Merry Christmas 2010

Joan Leaps Tall Buildings- Joan flew in SchliebenAir to Charleston, SC in April.  This is a monumental event.  Given her former aversion to flying in anything resembling a glorified aluminum cigar tube, this was the equivalent of a deep space adventure packed in a sardine can.  That Joan did not deposit predigested unpleasantness on the control panel is even more remarkable.  We stopped in Cape May the first night and stayed at the ‘Southern Mansion.’  This inn I highly recommend.  On the other hand, the ‘Pilot House’ restaurant avoid like the plague, or maybe dysentery.  Worst food on the planet!   Probably the universe.  Mrs. Paul’s Fishsticks would win, hands down.  The next day we flew to Charleston, rented a car and spent three nights there and then three nights in Savanna.  Both are wonderful tourist cities – easily traversed on foot and friendly – and, with Savanna’s beautiful squares every three blocks or so and its streets lined with magnificent live oaks and magnolias, one could almost imagine living there (except summers.)  (Savanna’s economy got a big boost with the publication of John Berendt’s book ‘Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil,’ in the mid-90s.)  We also had the best fish dinners we’ve ever had – and I mean the best ever – in the Chart House along the Savanna River.  Its décor? standard issue Georgian country club, but the food was fantastic.  During our return flight, we stopped in Chapel Hill, NC to visit friends, and stopped again in Trenton for an overnight with Dad, then home.  All together we overcame Joan’s worst fears.  The weather cooperated and we didn’t run into anything more unforgiving than – splat! – bugs.   Who knows?  We might even do it again, someday.  Bangkok, in one-hour increments.

Our Summer Vacation (When your retired, sounds doubly redundant)-

We spent a delightful two weeks at Silver Bay, NY in July.  Roy, Jenn, Jess and Brendan were with us the first week.  Grandfather Ernie and his friend Margie spent three nights there at the end of the first week, overlapping their stay with his grandchildren.  A highlight was an cruise down Lake George on the Silver Spray.

Jess: Interior Designer Extraordinaire / Studentessa Perpetua- Jess is working at one of the few Boston firms that hired staff during this recession.  Lucky her!  Since all design work these days is computer-based, she says she lives in her computer, or at least spends most of her day there.  In the spring, Jess will complete her fifth year at Boston Architectural College and next year (yes, just one more year!) she will complete her master’s thesis.  Ask her about wayfinding and site-lines… she’ll regale you for hours!  Brendan Haley, Jess’s significant other (should that be in caps?) runs a design/build business (BHaley Designs) and has been busy designing and renovating restaurant and condo interiors.  If you want to start a restaurant in the Boston area, call Brendan!

Roy and Jenn Keeping Their Heads Down in Bangkok- In Thailand now for over two years, Jenn continues as Assistant Chief of Station at AECOM, an international development consulting firm, and Roy has been saving tigers (well, not single-handedly) as a communications officer at Freeland Foundation, whose mission is to prevent wildlife and human trafficking.  Life in Bangkok got a little tense this spring during the Red Shirt uprising.  When the barricades went up on their street, they relocated to a hotel away from the action but, fortunately, it didn’t last too long.   Life is less chaotic now.  Oh yes, they’ve adopted another dog, Hop-along-Cassidy (Cassie for short.)  Cousin Ken would have named her ‘Tripod’, but he missed out on that one.  They now have two dogs and a cat.   They expect to be in Bangkok through 2012.

Acadia- Each year Joan and I spend four or five days in Maine’s Acadia National Park, hiking, recovering from hiking, eating with abandon, drinking in moderation—all, timed around Joan’s birthday.  Yes, Joan is a year older again.

Our Life In General- Other than the foregoing, Joan and I spend an inordinate amount of time just staying healthy.  I walk and work in the yard; Joan walks and attends a weekly Tai Chi class.  It’s amazing how much time and energy is consumed just moving one’s body … that, and reading the paper and all of life’s daily chores, like opening and closing the refrigerator door… good, nothing’s escaped.

Joan has always been an avid reader and enjoys a variety of subjects and genres.  She continues to be Paul’s book filter; sorting books worth his time from books to be sold back to the bookstore for pennies on the dollar.  She’s also been known to watch an occasional episode of ‘House’ and ‘Desperate Housewives,’ “the best program on TV,” she says—“sad commentary,” Paul says.

In addition to writing the occasional short story, essay and poem, Paul enjoys being able to think and write about the books he reads, and he posts his writing on a blog he calls ‘Synaptia:  The Random Firings of a “Maturing” Mind.’  (Paul notes that he shares an enthusiasm for Barbara Kingsolver with his sister-in-law, Barbara Reed.)  Additionally, flying for Angel Flight, household chores (indoors and out,) cooking, eating and imbibing (red wine, an organic health-food high in omega-3) fill out his busy week.

So, there you have it.  While our hopes for peace and national sanity have taking a hit this year and our imperfect union made more so by the Supreme Court’s disastrous “Citizens United vs. FEC” decision, we remain inexplicably optimistic.

Best wishes for a joyous holiday with friends and family. 

Paul and Joan

paul.schlieben@gmail.com

joan.schlieben@gmail.com

synaptia.blogspot.com/

'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver

I don’t think I’ve ever read two books by the same author, back to back, before.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it's because some books deliver an emotional intensity that I find both exhilarating and exhausting, and I feel the need to recover by reading something mindless, like a plot-driven mystery or a memoir by George Bush.  Or maybe it’s because once I’ve read a book that I really admire, I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed with the next; afraid my admiration for the author will be undermined.  Like most of us, I treasure my illusion.  Well, where Barbara Kingsolver is concerned, I need’t have worried.  Once again, as with ‘The Lacuna,’ I filled a legal pad with quotes that I read again and again. With luck, I’ll find a way to slip a few of them into this review.

‘The Poisonwood Bible,’ is the story of a Southern Baptist missionary family, Nathan and Orleanna Price and their four daughters, who travel to the heart of Africa to spend a year at a remote mission in the jungles of what was, in 1959, the Belgium Congo. 

This novel consists of seven “Books,” each beginning with Orleanna’s account, followed by her daughter’s contemporaneous account of their years spent in the Congo, and of their lives since.  Each tells of many of the same events in her own distinctive voice.

Orleanna’s ruminations – lamentations, really – are written years after her return from Africa at her secluded cottage on a Georgia Sea Island.  There, she struggles to make sense of their African experience – to understand how she had let Nathan lead her family to Africa, of how little she understood about Nathan and the Congo beforehand; of her failure to recognize the dangers that cost the life of one of her daughters and the dissolution of her family.   Of her flight from Africa and her life since, she writes movingly, “As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water.  I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me.”

You only have to read the following description of the jungle on the opening page to be drawn deeply into Kingsolver’s story.  It is both evocative of the Congo and portentous.

(My advice to any reader of ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ is this: after reading each of the seven “Books,” reread this first chapter.)

“Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves.  Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight.  The breathing of monkeys.  A glide of snake belly on branch.  A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen.  And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death.  This forest eats itself and lives forever.”  (Italics mine)

As is characteristic of her prose, Barbara Kingsolver’s descriptions of the natural world are spellbinding.  Further down the same page, we are made to understand that, while Orleanna is leading her four daughters along a jungle path, she is in no way in control of events that transpire or understands how she and her daughters happened to be there in the first place.  Speaking as if observing herself from afar, she writes,

“The mother … watch how she leads them on, pale-eyed, deliberate.  Her dark hair is tied in a ragged lace handkerchief, and her curved jawbone is lit with large, false-pearl earrings, as if these headlamps from another world might show the way.”  (Italics mine)

While sitting on a stream bank, her children playing around a bend, Orleanna writes, 

“A beautiful animal stands on the other side of the water.  They look up from their lives, woman and animal, amazed to find themselves in the same place.  He freezes, inspecting her with his black-tipped ears, from the gentle hump of his shoulders … Finally he surrenders his surprise, looks away, and drinks.  She can feel the touch of his long, curled tongue on the water’s skin, as if he were lapping from her hand.” 

This most rare and delicate forest creature, this okapi, a “horseish gazelle, relative of the giraffe” and this pale, white woman, as rare a sight as the okapi, calmly observing each other from across a stream.

Thinking back on her life years later, she writes,

“I had washed up there on the riptide of my husband’s confidence and the undertow of my children’s needs.” … “I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass.  I crave to be rid of them…”

“What is the conqueror’s wife, if not a conquest herself?”

“Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don’t, but we wear it all the same.  There’s only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live with it?” 

This is the question that consumes her since her exodus from the jungle.

Thus begins Orleanna’s struggle to make sense of the devastating experiences that would indelibly brand her for life.  Orleanna’s begins as a seventeen-year-old wife, on what appears to her to be a predictably happy path that quickly spins beyond her grasp in unexpected ways, overrun by an overwhelming force, the “riptide of her husband’s confidence.” 

Here’s how it all began: It’s the Depression.  Orleanna is living in a town called Pearl, near Jackson, Mississippi with her father, an eye doctor.  Along with her girlfriends, Orleanna attends a religious revival led by Nathan Price, a handsome, young, red-head, itinerant Baptist minister.  “We threw ourselves at Jesus with our unsaved bosoms heaving,” she writes.  Nathan took an immediate interest in Orleanna and “fell upon my unclaimed soul like a dog on a bone.  He was more sure of himself than I’d thought it possible for a young man to be, but I resisted him.”  After weeks of courting and equivocation, Orleanna’s Aunt Tess tells her, “You’re a-feeding him anyways, child, why not go on and marry him if that’s what he’s after.”   Whether or not that was what he was after, they married.  Then the war began.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, “half the men in all this world were pledged to a single war, Nathan included.”  Nathan volunteered to be a Chaplain but was sent to infantry training in Paris, Texas, instead.  From there he was sent to fight in MacArthur’s army in the Philippines where, just a few months later, he is injured and, dazed, is picked up wandering on the beach by the crew of a PT boat.

“From a Hospital bunker on Corregidor Island he wrote me a cheerful V-mail letter about his salvation by the grace of God,” Orleanna wrote. “That was the last I would ever hear from the man I’d married.”

While Nathan is recuperating, his unit is massacred.  In Orleanna’s words,

“Through the tunnels of that island fortress came wind of a horror too great to speak aloud—whispered litany that would take years to be fully disclosed to the world, and especially to me.  It would permanently curl one soldier’s heart like a piece of hard shoe leather.”  (Italics mine)

This is the genesis of “The Poisonwood Bible,” the closest we come to an understanding of the demons that possessing Nathan, gradually transforming him into someone possessed by a myopic Christian dogma—a madness.  It’s the closest we come to a sympathetic portrait of the man whose single minded religious fervor becomes a fever from which he never recovers.  It is also the point at which Orleanna’s imagined life took an abrupt turn towards the incomprehensible. 

Discharged from the Army early, Nathan returns home to Mississippi a changed man and resumes his Baptist ministry.  He had changed from “one who could laugh, … call me his ‘honey lamb,’ and trust in the miracle of good fortune…” to one who angrily scolded her when she tried to touch him “teasingly” … “Can’t you understand the Lord is watching us?”   Years later, after giving birth to four girls, including one set of twins, Orleanna declares, “I cannot believe any woman on earth has ever made more babies out of less coition.”

Nathan and Orleanna settle in Bethlehem, Georgia where they spend the next fifteen years.  It is at this point that their African story begins.  In 1959, Nathan volunteers to become a missionary in the Congo for a year.  Whether because they judged the Congo politically unstable or Nathan too unbending, the Southern Baptist Mission League advised against their going, (a detail Nathan keeps to himself,) and so they went.  The family packed up all they could carry and traveled to Kilanga, a remote village on the Kwilu River in the heart of the Congo.  Their daughter Leah says it best: “We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.”  The humorous descriptions of what they brought with them captured perfectly the giddy excitement and anticipation of a travel adventure into the unknown.

They struggled to keep their luggage below the allowable weight limit.  Then someone from the Mission League told them there was a weight limit for luggage, but not for what they could carry on their person.  Leah tells us, “We struck out for Africa carrying all our excess baggage on our bodies, under our clothes.  Also, we had clothes under our clothes…. the other goods, tools, cake-mix boxes and so forth were tucked out of sight in our pockets and under our waste bands, surrounding us in a clanking armor.” … “My Father,” she continues, “was bringing the Word of God—which fortunately weighs nothing at all.”

They are utterly unprepared for life in the Congo, which, without running water, electricity, gas or any of the conveniences of home, imposed the most primitive conditions on the family.  Quickly, their bleached flour spoils, their vegetable garden planted with seeds from home, fails miserably, and even the hammer they’ve carried from Georgia turned out to be useless, since there were no nails in the jungle.

There is also the historical backdrop that is key to understanding this novel.  Within six months or so of their arrival, in the face of increasing unrest, Belgium grants the Congo it’s independence and holds elections.  Fearing danger, especially for whites, the sponsors of their mission, Mr. and Mrs. Underdown, fly in from Stanleyville to urge Nathan and his family to leave.  Nathan refuses, ignoring the danger to his family and stubbornly holding on to his delusion that he is saving souls.  In the face of Nathan’s refusal to leave, the Mission League withdraws its meager financial lifeline, leaving the Prices to fend for themselves.

Patrice Lumumba is elected president.  However, in the face of US and Belgium – especially US – hostility, and of mining interests of southern Congo, Lumumba’s presidency lasts just fifty-one days.  The father of Congo’s independence is deposed and beaten to death.  Joseph Mubutu, a corrupt, rapacious army colonel and coup leader, becomes President.

(For more background on these events, see --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba)

Nathan, a physically imposing and domineering Southern Baptist minister, possessed by his war guilt and inflexible biblical dogma, sees his mission in the narrowest possible light—to save souls.  Nothing else matters, not even the wellbeing of his family.  As his daughter Leah observes, when speaking of the frequent funeral processions that pass their front porch, “He doesn’t seem to mind the corpses so much as the souls unsaved.  In the great tally Up Yonder, each one counts as a point against him.” 

Although unequipped for life in the jungle and cut off from financial support, the Price family struggled to survive.  Predictably, things do not go well.  Eventually, after a year of extreme hardship, events transpire that culminate in Orleanna’s and her daughters’  abrupt “exodus.”   Without other means of escape, they walk out of the Congo.  Nathan doggedly remains behind. 

We come to know Nathan only in relief, like a photo negative, viewed only through Orleanna’s and his four daughters’ eyes.

(Maybe, some day, as was done for Beowulf’s ‘Grendel’ in John Gardner’s 1971 novel by that name, Kingsolver will retell ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ in Nathan’s voice, although I doubt he would be any less a monster.)

Now, let’s talk about the daughters, whose narrations make up most of the book.  They are Rachel, sixteen; Adah and Leah, fourteen; and Ruth May, five.

Rachel, the oldest by sixteen months, is a self-absorbed teenager whose most important possession in the Congo is her mirror.  She wants nothing more than to get back to Georgia.  Upon arriving in their remote village, she declares, “Jezz oh man, wake me up when it’s over” and “…the Bobbie girdle I quit wearing right off the bat, this horrid sticky jungle being no place for Junior Figure Control.”  (Yes, as with her other books, Kingsolver serves up a considerable helping of humor, especially from the pens of these daughters.)  Rachel’s sister Leah describes Rachel this way: “[O]n the plane, she kept batting her white-rabbit eyelashes and adjusting her bright pink hairband trying to get me to notice she had secretly painted her fingernails bubble-gum pink to match.”  Rachel becomes familiar to us for her hilarious malapropisms and critical eye of her own, and for her acerbic observations in response to one assault after another perpetrated by the Congo or her father.  Of her father, she writes, “Hurray! They all cheered, but I felt a knot in my stomach.  He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.” and, when asked, “Did you know Katanga has seceded from the Congo?”  “I’m just happy to know somebody has succeeded in something.” she replies.  It turns out that Rachel, as detached as she is, is the truest reporter of events and dialogue, often punctuated with her own sardonic, malaprop-laden asides.   (I can only imagine the fun Kingsolver had writing as Rachel.  I can hear her laughing out loud, as I did, when writing lines like, “It is my girlfriends …” that helped me “… make the graceful transition to wifehood and adulteration.” And, “Maybe he’s been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.”)

Rachel's reporting of her father tense meeting with his predecessor, Brother Fowles and his African wife and children, and Nathan’s debate about scripture with the genial Brother Fowles is sharp, enlightening and a joy to read.  (I highly recommend Rachel’s chapter, starting on page 245 of the paperback edition.)

Then there’s the twins, Leah and Adah, both cleverer than Rachel, and more complicated—less stereotypical American teenagers and more open to the Congo experience.  Leah is a tomboy who, early on, works hard to win the approval of her father, but is determined to learn the ways of the jungle, like hunting with bow and arrow. As Adah attests, “Nelson [their houseboy] shows her how to stand, close one eye, and whack her arrow trembling into the heart of a leaf.  She is a frighteningly good shot.”  Her determined embrace of Africa separates her from her Father.  She comes to view Nathan as Africans might view him, if not deranged, inconsequential.  Consequently, she loses her own religious faith, but never her earnestness, her intensity, saying at one point to her future African husband, “I want to be righteous, Anatole.  To know right from wrong, that’s all.  I want to live the right way and be redeemed.”

Her twin sister, Adah, brain damaged at birth (“Officially my condition is called hemiplagia.”) walks with a pronounced limp and has trouble speaking, but is in every other respects as clever as her twin sister.  “It is true…” Adah says, “that I do not speak as well as I can think.  But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell. … Silence has many advantages.”  Besides being a sharp observing and chronicler of events, Adah’s talent or affliction, depending on how you look at it, is palindromes – reading and making up verses backwards and forwards, like, “Amen enema,” (her palindrome for her father) and “Poor Dan is in a droop.”

The youngest, Ruth May, is just five when they arrive in the Congo.  Her voice is less distinct, but she has a charisma all her own and quickly earns the affection of the village children by leading them in a game of “Mother May I” or, from their mouths, “Ma-da-meh-hi.”  Born nine years after the clutch of the first three, who had arrived within sixteen months of each other, Ruth May is Orleanna’s favorite.  Referring to her last child, she says this: “… the baby who trials her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after—oh, that’s love by a different name.  She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she’s gone to sleep.”

Of course, Africans play a vital role in this book and it is here that Kingsolver’s meticulous research and talent for empathy are on full display.  She absorbs the rich traditions, language and nature of Africa and plays them back to us in ways that make them intelligible, teaching us to appreciate and respect Africa’s struggles and rhythms, even to understand some of the subtle tones that make up the Kongolese language.  And, while not as foreign to her as Africa must have been, she achieves the same feat of affinity, as she inhabits the souls of each member of the Price family. 

The central tragedy here is that Nathan, a fundamentalist southern preacher bent on baptizing African children in the Kwilu River, a river in which an alligator had recently eaten a child, is the least suited to the task of saving African souls.   Religion, race, prejudice, cultural assumptions and ignorance conspire against his ever succeeding, especially at this critical moment as the Congo is waking from a century of colonial rule, to demand its independence. Kingsolver’s novel drives this point home: our approach to Africa ignores Africans.  The reasons for this are made manifest.

Nathan’s predecessor, Brother Fowles, who has married an African and embraced Africa on its own terms, and who plies the Kwilu River in an old barge delivering aid, put it this way: “If some of the branches have been broken off, and you who were only a wild olive shoot have been grafted in, and made to share the richness of the olive’s root, you must not look down upon the branches.  Remember that you do not support the root; the root supports you.” 

Armed with his religious dogma and southern American prejudices, Nathan is unequipped to absorb this central lesson.  Africans have their own religions passed down for milllennia; the Congolese only tolerate his; they don’t embrace it.  He brought a hammer to a jungle that uses vines and grasses to build their homes.  They have no need for nails.

The Africans of the village have indigenous knowledge acquired over centuries that it would take a lifetime for an outsider to acquire.  So too, have they been subjected to centuries of colonial rule that they have patiently endured, and for the most part, struggled to peacefully rid themselves.  Patrice Lumumba finally achieved Independence in 1960.  Yet, as was revealed more than a decade later, the United States saw Congo’s independence only through the narrow lens of the Cold War and considered Lumumba a Soviet puppet—an enemy who must be eliminated.   Speaking to CIA director Allan Dullas, Eisenhower said something to the effect that that “Lumumba should be eliminated.”  He was, and the consequences reverberate even today.

In a very real sense, ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ is an allegory.  Nathan arrives in the Congo with his own prejudices and misconceptions, dragging along a reluctant family as ignorant of the environment and people there as he is, but who come to see firsthand what their preacher father is incapable of seeing.  Nathan is burdened with contempt for anyone who doesn’t accept the righteousness of his mission and burdened too with contempt for women, even those in his own family, and of the blacks that inhabit the Congo and even those whites who have learned to appreciate and love the Congo, as Brother Fowles does.  If Nathan represents a US government that views the world through its own narrowly defined interests and exaggerated fears, then the women of his family represent those who come to see, after its too late, the greed and ignorance that drives a nation’s policies, and the shameful injustice imposed on so much of the world by their own government.

Barbara Kingsolver has much to teach us here.  We have seen this story played out, time and again, in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, where a powerful nation’s economic interests and imagined fears overwhelm weaker nations around the world.  There may be short-term gains, but as the bubble that is our economic empire’s arch through history pops, these chickens will come home to roust.

While ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ is allegorical below the surface, foremost, it is a moving story about a family caught up in its own history; lives they can barely understand themselves decades later. As Orleanna writes, referring to that rare okapi she spied across a stream, “I didn’t know any name for what I’d seen until some years afterwards, in Atlanta, when I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in a public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.”  

This speaks to the universal human condition to which we all are subject.  It is what makes this book an enduring classic.

Download and Print version >> Print version

I Write, Therefore, Am I?

I’m not a writer.  That’s not to say I haven’t written anything.  I have.  Lots.  Memos, technical documentation, email messages – some of them quite good.  But when was the last time you read a collection of someone’s memos or emails?

No, I write, but I’m not a writer.  Writers are people who write to live and live to write.  Some even make a living at it.  They’re fascinated with people, thoughts, and words – the kind of people who can do the New York Times crossword puzzle while on the john – in ink!  They’re the ones who collect reams of notes of ideas and details to punch up their prose; and write pithy, insightful character sketches, even if these never see the light of day.  Real writers get up at 4 A.M., brew a pot of coffee and sit down at their computers, typewriters, legal pads – whatever – and become so engrossed in their work they forget the coffee.  Writers are natural storytellers; able to weave a story around the most mundane events and, adding just a few ‘embellishments,’ make us laugh out loud, weep, sigh or gasp in surprise.  Writers have an eye for details and they have really good memories, able to summon evocative details at precisely the right moments.  They have perfect pitch, able to reproduce dialogue and accents convincingly.  They remember punch lines to jokes.  They have a rich vocabulary and the good sense not to flout it.  Writers are people who know that, as Mark Twain famously said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

I’m not one of those people.  Crossword puzzles frustrate me.  I forget jokes even if I remember the punch line.  Following a daily routine has never been one of my strength.  I’m not a natural storyteller or raconteur.  My education, as far as it goes, was more intent on getting the right answer than exploring a plethora of possibilities.  Like most Americans, school succeeded in stunting my curiosity.  Conformity was the goal.  I’ve had to make a conscious effort to reverse this conditioning.  My favorite quote is from George Bernard Shaw, who said, “The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.”  That almost describes my condition, except, in my case, I didn’t learn all that much when I was absent either. 

Is it possible to become a writer; one who appreciates words and never confuses “affect” with “effect”? Or “castigate” with that other word…?  Where would one start?

My own thoughts and experiences are all I have.  That’s all any of us have.  But, at sixty-five, I worry that my imagination has atrophied.  Perhaps, if I work at it, my curiosity can be rekindled, my imagination inspired.  Then, just maybe, stories will flow forth.  With luck, when inspiration strikes, it will be more lightening than lightening bug!

Why do I write at all?  This is what I ask myself.  The answer is that it’s the only way I’ve ever been able to order my thoughts.  I want to better understand who I am and what I believe; to better align my actions and beliefs; to feel the solid ground of certainty – not that my opinions are necessarily correct, but that my thoughts are my own, arrived at honestly; and that they form a solid foundation on which to build new insights.

The object of all of this?  To live the remaining years of my life fully.  Yes, I know.  Sounds hollow, like a New Year's resolution made after too much wine or, as a cynic might put it, “like a crock.”  We’ll see.  The difference between an accomplishment and a resolution is like the difference between a crock of jam and that other kind. - PS

'The Lacuna' by Barbara Kingsolver

W

hen an author’s name is the prominent feature of a book’s jacket, there is one obvious conclusion you can draw.  The author is a brand – all that’s needed to guarantee brisk sales.  Another less obvious conclusion is that, being successful, the author gets to pick the title.  The publisher may suggest a title, but what’s going to sell is the author’s brand, so a publisher is unlikely to press hard.  So what?  There’s a world of difference between a title picked by an author and one picked by a marketing department.  When an author picks a title, it is likely to contain a significant clue to understanding the book.  And, for an author of Barbara Kingsolver’s caliber, it is unlikely that she would be satisfied with a title that expressed just one idea or feature of her book.  She would select a title that was multidimensional, reflecting the complexity and richness of her story. 

In the case of ‘The Lacuna,’ I wondered if the title preceded the writing of the book or even whether the word “lacuna” itself might have in some way been the spark igniting the idea for the book.  Whatever its genesis, ‘The Lacuna’ is a great title that represents perfectly the many dimensions of this wonderful book. 

[Before I go any further, here’s a definition.  According to Dictionary.com, “lacuna” is “a gap or missing part, as in a manuscript, series, or logical argument; hiatus.”  It can also refer to “one of the numerous minute cavities in the substance of a bone…”  

The only usage of the word I could find was in Condi Rice’s 2007 congressional testimony.  "In response to charges that private security firms were not held accountable for their aggressive behavior, Rice dodged responsibility by repeatedly referring to a “lacuna” or a gap in the law that prevented the contractors from being prosecuted.”   I couldn’t resist including a poem by Madeleine Kane inspired by this testimony. 

Pondering Condi
By Madeleine Begun Kane

Rice shrugs off blame
For wartime’s toll.
Poor oversight?
Rice claims a hole—
A legal “lacuna”
Impedes control
Of contractor actions
On Iraq patrol.
Must fill that lacuna—
She touts that goal.
But who will fill
The lacuna in her soul?

For more, visit madcane.com.  OK, now back the to reviewing the book.]

 
‘The Lacuna’ is a wonderfully imaginative historical novel that threads the fictional life of its protagonist, Harrison William Shepherd, into the tumultuous lives of the celebrated 20^th century Mexican artists, Diego Rivera and Freda Kaylo, and also the Russian revolution leader, Leon Trotsky, who, for a time in the late 1930s lived in exile at Freda’s villa in Mexico.  Trotsky was assassinated there by one of Stalin’s assassins in 1940.  Kingsolver also manages to weave into her story Douglas Macarthur’s rout of the WW I “Bonus Army” in 1932, as well as J. Edgar Hoover and the House Sub-Committee on Un-American Activities’ post-war pursuit of communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  Amazingly, it all works.

Notable among Kingsolver’s fictional characters is Shepherd’s Mexican mother, a comically irresponsible, restless 1920s flapper who frantically attaches herself to one man after another, as if jumping from one lily pad and then another, as the previous one sinks under the weight of her expectations.  A fatally attractive flapper, she thoroughly absorbed the slang of that era, spouting words like “fillies” “pips” “sweet patooties and no-o-o dotie brodies” and “I’m just razzing you” and “wad of tin” … and on and on.  The best example is a brilliantly comical conversation between mother and son on pages 136-39 [Shepherd’s May 4^th journal entry].  If you read nothing else, read this.  It’s some of the best dialogue in the book.

Another prominent character to emerge later in the story is Violet Brown, of the “peculiar antique grammar,” to whom Shepherd, inviting her to become his secretary, writes, “… your discretion is prodigious. You resisted the siren song of tattle.  The seams of your character must be sewn with steel thread.”   Violet emerges as a character worthy of a book of her own.  Strong-willed, independent-minded, seventeen years Shepherd’s senior, she becomes his private secretary in Ashville, North Carolina in the 1940’s, and eventual his archivist after his presumptive death.  She has broken away from an uncomprehending Carolina hill family to pursue a dream of independence and travel. 

Harrison William Shepherd was born in 1916 just outside of Washington, D.C. in Virginia of a Mexican mother, Solomé, and an American father – “a claims accountant in her father’s firm who was helpless before her charms.”  She was under age, but as Shepherd himself writes,  “She solved the mathematical problem of age sixteen by saying she was twenty.  At twenty-four she said the same thing again, balancing the equation.  She became Sally, confirmed in the church of expediency.” 

From the very beginning, Shepherd was caught between two cultures.  Subject to a chaotic existence, he was tethered to a woman whose restless devotion to motherhood was tenuous – at times deniable, if judged an impediment to attracting a man.  Blessed with a keen intelligence and natural gifts of a writer, Shepherd is destined to make sense of it all by writing journals throughout his early years.

When Shepherd was ten years old or so, his mother ran off with him to Mexico to live with Enrique, a wealthy Mexican landowner of several oil rich properties.  Enrique planted her and her son in an isolated hacienda on a plantation island called Isla Pixol, far from the exciting urban life she had imagined.  It is on Isla Pixol that Shepherd’s story begins. 

Solomé is enamored of the post-World War I flapper craze.  Life on Isla Pixol is a great disappointment to a woman whose blood has been heated to boiling by the “Roaring Twenties.”  At one point, as Enrique is entertaining American oilmen with whom he is eager to make a deal, “Solomé tries to get them all to cut a rug.  She cranked up the Victrola and waved the mezcal bottle at the men, but they went to bed, leaving her fluttering around the parlor like a balloon of air, let go.”  That pretty well describes her life on Isla Pixol.  She is disdainful of the local natives and eager to make her escape.  As a boy free of prejudice and mentored by their cook, Leandro, Shepherd sees it differently. Shepherd writes admiringly of the couples dancing at a festival in the square, “…girls with red yarn braided into their hair and wound around their heads in thick crowns.  Their white dresses swirled like froth, with skirts so wide they could take the hems in their fingertips and raise them up to make sudden wings, like butterflies, fluttering as they turned.  The men’s high-heeled boots cut hard at the ground, drumming like penned stallions.  ‘Indian girls,’ his mother spat.  ‘What kind of man would chase after that?  A corn-eater will never be any more than she is.’” 

To Shepherd young eyes, “The dancers were butterflies.”  To his mother, “From a hundred paces Solomé could see the dirt under these girls’ fingernails, but not their wings.”

It is at a newsstand in Isla Pixol that Shepherd persuades his mother to buy him a student’s pasteboard notebook in which to keep a journal.   It is here, also, that Leandro teaches Shepherd to cook.  And, it is Leandro who becomes Shepherd’s link to the Aztec and Mayan history and Mexico’s past that will become the subjects of his novels, later on. Eager to learn, Shepherd slips books out of “Enrique’s library, every wall was covered with wooden cabinets.  The room had no windows, only shelves, and all the book cabinets had iron grilles covering their fronts like prisoners’ windows… The square openings between the welded bars were just large enough for a fine-boned, long-fingered boy to put his hand through, like slipping on an iron bracelet.”   It is from these books that he becomes fascinated with Mexican history and learns of Cortes and Montezuma and the defeat of the Aztecs.  His journals begin to take shape with wonderfully descriptive entries like this, “No word is heard from the turkey that chased children from the yard all December.  He greets the New Year from the kitchen, a carcass of bones attended by his audience of flies.”  And he casts an observant, bemused eye on his surroundings and, particularly, his mother, “a museum of bad words”, who, according to his kitchen mentor, Leandro, “… can’t even remember the day she gave you birth.  If an orphan boy is going to have any luck, he will have to make it himself.” 

It is on Isla Pixol as a boy of fourteen that Shepherd discovers the “Lacuna” – the underwater cave and the thematic metaphor of the book.  On the opposite side of the island, the cave is accessible only when the tide and the moon are perfectly aligned.  After several failed attempts and much study, Shepherd discovers that if you wait for a full moon and a flood tide, a tall boy of fourteen who is a strong swimmer can swim through the cave and surface in a saltwater pool in the center of the jungle; a pool that turns out to be the center of an ancient ruin and site of countless human sacrifices.  Here’s another sample of Kingsolver’s magical prose.

“Amate trees stood in a circle around the water hole like curious men, gaping because a boy from another world had suddenly arrived in their pool.  The Pombo trees squatted for a close look, with the knobbly wooden knees poking up out of the water.  A tiger heron stood one-legged on a rock, cocking an unfriendly eye at the intruder.  San Jaun Pescadero the kingfisher zipped back and forth between two perches, crying, ‘Kill him hill him kill him!’ …. It was like coming up inside of a storybook.  An ancient temple in the forest, a pirates cave down below.”

It isn’t long before Solomé looks for an escape route and finds it by charming “Mr. Produce The Cash” from Mexico City while Enrique is away on one of his many trips visiting his other properties.   “Mr. P.T. Cash” eventually affects her escape to Mexico City to become Mr. Cash’s “casa chica” in a small apartment above a bakery.  Harrison Shepherd writes in his journal, “Mother says a casa chica means probably his wife knows about her but doesn’t mind.”

It is in Mexico City that Shepherd becomes acquainted with Diego Rivera and his wife, Freda Kaylo.   Quit by chance, due to his experience mixing dough in Leandro’s kitchen, Shepherd becomes a plaster mixer for Diego Rivera, who is painting a mural in a public building.  When Rivera goes off to work on another project, Shepherd is left with nothing to do but go to school.  “School or a job is the only choice,”  His mother says.  Failing to gain entrance into the Preparatoria, he “begins a year of all suffering at the School of Cretins, Deaf Mutes, and Boys of Bad Character…”

“For a son on the wrong track, Mother has found a different set of rails and packed him off on them.  ‘Lock, stock, and barrel’, she said.”  He is sent to Washington, where his father immediately enrolls him in the Potomac Academy just outside Washington, D.C.   Arriving from Mexico in winter, Shepherd is introduced to “nostril ice.”

“Mathematics: the worst.  Nothing past the tables de multiplicar will ever fit in this calabash.  Algebra, a language spoken on the moon.  For a boy with no plans to go there,” he writes.

It was while enrolled at Potomac Academy – “A prison camp in brick buildings built to look like mansions, where native leaders called Officers rule over the captives” – that Shepherd witnesses, in 1932, McArthur’s infamous rout and burning of the shantytown built by the “Bonus Army,” 17,000 starving veterans of WW I, and their families, camped in Washington seeking bonus’ that they had been promised and of which they were in desperate need.   It was also here that Shepherd – described later in the book by his lawyer as “disqualified from service on account of sexual indifference to the female of the species…” – was caught in some unspecified sexual encounter with another student and expelled.   Later on, as the FBI is pursuing Shepherd, he burns the journal covering this period – another of the many “lacunas” of this story.

Shepherd returns to Mexico City and is hired as a cook and private secretary by Diego Rivera.  Gradually, he becomes a confidant and close friend of Freda Kaylo and chronicles (under Freda’s cautious, watchful eye) the arrival and exile of Leon Trotsky and his wife.  When Trotsky’s party move into another villa, Shepherd joins them there as one of Trotsky’s personal secretaries.  There is much turmoil that I am glossing over here, like the explosive affair between Trotsky and Freda, and the plotting of Stalin’s agent assassin, and Shepherd’s mother’s death. 

When Trotsky is murdered, all of Shepherd’s journals, and much else of monetary value, are confiscated by the Mexico City police.  As far as Shepherd is concerned, they’ve confiscated his soul, bringing his writing career to a halt.

After Trotsky’s assassination in 1940, Freda arranges for Shepherd to reenter the US as her agent to accompany her traveling exhibit of paintings destined to various cities in the US.  It is this experience that eventually earns him a job with the US Government, moving artwork for safe keeping during the war from Washington to the Biltmore Estate in Ashville, North Carolina.

Shepherd’s father has died, leaving him a roadster, which he drives south.  He settles in Ashville.  Eventually, he opens a crate of a painting that Freda sent with him to “Gringolandia” that contained one small painting, a gift to Shepherd.  Living in a rooming house, he had put off opening the crate but, when he finally does, he finds that Freda has packed it with all of his journals, which she had rescued, by unspecified means, from the police.  This is the catalyst that reignites Shepherds passion to write again.  He embarks on a writing career in earnest, writing historical novels set in ancient Mexico – novels that filled the “lacuna” of life missing from all the Aztec temples and hieroglyphs.

I

f the New Deal and the rise in interest in communism and socialism during the depression was in reaction to a capitalist system run amuck that had failed the majority of Americans and was, in most peoples minds, the root cause of the depression, then the post-war McCarthy witch-hunt was right-wing America’s revenge!   Thousands of Americans were caught up in the web of suspicion; and anyone who might have toyed with socialism or communism before the war was fair game.  Imagine the fate of a recently celebrated, well-known author, a closeted gay, Mexican-American man, living in Ashville, North Carolina, who had been associated with Diego Rivera, Freda Kaylo (both self-declared communists) and had served as secretary to the Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky.   This is Shepherd’s fate.  Questioned by the FBI, shunned by friends and neighbors, summoned by the ‘House Subcommittee on un-American Activities’, his publishing contracts cancelled – this is what Shepherd faces during the final chapters of ‘The Lacuna’.  All that is missing from newspaper accounts is the truth.  Slowly, the noose closes in around him.  Death seems the only escape.

So.  Harrison Shepherd is a Mexican-American boy who grows to become a celebrated American writer of historical novels that recreate Aztec and Mayan culture.  He bounces between the US and Mexico.   His mother runs off with him to Isle Pixol, Mexico, and then sends him back to Washington, (or as Freda Kahlo sardonically refers to it, “Throne of the kingdom of Gringolandia”), then back to Mexico, then back to the US, settling for a time in Ashville, North Carolina, (home town of author Tom Wolfe and the Biltmore estate of George Vanderbilt) where he lives from about 1940s until 1951. In 1951 he disappears – presumably, suicide by drowning – during a surreptitious return visit to Isla Pixol, Mexico.

As I said at the outset, the title, ‘The Lacuna,’ represents many things.  The most obvious is the cave on Isla Pixol.  It also refers to a missing journal that turns up after Shepherd’s death.  But it seems to stand, also, for the missing history of the Aztecs and Mayans, whose monuments and hieroglyphs are all that remain of a rich, vibrant culture.  And it stands for the truth that so often is missing from news accounts of events and the lives and of people we think we know, but superficially.  The recurring theme of the book is expressed this way: “That you can’t really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece.”  Whether describing historical figures such as Rivera, Freda or Trotsky, or describing fictional characters such as Shepherd or even his own Mother, or Violet Brown, our understanding of them is only an approximation.  

In form, the novel is a brilliant construction.  The first chapter is memoir.  The remainder consists of a series of journals and “archivist notes”, published “posthumously” fifty years after Shepherd’s reported death.  The first chapter is written and abandoned in the late 1940s by Shepherd himself, by then a successful author.  The memoir was begun reluctantly at the urging of his determined assistant, Violet Brown. The “Lacuna,” here referring to a missing 2nd journal, is Shepherd’s excuse for abandoning the project.  But, at this stage in our nation’s history, there is a darker secret he is reluctant to expose.  Violet Brown, seventeen years older than Shepherd, becomes the “Archivists” in the novel, posthumously editing his journals for publication.  At a time when the FBI is pursuing Shepherd in the late 1940s, he instructs Violet to burn all of his journals, but she secretly saves them by pretending to burn them in the backyard of his Ashville home, and then hiding them at her rooming house.  Upon Freda’s death in 1954, Violet receives the missing 2^nd journal. This contains a crucial detail of his early years on Isla Pixol that resolves the mystery of his “death” and, consequently, provides great comfort to Violet, for he has certainly become the ‘lacuna’ in her heart.

Barbara Kingsolver has sewn history and fiction together so skillfully, it’s impossible to see the seams.  ‘The Lacuna’ is a brilliant work – rich in imaginative, descriptive language, humor, characters and pitch-perfect dialogue.  You will linger over dazzling passages, tossing them around on your tongue.  It’s also alive with something more difficult to describe – organic relationships that grow out of intimate knowledge, acceptance, and devotion.  This is the perfect “slow read” – a book that you’ll want to go through with a highlighter and spend hours returning to the passages that gave you pleasure.  I included just a few of the hundreds I highlighted to illustrate my point, but repeating them out of context only diminishes their effect, so I’ll close by simply saying, read this book slowly.  It will delight you.

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(c) Paul Schlieben 2010

How I Came By My Chris Craft by Paul Schlieben

Yahoo!

I

t was one of those lovely summer days in the Adirondack Mountains, comfortably hot, with a few cumulus clouds and a light southerly breeze shuttling in slightly humid air from the east, but not unbearable or unpleasant.  My wife, Joan and I decided to hike to Jabe’s Pond, about a mile and a half west of Lake George and our rental cottage.  Jabe’s is isolated and pristine and about a mile long by a half mile wide.  Every year we look forward to this hike, which has become an annual event.  For the most part, the trail is a gentle climb, following a brook on a shady trail.  While much of the area had been logged over more than once, there are a lot of tall pines, oaks, birch, maple and beech along the trail.

Invariable, in seems hotter and much more humid under the canopy of trees than out in the open.  Whether this is due to our exertions or the fact that a breeze doesn’t penetrate the trees, I don’t know.  But, insects like shade and still air and they didn’t waste any time finding us.  I regretted not bringing insecticide.   My arms were in continuous motion around my head to warn off the insects for most of the hike.  Joan, with her dark hair, usually attracts insects more than I do, but this day I was there chosen quarry.  Eventually, I broke off a cluster of leaves from a sapling and rhythmically struck first one side of my neck and then the other – sort of like a self-flagellation ritual.  Up to a point, this worked well.

We made it to Jabe’s Pond, swam, and watch and listened to the melodic calls of a family of loons as they dove in the pond and resurfaced many yards away, again and again. We also watched transfixed as the tiniest fish I’ve ever seen navigated the pebbles in the shallows, whether in search of microscopic meals or a passage to deeper water, I couldn’t tell.  I wondered at its chances of survival.

But, it is the story of our trip back to Silver Bay that I mean to relate to you now.  Just as we were drying our feet and pulling on our walking shoes, a giant, prehistoric pterodactyl-sized mosquito – call it mosquito-dactyl or whatever you like – swooped down and grabbed Joan with its right foreleg and wrapped me tightly with its left, and off it went, with Joan and me dangling helplessly, looking up, able to see only the tip of its proboscis, the size of a Gatling gun and varnished with a dark sheen of dried blood from its last victim.  At first, we struggled, but as we climbed above the treetops, we stopped struggling and held on for dear life.   At first, it was hard to discern our direction of flight, but years of flying experience came in handy and I quickly picked out some landmarks and got my bearings.  I could see that we were headed for Lake George and would, in fact, be flying right over our cabin.  At first, I thought the giant mosquito was going to pass over the lake to the other side, but, whether due to fatigue or distracted by the glare of the sun reflecting off the windscreen of a speedboat making its way down the lake; and due to the fact that I weigh considerably more than Joan, the giant mosquito dropped me.  As I slipped from its hoary grasp, I just managed to snag Joan leg and held tight.  As luck would have it, the weight of both of us was just too much for the giant mosquito and it dropped us about a hundred feet above the lake, and we went hurtling through the air into the lake, making a tremendous splash.

It was at this moment that the speedboat – an enormous, beautiful mahogany job called the Black Arrow pulling a water skier – sped by.   The skier, performing an intricate sweeping move to the outside of the speedboat’s wake, fell and cart wheeled off into the shallows adjacent a small island.  As the tow rope came skittering by Joan and me, I grabbed the tow bar with my right hand and Joan with my left hand and – pop – we were up and out of the water, moving about sixty miles an hour – so fast, in fact, that we didn’t need skis; our hiking shoes were sufficient to stay upright and glide across the surface like water bugs.  This was quite exhilarating and fun, although I think Joan suffered from a bit of whiplash from being jerked up so quickly.  Anyway, as luck would have it, the boat circled across the lake right behind Slim Point and I was able to let go of the tow bar and glide smoothly into about a foot of water, where I sunk to my ankles but managed to stay upright.  “Wow!” I said.

Joan wasn’t as thrilled.  She looked at me and, with some irritation, due to the frequency of my losing my glasses, said, “Paul, what happened to your glasses?”  

I reached up to my face and, sure enough, they were gone.  “They must have come off when that mosquito-dactyl dropped us in the lake!”  I said.

“Well,” she said, “they were brand new and cost a small fortune. You better go back out there and find them, and don’t come back until you do!”

I agreed.  The idea of spending the second week of our vacation without glasses would have put a real crimp in my activities.  In fact, I’m really lost without them.  So I flew out to the middle of the lake.  I know, I know.  This is where I lose you.  “What does he mean?” your thinking.  Figuratively, he “flew out?” as in “hurried”?  No, I’m being literal here.  I’m sure you’ve believed everything I’ve told you so far, but “flying?  Come on!” Well, I can assure you, its true.  I’ve had lots of experience flying in dreams.  In fact, I fly quite regularly.  I learned when I was quite young, flying from chair to couch, eventually to the dining room table and then taking it outdoors to the park that had a nice gentle slope of grass that would cushion my falls.  I got quite good at reading the winds, particularly the updrafts, and I managed to soar great distances.  It’s the most fun I’ve ever had.  The toughest part is learning to keep you feet together like a rudder.  That’s the secret to maintaining a delicate balance.  A helicopter pilot once told me that when flying a helicopter, “you don’t move the controls, you just think about moving the controls,” the touch is that sensitive.  Well, human flight is much the same and it takes a lot of practice to learn how to do it right.  I guess that’s why so few human beings fly.   What with various mechanical means of flight available and the bad experience that some have had, like Icarus flying too high and depending on artificial wax wings that melted in the sun – what a dope!  A lot of people just turned away from human flight entirely.  But, I can assure you, it just takes patience.  Any boy with a dream can do it.

So, I flew out to the middle of the lake and, when I thought I was just about to the place where the giant mosquito dropped us, I plunged into the water like a pelican diving for dinner.  About ten or fifteen feet down, something quite extraordinary happen.  The biggest lake trout I’ve ever seen came swimming by and, remarkable – are you with me here? – my glasses were draped across his occiput, just behind its eyes.  I grabbed him by his tailfin as he swam by and demanded that he fin over my glasses.  (Well, they don’t have hands.)  I have to hand it to him, he tried.  But fins a pretty slimy and the glasses slipped off and started to fall deeper and deeper, spinning as they fell, like a seedpod in the wind.  Short of breath, I went back to the surface, took a deep gulp of air and then dove down after my glasses, which were slowing receding into the gloom.   I dove and dove.  Fifty feet, then a hundred feet, then two hundred feet, and on and on.  I knew the lake wasn’t more than a few hundred feet deep, so I was really puzzled as to how it was that I was able to descend, deeper and deeper.  Just as I was about to give up, the glasses snagged on a rocky outcropping and I was able to grab them and put them on.  What a relief.  But, as you can imagine, I was fairly out of breath and fearful that I might not be able to make it back to the surface! 

I looked around and realized that I was in a deep cave at the bottom of the lake.  It had been rumored for years that such a cave existed, but since no one had ever discovered it, we all discounted the likelihood of such a cavern.  You can imagine how excited I was to confirm its existence now!  I turned around quickly and bumped my elbow on something strange and turned to examine it more closely.  I backed up in a fright, for it was a skeleton!  And, attached to the skeleton was an aqua-lung of a style perhaps twenty or thirty years old.  I examined the pressure gauge – I had to rub some of the algae off it first – and, as luck would have it, discovered that there was still air in it, just enough to get me to the surface!  Quickly I unwrapped the aqua-lung from the tangle of bones that slipped away, one by one, as I worked it free, and managed to strap it to my back and take a big breath.  You can’t imagine how relieved I was.  I started for the surface.  Half way up, perhaps at a depth of three hundred feet, the air ran out, so I had to hold my breath and hurry to the surface as fast as I could, all the while knowing that I risked getting the bends.  But I had no choice.  I breached the surface like a whale and took a big, grateful breath of air. 

Nearby, an old man was sitting in a boat, quietly fishing.  He had the crumpled look of someone who had stopped thinking about his appearance years ago, bringing to mind an unmade bed.  His straggly grey hair stuck out from under his hat like clumps of dank straw, and he had sprouts of hair growing in the strangest places – from his ears, behind is jaw, under his chin.  And, as if a time-traveler from of bygone era, he held a pipe clenched tightly in his jaws.

He startled some when I breached, more hopeful than frightened I suppose, then he resumed his solipsistic attitude of indifference, although I must have been a surprising sight, even to an old man who had probably seen everything.

Fatigued, it was all I could do to swim over to his boat – an old wooden craft with a high transom that for some reason reminded me of a Pogo comic – and, holding on to the gunnels, said, “Mister.  I need to get to a decompression chamber, A.S.A.P.!” 

I went on to explain about Jabe’s Pond and the giant mosquito-dactyl and my glasses and lake trout and the cave and the bones and acqua-lung.  Taking his pipe from his mouth and stabbing the air with it, as though to spear that lake trout, he said, “that damn trout… I’ bin tryin’ t’snag him for better part of forty year, and wouldn’t ya knowd it, you had him in your grasp, by the finny fin fin!  Then ya let him go!” Shaking his head, he spits a gob to leeward in exasperation.  “Jezz!  I give up.  He-yer, climb in, mista.   I’ll take ya back to my cabin and we can have a few beers.  That’s the best way I know to decompress, and I sure could uses some decompressin’ meself!”

Well, I was bushed and that sounded pretty good to me.  So I climbed in and he yanked the starter cord and off we went to a secluded little cove I had never noticed before, and pulled up to the most rickety string of docks you’ve ever seen; docks that looked like they had been tacked together with timber fall.   Tied there were maybe a dozen or more boats of every description – Boston Whalers, an old Chris Craft, a few Grumman canoes, a perfect Century speedboat, an aluminum Aristocraft, a couple classic Lyman runabouts, and more.  We tied up and strolled up to his cabin, just a few yards from the docks.  He told me to have a seat in a wicker chair on the porch and went in to the cabin, returning a few moments later with as many beers as he could hold, six or eight maybe, and an old-fashioned beer can opener known as a churchkey.  I studied the cans a moment.  “Piels!” I said, “Where did you get them?  They haven’t made Piels beer in years!” 

“Yep, that’s so.  Bought a whole boxcar when they closed up down-state and been drinkin’ it ever since, goin’ on thirty year or so.”   He took a long pull on his can and belched quietly.  “Perty good, ain’t it?”

I looked down at the can; its top pitted with rust, and wiped it on my shirt.  Warily, I took a sip, then a longer pull and agreed.  “But doesn’t it go stale after a while?”

“Suppose, but after a few cans, never noticed much.  Decompresses just the same as them new fancy Rocky Mountain suds they try to pass off as beer nowdays.  And don’t get me sta-ted.  Lite beer is like sayin’ ‘buy fou-a cans where two might a done the job just fine’.  No thanks, mista.” 

“You got a point there.  What are you going to drink when you run out of this?”

“Oh, that ain’t likely.  See that shippin’ containa they-er back in the wood?  Stock full it is.”

“Wow!”

So, we sat there on his porch drinking his ancient Piels, chewing the fat – literally, moose jerky he made himself, which oozed grease with every bite – delicious! – and sat there overlooking the prettiest, shady little cove that no one even knows exists.

Being a solitary sort, and not inclined to small talk, it didn’t take long for him to run out of conversation.  Then we just sat quietly, drinking and enjoying the view.  Eventually, it occurred to me that Joan was probably still waiting for me on Slim Point and would be getting pretty annoyed.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I better get back to the other side of the lake.  My wife’s probably getting a little worried by now.  I really thank you for your hospitality.  Decompressing like this really works.  I’m amazed!”

“Sho-wer.  Beats the hell out of bein’ stuck in some kind of pressah cooka for hours,” he said.  “Say, mista.  Just take one of them boats they-er.  I’ll swing by and pick it up sometime, or,” and then, almost inaudibly to himself, “oh hell, I don’t know, maybe I won’t.”

“Where did you get all those boats, anyway”?

“All them fools that come lookin’ for that cave down there.  Once I started that rumor years ago, they just keep comin’.  Lord.  They strap all that heavy stuff on, dive down and then just never surface agin.  It was just meant to be a joke, really,” he added, (a little defensively, I thought.)  “I never even knowed it was they-er; not until today when you popped up and told that yarn about losing your eye-specs.  I wouldn’t have believed it myself.  But there must be a dozen fools down there still, lookin’ for a way out.  Not until you told your yarn, did I believe it meself.  Nobody knew.”

“Hmm….   Don’t you feel a little bad, given all the people been lost down there?”

“Nope.  Never occurred to me to feel bad… fools all of ‘em,” his voice trailing off, wistful and quiet, as though the thought was new to him.

“Hmm.  Well, OK then.  I’ll be off.  I’ll tie the boat up on the other side, at the Silver Bay dock.  I’ll fill the gas; that’s the least I can do.”

“Oh, hell.  Don’t botha.  You can keep it if you want.  Look around.  I got dozens of boats.  Don’t need ‘em all.  Take that Chris-Craft they-er.  It’s a ’54 or so.  Needs a slap’a varnish but the engine tics sweet as a parlor clock.  Them ol’ flathead eights; you just can’t beat ‘em.  But she’s been sitting here at the dock for a goin’ on two years now.  Won’t last if she ain’t tended to.  High maintenance ladies, them varnish boats are.”

Then, as an afterthought, almost sheepishly, I thought, “Hmm.  Aah,” clearing his throat,  “Ahem. I’d be much obliged if you didn’t mention the cave to anyone, or my little cove he-yer, for that matta, if you don’t mind.  See, I make a pretty good livin’  sellin’ them boats and I wouldn’t want to spoil a good thing.  That Century they-er should see me through five years or mo-wer.”

“Wow! … Really?  Must be worth a lot!” I said.  “OK, I guess.  I’ll be sure to keep your little secret.  Hell!  Who would believe my crazy story anyhow?  It’s just too farfetched.”  

“That’s so.   That’s so,” he said.

With that, before he could change his mind, I leaped the gunnels of the Chris Craft, hit the starter, untied it from the dock and sped off, waving my farewell. 

On the trip back across the lake, it occurred to me that someone might recognize this boat someday, but I was willing to take a chance.  If anyone claimed it, I’d give it over.  But nobody’s ever even hinted at it.  Briefly, I wondered if he offered up the Chris-Craft as a sort a bribe, to keep me quite.  But I quickly put that out of my head.  “Yahoo,” I said, as I pushed the throttle forward.

And you know the craziest thing?  I’ve tried to find that cove many times since then but I’ve never been able to locate that narrow little inlet.  But I’ll keep trying. 

Anyway, that’s the story of how I come by this classic Chris Craft here. And, come to think of it, she’s the only proof I have that my story is true!

Oh yes.  For dinner, we had corn on the cob, grilled chicken and fresh peas, and that’s the whole truth, so help me god.

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'The Spies of the Balkans' by Alan Furst

If you are interested in the history of the Balkans, as I am, the best thing you can say about ‘Spies of the Balkans’ is that it shines a light on a part of the world during WW II as it was being overrun by the Germans in 1941. Most readers will appreciate the map at the very beginning, to which you will refer more than once. I often confuse Budapest and Bucharest, had no idea where Sofia, Bulgaria is, and had never heard of Salonika, a port city of Greece, where the Vardar River empties into the Aegean. Salonika is where most of the action in ‘Spies of the Balkans’ takes place and where its protagonist, Costa Zannis, heads up a special department of detectives that investigates sensitive cases involving politicians, bankers and the elite of Salonika. During the final months of 1940 and first half of 1941, as Germany gains a stranglehold on the Balkans, Costa is drawn into a scheme to smuggle Jews out of Germany. At the urging of Emilia Krebs, a German Jew from Berlin and mastermind of the plan, he and a network of like minded agents sign on to smuggle refugees from Berlin through Prague, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, to Bulgaria and, occasionally, Salonika and over the border to Turkey or via ship to Alexandria. It turns out that Frau Krebs is married to a high-ranking German officer who “serves on the General Staff of the Wehrmacht, a manager of logistics.” This shields here from excessive scrutiny – the ‘J’ for Juden (Jew) is missing from her passport – “Oh no, not mine; they wouldn’t dare,” she says, when asked about the missing ‘J’ by Costa.

You can divide this book into two parts, 1) an historical novel that narrates in satisfactory detail the harrowing escape of Jews from Europe (at least those with friends and money) and 2) a novel of Costa’s various sexual conquests. Once you’ve divided it up, you can pretty much discard the latter, or, short of defacing your copy, discount it as a clumsy, not very convincing – I hate to use the word – ‘literary’ device in support of a history that is worth knowing. (Of course, some of you will want to do it the other way around.) However, since it is unlikely that I would have read a book about a Balkan WW II escape route, I forgive Alan Furst for spicing up the book with his cast of lovers; woman he uses more often to prop up the narrative, and Costa Zannis’ love life, than to add substance to it. His various English agents, among them Roxanne, his lover in the opening scenes, and Francis Escovil, Roxannes male replacement (but not Zannis’ lover) seem contrived and stereotypically predictable. Then there’s Tasia of the “very sultry perfume’ – you can guess where that chapter is headed – a former lover who conveniently declared she had no interest in marriage. There will be no complications here, just good clean fun. Tasia sole function seems to be filler – a bed warmer, so to speak – between Roxanne and Demetria, with whom he falls madly in love solely based on the stunning beauty of her blond visage, as she peers out from among packages stacked in the back seat of her husband’s Rolls, and later, as she coyly presses her bottom against a couch at a gathering of the dignitaries of Salonika. Was there a message there, Costa wonders? Wait! I thought he was mad about Roxanne. Oh never mind – Demetria, it turns out, fell in love with Costa years ago in school when she was just 13 and he 17; an infatuation of which he had no knowledge but, never mind… he can’t quite get that couch out of his mind. So he rides out the remaining chapters risking all for Demetria, the beautiful, sad-eyed trophy-wife of Nikolas Vasilou, a shipping tycoon (what else!) who is strong-armed or sweet-talked by Costa’s boss and chief of police, “St. Vangelis,” to donate a very generous private bank account to Costa in support of his refugee project, and who “was said to buy and sell ships, particularly oil tankers, like penny candy.” (Blame it on the translator… oh, wait, this was written in English.) And did I mention the wife with two kids in Paris, who didn’t want to leave her native France ten years earlier? Or, that Emilia Krebs, “…lipstick, dark red, a color that emphasized her black hair and pale skin. Stunning, Zannis thought, was the word for her. And seductive, future delights suggested in the depths of her glance….” Oi, what a schlemiel. No shame, Costa! It turns out Emmi was strictly business, with the assistance of a rich grandfather, a wad of cash (U.S. dollars), and a single-mind determination of opening an escape corridor for German Jews. No time for hanky-panky.

For the sake of intrigue, I thought at least one of these woman, or Gabi Saltiel, Costa’s assistant, or Spiraki (the head of port security), or Sibylla (office assistant), or Celebi, the Turkish envoy, or Elias the Poet, or Nikolas Vasilou, whose wife, Demetria, he is intent on stealing away, or any other one of the long list of characters, could have added an element of intrigue by being a snitch in the employ of the enemy or a wee bit upset by Costa’s romantic obsessions, but, no, they’re all exactly who they say the are or conveniently indifferent to Costa’s peccadilloes, distracted by the naughty maid.

Alan Furst specializes in historical novels and for this he earns my respect. After all, he has to make a living, and researching and writing novels is hard work. I enjoy peering into the past from a new vantage point and he’s done a reasonably good job bringing to life the bones of history; it’s just the connective tissue that could use some tweaking. ‘Spies of the Balkans.’ I’m glad to have read it. I just wish it were a better book.