty in the first two years of the band – and we all explored our favorite musical styles. The blues were represented by “Boinger Man” and  “Middle Class Honkie Blues.” [4] Reggae and ska with “Nuclear Accident” and “Gangrene.” Punk with “Fab Con Men” and “I Wanna Be Your Toto, Dorothy.” Country and western with “Goodwill Store.” California surf music with “Iowa Wave.” Doo-wop with “I Like Ike.” Calypso with “Bio” (a remake of Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” that explains the simple pleasures of selling one’s plasma). All these songs were homages to genres that had influenced us, but our flair for musical shape-shifting also dissuaded listeners from trying to define us.

There was so much that I loved about performing with Pink Gravy and participating in other Monos’labic sabotage. I loved having the opportunity to collaborate with a group of creative people. We leaned on and learned from each other when composing or refining songs, lots of co-writing of both lyrics and music. Inspired by the band’s protests at the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant, I had written the poem “Emotional Data,” which the band managed to turn into a song with a brutal driving beat and a call-and-response singing approach between me and Thomascyne and Brenda. Here are some of the lyrics:

D: I’m the guy with the x-ray eyes

T/B: That’s not the Cedar River

D: That’s a coolant system getting hot

T/B: That’s not a rain cloud

D: That’s a plume of hydrogen gas

T/B: I’m a fixed statistic

D: Nothing to evacuate

T/B: When the meltdown comes

D: Woah! Nothing to evacuate

T/B: With the stockpile comes down

D: I’m afraid of the light

The song featured a long instrumental breakdown in the middle that sounded like industrial noise. This became the signal for all available band members and every brave soul in the bar to do the song’s signature dance, The Meltdown, which entailed slowly descending to the floor and writhing amongst each other in the most congenial of ways – part mosh pit, part hippie love-in. 

Doing the Meltdown on the dance floor at Gabe’s.

I loved the dopamine high of performing in front of a raucous audience. I loved singing “Rock ’n’ Roll Nun.” [5] We all had stage names for our Pink Gravy personas: Louise and Thelma Swank, Phil Dirt, Dr. Ben Gay, Bob Quinze, Bert the Intellectual Cowboy, St. Orlando, David Ben Sunny. I might be introduced as Physical Ed or Johnny Brandex or Kid Karnage, all depending on the moment. That, along with our stage outfits, functioned as disguises so we could fabricate semi-porous boundaries between our performative lives and our more prosaic daytime lives.

This and the previous photo are by Steve Zavodny, The Daily Iowan.

I loved the way we were able to slip onto public platforms to make fun of the idiot world around us. In 1980, during the heat of the presidential campaign, David Tholfsen and I concocted a side project called the David Convention. Faced with a choice between a Georgia peanut farmer incumbent and a Hollywood movie star, we fought to add an option to vote for David – any David. I recall running around the campus Pentacrest during a noon hour in a pink polyester sport coat, hollering, cajoling students to vote for David. At a Pink Gravy gig at the Crow’s Nest on November 1, we held the David Convention. David and I famously performed an acapella medley of our favorite Wild Man Fischer songs. Quite a few other Davids were there.

Yeah, the Daily Iowan ad actually said “Miller Time,” our shameless promo for Miller High Life. But we never turned down free publicity. Photo by Dom Franco.

I did take breaks from the band to travel – the first five months of 1980 in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. The band continued to perform with great energy. In a rather charming documentary of the band, some of the best videos were shot while I was gone. When I returned from a summer-long 1981 journey through Europe, both the band and I had moved on. But our parting of ways was amicable. Pink Gravy dispersed in that centrifugal way typical of our time – to Lee County, Iowa; Bloomington, Indiana; New York City; Phoenix; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco. Some of us have formed new bands; our first drummer earned a doctorate in musical anthropology; one of us plays Irish traditional music. I’m still here, holding the gifts I gained from the experience – a clearer recognition of myself as a poet, the joy of creative collaboration, the liberating craziness of spontaneous performance – gifts that would quietly resonate in other chapters of my life.

Footnotes:

[1] From Part 1: The Monos’labs were parodies of clueless inarticulate suburbanites, Dick Nixon’s Silent Majority, who would then flock to vote for Reagan. Seemingly unable to fight the rising tide of conservatism, the Monos’labs chose to cynically and satirically infiltrate it.

[2] See “Why Are These People Acting Stupid?” by J. Christenson, The Daily Iowan, November 11, 1979, pp. 1A, 4A, 5A. http://dailyiowan.lib.uiowa.edu/DI/1979/di1979-11-08.pdf 

[3] From a Viewpoints letter published in The Daily Iowan, Bill Case, October 4, 1979.

[4] Although I’m unable to link any of the sound recordings we have of our music, our collection of live recordings is in the process of being digitized for the Pink Gravy and Monos’labs archive being curated by the University of Iowa Special Collections folks.

[5] Who wouldn’t enjoy singing, “Here comes the fire chief / Oh, here comes the fire chief / With his red helmet and damaged brain cells / He’s just seen a rock ’n’ roll nun / But a couple a days in the electric chair oughtta set him straight”?

On Quests, Part 2

From The Green Knight (2021), Dev Patel as Gawain and Alicia Vikander as the Lady of the Castle.

“Writing has always been a way to reconcile my lived experiences with the narratives available to describe it (or lack thereof).” –Melissa Febos, Girlhood

That week with Bobbie, we talked about everything. Mornings after Jeff left for work and evenings after dinner, Bobbie and I would take her dog, Gertie Bell, on long walks steeped in conversation. Wednesday, we drove down to Fire Island, part of the barrier chain guarding Long Island’s south shore. We walked along the beach and then picnicked at one of the sanctioned swimming areas. All told, we walked, and talked, over nine miles that day. Thursday morning, we bustled around the kitchen, making lunch for the social studies teachers’ book club Bobbie belongs to; I contributed a Spanish tortilla and helped her make panzanella and another salad. Bobbie had let me know beforehand what book they were reading so I could participate in the discussion.

Friday morning, we swam at the beach near her house and then ran errands in preparation for Family Day, an event hosted by the Huntington Beach Community Association, in which Jeff plays an active role. Bobbie and Jeff’s oldest son, Ben, and his wife and their two children arrived that evening. Saturday was Family Day – neighbors gathering at the beach for fellowship, friendly athletic contests, and lunch. Jeff recruited me to help grill burgers and dogs, and asked me to pair up with Bobbie for the final event, the egg toss competition, while he sought out another partner.

Our long talks included topics we’d covered in our letters, because talking about them in person is different – our hopes and fears for our children and grandchildren, chapters from the stories of our marriages. Bobbie expressed some of the frustrations anyone who’s been married for three or four decades feels when the dynamics of the relationship get predictable because each person takes the other for granted. I vouched for Jeff – he is reliable and generous, I proposed, a good man, a good father and grandfather, a good husband. Bobbie agreed all that was true.

After taking my leave early Sunday morning,[1] as I drove down the Jersey Turnpike and the Eastern Shore toward Virginia Beach, I thought about those five days with Bobbie – what a gift it was to renew our friendship. I was amazed that everything about her that I loved in 1972 is still there in 2021. But I also had this odd feeling of pride in how I’d handled myself (or how we’d handled ourselves). After our first walk around the neighborhood, we’d held each other in a long sweet embrace. And as we would walk and talk, we often brushed shoulders and arms as I’d leaned in to listen better. But that was the extent of our physical intimacy. We instead expressed those feelings by simply being attentive to each other’s needs and moods. I have no doubt Jeff picked up on our mutual affection but, as a kindness, allowed space for it without comment.

In The Green Knight, Gawain, exhausted by his journey and stripped of his horse and all his possessions except the battleaxe the Green Knight had given him, arrives at a castle and collapses in its doorway. We next see him sleeping in a comfortable bed, tended to by the lord of the castle. The lord tells him he will go out every day to hunt and bring home meat to give Gawain strength so he can complete his quest. While he’s out hunting, the lady of the castle attempts to seduce Gawain, testing his chivalry and moral virtue. Her advances repeatedly rebuffed, she instead gives him her green sash, a charm to protect him from harm. I’m not suggesting a perfect analogy between the Arthurian legend and my story – Bobbie certainly never tried to seduce me – but the similarities are uncanny.

When I talked with Bobbie again on my way back to Iowa, she mentioned that Jeff had resumed going on those long walks with her and Gertie. Perhaps seeing Bobbie the way I saw her had given him a renewed appreciation of her. Perhaps my attention to Bobbie had made her glow in a way that enhanced her beauty. Perhaps my visit had helped them find a little more happiness in their life. Oh, I was pleased with my supposed achievement, probably too pleased, but at least I had a legend to explain it all.

That last homeward hour on I-80, which I could nearly drive blindfolded, I catalogued memories of the journey. The hospitality and generosity of Jon and Kathy. The time spent with them and other friends I’d grown up with, folks I’d looked up to when I was a lost high school freshman trying to figure out who I wanted to become. Camping with Emma, Oscar, and Linus in the Virginia sand dunes, among Live Oaks and Scrub Pines. Hiking with them through freshwater swamps filled with turtles, Bald Cypress knees jutting up from tannin-brown waters, the air thick with Spanish Moss, impressive dragonflies, and the plunking, ricocheting calls of bullfrogs. And those perambulatory tête-à-têtes with Bobbie. The culinary duet we performed the morning before the book club meeting. The way I was welcomed into her and Jeff’s family, as if a place had been saved for me all along.

I now sense that, more than ever, I’m on a cusp, my momentum propelling me forward, keen to embrace a feeling not felt since my wife died almost three years ago, something I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel again – that feeling at the beginning of love, that feeling of “When will I see you again?” Could it be that my love for Bobbie makes me more receptive to love from other sources? Is this some kind of reward for “my gallantry”? I know life doesn’t work that way, and honestly, being ready for love – in a world riven with woe – that alone is enough.

8 September 2021

Footnote

[1] Bearing Bobbie’s parting gifts of a half-dozen books, garden produce, and a fresh-baked loaf of blueberry bread.

On Quests, Part 1

Translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, among others, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written by an unknown 14th-century poet of the West Midlands of England. .

As I recently watched The Green Knight, based on the Arthurian legend Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, one scene resonated for me as I sensed the extent to which it mirrored my recent experiences with my friend Bobbie. The movie is a faithful retelling of the fourteenth-century chivalric romance, with chapter titles in Old English blackletter and a soundtrack that is positively eerie, sometimes sounding like a chorus of Tuvan throat singers. King Arthur is old and doddering; Queen Guinevere is decidedly unlovely; Sir Gawain is a youthful goof-off. 

The story centers around Gawain’s quest to fulfill a Christmas Day promise to seek out the Green Knight one year hence, whereupon Gawain would receive the same blow he chose to deliver to the Green Knight. (Gawain had cut off his head, likely not expecting the Green Knight to pick it up as he laughed and rode away.) Gawain’s journey is infused with magic – a woman who asks him to retrieve her head from the bottom of a lake, a talking fox that befriends him, the Green Knight himself, more vegetation than human.

Last October, I was working on a memoir piece about falling in love with Bobbie the summer after high school.[1] Those recollections of first love inspired me to reach out, if only to thank her for all she gave me. I sent a letter, a shot in the dark, to the Long Island address I had for her when our correspondence was sidetracked over forty years ago by growing families commanding our full time and attention. My letter did reach her, and a week later I received one in return, eight pages on yellow legal pad paper. All that catching up!

Although we exchanged emails and cell phone numbers, we decided to continue to correspond via handwritten letters. Over this past year, one of us has received a letter from the other every ten days or so, the U.S. Post Office’s lack of delivery speed giving us time to think of something new to write about, although that was never really a problem. We had a lot to share about our lives and families, about the dismal state of the “American experiment,” about our experiences as high school teachers. We had both left secure jobs in our late forties, returned to school to earn education degrees, and then helped students learn about World History (Bobbie) and Language Arts (me). We would have been great colleagues, our teaching philosophies matched so well.

In May, while I was visiting old hometown friends in Akron, Bobbie sent me a text: “Cheryl told me you are there today and tomorrow. Hope your visit is wonderful. If you get sleepy as you drive back to Iowa, give me a call. I’d be happy to help some of the miles pass.” I had other stops before returning, but ten days later, I texted Bobbie from the first rest stop in Illinois to see if she was available to talk. Back on the road, ten minutes later, I got a call from her: “Where are you?” “Just east of Champaign.” “Well, turn around! I’m in the middle of Pennsylvania on my way to Ohio.”

I was momentarily tempted to do so but decided to continue homeward. Instead, we talked – for the first time in all those years, for over two hours as we both drove west. The miles flew by. We agreed that since we’d missed this chance to meet up, we must do so soon, and I told her I’d be coming back east in August to camp with my daughter and grandsons in Virginia. When we finally said goodbye, as Bobbie was pulling into a rest stop and I was crossing the Mississippi River, she said, “I love you.” Without a moment’s hesitation I responded, “I love you too, Bobbie.”

We made plans: I’d visit her on Long Island at the beginning of August before heading down the coast to meet Emma, Oscar, and Linus at a state park near Virginia Beach.[2] I stopped in Akron for a few days, then drove to the middle of Pennsylvania Dutch country, in the foothills of the Alleghenies, where I camped for the night at the all-but-deserted Holiday Pines Campground – for free since the office was closed. The next morning, as I fueled up on the Twilight Diner special, I watched two horse-drawn buggies make their way along the Interstate 80 overpass. I reached New York City at noon, avoiding rush hour traffic, crossing the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan and the Bronx, then across Throgs Neck Bridge to Long Island, pulling up in front of Bobbie’s house an hour later.

It had been 45 years since we’d last seen each other, but we reconnected as if it were yesterday. Of course, all the letters had smoothed out much of the potential awkwardness of the meeting, but we both still felt a twinge of apprehension. After all, we had professed, not in so many words, our love in those letters, letters that I wasn’t sure her husband, Jeff,[3] was fully aware of. When he arrived home that evening from work, he welcomed me without reservation, taking me on a tour of the dovecote that housed his flight of homing pigeons and the chicken coop he’d built for their laying hens. I was given their boys’ old bedroom, a beautiful space with three ribbon windows looking down on Northport Bay and, beyond a narrow neck of land, the Long Island Sound and the far Connecticut shore. Two skylights in the roof let in sunshine filtered through the tall oaks towering over the house. I called it the Treehouse, and there I slept for five nights as Bobbie and Jeff graciously wove me into the fabric of their life.

Footnotes:

[1] For the full story, I invite you to turn to Falling in Love for the First Time (Parts 1-3) in this blog series.

[2] First Landing State Park, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, where English colonists first arrived in 1607.

[3] Jeff was the boyfriend after me. When I visited Bobbie in Denver near the end of her first year of college (still thinking I was her boyfriend), he helped replace my car’s fuel filter so I could drive back home.

On Wanting to Shampoo You

I’ve been relistening to and reloving Joni Mitchell’s Blue, fifty years in this world. Ah, the sweet pirouettes of her voice. Her lyrics are still fresh; they still speak to me about the yearnings of youth. Even when the words seem to miss, they hit: “I wanna talk to you / I wanna shampoo you / I wanna renew you again and again.” These lines from the album’s opening song, “All I Want,” seem laughable, at best whimsical, except that (as often happens when stuff gets in your head) they took shape for me three times in the past week ‒ in literature, in real life, in memory.

On a westbound train skimming along the northern border of the United States to Seattle, I was reading James Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country. In it, he tried to make sense of the many permutations of heterosexual, homosexual, and interracial love and relationships, such as this: “Yves ... preferred long scalding baths, with newspapers, cigarettes, and whiskey on a chair next to the bathtub, and with Eric nearby to talk to, to shampoo his hair, and to scrub his back.”

The title of Joni’s song is rich with ambiguity. Is this the apologetic, self-effacing “all I want …” or the unreserved, exacting, full-throated “ALL I WANT!” or both at once? The young British singer-songwriter Arlo Parks said, “What I love so much about this song is that it is full of contradiction and conflict. There’s a real sense of exploring what it means to be present and alive in the moment…. It feels like she was trying to hold onto something or keep up with something.” At the end of the first stanza, when Joni entices her listener, “Well, come on!” I am ready to do whatever that means.

While visiting my oldest son, Sierra, and his partner in Seattle, we took the ferry to Bainbridge Island one day for the pleasure of crossing Puget Sound. He had pointed out that because of the high cost of housing in Seattle and its avid backpacking and camping ethos, many homeless people live under highway overpasses but in top-quality tents.

At a sink

in the men’s bathroom

in the ferry terminal

on the Seattle waterfront

one guy shampoos

another guy’s hair

As I wash my hands

at an adjacent sink

the shampooer turns to me

and says, “How’s life

in the real world?”

Finally, Joni’s lyrics brought to mind the times I helped bathe my wife, Pat, over the last year of her life. Drawing the bath water, helping to remove her shoes and clothes, supporting her as she stepped into the tub. Then pouring a pitcher of water over her head ‒ the water cascading down and glinting in the morning light ‒ and shampooing her hair, momentarily lost in the minty smell and thick luxurious foam. Then one more submersion, carefully rinsing her hair, using my left hand to protect her eyes from the stinging suds. And after that, lathering a washcloth to massage her back, neck, arms, breasts, belly, genitals, legs, feet. A stark reminder of how her body was withering over time, skin more and more loose, muscles more and more lax from disuse.

Pat rarely felt anything other than physical discomfort, if not pain, in her final year, the fentanyl patches and oxycodone her only relief. I tried to make those baths for her a small moment of repose, but I was sometimes less than patient with her, and her crankiness (as much as she’d earned the right to it). At my best, I gave a good performance of selfless giving. At her best, she silently applauded the effort.

In each of these moments, I was reminded how physically intimate the act of shampooing another can be, what a superb example of caregiving it is. As she described her desire to be alive and free with someone, Joni might’ve simply sung, “I wanna make love to you.” Her line is far better.

19 July 2021

My Days in a Rock ‘n’ Roll Band…

or, How I Became a Monos’lab, Part 1

When I returned to Iowa City in late August 1979 from my Cape Breton trip, I was looking for a change. I responded to a roommate-wanted ad on the New Pioneer bulletin board. This small step led me into a world of new friends and collaborators, of artists and musicians and writers, people who looked clear-eyed at the world handed down to them and engaged with that world in the guise of characters, as if it all were a play, and it was.

I met Thomascyne Buckley, a gregarious, auburn-haired art student, at her first-floor apartment in a house on Fairchild Street, and soon moved in with her and her dog Max. They’d been living there a year, and she’d put her stamp on the place. The creative chaos was both exciting and unsettling, but I soon found my footing. Hanging from trees in the backyard were boingers, musical sculptures Thomascyne had made by shaping thick aluminum wire into objects vaguely resembling tight tornado funnels. I would lie in a hammock, reading and absentmindedly strumming the boingers with anything like a drumstick to produce a shimmering and beautifully eerie sound, a coda perhaps to a particularly good poem or paragraph.

As the semester started, what we were each studying and creating led to interesting discussions across disciplines – art, literature, music. Having caught parts of a Dada Conference held at the university back in the spring, we both were drawn to the absurdist sensibilities of Marcel DuChamp, Kurt Schwitters, John Cage, and others. And we were also keeping a close eye on current issues.

In her sculpture class, Thomascyne was constructing “eggthings,” costumes made of wire frames covered in heavyweight gessoed paper, with armholes, legholes, and an eyehole, and a seam between the top and bottom that would allow a person to put it on and wear it. I was intrigued as I watched her work out the practical design issues of making wearable art. Meanwhile, she was constructing a narrative to explain these six eggthings: Dr. Bob was in the lab, messing around with some radioactive materials, when a half-dozen adjacent eggs were accidentally contaminated, mutating into these six-foot-tall eggthings.[1]

At that time, most politicians thought nuclear energy was the solution to our need for a cheap and unlimited alternative to fossil fuels. But others feared nuclear power plants were being approved and built too quickly without regard for their dangers. Those fears were realized in late March of that year when a partial meltdown and radiation leak occurred at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Thomascyne’s sculptures were whimsically highlighting those dangers, critiquing them by normalizing them.

Meanwhile, one of Thomascyne’s sculpture classmates, Brenda Knox, was creating fabric head masks of characters such as Madge and Howard Nelson, Bowlo, Zippy the Pinhead.[2] These characters became model Monos’labs – clueless inarticulate suburbanites on vacation, parodies of Dick Nixon’s Silent Majority, the kind of folks who would flock to vote for Reagan the following year. Brenda and Thomascyne scoured second-hand stores, looking for outlandish outfits for the Monos’labs, the more polyester the better. Seemingly unable to fight the tide of conservatism sweeping the nation, they chose to cynically and satirically infiltrate it.

Other young artists would frequent the Fairchild Street house. Walter Sunday stopped by, lugging a large paper bag filled with combs he had scavenged from the streets. I was taken by his single-minded passion and began to do the same. These are the opening stanzas of my long poem documenting the experience:

Once upon a time, Walter, obsessed with the debris of combs,

casually left a pile of them on our kitchen table.

Black and anonymous, as common as money, they

remained there, an arrangement that lasted through the winter.

Their purpose squandered, never again would they

orchestrate the wave of hair through their fine teeth.

Then the sun returned and the snow melted, disclosing

this residue of combs scattered throughout the city.

Combs on the sidewalk, steaming with ownership,

still holding the private tangled strands of lives.

Combs made of hard rubber, DuPont nylon, all the plastic

brands—Pro, Goody, the ubiquitous black Ace, the Unbreakable …

At the suggestion of Thomascyne and Brenda’s sculpture professor,[3] all this came together as a performance of their work. Thomascyne had recruited a crew of adventurer-participants; all the eggthings were selected for their tall, lanky physiques. She had located a free piano and a pickup truck. That afternoon, we hauled the piano across town while playing it maniacally. And so it began one night in late October, near the UI Art Building, under some trees beside the river, dimly illuminated by the lampposts on the bridge.  

This was the debut of the Monos’labic Orchestra. Thomascyne’s tangled tree of boingers made a musical appearance, trash cans provided a percussive element. Six eggthings – all well over six feet tall – danced and whirled and chanted: Moon, stars, planets, boing! … Omm-lette! …  Je suis fou! Je suis dans la lune! A sizable crowd of students showed up, curious about what and why. It was all wonderfully messy and funny, but also at times magical and mysterious. 

The eggthings were naïve and idealistic, in need of protection from a judgmental world, so we adopted them. Everyone involved in the performance realized this wasn’t over, that some kind of second act was coming. That next act took place on a slushy February day when the six eggthings returned to public life to protest the wholesale slaughter of their brothers and sisters at Hamburg Inn #2, Iowa City’s popular breakfast diner. The entire demonstration was documented – the eggthings picketing in front of Hamburg Inn,[4] a “token woman reporter” interviewing them and inviting them to make an incoherent statement of their concerns, and then a VW van suddenly appearing and a pack of RV people clambering out, chasing off the helpless eggthings, and catching up with the most hapless of them, Sonny Side-Up, across the street. A martyr to the cause, Sonny lost his life that day, his scrambled remains strewn in the alley off Linn Street

A few weeks later, Pink Gravy and the Monos’labic Orchestra performed at the Wheel Room, the bar in the basement of the UI student center. It was both a memorial concert for Sonny Side-Up and a Mardi Gras Festival celebration. Making its first appearance was Pink Gravy, the electric rock band manifestation (or mutation) of the Monos’labs. In the planning leading up this event, scraps of ideas on paper were floating around the Fairchild house kitchen table. On one of them, someone had scrawled “punk group.” Thomascyne walked in and misread it aloud: “Pink Gravy?” The name would stick.

Once again, Thomascyne served as the mastermind and agent provocateur and mother of this venture. Both Brenda and Thomascyne had great voices. Brenda played sax and flute. Thomascyne quickly picked up the electric guitar and sax. Paul added his solid lead guitar and vocals, and Chad became the quintessential quiet, steady bass guitarist. Bob was on drums, Eric on keyboards, and David Tholfsen and I on percussive energy and vocals. Alan, Scott, Kevin, and many others joined in at various times during the life of the band. I was invited to get involved because I was a poet who enjoyed disguising myself in costumes and acting goofy. I sang backup and occasionally lead vocals. I played the tubes[5] and other percussive instruments – squeak toys, boingers, bike horn, smoke alarm, as well as more traditional instruments.

In March, we played the Wheel Room again, and in April, we were at The Moody Blue to rally support for an upcoming demonstration at the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant near Cedar Rapids, where a number of Monos’labs were arrested for trespassing. In May, we rented the Old Brick building for a Graduation Blast featuring Pink Gravy and the Monos’labic Orchestra. Brenda, who worked at Gabe’s, helped us get our foot in that door, and by July, we were playing gigs at what would become our favorite place to play. We publicized our shows by stapling bright, busy collage posters all over town (which fans would then remove because they liked the art). Much of the raw material for the posters came from magazines of the fifties, a bonus of our second-hand store scavenging. We mastered the art of xerox, sometimes making copies of copies so that the image degraded, generation by generation.

How does one explain this? We were a bunch of bored and restless kids who decided to do whatever we could to shake up the status quo, to épater les bourgeois.[6] The recipe: stir up a couple of visual artists, some writers, a few musicians, and shake vigorously, garnish with Monos’labs and eggthings. The end result was a conceptual garage band (or warehouse band since we practiced at Blooming Prairie Warehouse) that was visually interesting and musically all over the place. People came to see the spectacle, listen to our songs, and dance with us. For me, hanging with this group of people was creatively inspiring and crazy fun. As Pink Gravy would remind us in its ska number “Everybody Is a Monos’lab” – “S’labbin’s happenin’/ It certainly isn’t fattenin’/ You just gotta see it through/ Get some data from the view.”

Footnotes:

[1] According to the song “Eggtime,” by the band Pink Gravy.

[2] Madge with cat-eye sunglasses and severely coiffed hair, Howard looking vaguely academic, Bowlo a pudgy-faced Italian guy, Zippy with an actual rabbit ear TV antenna.

[3] Louise Kramer, a visiting instructor from New York City. The creation of Thomascyne’s boinger pieces had been encouraged by David Dunlap in his drawing class.

[4] One of the picket signs was a real estate yard sign that had been appropriated and mutated: “Dick IcKee real or.”

[5] Rubber shower hose, galvanized iron and PVC plumbing pipes, plastic tubing,

[6] That is, stick it to the man.