Flight North

Settling comfortably into a window seat the next afternoon, whole row to myself on the lightly booked mid winter flight,
mind drifted back to the first trip north eight or nine years earlier.  First time in an airliner, still feel the trepidation upon looking out the window at the wings flexing as the heavily loaded 707 lumbered away from SeaTac terminal.  Then herded into a classic old Connie, four Pratt and Whitney turboprops rattling every rivet in the aging airframe, crawling westward out of Anchorage under a ragged looking low ceiling, cannery crew drunks quieter now in the turbulent air.

That job came to me in the same way as Phil’s call yesterday, unexpected voice on the telephone barking out a set of instructions for a trip north.  It wasn’t a job offer so much as an order to be there at the appointed time.  Almost wrote it off as some kind of crank..  Ten minutes later Jon called and he had also been offered the job by the same guy, who as it turned out his mother remembered from the old Vashon community, and it was the real deal.  He and I applied for the work back in march, Phil gave us the name of the boat down in Lake Union. It worked out very well for me, paying nearly all my college expenses working summers in Jack’s finishing school, as it was known in some quarters referring to the boss’s preference for inexpensive teen age labor for the short, busy Red Salmon season in the Bay.

Anticipation of the hearty dinner in the Commander’s comfortable mess room began to dim when I checked in for the flight out of Anchorage to Kodiak.  The two hour delay extended into an indefinite delay, followed by a single word, canceled. Settled into a single room in the cheapest hotel on the list, hoping for better weather in the morning. 

The dry cold of the Anchorage night with the old radiator hissing and clanking, and a ruddy loom from the flashing neon sign around the corner seemed much more like the seedy part of down town Spokane than my boyhood images of the great north country.  Sometime in the night laughter from the street below brought to mind the time the Old Man stuttered his way through what must have been Aunt Norma’s instruction that he talk to us boys about sex.

I don’t think Jon or I realized until much later that the Old man was trying to warn us about the dangers of venereal diseases, as he carried us back in time, but we certainly enjoyed the vivid imagery of the story. 

“It was the only place we could get a shot of whiskey in town, and we had to have it on account of it being such dinging cold day."
“That old whore didn’t want to let us to leave there without having a little piece of something else, but we were too scared to touch it.” 

Pausing to make the right turn from Bothell highway onto one forty fifth street, fisherman's hand clicking the shift lever up into third gear and went on, “You see the year before older brother had taken us to the wax museum down here in town, where saw what happens to boys who are careless like that.”

Jon and I, ninth grade boys, could almost taste the scene, rutted muddy street,  random scattering of clapboard houses up from a high black wharf in the tiny out port hamlet.  Dim, single light globe on frayed cord hanging over a little table, iron bed stead under yellow shade window where the business of the establishment transpired, tall black liquor bottle dirty shot glasses.  Older brother acting confident, showing his teen age ward the ways of the world; mistress of the house appearing huge and frightening in a city boys imagination.  Years later some of the guys off the cannery boat spent an evening in just such a house, and it couldn’t have been more different from the imagined scene from the Old Man’s youth.  The old whore turned out to be as much a social worker and nurse as a working girl, expertly tending to our skipper who had had way to much to drink while the hippy kids smoked a few joints and listened to record albums in the living room of the cozy little house a couple roads up from the waterfront.  No business that evening as far as I could see, halfway suspected that part of the story to be nothing more than small town gossip, doesn't matter one way or the other now, and poor old Bjørn our skipper dead less than a year later, lost on a trip out to the winter crabbing grounds.

Hearing the wheels clunk up in place under my feet as the 737 lifted sharply off the runway in Anchorage at eleven the next morning, filled me with a delightful get away feeling, clearing out the nagging fear that at the last instant the weather could close in again and keep me on the ground for another day.  The contrast between deep blue sky and billows of stark white cloud banks with patches of ocean visible below was spectacular, gluing my face to the window until I almost got a crick in my neck.  Lunch in the Commander with the boys at last!  I especially looked forward to seeing cousin Tom.  We used to have the best times at family gatherings if Tom was around with his supercharged energy and the ability to keep everyone laughing until our sides hurt.  One thing worried me just a little.  The last time I had seen Tom a huge political argument flared up about which I still felt a bit embarrassed.  Must be seven or eight years ago by now.  When was it, just after Thanksgiving in the fall of sixty six, or could have been early in the winter of sixty seven, can’t really remember for sure?   My brother Justin and I shared a tiny two room flat in a broken down old building that Norm and Simon owned over on Eastlake Avenue.  It was an ideal pad for a couple kids, a quick commute around the lake to Seattle Pacific where we took our classes, and an easy walk over the U district. We loved that little pad, two ancient wobbly glass double hung wood frame windows opened onto the almost quintessential beautiful Seattle vista; south Lake Union, Space Needle and down town skyline in the days before big city boxes reaching for the clouds dominated the scene.

The place was tiny, a narrow room in which two beds, frames trashed in favor of what we visualized as beat-nick style interior decoration, matrices along on the floor.  An old gas range that had to be lit with wooden matches in the kitchen, chipped porcelain sink, unmatched separate hot and cold water faucets with a miniature side board on spinally legs in the other corner.  Some of the other tenets on that floor shared a toilet in the hall, where we also took our showers, but our luxury apartment featured a two by two room in which a high stool toilet provided all the comfort a guy needed.  In no time the walls of this tiny room were completely covered with pictures and posters, fitted it out with a deep crimson light bulb.  The page torn from Helix taped to the inside of the door on which Janice Joplin’s cleavage invited us into a world of excitement and mystery almost came to life in that ruddy glow.

Justin and his buddy Ron, who was having trouble lying his way out of the Navy that fall, had been a part of the tail end of the folk music scene around town for a couple years, hanging out in coffee houses over in the U district.  The beaded door curtain from the old P house on the Ave somehow ended up hanging between out living room and kitchen, a historical artifact of which we were most certainly very proud.  There was probably as much influence from Maynard G. Krebs character in the silly old T.V. show as Keruac or Ferlingetti in our image of an alternative life style, but we were having fun living on our own for the first time.  None of us had gotten on Kesey’s bus yet,  but there was a palpable sense of optimism in the air, a longing anticipation that the world was on the verge of a magical transformation that would revolutionize everything.  Historical accounts of that era usually don’t get this part of the story, almost certainly intentionally edited out to avoid more complicated evaluation of the mood of the times.  I have often wondered what was really going on in our minds.  Where did such a prevailing anticipation of a better future really come from, where did it go?  It wasn’t just a local thing either, I have talked about these days with people who were in different parts of the country, with different cultural backgrounds, who say the same things about these middle years of the sixties; an overwhelming sense of optimism for a better future that was about to blossom.  Just what these changes were going to be wasn’t at all clear.  It was more profound than simplistic materialism, came ahead of, may have prompted the sex drugs and rock-in-roll era that that made a more lasting impression on the national psyche, and seemed to wash over large segments of the country all at once.  How this mood melted into the rampant materialism of the eighties and nineties is also an interesting question for which I do not have an answer.  My father used to blame the hippy philosophy for his two son’s failure to immerse ourselves into conventional careers, but if this were true, why then did the generation who flocked to Golden Gate park during the summer of love and Woodstock a couple years later morph into the yuppie generation, obsessed with all the trappings of material wealth and power.  Maybe if Justin and I had embraced the so called hippie movement of our youth rather than just observe it from the side lines we too would have clawed our way up some dead end corporate ladder along with all the others.

Cousin Tom apparently hadn’t felt the spirit of change, at least not in the same way as the little circle of guys who were lounging on the matrices and thrift store pillow furniture lining the walls of the little beat pad on Eastlake when the thickly painted wood door rattled with a forceful knock.   It was Tom and Jon, framed in the glare of the hallway lighting pouring past them into our smoky candle lit den.  Heartily welcomed in, each quickly offered a baby food jar of the houses finest wine from the gallon jug that sat on the little kitchen table next to our father’s old Royal typewriter where we tapped out our college papers on non party evenings.  A pot of canned beef stew was still warm on the ancient gas range, but they boys had eaten at Dick’s on the way as usual.  I can’t say for sure, but it is possible that Jon never drove past an open Dick’s drive in without stopping off for a Coke if not burger and fries.

The convivial atmosphere of joy at seeing good friends quickly changed when Tom announced that he had enlisted in the army, and was on his way to Southeast Asia to kill some commies.  No one in the room was what could be called a political radical in any sense of the word.  We would have vehemently argued against nationalizing industry, far from enamored with the Soviet system, most of us were just beginning to edge our way toward the Democratic party after growing up in households that were best categorized as Eisenhower Republican.  In my case, it was several more years before I begun to understand the vital role played by trade unionism in the growth of the middle class in this country, which may well have been the underlying foundation for the flash of optimism we were feeling in the prospects for a brighter future for our generation.  But we were vehemently against the war that was heating up at that time, and aghast at hearing someone our own age who believed in the whole red scare theory of communist world domination.  We thought poor Tom was just confused over a few facts, and with careful explanation he could be set straight.

It is entirely possible that Tom was the first person any of us had met in our own age group who believed in the radical right wing interpretation of current events.  Sure, there was always someone’s old man, veteran of the Great Depression and war who liked to go off on us about this stuff.   These guys could be easily dismissed as brain atrophied from old age.  Remember, we were conditioned not to trust anyone over thirty in those days, and we just laughed them off for not realizing that their fight against fascism had been an entirely different kettle of fish.  Throughout the entire era when practically everyone I knew dodged and lied our way out of the military I never met a single guy who didn’t admit that if it were the same situation as the nineteen forties we would have been first in line to enlist. 

 With the military draft providing the cannon fodder for the ruling elite, it never occurred to us than anyone not trying to use heroism in battle as a career stepping stone would buy into what we saw as a dying vestige of colonialism that was being waged primarily to generate profit the weapons industries.  Tom didn’t see things quite this way.  To him it was a classic struggle of good against evil.  Worldwide domination by evil communists, sweeping from the Kremlin, first through China then down into Viet Nam, and if not stopped then and there the tide would overwhelm any and all peoples caught in its path.  He was unmoved by the argument that if the people of Viet Nam had savagely fought against the Japanese, then ran the French back to Paris when they attempted to re-colonize after world war two, and were stubbornly resisting the American attempt to take over where the French left off, then why would they suddenly decided to roll over to Soviet colonization?  To us the reasoning was compelling, and even admitting that there were certainly individuals in the country for whom things would not go well when American support ended, the overall effect in historical terms would be better to end the war immediately than let it drag on, maybe even get worse than it was.  No one in the room that night would have ever guessed that the war was just getting started, with nearly a decade of gruesome fighting yet to come.        

The argument got hot.  Tom, a big guy with quick wit and very sharp mind held his beliefs passionately, and was not about to give a single inch on any point presented.  Dogged persistence was built into his personality, and truth is for those of us who loved him as a brother we would never have wanted him to be any other way.  He jumped into things with a passion that Jon and I could hardly hope to match, and in many ways we looked up to him as a role model.  Maybe not to the extent of following him over to the army recruiter’s office, but certainly in many other ways throughout our lives.  In response to his showing us his straight razor one time, we went down to Good Will and found razors and straps of our own, scraping the fuzz on our chins diligently in the old style for several years.  At school in Oregon he had made stroke position in the eight man crew on the strength of his Oklahoma farm work strengthened back and will to succeed.  Jon and I followed his lead, turning out for crew over at Green Lake.  It was a private club with both girls and boys boats.  They let us practice in a barge filled with inexperienced rowers, and both of us did fairly well, and  I made it up to a seat in a girls four place boat a couple of times, almost keeping up with them.  But the day I was picked for a space in the men’s eight it was a total disaster.  Lucky to get out of there still walking after being beat up with the sweep hitting me in the chest hard every time I caught a crab and lost control of the heavy ore.  After that Jon and I still showed up at the lake a few times, but soon got the message that we didn’t have the right stuff when the coach sort of overlooked us when he was picking people for places in the boats for the practice runs.  Our careers on the water ended before doing any more damage to ourselves of the equipment. 

Tom’s mother Esther, who always called him Tommy, was an older sister of my father.  I can still hear her almost gasp in a mix of pride and exasperation, “of course you know Tommy, he has to be all boy!” She had been talking about Tom playing the piano at the time, but I recall her saying it more than once over the years.  He must have been in high school, could have been a year or two earlier, when we all had piled into cars wildly driving I-5 from Seattle down to the small college town in Oregon where  for a classic family Thanksgiving holiday.  Early on in the visit Aunt Esther had insisted that Tom show us the piano piece he had been learning.  With much loud protests he finally sat down to the keyboard and began to play.  Always the rough and tumble guy, Jon and I had been amazed to hear how good he was playing piano, truth is we were more than a little surprised that he played the piano at all.  Our image of an Oklahoma farm boy, motorcycle rider, into models and fireworks didn’t include classical music.  But there he was, almost led to the piano bench by his mothers grip on an ear, settling into a classical piece of music which he, at least to our ears was doing a very good job of navigating.  Not out of character for very long, the piece quickly began to swell into dramatic crescendos.  Each time he reached a point where the volume swelled Tom began letting out dramatic gasps and hisses, almost foaming at the mouth as if he were the Phantom himself, deep in his chambers under the Opera House, moaning over the keyboard of a mighty organ, captive damsel watching in fascinated horror.  With each energetic “H a a a a a” Jon and I shrieked with laughter, laughing until tears ran down our cheeks and we rolled on the couch in glee.  Egged on with an appreciative audience Tom gave the piece a second and third go, putting more energy into the performance at each turn.  It was a truly memorable performance, like everything we ever did that included Tom it was wildly energetic and great fun.   That was only time I ever saw him play the piano, never heard it mentioned again, have no idea if it is something that he continued to do in later years, probably not.     She and Jon’s mother Norma were always very close.  As a kids we took things for granted, incidents that were fresh in the adults memory were only often repeated stories in our little worlds, but that generation must certainly have been deeply impacted by the specter of early and frequent death in the family.  In addition to at least one stillborn, these girls lost two older sisters to early death, losing their father before his fiftieth birthday, and a much fawned upon younger brother to an infection brought on my  freak spider bite as well.  From the post antibiotic generation’s perspective this seems excessive, but in the long view it is my generation who has been shielded from the realities of human mortality, forgetting that we have inherited the capability of soldiering on through horror and heartbreaks of this kind from ten thousand generations who came before, each one with its own stories of tragedy and loss.   Somehow they had managed to get from a tiny back water community on a Puget Sound island into an east coast university, where Esther married a dashing young post doc who ended up with two PhD degrees, philosophy and theology and started that branch of the family, settling in the mid west for several years before coming out to a small college town in the lush Willamette valley in Oregon sometime during the early sixties. 

Where our parents generation had been shaped by early death and the loss of a prestigious, lucrative business in the community as a result of possible underhanded dealings by business partners after Grandpa Pete passed, Tom’s formative years were impacted by mid-west values engrained through farm work out on the prairies of Oklahoma.  While my brother, Jon and I spent summers lollygagging in the back yard shade, hardly called upon to do more than maybe take the kitchen trash out a couple times a week, Tom’s was doing a man’s work out on the farm.  Somehow an arrangement was made at a fairly early age where Tom moved in with a farm family every year as soon as school was out and spent the holiday weeks doing the farm chores and riding a tractor in the fields, often for fifteen hours a day.  This sounded like a fantastic adventure to us at the time, although one wonders how he really felt about being away from home working on the farm while other kids his age were kicking back with family and friends during the summer breaks from school.  It was an education that none of the collage boys lounging around the apartment that evening could even imagine.  Add to this the influence from a father who was powerfully conservative both politically and personally, and it is easy to understand how Tom landed in Seattle on his way to boot camp with a somewhat different world view.     

Lights from the city reflecting through the ancient glass window distorted into long streaks sparkling in the green glass of the now nearly empty wine jug on the table as the political argument began to reach a crescendo.  Mike, the leading voice of calm, reasoned dialogue studiously stuffing and lighting his pipe as he crafted his next line of argument, Roger somewhat nervously sipping from a dark brown Lucky Logger bottle that he preferred over our cheap wine,  chimed in with salient points, and Kenny, leaning in the corner fumbling with chords on his guitar, great shock of curly red hair obscuring his face in shadow, apparently aloof from the whole scene, occasionally raising a fist and repeating the slogan, “off the pig,” through a slightly crooked smile.  Tom responded point for point, throwing his best pitches with art and power, painting a picture of the horror; the red tide of communism closing icy fingers around the throat of western civilization.  His creative use of language and quick wit combined with a deep intellect pressed on with the warning that if we failed to act now, the commies would soon be marching up Eastlake Avenue in front of our little apartment, engaging in wonton slaughter at every corner. “You guys can’t just sit here doing nothing while they are over running the entire world!”   

Enjoying the theatrics of the moment every bit as much as the merits of the arguments on either side, my brother Justin barked out his opinions along with the others.  At the time we all looked up to him has having found the Holy Grail of our day, permanent deferment from the military draft.  While still in high school Justin and a couple of his buddies enlisted in a Naval reserve program that allowed Junior and Senior boys to play at being in the service on week end visits to the local Navy air station, obligating themselves for active duty as soon as they graduated.  At first it seemed like great fun.  Sometimes catching a transport flight out to another city where seedy rites of passage with whisky breath whores while the older guys exchanged jokes and cigarettes in the alley outside probably occurred; all the things a boy fantasizes about military life.   But the fun soon wore thin, and with the reality of active service quickly closing in around them, Justin and Ron, the guy he played music with at the time, began hatching plans to lie their way out of the whole thing as quick as they could.  Studying every aspect of naval regulation with zeal they never mustered for any class in school, each of them carefully crafted a set of physical or psychological symptoms that, if the military doctors believed the stories, would qualify them for quick and honorable discharge from service.  Justin choose a psychological approach and was back home by the fourth of July his graduation summer, Ron, who graduated in my class a couple years later, had a bit more trouble with his made up physical disability, languishing for half a year at Treasure Island in San Francisco before he made it home with his discharge.    Both of them were now safe with the coveted exemption from the military draft that each of the other boys in the room that night were also plotting to get one way or another.  Not as harsh as the lowly 4-F from our parents war, that branded a guy as a total misfit, guys in our generation were granted a 1-Y.  This meant that you were basically fit for service but choosing to lounge around home rather than risk getting your ass shot off out in the jungle somewhere.  No one realized this at the time, but as the history of that era began to jell in later years and the fact that the brunt of fighting in that war was born by minorities and lower classes, it became obvious that it political decisions must have been made in high places to write loop holes into the selective service laws and military regulations to allow anyone with a bit of education to be granted a permanent deferment with nothing more than a minor inconvenience.   Draft resistance committees existed on every college campus, distributing information on how a guy could get his exemption from service, and no one I knew who really tried to get a deferment was actually drafted.  One guy I knew, who had a flair for the dramatic appeared at his induction appointment stark naked, green dye covering his skin, high on LSD, but all the rest of us managed to get our deferments with a much more low key approach.  Like Justin and Ron before us, we studied the rules and regulations, preparing a verbal presentation to a doctor or shrink, waited a few weeks on pens and needles before getting the final excuse.  At the end of the day it wasn’t much harder than calling in sick to the boss at the job, then going out to the golf course for the afternoon.

All that was ahead of us now.  The evening that we tried to set Tom straight we still had absolute faith that reason could win out over irrational emotion, if enough people articulated the arguments against the war and the underlying faulty world view that made wars like that inevitable the whole thing would end and no one would have to worry about being called up to battle.  Tom wasn’t buying it, and even thinking that he was completely wrong in his interpretation of contemporary history, you had to give him credit for making a colorful, dramatic if not persuasive argument. 

 Taking the challenge on that level, possibly feeling a bit of competitive spirit not to be outdone in a rhetorical sense, Justin decided to abandon logical refutations of Tom’s fears and, in the language of the sales profession where we all ended up many years later, went for the close.  Emphasizing the pause after Tom’s prediction of commies milling around the streets in front of our building before morning light, Justin took a long draft form his baby food jar wine glass, then spoke to the now quiet room in a deliberately languid tone.  “When they start scratching at the basement door of the apartment house, I’ll send Paul down with our little single shot .22 to fend them off.”

That pretty much did it, even if Tom has seen the intended hyperbole in Justin’s comment the dynamic of the moment left him with no other choice but to terminate the conversation.  Absolutely certain that we were all ready to tuck our beloved copies of Mark’s Capitol under our arms and move out to the collective farm to grow cabbages under the watchful eye of the commissar, he stormed out of the room and I hadn’t seen or heard from him until Phil mentioned that he was working on the boat with them in Kodiak.    

By the time of the flight that that morning I had learned a lot about getting along with people, especially in the art of stepping around certain hot button issues to avoid arguments.  Oddly enough, it was my brother Justin who helped me learn these lessons.  Sometime in the first year of two of the seventies he had totally flipped is world view a complete one eighty degrees without a word of warning.  No discussions about a stepped change in opinion or attitudes, no thoughtful observations in which he allowed as how he used to think one way but was beginning to change his mind based on new evidence.  It was complete and at least from my perspective sudden.  The same guy who fanned the flames in the big blow up with Tom, the author of at least two similar incidents in which he totally went off on our mom and dad along the same lines, anti war and left wing domestic politics, suddenly went postal on me one afternoon in the early seventies, defending of all people Nixon and Kissinger when I suggested they were war criminals, as if they were his dearest bosom buddies.  He and his wife Kathy had moved from being fascinated by writers like Edgar Casey and Gurdjieff, astrology and mysticism into a Pentecostal style of fundamentalist Christianity, so the political changes were probably an inevitable part of that transition.  It caught me by surprise because I was not yet aware of the ultra right wing political agenda that was being threaded through these religious sects at the time.  My personal experience with the Christian religion, in which I still believed more or less at that time, was a somewhat left leaning politics, and I never could get a handle on the connection between the teachings of Jesus and the right wings agenda in this country.  But that’s beside the point.  The lesson for me was more interesting and useful.  People like to believe that notions of religion and politics are the core of their very being, but looking under the surface trappings of dogma indicates they are not.  Politics and religion are more like than thin gauze that we drape over ourselves in the same way that we choose a shirt from the closet every morning.  The bulk of our being, who we are as people, good, bad or as is most often the case a complex mix of both, isn’t affected by these things nearly as much as most folks presume.  Thoughts, feelings, sense of humor and motivations, sexuality and the need to kick back and have a little fun once in a while bubble along under the surface pretty much the same in everyone.    

 So, I wasn’t planning for any trouble with the boys in the boat.  If anyone mentioned the huge argument the last time I had seen Tom I planned to apologize for my part in the evening’s entertainment, and avoid rekindling possibly sensitive issues around the galley table.  And as for the probability of listening to notions and opinions with which I was in disagreement, that was ok too.  Even at this tinder age I was beginning to understand that there is more than one way to experience this life, and nothing useful can be gained by being argumentative.

Copyright 2012 - Paul Petersen

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