Going South

Last night I said to April, "It’s getting so cold here. I wish we could go south for the winter."

She looked at me for a second, then burst out laughing. Because, you see, we are going south, just two weeks from now, to the sunny west coast of Mexico, for our fourth consecutive winter in Yelapa. This year, our son and his family will join us for the first two weeks.

"Aren’t we lucky?" April said.

Yes, we are. We’re extravagantly lucky. There’s no other word for it. It’s compensation for growing old, I guess, our reward to ourselves for making it to retirement, for somehow having the means (though just barely) to go south. But we’re doing so out of selfishness.

We’re being selfish—we’ve had to face it—because, rather than putting our daughter through college (she was accepted this year into the music program at the University of Victoria and is attending on a student loan), and maybe helping our son out financially to establish himself in business, we’ve elected to keep most of my just over six-figure inheritance from my mother for ourselves. We’ve invested it so that it adds modestly to our monthly pensions, and so, since 2005, we’ve been able to escape the Canadian winter.

Our rationale? Our children are young adults. They have their lives ahead of them, during which, with luck, they’ll somehow establish themselves to the point where they, too, might enjoy the fruits of retirement and travel. We, on the other hand, have our lives mostly behind us. The trouble with retirement, as I say to younger people who express their longing for it, is that unless you make a fortune beforehand, you have to get old before you can retire. It’s a state a little like being more or less comfortably on death row. It can be pleasant, but there’s no hope of your sentence being commuted.

Anyway, we might have put my less-than-large inheritance into a trust fund for our kids, let them draw on it as needed, and stayed put in our little homemade house, on our 9.2 acres of land, into our declining years—a house and land (the land, anyway) that the kids will inherit someday, for whatever they or it may be worth. Our hope is that it’ll be worth something.

So, selfishly, we’ll again go south this winter—and for as many more winters as we’re allowed in our increasing old age.

Wind Dummy

Here's another long (and probably unpublishable) piece, written out of memory and a little research for the record.

WIND DUMMY
Memories of Early Hang Gliding

One afternoon in early July of 1974, as I sat in my office as assistant registrar of the now-defunct Notre Dame University of Nelson (Nelson, British Columbia), I saw an amazing sight: reflected on the glass front of my office, through the window behind me, was the familiar mass of 2,200-foot Elephant Mountain, which rises across the narrow West Arm of Kootenay Lake and overlooks the town, and the tiny figure of a man on top of the "elephant’s" head with what looked like an enormous kite. Turning around to look directly out the window, I saw the man lift the kite, run with it off the mountain—and fly!

He took off parallel with the Arm—into the wind, I supposed—tilted into a turn, straightened, and began to glide over the water. His delta-shaped kite, painted yellow and black, was like a giant butterfly. I stood at the window, watching his slow flight, until he arrived above the sawdust flats along the shore of the Arm, went into a downward spiral (what I would later know as a diving 360), came out of it alarmingly close to the ground, I thought, then tipped the nose of his kite upward and landed, on his feet, as neatly and gently as a bird.

What I’d just seen, I gathered, after checking the current Nelson Daily News, was a competitor taking a practice flight off the launch site in preparation for the Canadian National Kite Flying Championships to be held in Nelson that weekend. It would be the first event of its kind in Canada, a result of the growing enthusiasm for this latest daredevil sport that had found its way north from California, where it originated.

Sixty flyers competed that weekend in Nelson. I missed Saturday’s action, but my wife, April, and I were in town on Sunday to join the crowd at Nelson’s small-plane airport for the finals and watch as a helicopter, in several trips, lifted fliers and slingfuls of their folded kites to the top of Elephant Mountain. Through binoculars I watched them assemble their kites up there, and then, one after the other, take off, all trying for the target on the flats, a square of canvas with a 30-foot bulls-eye painted on it. Most of the flyers landed, more or less skillfully, within five minutes, the best pilots, a couple of them flying prone (eventually the only way to fly), on the square of canvas or on the bulls-eye itself. One or two landed in the lake, and at least one, wildly off course, put down on the roof of somebody’s house in the uphill section of Nelson.

Later that hot afternoon several of the best fliers put on a demonstration of ridge soaring, for as long as half an hour, in the updrafts along the face of the mountain.

It was all too exciting. As a farm boy in Minnesota, I’d watched redtail hawks soaring above the fields and had longed to fly as they did. Now I could, if I had the nerve and what I supposed was considerable skill. I doubted my ability to learn the required skill, and I wasn’t too sure about my nerve either. Nevertheless, after learning the name of the instructor in town and that he charged a modest $35, I signed up for a week’s lessons in hang gliding.
* * *
Humankind has wanted to fly since who knows when? There’s the legend of Icarus, who in wings made of feathers and wax flew so close to the sun that the wax melted and he fell into the sea. There are drawings from the sixteenth century by Leonardo da Vinci of batwing flying machines, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sketches of gliders that may or may not have been tested. So far as we know, glider flight was first achieved by an American, John J. Montgomery, and by a German, Otto Lilienthal, in the years around the turn of the last century. Montgomery flew as early as 1883, Lilienthal in 1891; both men were eventually killed in crashes, Lilienthal in 1896, Montgomery in 1911. Meanwhile, there were other pioneers of flight, England’s Percy Pilcher, killed in 1899, and America’s Octave Chanute, who flew countless times off sand dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan in the 1890s, and survived.

Then came the Wright brothers, who first experimented with hang gliders between 1900 and 1902 before achieving powered flight in 1903. After that, powered flight was all the rage, and hang gliding was lost to history—until an engineer named Francis Rogallo, in the 1950s and early ‘60s, patented designs for a "limp"delta-shaped wing, a kind of parachute reinforced with metal tubing, that NASA considered as a device for gliding space vehicles after reentry into the atmosphere back to earth. NASA ultimately rejected the Rogallo wing, but it led, in 1964, to the "Bamboo Butterfly," a bamboo and polyethylene adaptation of the Rogallo by a daredevil named Richard Miller, who learned to fly with it off California sand dunes. Soon other crazies were running off hills and dunes under various contraptions made of bamboo and plastic, and hang gliding (called "skysurfing" at first, suggesting seaside launches and the initial low-level flights: "Never fly higher than you care to fall," was an early adage, soon ignored) was reborn.

The first modern hang glider meet reportedly was held in 1971, in California. At this and at subsequent gatherings flyers swapped experiences and the practical knowledge they’d gained—often the hard way. Refinements to the Rogallo wing were introduced: notably the swing seat and the triangular control bar (also called the trapeze bar or A-frame), developed in Australia along with probably the first true Rogallo hang gliders and brought to the U.S. by Aussies Bill Moyes and Bill Bennett. Moyes had served as a test pilot of Rogallos built by John Dickenson, an Australian engineer, for towing behind speedboats. Moyes eventually realized that by taking off a height of land you could fly free, without a tether. He started performing at fairs in Australia.

His friend Bill Bennett, another hang glider barnstormer, went to the States in 1969 and did stunt flying with the Rogallo. Moyes followed him in 1970 and also put on hang gliding demonstrations, once flying into the Grand Canyon, another time having himself lifted by an airplane to some 8,000 feet before releasing.

The swing seat and A-frame control bar made obsolete those early gliders strenuously and rather awkwardly guided by hanging by your armpits from parallel bars and shifting your weight by throwing out your legs or sliding back and forth on the bars. The swing seat gave you a comfortable ride, and with the control bar, you shifted your weight simply by pushing or pulling on the bar, or cranking it to the right or left, to easily increase or decease your speed or effect a turn.

Flights with the Rogallo wing in Canada were first made off ski slopes. Willi Muller, manager of a ski hill outside Calgary, Alberta, watched a skier fly off a hill at Lake Louise in 1971, started building kites for himself and then for others, flew off various ski hills in western Canada, and eventually competed in meets with the likes of Bob Wills, Chris Price, Dick Eipper and Dave Cronk, early heroes of the sport.

In 1973, Willi and his brother Vincent formed Muller Kites, Ltd., in Calgary, and soon after bought land on Cochrane Hill, west of the city, for use as a launch site. The open slope there and Alberta’s prairie winds made it a great place to hang glide, and many, if not most, of the flyers who competed in the Nelson meet in July 1974 were graduates of Cochrane. Many, if not most, flew Muller kites. The organizer of the meet, Leigh Bradshaw of Nelson, was himself a Cochrane graduate, and he was the guy, it turned out, who would teach me, and others in the Nelson area, how to fly.
* * *
Exactly a month after first seeing men fly like birds, I was one of a small group of would-be hang glider pilots who gathered one evening on the lawn in front of our instructor’s house in Nelson. We were there for a "ground school," preliminary to practical lessons. Nose down on the grass for our inspection was an assembled Muller hang glider. It was a delta-wing made of Dacron sailcloth and aluminum spars, and standing beside it was Leigh Bradshaw, who turned out to be a gangly youth with a bandaged arm. He’d been flying that day and crashed, skinning his arm to the elbow.

He took our names, checking them off the list he held. Then he asked our ages, eighteen being his minimum for instruction. A couple were boys just out of high school and precisely at the minimum age. Most were in their twenties. I was thirty-nine, which made me the "old man." Leigh himself was twenty-four.

The kite before us had a twenty-foot wingspan and weighed forty-two pounds, Leigh said. He had each of us take a turn at strapping on the swing seat, hung by nylon ropes from the kite’s central spar, its "keel," and grasping the control bar to lift the kite up and get the feel of it. It wasn’t easy keeping it balanced. When taking off, Leigh said, you grabbed the control bar and lifted the kite over your head to the extent of the seat’s ropes, then ran with it as hard as you could. "You keep running," Leigh told us, "lifting the nose of the kite up slightly to fill the sail and as you lift off, you pull the bar in slightly to dive a little and reach flying speed. That’s fifteen miles per hour with a Muller. Then you level off and you’re flying!

"Thumbs up, though, on the control bar," Leigh warned. "Know why? Cause if you crash with your thumbs around the bottom of the bar, you’ll break’m. Snap! Just like that."

Lessons would start that Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. (agreed on as the time we’d all be off work) on Leigh’s "practice hill" in Krestova some ten miles out of Nelson. We were to come in long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and bring gloves. Helmets weren’t mentioned. Few wore them in those days.
* * *
Two days later, from the rim of a little "bowl" in the hills around Krestova, we "fledglings" started the humbling business of learning to take off and land with Leigh’s "trainer," a somewhat battered old Muller. We took turns with it, lifting it over our heads and running down the slope with it, "goat jumping" into the air at first, despite Leigh’s yelling at us not to, and falling back in a stall on the kite’s tail or crashing headlong into the dirt—eating the dirt, driving your face into it, tearing your shirt sleeves, wrenching your back.

One poor bespeckled fellow broke his glasses his first or second try down the hill. It was awkward running while strapped to the swing seat and trying to balance the heavy kite over your head. The trick, as Leigh kept stressing to us, was not to run and then jump into the air, but rather to keep running until the kite itself lifted into the air and took you up with it.
My first go was a classic failure: I "goat jumped," let my legs stretch out in front of me, and sat down hard on my rump. "I broke my tail-bone that way," Leigh commented.

My second attempt started out fine. In a sharp wind, I took off like a bird (my light 120 pounds under the twenty-foot kite gave me an advantage) and sailed out over Sandy, our assistant instructor, who yelled "Stall!" I pushed on the control bar, the kite tipped up, then heeled over in the wind and came down on one wing, which held me up for an instant, dangling in the swing seat, until the wing’s aluminum spar buckled and I fell to the ground. That ended our lessons for the evening.
* * *
The next evening, our painful lessons resumed: slogging up the training hill with the heavy, awkward kite on your back, swinging it into the wind at the top, trying to balance it, hold it steady, as you wait for the right aerodynamic (the right psychological) moment before starting your run down the hill and, hopefully, taking off. You crash. Then puffing, sweating, hurting, you slog up the hill again. You’re like a penguin trying to be an eagle.

We were helped, at first, with "keel-assist" takeoffs. Leigh or his assistant would grab the kite’s tail and run with you, tip the kite’s nose up for you to fill the sail, and give you a last push into the air. That sometimes worked to lift you off.

But then you went back to unassisted takeoffs. I bombed twice unassisted after a successful keel-assist, the second time really hard, wrenching my back. Then, third try, I tripped while running, "fell" into the air, and actually glided down the hill before landing, more or less successfully. "Good," Leigh said, "but you’ll need more lessons before I let you fly off a mountain."

That next week, after a day of sedentary work at my desk, I’d leave for more physical punishment at Krestova—more painful attempts, more humiliating failures, to fly.

But then, on Thursday of that week, I flew!—and flew again that Friday, repeatedly, running down the hill at Krestova and taking off to glide to the other side of the bowl, the sails luffing behind me as I dove before flaring the kite to achieve a landing. The sensation wasn’t at all like one’s dream of flying. Hanging in your seat below the kite, you felt the air’s power, an invisible force that held you up and carried you over the ground as if being swung from a crane, while the kite itself, constantly in need of control, didn’t let you feel much like Peter Pan.

That weekend, I "graduated," off Mount Hardy, outside Grand Forks, B.C.
* * *
Grand Forks is a former mining town in the idyllic-looking Kettle River Valley, some seventy-five miles west of Nelson. It’s in B.C.’s Boundary Country along the U.S.-Canada border, a region of semi-desert where the bare hills outside town are perfect for flying off because of their steady updrafts and the absence of trees to crash into, and because the agricultural fields in the flat valley are ideal for landing. With other members of the club we soon formed and jocularly called Acrophobia, I would fly many times at Grand Forks during the long, benevolent fall of that year and into the following summer.

At Grand Forks, that graduation weekend in late August, I mostly waited—waited on top of Mount Hardy for my turn to fly in a state of controlled anxiety, wondering whether my legs would buckle when I started my run to take off. Mount Hardy was a lot higher than the training hill at Krestova: 700 feet vertical, Leigh said. (Actually it was 1200 feet above the valley floor, but he didn’t tell us that until afterwards.) Watching others take off from it was almost unbearably exciting—and not a little frightening—especially as there were a couple of very bad takeoffs and one potentially fatal stall.

One student crashed on takeoff, just over the edge of the mountain, breaking his control bar. Another flew through bushes and bounced off rocks before sailing out over the valley. Another took off all right but stalled maybe a hundred feet above the ground, sideslipped into a dive, and pulled out just in time to make a rough landing in a bean field. Another executed an ugly, heart-stopping takeoff, banging into a rock and losing his grip on the control bar. He got hold of it again but lost so much altitude he barely cleared the power lines along the road in front of our designated landing field. The day ended before I’d had my turn at risking disaster.

My turn came, finally, the next day. By that time, after tensely waiting until late afternoon, I was as scared and yet ready to go, I imagined, as a paratrooper the night before D-Day.
It had been a hot day, the thermals building, making lots of lift and by the afternoon some turbulence. I bent under the trainer and strapped into the swing seat. Leigh said to wait. A downwind tipped the kite forward. Another student pulled the tail down and held it. Squatting under the sails, I winked at April, standing nervously nearby. Then Leigh said, "Okay."

I stood up and adjusted the seat, straightened the ropes, lifted and angled the kite into the wind.
"Go," said Leigh.

I ran down the shallow incline and off the edge of the slope and into the air. It was that easy. I pulled the bar in and picked up flying speed. The sail began to rap in the wind. Behind me Leigh whistled, my signal to turn. I turned, swung around the hill and started down, down the mile-long glide to the landing field. I was flying at incredible speed, it seemed (maybe forty mph), because I was diving all the way, as instructed, to avoid stalling. (After yesterday’s student mishaps, Leigh had gotten nervous about stalls.) Vaguely I was aware of the town of Grand Forks, off in front of me, and of the ground below me. Once I looked directly down and was struck with vertigo at the sight of a house the size of a child’s toy block under my dangling feet. The kite bucked and the sails snapped in the afternoon’s hot-air turbulence. I watched the angle of the nose (again according to instructions), watched it pitch and yaw as I fought against its tendency to tip upwards, leaning into the A-frame and holding the control bar in tight against my chest. The feeling was a little like surfing (sky surfing, yeah!), though more like a toboggan ride, fast, bumpy, as you slid down the hard, invisible air. Leigh had said to do S-turns to lose altitude as I approached the field, so as not to overshoot it, so I wrenched the kite back and forth, sideslipping, the control bar wanting to tear itself from my hands.

I cleared the power lines by some fifty feet, then saw the field rushing up at me. I pumped the bar out a couple of times to slow the kite; then, as my feet neared the ground, I pushed out and up into a stall and settled to earth. "Wow," I said. And again, "Wow." I could hardly wait to try it again.
* * *
I didn’t fly again, though, except for a couple of little practice flights off a small hill near my home, until mid-September, during another weekend at Grand Forks. The week before, word reached us that a flyer from Calgary, Bill Taylor, had been killed at Hope, B.C., near Vancouver, after taking off from a cloudy peak and, no doubt becoming disoriented in the fog, crashing back into the mountain. He was the first hang-gliding fatality in Canada (one of fifty worldwide in 1974). That was grim news, but it didn’t deter me or my comrades. Hang gliding, like flying generally, was a calculated risk. You accepted the risk for the absolute thrill, the transcendence, of flying like a bird.

There were more accidents—one spectacular one—my second weekend at Grand Forks. Like most of us in our club, I kept a flight log. Here is my entry for September 14:

Mount Hardy. Four flights, the first three in the used Muller 18 Wayne and I bought from Leigh for $200, the fourth in Leigh’s new 18. All lovely flights. I was more relaxed, learned to "trim" the kite for the best glide angle. Got lift and accepted it. Can fly now without coaching.

Three accidents, though, two of them horrendous. Andy, a fledgling starting his second flight, dove too steeply, crashed just below the launch site, and suffered a broken shoulder and cracked vertebrae. (He was taken by ambulance to the Grand Forks hospital.) Cam stalled on takeoff and has cuts and bruises. Wayne, on his graduation flight and in our kite, took to fooling around in the air and flew into the power lines. The kite looped around the wires, shorted out the electricity in Grand Forks, and he was shocked unconscious. I had taken off right after him and lost sight of him until, after landing, I turned around to see him and the kite hanging upside down from the wires. He’s dead, I thought, as I approached, but then he came to and pulled his head up. Suffered burns on his legs and one side of his body and the Dacron on our kite is singed all along the wing spars, one of which is bent. He hung up there in the wires for 45 minutes, beginning to freak out after the power went back on, before being rescued by West Kootenay Power workmen, who arrived from Grand Forks with a cherry picker. The second ambulance that day took him to the hospital, where he was given a tranquilizer, treated for burns, and released.

As the ambulance carrying Wayne headed into Grand Forks, the power boys stayed behind to deliver a lecture. "You shouldn’t be flying over these wires," we were told. They carried 2400 volts and our friend was lucky to have survived. One man pointed to the high-tension lines in the distance, going down the slope of Mount Hardy only a few hundred yards from our launch site. "You fly into those and you’ll be incinerated."

To allay their fears for us, to show that Wayne’s accident was a fluke, we had them watch as three or four of us drove up the mountain and flew off to glide over the lines with a couple of hundred feet to spare. That so excited the workmen they were ready to take up hang gliding themselves.

Wayne, acting on the same principle that a rider, after being thrown by a horse, gets back on the beast, flew again the next day—twice. Then he gave up hang gliding, though not flying altogether (opting for powered flight, he got a pilot’s license about a year later), and not without leaving a cautionary image of himself hanging from the power lines at Grand Forks in our broken kite (Leigh took the picture and sent it in) that appeared in the accidents section of the January 1975 issue of The Flypaper, the official organ of the Alberta Hang Glider Association.
* * *
Following that weekend, I called in sick one day to fly with Leigh and some others off Buchanan Lookout, 4,500 feet above the town of Kaslo, up the shore of Kootenay Lake from where I live near the ferry landing at Balfour. Didn’t land in the lake, as I wrote in my flight log.

Flew twice that day, long, ten to fifteen-minute flights, including, on my second, a soaring lift above the Kaslo golf course, situated on a knoll overlooking the town, which provided a sudden bump of air as I passed over it. Stalled and lost my stomach. But such lovely smooth flights overall, the wind flowing audibly through your sail, your wires faintly humming, your wings slightly flapping (like a bird’s!) as you float, intensely alone, some thousands of feet above the earthbound world. You’re buzzing, all your faculties are engaged, you’re entirely in the here and now. Still nervous on takeoff, I told my flight log. Have to psych myself up to it. The launch at Buchanan is off a ledge below the Lookout, out of the wind with the kite’s full weight on your back as you run off the edge, trusting that you’ll fly. You drop, your sail fills, and you’re flying!

After our last flights that day, Leigh asked, "Wanna fly Lavena?"

I knew about Mount Lavena, just north of Kootenay Lake, above the farming and logging community of Meadow Creek. At 5,880 feet vertical, it was maybe the highest peak one could fly off in the West Kootenays. While still taking lessons, I’d watched Leigh and his previous class of students fly off it about a month earlier.

"Sure," I said.

"How about tomorrow?"

It would be my eleventh flight—and was almost my last.
* * *
Leigh organized the flight, arranging with a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation maintenance crew for the four of us—Leigh himself, Ted ("Terrible Ted," a onetime professional wrestler), Brian (a B.C. Hydro employee), and I—to go up with them in the early morning to the top of Lavena where, along with a forest lookout tower, there was a CBC relay station. I called my office to say I was taking another half day off and that I’d probably be in for the afternoon.

It took an hour and a half in the crew’s 4x4 van to reach the top of Mount Lavena. Switchbacking up through the forested lower slopes, we were lost in the trees until, above tree line, we came out on the bare summit and got our first unnerving look at the valley floor, more than a mile below us, over which we would launch ourselves. "Your mouths dry?" Leigh laughed, then passed sticks of gum around. "Little trick," he said. Chewing gum did work up some spit in your mouth.

At the lookout, the CBC guys parked their vehicle and helped us unload our kites. Then they stood watching as we carried our kites to a narrow point of rock jutting out into sheer space just below the lookout. The air was chilly at that altitude, and much too still. I had a sense of unreality and started to tremble from the cold and, yes, with cold fear as I assembled my kite. We were up so high! You could look across, level with us, to the snowy field of a glacier on top of the opposite range of mountains; look down through wispy clouds, as if from the stratosphere, to the little patchwork of Meadow Creek, five miles away yet seemingly right under our feet.
It was difficult to tell where, exactly, to face into the wind. There was no wind, only whiffs of air now and then that your telltail, the nylon ribbon on the nose of your kite, told you were as often at your back as in front of you. We waited, crouched under our kites and strapped to our swing seats, for the air to settle.

It was scary. I was so scared, in fact, my hands were shaking as I gripped the triangular sides of my control bar. Then the air stopped moving. Leigh said, "All right, guys. It’s now or never."
Ted went first. He was a powerful, stocky fellow weighing over 200 pounds whose philosophy when taking off was "Do or die!" He did, running the short length of rock (hardly a dozen feet) to literally dive off the edge and sail out into the emptiness with a warning shout back, "Little updraft, boys!"

I should have noted that as, the second to go off and thoroughly spooked now by the stillness (I felt every one of my eighteen-foot Muller’s thirty-eight pounds as I lifted it, felt I would drop like a stone instead of fly), I raised the kite’s nose to "grab" for air as I ran and at the edge, consequently, struck the updraft as if it were a wall and hung there, suspended, one foot on the rock and the other in space.

I tried stepping back but couldn’t. Tried pulling down the nose of my kite and pushing off with my one leg still on the rock: couldn’t. Finally, I did push off, dropped and felt the tail of my kite crash sickeningly against the rock, then the kite begin to tip over toward the forested slope, some two thousand feet below me. This is it, I thought in that dreamy state of dissociation, as if "it" were happening to somebody else. I’m going to tumble into those trees.

But it wasn’t my time, as my Catholic mother might have said. Instead of somersaulting into space, the kite slid with a grinding sound off the rock—and I was flying! Astounded, I looked back to see my tail wires still miraculously intact, though with part of a bush hanging from them, and the dumbstruck faces of Leigh and Brian staring after me as I flew away. Then I was out over the valley, in perfectly smooth air, standing still, it seemed, over Meadow Creek. The town seemed gradually to move away from me as I lost altitude; then, at a certain level, the illusion disappeared and I was definitely gliding toward it. Relaxed now in my swing seat, I was enjoying the flight.

Even in the "dead" air of that morning, without any lift at all and with the Muller’s low four-to-one glide ratio (a drop of one foot per four feet of horizontal glide), my five-mile flight to Meadow Creek took a glorious, almost twenty minutes. I passed over Duncan Dam, over the Duncan River, over Meadow Creek itself. I might have practiced a hammerhead stall, something Leigh liked to do, in which you pushed up on the control bar to cause a stall, then had the bar slap you in the chest as the kite went into a steep dive and you lost your stomach. I had the altitude for it, and I knew the kite would pull out of the dive almost of itself. But I was anything but a stunt flyer. So I flew straight on, passed over a line of trees, and landed perfectly in a cow pasture.

A man appeared with a movie camera and shot pictures of me as I nosed the kite over, unhitched my seat belt, and stepped out from under the wing. A teenage boy helped me fold the kite up and carry it out to the road. "How do you learn to do that?"he asked excitedly. "You think I could do it?" It struck me that I was like a barnstorming pilot out of the 1920s. But I was shaking. My adrenalin had stopped pumping and the reaction had set in. I kept hearing the grinding crash of my kite hitting the edge of Mount Lavena and seeing myself tumbling, over and over, into extinction.

I looked around for Ted, but he’d come down, I learned, on the other side of town. Then Brian passed over, shouting wildly, "Which way is the wind?"

"There isn’t any!" I called up to him.

Then, as he landed, I noticed a back wire dragging from his kite: one of the four wires, front and back, that attach to the control bar and help hold the kite together. Jezus. He’d taken off clumsily as I had done, he told me, snapped the wire and had anything but a relaxed flight as he crabbed the weakened control bar, pondered his weakened wing, and wondered whether his kite would collapse if he hit turbulence. But he made it down okay.

Then Leigh swooped by overhead to land perfectly on the road. We were all down then, all safely back on mother earth, having flown from the highest launch point that most of us would ever experience.

I was sleepy suddenly, and slept in the back of Brian’s car all the way into Nelson. But by the time I was dropped off at the university, I felt rejuvenated, and I worked through the afternoon with that powerful sense one has, after staring death in the face, of being marvelously alive.
* * *
That long, mild fall of 1974 in southeast British Columbia, I racked up 32 flights, flying as late as early December. A great thrill during Octoberfest in Nelson was to fly with fellow members of Acrophobia off Elephant Mountain, recreating in our minds the championship meet in July in Nelson that had inspired all of us to take up hang gliding. Like the competitors in that meet, some dozen of us were helicoptered to the top, where the view of Nelson, some two thousand feet below, wasn’t so breathtaking as Meadow Creek from Lavena or Kaslo from Buchanan Lookout, but it was exciting enough. There was a good wind, and our takeoffs were easy. I had lift until I was over the water of the West Arm, after which I glided across to arrive some hundreds of feet above the sawdust flats, when I put my kite into a diving 360. I spun down, leveled off, and landed upright. Felt a wave of confidence; felt I knew now how to fly.

The next weekend, still feeling confident, I drove to Kaslo with April and flew alone off Buchanan Lookout. It was my 17th flight, and I had another close call.

Before going up to the Lookout, an hour’s steep drive, I stopped in Kaslo to check the wind. It was very windy on the beach by the Moyie (the last paddlewheeler on Kootenay Lake, installed as a museum on shore) but a little less windy along the wider stretch of sand by the city park. Decided to land there.

Up at the Lookout, there was virtually no wind at all, just a gentle updraft at the edge of the cliff below the lookout tower that barely moved my telltail. Strapped in and ready for takeoff, I had second thoughts. Should I do this? Could I? There was no one to push me (April stood quietly behind me, assuming I knew what I was doing), no fellow flyers around to lend me the courage of camaraderie. I faced into the wind, such as it was, took a deep breath and expelled it, lifted the kite and positioned the nose slightly down, leveled it as I ran toward the edge—and flew off. I turned in my seat and waved goodbye to April. She stood on the ledge and waved, somewhat half-heartedly, after me.

The three-mile flight to Kaslo was exhilarating. I got lift a couple of times, got the usual lift over the Kaslo golf course, where a twosome of tiny golfers looked up at me as I flew over them, still at least a thousand feet high. I sailed toward the lake and, above the sawmill’s teepee burner, its smoke bending horizontally in the wind, I was able to hover directly over it and look down into the flames. Then I turned downwind to start a diving 360, changed my mind when I saw the altitude I lost, swung back into the wind, then back and forth, S-turning, trying to lose altitude. The kite wanted to soar, and I wrestled the control bar, S-turning, until abruptly the kite flipped over and I peeled off like a fighter plane toward the lake. The water rushed up at me and I expected to crash into it, be knocked unconscious, drown. But then, cranking at the control bar, I pulled out, still some fifty feet up. I was over the water and flying again, but when I turned downwind, toward shore, I quickly lost the rest of my altitude and just managed to turn into the wind once more to land on a gravel spit at the mouth of the Kaslo River. It must have been pretty to watch.

"Where in the hell did you come from?" the man standing there, fly fishing, asked. I’d flown right over him before touching down.

Flight log: Learned another lesson. A strong wind near the ground is dangerous. You can stall. So keep your nose steady, come straight in and keep your speed up.
* * *
We were all learning such lessons through raw experience: learning by our mistakes, by surviving accidents and near-accidents; learning that up in the air you were out of your element, really, and that you had to be careful, you had to be focused. Somebody else said it: The Rogallo wing is a beautiful butterfly with a deadly sting. You never forgot that.

The wind! It was a flyer’s friend. But it was also frightening at times and could be your enemy. The wind could slam you against a mountain. It could cause you to soar. It could tip you over. It could catch you in a downdraft, invert your sail, and drive you into the ground.

When the wind was uncertain, we flipped a coin to see who would be the first off. That flyer, who would test the wind for the rest of us, was the "wind dummy." We were all wind dummies, now that I think of it, in those early, trial-and-error days of hang gliding when, as a Nelson helicopter pilot, who’d several times had the "grisly" job of picking up injured or dead kite flyers after they’d crashed and thought the sport was crazy, put it, "Basically [these guys] are jumping in ignorance and hoping they’ll reach the ground alive." There was truth in that.

In fact, most of us were completely ignorant, at least at first, of aerodynamics, of weather and air currents, of the dangers of flying off a place like Buchanan Lookout, where three valleys converge and the air is often turbulent. Dan Poynter’s Hang Gliding: The Basic Handbook of Skysurfing offered practical information on the sport, and there were tips in every issue of the Alberta Hang Glider Association’s monthly Flypaper, of which I was now a member: how to achieve a level 360 without stalling; how to tell, in mild air, the direction of the wind in order to make a good, upwind landing. There were warnings about checking your kite for kinked or metal-fatigued spars, frayed wires, bent or cracked bolts, particularly for damage to the kite’s center bolt, the so-called Jesus bolt, which would cause the kite to collapse were it to break in flight. But there was nothing like up-in-the-air, hair-raising experience to teach you things you couldn’t get from your reading.

Rank stupidity was something else. Drinking and flying, for instance, which was a habit of many flyers. (Not me, though a beer certainly tasted good after a physically and emotionally draining day of flying.) Worse: doping and flying. Somebody asked me once, "You ever get high before you fly?" My response: "Are you kidding? Flying itself makes you high!"

Yet there were those for whom smoking a joint offered enhancement of the experience or perhaps eased their nervousness before flying. Marijuana was probably involved in the case of a pilot who, in 1977, launched himself off Buchanan Lookout after failing, or forgetting, to attach his prone harness to his kite. He and his kite separated, and he fell a thousand feet to the rocks below.

Flight Log: Buchanan Lookout, 20 October 74. 20th flight. Met Ted at his place in Kaslo and we went up in my truck. Ted’s girlfriend drove it down.

As windy on top as yesterday. I went off first, sailed out, and was tossed around like a leaf in the wind. Not so scared this time that I’d I lose control of the kite, but I had to fight the control bar. At times it seemed I’d be blown out over the lake. Once the wind pushed me into a steep dive and I lost my stomach; made me yell. Leveled off within a hundred feet of the trees. Finally came in low over the last ridge and saw I wouldn’t make it across the bay to the public beach. So I S-turned down, over the highway, over the power lines, and landed on the dirt road by the boat harbor. Ted sailed over me, crossed the bay, and landed on the beach.
Didn’t fly again (I’d been spooked), but Ted went up and soared for 15 minutes. Beautiful to watch.

I flew a dozen more times with fellow Acrophobes before winter closed us down (some who knew how to downhill ski tried flying, with some success, off ski hills), lovely, silken flights most of them, off an old mine above the town of Ymir (1200 feet vertical), off Buchanan Lookout, off Spencer Mountain (1500 feet vertical), a new site out of Grand Forks, during which I felt no fear of the wind anymore, only a healthy respect; felt almost no fear at all, only an awareness of the risk, in that instant before takeoff, which I likened, romantically, to the bullfighter’s "moment of truth" before he lunges at the bull to plunge his sword into its heart. It was Terrible Ted’s moment of "Do or die." You felt it in your crotch.

My twenty-third flight, at Ymir, I crashed into a tree.

What happened was that after takeoff I experienced so much exciting lift I decided to take a tour of Ymir’s narrow valley, flew into the shadow of a mountain, got caught in a downdraft, and ran out of air, as we called it, which felt like the hand of God was pushing me toward the ground. Below my feet, getting closer by the second, was a whitewater river, and beside it a railroad track lined with power lines, neither of which looked like a good place to land.

Then I was out of the downdraft and flying again, but I’d lost so much altitude I doubted I’d make it to the field now. Nevertheless, I tried—almost made it. But then, as I was about to clear the last of the trees before the open field, I hit a rotor, the kite suddenly dipped, and I slammed into a tree—was thrown against the ropes of my swing seat, then left hanging, without a scratch, some twenty feet from the ground, my kite bent like a pretzel. I unbuckled and climbed down.

With help, I got my kite out of the tree and carried it home on the roof of my car. My wife met me in our driveway. "That’s it," she said. "You ready to quit now?" No. But I had to replace both wing spars.

I wasn’t the first, I heard, to crash at Ymir. The weekend before, as windy as it had been for me, two flyers flew into the trees, one almost exactly where I put down, and a third landed in the river. Live and learn.

My last three flights that year were off Spencer on December 8. With 32 flights recorded in my logbook, I was eight away from "advanced" standing, had managed to live and learn without crippling or killing myself, and felt I knew now most of the risks of hang gliding. But I was still largely ignorant of the ways you could reduce risk by learning about atmospheric conditions and how you could gauge them by studying the sky; how you could determine wind currents and where there were liable to be crosswinds, wind shear (a sudden change in wind speed or direction—or both at once), or rotor (caused by obstructions—trees, as at Ymir, hills, mountains. Think of water in a stream curling over a rock or eddying against a bank and your kite as a wood chip caught in the swirl). You could anticipate the flow of air by the look and location of the peaks and valleys, by the look of the clouds, by an educated study of the terrain. I did some meteorological reading that winter. Then spring came, and another flying season.
* * *
Mount Hardy, 23 March 75. Three good flights, my 33rd through 35th. Erratic weather but a nice wind. My second flight Leigh had to hold my nose wires before takeoff. Walked me to the edge, then let go and jumped aside as I stepped off and was immediately lifted, up some 50 feet above the ridge, to hover for almost four minutes, Leigh said. What a thrill. Our last flight, the bunch of us, Leigh, Cam, Blair and I, saw a snow shower approaching that had all of us scrambling to our kites. We flew into it, just for the hell of it, dry, hard little flakes that stung your eyes and had you flying blind for a few moments. Another thrill! No fear anymore, just excitement.

There followed in April a series of flights off comparatively low launch sites: Duncan Dam Lookout at the head of Kootenay Lake (150 feet vertical), and an outcrop above Notre Dame University of Nelson and the Kootenay Forest Products sawmill on the edge of town (only 500 feet vertical) that we dubbed Red Sands for our beach landing down the shore of the West Arm. I racked up seven flights off Red Sands, a tricky place to fly from because of its shifting winds and the fierce crosswind along the Arm that you flew into after diving between the trees on the slope. Being so close to the university, though, I could fly on my lunch hour or right after work.

One Saturday, after the appearance of a group of jolly flyers, I let myself be talked into leaving the student whose examination I was invigilating for a quick flight off Red Sands. Locking the student in my office after telling him I had an errand to run, I left him, flew happily without mishap, and returned to find the student still intent over his exam and the university president, who happened to live next door, outside my office with a troubled look on his face. Where had I been? Why had I left the student? I talked fast, and somehow avoided being fired.

In May, the warm weekend of Kaslo May Days, I set out with two members of the Kaslo Hang Gliding Club to fly for the first time that year off Buchanan Lookout. We were driven up the steep, gullied road by somebody in a 4x4 until we ran into a couple of feet of slippery snow. From there we waded through the snow, carrying our kites, for more than a mile to the Lookout.

At the Lookout we found a pair of hikers, a man and his wife, who followed us excitedly to the launch site to watch our takeoffs.

We assembled our kites and waited. The conditions were chancy: updrafts and downdrafts, crosswinds, swirled around us. Over where the Kaslo River comes out of the mountain pass between New Denver and Kaslo to empty into Kootenay Lake, we saw changing weather coming in: snow flurries even. The air turned cold. Downdrafts chilled the back of our necks.

There was a lull. The two Kaslo flyers, one after the other, lifted their kites and ran off. The first flyer got out beyond the slope of the mountain and began what looked like a bumpy ride toward town. The second sailed out, smoothly at first, but then his kite tipped violently sideways, nearly throwing him out of his seat. That gave me pause.

Alone now (except for the couple behind me, waiting impatiently, I thought, for my takeoff), I knelt under my kite and watched the weather deteriorate. Finally I unbuckled, stepped out from under the kite, and folded it up.

With the man helping carry my kite, I did what flyers had to do sometimes. I walked off the mountain.
* * *
Later in May I flew off Ymir, three good flights, and in June off a new place, Silver Dollar (2,200 feet vertical), near Salmo, where the ridge lift was so great that Jim, a teenaged Acrophobia member who flew prone in a Seagull, a bigger, better kite than the Muller, was carried swiftly up another thousand feet above the launch site to soar back and forth, whooping, above those of us still on the ground. We stood marveling at him for a couple of minutes (such soaring ability was new to us then; later, as gliders improved, it became commonplace), then rushed to get into the air ourselves. Somebody else in a Seagull rose up to Jim’s altitude, but the rest of us, in Mullers, had to settle for more or less rough glides, through gusting winds, down to the valley.

My second flight I crashed on takeoff, plowing into the brush on the gradual slope just below the launch site. Unhurt but humiliated, I struggled with my kite back up to the launch site and tried again. Took off correctly this time, flew out into the turbulence and soared a bit, came in high over the landing field, circled it, then S-turned down to be further humiliated when I landed too fast, nosing over in front of my wife and our friend Sheena, who’d watched me fly that day for the first time.

That was the end of my fiftieth flight—and the end of hang gliding for me.

A couple of weeks later I fell out of the sleeping loft to the first floor of our cabin and suffered compression fractures of two vertebrae. That grounded me for the rest of that year. By the following spring, however, I was ready to fly again and thinking of buying a new kite, one with a better glide ratio than my old Muller.

Meanwhile, my wife and I had applied for adoption. That led her to declare, assuming we were to get a child (which we did, the following year), that she didn’t want "a cripple" for a father, nor to find herself a widow and a single mother. So I allowed her to clip my wings, gave up flying, in fact, with a kind of relief, as something I no longer had to pump myself up to on weekends, no longer had to prove to myself I could do. I had done it. So now I could relax, and get on with the rest of my life.

And yet it was hard to let it go. To paraphrase what Hemingway once said of his obsession with bullfighting, for a whole year hang gliding filled my inner life. That summer after my accident, I visited old launch sites, saw old comrades and new faces, felt estranged from their brotherhood of daring.

Acrophobia membership rose to include at least one daredevil female over the next year or so, and then fell. Enthusiasm for the sport waned after that except among the happy few who could afford it and keep at it as hang gliding faced regulations and kites became more sophisticated, more expensive, and certainly a lot safer. Flyers dwindled, I think, to a dedicated cadre whose skill with their high-performance gliders made them something like professionals. Gone were the reckless, amateur days of hang gliding that I had known. By the 1980s the simple Rogallo had become a true gull-or hawk-like wing, with glide ratios of 10-1 or better (14-1 is now common) that gave pilots the ability to soar for hours, climb to cloud base, fly across country for more than a hundred miles.

Accidents ended flying for some I knew. Young Jim, at Grand Forks, trying to land on the ridge he’d been soaring over in his Seagull, had the wind catch his kite and roll it, slamming him against the ground and breaking one of his hips. Ken Greene, brother of Olympic champion skier Nancy Greene, whom I met once in Kaslo, died from massive internal bleeding after crashing into Mount Swansea at Invermere, B.C. Leigh Bradshaw quit flying and quit instructing, I heard, after seeing too many of his students crash and not wanting to feel responsible if one of them was killed. Others, I think, just quit after they got older, maybe wiser, or like me developed responsibilities that made risking one’s life and limbs kind of foolish, if not selfish.

My kite still hangs in our shed, a relic of those dumb, early days of hang gliding and a reminder that I was part of them. I took it down once, some years after I’d put it away, to demonstrate the sport, in brief little flights off fifty-foot Duncan Dam, to a young aspirant, who suddenly lost interest. He was a wind surfer and decided to stick to that sport. "Water’s a lot softer than the

ground," he told me.

In my seventies now, I probably couldn’t foot launch anymore, and besides, my old Muller with its probably fatigued aluminum spars and dried-out, brittle Dacron would be much too dangerous to fly. In fact, all Rogallo wings, slow to respond, their "limp" Dacron sails prone to inversion in turbulence, are relics now, no longer flown.

At times I think excitedly of owning an ultralight airplane. For around $5,000 I could order a kit and over the winter build a plane in my shed, as a former schoolmate of mine has done, several times, in his barn in Minnesota. But that’s just an old man’s fantasy. I’ve accepted that I’m permanently grounded now, a victim of caution as well as age.

And yet to this day, I watch soaring birds with something like an educated eye, and in summer or early fall, I can’t drive past a rocky peak or a high outcrop or a high, bare slope in these mountains without seeing it as a launch site.

"Look!" I’ll exclaim to my smiling wife. "What a place to take off from! What a day to fly!"

19 July-11 November 2004
10-12 November 2006

Intimations of Fall, Preparations for Winter

Rain, finally. Yesterday it rained a good part of the day, afterwards putting clouds of condensing moisture in the air and mostly clearing it of smoke. This morning we hear no fire-fighting helicopters. The sky's partially cloudy, alternately sunny, the temperature comfortably cool. One feels fall's intimations.

A couple of days ago my wife, whose Spanish is adequate to the task (mine isn't), arranged by phone to rent our favored place in Yelapa, on Mexico's west coast, for what will be our fourth winter stay there. Last night, via Expedia, I booked our flights to and from Puerto Vallarta. We'll fly there December 12, spend that night in Vallarta, and next day take a water taxi the 22 miles down the coast to Yelapa, where we'll settle in for another three-month stay. We're scheduled to fly home from Vallarta on March 19, which means our stay will be closer to three and a half months. I hope to get some writing done while there.

We look forward to a Mexican Christmas, something we haven't expererienced since our winter in Oaxaca, 38 years ago. Look forward to meeting the friends we've made down there, some of them permanent residents, most winter escapees like ourselves.

Our son, his ex-partner and their six-year-old daughter, our only grandchild, will fly down for a two-week stay with us in December. We'll miss our daughter, who'll be in Victoria, enrolled in the music program at the University of Victoria -- she went down with us last year for two weeks -- and probably won't see her until she and her boyfriend come back to Nelson for a visit next summer. We might, however, make the nearly 500-mile trip to Victoria to see them before we leave for Mexico.

Meanwhile, my son and I have the next three months to fill our woodshed for winter. We heat with wood, and though we'll be far away in the south this winter, our son will be here, staying in and looking after our house.

Just heard a helicopter fly by. So summer's fires are still burning. . . .

The Waning Days of Summer

Seems like only yesterday it was the first of June and I was just back from a successful promotion of my book in Minnesota and we had the whole summer ahead of us. Now here we are in the middle of August already and summer's definitely on the wane, signaled by the singing of crickets at night (they come to life as summer is dying, it seems) and the end of July's record-breaking heat and tinder dryness that caused a rash of forest fires and filled the air with smoke and the sky with helicopters and water bombers these last couple of weeks. Meanwhile, since August started the nights have been getting cooler and the mornings colder. We've had some rain, finally, though not enough yet to put out all the fires. Anyway, there are streaks of snow now on what had been the bare summer peak of Mount Irvine. Looks like both summer and the fire season are about over.

Many people look forward to fall, and I admit that I enjoy it myself -- October's golden days, anyhow. There's a quickening in the fall air ("Football weather," Scott Fitzgerald called it, ackowledging its excitement), but there's a sadness in the season, too, because after autumn comes winter. And I, for one, have never looked forward to winter. Winter is a dead time, the long, long wait for spring and then another summer, which always passes too quickly.

Many people look forward to winter, especially skiers and other hardy outdoor types, but I've always preferred swimming to skiing or hiking through the snow, and being able to enjoy the outdoors in jeans or shorts and a tee-shirt rather than all bundled up. I grew up in Minnesota, after all, where it was mostly below zero Farenheit in the winter and our house was uninsulated and the pisspot under my bed sometimes froze in the night. I got my fill of those cold Minnesota winters, and have gotten my fill of the milder, though darker, winters here in B.C. after thirty years.

Still, I don't dread the coming of winter here anymore because my wife and I are snow birds now. Now when the ospreys disappear from Kootenay Lake and we know they've flown south for the winter, we also know we'll soon follow them.

The Festival Season

My wife and I spent this past weekend at the Starbelly Jam music festival in Crawford Bay, B.C. Crawford Bay is across Kootenay Lake from where we live. You catch the ferry, the big Osprey 2000 or the much smaller Balfour, at Balfour (two miles from our house), and cross the lake to Kootenay Bay. It's a pleasant little voyage of some three miles ("The longest free ferry ride in the world!") and takes about forty minutes. This time of year the line of vehicles at both ferry landings is long, and you often endure a two-ferry wait. When there's something like the Starbelly Jam going on, it can be a three-ferry wait, as long as the usual wait down on the coast to cross from Vancouver to Vancouver Island. What helps is that, with only the Osprey running at night and big lines of waiting cars on both shores, the captain sometimes opens the boat's throttle, cutting the crossing time in half, to twenty minutes or less.

This is the season for festivals -- mostly music festivals -- throughout North America, if not in Europe and the Northern Hemisphere generally. They seem to have started (I don't think they existed when I was a youth in the 1950s) in the 1960s with the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, which was also the year of the Summer of Love in San Francisco (and the summer of the race riot in Detroit, during which I was a mail carrier in the inner city) and reached their zenith with Woodstock in 1969. In between those two events, and for a while afterwards there were many lesser events called Love-Ins or Be-Ins, here and there, where hippies, semi-hippies, bikers, college students -- Sixties youth, in short, disaffected and otherwise, being young together -- gathered to smoke dope, make out, and listen to the funky good music of the era.

Here in the Kootenays of British Columbia, as elsewhere, I'm sure, such festivals remain alive and well, drawing old and new hippies, ex-hippies (like ourselves, I suppose), and just folks, though I must say they've become rather less wild, more controlled, than they used to be. At Starbelly this weekend I saw a beautiful young woman nurse her baby, then unabashedly leave her shirt off while her male partner gave her a haircut. Nobody seemed to notice; or rather, people noticed, as I did, and accepted (and perhaps secretly applauded) it as part of the scene. It harked back to the Flower Power 1960s, but had this been sometime between 1967 and 1971 or so, there would have been more than one topless young woman in the crowd, many of them lined up and swaying in front of the bandstand. The Sixties, one remembers, weren't only political; they were sexy.

It occurs to me now that the Sixties never died, and in fact are enjoying a revival as Iraq becomes every bit as messy and controversial as Vietnam was and we face the undeniable evidence (though deniable still to world leaders and the profit-mad corporations they serve) of Global Warming.

More than ever, it seems to me, Dickens's opening sentence in A Tale of Two Cities applies: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . ."

Aspirations IV

Yet another apprentice story, also eventually published in that littlest of "little" magazines The Archer. Another early example of my writing, as a rank beginner, about the things I knew.

REBIRTH

Everywhere there was dust. It hung in the air like gray fog, under a hot sun that was like a gray plate in the sky. Ma could not hang her wash outside on the line stretched between the trees on our lawn because of the dust raised by cars passing by on the gravel road. The trees all along the road were gray, and the corn was dry and brittle in the field in front of the house and the grass in the cow pasture below the barn was brown. There were growing cracks in the ground. Standing on the porch, looking out over our fields and pasture to the height of land a quarter mile away, what you saw was a landscape like in a black-and-white movie. Pa and I looked out from the porch every day. Dinner eaten, we would step onto the porch and see the land dying before our eyes, every day a little more.

Today was even hotter than usual, and windy, the air filled with dust. A car roared by and the heavy cloud swirling up behind it caught the wind and raced across the fields. It seemed the world was ending.

"Two months," Pa said. "Almost two months without a sprinkle."

We stood on the porch, hating the wind and the dust and the heat.

"We’ll have to buy hay this winter," he told me. "Our second-crop alfalfa is burned up."

"Two whole months," I said. "Jeese."

"Aren’t you going to Martinsville this afternoon?" Ma called from the kitchen.

"Yeah, I suppose so," Pa answered.

"Well, get two loaves of white bread, and—oh, I might as well write it down. You’ll forget."

She came out on the porch with a slip of paper. She handed it to Pa, and he stuck it inside his shirt pocket. He turned to me. His voice was low and toneless.

"Get the mower hitched up and cut the alfalfa on the flat. Cut it close. Try to get some hay out of it."

I nodded.

Pa walked across the brown and dying lawn, got into our almost-new, ‘49 Chev, and drove out of the yard and down the road, dust rising and sweeping away across the fields.

I walked across the yard to the machine shed, hating the wind that pushed against me and tore at my eardrums. I ground my teeth and felt the tiny hard particles in my mouth.

Inside there was shelter from the wind, but it buffeted the walls and caused the sliding door to bang in a steady rhythm. I greased the mower. Finished, I drove the tractor around from the other shed and hitched the mower to the drawbar. Then I eased the tractor and mower slowly outside and around to our bulk gas tank, where I filled the tractor and checked the oil and water. When I walked to the barn for a pair of pliers, I noticed the wind had subsided. The cows were in the yard, as they had been all day for many days now, lying there and staring patiently out at the brown pasture, not eating, looking gaunt and tired, their udders small and shriveled. No milk again tonight, I thought.

I took a long drink at the pump house, swishing the water around in my mouth till it grew warm, then spitting it out and taking another, this time gulping it down. The metal seat was hard and gritty as I put the tractor in road gear, opened the throttle, and drove fast out of the yard. The dust rose all around me, and I stood up, squinting through the haze.

Where the height of land leveled off, I turned into the hayfield. It lay on the flat top of the height of land, along the eastern edge of our farm.

The wind had almost died. The sun went behind clouds, but there was no relief from the heat. Sweating, I lowered the sickle blade and checked it. The sky took on a yellowish tinge. The earth seemed to hold its breath.

For almost an hour I cut alfalfa. The tractor hummed monotonously, the mower’s sickle blade clacked back and forth, and I went round and round the field, each circle smaller than the last. Suddenly the blade hit something and jammed. I stopped the tractor, backed up a little, then stepped down to clear the bar. I had run into a tuft of dirt jutting up too far for the bar to clear it, and one of the sickle blades was bent, a rivet snapped. I went to the tool box on the drawbar for a hammer and chisel, and I was pounding and swearing quietly, trying to snap the remaining rivet so I could remove the damaged blade and replace it, when I looked up and saw what was coming.

It was a huge black thunderhead, roiling in from the southwest. A wild excitement took hold of me.

That cloud could hold a tornado, I knew, but I laughed and heaved the mower blade into the raised position and secured it. Then I jumped up to the tractor seat and looked back and saw that the church steeple in Martinsville, three miles away, was blotted out. The storm was sweeping toward me, a driving column moving fast. You saw a stand of trees with that dark column approaching from behind, then the trees disappeared and the thing was coming—a wall as high as the sky.

I drove out of the field in road gear, standing to keep from bouncing off the seat. On the road I kept weaving the tractor back and forth, from one shoulder to the other. I yelled and laughed at the same time. There was a delightful thickening in my throat and I could not keep still. I kept looking back at the oncoming darkness, glancing at the road in snatches, watching the column pursue me with a crazy, almost unbearable tightness. It looked as though it would strike before I reached home.

I was turning into the driveway when it hit. There was a rush of cold, damp wind, then sudden, blinding rain. Sudden, blinding, beautiful rain.

I skidded around to the left and burst inside the shed, almost going through the wall and out the other side. I switched the engine off and started for the house, yelling and laughing. When I reached the porch my clothes were heavy and clinging. Still laughing crazily, I pulled off my shoes, then ran back into the rain. The first sudden rush had ceased, and now there remained a steady downpour. I held my face to the sky, feeling the sting and laughing.

Pa drove into the yard, grinning through the side window of the car. He stopped before the house and got out and in a moment was soaked. He came up on the lawn, still grinning. He walked across the lawn, stopping often to gaze out over the fields, keeping that grin on his face. I could hear Ma yelling at us to come in before we caught cold. Then I heard her laugh and she came out and joined us.

We stood there in the rain a long time. It stopped, finally, and everything seemed to come to life. The lawn turned green before our eyes. The sparrows in the trees back of the house were chattering in a shrill volume.

"You can forget about cutting the rest of that hay for a couple days," Pa told me.

"Yuh," I said, smiling. I could not stop smiling.

"We’ll get some hay yet, Missus Miller." He grinned again and gave Ma a pinch.

"Feeling your oats already, huh?" Ma said.

"You bet." Pa laughed and pinched her again. He turned to me.

"C'mon, Carl. Let’s get those chores done early for a change." Then, to Ma again, "We’re going out tonight, Missus Miller."

"Where?"

"I donno. Out to eat, to a show maybe. Just be ready when I come up from the milking." He motioned to me and we started down toward the barn.

That night it rained once more. The folks went out and I stayed home, allowing them, without realizing it then, that time together. I fixed my own supper, then went to bed early and lay awake, the covers pulled up to my chin, listening to the drops of rain hit the roof and roll down the incline to splatter softly on the ground beside the house. I’d forgotten how nice that sounded. I guess it put me to sleep finally.

1955

Aspirations III

For the record, this is one of my earliest stories, written in my off-duty hours as a 20-year-old U.S. Navy sailor stationed in Hawaii. Specifically, I was a Navy journalist, working in the Public Information Office at the headquarters of ComSubPac (Commander Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet), on the subase in Pearl Harbor, which gave me access to the office at night and on weekends when I wasn't standing watches on the "quarterdeck" of the headquarters building every fourth night (four hours on, eight off, like at sea), which was part of the routine at SubPac. I was on a four-year enlistment in the Navy (four seemed to be the ruling number), and SubPac was my first duty station, where, in my spare time, I was setting out to become another Jack London or Ernest Hemingway. As Hemingway had done, I was starting out by writing as simply and directly as I could -- writing like Hemingway, in short.

Incredibly, this little story was eventually published, in an obscure, extremely "little" magazine called The Archer.

THE NEW GIRL

Gladys was next. She got up in front of the room and we all leaned back expectantly, waiting for the new girl to speak. She was the third person to give their speech, and so far the class had gone well. Miss Anderson was sitting on the edge of her desk, smiling at Gladys. Gladys looked scared.

"Ahhh . . . " Gladys said.

Miss Anderson smiled encouragement. The class waited.

"This is my first speech. I can’t remember anything."

"Did you prepare your speech?" Miss Anderson asked.

"Yes, but—"

"Well, then. Don’t be frightened. Remember to look at your audience and stand still and you’ll do fine."

She looked into our faces, eyes wide and frightened, sweeping the room, staring right at you so you had to turn away.

She was a big-boned girl, with big features. Her nose was large and her chin firm and square, with hair long and straight and clipped in bangs across her forehead. The whole face was coarse, like a man’s. And her body was a man’s body; the muscles stood out from her arms and her legs were thick and stout. "There’s a girl for you, Tommy," Jack had said to me, her first day at school.

"When I was a little girl my mother used to tell me . . . Ahhh . . . She used to say to me . . . Ahhh . . . and my father would always get mad and— "

"Stand still, Gladys," Miss Anderson said.

"Ahhh . . . "

Her face began working. She looked wildly about. She looked over at Miss Anderson and Miss Anderson smiled. She kept looking at us, looking through us, and everyone held their head down and glanced sideways at each other and grinned.

Miss Anderson was frowning now.

Gladys looked ready to cry.

The room was still. No one whispered or laughed, but they kept their heads down and looked sideways at each other and grinned. No one looked at Gladys.

"Ahhh . . . " said Gladys.

The room was heavy. A breeze drifted in through the two open windows in back of the room, smelling of spring and of the outside, lifting a paper from someone’s desk and clapping it down on the floor. Miss Anderson said nothing. The class continued to look down at their desks, but for a long time now there had been no grinning. I found myself reading the names etched in the wood before me: Phil. Jerry. Jo Anne. Cal & Janey. Once or twice I looked up, but then quickly returned to the names on the desk. I kept my head down, knowing the others were doing the same, wanting to look into her face, into the faces of those around me, wanting yet wanting not to, playing with my fingers and waiting. Finally a student dropped his pencil.

"Maybe you’d better sit down, Gladys," Miss Anderson told her.

Suddenly Gladys burst out crying.

"I knew it! I knew it this morning!" she sobbed.

The new girl returned to her seat and laid her head in her arms and continued to sob. Everyone looked at her and then at each other and then at Miss Anderson.

Miss Anderson called somebody else, and the class looked at him hopefully. Presently Gladys stopped crying but remained with her head cradled in her arms. Every little while someone would look over at her, unsmiling, then quickly turn back to the speaker.

The bell rang and we all rose and began filing out of the room. Miss Anderson went over to Gladys and laid her hand on the girl’s shoulder, talking softly.

The hall was airy and full of high school students, rushing past to their lockers. And there was nothing to do but join them.

1955

Aspirations II

Here's another of my early, unpublished stories. You'll see it owes a huge debt to Ernest Hemingway. In fact, it's my attempt at something like "Hills Like White Elephants," his bitter little story about a couple's estrangement in romantic surroundings. The sensibility in his story is so youthfully romantic, as it is in mine.



TO THE WORLD’S END

The Alcove had always been a good place to meet because it was close to his paper and close to the office of her magazine. It was close to everything they knew between the hours of nine and five, but now it was after six and the last light was lovely against the tall apartment buildings that rose like twin towers of Babel on the river front. She had arrived late, and now she pushed at her hair and stared at passers-by on the sidewalk as she waited for her beer.

She was beautiful, he reminded himself, more beautiful than any of the other young women in this sidewalk bar on this summer evening. Her hair was short and curled prettily into the corners of her eyes. Her skirt too was stylishly short and her legs, in seamless stockings, were extremely fine. The man, who sat with his beer in front of him, was himself as sleek, as sharp-looking as any other man here in his buttoned-down collar, his thin tie, and his tailored suit.

"You know, I’ll kind of miss this place," the girl said. She took a deep breath and folded her hands on the table. "Because, of course, I won’t be coming here after you’re gone."

"Why not?" he wondered.

"Oh, you know. Too many memories."

"Oh."

Her beer arrived. She sipped at it and stared at the twin towers.

"We’ve watched them go up, haven’t we," she said. "A year."

"Yup," he said, "a year. I hated to see them finish."

"Oh, they’re not quite finished," she said.

He caught the waiter’s eye and raised a finger. "Want another?"

"Not yet."

The waiter brought him another beer. He poured some into his glass and drank it off. Then he poured the rest and finished it.

"How many is that, Eddie?"

"Two."

"Liar."

"All right, four. No more."

"You’ve certainly taken to drinking since we met."

"I guess I have."

She picked up her purse and began playing with the leather handle, twisting and pulling at it.

"Your stuff all packed?"

"Yeah. I leave at eight. Have to rise early."

"That’ll kill you." She smiled.

"Naw. I’ll be starting my travels," he told her. "I’ll be excited."

"Where will you go first?"

"London. There’s a place, a pub, somewhere in London that I heard about from somebody. Called The World’s End. I like the sound of that. I’m going to look for it. After that . . ."

"Sounds lonely," she said. "A lonely quest."

"Come with me. It won’t be lonely then."

"You know I can’t."

"I know."

He lifted his eyes to the twin towers and saw the evening light seeming to burn at the tops of them. Once he had been stirred by the sight of the sun against the high buildings of this city, and that first cold beer at the end of the working day, and by this girl, who finally was as exhausting as the rest of his life here. It was all exhausting. Everything was exhausting, but now, after a year and a half of it, he was leaving. He was leaving the whole white-collar, nine-to-five scene, that stultifying, soul-destroying wad of commitment and responsibility you were asked to swallow when you worked as a reporter for "the world’s greatest newspaper" (by its own admission, he and his fellow reporters always added, which always got a laugh), a paper whose chief concern, finally, was not to report the news but to maintain the status quo, to attract advertisers, to make money. He was done with that, done with wearing a buttoned-down collar and knotted tie that was like a noose around his neck. He was finished, too, with that midnight anguish when, after too much drink and empty conversation, in an upsurge of false hope, he’d abruptly, almost frantically, feel the need to make up for lost time, to stop wasting time, to begin again, now, this instant, when really there was nothing to do but stop drinking and take the El home to bed so that you could get up in the morning and go back to work. But he was through with it now. He was through with the white collar. No more white collars, or rather he could wear a white collar now, or a blue collar, or no collar at all, because now he was free.

He raised a finger.

"Don’t have another. Please."

"Yes," he said. "Just one more."

"You’re drinking yourself into a breakdown."

"Precisely. Going all the way. To the world’s end!" he cried and raised his empty glass to the glory of the twin towers.

"I love you," he told her. "I love you, Susan, do you believe that? But I’ve got to leave."

She looked away.

"Come with, why don’t you."

"The only reason you offer that—for the second time, by the way—is that you know, you know, I can’t possibly."

Of course. She had an invalid mother. Wasn’t that convenient? Her mother was a nice-enough old lady, uncomplaining but virtually helpless, and of course demanding in her nice way. Susan had an older married sister and a well-off married brother, but she, the youngest and unmarried, had been delegated, it seemed, to look after their mother. The entrapment of that. That loving, dutiful entrapment. It was Eddie’s warning not to get involved. But then he had.

"You could leave her," he told Susan, after their first time together. It was upstairs in her mother’s house, with her mother asleep (they hoped) downstairs. "Let your busy sister and her asshole husband or your rich brother and his smug wife take over now. "We could go away," he told her.

Now he said again, "You could leave your mother. Let your brother or sister take a turn."

"We’ve been over that,"she said. "And you’re drunk. Our last night together, and you’re drunk."

"I’m sorry, baby, I really am." He really was. "I’m so sorry. But I have to get out of here. I hate this goddamn town."

"You don’t hate it."

"No, that’s the trouble. I really love it. I love you."

He looked fervently at her, to show how much he loved her, and abruptly she leaned toward him across the table, her face intense, her eyes shiny.

"I’ll go then," she said.

"What?"

"I’ll go with you."

"No you won’t."

"I will, I will," she told him.

"What about your mother?"

"I’ll let somebody else take care of her. I want my own life," she said. "I want a life with you."

"You mean it?"

"Yes. Yes," she said.

Her hand was gripping his. He took a swig of his beer. It might have been the beer, it might have been nervous exhaustion, it might have been the light gleaming golden on the twin towers, on those proud, cold, elegant monuments to something or other, but whatever it was, he was crying. Okay, maybe not crying exactly, but there were tears in his eyes, as there were in hers, and he put down his beer and ran his hand up the firm softness of her arm.

"Oh, Susan," he said, "sweet Susan. You can’t, you know you can’t. You leave your mother and you’re selfish goddamn brother and sister will put her in a Home. Won’t they? You can’t leave your mother any more than I could leave mine, if I was in your situation." That was a guess; he wasn’t sure what he’d do in her situation. "She needs you, after all, we both know she needs you," he told her. "You have to stay. And I have to leave, don’t you see?"

"Yeah, I see." She reached over and touched his face.

"Christ," he said. "You’re so beautiful."

"Don’t go," she pleaded. "You can find another job. We’ll get married."

"No," he said. "I don’t want another job, and I don’t want to marry you—not the way things are. I’m not worthy of you," he told her.

"Bullshit."

She dropped her hand. He drained his beer. He was trying to remember something, something he’d read sometime ago. Then it came to him.

"‘A system of restless wandering . . . ‘" he quoted. He stared hard at his empty glass. "'Detachment . . . a means of passing through life without suffering and almost without a single care . . . invulnerable because elusive.’"

"What’s that?" she asked.

"Conrad. Wrote about exile. That’s me, I guess. An exile."

"You filthy romantic," she said. "Would you excuse me a minute? I have to pee."

She rose with her purse in one hand and with the other smoothed the front of her short skirt. Her exciting body, her tough, lovely face: it was all there in front of him and his belly contracted, suddenly, with hunger for her.

"We going to your place later? Please," he said.

We’ll talk about it when I get back."

But fifteen minutes later she was not back, and at length he realized she might never come back. She must be waiting it out in the ladies room, or maybe she’d slipped out when he wasn’t looking.

"Waiter!" he called.

The waiter came over. He was smiling.

"Another round for the gentleman and his lady?"

"No, thanks. The check, please."

The waiter began writing out the check and the man looked over at the door marked Ladies. He felt suddenly fiercely proud of the girl and was sure now that he loved her. He loved her, and yet he was so relieved, so grateful to her for helping him, in this way, to end it.

"Would you tell the lady, if you see her," he said brightly, thinking of her and how much he loved her, "that I couldn’t wait? And tell her it was all my fault."

Then he paid the check and walked away down the sidewalk. At the corner he stopped and turned around. If she comes out now, he thought, if she comes out by the time I count to ten, I’ll go back. If she comes out by the time I count to twenty. He counted to thirty, to forty, but she didn’t come out and he didn’t go back.

Finally, he turned the corner and it was all behind him.

1963

Aspirations I

This is the first of a series of early stories of mine that never made it into print. So I'm posting them here to get them out, anyway, into cyber space.

CROWS AND INDIANS

The woods were a green wall beyond the farm, the wild edge of Carl's world. It was where the crows lived, where they roosted at night and set out from on their raids of farmers’ fields every morning. Carl knew to stay out of the woods – You'll get lost! – but he was with his father now and Oscar. His father carried his shotgun.

"Corn's comin' along," Oscar said in his lilting, resonant voice that was like the mouth organ he played.

"Yup," Carl's father said; his voice was thinner than Oscar's, quick and excited, "if the crows don't get it." He pointed his gun at the sky. "Think it's high enough yet to cultivate?"

"No-o," Oscar said. "The shovels'd bury it still."

They were crossing a field still soft from spring planting, stepping over the corn rows, the new plants so intensely green they seemed to glow against the black soil. There were tracks in the soil that Oscar pointed out, the toed prints of crows and pheasants, little hand prints of raccoons, and a line of cloven hoof prints, like a heifer’s, Carl thought. "Deer, by golly," Oscar said. "I thought they was all hunted out."

Carl looked back. The farm was a kind of island among the rolling fields. There was the circle of buildings around the yard and the metal windmill poking up, its silvery blades arrested above the shade trees around the house. He saw the cows, strung out from the barnyard, heading for pasture after the milking. It was a calm, early summer evening, still light at eight o’clock.

"Keep up!" Carl's father called. The men had walked on, and Carl ran to catch up with them.

They reached the woods. There was an absolute division here between the thick growth of trees and the open field, as if the field of young corn were a dark, weedy pond and the trees grew heavily down to the water. His father said, "Watch your eyes, Carl," and the men pushed through the curtain of leaves. Carl followed, and found himself in another world.

. It was hushed and contained, secret, like the inside of an empty building, empty and yet alive. The trees stood like columns, not crowded together as they appeared from outside but spaced, with park-like regularity, the big trunks going up and up to the spreading branches and the roof of leaves. There was a concentrated smell of damp earth and moldering vegetation.

"Say, this looks like virgin forest," his father said.

"Ya," Oscar said. " Larue, he left it be. This here was his sugar grove."

"Yeah, a lot of the French around here made maple syrup, I guess. Like back in Quebec."

"Syrup and sugar both," Oscar said. He looked down at Carl. "You ever taste real maple sugar, Carlie? It's the sweetest candy there is."

Carl tried to imagine the kind of candy could come from trees. Oscar said, "Lucien, he still tapped maples, back when I started work for'm. That pasture where the crick runs, below the Martin barn? That was all maple trees once."

"What happened?"

"Well, Lucien, he wanted his first car, you know, that old Dodge sitting out back of his corn crib now. Got the money for it by selling off his maple trees, for lumber."

"He would," his father snorted. "The quick buck!"

Carl realized, uneasily, that they were talking about his grandfather. Grandpa Martin with his cracking, smoker’s laugh and his big nose peppered with blackheads. The merriment in his eyes until Grandma scolded him for sneaking uptown to the tavern.

"Ya, well Lucien was no farmer," Oscar said. "None of the Martin boys was, not like old Charles. He owned an entire section at one time, did you know that? Give his boys each a farm when they got married, but they all pissed what they had away. Lucien, you know, got the home place."

"Yeah, and now that's pissed away," Carl's father said. "Christ. Why couldn’t I have inherited a farm? His father grinned at his hired man. "Whattaya think, Oscar? I make a farmer?"

Oscar looked carefully at Carl’s father. "Ya-a," he said. "You ain't afraida work, I’d say, and you seem to know how to manage."

Carl's father grinned once more and sniffed the air. They were deep in the woods now, walking among the quiet trees. The ground was soft with rotting leaves, crunchy with fallen twigs. Spindly seedlings brushed Carl’s face as he passed, and there were trees and fallen logs with half-circles of cork-like growth on them, like the growths on a horse’s legs – what his mother called "artist’s easel." The deer flies bit savagely at him. He kept snagging his face on invisible spider webs.

"Look here," Oscar told Carl. He showed him the moss on a tree, a smudge of dull green on the trunk. "The moss always grows on the north side," Oscar said. "You know where north is and you can find your way out of the woods."

Carl wondered how that applied – how knowing where north was could tell you which way to go.
"Hey," his father said. "Here's an old fence."

"Ya," Oscar said. "That used to be your line – Larue's old line – till he bought up this next piece to make your eighty."

Then Carl saw the rusted barbed wires draped like vines between the trees, and how they passed right through the trees as if growing from them.

"You see that, Carlie?" Oscar said. "The trees grow over wire like that, like scar tissue."

His father tugged at the wire. "When ya think that fence was put up, Oscar?"

"Oh, maybe thirty years ago," Oscar said.

"Now that was the time to go farming," said Carl's father. "Well no, I suppose the best time was back when the Martins first came here from Canada."

"It was all woods," Oscar told him. "Like this. Or brush or grass prairie that a plow couldn't turn over in those days. Not to mention the sloughs around the lakes that were only good for the wild hay you could get off'm. When my grandfolks first come here from Norway, all they did for a coupla years was clear."

"Yah, but dammit, Oscar. Goddamn it, I'd like to of been here when this country was just opening up."

"Plagues of grasshoppers," Oscar went on. "Grass fires. All kinds of sickness. People went crazy. Then too in those early days there was still the Indians to worry about."

"That's right! You ever hear Lucien's story about how, during the Sioux Uprising, I think it was, the Martins and their neighbors all packed up and made for Fort Snelling and his mother — she was a little girl then — fell out of the wagon and broke her arm? Just think." Carl's father looked happily around him. "These big old trees must've been standing here when all that happened."

"Ya," Oscar said. "A man should keep his eyes peeled. You can still find old arrowheads, things like that."

"Daddy ..."

"Well," his father said, "my granddad was a pioneer. On my mother's side. Homesteaded in Dakota Territory and ran a dray line out of Sisseton. Then he moved up to Saskatchewan, when that country was just opening up. I was born up there. Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. My dad was a CPR engineer! I barely remember him, though. He was killed in a train wreck when I was younger than Carl here."

Carl knew that story. There was an old, gilt-framed photograph of the grandfather he never knew on the wall in his folks' bedroom. His fading likeness grinned from the seat of a wagon on a flat prairie. His long-barrelled "goose gun" lay across his lap, and he held the reins of a team of horses whose heads didn’t show in the picture. He looked vaguely like Carl's father. Will Miller. He was a mighty hunter, Carl's father said, a great wing shot.

"So how'd you wind up down here?" Oscar asked.

"Come down looking for work when I was sixteen. Hell, I rode the rails like you did, Oscar!
Wound up in Minneapolis and took any job I could get. I mowed lawns, I caddied at country clubs. Pumped gas. Then I met Carl's ma and started going out to the Martin farm and I thought, hell, why not try farming? I could see Lucien was letting his place go, and I might have taken it over, but I wanted my own place. I’ll say this for old Lucien, though. He vouched for me at the Martinsville bank so I could get a loan."

"Then I come back from Kansas and now here I am working for you instead of the Martins."
"That's right! You might say I inherited you, Oscar."

"Daddy ..."

"What?"

His father was striding ahead now, jaunty, his shotgun in the crook of his arm. His black hair shone under the trees. Oscar followed, his graying, sandy hair sticking out of his cap, stooped yet still taller than Carl's father.

"Daddy ..."

"What, I said."

"There still ... Indians in here?"

The two men stopped and grinned at each other. Oscar said, "No, Carlie. The Indians're are all gone now."

"Where'd they go?"

Oscar looked at Carl's father. His father said, "They're on what they call reservations now, Carl. Those are places set aside for them where they can hunt and fish all year around, just like they used to."

"Ya, " Oscar added, "and they don't even need a license, like we do."

"How come?"

Oscar looked at Carl's father again, and his father said, "That's a long story, Carl. Maybe you'll learn about it in school."

"But how come Indians don't live here anymore?"

"Because. They had to move. They couldn't live here after people like us came here and settled."
"How come?"

"Because." His father took a breath. "The Indians lived different from us. They didn’t use the land like we do. They mostly just lived off it. Oh, they raised corn, I guess. But they didn’t clear the woods and plow up the soil and make farms and towns, like we did. You might say the Indians lived wild, and we live tame, Carl." He turned to his hired man. "Ain’t that about it, Oscar? Maybe the Indians had the right idea."

Oscar grunted. Carl thought about the Indians living wild in the woods, in these woods, and felt scared and excited.

"Daddy?"

"What."

"But can't I ever see a Indian?"

"Sure. We'll go up to Red Lake sometime, to the reservation."

"You won't have to go that far," Oscar commented. "There's plenty on Washington Avenue."

"Where's Washington Avenue?" Carl asked.

"In Minneapolis," his father said. "We'll go there, too, sometime, though the Indians in Minneapolis ain't like the Indians we're talking about."

"What kind are they?"

"The kind that hunt bottles," Oscar said.

"What?" Carl said.

"That's enough questions," his father said. "And Oscar, we better not go into that." He lowered his voice. "We better be quiet now. The crows'll be coming."

It was getting dark in the woods. Carl knelt between Oscar's knees, in the warm pocket of his smells – manly smells of sweat and tobacco and the barn – while his father crouched beside them with his shotgun. They were all crouched in the hole where a big tree had uprooted. Above, through the break where the tree had stood, was the deepening sky.

Oscar slapped a mosquito. The deer flies circled their heads and they all swatted at them.
"Bugs ain't too bad yet," said Oscar. "Wait'll July."

A bird called, sweetly trilling among the trees. Then a squirrel chattered. Carl saw it, crouched on a branch, its jerking tail, its tensed little body.

His father pushed a shell into his gun. He worked the lever on the chamber, then loaded more of the fat shells into the magazine. Then he aimed at the trees. "C'mon, crows," he said. "I'm waitin'."

"That a Browning?" Oscar asked.

"Damn right. Twelve-gauge Browning automatic. Best shotgun in the world." His father handed the gun to Oscar. "Made in Belgium. I bought that gun when I was nineteen years old. Took all my savings."

Oscar held the gun up and Carl saw its beauty. He saw the scrollwork etched into the blued metal above the trigger guard, and the walnut stock, and the rubber cushion on the butt. The gun's kick, his father said, would knock the snot out of Carl's nose. His father kept his gun in its sheath in the closet of the folks’ bedroom, and Carl was never to touch it. The sheath itself was beautiful, soft buckskin lined with rawhide.

Oscar handed the gun back to Carl's father. "Sittin' in this hole reminds me of the war," he said. The first one."

"Yeah, you were in it, weren't you, Oscar. Think we'll get in this one?"

"Ya-a."

"Well, I just hope I don't get drafted. I shouldn't. I'm thirty now and on a farm and I got a family."

"They might draft me," the hired man said dully.

"Naw. You're way too old, Oscar! How old are you, anyway?"

"I'm fifty."

"You're all right then. Anyway, another war should pull us out of the Depression. The price of milk could go up. We could make some money!"

People talked of the war now. It was like a storm, away off across the ocean somewhere, maybe heading their way.

"Daddy ..."

"Quiet now. I hear'm."

At first Carl heard nothing, just a rush of wind through the treetops and then a squeaking noise, kind of spooky. Oscar whispered, "That's the trees rubbing together, Carlie. Listen."

Carl strained to listen. It was like the creaking in an empty house or a ticking clock surrounded by silence.

"There," Carl's father said. "Hear'm?"

Carl strained to hear. Then he tried to see the crows, as he saw them most evenings from the farm, that black, undulating line of them, flapping toward the woods where Carl was now. But he only saw the sky, and the yellowing clouds, through the break in the trees.

Then: CAW! Sharp and alarmed. Then a rush of calls, CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! and dark shapes above the trees, whistling wingbeats and wheeling flight, and his father raising his gun and BANG, a crow crashed through the leafy branches, then BANG BANG, and BANG, and another and then another crow broke through the leaves overhead and bounced when they hit the ground. His father scrambled out of the hole and aimed up through the trees. BANG, and Carl saw the smoking shell eject from the gun. Then the crows were gone. Carl's ears were ringing. And faintly, like sprinkling rain, the spent shot fell back through the leaves.

His father was jubilant. "Christ. You see me hit those last two, Oscar? It was like shooting geese!"

Carl ran to where a crow had fallen. It lay crumpled among the dead leaves with its head up, following Carl with a furious eye. Its beak was open. It was panting.

"Watch out for the beak!" Carl's father called.

Carl reached down and the crow clamped its beak over one of his fingers. "Ouch!" he said, more startled than hurt. But when he jerked his hand away, the crow hung on so that Carl lifted it from the ground. "Ouuuu!" he cried, the crow hanging from his finger. Ouuuuuuu!"

Carl's father strode up. He squeezed the crow's neck and its beak opened. Carl pulled his finger away. Then his father grasped the crow’s head, twirled its body, and the body dropped to the ground. There it jumped and flapped just like a headless chicken.

"Stop crying," his father said now. Then, softer, "Let's see your finger."

It was pinched and sore, but the skin wasn't broken. It was okay.

"That poor crow was just defending itself, Carl," his father told him. "It was being brave."

Oscar came over, swinging a crow by its legs. "Here, feel this one, Carlie. It's dead for sure."

The dead crow was floppy, still warm, in Carl's hands. All its strangeness, the black sheen of its feathers, its wicked beak, its closed, tiny eyelids – he held the wild, lifeless, now harmless thing in his hands and tried to fathom its strangeness, its mystery. Blood dripped from its open beak. You could see its pointed little tongue.

"Crows're smart, you know," Oscar said. "You catch a young one and slit its tongue, it'll learn to talk." He took the crow from Carl. "Ed, you wanna show this one to your missus?"

"Naw," Carl's father said. "Helen wouldn't appreciate it."

Then Oscar pulled a wing feather out and stuck it in Carl's hair. "Now you're like an Indian, Carlie."

But Carl's hair wasn’t long enough. The feather fell out and he picked it up. He put it in his shirt pocket.

Walking back through the dusky woods, they nearly collided with the old fence. "Watch out!" his father said. He handed his gun to Oscar. Then he lifted Carl over the fence. Finally they pushed out of the woods into the open field.

It was a relief stepping out into the open. The circle of farm buildings was like a fort across the corn field. The barn and the sheds were dark, but there were lights showing warmly in the house. That’s where Carl's mother was, and his little sisters. He’d been far, far away, it seemed, and gone a long, long time.

His father stopped and looked back at the wall of trees. "The land's fairly level in those woods," he said. We could maybe clear to Larue's old line and extend this field."

"That'd give you another eight, ten acres," Oscar said. He smiled down at Carl. "You wanna ride on my shoulders, Carlie?"

Carl looked up at Oscar, then over at his father. "No thanks," he said.

The dark woods stood behind them now. Carl thought, When we’re back at the farm they’ll still be out here. He wondered where the crows had gone. Would they ever come back?

He wished there were still Indians in the woods. He would see some, though, in Minneapolis or up at Red Lake.

He felt for the feather in his pocket. It was still there.

1983-2001