Bob Kunzinger

The Dead

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

I guess the first was Karen. Karen was from Pennsylvania–this was quite early in my career and I had just moved back to the Beach from Pennsylvania myself, so I could relate to her writing. She spoke in class about adjusting to being away from home for the first time. Her husband was military and they were stationed here. Her paper was about the changes. I sat on my couch and read about her excitement to start life anew and all the places they would finally see together like they planned. She took a job–not because she needed the money, she wrote–but because she wanted to do something. So she took classes and got a new job as a server at the North Witchduck Inn in Virginia Beach. She got lucky, I read; another worker had been fired and she filled the opening in the place not far from their home.

I had just put her paper down and moved on to the next when the phone rang and it was the provost of the college. He wanted to tell each of her professors before we heard it on the news. The fired server and her boyfriend returned to the North Witchduck Inn and shot four people in the back of the head, execution style, including Karen. For a few years I held on to that paper. It reminded me how in a class filled with “I’d rather be anywhere else but here” students, someone was glad to be present, to be truly present.

Then there was Mark. Mark stopped me in the library and asked if we could talk. He had just received orders he was headed to Kuwait for the first Gulf War, and he was told to get his “affairs” in order. “Talk about telling you you’re going to die,” he said. I assured him everyone going overseas in the military is told to make sure their affairs are in order. We laughed a while about nothing; really nothing at all. The smallest of things that day were funny, the simplest of moments were beautiful. We walked to his car and he showed me a picture of his son. We talked about how when he got home our boys could play together. I don’t remember Mark’s last name, but I will always remember his face.

Tricia and I used to talk at the copier every day. We talked about music and travel. We talked about food and how the smell of cinnamon buns is better than the aroma of coffee. She had braces and said her students haven’t said anything about them yet, but she was certain they noticed. I remember her asking if I noticed her braces and I laughed out loud, right there, like the laughter was my answer, then I said, “Well, T…yeah! They’re right there! But they’re beautiful. I can’t imagine you without them. They’re just so you!” We laughed a long time. T got depressed easily and I could usually tell from the faculty workshops about recognizing various issues with students when she was in a down cycle. The dean came to me and said Tricia’s medicine was messed up and her husband found her hanging in the kitchen.

Stay with me. Please.

Then there was Rachel. Dear, beautiful, full-of-life Rachel. On a study abroad in St. Petersburg, we walked freely down Nevsky Prospect, the Fifth Avenue of the city. I was right behind Rachel on the crowded street so we were all pretty close to each other. As usual, she was engaged in taking pictures and writing in her notebook, jotting down “Kazan Cathedral” which was just to our right. Of all the people I’ve traveled with—numbering well over four hundred—Rachel was by far the most diligent about drinking it all in, making notes, taking countless photographs. She always smiled anyway and could make everyone around her laugh, and there on the other side of the world she was in her element. She absorbed every single moment. In the evenings she’d come into my room and show me what pictures she had taken that day and double-checked their locations. Then we’d sit and talk about her impending motherhood, what it’s like being a parent—my son had just turned ten. We walked past Kazan Cathedral; she was absorbed in her notes and stepped right off the curb and into the cross street where a bus was ripping past us at forty miles an hour. I was close enough to Rachel to grab her hair which she had pulled back in a pony tail, and I yanked her back into my chest, and the bus was close enough to knock her bag out of her hand on into the street. Those around us screamed and Rachel turned back somewhat unaware of what had just happened. “He saw me,” she said, to which I replied, “Yeah, he did. He just didn’t care. Pedestrians don’t have the right of way here.” We picked up her belongings and in no time she was back into enjoying her tour of Russia; my heart didn’t settle down for hours. The last time I saw her she brought her daughter, Shaylyn, to my office. This beautiful woman with her beautiful little girl was so excited to move on with her life; she’d be a single mother, she told me, and hoped she could set a good example. Then we remembered the bus in Petersburg, laughing at the nearly tragic outcome, and she assured me I had saved two lives that day. I laughed and told her I was just glad she hadn’t cut her long, curly hair. “Yeah that hurt, by the way,” she joked, grabbing the back of her head.

Her daughter has her eyes.

Not much later, in May of 2005, the little girl’s father went to find Rachel who was hanging out with some friends at their apartment. When she refused to let him in, he cut a hole in the screen and climbed through. Rachel ran out the back door and called 911. Her ex walked through the house and shot four people killing two of them before he found Rachel hiding outside. She had called 911 and the operator had to ask several times what was going on, but Rachel was quiet, until finally she replied, “He saw me,” and her ex put his gun to her skull and shot her in the back of the head, killing her instantly. This one breaks my heart.

I sat in class last week and watched my students do group work. A few engaged students carried the rest, but more than half the class kept reading their phones, staring out the window, messing with their hair. “What are you doing here?” I asked in a general fashion. They were quiet. “What are you doing here?” I asked again. They just stared at me. I remembered the rule of threes: First time they hear it; second time they think about it; third time they start to understand it, so I hit it once more: “Seriously,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

They remained quiet.

Bobbie slipped slowly inside herself. First alcohol, then drugs, then homelessness, until this beautiful woman who became a neonatal nurse was found dead next to a dumpster. Carrie OD’d and ended up in a brain center where she kept telling me the same joke when I’d go visit to talk to the patients: “Knock Knock. Who’s there? Cargo. Cargo who? Cargo beep beep.” We’d always laugh and she’d keep laughing long after I moved over to Dave who was learning to walk again. Carrie was a biomed major, graduated high school early and had applied for Drexel University to transfer and had just been accepted. The stress got the better of her and she “used a little something to keep her nerves in tact.” Dave was found in the garage. He brought the dog.

“For the next project,” I told my students before leaving on a reading trip to Ohio two weeks ago, “I want you to tell me what you are doing here. Include your short range and long term plans. Include your hidden ambitions, your unspoken dreams, that secret that can ignite your internal motivation. Tell me what you hope this moment looks like when you look back five years from now.”

They stared at me. No one, not one, not a single student: NOT. ONE. TOOK. NOTES.

I asked Geoff, who bares a stringing resemblance to Johnny Depp, and is someone I can usually count on to keep up, what they need to do. “Write about what we’re doing here.”

“And?”

“And…be ambitious with it.”

I repeated what I had said, asking them to write it down, which they all did–on their phones. Fine. I looked at a woman on the right side of the room. Sometimes I hope to see Karen. Or Rachel. I asked her the name of the woman immediately next to her who she had been talking to during group work for a half hour for the fourth time this semester, and it was already late October. “What is her name?” I asked. She looked out the side of her eyes as if the woman wore a badge.

I stared at them. “What are you people doing here?”

I am haunted, some days. Not by the dead or their memories; not by the tragic loss of life and the repulsively early departure of far too many souls–a dozen more of whom I’ve left out of this. I am haunted by how easy it is to not live at all. I stopped at the door. “If it makes you feel better, most of the time I have no idea what I’m doing here either.”

They laughed, and I thought of Bobbie. They laughed and the woman introduced herself to her classmate of ten weeks, and I thought of Karen. I thought of Rachel and Trish–adorable Trish. They laughed and I realized not every moment should be one of ecstatic joy. But we certainly should be closer to life than death, shouldn’t we?

Oh, and there’s Kevin, who simply disappeared, and Charlotte, who just three weeks ago tried to kill herself. Charlotte is transitioning and has just about as little support as a person can get. I leaned against the door jam and asked if they understood the assignment. So I asked again, knowing, waiting, certain someone would give me the answer I absolutely knew they all knew, and someone finally did.

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s required.”

I smiled. “No. It’s not,” I said. “You’ve been deceived. Certainly to attend this college, to graduate, this is a required course. But nothing is required of you anymore. You’re not children. You can tend bar in Key West. You can hike across Europe. You can be anywhere, do anything, and you, for some apparently unknown reason, chose to be in my class on this day at this hour and sit and stare at your phones even though you could be anywhere else.” I laughed at the last part. “Anywhere!”

“With that in mind,” I added, “What are you doing here?”

Oh, and Bo, who got killed when the car he was riding in hit a tree on the way to Florida. And Eddie. Dearest, kindest Eddie. And Marcus. Jamal. Chris. Joe.

Karen wanted to have kids. Rachel wanted to be a teacher. Mark wanted to come home and bring his son out for ice cream. Bobbie wanted to dance.

All she ever wanted to do was dance.

Listen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg-Qdrr3XSk

Au(tumn)

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

I’m home and the leaves changed and mostly fell while I was away the past week. I love traveling in the autumn, especially in the north, this time western Maryland, Ohio, West Virginia, and the mountains of Virginia. Such colors I’ve rarely seen anywhere else, like a painter’s palette, like a quilt. Like fall.

“I lived in a yellow house, like butter,” Van Gogh wrote of his place in Arles where he did his boldest work, filled with colors and tube paints pushed onto the canvas like toothpaste. When we speak today of his work, it is from Arles we mostly mean.

I, too, lived in a yellow house, like butter, along a country road running past a reservoir in central Massachusetts. Next door was a tall, white church with a cemetery, and the road wound up through the small village, past the Deacon’s Bench Antique Store, past the nursing home, up into Sterling and past the cider mill. It ran up the mountain, winding into the village of Princeton on Mt. Wachusett, where in autumn I’d hike to the summit and look across the New England tapestry of orange and rust, stretching clear to Boston, to New Hampshire, and west toward the Quabbin Reservoir. The crisp air, like yesterday in West Virginia, cleared my head, pushing away fears and anxiety. “It’ll be fine,” it whispered. Well, it won’t, I thought, but for now it is, and sometimes that’s enough.

I wonder if I’m starting to enjoy autumn more now than summer because I’m getting older.

The trail behind the house is covered beautifully in leaves that no step, yet, has trodden black, though signs of deer are evident. They bed down in a holly grove at the far end of the property and walk down toward the patio where the deep, heavy birdbath is apparently now theirs. The front path remains mostly clear as it runs in such a way and is wide enough for a soft northern breeze to keep the leaves to the side. But not always, and certainly not after a good, steady October rain like last week before I left. There’s something so immediate about autumn.

It is the time of year my father died. I read somewhere that other than the holidays, autumn is the most common time of year for elderly deaths. Younger people die more in Summer, which makes sense for the numbers out doing things they probably shouldn’t be, and January through March has the highest rates of suicide.

It’s odd how so many people come to life in autumn when nature is slipping away for a while, ducking behind the guise of death, returning half a year later, slowly. For now, it is beautiful, and the colors reflect in the duck pond and out on the river. They shine back at the hills I walked around a few days ago, and they remind me that for now, just for now, we’re all noticing the same beauty. It’s incredible that people throughout the autumn world all marvel and gaze at the ripple of color coming down the tree line, the scatterings of hues under oaks and maples and birches, and how the white trunks stand forth as the control group so we can see just how fine a job nature did.

I used to get depressed in autumn, feeling the summer slip away, the time of life and the sun on my back. It always, absolutely always, brought me to life, so I pushed the fall off as much as I could, perhaps anticipating what happens after the fall, in the dead of winter when hope is often difficult to unearth. But now I find in autumn something reassuring. Maybe it is simply that even growing old and letting go can be done with absolute beauty and grace.

At the end of The Lion in Winter, Geoffrey wonders what difference it makes how a man falls, and Richard remarks, “When the fall is all that’s left, it matters a great deal.”

Nature knows how to make an exit. She knows how to hold her own. I suppose her last green is gold as well as her first. I am surprised I have been so resistant to change. Maybe I’m getting tired.

Or maybe I just miss my yellow house near the Old Stone Church on the road to Wachusett.

“The Old Stone Church” where I walked nearly every day for three years. My Yellow House is just off to the left of the picture. No, I didn’t take this shot.

Departure Signs

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Some stories are difficult to write about for a variety of reasons. This falls into that category, but not for the reasons one may conceive, such as “too sad,” or “too morbid,” both of which I write without much trouble.

No, this is about diction and sound. It relies heavily on the reader “hearing” particular words phonetically so one can understand the misunderstanding.

Here’s what happened:

Many years ago I drove my parents to Norfolk International Airport for a flight to Islip, Long Island. It was early, just after six, and nothing was open at the airport food court yet except an “A&W Root Beer” joint serving breakfast biscuits and coffee. Dad was still tired, so he and I sat at a table while Mom went to get two coffees and two breakfast sandwiches for them. I opted out.

I could hear my mother repeating the order several times to the Filipino woman working alone behind the counter, and frustration grew between both of them. After fifteen minutes of Dad wondering where Mom disappeared to, she returned with a brown tray with their order.

“Somethings not right,” she said.

“Why?”

“It came to $27.50.”

“Airport food is very expensive,” my father chimed in, reaching for his bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit.

“That sounds wrong, Mom.”

“I couldn’t understand a word she said.” And at that, Mom grabbed the sandwich out of Dad’s hand, put it back on the tray, and walked to the counter.

“They’re speaking Spanish. No wonder.”

“No Dad, it’s Tagalog.”

“Why don’t you help your mother. You speak Spanish.”

I walked to the counter. The woman looked at me. I simply repeated what my mother had said from the start, that the sandwiches and coffee should have come to just over $8. I swept my hand across the plate and showed her the receipt for $27.50, and she put four more sandwiches on the tray. I took them off and asked if she was the only one there. She walked into the kitchen.

Exasperated, I put my hands on the counter with my head down and said, mostly to myself, but my mother could hear, “We’re not going to get anywhere unless we speak Tagalog.”

My mother stood up as if she had new life breathed into her. “Well! Then let’s speak to Galag. Is he the manager?“

The woman returned with an older, Filipino gentlemen, and my mother, very politely, told him, “I’m sorry but we paid almost thirty dollars for sandwiches that only cost about eight, so we’d like to speak to Galag.”

“Mom…” (it was hard for me to speak as I was laughing)

“I think my son here knows him, but we’d like to speak to Galag immediately.”

“I don’t understand!” the man said.

“Is Galag here? We’d like to speak to Galag please.”

“I speak English,” he said to her, and then, just as I was finally calm, added, “I’m sorry but it takes quite a while to speak Tagalog.” I lost it when Mom looked at me and asked when the flight leaves and if we had time to wait for him.

The man, figuring out the problem quickly, refunded all of Mom’s money and gave her new sandwiches for free. On the way back to the table, she turned to me and said, “How do you know Galag?”

Dad had wandered across the hall to Starbucks which had opened by then.

I was at Mom’s this week. We talked about Long Island, and about Dad, who passed away eight years ago on October 21st. I think of him when I’m in airports, or when I see a payphone. He had an 800 number at his desk back when the only way to call home was “long distance,” and it cost a fortune. So throughout my techless twenties, I was able to talk to Dad several times a week. I’d call from the Arizona/Mexico border, from New England, New Orleans, and everywhere in between. He was a quiet man with a deep sense of humor. One of my biggest regrets in life is I am not more like him.

In their later years I brought them to the airport or Amtrak more than a few times. Once, we were on the train and I disembarked just before they left. But it turns out my officemate Tom, who knew them, was on the same ride north and kept them company the entire way. Another time I brought Dad to some flight somewhere, I forget where, but we had a drink at Phillips Seafood Restaurant in the airport and talked about travel and books and plans. When we talked like that I felt close, of course, but also more connected; as if we shared something larger than ourselves. I could always tell when he was thinking about travel, though he rarely went very far. He didn’t miss a chance to talk to his kids about it, though. The signs were there to show me where his mind was; the way he liked to ask where I was going next. The way he listened so closely, responded always with such encouragement.

The first time I flew in my life I was fifteen. Dad had a convention in California, and Mom refused to fly. So Dad and I dropped her off at the Amtrak Station in Norfolk, played golf, and went home. Spent the next day around the house and then we went out to dinner together. The following day we flew to Los Angeles business class—my first ever flight—with dinner menus and a large screen on the wall so all the passengers could watch a movie together. It was Rooster Cogburn with John Wayne. We arrived in LA, rented a car, and drove to the train station and waited for Mom to arrive. We laughed about that for years.

One time we remembered that story when he brought me to the airport to fly back to Buffalo for college. He said he couldn’t stay, so he shook my hand and left. I got something to eat, wandered around, found my gate, waited, boarded, and the plane taxied out to the runway.

It had been about ninety minutes, but when I looked out the window, I saw Dad at the observation parking lot standing near his car, waving.

“My life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man.”

–d fogelberg

Me with Dad at Mahi Mah’s Restaurant in Virginia Beach (photo by Michael Kunzinger)

Passing through Nature to Eternity

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there’s a house in there, swallowed by the growth

It’s raining, and the air is cooler than it has been, which brings with it, for me anyway, a soft undercurrent of sadness. You see, I love summer. I love the heat and the stillness of it, the hot sun on my face and shoulders, the sand under my feet, the water—oh the water. So when I wear long sleeves or shoes with socks, or when the water can no longer be waded into for no reason at all other than slant of earth and distance to the sun, I get melancholic (as if listening to Jackson Browne right now might not already be responsible). And today was like that, but more so because of the rain.

This week’s work involves adding random details from my younger years to a one-hundred-and-eighty-page manuscript to set a sharper tone to a time that was above description, beyond anything that could be limited by diction. This editing stage sends me back to a place I would, both at once, relive again in a heartbeat and never want to think about in my lifetime. But it was so long ago I have trouble remembering some details and I get lost in the weeds of long ago. So to clear my head, I went for a walk to keep myself present, keep my mind on the here and now. Rain can certainly do that. This can be a Herculean task at times—keeping things clear. More so for me when the air is cooler, and the sun is not so hot anymore. It made me realize how much simply fades from our lives if we stop paying attention to it.

Writers have various ways of dealing with ghosts. Some watch Pirates games, some watch movies. Some drink and some play with their dogs in open fields. I walk.  

Down the road is a track of wooded land with an old colonial house. At one time, even since I built here twenty-seven years ago, the house was completely visible and well admired. It sits recessed on the front edge of beautiful, forested land with hardwoods, which this time of year are starting to show their colors. The house is white with a wrap around porch, hedges, and a front lawn more akin to a rolling, green field where deer gathered every day at dawn and dusk to sip the dew. I loved walking by and think about sitting on the porch, drinking tea on a day like this, watching deer and listening to something gentle, like piano music, while rain kept meter on the porch roof.

You can no longer see the house. The front lawn has grown deep in weeds and small trees after just a half dozen years of no one caring for it. Nature has reclaimed the entire property, and the house, if you walk up the no-longer-navigable driveway far enough, is covered in vines and mildew. Several porch slats are caved in, and while the windows remain in tack, portions of the siding are simply gone. I don’t know who owns the place, but the man who rented it and lived there with his dog has gone back to Richmond an hour from here and, presumably, has no connection to or obligation for the place. For all I know the owner is dead. That happened elsewhere nearby. One house not far from here has been so reclaimed by nature it is absolutely impossible to tell there is a structure there except for a slight glimpse on a sunny day of a car bumper and an old boat appropriately named “Prozac.”

It happens sometimes when there is a lack of heirs in a community where restrictions are limited and property size is usually somewhat sweeping. The once lived-in and celebrated home is a house being swallowed by the earth, as all eventually will be. It makes me wonder if Mars at one time had a suburbia which a billion years of burning sun and negative-Kelvin ice storms vaporized into nothingness. That’s what crosses my mind when someone doesn’t mow their lawn very often.

There was a time, though, when someone oversaw the construction of the beautiful place, measured twice and cut once, new owners backing up a moving van and carefully designing the rooms, children running up the steps to their bedrooms, leaning against the window on days like this to watch the deer out front. The place might have filled with the aroma of turkey in the fall, soft sounds of football from the television in the den in the back, with the double doors that looked out over the marsh to the east. Geese frequent the area, and from the porch the kids would have sat in the chairs when relatives visited and watched the birds land in the fields across the road.

The kids grow up and leave, for Richmond, for DC, for another place. The parents can’t take care of it as well as themselves, so they move to a smaller place in the village, or in with one of their kids, and the paid-for-house sits alone and silent. Taxes only run a few hundred a year, so they’re easily paid and then forgotten. Then they rent it to a man with a dog, but he leaves too, and the owners die, and the kids let it go, hoping to take care of it someday.

Or maybe they had no kids, like the Prozac house. It just sits there until nature, which always wins in the end, wins.

I wonder if I’d run through that entire scenario if it wasn’t raining. Autumn is proof, I suppose, like old, uninhabited homes, of the passing of time.

Back at Aerie, I sit on the porch, drink tea, listen to a football game, and can smell turkey drifting out from the kitchen. I have some planting to do for the fall—bulbs mostly, but the back trails have gone untended for far too long. I’ll do that, this week probably. The area behind the shed needs to be cleaned up as well, and I need to get an estimate on stripping and restaining the house; I’m way overdue on that. I don’t have the energy I did when I built the place twenty-seven years ago. Then, all winter long I came and helped stack the logs, met sub-contractors while my then three-year-old son sat watching his home rise out of the dirt. While the roofers worked or the electrician figured out how to install wires in a log home, he’d ride on my shoulders as we walked down the hill to the river and we’d talk about what we’d do here–a pool, of course, and a basketball net. We’d play football in the yard, and we’d throw the baseball, of course. Come that early Spring I built the inside; all the interior walls, the cabinets, the stairs, the rest. The rest of life was still a distant curve after a still-to-come lengthy journey, and this place was forever. Come spring, we moved in, and the wood smelled so fresh, plus outside honeysuckle and lilacs.

The leaves are changing colors early this year, and I can feel the fall in the chill of the wind. The bay breeze helps keep it seasonal for now, but the winds will shift soon to the north, shutting down summer completely.

I don’t mind fall; it is beautiful. My time in western New York and especially in central New England spoiled me for how intensely beautiful autumn can be. But summer for me has more hope, still holds just enough promise for everything to work out fine in the end. It is the time when we keep building our lives instead of stepping aside and letting nature run its course.

Does everything eventually bend the way of the once-white colonial? Is even Aerie headed someday to the condition of the Prozac house? We like to think not.

And anyway, for now, I am here, sitting and drinking tea. Tonight the fox will come by the side of the house for apple pieces, and the birds flitter between the crepe myrtles and the porch-rail feeders. Life is everywhere right now, even while summer fades. I can hear the geese headed toward the field.

The rain has eased, and I think I’ll walk again, down past the farm, past the unseen, recaptured house, and to the river, which will hold its own for eras beyond everything else, as waters have done since the start. But then I’ll need to cut the grass. If I have the energy, I’ll also trim the hedges.

“And while the changing colors are a lovely thing to see,

if it were mine to make a change I think I’d let it be.

But I don’t remember hearing anybody asking me.”

–John Denver

Aerie

That Which We Are, We Are

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel

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

Awake

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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.

Happy National Coffee Day

The Drifters

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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.

Let’s take it one night at a time, shall we?

Pre/Post

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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.

September 8th

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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

Breakdown Dead Ahead

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

This morning I woke up about four from a dream so real I looked around the room expecting to see people from a place I used to work; people who just a few deep minutes earlier were sitting next to me in intense discussion. I sat in bed aflush with images of standing in hallways, sitting in my office, standing before classes, walking from building to building; or the early days out in portable buildings, walking to the market with my officemate for lunch.

My heart raced and my breathing became labored and shallow. My BP spiked and my mouth went completely dry. I got up and headed out to the river where the water found my resting pulse. Some seabirds dove for breakfast, and I watched an osprey carry a fish to a nest. Dolphins swam by. The dolphins don’t know about my dream. The osprey might.

With a nod to Jason Isbell: Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.

I rode that train for almost thirty years, one-way, full speed. When I disembarked, it took me some time to get my bearings; I still can’t always find my balance. Usually I can forget that period of my life, but when I remember incidents, or, like last night, when I wake up awash in the past, I shake.

It is difficult to explain.

There’s nothing from that time I need any longer, and nothing to gain from remembering. It has taken me five years to figure this out, always assuming that since I spent so much time—literally half my life—wading through those murky waters, it must be essential to carry at least some of it forward. But no—and this is where one can get their money’s worth out of therapy: Simply, no. Nothing. Oh, of course at the time the paycheck and benefits, the ability to travel the world on someone else’s dime, all worked for me. But that inner-core sensation that I’m “contributing” my “verse” to the bigger “play,” well, that never materialized for me, so thirty years of pouring oneself into the same bucket with a hole in the bottom is quite discouraging. Don’t misunderstand me; it had serious advantages over nearly every other profession. This isn’t about that. In fact, I still do it somewhere else, and I love it. It was there. It was then. Some people who try and remind me I did some good, had a positive effect on some people, and should be proud of that period, are missing the point. I know what happened; I was mostly there at the time. It is irrelevant. Like watching your favorite baseball team score six runs in a game but lose ten to six. Yes, remind them of how great they did scoring the six runs; then step back.

This is about the self-preservation necessary by living a life which outpaces the past. Sometimes—granted, not always; in fact recently I wrote fondly of my time at a health club in New England where I know I had a positive effect as well, and about where I wish I would have a vivid dream, of course—but sometimes there are no glory days and there is no sense of melancholy. Sometimes those tethers simply tug at the scars, open old wounds. You have to let it go. It’s not always an amicable separation; sometimes it’s a reminder of wasted time, and the best psychological recourse is akin to a bad divorce. Or, better, like you never met the person to begin with. Yes, that would be better—some dreams can kill.

The idea of “moving forward” is so simple and common that the axioms to do so are abundant, and they all are a variation of the need to “face forward” and “take small steps.”

Let’s go deeper:

A nervous breakdown in movies is nearly always represented as a person freaking out, flailing their arms, and screaming or crying or otherwise needing to be slapped upside their head. This makes sense since some visuals are needed. But the reality is a nervous breakdown can be as subtle as the rain. Certainly there can be “emotional outbursts and uncontrollable anger,” but more often it is what cannot be shown appropriately on a screen that dominates the symptoms: withdrawal, a sense of being overwhelmed, not wanting to interact with others, feeling burnt out, moody, low. Your self-esteem evaporates, you feel worthless and unqualified for anything, you make illogical requests, you assume nothing is going to work. You stop showing up. You make horrible, self-destructive decisions to the point that those who had faith in you lose their desire to help.

At first, after a major change, after that significant about face, what you do not yet realize is a nervous breakdown can come disguised as a welcome surprise. It is, in fact, similar to mania in that the person might feel overly optimistic.

Here’s how the experts break it down:

  • The honeymoon phase – The first stage of a nervous breakdown is referred to as the “honeymoon” stage and is particularly noticeable when undertaking new work responsibilities or initiatives. There are no warning signs of a nervous breakdown at this time. You are, on the contrary, enthusiastic and committed to your work. You are also highly productive and eager to demonstrate your potential in any way possible. If you do not avoid overworking or implementing effective strategies to deal with stressful situations and get enough rest, you will gradually progress to the next stage.
  • The onset phase – This stage is reached when you recognize that certain days are more stressful than others. You have insufficient time for personal needs, family, and friends. As you struggle to keep up with your stressful schedule and workload, your productivity levels begin to diminish. And you may begin to experience some mental and physical symptoms of stress, such as headaches, anxiety, changes in appetite, high blood pressure, and an inability to concentrate or focus. 
  • The chronic stress phase – Chronic stress sets in when you do nothing to manage the mounting stress of work or other commitments. As a result, your productivity levels decline, and you may start to feel overwhelmed. You begin to withdraw from social situations and exhibit symptoms of mood disorder. In extreme circumstances, some individuals may start to self-medicate with alcohol or drugs to escape their overwhelming negative emotions. 
  • The burnout phase – Burnout occurs when an individual has reached their limit and can no longer function normally. During this stage, you will neglect your personal needs and self-care and continue to isolate yourself socially. Along with other physical symptoms, headaches and fatigue may intensify. 
  • The habitual burnout phase – Those unable to recover from burnout and whose symptoms have become a part of their daily lives attain this level. This phase can have a detrimental effect on your career, relationships, and health and cause burnout syndrome or other long-term complications. Therefore, getting assistance as soon as possible is imperative if you are experiencing this phase of a nervous breakdown.

Usually comfort is found in extreme retrospect; that is, you look to times before the place of the fall, when that proverbial garden was still green and the metaphoric apple was still on the tree. You reach back for help from those you knew before all of that time, those without association.

And sometimes you get it, though usually not because there is an overwhelming urge in society to tell people it is a “phase” and they’ll “move past it.”

Ask them to do that to a soldier just back from war; tell them their issues are just a phase and they should move past it. How about this instead: listen. Tell them you’re there if they need you. Call them more than once to see how they’re doing, to talk about something completely present and benign.

Semantically, the words “nervous” and “breakdown” are deceiving because it isn’t the same “nervous” one feels when the roller coaster is clicking to the apex of the ride; it is an internal, simmering, indefinable nervousness more akin to complete and absolute helplessness so that even talking seems irrelevant. And it isn’t a “breakdown” in the category of the car no longer running because the starter is broken. It is more like a stall; all the parts are working, but you have a complete sense of an inability to move. You’re a deer in the headlights.

And often, quite dangerously, there is the overwhelming need to just end the thought process that fuels all of this.

Ask that soldier just back from war what their instincts are when they’re feeling this way. It isn’t to “talk about it” or be told anything at all. And the mere fact one might have to take drugs to get them through is a daily reminder swallowed with water that something is not right and any sense of hope is clearly synthetic.

So what is to be done?

Ironically, you accept that it was a phase you went through, and it is time to move on. You just do not, do not, absolutely do not want to be told that.

Because the dreams will come and you’ll see faces of people you used to eat lunch with, used to share an office with, and your depression with force you to wonder why you wasted so much time with people who couldn’t give a rat’s ass you ever existed at all. And that just fuels your sense of worthlessness. And the cycle begins.

Every single person has to decide for themselves how to deal with this. And no one can tell them how; even a therapist, though any therapist worth their weight already knows this and simply helps someone discover these things on their own.

It is as individual as your dreams.

If it were me? I mean, just speaking hypothetically here, but if it were me what would I do to somehow shed those deeply rooted and tightly clasped feelings of worthlessness?

My instinct of course would be to leave like I did throughout my twenties. Maybe I’d go back to Spain, or perhaps sail south on a forty-one foot Morgan Out Island named Pura Vida. Maybe I’d move to some mountains somewhere and go hiking. Yes, that would be nice too. That therapist worth their weight would somehow suggest that having plans like these, escape plans, is essential even though you know you’ll never follow through on any of it. That isn’t the point; the point is about possibility, about choice, about regaining that often taken for granted ability to make our own decisions, something that seems completely gone to a person with this level of depression and hopelessness. They need to feel possible.

It’s kind of like hope but not really. Hope implies some form of stagnancy, of waiting. It needs to be more kinetic than that, like saying, “Hey, let’s get an Airbnb in the Netherlands,” or “You know I think I’ll walk the same route this time instead of doing the Portuguese Route.”

Imagine a brain whose sense of “possibilities” has been extracted. Just for a moment, imagine a person who has not even a remote sense that anything good can possibly ever happen again.

That’s what we’re talking about.

And if you walk into any store today, anywhere, one out of every twelve people are feeling helpless. One out of every twenty completely abandoned.

+++

On the wall of an office I was in a few weeks ago is a poster of an open sky across some western vista. The quote from Richard Bach is one I remember from when I was young.

“Here’s a test to see if your mission on this earth is complete: If you’re alive, it isn’t.”

Too simple? Too elementary? Too, excuse me, pedestrian?”

Maybe.

But I saw the poster and thought of Spain, so there’s that.