Santa Comforts a Friend by the Fox

 This was published in the local papers.  If you don't read me on Face Book you would have missed it.  Thought you might need one more Christmas message.

Sometimes I go to “the flats” on the Fox River after swimming laps at the Ottawa YMCA.  The area along the walking trail between the Y and the aqueduct is a ribbon of nature running through town.  Sometimes you see a heron, or ducks.  The flow of the river brings me peace.

I was there last week. I heard someone whistling “Silver Bells” and looked down the trail.  Walking towards me was a guy with a big white beard in a red coat.  I yelled out to him.

“Did you know I’d be here Santa?”

“C’mon McClure, you know I keep track of you.”

“I’m glad.  I was afraid I wouldn’t see you again.”

“I was visiting Opportunity School. Such good kids and teachers.  They have a schedule all organized for me.  Great way to connect with kids.”

“Have a seat, Santa.” 

He sat next to me.  Nothing better than old friends.

“How was your year McClure?”

“I figure you know that already Santa.”

“I got a pretty good idea. I just want to hear what you thought of it.”

“I had a few health problems, like most older people, but they’re minor really. My granddaughter June is almost three and turning into an amazing little person. My wife and I get to see her often.  Both of our kids are doing well.  Life is pretty good.” 

“I’ve been keeping up with June.  She’s a cutie.  She’s going to have a great Christmas.”

A fish jumped in the river.  Santa and I watched a ring of ripples spread out on the water.

“You sure there’s not something bothering you McClure?

“Isn’t that nosy Santa?”

“Just trying to help. You know the lyrics of that Santa song ‘he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.’  They’re true.  I know you’re having sleepless nights, and it’s not just because of that cough you have.”

I kept my eyes on the river.  Santa kept quiet.

“Ok, if you must know.  I’m terribly worried about a future I won’t be part of.”

“But June will be.”

“Exactly.”

“It would be good to name those fears.”

I turned to face him.

“I’m afraid we’ll never create solutions for climate change.  And the calamity will make life miserable.  We need huge investments in alternatives to fossil fuels, but instead the world wastes its resources waging war against each other. The level of hate and violence between us, as Americans and global citizens, only grows.  We’re losing the ability to compromise.  That is June’s future.  And I feel powerless to stop it.”

Santa nodded.

“A lot of people feel like you McClure.  They feel as passionately about it as those who fear change so much they will do anything to resist it.”

”We’ve screwed things up terribly.”

“You know as Santa I represent hope and goodness, as seen in the innocence of children.  So, I’m glad you’re worried about their future. That’s why I exist, and I’ll continue to exist as long as children believe in me.”

Santa has a soothing voice.  He’d make a great therapist.  He went on.

“You know what kids have that adults risk losing?  They have an unmistakable sense of joy.  It lives strong and clear in their eyes.  Just look.  I’m sure you see that joy in June’s eyes.  You must find joy again McClure.  Cause you know what happens after you abandon joy?  You’re in the worst trouble there is.  You lose hope.”

“It’s hard Santa.  I get so tired.”

“I know it’s hard.  Lighten up and have some faith in the children.  You were once a child who grew to shape the world.  Let the children lead us out of this mess.  That’s what has always happened in the 1,743 years since I was created.  Work for change.  Have faith.  Hang onto joy.  Don’t ever lose hope.”

“Thanks Santa.”       

“Merry Christmas McClure.”

After Being Fooled

 In the fall of 1974 in Aberdeen Scotland, after being fooled, quitting a perfectly good job, getting cheated out a hundred bucks, and losing out on a job that never existed I retreated a bit.  It’s instinct, I think.  I slowed down, slept in, withdrew from most conversations, and stayed to myself. 

The old guys at the YMCA hostel, who by their age or infirmity had been granted the privilege of not being forced to leave the premises at 9:00 a.m. and returning at 4:00, watched me warily.  I think they thought I was going to fold up somehow after my change of fortune, get terribly drunk, and act out my pain and shame publicly.  But I didn’t.  Instead, I stayed away from the fellas and found my way to the public library.

Aberdeen’s central library wasn’t far from the hostel, or the harbor, but I’d missed it entirely.  It was a big stone building funded by Andrew Carnegie, a famed railroad baron and library builder back in the States.  He was born in Dunfermline, Scotland between Edinburgh and Glasgow. 

I just wanted somewhere quiet and warm.  But they also had a good map room, and the biggest globe I’d ever seen.  Libraries are good places to get your bearings; take stock of where you are, where you’ve been, and if you’re lucky plan where you’re going. 

Feeling warmth is a rare sensation during a Scottish winter on the North Sea.  Chalk it up to drafty old buildings, bad central heating, or if you wish the trite generalization that Scots are cheap.  But truth be told the cold is mostly a function of latitude. 

Aberdeen sits on the earth at 57.15 degrees North latitude.  If you strike an arc on a globe at that latitude by holding your finger at that latitude while slowly turning it toward North America, like I did, you’ll find your finger on the southern tip of Hudson Bay in Canada.  No wonder it’s so damned cold in Aberdeen.  It’s almost a thousand miles north of our farm in Danvers.  And the Scots claim the North Sea actually tempers their climate. How that frigid body of water helps keep them warmer is beyond me, but that’s the theory.

The Aberdeen library was uncharacteristically warm.  There in the map room, I would shed my pea coat and also a wool sweater I rarely took off, then soak up both the warmth and the silence.  The library had soft leather chairs where I sometimes snuck in a nap.  A librarian woke me only once that I recall and did so kindly.  I wasn’t the only indigent person sleeping in that library, and we clearly couldn’t pass as scholars doing research.  Most of us just wanted to escape the world outside.

When I was awake, I often moved a giant world atlas from its home on the shelf to a vacant wooden table to view the world in more detail.  When I reconstructed the route I traveled that summer and looked at it on the big pages of the atlas, my trip looked crazy.  I kept crisscrossing the continent.

I landed in Amsterdam and stayed up for 36 hours straight.  Caught a train to Frankfort, Germany to see an old Danvers friend in the military and from there went straight to Rome.  I learned that with a Eurail pass, one could board the train at night, sleep in those comfy enclosed European train compartments, and save the cost of a hotel stay.  Get tired, go to the train station, sleep all night, and wake up in another country.

From Rome to Vienna.  Vienna to Pamplona, Spain to catch the festival of San Fermin and the daily running of the bulls.  Seven days of bullfights, wine, and parties.  I pitched a tent in the park there and met people from all over the world; a Moroccan man trying to find a home in Europe, teenagers from Las Vegas, a girl from Alaska who wanted to cross the Straits of Gibraltar into Morocco.

First, she had to go back to France to meet up with friends and borrow money.  In ten days, she promised to meet me in Seville at the American Express office at noon. We would go together from there to Morocco.  

I went from Pamplona to San Sebastian Spain on the Atlantic coast.  There I decided on my immediate future.  I resigned from my teaching job in Ottawa via telegram, wrote my parents a long letter, and promised myself that I would spend at least a year, maybe longer, living outside the United States. 

I left the Basque country in northern Spain and made my way to Seville in the south but the girl from Alaska didn’t show.  No cell phones you know.  And no messages for me at the American Express office. For three days I hung out at a café across from American Express watching for her before going on to Morocco alone.  I tried not to take it personally but found that impossible. 

When I got to Morocco the world shifted.  I went from an orderly and familiar Christian continent to the Muslim world.  I loved the colors, the open markets, the crush of people in the streets, the kif, the mint tea, the exotic music, and the marked difference between that world and everything I knew before.

I met a ragtag bunch of Europeans on the boat from Gibraltar.  Together, after a few days in Tetuan, we went down the coast to a small fishing village called Targa and camped on the beach.  The locals greeted us with a gift, a bucket of fresh sardines.  They showed us how to cook them over an open fire.  It was wildly beautiful.  But I knew I couldn’t stay.  I went back to Amsterdam, sold my return flight to the States, took a tour of Germany, and then made my way to Scotland where there was money to be made.

Where would I go after Scotland?  I began to form a plan.  I decided to go back to Morocco in the spring and take it from there.  I consulted the big double-page display of North Africa in the atlas.  Even just a little planning would make my trip more linear and more economical than before.

From Morocco, I could follow the Mediterranean coast east to Egypt, passing through Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.  At Cairo, I could go down the Nile River through Sudan, and head east to the port of Mombasa, Kenya on the Indian Ocean. I’d met a Portuguese couple who were heading that way to work on a boat, called a tramp steamer, from there to India.  Their goal was Goa, a former Portuguese seaside colonial state in India.  They wanted to be there by Christmas.  They might be on Goa’s beaches now, I thought, as winter approached in Scotland.  It was a plan.  But I’d need to finance it.  Maybe work along the way. 

The other resource I made use of in the library was the newspapers.  When all else fails, there are always the employment ads.  I scanned them daily.  One day this ad appeared for a job near Aberdeen.

Dairyman wanted.  State of the art milking parlor system.  Must be experienced.  Work with a team milking, feeding, and caring for 200+ cows daily.  Room and board provided.  Every other weekend free.  Apply in writing only.

As soon as I saw that ad I sat down and wrote a response.  I described the dairy farm I grew up on in Illinois, the cows, the types of milking machines we used, etc..  I laid it on thick, but I didn’t have to stretch the truth.  When you don’t know what else to do, it is comforting to fall back on what you know.

I gave the number of the pay phone at the hostel as a contact and told the old fellas in no uncertain terms to answer the phone if it rang.  It hardly ever rang.  The dairy farm owner called early two days later during breakfast.  I answered.

They hired me over the phone.  Not the best pay, but no need to spend a nickel of it.  I would take the first bus the next day to a small town northwest of Aberdeen, and they would pick me up at the bus station in a Land Rover to take me to the farm.  My unemployment didn’t last long.   Once again, I said goodbye to the fellas and assured them this time I wouldn’t be back. 

I went to bed early that last night at the hostel.  Sometime during the night, I was awakened by yelling from the day room.  Sound traveled well inside the hostel. The room dividers didn’t go to the ceiling, “so the heat can circulate better” the hostel manager claimed.

“What heat?” was the logical follow-up question.

I buried my head under the blankets, but the yelling continued.  Finally, I got up to investigate. 

It was Hamish, one of the older and perhaps frailest of the poor bastards who found themselves alone in their last years in that bleak facility.  He was sitting in the dark at a table in the day room, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, his back to the windows that faced the street.  The only light came from a streetlight down the block.  When I came out, he was quiet.

“Hamish, what are you doing up?”

He looked up at me with big eyes.  He looked scared.

“Who are you?”

“What do you mean?  It’s Yankee.  You know me.  What are you doing up?  And what’s all this yelling about?”

“They’re coming after us Yankee.  Here they are again! Don’t let ‘em see ya.”

With that, he hunched under the table and began yelling.  No words, just pure fear.  A light shined through the windows, fell on the wall nearest us, and then swept around the room till it was gone.

“Stop yelling Hamish.  It’s OK.  Those are headlights from a car on the street.  Nobody’s coming to get us.”

“The hell they aren’t.  Tell the others.  They’ll kill us all.”

The look on Hamish’s face made the hair stand up on my arms.  It was as if he’d lost his mind.

“Wait here.”

I went back to the sleeping rooms and banged on Archie’s door.

“Archie, wake up.  Something’s wrong with Hamish.  He’s talking crazy.  You gotta see this.”

Archie answered from inside the room. 

“Let me get my pants on.”

He stumbled out of his room rubbing his eyes.  We sat on either side of Hamish in the day room.  Archie spoke to him in his slow deep voice.

“What’s this Yankee tells me about us being in danger Hamish?  Looks safe to me.”

“They’re trying to spot us with the lights Archie.  Once they get us in their sights, they’ll start firing.”

“How long since you’ve had a drink, Hamish?”

“Canna tell ya.  Three days, maybe four.  Me check comes tomorrow.”

Like most old guys who lived there permanently, Hamish was on the government dole.  

Headlights entered the room like before.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph they’re back!”

Hamish grabbed us both by the arms, tried to pull us under the table, and howled.

“Yankee, go turn the lights on,” Archie said.

I ran to find the switch.  When I turned back to the table, Archie had his arm on Hamish’s shoulder and was talking to him softly in Gaelic.  As Archie talked, Hamish scratched his neck hard with both hands.  His long fingernails, the first two on his right-hand brown from nicotine in the roll-ups, had made red streaks on his skin.  Some of the streaks were bleeding.  I hadn’t seen that in the dark. 

“He has the D.T.s Yankee.”

“What’s that?”

“Delerium Tremens.  Comes from alcohol withdrawal.  He needs a drink is all.”

“Jesus, Archie shouldn’t he be in the hospital?  He’s old.  This must be so hard on him.”

‘I’m not putting him in hospital.  If he chooses to go, when his head is clear, he can go on his own but I’m not doing that to him.”

“So, what do we do?  We can’t leave him like this.”

“We give him a drink.  Do you have any whisky?”

“Yeah, I have a full flask, but that sounds crazy.  He’s out of his mind because of alcohol, and we’re giving him more?”

“He’s out of his mind because his body craves alcohol.  Once he gets it, he’ll settle down.  He probably hasn’t slept for days.  Give him a jill and have him drink it slow.  Once he gets it down, wait ten minutes or so and give him another.  Then make sure he drinks a couple glasses of water.  Get him to bed.  He’ll be all right Yankee.  Once Hamish gets a bottle tomorrow, he’ll be himself again.”

“How do you know all this Archie?”

“I went through the D.T.’s myself a long time ago.  But I was able to quit the drink.  I’m not sure Hamish ever has.  And at his age, he may never.  Though I’m afraid never may last just a short while for our friend Hamish.  Will you do this for him Yankee?”

“OK.  Yeah.  I’ll do it.”

Thank you.  I’m going back to bed.”

That was my last night in the YMCA Hostel in Aberdeen.  The last time I saw Archie or Hamish or any of the old fellas.

Travel enlightens one so.

Glad That Didn't Happen to Me

 As the pipeline job outside Aberdeen went on the weather and working conditions worsened.  More and more the talk among the workers turned to when the job would shut down. 

“Why don’t they tell us the plan?” I asked.

“They don’t want us to quit,” the old man who loved rainbows and watched out for me explained.  “They tell us now the job is over Friday, and they won’t have enough men to finish out the week.”

“Where would we go to find better pay than this Paddy? I’m staying till the end.”

I’d taken to calling the old man Paddy.  He liked it.

“And then what Yankee?”  Scrabble around Aberdeen for weeks finding something else?  You’ll make nothing at all for two weeks and spend down your savings.  If you were smart, you’d have a line on your next job now.  And to think I once took you for a smart Yankee, if such a thing exists.”

“What are you going to do Paddy?”

“I miss my wife and her cooking.  The bones are creaking with the cold and there’s a peat fire back home waiting to warm me up.  I’ve tucked away enough money to get us through the winter nicely.  You won’t find me looking for work till spring.”

It sounded so good.  Paddy went on.

“You’re a long way from home Yankee, but I imagine you could get there if you wanted.   Will you be heading that way soon?”

“I’m not going home.  I’m planning to travel more come spring.”

“Would be a shame not to be with family at Christmas.  But Christmas is far bit away.  This job will never last that long.  You know that do ya Yankee?”

“Yeah, I know.”

I didn’t know what would happen next.  Usually, I love that feeling.  But that’s not how I felt walking to the hostel in the dark with my friends.  It was Friday, we’d gotten paid, but I was down.

My young Irish friends, who got me the job, were happy.  They could see the end of the job coming and the prospect of hometowns, family, and girlfriends.

“Come down to harbor with us Yankee.”

“I think I’ll skip it tonight.”

We’d been drinking near Aberdeen’s harbor, bustling with activity from the North Sea oil boom.   Our favorite pub was always crammed with sailors spending money.  It wasn’t the sailors that drew us there, so much as the girls that hung around the sailors. 

“Come on ya cheap laggard.  How many more nights will we be together?"

 

At the pub my mates got into a game of darts for serious money, and I stayed put on my bar stool.  An older man took a seat beside me and ordered a gill (say jill) of Dewars whisky and a Guiness back.  Then (1974) as many drank whisky in Scottish bars as pints.  Many drank both.   I was nursing a gill of White Horse whisky with a Newcastle Brown Ale chaser.

A gill is four ounces.  Never saw a shot (1.5 ounces) back then in Scotland.   Scots are serious drinkers.  And no “e” in Scotch whisky.  Whiskey is made in America or Ireland.  Whisky is Canadian, Scotch, or Japanese.  

At the dart board, my mates won their match and ordered themselves and me another round with the winnings.  They were laughing and happy, but then they would be home soon.  I didn’t know where I’d be.  Or what I’d be doing for work.

The stranger on the barstool next to me said something.

“Pardon me?”

“I say where you from?”

“The states.  Illinois.”

“Are you here working on the rigs?”

“No.  I tried to get on but couldn’t.  I’m working on a gas pipeline, goes from here to Peterhead.”

“I’m surprised the weather hasn’t shut them down.”

“I think it’s about to.”

“You going home when the job’s done then?”

“No.  I came to Europe in June.  I want to work through the winter, save money, and leave in the spring.  Maybe to North Africa.”

“So, what’s next after the pipeline?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

He had a sip of whisky, followed by a swallow of Guiness.

“I don’t suppose you’d be interested in working in a ship’s galley, would you?  My cook’s helper up and quit on me today, and we shove off on Monday at noon.  If I don’t fill that job, I’ll have to cook and feed 30 crew members myself.”

“What kind of ship?”

“Platform supply vessel.  We shuttle supplies from the harbor out to the rigs, and stand by in case of fire or other emergencies.  Jack of all trades like.  We can move but the platform can’t.  We act as their legs.  Monday we’re hauling out a big load of pipe. You never know what they’ll call on us to do.”

I took a drink.

“So, you know your way around a galley?”

“Never been in a galley before but I know kitchens.  Worked at a roast beef sandwich joint in college.  Learned cooking from my mom on the farm.”

“Not much to it.  Lots of cutting up vegetables and washing dishes.  I’ll teach you the recipes.”

“How’s the pay?”

When he told me what a week’s wages were, I tried to appear calm.  They were nearly twice what I was making on the pipeline.

“I’m interested.”

“Well, you’re in luck.  The skipper authorized me to do the hiring.   He’ll do the paperwork with you on the ship, get you signed up all legal like.”

“Just like that?  Can I see the ship?”

“Sure enough.  It’s tied up right down the dock outside.”

We were standing in front of it within minutes.  I let out a long whistle when I saw it.

“My God, it’s huge.”

“It’s built to take on heavy seas.  The North Sea gets rough out there.”

“So, I just show up Monday?

“Yeah.  Be there by noon.  I’ll likely be on ship.  Ask for Sig Larson.  I’ll give them your name.  Oh my gosh, I don’t even know your name.”

“Dave McClure.”

We shook hands.

McClure. That’s a Scottish name.”

“It is?  I thought it was Irish.  My great-grandfather sailed to America from Ireland.  He lived in Antrim County up North.”

“Well, if he was born in Ireland some McClure before him went there from Scotland.  McClure is an old clan name.”

We talked more, standing there on the pier by the huge ship.  He asked about our farm, told me about his family which was originally from Norway.

“We should have another drink to celebrate.  How about one for the road back at the pub?  I’ll buy.”

He reached into his pocket.

“God help me, I left me money clip on the bar.”

He dug in all his pockets.

“I don’t have it.  I had nearly a hundred quid on me.”

“Let’s get back quick then.”

We went back to where we were sitting and flagged down the bartender.

“We were here not twenty minutes ago, and I left a money clip full of pound notes on the bar.  And it sure as hell wasn’t a tip.  Did you happen to pick it up did ya?”

“Sorry mate.  I don’t see many tips in here and I’ve not seen a money clip loaded with pound notes I can assure you.  That I’d remember.”

My soon-to-be boss pounded his fist on the bar and spun away facing the crowd.

“SOME LIMMER MADE OFF WITH MY MONEY AND I WANT IT BACK!”

The bartender was quick to respond. 

“Look here, mate.  Let’s not be yelling and scolding the customers.  You made a mistake and your money’s gone.  Now either have a drink or move on.”

“I’ll buy us a drink,” I said.

“No, let’s get outa here.”

I followed him outside as he stomped angrily out the door.

“I can’t believe I’ve gone and done that.  Here I am on a Friday night, with the banks not open till Monday, and I’ve let all my cash be blown to the wind.”

“I can lend you some till Monday.”

“No.  Lord, I’ve got a dinner date tomorrow night at a steak house that’ll cost me a bundle.”

“It’s OK.  I just got paid.”

The week’s pay was in my left pocket.

“What will you need?”

“Forty pounds or so.  But I couldna ask you for it.”

“No really.  It’s OK.  You can pay me back on Monday.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Forty pounds was almost a hundred dollars in 1974.  That was a whole lot of money to me then.  Still is.  But after all, the guy was getting me a job.  I took my week’s pay out of my pocket, counted out forty pounds, and put it in his hand. 

“I hate taking this from you.  But, I‘ll have it ready for you Monday when I see you on ship.  Noon, right?”

“Right.”

He shook my hand hard and gave me a big smile.  We parted ways, me up the hill to the hostel, and he down the street towards the ship. 

I had a lot to do.  I packed up my backpack for the first time in months.  Said goodbye to my Irish mates and asked them to say goodbye to Paddy and the foreman and the guys on the pipeline job.  I gave them the Wellingtons to return to the English foreman’s man. 

I checked out of the YMCA hostel and said goodbye to the old men.  They were happy for me and amazed I could get a job so easily as a seaman.   Archie, one of my favorites, was especially pleased. 

“I mean you have a way about you, getting these good jobs.  I’m proud of you for making your way through the world so well.”

Archie was from the isle of Jura, the least populated of the Hebrides Islands then, with somewhere around 200 people.  He was a simple man, and from what I could gather had lived a very simple life.  He talked slowly, laughed easily in a deep voice, and occasionally slipped into speaking Gaelic.  His most frequent expression was wide-eyed wonder, as if the world outside Jura was hard to fathom.  I’d always wanted to make it to Jura, where George Orwell lived for a time, and see firsthand its wild beauty.  Still hasn’t happened.

“By golly, Yankee I don’t know that I’ve ever met a man as lucky as you.  Who knows what you’ll be doing next?  I wouldn’t be surprised if you were elected to Parliament.”

Archie wore the same sweater every day and was always fiddling with his tobacco tin, worn and dented, filled with Old Holburn, which was cheap and rough to smoke.   He always offered me a rollup and I only took him up on it once.  Unlike the rest of the old boys Archie didn’t drink, although he may have in his youth.  Archie had a blank look about him at times.   How he ended up in that flophouse and what he lived on I don’t know.

“I’m proud of you Yankee, and I wish you all the luck in the world, though I don’t think you need it, what with talking your way overnight into a job as an able-bodied seaman.”

I checked out of the hostel after breakfast, took my time saying goodbye to the fellas, and killed time till about 11:00.  Archie walked me down to the door and shook my hand before I headed to the docks.  It was a sunny day, rare for Aberdeen.  I was excited to be going to sea.

When I got to the slip where the boat had been tied it was empty.  There were a crew of men working on the boat next to the gaping hole where it had been docked. I yelled out to them.

“What do you about the supply ship that was docked here over the weekend?”

A man yelled back.

”It left at first light.”

I closed my eyes and felt a rush of heat go from my head to my stomach.

“Who owns that ship?”

They gave me the name of a company and how to get to its office near the water.  I walked there straightaway and inquired of a desk clerk about Sig Larson.  The clerk stopped me and brought an older man from an office in the back.  I told him the story.

“I know most of the crew members by name and have never heard of him, but I’ll check the list to make sure.  Give me a minute.”

He came back quickly.

“As I suspected, no one with that name works for us.”

I just stood there.

“I hope you didn’t lend him any money.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Have you ever worked on a ship at sea lad?”

“No.”

“We’d never put you out there with no experience, even in this labor market.  You’d likely be flat on your back seasick for a week.  Sorry son.  I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do.”

I walked back to the YMCA hostel and climbed the stairs in a fog.  When I entered the room where the old guys hung out during the day, the few they let stay looked up at me in surprise.

“What are you doing back here Yankee?”

I told them all the story.  There was no job.  I lent him money.  The ship had sailed.

Archie was sitting there and looked at me with a long face.  In his slow low voice, he said…

“I’m glad that didn’t happen to me.”

With that Archie picked up his tobacco tin, walked past me, and went to his room.

Finding Work in Aberdeen

Hitchhiking from London, England to Aberdeen, Scotland was easy.  But my employment there didn’t turn out as expected.  How often do plans match outcomes?

I went to Aberdeen to work on an offshore oil rig in the North Sea.  At my first oil company interview, I was told the lack of Scots employed in the industry, and the multitude of Americans hired, had become a political issue.   Better luck next time. 

I found an employment agency and worked at a lumber yard for two weeks.  Though I was living at the cheapest place I could find, a second-floor firetrap of a YMCA hostel populated mainly by old alcoholic men, I soon realized I would save little on lumberyard wages.  Luck came my way when three Irish boys checked into the hostel and befriended me. 

“So, you’re looking for better work then Yankee?”

“I sure am.”

“Why don’t you come with us tonight?  We have a meet-up with a man from our town back in Donegal who’s putting together a work crew for a pipeline.  It’ll run from Aberdeen here up the coast about 48 kilometers to Peterhead.  Will last for a good while.  Maybe we can get you on.”

Darkness found the four of us on a sidewalk in a rundown neighborhood ringing the doorbell of a tiny house.  When the door opened, light from inside the house fell on my three new friends and outlined the shape of a big man in a tweed sports coat.  I stood behind them. 

One boy did the talking.  He introduced himself and dropped the name of an uncle who formerly worked for the big man and had sent them.  The man acknowledged knowing his uncle and asked after him in a low voice.  The boy went on to introduce his two mates by name.

“And we’ve met up with a big Yankee who appears able to put in a fine day’s work.   Might you be needing him as well?”

“Let’s have a look.”

They stepped aside and I took a step forward.  I felt odd being sized up physically with little consideration of anything more.  He looked me over and said nothing.

“Right then, the bus will pick up the four of you tomorrow morning at (some intersection).  If you’re late you’ve lost the job.   We won’t be waiting for you.“

He took a small notebook and pencil out of his jacket pocket.

“Let’s have your names again.”

He wrote down their surnames.  Never asked me mine. 

That’s how two and a half months of hard labor for good pay in the Scottish countryside began.  Next to a deep trench, Caterpillar tractors with side mounts grabbed wide steel pipes and joined them to a string of pipe welded together.   I was on the small crew that shoved eight-foot wooden 4x4’s under the pipes where they joined, building platforms of various heights to hold them steady and level while spot welders tacked the pipe ends together. 

The 4x4’s were scattered next to sections of pipe with a ditch beside them.  The line snaked as far as we could see across Scottish farm fields and meadows.

They put me on that job of horsing 4x4’s the first day and I never had another one.   Finish welders followed, working under canvas shelters, welding the pipes completely.  Later they were X-rayed to ensure seamlessness.  An English foreman ran the job.  He was the king.  The welders and the Caterpillar operators were princes.   The Irishmen, forty of them maybe, along with me were the serfs.  I was the only American.

It rained every day.  I had leather shoes that were quickly being destroyed in the mud.  They all had rubber Wellingtons.  They served tea morning and afternoon.  Tired filthy workers stood in the mud balancing a China cup of tea and a biscuit during a break twice a day.  An old Irishman with a kind face took me aside during afternoon tea on my first day. 

“Ask the English foreman’s man for Wellies.  They won’t give them to ya till ya do.”

He paused.

“And mind your back.  There’s no safety outfit gonna come to your aid on this job.  If you get hurt, they sack you.  If they ask you to do something ya thinks too dangerous tell them ta fook off.  They’ll find someone else.  You‘re not in America anymore lad.”

He was the man on the job first to notice things beyond us and point them out.  A stone fence snaking up and over a rise.  Cows on a hillside.

 

And the rainbows.  Because it rained so often, with sun off and on, rainbows were plentiful.   Partial rainbows ending in clouds, full sky rainbows making a perfect arc between two points on the horizon, double rainbows. 

“Look there Yankee.  There’s another one. “

I glanced up. 

“Yeah.  Nice.”

“Nice? All ya can say is nice?  Is that what they teach you in America then?  Rainbows are God’s gift to man Yankee.  His assurance of pardon to us wretches.  His promise of forgiveness.  Gorgeous, beautiful, blessed forgiveness.  Have a bit of humility Yankee.  Acknowledge beauty and grace for fook’s sake, even if just to humor an old sod like me.”

Fridays were paydays.  My first payday on the job the big man who looked me over that night in Aberdeen came out during afternoon tea in an old jeep, wearing that same tweed coat, its pockets now bulging with cash.  The foreman’s man was with him holding a clipboard and calling out last names.  Men would walk up to him when their name was called.

“Doogan.  Five days.”

The man in the tweed coat multiplied our daily wage in his head by the days attended and handed each man a wad of cash.  Some mumbled thanks.  The man in the tweed coat said nothing.

The list was alphabetical.  I was last.

“Yankee.  Five days.”

The man in the tweed coat handed me my money.  I thought I saw a smile.  Could have been my imagination.  He walked back toward the jeep, where the foreman’s man was rummaging around. As I turned to walk away, I heard the foreman’s man yell out.

“And Wellies for the Yankee as well.”

A pair of rubber Wellington boots tumbled through the air and landed beside me.

That night on our way back to the hostel the three Irishmen and I stopped at a fish and chips takeout, not much more than a couple of deep fryers and a table on the street,  They made a cone out of sheets of newspaper, folded it at the bottom, filled it with deep-fried potato wedges, and put two fried fish filets on top.  We shook salt and malt vinegar on all of it and ate it with our hands as we walked.  I held the paper cone to my chest under my chin. The smell of the vinegar and the heat from the fish rose up onto my cold face. 

“So, whatcha think of your first week Yankee?” asked the Irishman who did most of the talking.

“It was damned hard, but good.  I’m making decent money.  Thanks for getting me on.”

“You’re doing well.  We’re going to the pub for a pint.  Care to join us?”

I went, feeling like I belonged.

The Old Man in the TR 2

It was the fall of 1974.  I entered the UK for the first time early one morning at Dover, England as a foot passenger on a car ferry.  I was a little alarmed at the cost of the fare.  After paying it, I had less than $100 USD.  I would need a job quickly, maybe instantly, in Aberdeen, and until then, I would have to travel on the cheap.  The view of those white cliffs from the boat was free and beautiful.  I felt lucky to be there.

I met an American GI couple on the ferry who offered to take me to the outskirts of Dover in their VW van before they turned north along the coast.  I had decided to go to London and catch one of their big highways to get to Scotland quickly.  All done on paper maps those days.  It looked to be as good a route as any.  I’d gotten an early start.  The day was clear and sunny.

The VW was left-hand drive in a right-lane world.  After they let me out, I stood on the wrong side of the road to hitch, quickly realizing it when a car went by me in the wrong direction.  The GIs left me at a country roundabout.  Not a bad place to thumb down a ride.  I walked through the circle to the road I needed, made sure I was on the correct side of the road, set up where the shoulder offered a space to pull over, propped my backpack against my knees, and struck a hopeful pose. 

A tiny green convertible with the top down approached.  I put out my thumb and almost instantly the sound of deceleration, then braking, filled my ears.  Life is good in those moments.

The driver was an old guy, in his seventies I’d guess, with a flat touring cap, a big gray mustache, and a smile.  He opened a very long side door to let me in.  I stood with my backpack in hand and nowhere to put it.  It was a two-seater.  Two individual windshields too.  Right-hand drive, wrong side of the road.  I was disoriented.    

 

“Hang on there.  We’ll stow your gear in the boot.”

The boot was the trunk of course.  We sat low in the car.  It felt as if we were inches above the pavement.  The motor was loud.  Above the noise, he was telling me about his car.

“Wanted this car when I was working and raising kids but couldn’t afford it.  Bought it when I retired.   I take it out nearly every day the sun shines.”

“What year is it?”

“1952 Triumph.  TR 2.”

“That would make me a year old when it was built.  I’m 23.”

“Bloody hell, you’re but a lad.  I’ve got fifty years on you.”

Thus began a conversation that continued throughout the ride.  As much as the driver of the Mercedes on the Autobahn was laser-focused and tight-lipped, that old guy never stopped talking.  Within twenty miles he’d queried my whole life story, short as it was.  And he drove so slowly.  Everyone passed us.  Some honked.  Others waved.  My new friend smiled and waved back.  He was a happy man.

 He told me about his wife, his kids, his job, and his childhood.   I barely had time to look at the countryside.

“Say, could you make us rollups?”

“Tobacco?”

 He looked at me oddly, with a question on his face.  I answered quickly.

“Yes, I can.”

“Would you mind then?”

 “No problem.”

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a tin of Golden Virginia tobacco.  Inside the lid was a pack of rolling papers.

Premade cigarettes were much more expensive in Europe.  Rolling your own made them lots cheaper.  I caught on to that in Amsterdam where I landed, smoking a nice Dutch tobacco called Drum.    My driver’s tobacco was much the same; moist, soft, stringy.  It rolled up perfectly.  I made two.

“Shall I light yours for you?”

“That would be brilliant.”

I leaned forward under the dash, struck a match, lit both, and passed one of the rollups to my new friend.

“Ta.”

Ta is an old British expression for thanks. 

“Ta back to you for the tobacco.”

“Back to me, you say?”  He chuckled.  “So American.”

As we neared Canterbury, I realized we were traveling, in reverse, the route of the characters on the pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.   Chaucer wrote that tale in 1400.  I never thought when I studied it as an English major at ISU I would be on that same trip 574 years later.

My friend and I talked about Beatles albums.  He favored Rubber Soul and Revolver while I liked Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, and Abbey Road.  He was also fascinated with the Beach Boys.

“How did they make that eerie sound on "Good Vibrations"?  What’s the instrument?  I keep asking you yanks but none of you seem to know.”

“It’s called an electro-theremin.  You play it without touching it.  It’s an electrified stand-up wand of some kind.  The tone changes depending on how close you hold your hands to it.”

Think how much we all needed Google in the 60’s and 70’s.

My friend and his wife lived on the south outskirts of London.  I explained how I was in a hurry to get to Aberdeen and asked how I could get to London’s north side quickly.

“Just barreling through, are you?  It’s a pity you can’t take in more of our greatest city.  But if you must, let me take you to the Tube.  I’ll point you to the last stop up north.  Then it’s either the M1 or the M6 north.  Takes about the same amount of time.  You’re nine hours away though lad.  Over 500 miles.  You’ll likely not make it today.”

He looked worried for me.

“I know.  It’s OK.  I’ll be fine.  I appreciate the ride and the conversation so much.  I wish you the best.”

“And I you.”

“Promise me in the future you’ll take in the sights of London.  It’s one of the world’s great cities.  There’s Stonehenge too, out in Salisbury.  You have a lot to see.”

“I will.  Maybe on my way back.”

I didn’t know when I’d be back or even where I would go from Scotland.  Turns out I did pass through at winter’s end, traveling quickly to join my brother for Christmas in Germany, and have yet to fulfill that promise to my Triumph driving friend.

Now that I’m about his age, fifty years later without a hitchhiker in sight, I’ve lost the opportunity to return the favor by pointing a young man with a sketchy plan in the right direction.  Perhaps I’ll find another way.     

The Autobahn

 At the end of the summer of 1974, with my Eurail pass expired, I took to the highways.  It had been a great summer, but my money was running low, and I needed to reload.  I heard good things about Aberdeen, Scotland.  The North Sea oil boom was in full swing, American companies were hiring for their offshore platforms, and they spoke my language.  Good money, they said.

I left my brother’s house in Tellig, Germany a small village in the Mosel River Valley.  He was an officer stationed at Hahn Air Force Base flying F-4’s.  He, his wife, and two young daughters were my anchor while I stayed in Europe.  I had been in Europe for five months, made the decision to stay, told my parents, resigned my teaching position, and said goodbye to my traveling companion who returned to the States.  When I left my brother and his family, I would be totally alone and on my own.  I hated saying goodbye, but I had to go.

My brother bought beer from a nice old guy in Tellig who brewed his own.  Good beer in returnable liter bottles.  Days before I left Tellig, my brother and I brought an empty case to his house to pick up a full one.  The beer man had gotten to know me and was interested in my plans.  My brother’s German was very good.  He told the beer man I was about to leave for Scotland. 

He knew no English and always assumed I understood his German.  He asked me a question.

“Wie reist du?”

I looked at my brother. 

“He wants to know how you are traveling.”

I looked back at him.   Not knowing the German word for hitchhiking, I stuck out my thumb.

“Ah,” he smiled.  “Tramp.”

I looked back at my brother.  He smiled in a way that told me to let it go.  So, I smiled back at him.

As soon as we got outside with the beer, I said “Did he call me a tramp, like we know tramps?”

Our farm was on an Illinois State highway, Route 9 between Bloomington and Pekin.  The men that traveled the highway on foot, often stopping to rest under our big maple by the road, were definitely tramps.  Hobos.  Bums.  I’d never thought of myself as one of them.

“No,” my brother replied.  “In German tramp is not a bad word.  People who travel alone, sometimes hitchhiking, sometimes not, are often called tramps.  To them, the word has an adventurous sort of meaning.”

A few mornings later, my brother let me off with my backpack by an entrance ramp.  He had offered, once again that morning, to take me to the train station in Koblenz for a ride to the Belgium border.  But I declined, telling him I might as well just get started hitchhiking.  He persuaded me to at least let him take me to the Autobahn, like an interstate highway in America on steroids.  We hugged and he drove away.  And there I was, very much alone. 

I walked to the middle of the ramp, stood tall with my backpack at my knees, put my thumb out and started my trip to Scotland.  Before long a black Mercedes slowed and stopped.  I ran to the passenger side and the side window went down on its own.  Early electric windows.  The driver leaned forward.

“You are accepting of rapid driving?”  He had a very heavy accent.

“Yeah. Sure.”

He reached over and opened the door.  I stashed my backpack in the back seat and climbed in.  Soft leather seats.  He instructed me to use the seatbelt and shoulder harness.  Before driving on, he reached into the glove compartment and brought out a pair of fancy leather driving gloves.   Tan with air holes across the knuckles.  He put them on slowly and carefully, pulling the wrist straps tightly. 

Then he revved up his engine, smiled at me, put the Mercedes into gear, and popped the clutch.

And the fastest ride I ever had hitchhiking began.  There are no speed limits on Germany’s autobahns.  They’re well-maintained, nicely banked, and engineered to accommodate high speeds.  The guy beside me had a car built just for this kind of driving.  Every time he shifted I was pressed back into the seat.  He put his car in the left lane and whenever we encountered another auto, he flashed his lights and the slower car pulled over to let him by.   No one passed us.

It was an amazing ride.  We hardly spoke.  He managed to ask me, without looking at me, how far I was going. 

“Oostend, Belgium.”

"So weit reise ich nicht.“

I heard the words “ich nicht” and, knowing them to mean “I not,” said OK.

I don’t know how far we went.  Germany flew by.  I hardly saw anything.  My eyes were glued to the road as were his, thank God.  He was a very good driver. 

He left me at a good intersection far west of where he picked me up.  I thanked him and he stuck out a gloved hand to shake. 

“Good luck.”

At that point, he left the autobahn.  I walked slowly to the next on-ramp.  I felt like I’d been in a NASCAR race.  I’ve never had a ride like it since.  

The End of Hitchhiking

 Have you ever made a flip comment, meant to be humorous, then remembered it later and thought “That might actually be true.” 

I responded to one of those pointless FaceBook posts that posed the question “What is the one thing that is destroying the world as we know it?”  The real answer is no doubt climate change, which barely showed up.  The most numerous comment, of the thousands generated, was “Joe Biden”, which shows you who is reading generic FaceBook posts these days.

This thought came off the top of my head and I posted it without thinking.   

“It all started with the end of hitchhiking.”

I’ve had that thought before but never expressed it.  I don’t know when it happened or why and I’ve known anyone else concerned about it.  But hitchhiking is dead, and I think it has implications.  It’s a symptom of something bigger and more troubling. 

I’ve traveled a lot during my almost 72 years on Earth.  I don’t know where hitchhiking falls in the order of miles per mode of travel.  I’ve flown to Europe four times, to both Japan and Hawaii, as well as a winter trip to Mexico or Central America nearly every year since 1988 volunteering for I Care International’s optometry clinics.  So, air travel might account for a lot, because of the big trips.

Being an American in the rural Midwest most of my daily travel has been in cars, old Buicks mainly in the past twenty-five years.  While I drove a lot of miles between Ottawa and both Chicago and Springfield for work, my more frequent daily commute, a benefit of living and working in a small town, began on Ottawa’s north side and ended down the hill on the north side of the rivers, not 2 miles away.

I own a canoe but never had a boat, and have never been on a cruise, so nautical miles are limited mostly to ferry rides, lazy floats down the Fox, a handful of great trips in the boundary waters, and day trips fishing from open boats with outboard motors on Ontario lakes.

I used a Eurail pass heavily during the Summer of 1974, took the train to Springfield for a while there in the late 80s before my cornea transplants, and enjoyed a great ride with my wife on the rails from Montreal to Quebec City up the St. Lawrence River valley.  Now we take the Metra from Joliet to the LaSalle Street station when we visit Chicago and the kids, but rail travel has not amounted to much in my getting around.

But from the time that Eurail pass ran out till the end of 1975, I hitchhiked all over Europe and North Africa.  I hitchhiked from the Smoky Mountains to Ecuador and back to Danvers, Illinois in 1976, save for the occasional cheap bus ride here and there.

And when I once again owned cars, I picked up hitchhikers whenever I could.  I considered giving rides in return for rides given me as good karma.  I never had a bad hitchhiking experience as a rider or a driver.   It was both a way of getting from place to place and an unspoken social contract between humans.  I liked hitchhiking a lot. 

In its purest form hitchhiking is (or was) “I want to travel but I don’t have much money” meets “I’m going that way and I don’t mind having company while I do.” 

Hitchhiking was (I think using the past tense is sadly accurate) Uber and Lyft without the smartphone app, the credit card payment, or the star ratings.  Have we now monetized each and every want and desire humans possess, or are there yet simple kindnesses that don’t translate their worth into cash?  Hitchhiking was ride-sharing in the purest sense.  It cost neither party a dime.  Yet it created value.  Call it human capital.  Call it generosity.  I’m convinced hitchhiking was a good thing.  

Hitchhiking was a personal choice and a voluntary act.  For the hitchhiker, it started with a simple and universally understood gesture.  Extend your arm and put out your thumb. 

I think looking presentable and smiling led to more rides.  I got a lot of rides and never turned one down, that’s for sure.  I ran to cars that slowed as they passed me and stopped, and the first thing I did after stowing my backpack and taking a seat was to thank the driver profusely.  I considered hitchhiking a purely directional mode of travel.  Take me one mile or a hundred, as long as you’re going my way.  All I asked was that the driver let me out at a spot where I had a decent chance of getting another ride. 

As a driver picking up hitchhikers, I admit to slowing down and doing a quick assessment of the person I was about to pick up.  Though I may have slowed, reconsidered, and kept going I can’t as I sit here in the shack remember an instance when I did.  Hitchhikers and those who picked them up were a trusting group of people.  The whole premise was built on trust.  Usually, we discovered we had even more in common as we talked.

Back then driving alone isolated you from others.  Now we call whomever we wish to talk to at any time on our smartphones, and if they don’t pick up, we dictate a message or (dangerously) text them. 

Many times, I think drivers (especially long-haul truckers before CBs) picked me up because they needed to talk to someone, either to stay awake or simply pass the time.  I was fine with silence, but if the driver wanted to talk, I was along for the ride. 

Hitchhiking without conversation was rare. It started with the “where are you trying to go/how far are you going” exchange and built from there. Talking, even if obligatory, taught me how to communicate better.  Meaningful and pleasant conversations extended rides.

And on the flip side, it was very apparent that some people who picked me up didn’t want to exchange ideas, they simply wanted someone to listen to theirs.  I did a lot of listening while hitchhiking.  Most of it was sincere and attentive, though over time I learned to fake it.  Both later proved to be good skills to have.

Hitchhikers got rides and drivers picked up hitchhikers because we didn’t fear each other.  Any lurking fear was overridden by a trust borne out of positive experiences.  To this day I don’t personally know of anyone on either side of the equation being harmed by hitchhiking.  No doubt it happened somewhere but I’m not aware of it.  So why did hitchhiking go away?

Most contend hitchhiking is dead because it is perceived as dangerous.  So much so that police departments discourage it, and many states ban it.  Though lightly enforced, those laws had their intended effect.  Hitchhiking is so rare now that there is a whole generation of people too young to even remember it.

The fear factor was amplified by law enforcement through public service announcements in the 60’s and 70s in the U.S..  A 1973 FBI poster, signed by J. Edgar Hoover, delivers this dire message under a scene of a family opening their car door to a man with his thumb out.  Sounds a lot like Reefer Madness.

To the American Motorist: Don’t pick up trouble!  Is he a happy vacationer or an escaping criminal—a pleasant companion or a sex maniac—a friendly traveler or a vicious murderer?  In the gamble with hitchhikers, your safety and the lives of your loved ones are at stake.  Don’t take the risk!

Ginger Strand, Author of Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that there has never been good evidence that hitchhikers, or those who pick them up, are particularly likely to be raped or murdered.  One of only a few studies by the California Highway Patrol in 1974 concluded the results do not show that hitchhikers are overrepresented in crimes or accidents beyond their numbers.

It’s more likely the widespread fear of hitchhiking is motivated less by evidence than by a pair of other trends.  As hitchhiking became rarer, it seemed more dangerous because of the people still doing it.

People without cars trying to hitchhike might be perceived as weirder, more deviant, or more dangerous.  The more stigmatized hitchhiking became the fewer drivers who were likely to pick someone up.  Fewer willing drivers led to fewer people trying to hitch.  And the downward spiral continued. 

Fear of hitchhiking fit into a general fear of strangers that blossomed in American society over past decades.  For instance, parents instruct their children never to talk to strangers.  Stranger Danger is a word worn cliché.   There is a kind of safety bug that’s taken over in society.  We’re much more reluctant to interact with strangers than ever before.  All those empty seats, all those lonely drivers.  It seems like a wasted resource, doesn’t it?

But others believe the decline of hitchhiking has nothing to do with fear of crime.  Joesph Stromberg, a journalist writing for Vox put together a good piece on hitchhiking called “The Forgotten Art of Hitchhiking-and Why it Disappeared.”  Here’s what he found by talking to others about the topic.

Most experts agree that the decline of hitchhiking has nothing to do with fear but everything to do with increased car ownership.  Since the 1960s, the percentage of car ownership in the U.S. has tripled, and the portion of households with multiple cars has grown even faster.  20% of us own three cars or more.  Add to that the fact that cars now last longer, and increased car ownership has extended to lower-income families.  Fewer of us need to hitchhike to get around.  In developing countries, where far fewer people own cars, hitchhiking is still commonplace.

I was talking about all this with a friend, not in the front seat of a moving car but in the back room of a bookstore.  About the same age, he also hitchhiked. 

“I’ve got a ton of hitchhiking stories,” I said.  “I kept notes in a journal.  I’m not sure anyone would appreciate them now because hitchhiking is so rare.”

“I think you’re wrong.  I know I’d love to hear them.”

“Maybe I’ll blog some, see how people react.”

“Please do.”  

Marvel in the Moment

In my last blog post, I was getting out of Memphis, heading to Mississippi, and looking for a Waffle House.  But sometimes life interrupts those road trip sagas.  I have a note on my desk that reminds me why that happens.

Hard to follow that advice when you’re writing in late June about events that took place in early March and then relating them to American history fifty years ago or longer.  Today I am busting to tell you what’s happening right now around me.  It’s smaller in scope but exciting.

I was mowing past the clematis on the corner of the garage next to the patio when a bright red cardinal flew out of the vines past my head.  That’s never happened.  I didn’t think much of it till the next day when I walked past that same corner to get the hose and a female cardinal flew out of the same spot.  I informed my wife.  During the pandemic, we turned into bird watchers.  It gave us more to talk about.

“There’s something going on in the clematis with a pair of cardinals.”

We’ve had that clematis for I don’t know how long, but soon after we bought the house in 1987.  It’s been moved at least once.  We could take care of it better, but it does well on its own and is easy to ignore until songbirds start flying out of it.

“You know,” my wife said.  “I’ve noticed a pair of cardinals being closer to the house than normal for a week or so.  The male has been perching on your tomato cages.  He’s never done that before.”

I built new raised beds close to that corner of the garage, within reach of the hydrant and the hose. 

“Let’s go look.”

We slowly snuck up on our clematis.  Odd behavior for seniors in their own backyard, but we didn’t want to disturb a Cardinal again if it was lurking there.  Not seeing anything with feathers, we inched closer.  I’m taller than my wife, so I got up on my toes for a better look.

In a tangle of dead clematis vines I failed to cut back last fall was a smooth brown basket holding three tiny eggs. Light gray with dark spots. I announced the news to Colleen in a whispered flourish. 

“We’re about to welcome baby cardinals to the neighborhood.”

There is something wonderful about discovering new things in nature, especially when they happen so close to you.  The nest is fifteen feet away from an umbrella table where we spend a lot of our summer.  It’s less than eight feet from our new garden.  And no more than a foot from an access door to our garage, just inside is the fridge where we keep beer.  We want to give the expectant couple privacy, but the cardinals built their nursery in the middle of our summer hangout.  It’s nerve-wracking, likely for them as much as us. 

Two summers ago, during Covid when we lived like lepers, we watched a pair of bluebirds hatch their babies in a bluebird house fellow bird-loving neighbors gave us.  We did that mostly with binoculars.  We saw the fledglings fly awkwardly for a few days, then disappear.  But the bluebirds were across the yard and far away. 

As fate would have it soon after discovering eggs in the clematis, I borrowed another neighbor’s power washer to begin preparations for a family 4^th of July party.  My wife’s three sisters, my granddaughter June and her parents, a bunch of cousins.  Does this happen at your house?  My wife declared a list of home improvements that had to be done, and could not fail to be completed, before the party.  

One assigned to me was power washing the patio.  I had to admit it was long overdue.  I borrowed the washer from another generous neighbor.  But after I was underway, and realized the noise that thing made, let alone the cloud of water and crud it raised, I quickly stopped.

“Colleen, I’m afraid I’m going to scare the cardinals away from their eggs for good.”

“Oh, come on,” she said.

“No, really.  Let’s find out about this.”

Because we wonder long about nothing in this smartphone phase of our lives, we sat down at the patio table and furiously googled the habits of the Northern Red Cardinal.   Here’s what we learned.

·       The female builds the nest 3-10 feet above the ground in shrubs, vines, or low trees.  The male brings her the building materials.  Nest building lasts 3-9 days.  It’s an open cup of twigs, weeds, grass, and leaves lined with fine grass or hair.  They build a new nest every year, sometimes more than once in a single year.

• ·       Cardinals don’t migrate.  They can start nesting as early as late February (though I doubt it in Illinois) and often continue into late August or September, raising one or two broods a year, one beginning in March and the other in late May or July.
• ·       Cardinals generally mate for life, which only averages 3-5 years.  However, divorces do happen, and when they do the partners search for a new mate.
• ·       A male Cardinals defends his territory during breeding season, chasing away intruders and predators. While the female is busy building, then nesting, the male keeps an eye out for predators.
• ·       Cardinals rarely abandon their nests because they are very protective of their brood during the breeding season. 

Trusting that last bullet point, I went ahead with the patio power washing.  I washed the section nearest their nest last, worked quickly, and the male Cardinal didn’t make much of a fuss.  A day after that was done, while taking a break from painting the patio steps with Colleen, I craned my neck to check the nest again when both parents were gone.  When I peered in, wide open beaks with big eyes above them rose and gaped open at the top of the nest.  Tiny naked bodies below those big beaks seemed almost an afterthought.  I was so shocked to see live hatchlings instead of eggs I didn’t count them.  I went in the house and reported the news immediately to Colleen.

“The Cardinal chicks are here!”

Young people might think of retirement as boring when they realize big news in their parents’ lives to be the arrival of baby birds in a bush.  But be honest, how cool is it to witness new life bloom right beside you?  Very.  I don’t care what stage of life you’re in.

We had the party, the weather was good, and our guests were on the patio all afternoon and into the evening.  We made a general announcement to them about the nursery in the clematis and they were good about staying away.  The Cardinals went about their jobs as new parents, gathering food, regurgitating it into their chicks’ mouths, and keeping watch over their nest.  It may have been my imagination, but I think the male stayed especially close.  I saw him perching in my garden, watching from boughs in the cypress tree, even standing guard on the rain gutter above the clematis.

I have to say I identify with his style.  I remember when our first child, our daughter Maureen, was born.  The day after her arrival when all was well, and she was scheduled to come home I went to Kroger and bought $250 worth of groceries (in 1983 when $250 bought a whole load of groceries).  Early the next morning I was one of K Mart’s first customers and bought our first microwave oven.  I was imagining warming up our baby’s milk and feeding her myself to help my wife.

I’m not suggesting human beings have similar parenting instincts as American songbirds, but the prospect of providing for my family hit me hard.  Like the male Cardinal I took parenting very seriously.  Still do.

Of course, Northern Red Cardinals have been in Ottawa a lot longer than humans have.  If they only live for five years, there are uncountable generations of Cardinals who have built nests, hatched eggs, gathered food, and stood watch over their chicks.  Maybe they too feel a need to make sure their kind survives and thrives in the ravines, valleys, and bluffs along the Fox and Illinois rivers, or wherever they their lives take them. 

My wife and I feel honored to be part of it if even in a small way.  The birth of a nest of Cardinal hatchlings in our clematis on Fields Hill is extremely local news noted only here.  But its good news.  For me, it comes at a time when good news seems scarce.   As a country we’re going to embark on an ugly election season that will last too long and exhaust us.  Be present in the moment and pay attention to the breadth of what is going on around you.  These are things that make up our lives.

 

Post Script:  I finished this piece on the 4^th of July to the sound of fireworks going off over the Illinois river down the hill.  This morning I checked the nest.

The chicks have fledged.  One never hatched.  From what I’ve learned, the fledglings fall from the nest, hop around on the grass, stretch their wings, and imagine flight.  All that while being watched over closely by the male and female Cardinals.  Another version of helicopter parents.  Unlike humans, they become empty nesters quickly.  Do you suppose they still worry after their offspring fly away?     

Sunset in Memphis

 It was late afternoon in Memphis when I said goodbye to the bartender at Pearl’s Oyster House and walked back to the Chevy.  When I got to where it was parked, I looked down the street.  It felt wrong to leave town without paying my respects to the site of the most significant event in Memphis history.  I walked on, past my car.

There are benches on Main Street between the front of the Lorraine Motel and the back of a building that used to be Bessie Brewer's rooming house on Mulberry Street.  The buildings are now all part of the National Civil Rights Museum.  My wife and I visited there a year before the pandemic.

It was warm, even for Memphis, as I took a seat on one of those benches in March of 2023.  Good time for a long sit.  As I looked around, I couldn’t help but think of what happened there just after 6:00 p.m. on April 4^th, 1968. 

My bench faced the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, which opened in 1940 as a modest and economical southern inn available to black travelers in the South.  Like many white Americans I was vaguely aware that segregation extended to hotels, but until I saw the movie Green Book, I didn’t appreciate what that meant.  That’s another way of saying I had never stopped to consider how it must have felt for a black person to be so separated from, pushed out of, the world enjoyed by white Americans away from home.

In 2019 the film Green Book won best picture, best screenplay, and best lead actor.  It was based on the true story of Dr. Don Shirley, a classically trained and superbly talented New York based African American concert pianist, played by academy award winning actor Mahershala Ali.  In the film Dr. Shirley insists that his agent book him for a series of performances throughout the South in 1962.

His agent agrees, but only if he accepts Italian-American night club bouncer and tough guy Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, played by Viggo Mortenson, as his driver and bodyguard.   When Tony Lip is hired, the agent gives him a copy of the Negro Motorist Green Book.

“What’s this?” Tony Lip asks.

“Those a list of the only places Dr. Shirley can stay when you’re down there.  Make sure he does.  If he’s not in one of those places every night, he’s in danger.”      

Over my shoulder was Bessie Brewer’s Rooming House, a flop house built on a small rise and made up of two buildings loosely joined together, one for whites, the other for blacks.  On April 3^rd James Earl Ray, using the name John Willard, rented a sleeping room.  Across the street was the Lorraine Motel, which was listed in the Green Book. 

Bessie remembered James Earl Ray aka John Willard, who rented Room 5-B, because he was well dressed and carried a thick roll of bills.  He peeled off a crisp new twenty for a room that cost $8.50 a week in advance. He also insisted on a room in the rear of the building nearest a bathroom that looked out on the front of the Lorraine Motel.  She didn’t ask him why he came to Memphis.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the national leader of the civil rights movement and co-pastor with his father of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, often stayed at the Lorraine Motel when he visited Memphis.  He was partial to Room 306, a double, in front of the motel just off the balcony.  He was sharing the room with another Baptist pastor, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  They came to Memphis March 29^th to support a strike of the Memphis Sanitation Workers, most of whom were African American.   The strike began in response to the death of two such workers crushed to death in a garbage truck accident.  1300 sanitation workers struck for increased safety measures, higher wages, and time and a half overtime. 

Dr. King and Rev. Abernathy’s support of the Memphis strike fit perfectly with the larger “Poor People’s Campaign” designed by Dr. King and other civil rights leaders.  The Poor People’s Campaign was aimed at alleviating poverty regardless of race by bringing poor Americans together as a unified group. 

The War on Poverty, neglected by President Lyndon Johnson’s administration and Congress, was widely seen as a failure.  The federal government was focused on the Vietnam War, and white America increasingly perceived anti-poverty programs as helping only African Americans.  The Poor People’s Campaign sought to address poverty by dramatizing the needs of the poor and providing solutions such as full employment, a guaranteed annual income, and more low-income housing. 

In 1968, Dr. King’s speeches often contained this line “We believe the highest patriotism demands the ending of the (Vietnam) war and the opening of a bloodless war to final victory over racism and poverty.”

The sanitation worker’s strike was supported by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the NAACP.  Although AFSCME was chartered by the State of Tennessee in 1964, Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb refused to recognize the union or the strike.  There was no dialogue between the city and the union.  Garbage piled up on Memphis streets.

 

James Earl Ray was born in Alton, Illinois and grew up in Missouri.  His family moved a lot.  The family went by the surname of Raynes after his father passed a bad check in Alton.  Young James Earl had a run in with the police at 15 and left school.  He joined the army after World War II but was court martialed for drunkenness and given a general discharge for “ineptness and lack of adaptability.” 

He worked in Chicago, then California, and in 1949 was serving a jail sentence for burglary.  That arrest and incarceration was the beginning of a string of jail sentences across the country; 1952 for armed robbery in Chicago, 1955 for robbing a post office in Kansas, and in 1960 an armed robbery in Missouri that earned Ray a twenty-year sentence.  In 1967, on his third escape attempt from the Missouri State penitentiary, he succeeded by hiding in a bread truck leaving the prison bakery.  He was on the run when he came to Memphis.

In Birmingham, Ray got an Alabama driver’s license and bought a white 1966 Ford Mustang.  He headed to Mexico.  There, under the name Eric Stravo Galt, he took up a career as a pornographic film editor.  It didn’t work out.  In November of 1967 he left Mexico for Los Angeles, where he worked odd jobs and was a volunteer for Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s presidential campaign. 

Wallace ran in November of 1968 as a third-party candidate of the “American Independent Party” against Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey.  George Wallace’s most notable campaign line was “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”

Ray left L.A. and arrived in Atlanta on March 18 where he purchased a map of the city.  After King was killed, the FBI found the map. Ray had circled the location of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Rev. Dr. King’s home on Sunset Avenue.

Ray was in Atlanta only two days before he left for Birmingham where, under the name of Harvey Lowmeyer, he bought a Remington .30-06 rifle, a Redfield scope, and a single box of twenty soft point metal jacketed bullets.  He returned to Atlanta.  After learning that Rev. King was in Memphis, he packed a bag and his newly purchased rifle and drove there.  He arrived on April 2^nd.  James Earl Ray came to Memphis to assassinate Martin Luther King.

Fifty-five years later, I was sitting midway between the Lorraine Motel and Bessie Brewer’s flophouse where James Earl Ray had locked himself in a second-floor bathroom sometime between 5:45 and 6:00 p.m.  He unwrapped his newly purchased rifle from a bedspread, stood in the bathtub, and knocked out the screen covering the window.

At 6:00 p.m.  Dr. King and Jesse Jackson appeared on the balcony.  It was a cool night. They had plans to go to dinner and a strategy meeting that night with several other civil rights leaders at the home of Reverend Sam “Billy” Kyles, long time participant in the movement and pastor of the Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis.

At 6:01 p.m., as King’s driver, Solomon Jones, standing by the white Cadillac parked below the balcony called out “Dr. King it’s getting cool.  You better get a coat,” the crack of a rifle shot was heard. 

The bullet hit Dr. King’s cheek, fractured his jaw, then entered his body in the neck area, rupturing his jugular vein and a major artery before fracturing several vertebrae and coming to rest in his left shoulder.  He was rushed to St. Joseph Hospital and pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. April 4, 1968.

The bullet would have traveled diagonally over my head between the two buildings.  Not a long shot, slightly downhill.  One pull of the trigger, a single shot in Memphis echoed across America and changed history. 

Just as the rifle shots on a street in Dallas which killed President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the volley of pistol shots from three gunmen in New York that took the life of Malcolm X on February 21,1968, and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by a single gunman at the crowded Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5^th of that same year.  RFK’s platform of peace in Vietnam had just won him the California Democratic Primary, which promised to pave his way to become the Democratic nominee for president. 

Taken together, those political assassinations in the span of five years dealt a crippling blow to the national leadership of both the civil rights and anti-war movements in America. 

Martin Luther King’s death sparked protests that boiled over into riots in 110 cities across the country.  The King Assassination riots, also known as the Holy Week Uprising, were particularly destructive in Washington D.C..  Angry crowds of 20,000 or more protestors overwhelmed D.C.’s 3,100-member police force.  President Lyndon Johnson ordered 13,600 federal troops and national guardsmen to the capitol.   Marines mounted machine guns on the steps of the Capitol building and the 3^rd infantry guarded the White House.  On April 5^th rioting took place within two blocks of the White House before rioters retreated.  It was said to have been the largest occupation of any American city since the Civil War.  By the time D.C. was considered safe three days later, 1200 buildings in that city had been burned, including 900 stores.  Damage was estimated at $27 million dollars.

In Chicago, violence centered on the West side.  It eventually expanded to consume a 28-block stretch of West Madison Street with additional violence on Roosevelt Road.  The neighborhoods of Lawndale and East Garfield Park on the West Side and Woodlawn on the South Side suffered the most chaos and destruction.  36 major fires were reported between 4:00 and 10:00 p.m. on April 5^th alone.

Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered 10,500 police sent into those areas, and by April 6^th 6,700 National Guard members sent by LBJ joined with 5,000 regular army troops from the 1^st Armored and 5^th Infantry divisions.  Mayor Daley ordered police “to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand…and …to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in the city.”   He would issue similar orders to his police force in late August 1968 in the wake of demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention held in his city. 

Similar scenarios played out in Baltimore, Kansas City, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Trenton N.J., Wilmington, Delaware, and Louisville, Kentucky.   Such prompt deployment of troops by the military was later attributed to advance planning following the Watts riots in L.A. in 1965 and the Detroit riot of 1967.   The pentagon called it their plan to contain “black insurrection.”

To liberals and civil rights advocates, the riots were a turning point.  The MLK assassination and riots radicalized many, helping to fuel the Black Power movement.

The riots also increased an already strong trend toward racial segregation and white flight in America’s cities, strengthening racial barriers that once looked as if they might weaken.  The riots were political fodder for the Republican party, which used fears of black urban crime to garner support for law and order.  Richard Nixon’s campaign platform solidified following the riots.  Some contend the riots sealed his victory in November of 68.

 

As a 71-year-old sitting on a park bench near the Lorrainne Hotel in Memphis this spring, as the sun set and the sky turned orange, I recalled how I felt in 1968 as a teen aged kid on a farm in Illinois.  I turned 17 in August of that year. 

The Vietnam War was mired in the violence of the Tet offensive.  16,592 American soldiers died in Vietnam during 1968 alone, an average of 319 per week.  Walter Cronkite announced a weekly tally of deaths in Vietnam as anchor of the CBS Evening News. 

I would register for the draft on August 13, 1969.  I felt my country was being ripped apart by forces I never knew existed; some phantom evil I couldn’t identify let alone understand.

I had a friend a year older who joined the Marines and was in Vietnam.  He wrote me letters about villagers in Vietnam fleeing their homes after napalm lit up the grass roofs on their huts.  He sounded like someone else.  Someone I didn’t know.

My brother was an officer in the Air Force and a back seater in an F-4 fighter jet.  He would soon be stationed at an air base in Thailand.  I wouldn’t know the extent of the missions he flew and the danger he faced until he came home.

When Martin Luther King was killed, and the riots raged it felt as if the violence and death of the war in Asia had come home to America.  I could feel the fear in my stomach.  1968 was set on fire by a bullet from a flop house bathroom in Memphis that burned away the hope of America.  I thought we outlived that fear.  Turns out it never left.