Patrick Egan's Blog, page 69

Confessions of a Reluctant Portal

People either hate me or love me.  I wish they would decide and stop being so fickle.  People are so fickle.

I can’t help being what I am.

Well, maybe that isn’t totally true.  Perhaps I am paying for some long-forgotten sin or just ‘doing time’ while I wait for the cycle.  But, don’t think I haven’t entertained the idea, dare I say it, that I am actually being rewarded in this heaven for a good deed that no person on earth can recall?

People look at me and see a simple mail slot.  But, I am much more than that.

I can be a savior and allow a person’s day to be the happiest they’ve had in a year…or a decade.  Or, I can be bearer of the bleakest news.

As the savior, through me can pass the post card from a foreign land, a note from the girl (or guy) down the hall asking a favor…or a date, a tax return to help with the rent, an invitation to a party or a letter declaring everlasting love and forgiveness to the one who sits in a tatty chair and watches and waits for a signal from me that something is about to drop to the floor.

As the gate-keeper for sadder stuff, I can let slide a sympathy card, a Dear John letter, a post card from a missing child that says they will never come home again…”thanks, but no, I’m happy here in Mexico”, a notice of overdue rent, a summons, a shabby piece of junk mail, a phone bill, an electric bill or the newspaper that carries the obituary of one’s childhood sweetheart.

People fail to realize that I can see two worlds at once. On one side, I see the indifference of the letter-carriers as they amble down the hallway.  They might glance at the return address; holding up the hallway light, but only to smile, frown or simply shuffle through their fist-full of mail.  Looking inward, I can see the loneliness, grief, misery, the bottle and the gun on the table, and the chin of an unshaven man or the mascara stained cheeks of a bottle-blonde who put on too much lipstick on a Saturday night …again.  I may even be witness to a happy couple, she in a polka-dot dress and he in a stained white undershirt, playing a game of canasta on the kitchen table, two bottles of long-neck Pabst Blue Ribbon at their elbows.

I am also the revealer of dark secrets…as seen when a pencil pushes my lid up and a pair of wet panic stricken eyes peer through me to witness acts of betrayal and lust.

But always in the background is the faded gardenia wallpaper, a dresser with a yellowed doily and a vase of plastic flowers.  In the outside world of the hallway, a fresh coat of tan paint is added every year.  My door is slathered with a chocolate brown high gloss enamel. Someone, though, takes the time to apply gobs of Brasso to me and makes me shine, for awhile.  This inside room changes little over the year.  Same set, different cast.

So, what about my fate?  In another time I may have been fashioned into a knocker on a stately manor house, the brass knob of a bordello in Memphis, a germ-covered handle on a schoolroom full of frightened and sickly children.  This building will eventually fall or get razed and I’ll be recycled into something else entirely. A key maybe, or a tap-dancing cleat, or a hub nut on a New York City taxi.  One way or another I will exist indefinitely…unlike those whose lives play out on either side of me.

I just wish people would decide if they love me or hate me.

I’m just not used to swinging both ways.

I Never Met a Map I Didn’t Like

Maps, like wild and green-eyed Irish redheads, are irresistible. They have a magnetic ability to draw me closer to them…to look, to touch and to stand in awe at what they can reveal to you.  There are a zillion kinds of maps. This space and my time does not allow me to tally them for you.  Nautical charts with numbers and bearings scattered all over (along with the always beautiful compass rose), the odd spatial effect you get when you stare at a shaded topographic map and the artistry of a geologic maps color coded to the rocks age and stratum are just three humble examples that dwell in the world of maps.

I collect maps, maps of all kinds. I have city street guides of European cities, star charts, watershed maps…I could go on.  Mostly, though, I like topographic maps that describe the three dimensional land on a flat sheet of paper.  I venture into the wild areas for hiking and kayaking and without a topo I am lost, and not just metaphorically.  Anyone who wanders more than 200 yards away from their car in places like the Adirondack Mountains deserves to be given the bill for the helicopter search.

I love maps but lately I’ve been thinking that I love them too well and too much.  I have no more room to store them, rolled or folded. Every corner in my office has or will be the home for a map.  Maps and books are taking over my small creative space.  Like pods from the Mother Ship, they must reproduce when I’m not looking, because when I awake the next morning, more of them need to be filed away.  Maybe this is akin to some kind of addiction…there is the new map on my shelf but I don’t remember buying it.  

I get atlases so I can have many maps between two covers.  The trouble with that is that the new atlases are so large, so heavy, that if you fell asleep with one on your chest, it’s mass would cause you to cease breathing and you would die. I don’t want that to happen.  After all, how would it look in the obit page of the local daily: the ambulance crew found his body beneath a 72 pound copy of the National Geographic Atlas of the World.

So when I turn away from my maps, I pick up my Gibson guitar and strum “The Ballad of Gerardus Mercator.” And when my fretting fingers get sore, I’ll pick up my walking cane and wander around outside.  I might take that path I just noticed the other day.  

I just hope I don’t make a wrong turn because I left my map at home.

These Haunted Mountains That I Love

Many of my blog posts tend toward the melancholy.  The themes have often been about loss, grief, aloneness and death.  That’s the way my mind works.  I stare at the rain.  I walk through the fog.  I wander old and forgotten cemeteries, reading the names, dates and wondering about lives lived a century ago.  It’s not depression (I’ve done that), it’s a sense of what was here once and is now gone forever.  The following post follows the rules my mind sets for me when I sit down at my MAC.

I live in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State.  We moved here over a year ago after buying a house on a lake in 2000.  I’m living a dream…a lifelong dream to be here full-time.  I climbed my first mountain when I was five years old.  That was followed by years of family camping at the State campsites like Golden Beach.  When my family dynamics changed and my three brothers began to grow up and go our separate ways, I headed for the High Peaks and began to summit the Forty-Six.  When my backpacking friends began to lose interest I moved onto wilderness canoeing.  I travelled onto Alaska and worked for the USGS.  I lived on glaciers thousands of years old, but the Adirondacks always called me back.  The smell of the balsam, the sand beaches and the blue-green crystals of the Opalescent River.  No other place was like it.

The protagonist in this tale, you need to know at this point, was not my father as one would expect.  Rather, it was my older brother, Chris.  He showed me the canoe waterways and the routes to Marcy.  He was my mentor and my backwoods guide.  He taught me many things but one briefly spoken comment lives with me to this day and can darken the brightest shimmering sunlight.  ”The Adirondacks,” he said, almost off-handedly, “was all about death.”

These days I live the life I thought I always wanted.  At last count, we have a 1920′s antique canoe, two other canoes, five kayaks, snowshoes, X-country skis and four bicycles.  What’s not to be content about?  To be here every day of the year…watch the seasons change and feel the peace.  But amidst all this, something is missing.

These lakes, mountains, streams and trails are harboring a ghost.  They are truly haunted.  I can barely walk out beyond the light of the campfire when I can feel “it” following me.  So, I sit and stare out the window at the rain and nap and lose myself in finding ways to avoid confronting the spirit that can make me weep.

Chris and I stood on many mountaintops in the fog, rain and total darkness.  Once we got lost coming off the back side of Colden and, by all rules of nature, should not have survived the sub-zero night without a flashlight.

He owned an antique guide boat that he bought in the 1950′s somewhere at a camp on the upper reaches of Raquette Lake.  He paid perhaps $50 for it.  My mother thought he was nuts to give his money away on something that was old and disused.  A person could see sunlight through the planking.  It became a family joke as we waited and watched him slowly and lovingly restore the craft at his place underwood the apple tree in our backyard.  It took about twenty-five years since he was only able to work on it during college and graduate school breaks.  The result?  I was with him as we made a slow and easy tour of Long Pond when a camper stopped washing his pans and came down to the shore to have a closer look. (This was years before the Guide Boat Renaissance).  The poor fellow, wiped the drool from his lips and jokingly (?) offered his wife in exchange for the boat.

I sat in the “swells” seat on one trip through Slang Pond when a sudden lightening storm-swept over us.  Chris calmly pulled the boat under some evergreens and held onto a branch while the violent bolts struck around us and the rain water began to deepen at the boats bottom.  All the while, he just grinned at me, enjoying every clap of thunder and drop of cold precipitation.

I was lost with him in the woods at Long Pond.  That would be bad enough but for the fact that it was pitch dark at the time.

I remember sitting at a campfire one evening when we spoke of how we’d like to die.  I said I saw myself, sitting alongside the trail with my water bottle and Kelty pack beside me.  A mountain peak, Haystack perhaps was our goal.  The path rose gently ahead of us but melted into a bright light that was golden and blinding.  It was then, I told Chris, that the legendary DEC ranger, Clint West “Keeper of Marcy’s Door” would wander out of the bright light, take his ranger hat off and wipe his brow.  I calmly watched him stride up to me.  I knew in my mind that he had passed away in 1953.   Clint stopped and said: “There’s a lot of trail work to be done up yonder, Pat.  ”Come on,”  he said gently and with serene comfort, “Let’s go.”  I shouldered my pack and went off with him…into the light.  In my story, I remember looking back at Chris and waving a final good-bye.  I looked back at him again and saw a certain sadness creep into eyes.  He waved back and then turned and looked back down the trail we had just hiked.  Chris listened with a smile.  Then he said simply that he’d like to pass on by having a massive coronary while under his guide boat, on a long portage.  Interestingly, that was not how he “walked on.”  Me?  I’m still looking for that light up ahead on the trail.

I can assure you, these few bits are but the surface of a deep pool of memory.  But those stories are for another time.

So, here I am.  Owning all the accoutrements of outdoor adventure and unable to find the peace these mountains once promised me.

I can’t drive a back road, turn a corner on a trail, circle an island for a campsite or stare into the deep cold waters of the lakes without the ghost of Chris standing there, just out of reach. I have trouble looking up at a cumulus-heavy sky and not feel or see him.

Because he’s everywhere, and not just in my imagination but also in the molecules that make the raindrops and silt of the rivers. And, someday far into the future, perhaps a part of him will lodge among those blue-green crystals of the Opalescent River.

                   non semper erit aestas

Long Live the King

So, now it’s more or less certain that the bones of Richard III were found buried under a car park in Leicester, England.  I happened to be in London when the news broke that researchers were looking closely at the site.  At first it sounded like a bit from a “Monty Python” sketch…but then I began to read the details and wonder.

It seems so logical.  Here we have a King that not that well liked in his time.  He is reputed to have been killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.  It was the battle that ended the “War of the Roses” and succeeded in opening the way for the Tudors to rule England for about 117 years.

But a King, in a car park? Now, that’s surreal.  But think about.  A battle raged.  Men died in messy ways and there was confusion all about.  His body was put into a hole on the grounds of the nearby Grayfriars Abbey.  There it lay, decomposing and nearly becoming soil until some scholars decided in 2012 to have a look at the area where the Abbey was located.

Using state-of-the-art techniques and then DNA analysis, it has now fairly certain that they had located the old misshapen monarch himself.

Pity poor Richard.  Vilified by Shakespeare and history in general, he kept a solitary watch on the substratum of Leicester.  Now, what town or city in England doesn’t need a car park?  Try to find one when you driving on the left and scratching around the great sites trying to avoid hurting a pedestrian.  It’s not easy.

So Leicester has one less car park but England has gained the bones of a key player in the history of Britain.

Without the foibles and darkness of guys like Richard, where would Shakespeare be?  Probably sipping some grog in a Stratford ale house, pinching the wench and dreaming up weird characters with twisted spines.

Long Live the King!

An American in Dorset (an excerpt)

Preface

As I understand it, I am not allowed to donate blood.  I have the British Government to partly thank for this dilemma.  It so happens that I resided in Great Britain during the years when Mad Cow Disease was in its very early stages.  I say, “partly thank” because even though MCD began to develop in their herds on their watch, no one forced me to eat a Steak and Kidney Pie every other night in the corner of a cozy pub, over the course of a year.

That part was my uninformed choice.

The incubation period of Mad Cow Disease seems to be measured in decades, so if I had contracted it in the mid-1980s, any aberrant behavior on my part would have manifested itself by now. (There goes something else I can’t blame for my odd personality disorders of late.)

Anyway, I can’t give blood.

~~~~

I didn’t go to England on a dare.  I didn’t go on a whim, or to escape a vengeful husband or boyfriend, to evade charges of mail fraud in Utah, to finish my thesis on John Keats or to search for that mythical British bar-wench who still remembered what a low cut serving blouse was for (although I admit I was somewhat curious about that last one).

I went because it was the only way, I thought at the time, to keep my sanity from slipping away from me and allowing me to fall into a dark place.  The root causes that led me to England happened years earlier.

~~~~

I had been teaching in public schools for seven years followed by another three at a private school in New England.

During my time in the public school, I often felt humiliated, oppressed and undervalued on an almost daily basis.  To be sure, this is and was an old complaint among educators.

My story does not begin when I entered a classroom for the first time.  If it were only that simple, I would have little to tell.  My tale begins this way:

I was on my way to class one afternoon. The late bell had already sounded.  I was tardy for my own class because I had felt the need to slip down to the “teachers lounge” for a cup of tea.  This “lounge” was actually a section in the basement of the boiler room of a building erected in 1908.  The few times I had sat at the faculty worktable to have a tea, I could hear the flush of every toilet in the building as the water gushed through the pipes over my head.  This building, I should mention, was designated for the ninth grade only.  Just outside my classroom window was a new $10,000,000 facility for grades ten through twelve.  I climbed the five flights of stairs to get to my room.  On the way, just outside my door I ran into a student who belonged at his desk in my class.  He already had several clashes with the law and his dislike of me was palpable.  I touched his elbow and said, “let’s go”.

At that point he jumped me and began swinging.  I crashed against the lockers and kept my head turned away as he swung at me to avoid having my glasses smashed into my eyes.  We banged against one wall of lockers and he swung me across the hall.  We both collided against another set of metal doors.  A guidance counselor leapt from his hallway desk (we were short on offices) and pulled him off me.  Ten seconds later I was standing in front of my class; they were clueless as to what had happened, and I tried to appear “normal”.  I leaned against my file cabinet and looked down at my hands shake like one stricken with palsy.

I decided to file charges for assault.  I felt strongly that teachers needed protections and it was up to me to send a strong message.  This was the only way I could do it.

The Principal declined to support me.  The teachers union turned their back on me.  In the end I went to the Magistrate alone.  I recall sitting in my car in the parking area of the courthouse listening to Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” and agonizing over what I was about to do.  This kid was already neck deep in trouble with the school.  Was I saving and serving my profession or was I burying this boy further into adolescent hell?

I settled out of court.

On another occasion, I was sitting on the stage of the school theater.  I was in charge of a study hall that contained about eighty-five students, mostly ninth and tenth graders.  I glanced out at the group and noticed a male student with his back turned to me and leaning toward the floor.  About five minutes before the bell rang to end the class, another boy came up to me and whispered, “He has it in his sock.”

I headed the offending student off at the door.

“Would you come with me for a moment?” I asked.

I led him to the Vice Principals office located down the hall.  We stood before his desk and I explained what happened.

“Well let’s see what’s in your sock,” the Administrator said.

Out came several items of drug paraphernalia, a pipe, some papers and a baggie of what I suspected was weed.

My job being done, I returned to my classroom.  I had a free period.  As soon as I sat down, I heard the yelling and running.

“Get him!” screamed the Vice Principal.

I stepped out of my room only to catch a glimpse of the student running past me and toward the stairwell. He descended two stairs at a time.  He reached the ground floor porch before I did, but I was in time to see him throw several items into the field near the school.

It was over in a minute.  The student was led away and I spent the rest of my free period poking through the brush.  I found the pipe and bag of “weed”.

My class schedule went something like this: I had five classes of ninth grade Earth and Space Science.  Each class had about thirty students.  Consequently I would find myself teaching the same topics, repeatedly, to about one hundred and fifty kids. There were no lab facilities at all.  I had to meet my classes in different locations for a few years.  In some of these old and creaky rooms I would hear my own voice bounce back at me from the rear wall.  I did not like the echo I heard.  I bored myself and could not help but wonder what these kids thought of me.  I should say in all fairness that the school district was recovering from a devastating flood in 1972 and class sessions had to be arranged according to what buildings were repaired and which ones were destined to be leveled.

What I had come to feel as a growing irrelevancy of my professional life hit me hard one fine day.  To earn a few extra bucks I signed on to do “homebound” teaching a state mandated system set up to instruct students who couldn’t be physically in the classroom for one reason or another.  One afternoon, I was at the home of a sixteen-year-old girl.  Her mother was puttering in the kitchen.  I sat at the girl’s desk in her bedroom and was in the process of teaching her about the formation of clouds as a function of condensation.

This girl was about five months pregnant.  She probably would not be finishing school.

She sat and listened quietly.  She was a nice girl, very polite and attentive.  I stopped midway through my fascinating description of cloud formation and drank some water.  During this short break, I asked myself about the quality of this girl’s future and, more to the point, what the hell clouds had to do with anything relevant at this point in her young life.

She earned an “A” for simply not putting a carving knife into my chest.

So, that is where I found my emotional self in the late 1970’s.

~~~~

I drove an orange MG Midget at the time.  My mind and hair should have been blowing free and easy to the disco rhymes of ABBA pulsating from an 8-Track player bolted securely below my dashboard.   As the useless sense of my life grew within me, I began to dread the long drive to the school from the farmhouse where I lived.  I needed to leave the house about 6 AM.  The number of the mornings began increasing when I stopped listening to the radio.  Instead I would pull off to the side of the road at 7 AM to weep hot and painful tears.  The fear in me was growing and spreading like a tumor of the soul.

I wasn’t afraid of the kids.  Most of them liked me.  That’s not what made me cry at dawn.  Instead, I was terrified by a life that seemed to trail off somewhere into future time ending on a hill near a tree in a pasture, or an empty seat at a honky-tonk bar at 4 PM, or later against a rusty concrete bridge abutment.

What took me from that place, wiping away my tears in an orange MG Midget to a teacher’s desk in Dorset, England several years later?  That’s the story I wish to tell.

 

 

Available in Kindle form from Amazon.

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