A WHALE THE SIZE OF TWO GREYHOUND BUSES, MAYBE THREE

This piece is a bit longer than the others.

 You are not dreaming. You are standing in the middle of a railroad track, bound to a post, stiff as Lot's wife, unable to move an inch, a finger, a toe, nothing, and a locomotive, the size of three school buses, is bearing down on you at top speed, nothing you can do about it, not one thing but watch it come. Don't quibble. You are dead.

Back some years I spent a good bit of time on the islands of Dominica and St. Vincent, windward islands of the West Indies, close to South America. People from St. Vincent, if they could afford it, often went to Venezuela to shop for things impossible to get on the island. I knew people who could afford it, and those who couldn't. The Punnett's were a family descended from the first Brits who colonized the island. centuries ago. Phyllis Punnett wrote the island's national anthem. They ran a boating supply business in Kingston, the capitol. Gombe' lived at the far edge of the bush. Gombe' the hunter. He was seventy years old and hunted wild boar with a cutlass. I knew these people, and through them I found the village of Barroulie, a village at the northern end of the island, where men went to sea in little more than leaking rowboats after gigantic whales, sperm and humpback. It astonished me that these flimsy vessels could outlast a storm as well as haul a fifty ton whale. 

This was a far cry from corporate whaling, large ships outfitted with state of the art contraptions designed to locate and kill as many whales as possible. We are talking about four men - four much older men - descendants of Carib Indians and escaped slaves - in a twenty-three foot wooden boat, open to the weather, outfitted with a struggling outboard and a patched  sail. Their harpoons had been fashioned from old automobile springs. This was mana a mano - "You will  feed my village, or you will kill me."  It had been their way for centuries. A large whale would support the village of Barroulie for a year.  I wanted to meet them. More to the point, I wanted to go to sea with them. 

Jamie was with me at the time, so we rented a jalopy and survived the pocked road that seemed no wider than a donkey path which curved up island to Barroulie. A village of shabby shacks and derelict houses in need of everything, chipped paint, rotting wood, cracked bricks, teetering buildings all around a town square patchy with weeds, with a goat tethered in the middle. I don't remember seeing anyone at all except a sour and wrinkled old woman behind the counter of the small, raggedy store stocked with tinned beef on every shelf. She made no attempt to hide her displeasure at having us anywhere near her. "You people ain't never here. Why you doin' now?" were the questions she didn't ask. Her face was tight lipped, angry, fighting not to say what she wished she could but had been taught since childhood that she couldn't. Children in ragged clothes congregated at the door and stared. We bought them all sodas. "Sunset.They be in sunset,", she volunteered, I think just to get us the hell out of her shop. The jetty, a cement and cinder block structure battered by waves on both sides, partially worn away - that's where the old woman told us to stand and wait. There was no one to see but those kids, the goat, and that old lady who stared bullets into our backs as we walked away. I gotta hand it to Jamie. She had guts for this one.

We waited on that jetty in the open sun for hours amusing ourselves watching the chickens snap up tidbits left on the fishing nets spread out on the beach.  We graduated to making bets on which chicken would get the tidbit first. Or counting lizards. That was fun. An occasional seagull swooped down and broke the monotony.  Late afternoon, when the sun was low we still had another hour before they came in. It passed, and so did they. With the sun lowering behind them, the village fishermen began coming back with their catch, mooring, unloading, brokering...When the whalers were initially sighted, every one stopped what they were doing and watched as the crew took down the mast, and the third man, Millington, started the outboard to navigate the rest of the way, as was the custom.  They finally reached a spot on the far side of the jetty, where it dropped anchor and sat by itself.

 We watched from the jetty as the four men anchored and stored their gear in a shed on the beach. It  seemed they took no notice, however, as soon as the gear was stored, they turned in our direction, looked directly at us, and began to walk towards where we stood on the jetty. They were predators, and they looked like predators: strong, sinewy bodies, alert, loose, eyes that fix, eyes with no mercy, senses all systems go. Black as if genetics hadn't touched them since the  beginning of time. The closer they came the fiercer they looked. The Caribbean Sea was our back-up. They had no idea who we were - rich tourists slumming? - and nobody else had any idea of where we were. Jamie was right next to me. Was this a problem in the making? I really didn't know. What I did was just go still and stayed that way. Kept my face still. Kept my mind still. My body simply there. Just be. Be. Just be. The man in the lead came within two feet of me. I still hadn't moved. He looked at my face the way I looked at his. It was time. I smiled and stuck out my hand. He smiled and offered his. I shook the hand of a man who could be no more authentic than he already was. All four of them. I was in the presence of men who did not pretend to anything.They were not well spoken but answered my questions, and I answered theirs. Did I hunt elephant? No, I did not hunt elephant. White bears? No bear at all. Horns? Yes, horns, also ones that fly - duck, geese...Shotguns were outlawed, so they trapped birds by stretching nets on trees. I told them I was interested in men who did what they did not because they liked it or dreamed about it or was passionate as a hobby, but the actuality that it is you to the core, not something you do, even if you do it well, but something you are, something you are born not made. Reading these words I'm surprised at how academic they sounded, but the crux of it all was that they agreed to take me to sea with them.

All this is prelude. Ten years passed.

It was the spring of '88. Mr. Punnett alerted me to the fact that this would be the final season of whaling in the Grenadines, banned forever, ordained by law, so this was going to be the last voyage of their lives - their last season to hunt the whales they've hunted forever - so, if I wanted to go, I'd better get down there. The Punnett's would find us a place to live. 

So, Jamie, Sevi, who was a year and a half old, and I packed up for St. Vincent and went down there for a month, in which time, I'd be out with the whalers. Once again Jamie played guts ball.  She manned the fort for sure. We bought mosquito netting, rented a modest place named Rose Cottage with lukewarm water and Rastas as neighbors. My problem was that all the men I had talked to years ago were dead or disabled, so I had to ask the current crew of three if they'd take me with them - the last three aboriginal whalers left in the Grenadines - I'd sit in the stern and stay out of the way, take a few pictures. The only man under seventy was the man who owned the boat - a Mr. Millington - and he was sixty-eight - bodies lean and strong from a lifetime of brutal work. Clothing so tattered the Salvation Army would immediately consign them to the burn bin. They barely said a word to me, made their points with chin and fingers. Often just a grunt. "Four a.m.," said Mr. Millington.

Of course, there's a whole lot more but none of that is the point. That locomotive heading towards you at full speed is the point. I'd been out with the whalers for three or four days. By that time, I was tolerated which basically meant I kept out of the way and bailed the water that constantly leaked with a gourd , Yes, the boat leaked. It's name was "Faith", just Faith  no "The" in front of it,  just Faith. One day nothing, nothing at all, ho hum, when suddenly the man on the bow, the main harpoon, begins yelling, "Aw, Lawdy! Aw, Jesus!" and pointing, and what he was pointing at was a fifty ton sperm whale churning straight for our boat. I really thought to myself, "Holy shit, is this the way I'm going to die?" Yet, it was the most mesmerizing sight, and I could not look away. I-MAX but real. I watched a sperm whale  coming head on.

What I felt was disbelief, that this should be happening to me, that's all I remember: disbelief.  

           "They never found his body."

I snapped picture after picture as the whale came closer and I thought, "Jesus Christ, who the hell dies this way?" Maybe an archaeologist  will unearth my camera on the sea floor in a few million years when the water is earth again.  But, the weird thing was, I don't remember fear or anything but wonder and disbelief at this behemoth coming for me. What do airline passengers do when they know their plane is going to crash? What can they do?  I stood there and kept snapping pictures. There it was, yards away, but, just before impact, the whale slowed to our speed, pulled up alongside and lifted his head as if to see into the boat. Just curious. The whale was just curious. It wanted to see what we were up to. I reached out and touched its head, rubbed my knuckles over its rough skin. I saw his eye looking at me. It saw me and I was no more man to it as so much flotsam , and uninteresting flotsam at best, but I wasn't dead. The largest living creature on earth had come to see what I was up to. Satisfied, it dove down and disappeared. 

Death let me off the hook that time. Was it a training session? Had that whale been spawn of Moby Dick I'd have been chum. I don't know what my death will be like when it finally comes. I know I'd rather not linger. When Bob Hope's children asked him where he wanted to be buried he said, "Surprise me". 

How do you top that one? 

When there is no moon and it's a pitch black night in early June, you hold hands with a two year old almost three and walk with him through the darkest night he's ever seen in a field with grass almost as tall as he is to watch with wonder thousands and millions and billions of fireflies twinkling on and off as if the stars had fallen and were searching for a way back.

PRAYER?

On the bulletin board over my desk, I keep a whimsical sketch of a small boy sitting beside a stream with his arms on his knees, his eyes closed, somewhere in thought, the edges of his mouth a wee touch of  smile.

It reads:

"Everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen."

I do that. A mountain brook flows right beside our house. It's a frisky piece of business, turbulent and smooth by turns. Sometimes a trickle. Sometimes a gush. Walk upstream a little bit to a bend in the brook where an ancient tree had been uprooted seasons ago.The great tree's trunk is breaking down - food and moss and nutrients for decades - ants and beetles and things that slither - a place to sit and listen. Listen for what? Nothing in particular. Just listen.

Is this prayer? 

Can there be prayer without a God?  I don't think I've ever thought of prayer out of a theological context. Religion;Prayer. Everything else is hope. Prayer, to me, was something transactional, a contract of sorts, albeit a sacred one, still a contract. 

                    "Will You protect me?" 

                    "Slaughter your best bullock and we'll see."

I try to think about nothing at all. Make my mind as empty as my check book. The Quakers sit in silence for an hour. Calm that chitch. You Buddhists know what I mean. Or Taoists. One of you folks out there. Try it some time. You know, that pesky thought, the one that keeps going round and round and round and round? Takes hydraulic brakes to stop it, right? T'ain't easy, Magee. 

I listen - I try to listen - to what the moving water sounds like passing over the stream bed: rocks, smooth and ragged rocks, shallow flats, pools, downed trunks, deep drops, the deeper drops, cutbanks, sandbars...The differences are subtle. I can't always hear them, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. They are. They always have, and they always will. 

I get those for whom prayer is a truly transcendent experience. If someone feels their private emotions connect them to something greater than themselves, a personal relationship with their God, maybe they are deluded, but maybe they also experience feelings that bring calm and peace and certainty - the very things most people I know are forever trying to find - calm and peace and certainty. Elusive little critters.

Daniel Pearl's last words before he was beheaded were, "I am a Jew". I am a Jew as well, strongly so, but not religious. Even so, I visit the synagogues in each country I've been in. I seek out the community. My daughter was actually named - Shoshana - Rose - in a synagogue in Medellin, Colombia. Still, the lift I look for is not from books but from acts of conscience. In general, I don't follow any religious creed. I said "in general" because I'm still at the seder table decades later wondering if the prophet Elijah will really come through the open door and take a sip of wine from his special silver goblet in the middle of the table on its own white, pristine cloth. I certainly don't think of myself as spiritual. No mystical insights. No endless nights of the soul. No Guide To The Perplexed on my bedside table. But calm and peace? You bet. Certainty? We may part ways on that one.

Just this instant I remembered something. No kidding. Not Fake News. Just this instant, writing about this.

When I was a student at Morgan in the early sixties, after a demonstration or some kind of political action, at the end of the day we all formed  a circle with our arms around each others' shoulders, and sang, "We shall Overcome". Black and white. Bodies linked and hearts swelled with hope and love and determination. "Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day." Many as one. The feeling I had then is the feeling I want now. Nothing less will do.

Trees have lately become a hot topic. Way back I wrote a children's book about a boy and his very own tree. For years I've planted them on birthdays and special occasions.The latest is a white oak I planted for my grandson, Dorian Alexander. It wintered well, and is growing beautifully, as is my grandson, I'd like to add. We know they migrate. Oaks have traveled down the mountain since we've lived here. Why? There's more water and better soil, and they know it. Their root systems communicate with each other and interact with multitudes of other woodland fauna and flora. They even medicate each other, nourish each other, feed and foster the no-see-ums - the moss, bacteria, organisms, and myriad insects, without which we would have no forests at all. Trees only appear to be still.The Druids worshiped trees, and I have always found comfort sitting on the ground, back against a sturdy trunk, legs out, at peace. When I worked in a rain forest the trees had above ground roots like the flukes of a whale. I'd just cuddle in, arms resting on the flukes like an arm chair. Think Frodo. Come winter, in the Catskills where I live, trees are stripped bare of leaves exposing their phenomenal twists and turns, all arms like that Indian goddess. Eternity is a winter wood that goes on and on and on and on. Bare trees against the snow. On and on and on and on. Nooks and crannies you never knew existed. So much you never knew existed!

 Jamie found this. I wish I had written it. 

Silence my soul
These trees are prayers.
I asked the tree

"Tell me about God."
Then it blossomed

      Rabindranath Tagore

Screenwriting/2021

Father's Day 2021 Pinocchio

I made a mistake, thought today was Father's Day, i.e., this piece. Here it is, anyway.

 Yeah, Pinocchio. That's how today's thing, this thing, got started. You can also blame my grandson. He cuddled up and asked me to read it. Could I say no? The passages in question: "Geppetto lived with his cat Figaro and his goldfish Cleo. He had always wanted to have a little boy, and while he worked on the puppet he tried to think of a name." Passage #2:   Geppetto, "I'm going to make a wish. I wish that Pinocchio would become a real live boy."  The yearning. Oh, the yearning. I didn't become a father until I was 47, except, oddly, I never thought I would not someday be a father.  I didn't brood on it. I rarely thought of it. Sneaky little clown. It was dormant and waiting. This will be my son's third Father's Day, my thirty-third FD. My daughter came home from pre-school one day and told me, "Annie said my father was gonna die because he has gray hair." Lucky for me, I still have all that hair.

So, of course, I got to thinking about my own father. We had one-liners, answers to questions, lived in the same house and worked in the same place, but I don't remember a single conversation, i.e., a subject tossed back and forth. He was a good and tolerant parent, but we never had a conversation. Yet, every Friday night we watched the fights sponsored by Gillette Blue Blades - the greats of that era:  Joe Louis, Archie Moore, Rocky Marciano, Emile Griffith, Sugar Ray Robinson, Jake Lamotta,  Two Ton Tony Galento, Max Baer. Tough men with a hard job. But, Dad and I never talked about it, not that I remember. No rehash. No analysis. I didn't even considerate it at the time. We were comfortable with each other. He was no doubt grumpy at times, but we never heard a word from him about his condition. He never complained or even mentioned it. It wasn't an issue, but it was a silent law. "Cripple" was a word forbidden in our house. You wouldn't even think it. Young and single pictures of my father show him to have been a fashionable young man, spats and all. Impeccably tailored. A bon vivant. As his disease, Paget's Condition, continued to cripple his body (At the time, there was no cure), he needed to have his suits made. Jake the tailor was the man with the needle. 

He didn't know I saw him. I was just going down the stairs and the door to my parent's bedroom was open enough to see a bit inside. He was looking at himself in the mirror, dressed in his best blue, pin striped suit. Looking in the mirror. To this day I believe he was thinking, "What the hell ever happened to me?"

Cut. Dissolve. Many years later I'm in Alaska following a local trapper, Mike Potts, working his line. Mike had been born in Iowa, but a flight in his father's airplane flew low to get a good look at Alaska, just for the helluva it. Father/son. That look was enough to convince Mike, barely into his teens, to live there. When I knew him, he'd been in Alaska for, basically, a life time, married to an Athapaskan woman, had kids. That family literally lived off the land, as did most of the villagers in this remote place on the Yukon River - fishing, hunting, trapping, barter, gettin' by. You pretty much made most of your own things. Not an easy life. Not a pretty place, but still  fascinating. Junk snowmobiles. Junk trucks. No paved street. No streets period. All dirt.  However, the villagers, mostly Native American were very good to me, generous and open.. One young lady who was headed for secretarial school in Fairbanks was convinced I was Al Pacino. Nothing I said about that one could dissuade her. "I know you. You're famous," she said. I told her, "Not yet." 

Cut. Dissolve. Mike and I are well on our way to his first cabin seventeen miles in. The trek opened with acres of tussocks. Thousands. You couldn't walk on them because there was no footing. They  bent and swayed and drooped. They were slippery with moisture. You had to walk around or over them - each one surrounded by an inch or two of water - moats - the most difficult terrain I'd ever been in. Ever! I could not keep my balance. It was brutal. I could see steep, rocky terrain n the distance and begged my body to get me there. A steep climb over rocks sounded like heaven.

I'm going to tie all this together. Hang on. By the time we reached his cabin we were seventeen miles away from the village. And my feet were in shreds. Both of them. I'd been breaking in a new pair of LLBean boots by running around the track at Fairfax High in LA. Then I came down with something and had to stop, so I went to Alaska with boots not totally worn in. My first few steps I knew I was in trouble but I wasn't about to back out. So. My feet. They'd skinned me, both feet. Red and Raw.

After a day or two around the cabin, Mike took off for his next trap, maybe ten miles down the line,  "You're welcome to come or not,"said Mike. I swallowed my pride. "Pass," I said. "Back in ten days," he said. So I'm now seventeen miles from civilization, and all by my lonesome. Except I wasn't lonesome.. I forced myself to explore the area. Every time I did my feet took a beating, but I didn't come to Alaska to sit still. When Mike returned I could not walk without pain, a good bit of it. The problem being that we had seventeen miles ahead of us. Mike said he'd send a helicopter out here to get me, but I said, "No. I'll get back. Send a chopper I'll hide. You go." The only way I could walk was to walk in the creek. Freeze the pain, I was sporting a fully loaded backpack that felt ton-ish. Rhymes with punish. It took me three days to get out. That cold water creek saved my butt. So, what has that got to do with my father?

Three miles from the village I picked up a "cat trail".  I assumed he meant mountain lion, when Mike told me what to look for, A cat trail. it was really a track made by a bulldozer, hence, Cat as in Caterpillar, a major manufacturer. of construction equipment. Cat trail. A  bulldozer, and I was looking for paw prints.

No choice. I had to leave the water to pick up the cat trail. Dry land. My feet were rated "agony". Every damn step. Why do I do this sort of thing? The doctors told us that when my father walked it was like a normal man running with a twenty-five pound pack on his back. The one I was currently carrying was near forty. I could barely walk. My father could barely walk. Both of us were determined to do it. Check out our DNA. From this distance, I see him now as I hadn't seen him then. Paget's had really done damage. His legs were bowed, his head enlarged, his chest caved in, no room for his organs, gangrene in the intestine...I never appreciated what he must have been going through until now. Was this a coincidence or am I missing something? Was I that obtuse? We could both barely walk but plodded on. With packs on our backs. Was I trying to re-create my father? Did some kind of perverse guilt force me to experience his pain? You tell me. Second thought. Don't.

One more Alaska story. It'll make you smile. We were five miles from the cabin. The sun had gone down. Mike went on ahead. I just dropped where I was. I carried a caribou skin for warmth as well as my sleeping bag, laid out the skin,, got in my  bag, fired up a joint, and watched the Aurora Borealis undulate across the night sky.

 I never doubted he loved me