I immersed myself in outdoorsy stuff in my early teens; even beyond that. I wonder if something innate in my DNA attracted me like chemistry to the outdoors and references to it, or my environment and influences doused me with enough references to nature that my path was clear.
I listened to all of John Denver; knew every word to every song. Played his music on the record player and my guitar. At the same time, my friend Eddie and I spent every single day in the woods and along the Great South Bay at Heckscher State Park, nearly literally our backyard back then on Long Island’s South Shore. I watched movies like Jeremiah Johnson and television shows like Grizzly Adams. I wanted to disappear from civilization like they did; I wanted cabins like they had up in the Rockies, with a warm fire going.
The beach took hold of my Buddhist-bending mentality, combined with Dan Fogelberg and Jimmy Buffett, books by Joshua Slocum and Robin Lee Graham. Patrick O’Brien and the first paragraph of Melville’s Moby Dick, which reads:
Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
Damn I wish I wrote that, wrote “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” “Rocky Mountain High” and “Sweet Surrender,” wrote home from some mountain in Utah not far from Redford’s “Sundance” ranch, long before the film festival was born. Instead, I played their music, watched the shows, and spent as much time as I could in whatever nature I could.
I think it was the beginning of me always feeling slightly outside of everything, just a little beyond understanding people. For some time I thought it was insecurity, but now I believe I just preferred the natural state of things, how perfect it is out there. I had the theme of Grizzly Adams down pat:
Deep inside the forest Is a door into another land Here is our life and home We are staying, here forever In the beauty of this place all alone We keep on hoping.
Maybe There’s a world where we don’t have to run And maybe There’s a time we’ll call our own Living free in harmony and majesty Take me home Take me home.
Even that line repetition is a nod to Frost’s line “Miles to go before I sleep.” Exactly.
Is it true that everything we are we remain? Our hopes remain. Our dreams remain. And if we hadn’t lived them out yet, perhaps we still will in some other season? Maybe.
A part of my mind never truly grew up, I know that. A part of my psyche still holds tight to how I used to think when I was young, sometimes to the point I can be out for a walk and not even remotely feel my age, forget that my ability to do most of the things I could then is, shall we say, compromised. But we trick ourselves. I can still ride a bike; can still hike in high altitudes. In my fifties I walked across Spain. So who knows.
What happens is we forget. We let go of so much of who we were to make room for who we become. It is natural and beautiful and necessary, and we would not come close to being who we are today without who we were then, watching Dan Haggerty and his bear walk down the mountain, or listening to John Denver’s opening guitar riff on “Rocky Mountain High.” It’s in our blood. It has to be.
Unless, again, something in our blood attracted us to those things. Who the hell knows, right?
Ever come across a trigger that brings you back to those moments you had then? Maybe it’s a picture in some old album your parents kept; or a book you read. I have books like that, from then, I have a baseball my friends all signed when I left Long Island and it transports my mind to that small village, almost as if had I driven there today I’d see fourteen-year-old Eddie coming out of his house ready to hike through the park. We have so much more ability to manipulate time than we realize.
So, I had this job. One of my first, and the last one as a high school student. I worked on Seagull Pier on the South Island of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel which connects Virginia Beach, Virginia, with the Eastern Shore of Virginia, known as the Delmarva Peninsula. I was thrilled to get hired out there for one reason: I’d be working “nearly” on the water, watching the sunset and rise, feeling the salt water on my face all the time, like Melville but without whales. I worked 10 pm to 6 am every night, usually alone, frying shrimp and fries, serving sodas to travelers with coupons they received when they paid their toll to make the crossing of one of the longest bridge-tunnels on the planet. Yes, they got a free Pepsi at the pier. It was pretty barren then—a diner-style interior with a few tables, a gift shop, and a pier filled with fishermen. In later years the restaurant took over part of the pier and became quite nice with a full menu. But back then it was just a quick stop for a basket of fried food, coffee or Pepsi, a few souvenirs and back on the road.
They tore it down a few years ago to expand the bridge tunnel.
I would drive my dad’s ‘72 Nova out there just before dark, park and stand on the rocks looking west up the Chesapeake, west, toward the setting sun. Then I’d head inside and cook, serve, clean, make coffee, talk to fishermen on rainy nights when they crowded the counter, talked to the rare customer who stopped for their free Pepsi or a burger at three AM. Then when my shift ended, or sometimes even before then if no one was there, I’d walk out on the parking deck on the east side of the building and watch the sunrise over the Atlantic at the mouth of the bay.
Just remembering that brings me such absolute peace I can, just for a moment, forget some of the minutia that I find myself up to my neck in. I remember, and I am there, can smell the salt, can feel the breeze coming off the water.
I love to remember.
One morning at about four, the door opened as I was just about to clean the grill. I glanced back to see who was coming in and it was a man by himself in a sweater. He had long hair, a thick beard, was tall, big, like a linebacker, and stood for a moment looking around. I called to him to sit anywhere and he came right up behind me and sat at a stool, and he said, “Can you make me a burger on that grill before you clean it, my friend?”
Instant voice recognition. It was Dan Haggerty. Grizzly Adams himself. I asked and he said yes. We talked and he insisted I make a burger for myself as well, and fries, and we sat together and talked for an hour in the empty Seagull Pier restaurant. He was on his way to Florida and preferred to drive very late and very early.
Young people: This is before there was any form of a device with which I could capture the moment unless I happened to have my camera—a big device with film in it—which I didn’t. So we have those triggers. A baseball, an old guitar. Stories.
Today I received mail from my sister. My brother-in-law bought a new car, and in the old car, buried somewhere in the console or glove compartment or somewhere, they found three Free Drink coupons for Seagull Pier from one of their many trips south to see our parents in Virginia Beach.
She was discarding outdated coupons some toll clerk shoved at her with her change. I received a wormhole to a version of me that had my entire existence in front of me from a place I loved to show up and leave out in the middle of nature, where the sun set and rose again with my arrival and departure. What had for nearly fifty years become illusionary, almost some fiction from forever ago, suddenly seemed to happen this morning, and I felt younger, more alive.
I still head to the bay—same bay, ironically—to watch the sunrise; and to this river every evening to watch the sun disappear west into the Utah mountains. I still dream of riding horses across the Rockies. I still listen to Denver and Fogelberg.
If not, I know for certain I’d be a poorer man.
Everything we are, we remain. Our hopes remain. Our dreams remain. And while not all of them will find fruition, some might. Some just might. If not in this, then perhaps in some other season.
Perhaps.
Thanks Cathy and Greg, for not stopping for a free beverage
Originally published in the now defunct St Petersburg (Russia) Times English edition, as well as the collection Fragments. In honor of National Caffeine Day (September 29th).
Awake
Irina asked if I wanted something to drink besides water and suggested coffee. “Espresso might be a good idea, Bob.”
“No thanks. I don’t drink coffee.”
“You are an American and you don’t drink coffee?”
“Never have. The one time I tried it the bitterness was so bad I couldn’t swallow.”
“Oh! You thought it would taste good! That’s the problem,” she said, laughing. “Bob, you don’t drink coffee for taste.” Then she poured a cup, a regular sized coffee cup, filled with espresso. “Here, try espresso. It will give you some energy.”
I’d already been awake for nearly thirty-five hours including the flight from New York to St Petersburg, and at some point my body simply woke up again, as if the bright midnight sun and the over-exhaustion were sensors to start over. Still, my mind flat-lined and I sat in the café and stared at the wall expecting it to move or fall or something. This was a new level of exhaustion. Friends showed up one at a time, each ordering a glass of wine or a beer, sometimes just water. Without noticing I had finished my cup of espresso. Also without noticing, Irina filled it up again. When we were all there and made our plans to walk along the gulf during the few short hours of the midnight sun, one friend sitting close put her hand on my arm and said, “Bob! You’re vibrating!”
That was the moment–just after midnight–I discovered caffeine.
I needed to know who came up with this so as soon as I returned to the United States I ordered a venti, half-soy, non-fat, caramel cappuccino extra hot with foam and an extra shot of espresso, and googled away the night. Caffeine dates back to the Stone Age. They’d chew seeds of certain plants to ease fatigue and elevate their mood. But it wasn’t until about 3000 BC when a Chinese emperor accidently dropped some leaves in boiling water that the
“drink” form was formed. I drank and kept researching: Actually coffee as we know it according to myth though it is widely accepted as accurate evolved from Ethiopia of course Ethiopia where else I mean almost everything has some sort of origin in Ethiopia but anyway the myth suggests that Kaldi a goat herder noticed his flock would not rest well and in fact be extra active after chewing on certain bushes so Kaldi began eating the berries of the bush his hyper goats were eating and he felt a sense of vitality and it really grew in reputation and spread west so that by the 16th century coffee was pretty well used in the near east and in the early 17th century it swept Europe and was most often referred to as Arabian wine and it was during this time that the first coffee shops opened in places like Constantinople and Venice and in 1652 the first coffee shop opened in London and they quickly became places of important social relations where significant trades and dealings were carried out on this addictive legalized substance which I suddenly craved again so I got up and ordered a quad half caf venti 3 pump vanilla 3 pump hazelnut soy extra hot no foam with whip and cinnamon sprinkles latte and read more about how caffeine heads right to the blood and the liver takes the stuff and cuts it into three parts one of which elevates the glycerol and fatty acids in the blood which must kick open the eyes a bit, another dilates blood vessels making us pee more, and the third relaxes the bronchi muscles making breathing easier and man that is so true talk about getting the motor going so anyway various studies show dramatic increase in the pace runners have the distance cyclists cover in any given period and intense results in attentiveness driving but it cannot make a drunk person sober at all never could and it cannot replace the bodies need for sleep but since I couldn’t sleep I mean I wasn’t close to tired I got up and ordered a triple grande skim iced upside down iced caramel macchiato and read about the Kola nut.
Since that night on the Gulf of Finland when the sun both literally and metaphorically never went down, that wonderful, miraculous property has kept me awake during long drives, helped two of us count all the stripes on the wallpaper in a Russian hotel room, kept me awake during my own boring lectures and a couple of wedding ceremonies. It has mowed my lawn, painted my bedrooms, and wrote more than a few essays.
I don’t know what tomorrow will be like, but today was a good day. My son and I hiked a short trail along a tidal pond on the Northern Neck of Virginia. The water is covered with lily pads, though today for the first time we didn’t hear any frogs. Perhaps the impending storm. We walked to the end, noting the cooling air and how in a month or so the trail will be beautiful for the oaks’ changing leaves.
We drove to Hughlett Nature Reserve, which is basically a wooded area with trails that lead to a long stretch of beach on the Chesapeake. Other than an elderly couple who left as we arrived, we were alone, which is astonishing when you consider the beauty of both the area and the day. The rest of the weekend is going to be a washout because of Tropical Storm Ophelia, but today, with twenty or twenty-five miles per hour winds and no rain was perfect for beach combing. We walked down one wooden walkway out to a crow’s nest from which we could see nearly to the Eastern Shore as well as up and down the bay. Normally, there would be egrets and herons as well as countless gulls and sandpipers, but none today, again, because of the storm. Once we came upon an eagle who refused to leave one spot on the beach no matter how close we approached her. Not today.
But on that platform with the perfect breeze, the temperature just enough for what I wore, and the rough seas in full demonstration of nature’s moods, a sense of peace swept through me. I could have stayed, should have stayed.
We leave these moments in nature too soon. I suppose we are hardwired to change what we’re doing every so often. I don’t think it’s attention span or even retention span. And I don’t think we get bored. I suspect muscle memory engages and we take a deep breath and “move on,” as if we have another class to get to, or some appointment to keep. We did this too. We looked around for awhile and then left. More to see? Not from that vantage. We walked back to the car and eventually went home. But I could have stayed and when I got home I wondered why I didn’t.
But I don’t want to douse that sense of peace with analysis of leaving or time spent. Instead, I looked at a few pictures of today, remembered how I felt, and noted I’d like to go back in a few days. It was one of those moments; we’ve all had them. Moments in which we are completely present without memories or anticipation bleeding into the now. We just are, and it is beautiful.
I’ve had more than my share, and I’m forever grateful for having such a life which afforded those times.
Like the Northern Lights in northern Norway one March evening when the planet was covered in snow and the entire earth could reach up and touch green bands of light.
Standing on a rock at the end of the world in Fisterra, Spain, feet from Camino Kilometer Marker which read “0.”
Have you had those? Can you recall them quickly, feel the wind again? Hear and taste those moments again?
Standing on another rock, this time Chersky’s Rock above Lake Baikal, the absolute peace of a thousand miles of nothingness to the north, east, and west. Looking out and seeing what explorers saw for a thousand years, and more.
Something snapped outside, a branch perhaps. The wind is picking up and I can hear the long windchimes even from here on the other side of the house and sixty feet through the woods to where they hang. And we’re still twelve or more hours from the eye moving past.
Another moment of presence: Hurricane Isabele. I stood on the front porch in the pitch black of that September night, nearly exactly twenty years ago to the day, when thirty oak trees snapped like sticks and fell, on the driveway, in the woods, across the yard, everywhere. I had loved the wind before then, always tilted my head toward it to feel it brush my face. Since that night a score of years ago, the wind remains in perfect sync with my anxiety. Tonight it is not so bad, but I just heard something snap. I’ll end up on the porch of course. Such a day of complete peace followed by such high anxiety, as if the peace was a respite offered to me in preparation for tonight.
My father and I went whale watching once off of Virginia Beach and we saw a humpback breach the choppy Atlantic waters and roll onto her back, go under again, her tail swinging well into the air before slapping down and moving on. That moment.
That sunset across the Great Salt Lake I wrote about recently.
A golf game with my father, my brother, and my son, followed by lunch, endless laughter. That day. The one during which my brother drove a golf ball through someone’s house window, my father backed over a sign in the parking lot, my son drove the golf cart over a garbage can and flattened it, and I, well, I tried to cover the bottom of a lake with Callaway balls. Give me that day now, one more time again.
A quiet tearoom that no longer exists in Prague. I went there every night for a month, had spiced tea and apple strudel and wrote, listened to beautiful music, walked back to my apartment near the castle at midnight.
Today. On the platform reaching out over the tidal marsh along the Chesapeake across the river at Hughlett Nature Reserve.
When we think ahead, life seems to stretch out like some airport runway, and it reaches out beyond our vision, further than conceivable for not knowing how long it will take, what will happen along the way, unforeseen moments of joy or sorrow. But when we think back, our minds are able to bypass the minutia and go immediately and exactly to a specific moment. It is why life seems to have gone so fast; we don’t need to retrace our steps—we simply chose a memory and beam our minds to that moment. The past is accessible like a quick Image Search, whereas the future is a speculative climb up endless rungs. So of course life in retrospect seems so swift. I think of the platform and the wind and the sound of the crashing waves and today seems fast; just that moment eight hours ago now might well have been last week. But I’m there, now, even as I type this.
But this wind, that cracking outside, the windchimes, the gusts in the tops of trees, all indicate this storm is still approaching and I cannot conceive of its conclusion—and I’m guessing it is going to be a very long night, despite the fact that tomorrow night I will once again think to today’s moment out at the bay and be there again instantly, as if time were mine to manipulate.
It isn’t though, time. It is clearly out of my hands.
Sitting on the rocks on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way drinking wine and watching the waves across the north Atlantic.
Drinking frappes with my mother, talking about life, laughing about life.
Sitting in beach chairs on the gulf, Malibu Rum and OJ with Mango juice, just being there without baggage or appointments.
Something else cracked, or the same branch/tree cracked further and soon I’ll hear that familiar and haunting sound of wood hitting earth in the dead of night.
There are more, some tragic, some deeply transforming. I’ve been lucky to have a life of moments.
When I was in college I hiked to a hillside across the river behind campus and sat in a clearing in the woods. The great spiritual writer and monk Thomas Merton used to sit there when he taught briefly at the college, and so the spot became known as Merton’s Heart. I hiked to Merton’s Heart and sat and wondered what, since I would graduate just days later, I wondered what I would do with the rest of my life. I knew clearly unlike most of my classmates who mapped out some logical and ambitious future, that I had absolutely no idea. I’m not kidding. I had no idea.
And I’m not kidding about this either: I still don’t.
But my senses are all alive and conscious of where I’ve been. Really, I wouldn’t trade anything for where I’ve been.
Like sitting on a pile of blankets in a shed in a small Mexican village with my friend Diego, laughing about the trinkets sold at the market and drinking Tecate Beer.
Standing with friends on the summit of Mt. Wachusett in central Massachusetts watching kettles of hawks circle above.
Sitting on the steps to the house here at Aerie, ready to explore the woods with my then six-year-old, remembering my son’s birth in one retrospect instant but not yet knowing—not able to possibly conceive—where we would go in the decades ahead.
And today I learned that the moon is slowly drifting away from Earth. Like I really needed this with everything else going on. Last week it was one excuse after another from students; this week I picked up a new bottle of an old prescription but instead of it being 50 mg per dose, the pharmacy accidentally gave me 200 mg per dose. Yeah, yesterday sucked. The good news is I survived. Today I learned that the moon won’t.
The truth is we won’t really have to worry about losing our lunar brother. By the time it slips out of this planet’s gravitational hold, the sun will have already swallowed up most of the solar system anyway.
There’s a positive spin for everything.
This reminds me of Woody Allen’s movie Radio Days. The parents of a kid about ten take him to the psychiatrist because he refuses to do his homework. The doctor asks why he won’t do his homework and the kid replies, “I learned in school that the sun is going to die in four billion years.” “So??” the doctor says, and the kid replies, “So what’s the point?”
I know it is extreme, but I get this. I mean, I TOTALLY understand this. Especially yesterday with 150 extra milligrams of drugs in my blood. We put forth great efforts to make some contribution to the world, add our “verse” to the “play,” as Whitman wrote and which I’ve often quoted, yet even the greatest humans in history become footnotes. Friends die, parents, relatives die, or worse, fade away and stop calling or stop returning your calls, which can be even more painful, and you wonder what was it all for. What good amid these people, these trappings of life, am I, to cop another Whitmanism.
Answer: The moon.
The very orb whose drifting I learned about which caused not just a little sadness circles back to play the role of savior. I mean, just look at it, the most common object for all of humanity, the one—and other than the sun, the only—object we all share, stare at, dream about, write poems and prose about since the origins of humanity, the one object we’ve relied upon since humans looked up, save the sun, and even more so, actually, since we often look right into those cold, white crater eyes of the lunar surface but shy away from the retina-burning sun.
At night, at the river, I watch the moon shimmy on the surface of the bay, or catch a gull in flight and watch her wings spread out over the reach of the fullness of the moon. It has stood witness to wars, to famine and plight, to self-destruction and sacrifice, to suicides and celebrations; it has hung peacefully above pilgrims and plane passengers traveling overseas overnight; it illuminated safaris and caravans of refugees, guided Marco Polo, Magellan, my son, now, in Spain, fumbling home to his hotel.
There’s the Wolf Moon, the Worm Moon, the Snow Moon, the Pink Moon. There’s the Flower Moon and the Buck Moon.
In my life I have counted on it, hanging out there over the Great South Bay, over the Allegheny River, hung just above Merton’s Heart, over the Sonoran, the Sahara, the Chesapeake.
There’s a moon over Brooklyn, Anne Murray sang, and it’s coming into view. It was certainly in view the day I was born in Brooklyn, as it was a waxing gibbus, with more than ninety percent of its surface illuminated that July night. The Bob Moon it was called.
The sun on the moon makes a mighty nice light, wrote James Taylor.
She comes more nearer earth than she was wont, and makes men mad, Shakespeare said.
It’s the small step. It’s the giant leap. It’s one of three things with the sun and the truth that Buddha reminds us cannot be hidden.
I walked once, many moons ago, along a mountain path in Norway, and I watched the moon shiver in the wake of the Northern Lights bouncing around my head like lace curtains lifted by a breeze through an open window. I glanced at Brother Moon as an old friend as if to say, “Are you seeing this?” He was.
It’s a harsh mistress.
It’s the friend, Sandburg tells us, all the lonesome can talk to.
It’s made of cheese.
It knows far more secrets than Sister Sun. Of course. People have less to confess in the light of day, which by its sunny nature brings out our hope, pulls from us some sliver of possibility. But the moon catches us at the witching hour, it remains sole witness to our suffering when those tigers come and taunt us, tug at our fears and anxieties that keep us awake. He’s watching; promising us, if we stop crying long enough to notice, that we’ve been this way before, and we will again.
We have been there, to this moon of ours, for it is ours for now. It was simple science. Jim Lovell once noted that we now live in a world where humans have walked on the moon; that it wasn’t a miracle; we just decided to go. I once wanted to go, when I was nine or ten and Neil and Buzz were blemishes on its face. As I grew, I knew I’d never get there, but that was okay. I started to contemplate people instead, and fixated on Merton’s inquiry as to what can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves.
Now I’m depressed again. Time for some moonshine, head outside to talk to some neighbors, and if we drink enough we’ll moon people in passing cars.
But I digress. I’m sorry; sheer lunacy.
***
Some years ago my son and I walked across Spain. Sometimes we got up before the sun, like we did in the village of Ponferrada, and followed the moon down a trail west toward Santiago. We talked about breakfast and new friends and old ways. We talked about other places to see and the last village we stayed in. We were that rarest of all things—absolutely and completely present, walking beneath the moon, talking.
We drifted away from the village and the lights and the people ever so slowly, wondering if we remembered everything, but then letting it go, moving away from the city’s gravity and into our own space, just the two of us, knowing full well, as did Lennon, that we all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Drift away as you must, Brother Moon. I’m not going to let it bother me tonight. You’ve gotten me through some seriously long nights before, and you certainly will again.
I was three, just a few months older than John-John, when his father President John F. Kennedy was shot. I don’t remember the incident at all, nor am I aware of a difference in temperament before and after that fateful day in November of ’63. But I’m told it was distinct, black and white, an absolute clarity in “before and after” references. I’m told Kennedy came with hope, with promise, with lofty goals like landing a man on the moon and cleaning the earth, the Peace Corps, the hope of peace in general. He was young and so was most of the population as the first wave of baby-boomers came of age. Things were good.
Camelot.
I saw footage of the event only in great retrospect years later. People talked about conspiracy theories, they talked about Vietnam and Civil Rights; and they talked about the subtle differences of expectation and hope before and after November 22nd, 1963. But I only ever understood a post-Dallas world; there will always be something lacking in the narrative for those of us who didn’t experience life back then, in the times before Dallas. There will always be some subtle element we will never be able to grasp.
***
I used to ask my writing students this week every year, what do you remember? How were your parents that day? Their work covered the spectrum from indifference to passionate recollections of military members who had returned from Afghanistan and Iraq. And, predictably, as the years went by the details became less clear, less “involved,” and more repetitive to what they heard from others, from history class even.
I don’t ask those questions anymore. None of my current college students were yet born September 11th, 2001.
They couldn’t know that before 911 our thought process was different, more hopeful, absent of impending doom. We still had that absolute conviction that whatever happened to us as individuals and as a nation was still pretty much in our hands. They have no idea that before that day we looked forward to what was next, not fearful of what might happen. Our daily vocabulary was absent of phrases involving extremism, terrorism, anthrax, and Fallujah. These concepts were real and among us, but they affected others, were problems for others, were handled by others. Our attitudes of issues concerning Afghanistan and Iraq and terrorism back then are similar to my students at this campus in Virginia worrying about what is happening to students at some college eight thousand miles away. We were peripherally aware of a situation, that’s all.
***
Higher education has once again become more of a world of industrial education, where students expect that the sole purpose of their classes should be to prepare them for employment, where enrollment is plummeting not just because of cost but because of the greater population of teenagers not seeing a point to it, so there is a desperate need for the study of philosophy and art.Am I being too optimistic? Am I tilting at windmills? I suppose.
But In a world which has adjusted to constant violence and invasion, where disease is rampant and the climate is killing us, I can’t think of a better time for educators to emphasize the potential of humanity. But technology is our new curriculum, and students today are convinced it is the sole foundation of whatever they do. But “it has become appallingly obvious,” Einstein said, “that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
“Intelligence plus character is the goal of a true education,” Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted. Yes, let’s go there. Let’s get back to that pre-911 thought process. It seems we are in dire need of starting over. Now. The earth is dying and the human race is watching it all happen on Instagram and TikTok. In this culture, we cannot teach anyone what “hope” was like in the before times; all we can do is hope. Educators first must be examples. In these times, those of us older than forty are by virtue of memory social historians who can remember a world of possibility and promise. We were there.
According to Plato: “The direction in which education starts a man, will determine his future in life.” Shouldn’t we start with hope? With possibility. We didn’t used to have to teach those ideals, but my students weren’t born when those once innate concepts were foundations instead of today’s cyber security and terrorist activities.
I cannot teach these people what life was like before terrorism terrified our cities. I can perhaps describe what it was like to sit at a table for lunch at Windows on the World completely absent of fear and enjoy the view. I can talk about crossing borders without interrogation, walking family members all the way to the plane for their departure, carrying pretty much anything I wanted on board a flight. I can talk about what wasn’t talked about, places we never heard of. I can ask them why it isn’t like that anymore and what do we need to do to find our way there again.
Now I ask them to write what they think is humanity’s greatest strength, most encouraging potential. The papers are sparse. Their minds draw a blank; and it isn’t their fault. If the terrorists succeeded in one aspect in affecting American culture, it is this: We used to think about what can go right; now we think about what might go wrong.
That’s as tragic as the difference between pre and post can get.
The Siege of Leningrad is one of the more disturbing and inspiring events in history. The Nazi’s blockaded Leningrad (present day St. Petersburg) on this day, and for the next 900 days bombarded the city in an attempt at first to take the city, but when they couldn’t, they tried to wipe it from the face of the earth.
The following is a chapter from my last book The Iron Scar, in remembrance of those lost and the survivors.
Persistence
(from The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia)
Bob Kunzinger
This evening I sit in the dining car somewhere in eastern Siberia, writing, drinking tea, and the only other passengers are an elderly man and his son, also drinking tea. They’re quiet and both glance at me from time to time. Eventually, I walk to their booth and ask if I can join them—the younger of the two speaks broken English and he waves to the empty spot next to his father. He introduces himself as Dima; and the elderly man, Sergei, wears two or three medals on his green shirt, and I ask if one particular medal is the same as another I had seen in St. Petersburg, given for bravery during the siege of Leningrad. It is.
The dining car on the trans-Siberian railroad looks much like old Airstream-style diners in America, with booths along both sides, full size windows at each one with small curtains, and all are kept clean, with flowers, a napkin holder and place mats. At one end of the car is a bar with well drinks as well as a small variety of more expensive liquor on a higher shelf, and a generous selection of domestic and imported beers and soft drinks. The menu rivals the most common pub at home. Grilled chicken, hamburgers with French fries and other sides are available, as well as more complete dinners and some appetizers. Caviar, too, and salmon slices with toast, borsch, and traditional fare such as cabbage and sausages for tourists like us who wish to feel part of the landscape, and for locals whose daily diet includes such items anyway.
The prices are about the same as they would be at stateside diners, but Russians for the most part can’t afford that and usually buy their food from the babushkas at the stops along the way. Seeing as how there are so few tourists, the booths are always available, so Michael and I spend much of our time here, playing chess, eating, and working.
Paying attention to this sudden mixture of cultures is the tender. This always smiling woman sits at her own booth near the bar with several pads spread about which apparently need her attention. From time to time she looks up, partly to see if we need anything and partly, it seems, to catch what she can of our conversation. She normally likes to play traditional music on the player whenever I sit down, but when she sees me join this veteran and his son, she puts on Shostakovich. We all recognize it immediately and the old man smiles. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Seventh Symphony, the Leningrad Symphony, in the forties and performed it for the first time to a packed theater in his besieged city of Leningrad. Despite the rattle of Nazi bombs exploding in the background, no one left the performance. Today in the memorial cemetery in that city where nearly 700,000 people are buried, Piskaryovskoye Cemetery, it is still played while thousands of people pay their respects. I have spent many Victory Days there, meeting veterans, offering them a carnation in thanks for their work in the war, so it is an honor to share tea with this veteran.
It would be negligent of any traveler, foreign or domestic, to make this journey without learning about and acknowledging the Blockade in Leningrad, the horrors of the Great Patriotic War, and the incomprehensible courage displayed by the citizens of what is now St. Petersburg, which was bombarded by the Nazi’s for 900 days in an effort to complete Hitler’s desire to “wipe Leningrad from the map.” That history is this old man’s youth; and the fact he survived and went on to raise a son is nothing short of miraculous.
This is where this great railway and Russian history collide.
Some background:
The original name in Russia for the railway was the “Great Siberian Way,” and it was only in the west we called it the trans-Siberian railway. At the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900, the railway was an exhibit with the most extravagant interior cars on display and promoted as the ride of Czars. While it was true the line from St. Petersburg to Yekaterinburg was indeed the rail for Czar Nicholas II and his family to seek refuge in their palace on the Iset River, the promotion at the Fair was misleading since from the start this railway mostly carried people to war. When Czar Alexander put his son Nicholas on the project, he did so with the assistance of Sergei Witte, a minister in the Russian government and confidant of the Czar. The heart of the empire was, indeed, in the western third of the country. St. Petersburg and Moscow were, and still are for that matter, the center of the Russian universe, and from the time of Peter the Great’s ambition to create a “Window to the West,” the powers-that-be focused their attentions there. But in the late 1800’s, the government noted the potential resources available in the east, thinking Siberia might be an economic boon instead of simply a destiny for dissidents. At the same time, St. Petersburg had its eye on parts of Manchuria and moved forward with the rail to that destination under the pretense of trade; the truth is they eventually occupied the territory, a move which aggravated Japan who also wanted control of the area. Japan saw the TSRR as a tool of expansion and eventual invasion, which, of course, it was. Hence, the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. But the tracks weren’t finished yet, and troop movement in the area where roads even today are poor, meant ultimate defeat for Russia.
Still, they had their rail, which a few years later was completed to the Pacific port of Vladivostok. But Japan had its day, and instead of Russia using the railway to dominate the eastern Asian region, Japan did just that by defeating Russia’s Pacific fleet and controlling territory they long wanted. Their rise to power anticipated the conflict in the Pacific which would be that part of the globe’s World War Two.
During World War One, the United States had many economic interests in the region, not the least of which was a ton of weapons strewn north from Vladivostok along the rail. To protect those interests, President Wilson sent eight thousand US troops to the region—the only time US soldiers were stationed in Russia. The War in Europe would not be over for another three months, but in Russia, change was constant. The Mensheviks had ousted Czar Nicholas and replaced him with Kerensky, who the Bolsheviks quickly ousted, so the allies had no one with whom to work in eastern Asia. But it was during that short and welcome reign of Kerensky that the US took over the operation of the trans-Siberian railway, a move supported by the allies in Europe and seen as the spread of democracy the western world had hoped for. At the same time, however, the Bolshevik Revolution swept east literally following the tracks all the way to Vladivostok. The United States withdrew their interests and in a few short years the noble ambitions of the entire empire would quickly derail.
Josef Stalin took over the Soviet Union in 1922, a post he would hold for thirty-one years. He longed for a railway across the polar region of Russia to expedite travel to the Far East. This “Dead Road” was built by “enemies of the people” of Russia. It is estimated that 300,000 prisoners worked on this project with a third of them dying in the brutal northern winters. The entire project proved short-lived, however, when the short part of the line which had been completed sank into the ice and snow. But Stalin understood the value of rail transport, and the pogroms started by the Czar to relocate Jews to eastern Russia were continued under his rule with the aid of the Trans-Siberian railway further south. It was no possible to purge entire towns, exile anyone who so much as spoke about him without praise, as well as those who outwardly opposed the oppressive government. In fact, not many people during those years rode the railway by choice. It was a means for guards to get to work or to send prisoners east. The rail between St. Petersburg and Moscow remained a crucial route between what is considered the cultural capital in the north and the political capital an eight-hour ride south. And the cross-continental railway in post-coup Russia became a means of transport for workers heading to and from a job, families going to a dacha, and the rare and idealistic tourist heading to Beijing or Vladivostok.
Aside from so much death associated with this transport, there is one glaring and essential exception when rail travel was, in fact, a lifeline in Russia: The Great Patriotic War. World War Two. A separate rail from the trans-Siberian route was built by hand every single winter during the war across the frozen Lake Ladoga just to the east of Leningrad to try and bring in supplies and bring out citizens of the city, which was besieged from September 8th, 1941, until January 27th, 1944. During that time nearly one and a half million people in the city—mostly women and children—died of starvation. The people of the city to this day are most proud of the fact that, despite nine-hundred days of bombardment, the Nazi’s still couldn’t defeat the “defenders of Leningrad.” And because of the invading Germans, factories were moved from the western part of the country to the most eastern reaches of European Russia, in the Ural Mountains, where more than three hundred plants were rebuilt close to the railway, mostly by the prisoner population.
Before me now, however, is a man who refused to leave Leningrad. I mention my understanding of his courage and struggle, and the old man smiles. He places his hand on my wrist and says, yes, he could have ridden the rail across the lake during that first winter—he was just a young teenager, and no one would have questioned it. But he chose to stay and help transport whatever food he could to the front line, which during the blockade was in every direction.
The tender brings a plate of salmon and bread which they share with me, and we drink more tea. Sergei dips some bread in his tea, and his son offers me salmon.
We speak for quite some time about the trail, about Michael and I and our wild idea to see Siberia, and about their present journey to a Dacha to spend August. Eventually, I ask about his medal, about the war, and how much he remembers. Sergei takes a long bite of his bread and nods toward the plate of salmon. “Food was the most significant issue,” Dima translates as he looks in despair at his father, clearly knowing what comes next. “Leningrad’s population of dogs, cats, horses, rats, and crows disappeared as they became the main courses on many dinner tables. Nothing was off limits. People ate dirt, paper, and wood. The vast majority of casualties were not soldiers, but women and children.”
This much I know already: The siege of Leningrad is political history as well as military history, yet it is also personal. It is the story of a child living on a few grams of bread, his mother making sure he only takes small bites throughout the day for fear if he eats it all at once he will surely starve to death. He will anyway, and the history of the siege of Leningrad must include the story of these women who survived, these sorrowful mothers, who had to grasp whatever sliver of hope they could that they would win in the end so to save their beloved Mother Russia.
The siege is one of the chapters in books about 20th-century atrocities; yet it is also the conversation over beers in a corner pub, where as late as the nineties when I first started coming here, most veterans still held back their emotions against the questions of the curious’. Some allowed others to cross the line into their world, allowed them to suffer the starvation through stories and tears because they knew it might be the only way these great heroes, the defenders of Leningrad, will be remembered.
Me on the right after giving the carnation to the veteran (photo by Kay Debow)
I recall a conversation I had once with a woman in St. Petersburg’s Palace Square. She was fifteen during the siege when she had to pull a sleigh carrying the body of her sister, who had died of starvation. She made it to the graveyard and left her sister on the pile of bodies. Another there, Alexander, remembered how he would cut up a piece of bread once a day for his brothers. His parents had died of starvation some time earlier.
Nearly three million civilians, including nearly half a million children, refused to surrender despite having to deal with extreme hardships in the encircled city. Food and fuel would last only about two months after the siege began, and by winter there was no heat, no water, almost no electricity, and little sustenance. These citizens still had two more years of this to endure. Leningrad is roughly at the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska. It gets cold.
During that first January and February, 200,000 people died of cold and starvation. Because disease was a problem, the bodies were carried to various locations in the city. Even so, people continued to work in the deplorable conditions to keep the war industries operating. When they were not working or looking for food and water, they were carrying the dead, dragging bodies on children’s sleighs or pulling them through the snow by their wrists to the cemetery.
One man said, “To take someone who has died to the cemetery is an affair of so much labor that it exhausts the last strength in the survivors. The living, having fulfilled their duty to the dead, are themselves brought to the brink of death.”
But the people of Leningrad would not surrender. I met a woman named Sophia in a graveyard on the north side of the city. She had been an adolescent during the reign of Czar Nicholas II and thirty years later lost her husband and son during the siege. We sat on a bench, and she told me of her life, of her family, as if time had turned it into a hazy event she had heard someone talk about years earlier. Her hands were transparent, and she spoke of Leningrad as being a prisoner of war, with no rations and no electricity and little hope. The city became a concentration camp, its citizens condemned to death by Hitler.
But thousands of people were evacuated across Lake Ladoga via the famous frozen Doroga Zhinzni, the Road of Life. During warm weather, some were boated across, but in winter they were carried on trucks across the frozen lake under German fire and moved via the railway. Heading north was pointless; the Finnish Army, allied with the Germans since the bitter Winter War with the Soviets in 1939-1940, held the line there. But once across the lake, this very train took people further east until the rails simply could not run. When we stand between the cars and rumble along, listening to the clashing of metal beneath us, it is hard for me not to think of the thousands of starving citizens transported east, listening to the same sounds.
“We simply had nothing to eat.” Yes, starvation was the Nazi’s objective. The blockade was a time during which one gauged success by being alive or not. Some survivors, however, tell of encounters with people who had such severe mental illness from disease and starvation that it had become unbearable. The accounts are sometimes spurious, but too many narratives contain too many parallel events to write them off as exaggerated. Several wrote of what became known as “blockade cannibalism,” including the story of a boy who was enticed to enter someone’s apartment to eat warm cereal
One woman used one of her dead children to feed the others.
For nearly three years, Leningrad was under attack night and day, and almost half its population, including 700,000 women and children, perished. The Germans left the city of Peter the Great, his “Window to the West,” in ruins. Still, the Nazis could not defeat Leningrad.
The likes of that bravery and sacrifice will never be seen again.
During those years as well as a decade before and past Stalin’s death in 1954, Soviet industrialization moved many citizens to the region stretching from Omsk to the Pacific, and the vast majority of these people worked in towns built for the sole purpose of some factory. But the most infamous use of the railroad during this dark period was to transport prisoners to the Gulag system. Prisoners in the penal system in Russia were tapped to exploit the natural resources in the mineral-rich east. It started officially in 1929, but just five years later, nearly half a million Soviet citizens with a prison term of three years or longer were loaded on these railcars and transported to the Gulags. Five years after that, the camp population totaled more than two million. Some eighteen to twenty million inmates, while suffering the most inhumane conditions, facilitated the exploitation of timber and minerals in remote areas in slightly more than two decades. They also laid railroads which branched off of this one, constructed roads, secured dams, and worked in the factories and on the farms,
The veteran looks around and says more quietly as his son again translates, “Every single person on this train is connected to the war; either a grandparent or parent was killed, or less likely, survived. Everyone on this train is fortunate to be alive because of citizens of Leningrad under the most horrific conditions. I played a very small part, but I am glad I survived to be able to raise my own family.” He smiles at his son, who places his own hand on his father’s sleeve.
Today, war monuments dot the landscape. Most of them honor veterans of the two World Wars, but many as well for those who served in Afghanistan, the most notable being the Black Tulip memorial in Yekaterinburg, named for the ship which carried home the Soviet deceased. The monuments to the Siege of Leningrad, or the “Blockade” as Russians refer to those dark nine-hundred days, are numerous in St. Petersburg, of course, but they also spread surprising far to the east, following the tracks taken by those souls who managed to get out of the city under cover of a cold, dark winter. The same chance Sergei turned down, as his medal clearly shows.
I grew up during the age of the Evil Empire, the Red Menace. Siberia and Irkutsk might as well have been on the moon—I was never going. All I knew of this land when I was young was from playing RISK with my older brother. He usually won but I had fun moving my armies around the board, sometimes skipping from Alaska to Kamchatka, proving to me capture of the Russian coast was key in controlling the outcome. When Michael was growing up we did the same thing. But it wasn’t until I was much older that I learned something valuable: that miserable game screwed up my sense of geography. Siberia is not a country or a state, it is a region, like the American West or heading out to the Plains. Ian Frazier wrote Siberia is more of an idea than a place. Irkutsk is not a country but a city, and Yakutsk is not east of Siberia it is in Siberia. The Ukraine does not take up most of map, doesn’t run from the Arctic to the Med, and doesn’t replace Russia, which that Soviet era game completely left off the planet. Still, those faraway places in beautiful colors with brightly colored armies became mythical. In the end, I didn’t have to move armies to travel to Siberia; no opponents waited across Parker Brother’s boundaries. I didn’t roll doubles. I didn’t pick the wild cards. I just came, and in doing so I wiped out decades of ignorance about these people over a cup of tea and some salmon slices.
The old man looks out the window into the dark evening, and I can sense his mind has recessed into some sharp and tortured memories. His son leaves his hand on his father’s and nods to me, indicating he sees I understand. We sit quietly like this for a long time, drinking tea, as the train rolls forward through history.
photo by Michael Kunzinger
You can order The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia, by clicking here
I assigned my creative writing students a lengthy brain dump: Name five moments you remember. I gave no other guidance on the moments themselves; I did not indicate they needed to be significant in any way, or funny, tragic, life-changing, anything. Just five moments. In addition, I wrote, why did you choose those moments; I mean, why do you think your memory pulled those up?
Of course, most people have trouble narrowing it down. I believe we simply don’t want to choose the wrong ones, as if later—and this is true—we will think of even better (or more horrific) moments we should have mentioned. But the point is to consider the mental tether to those particular moments that they rose to the top in an internal sea of experience. Can you think of five?
Being the dutiful professor, here are mine, listed, as I instructed them, in the order they came into my head.
Location: On a train headed from Santiago, Spain, back to Pamplona, Summer of ’14. I looked to the south as we headed east and I saw pilgrims walking in the mid-day sun, backpacks on, walking sticks out front, side by side, laughing and talking, and it took me up short. We had spent more than a month crossing Spain and after walking for weeks and weeks, we adjusted to that lifestyle. That is where we belonged, out there. Psychologists say if we make something part of your routine for three weeks, our system adjusts enough to expect it every day. That happened to me. Being on the train was wrong; I wanted to pull some brake cord and jump off, join them, head back towards Santiago. It was at that moment I knew I’d walk that Camino again because that is where I belong, not on a train. It took no time at all, none, for me to have the clarity that I knew exactly where I should be. How rare is that?
Location: The salt flats on the Great Salt Lake, Utah. Summer of ’22. We walked across a good part of the dry lakebed whose shoreline under normal conditions was well behind us. To the left was the amazing Spiral Jetty, well out in front of us to the west was a golden sunset with laser like reach picked up by the glistening salt flats, and right in front of us on some rocks were two glasses of champagne. There are moments you remember all your life, made more special by the once completely inconceivable notion that they’d ever happen to begin with–a chance to hang out with and laugh with someone you thought you’d never see again as you finish each other’s sentences as the salt seeps through your shorts. This was one of those moments.
Location: Between cars on the trans-Siberian railway. Summer of ’13. Michael and I spent a good deal of time in these passageways, him playing harmonica, me watching the lush landscape flee behind us. That moment brings me such peace as it is filled with nearly nothing. We have no possessions with us save his harp and my curiosity. We stood, standing still while barreling west, outside of the main cabin on the train with cool air coming through the passageway, but inside, safe, a private viewing room of sorts. I can still feel that rumble, hear his tunes, the sound of the door swooshing open when someone passes through and nods, pauses to hear Michael play. We always need to find a place to center ourselves, find our footing.
Location: Bayside Hospital, Virginia Beach. Summer of ’96. Michael had slipped on some playground equipment and a bolt when into his skull above his eye. We rushed to the hospital where we waited in the ER waiting room for hours despite a hole in my three-year-old’s head. It was freezing and my shirt was off as it had been completely blood-soaked. Finally they took us back after two hours of Michael walking around holding a cloth to his gapping hole looking at people asking what they were in for. “What’s wrong with you?” he’d ask. “Where’s your other arm?” Finally, the doctor sewed his head while he sat on my lap and counted stitches along with the nurse. He didn’t cry, nothing. Just eyed the orange juice boxes and cookies on a nearby table. When they were done, he jumped down and asked if he could have a cookie. I sat with my head between my legs, feeling fainter than I had ever been. Then a cookie appeared before my eyes and I looked up, and he said, “Here Daddy. Have my cookie. It looks like you need it more than I do.” You’re never too old to sometimes admit you just need a cookie.
Location: Heckscher State Park, Long Island. Summer of ’75. I would be moving to Virginia in three days. My best friend of six years, Eddie, and I hiked one more time, one last time, through the state park behind our neighborhood on the Great South Bay. We’d hiked every inch of that place, knew every creek, every trail. We climbed the old dilapidated beach cabana, the old garage in the woods, the old estate house, all buildings gone nearly half a century now. That last day we hiked for hours, and Eddie said we needed to plan something so we knew we’d see each other again. We had been singing songs; I was just learning guitar so I sang some I had just learned, and we both would sing as we hiked. Beatles, Harry Chapin, John Denver, and hits of the day like “Seasons in the Sun,” and some others. We had just sung, “Cats in the Cradle” when he said, “So let’s plan something.” We did. We decided we would someday get a car and drive the entire perimeter of the country and write a book about it. I said we absolutely had to do that and Eddie laughed and said, “We will! If I live that long!” and we sang more Chapin.
Just over forty years later we spoke on the phone again for the first time since that day. We spoke for hours, and then again, and again, and finally he said, “We still need to take that drive and write that book.” I told him, no kidding, two childhood best friends become friends again half a century later and drive around the country—this is a book waiting to happen. Really, I said, we have to do this! I can write this book, I told him. He had just finished reading my collection Borderline Crazy and said he thought the same thing, that we must do this. He said it was inevitable and he really believed we would make this happen, but he didn’t live long enough.
“Time is paper thin,” wrote Toni Wynn.
Sometimes someone you think you’ll never see again shows up and reminds you of who you are. Sometimes someone you are certain you’ll see is suddenly gone and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it but remember those moments, these moments that I’ve been lucky enough to have a lifetime of.
Life should be a long string of these moments. It’s all there is.
a view from this wilderness 