My First Fall

Actually, it wasn't. There were two priors but they were a few winters back on the ice and don't count because everybody slips on ice. Nothing unusual in that. The one I'm talking about now was a whopper, the mother of all falls, one completely unexpected, seriously designed to shatter bones and put this poor sucker in a home. One second I was up; the next second down. Here's how.

We have maple, apple, and Norwegian spruce trees behind our house, gnarled and ancient, and last winter's seven foot blizzard snapped thick limbs off those old trees as if they were cheap chopsticks. The following spring my brother, Joel, came up from Maryland to help me turn those broken limbs into firewood. We got out the chainsaw and went to work. Two guys, yo. "Ice Road Truckers", "Axe Men" -- Catch us on the Discovery channel, yo! The limbs on the ground were the easiest. Cut here. Cut there. Yo, y'all! Fireplace logs!

One piece remained: a substantial limb hanging from the trunk by a wooden hinge created when the limb snapped. We cut through the hinge but the limb hung up on a tangle of smaller branches. So I carefully worked it down to the ground where, since we were on a small rise, it began to roll. Slowly but inexorably it rolled. Either it was going to take me down at the ankles, or I'd have to jump over it. Which I did. Up and over it. Just as I was in the midst of congratulating myself for being so nimble at such an advanced age, I was suddenly airborne and hit the ground smack solid on my right hip. Full on. My brother said it looked like I'd bounced about six inches. It felt like a ten pound sledge hammered into my hip. I was certain I had broken it and about half the bones in the rest of my body, but I lay there cautiously wiggling everything I could wiggle until I convinced myself nothing was broken. Everything worked. Hold the 911. Still, it hurt, and, when my brother made to help me up,I let him. I walked around in circles for awhile trying to walk it out. Then we finished cutting up the log and went back to the house.

By this time it was painful to put my foot down. My hip sported a bruise the size of a hub cap and the color of rot. But I was absolutely certain that nothing was broken, and, to prove it, I'd walk up the seventeen steps to our second floor.

Just let me sit here a minute.

Time's up! Move it out!

And so I started up the steps determined to get to that landing way far up there higher than it had ever been before. Someone had moved it. Obviously. I do not need to belabor how awful were the next few eons of my life except to say this: pain shot through me with every step, but I could not stop. To stop would be to never again be able to take another step, and I had to get to that landing, didn't I? It didn't occur to me that this was ridiculous. It just had to be done, that's all. So, I did it, and it turned out nothing was broken after all.

But why did I do such a thing when I didn't have to? Masochism? There was no pleasure in this pain, though there was a flush of satisfaction upon reaching the second floor landing. Still, I wouldn't call it masochistic. The root of it goes deeper than that. It made me think about my father.

My father was a cripple. He suffered from a deforming condition known as Paget's. Nowadays an injection can cure it, but my father was born in 1900 when nothing could be done. He had been a straight and handsome man, but, by the time he died his legs were terribly bowed, his head was too big for his body, his shoulders dropped. He walked with the aid of two metal canes and had survived terrible internal damage brought about as his body closed in on itself. His organs, jammed into a smaller and smaller cavity, stopped working properly. Still, at the end of his life, the man remained on his feet working twelve hour days. I never once heard him complain, not about anything really, and certainly not his condition. A doctor told us that when my father walked it was like a normal man running with a twenty-five pound pack on his back. Yet, not only didn't he complain, my brother, sister, and I never thought of him as a cripple! I was truly puzzled when my wife, Jamie, held a picture of him in her hand and said, "I didn't know your father was crippled." "What're you talking about?" I asked. "Look at this," she said and made her point by getting me to look hard. My father really was a cripple. I'd never thought of him as that before. How much pain and dismay he must have felt! How hard it must have been for him to maintain his dignity! How could he not be angry? At whom? At God? He just didn't talk about it.

Many years after his death I walked across a substantial piece of Alaska with a local trapper who was preparing his line for the winter. We were a good twenty miles in when we separated for a week. He went down the line, and I roamed out from where I was. I'd bought a new pair of LL Bean hiking boots and prepared for the trip by running in them. But I came down with some kind of bronchial mess and couldn't get those boots worked in the way I would have preferred. I wore them, anyway, and, before we cleared our first stretch of these dreadful hummocks which slipped from side to side, I regretted it. There was no way to get good purchase. I never imagined the terrain would be that difficult. Mike, the trapper, moved ahead so quickly I couldn't keep up. He'd say, "I'll meet you in the saddle of that mountain", point, and disappear. By the time we reached the first line cabin twenty miles in, my feet were raw and bleeding, so I opted to stay where I was while he went ahead. I wanted to experience the solitude.

I warmed up some spruce pitch, rubbed it on my feet then bandaged them until I could barely get my boots on again. It worked well enough for me to hobble around and get a decent look at where I was, but I couldn't help but wonder how in the world I was going to hike the twenty miles back to the village? It didn't occur to me that I wouldn't do it. I just wondered how? I should have stayed off my feet while Mike was gone, but how many times would I ever be alone in the middle of Alaska? I wanted to take advantage of it to see as much of it as I could. By the time Mike came back a week later, the top layers of skin on both my feet were gone, and I could barely stand. If I could have taken off those damned boots and burned them I would have, but I couldn't do twenty miles of no trail in my stocking feet. Mike didn't think I could do it at all, and said he'd send a medevac back for me. "No, you won't," I insisted, "I'll get out." I was not about to have anyone come in and get me. "If you're not back in three days, look for the chopper," he said, took off, and disappeared around a bend in the river in less time than it took me to tie my boot laces. That river turned out to be a godsend. I walked in it as much as possible to numb my feet in the cold water. Without that water I couldn't have walked at all.Fifteen miles down, two days later, I had to leave the river and follow an old, grown over cat trail (made long ago by a Caterpillar bulldozer) the rest of the way to the village. I had never been in such pain in my life. I wore a backpack and carried a rifle which only made it more difficult. I banged my fists on my thighs and screamed at myself to keep going. If I stopped I'd never start again. Move! Move! Move! One skinless foot shuffling after the other. Move it! Move it! Your father didn't stop, and neither will you! When he walked, remember, it was like a normal man running with a twenty-five pound pack on his back. Remember? "You have a pack on your back," I said to myself. "Is that what this is all about? My father?"

Maybe. But I'm more comfortable giving you fact than conjecture.

I gasped with relief when I finally spotted chimney smoke. I'd made it, and that night Mike, his Athapaskan wife, and a couple of pick-up trucks packed with local tribesmen took me out and got me numb drunk.

I left those boots behind and haven't seen them since.

When I Became A Liberal

In 1960 I was a newly minted Marine stationed at Courthouse Bay, Camp Lejeune, undergoing intensive training as a combat engineer. As I remember the day started with a three mile run (Whether it was before or after breakfast I don't recall) and continued in the field with high explosives, mines (We were the ones who put them in and took them out), and booby traps. We were also taught to make improvised explosive devices with whatever we had at hand. I remember booby trapping a box of nails thinking joyfully how it would shred a human being. We dealt in death and destruction, and were proud of what we could do. We never considered the consequences to ourselves -- after all, we were immortal; we were Marines; we had survived Parris Island. What could be worse? We never considered what the enemy would do to us, only what we would do to him. Maim him; destroy him. We were the force even Mao feared. We were the force the Germans in WW1 cursed as "Teufel Hunden", Devil Dogs. Sir, yes,sir, we were immortal.

One day a mate of mine returned from the base library with a book he had borrowed. He was a very bright kid whose father was a physicist at Oak Ridge. "You gotta read this," he said and handed me the book. I can still see his face clearly, though I can't remember his name. The book was "Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo. I do recall watching the McCarthy hearings on television, but I had no idea of the Hollywood blacklist, still less of Dalton Trumbo, a guy with a funny name. "What's it about?" I asked my friend. "Just read it," he said. So I did. And I was stunned. I'd figured the book was some kind of boy's story, something you might find in a magazine like Boy's Life or Argosy. It was about page fifty when I realized what I was reading. The voice telling the story was that of a horribly wounded soldier, WW1, who had been in an explosion that had destroyed his arms, his legs, and his face. He had been reduced to a torso, a hunk of meat with a brain, no eyes, no mouth, unable to communicate, only to think. As he gradually discovers what he has become, so does the reader, and the shock of recognition absolutely stunned me. How that book ever made it into a Marine Corps library I do not know? My guess is that whoever ordered it had no idea what it was about. Just a good old book about a good old boy. Yeah, right. What it was was a devastating story about a man turned into a piece of meat, only with a mind that still worked, still thought, still remembered, still pondered, still cried out in the silence of his soul to be as he once was. It was an agonizing read, and the image of this poor wretch has never left me. It was the dawn of my personal politics. Gradually, the notion took root that I and my buddies, guys I had grown to love and trust more than anyone on earth, were merely pawns in the games of power brokers. What was engendered was not revolt but ambivalence, some of which is with me to this day so many years later. Being a Marine meant you had become a member of the greatest fighting force on earth. There were no Green Berets, no Navy Seals; there were only the Marines. And I was one. And I was so proud of it. Even today when I hear the Marine Corps Hymn tears come to my eyes. I straighten up. Do not mess with me. I am ready for battle. Note this: every American military unit has a song: Anchors Away, the Wild Blue Yonder, the Caissons Are Marching Along. Only the Marine Corps has a hymn. A hymn! Its final lines are, "If the Army and the Navy ever look on heaven's scene, they will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines." And yet. The older I became the more entrenched the idea that young men were sent to die for old men who wanted things their way. And yet. When I was at Yale in the mid-sixties I seriously considered going back on active duty. Semper Fidelis. Go figure.

Codger? Curmudgeon? Choose one. Uh, no thanks.

One day early last Summer Max and I sat on the front porch theorizing about why West Kill Mountain had thus far turned green only by its bottom half. It had been a brutal winter capped by a seven-foot blizzard, and both of us were ready for fat leaves and sunshine. The daffodils had flowered. The forsythia was a thousand bursts of sunlight. Lilacs were only two or three days away, but the top half of the mountain remained drab and barren. A few years ago a plague of gypsy moths denuded these mountains, and they looked like that. We felt we had been robbed of our spring. Caterpillars seemed to hang in mid-air, their silken threads invisible in the bright sun. Folks were burning larvae sacs out of their trees. They’d use apple pickers stuffed with burning newspaper to reach them. Then billions of black flies – I mean BILLIONS AND BILLIONS AND BILLIONS -- descended in an angry cloud to search and devour every morsel remotely resembling moth. Local scuttlebutt had it that the forestry department dumped them over the Catskills to counter the moths. There are lots of rumors, none of them corroborated, about what the forestry department does from bringing in wolves and mountain lions to problem bears from other districts. But, we were talking about flies. At least, the moths kept their distance. The flies infiltrated our wrap around screen porch with the skill of trained sappers and did their best to crawl into our ears.until one morning they were no longer there, none of them, none at all, not one. They’d disappeared as suddenly as they’d come.

So, Max and I, that early summer day sitting on the porch, unanimously decided that, since there were no gypsy moths around, West Kill mountain must be slow this year due to the penetrating cold. It took us two cups of coffee each to come to that conclusion. Then Andrea came running by.

Andrea is a model who lives a couple miles down the valley and runs the road when weather permits and sometimes when it doesn’t. She’s tall, from Oklahoma, a stunning mix of Black and Native American. Usually, we simply call out to each other, and she keeps going. This time she came up to the porch – the first time she’d ever done that – and she was laughing, pointing at me and Max and bent over laughing.

“Somebody ought to videotape you two,” she laughed. “Couple of local characters, all right. Couple of codgers like those guys from the Muppets.” She thought this was a riot. “I’m serious,” she said. “Talk into a tape recorder. I just know you got tales to tell. You’re livin’ history. Spill it.”

Um, wait a minute. Back up. Past beans, past living history, past stories to tell. Back. Back. Codgers! Hold it right there. Codger. Now, someone generations my junior might mistake me for one, especially if I haven’t shaved for a few days, but they’d be wrong. And anyway Andrea was looking at me through a screen that no doubt hampered her vision. The point is: I have worked hard at not being a codger, an ugly word, by the way. Codger. It sounds like you’re trying to spit up something. I like the word “curmudgeon”, its synonym, and, consequently, “curmudgeonly”. I like it’s sound and the odd way it looks, and, I admit, at one time I deemed it something to which I sort of aspired: the notion of the crotchety but lovable old geezer. I knew a guy named Bill back in Montana who aspired to some day be like his grandfather. The old man sat in the back yard with a .22 rifle and shot the pigeons that landed on the phone wires overhead. We laughed at such a cantankerous old fart, for that he was, but there was something in me that looked at this as a possibility. A cute, old guy, you know, a crank with a heart of gold. That guy.

One day – I don’t know if we were married, yet – but one day I was regaling Jamie with the notion of an old curmudgeon, convinced there was something endearing about it. I made sure to tell her about Bill’s grandfather. She reacted as if to a really vile smell. “What’s so cute about that?” she wanted to know. “You go that route, you go it alone.” I saw her point. I’ve got a notion of what I’d like to be as I grow older, but it ain’t that. If I ever flip old codger on you, kick my butt and tell me to act my age.

MORGAN STATE COLLEGE, AUGUST, 1963 - MLK'S BIRTHDAY, JAN, 2011

Forty-seven years ago. Wow, what a long time! I was twenty-two, a student at Morgan State back then, so, as Morgan was a Black college and I was the only white man in matriculation at the time, there was no way I could avoid the March on Washington and ever show my face on campus again. I had been a student at Morgan long enough to begin to grasp the cancer that was racism. Is racism. Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat. Courageous students in North Carolina sat in at a whites only lunch counter. I would be on that march. Period. I was determined to make a statement.

Morgan’s campus crackled with anticipation. Busses were hired to carry students to and from D.C. I don’t remember how I got there, but I don’t think I went on a bus from Morgan. Something tells me I went to the bus station downtown and took myself over on a Greyhound. I wore a suit and tie, polished cordovan wingtips, and a fresh haircut. I realized I did not want to be part of a contingent. It wasn’t, I don’t think, the ego’s fear of getting lost in the crowd but the inability to make a statement.because I’d be invisible, and, if I were invisible, what was the point?

I’d been cautioned by my mother in Baltimore not to get involved, however, as I’d been lying to her for most of my remembered life, anyway, I had no trouble assuring her not to worry. I had to go to work; I wouldn’t be there. Don’t worry, ma.

How I got from the D.C. bus station to the march I cannot remember, but I do remember being on the march itself: a nice, naive Jewish boy without a sign in an ivy league suit and button down shirt, all by his lonesome. I felt more exposed than any time before in my life. It was hot, but I kept my tie neatly around my neck and my suit jacket buttoned with the cuffs of my shirt a proper single inch beyond the jacket sleeve, and still I wondered if this was what it felt like to be stark naked facing a pack of snarling dogs? Not that I was. Not that they were. Not yet. That would come, but I have no memory of hecklers that day. I went with the crowd as it pushed towards the Lincoln Memorial and found myself in position to see Dr. King quite well while he gave his legendary speech: “I have a dream…” His words snatched those snarling dogs and shut them up quick. I heard the words clearly and knew I had just witnessed something extraordinary.

I don’t remember going back to Baltimore, but, that evening, my mother asked me how my day was in that way she had when she knew she’d nailed you. I said, “Fine.”

“Work was…?” she asked.

“Fine,” I answered.

“You lied to me,” she said, and I knew she knew, though she remained uncharacteristically composed.

“How’d you know?”

“Your cousin, Doris, called from San Diego. Her whole family spotted you today on tv.”

“Yeah?”

“Every network.”

“What’d they say?”

“They said you looked respectable.”

“I guess so,“ I said and wagged my tie.

“Where is this going to lead?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

I wasn’t lying. I really didn’t. I still don’t.

MORE MAX & SOME ON STONE WALLS

I’ve roamed these woods and fields for more than 27 years now, and still I come across piled stone walls in unexpected places, centuries of grunt work done by hand. Country like this can wear you down. This land grows rocks as easily as it grows spruce trees. You can’t so much as plant a sapling without clearing dozens of rocks from the hole. If there were only a way to make some money off them!

Years ago, the first Winter that we lived here, I was tromping around after a major snowfall when a red fox led me to something odd. The sight of a red fox on virgin snow is rare and very beautiful, a ruby in the rough. He saw me first, I’m sure. Wood creatures usually know you’re there before you do. The fox stood on a small rise looking back at me over its shoulder. I stopped as soon as I saw it, and, nearly the instant I did, the fox took off at a trot towards a configuration of stones I’d never seen before, dove in, and disappeared. It must have been his den. Clear sets of tracks showed his comings and goings, and the piles of stone slabs seemed to be an old foundation. But it was deep in the woods and hard to reach, and made me wonder who had lived there? I figured Max would know. He’s lived most of his 56 years up here and knows about everything there is to know including local gossip. He stopped by later in the week, and I asked him. Turns out local scuttlebutt has it that at one time the insane were housed there. It must have been a cold and miserable place. I’m not superstitious, but now, during a storm when the wind wails and moans, my mind turns to Purgatory and the misery of lost souls. Of course, I don’t believe this, however, if I’d lived a hundred years ago I might have.

One day, Max and I got to talking about these walls. We’d both heard that landscape designers were pillaging them for the owners of second homes. Rocks with lichen were especially valuable, and rocks with lichen were what we had, tons and tons of rocks with lichen. We could take apart some of these hidden stone walls that no one could see and go to market with them. Being the astute businessman that I am, this idea went nowhere. Well, almost nowhere. Max raided a wall behind the barn, trucked the stone slabs to the front of our house, and then spent innumerable days putting them together again. Max would stand there and study the stones with the concentration of a chess player until he saw how best they fit, and now an old stone wall, precisely built and balanced, borders our front lawn. It’s a beauty, impressive as any stone wall is impressive, but, if you look closely to see how perfectly it’s been put together, it’s even moreso. Max is as proud of this construction as any sculptor would be, and the sight of it never fails to give me great pleasure.

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Spruceton Valley & My buddy, Max

I live 4.6 miles up County Route 6 at the far end of Spruceton Valley in the hamlet of Spruceton, village of West Kill, town of Lexington, County of Greene, the northern edge of the Catskill range, upstate NY. I-phones do not work here. There is no cable. The local market is half an hour away. Sometimes an hour passes without a vehicle coming by the house. There is no rush hour. It is very quiet, and, in Winter when the creek is completely frozen and covered with two feet of snow, there is no sound at all. At some point, a single crow might caw once, brittle in the frigid air. Once swallowed by silence.

The first recorded deed on the property was in 1820. It was a farm and then, when we bought it, a hunting lodge with thirteen bedrooms, each with a sink equipped with spring-loaded faucets that snapped back the instant you let them go. You could lose a finger on one of those things. Changes were made, rooms knocked out. The house gradually became ours. It’s comfortable, and we love it, but don’t think Martha Stewart. High end it’s not. Some might say it needs work. It does. We bought the place complete with every plate, pot, pan, and piece of flatware, and, decades later, we’re still using them. The irony is that these same plates and bowls sell for a fortune now in antique shops and flea markets, and we’ve got service for about forty. Suddenly our stuff is chic instead of curious. . Everything recycles, even our dishes. Nothing short of a sledgehammer can shatter them, and buster, you’d better hit it just right. They will live forever. Certainly, they will outlive me.

My buddy, Max, came by today. I knew he would because we had a big snowfall, and he’d be out plowing people’s driveways. He stops in regularly, snow or not, and drinks two cups of coffee before moving on. We have a deal, Max and I. He can walk into the house any time without knocking then go ahead and make a cup of coffee for himself. Makes one for me, too, but the deal is that if I’m seriously working I’ll stay at my desk and not socialize. Fine with Max. He sits at my dining room table reading catalogues and magazines until the coffee’s gone and it’s time for another lawn or another driveway or a favor to do for somebody. Then he yells, “Burn ‘er, bub” and goes about his business. When he doesn’t show (which happens only when he’s away on vacation or with in-laws for holidays) I’ll often go days without seeing anyone at all. My closest full-time neighbor lives a quarter mile west. My children are in Boston, and my wife works in LA. My job is to write novels and keep the home fires burning. Good thing I like silence because I’ve got it.

Max plows our driveway and mows our fields, and he stops in at random times during the week, basically, to see if I’m still alive. Recently he actually admitted it – “Well, y’know, Steve, you’re getting’ up there. You might not look it but still you’re getting’ up there. I gotta look in on you time to time to make sure, you know…” Yeah, I know, and actually I’ve suspected so for years. His visits have kept me aware of my mortality in a way that nothing else does. We joke that he’ll find me one sub-arctic day stiff and frozen solid standing in the bathroom with my shotgun poked out the open window eternally waiting to ambush the red squirrels chewing the timbers of my house (Unless you have experienced a plague of red squirrels run amuck through your house in biblical proportions, don’t criticize.). More likely he’ll find me at my computer with the usual look of literary anguish frozen on my face, but I don’t tell him that. I’m not going to do anything to diminish my legend. Like a Frederick Remington scout or a Charlie Russell.free trapper I want to be remembered standing tall not hunched over a keyboard.like Scrooge’s clerk who didn’t have a keyboard, I know, but you get the picture.