After my stepfather’s sporting goods
store went bust in ‘55, my mother’s
school teacher salary barely supported us.
Dick finally found a bookkeeper job
at the territorial TB sanitarium,
north of Seward.
We moved from our trailer and shed
into a cramped staff apartment—
the arguments and shouting
never stopped.

My room was a closet
with a door
I’d close at night.
Radio to ear,
I’d listen
to Frankie Laine, Teresa Brewer, The Platters,
until the town’s only station
signed off before midnight
with a choral rendition
of the territorial song—
“The blue of the sea, the evening sky,
The mountain lakes, and the flow’rs nearby—“

I’d sing along, fly
amid delta clouds
of widgeons and pintails,
climb high ridges
to whistle with marmots,
nod off in fields of glacier lilies
lupine, paintbrush.

I journeyed back to Seward a few years ago, hiked down Fourth Avenue to the Alaska Shop, bought the souvenir mug I use daily–deep blue, Big Dipper and Polaris pointing true.

To that young man lying in the closet, I can only say, life got a whole lot better–but it took awhile.  Hang on, keep moving with the Arctic terns.

to help
my classmates decide
which candy bar to eat first,
I suggest, Eeny, meeny miney moe,
catch a nigger by the toe…

What’s that?
No one has heard the word.

My accent quickly disappears.
I soon learn to feel
smarter than the tough native
kids with parents in the TB sanitarium.

Seward, 1953

_______________________________________________

Here, thanks to  childhood relocation from Tennessee to Alaska,  the process of prejudice (and the role language plays) is crystallized, but not stymied.  Our deeply ingrained tendency to (mostly unconsciously) define “us vs. them” often displays a distressing  resilience, evolving right along with greater consciousness and sensitivity to diversity.  In this long-ago instance, it effortlessly made a localized “adjustment.”

Seward, Alaska, 1952

(No. 62 in a series of responses to Han-shan’s Songs of Cold Mountain)

Starting afresh in a new location is always a challenge to a kid, maybe especially one with no siblings.  I did this several times as a child–and learned, early on, that there is a place deep inside where we can go to survive.  Here, raw pain can somehow be handled–In My Room, as the Beach Boys once put it.  There may be an entry price; more importantly, it is vital not to get stuck there.  As ever, underlying the psychological impact is the essential experience of sitting alone under a solitary moon, even if lost and confused.  And it is in this sense that, even at such a impressionable time as described in this poem, “everyday is a good day,” as the old teaching story has it.

(Numeric reference to Han-shan’s poem reflects the order of presentation in Burton Watson’s translation, presented as Cold Mountain, Columbia University Press, 1970.)

That night my mother tells me
he is gone forever.
I numb, suspend
in dry shock.
-Remember everything he taught you.
-He taught me exactly how to dry
between my legs after a bath.
I’ll remember.

And I do:
I saw the towel forward and backward
on both sides of my genitals.
It works well,
leaves my crotch
feeling tingly.

(No. 41 in a series of responses to Han-shan’s Songs of Cold Mountain)

One of the few specific things I recall about my father was his instructing me how to towel between my legs. He and I would occasionally drive to a large, double-sized swimming pool in Murfreesboro, 30 miles southeast of our home in Nashville. On one of these outings, in the pool’s locker room, he imparted this wisdom. It was all I could think of in answer to my mother’s attempt to reassure both herself and me on the night he died.

This daily, post-showering ritual became part of my life long ago. Readying myself for a new day, an occasional shadow of grief or anger will surprise me, all these years later.

(Numeric reference to Han-shan’s poem reflects the order of presentation in Burton Watson’s translation, presented as Cold Mountain, Columbia University Press, 1970.)

Seward, Alaska, 1952

As a child in Alaska I quickly got the impression that my value as a human being had something to do with how competent a fisherman I became. My stepfather, a sport-minded man, reinforced the importance of this portal to manhood. I never measured up in his eyes, but that had to do with far more than fishing or with me. However, in the incident captured in this poem a kind, unknown grandfather gave me a hand with just the right touch. I was nine years old.

We form the Boys’ Alaskan Defense (B.A.D.) to save
our town from Commies. Our .22s, 16 gauges,
.30-30s will be turned from hunting
to higher purpose.
We haul K-rations, plasma units,
army tennis shoes, other essential stuff,
from poorly padlocked civil
defense bunkers,
stash our supplies in two abandoned
cabins up a nearby valley.

We train all summer at our hideouts—
throw knives at trees,
hack stumps with pickaxes—
but are always home for dinner.

My best friend, Marshall, is visiting
when my mother
lets in Tommy Roberts (oh, shit!),
district territorial policeman (he’s a hero to us all).
He wants to speak to Marshall and me,
separately.
Me, first.

Son, this is serious.
I nod.
Tommy reveals that a woman
and her berry-picking daughter
found stolen gear.
Something else, too:
A red baseball cap.
(Christ Almighty, Marshall’s mother—she sews
name tags onto everything.)

Any idea how it got there?

I tell him someone swiped Marshall’s hat,
that the thief must be the same person he’s after.
Later, Marshall says he gave
the same answer.

Tommy leaves, knowing
we know.
He has his men.

Then I tell Marshall I keep
detailed guerilla operation notes
on 3×5 index cards.
He just about shits
his pants.

Near a wooded stream
where we camped as Boy Scouts, fished, hunted,
we burn the evidence in a tiny fire,
sift ashes into the creek
slowly chant,
So dies the B.A.D.
So dies the B.A.D.

The seven of us in the BAD were 12 years old, had probably never heard of Joseph McCarthy, who’d shot his wad by 1955. Still, deep Cold War fears filtered down to us, mingled with the last of the golden baubles of our boyhood to create a heady mix of patriotism and army set fantasy. I’m thankful for law officers like old Tommy Roberts who had a finely tuned sense of the power of “a word to the wise.” It’s no longer such an innocent time.

Several years ago I visited my old friend, Marshall. At the time he still lived on the Kenai Peninsula with his wife and kids. A sometimes cop, sometimes Northern Slope security guard, he told me he went to college for a year or two, “majored in beating up Vietnam war protesters.” Nonetheless, our old connection held. We climbed a couple of thousand feet up Mt. Marathon, sat on a grassy perch looking down on Seward. Hours passed as we re-lived our late childhood and early adolescence, played out long ago on the living map below.

The Famous Flames were solid.

Eventually, the funereal four
returned with a lifeless James Brown,
gently propped him onto the stage,
curled a microphone into his hand.
Feebly, he rose, rasped into the mic,
Oh, baby, please…
don’t go.
We went insane.
We cried and shouted
in a roar that I still
feel in my
chest.

Oh, baby, please please please please please…
don’t go.

It was 1959, and the town was Pueblo. My friend and I were into black music as much as two white kids going to high school in Colorado Springs, 40 miles north, could be. We listened to rhythm and blues on the powerful Mexican border stations (the “X’s”) and haunted Rhythm Records, the only black record store in C. Springs. In a way, early James Brown was like early Elvis Presley–they both pointed us straight into the wilderness.

That night in Pueblo, James Brown taught passion. I think he changed my life.

Always a showman, he closed out his final act on Christmas Day, 2006.

The only other passenger
on the San Bus was Howard
Rhudy, a maintenance
man at the TB sanitarium.
Everyone knew Howard
wrote poetry and was
scholarly.
Howard saw me
absorbing words
copied from The Platters’ latest
hit. I handed him the page
when he asked to see it.
He finally rasped,
Did you write this?

Oh, no, it’s from the radio.
I was thrilled
that he would think me
capable
of writing these words.
Frightened,
that someday
I might
have these feelings
for real.

Seward, Alaska, 1956

Here was one of those relatively rare moments of encouragement (and to write, of all things) from an older person as I was growing up.

Of course, popular music has long served as a training manual for adolescents figuring out how to feel. In most cases the lesson was, and is, “I can’t live without you,” an emotionally fused, utterly inadequate and immature way to approach intimate relationship. I took the hook, as most of us did, and have spent a very long time growing beyond that approach.

It’s nothing
but a spawning salmon
full of
worms.

Once again
to my mother’s husband,
I do not measure up,
will never be
a fisher-
man.

Seward, Alaska, 1952

My father died when I was seven, and my mother remarried when I was nine. We left Tennessee, journeyed over the Alcan Highway to Alaska. From her husband, and from the place, I quickly got the message that manhood (very important) was in no small part measured by how well one hunted and fished. At the time, I had no experience with either. Described here is a fish I managed to catch, but that still got away. It took a lot with it.

Seward, 1953

Here, at an intersection of nature and nurture, can be observed the origin of good, clean warfare. All ironically superimposed on the the remnants of a global war that we knew of through old war movies and the stories of our parents. This was fun, but within two years, the same group of friends would be unconsciously swayed by Cold War rhetoric and begin worrying and childishly preparing for the Commies to invade our Alaskan home.

The old facilities around Seward were never used to repel an actual Japanese invasion, but with war activities so near (e.g. in the Aleutian Islands), there must have been enough concern to fortify the place. The “prisoner of war” camp never housed any foreign soldiers, but was occasionally used as a brig.