by
Valdis Kibens
Memoirs in Search of a Format
Dedicated to
Kurt and Kristin
Copyright 2009
Introduction
In response to my children's questions, I started out to record, if not the entire story of my life, then at least the part that tells how I came to America. I immediately came to experience the process that I had heard of but not really entirely understood, namely, that the story takes on a life of its own. First, it took the format of a series of isolated vignettes arranged more or less in chronological order, each focused on one or more central events. But since the crucial events of the story took place when I was between 8 and 13 years of age, it was difficult to write about that time only from the viewpoint of a child, as if I knew nothing about the big picture of history of the period. So I invented a subterfuge, in the form of a handy time machine that allowed me to cope with this condition by skipping from my thoughts in the present to a view in which I focused on a scene as seen by an eight year old, growing into a teenager. In that sense, the whole story became somewhat of a self-exploration in addition to a narration for the purpose of educating my children regarding my personal history.
The story begins with my first memories, circa early 1940s, when we lived in a restored castle in a small town in Latvia called Jaunpils, which had been built in the year 1300 and was currently serving as an agricultural institute for which my father was director. If you will go to the Internet and look up Jaunpils on Google, you will see a description in great photographic detail of my home in Latvia for the last several years before leaving for Germany.
The years 1944 and 1945 saw the family in transit from Latvia to Germany, to settle down first on a German farm in Bavaria and then, in the summer after the war ended in May 1945, a Displaced Persons (DP) Camp near Munich in the American occupation zone . My early education took place in a Latvian language school in the DP camp. These were the years that were the most turbulent in terms of direct interaction with World War II.
In 1949 we emigrated to the United States and settled down in Marks, Mississippi, where I learned English and became familiar with the more basic American customs. Among other skills I learned was that of picking cotton by slinging a bag over my shoulder and dragging it along the rows of cotton bushes, a resource that could be claimed by very few of my future colleagues.
I was fortunate in 1952, having finished the 10th grade of high school, to receive a scholarship to Yale University, sponsored by the Ford Foundation Preinduction Program on the premise that it may be possible to send students to universities before being drafted into the Army. So I wound up at Yale at the age of 15, ready for whatever was to happen to me in the New World. And at this point I turned off my time machine and put it on the shelf for such a time when I might like to use it again.
1. Call me Pika
“Can you say ‘puika’?” (The word for ‘boy’ in Latvian; pronounced “pweeka”).
“Pika.” (No meaning. Pronounced ‘Pee-ka’, as in peekaboo)
"Say ‘puika’!”
“Pika!”
“All right, then, Pika you shall be.” Since that day I have been Pika to my family, though my given name is Valdis, so named after my godfather, Valdis Vikmanis, my mother’s youngest brother.
Valdis Vikmanis remained in Latvia, while two of his brothers, Jekabs and Alfreds, and his sisters, Emma, and Olga, my mother, escaped to the West. He was prominent in the musical life of the country as director of the Liepaja Music College and the first postwar conductor of the Liepaja Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1883. A recent visitor from Latvia referred to him as “the soul of Liepaja”. I could argue that my musical life began with an early birthday present that he gave to me, namely, a recorder made of light-colored wood that I have always known how to play because I learned to play it at an age of which I have no memories. I still have the recorder in my posession.
For reasons which I neglected to investigate while I still could, my parents addressed me in the third person singular, as in: “Does Pika want to eat?” Or, sometimes, using the diminutive construction of Pika: “Does Pikins want to eat?”
Certain nouns in all languages beg to be given additional softness and emotional warmth, especially those dealing with infants or the young of any species. Thus, in English, a young cat is referred to by the special, endearing term, kitten. A dog, puppy. Children’s given names are transformed into diminutive forms as, for example, from Joseph to Joe, to Joey. Robert to Rob, to Bob, to Bobby. Edward to Eddy, John to Johnny, Susan to Suzy, and Deborah to Debby. The Latvian language uses suffixes that can be applied to any noun to construct a diminutive form that give a warmth and softness to Latvian that I have not encountered in any other language.
I replied in kind, namely: “Yes,
Early evidence of my linguistic street smarts comes from a story that my parents have told time and time again concerning a time, at the age of four, perhaps, when one of my transgressions had exceeded the thrashing threshold. My father kept a small bundle of birch branches on top of the wardrobe to bring home important points of my education with particular emphasis. He and I are faced off here in the classical pedagogical ritual, and his line reads: “Do you see that birch switch on top of the wardrobe?” And my reply, attesting to my early skills at the use of language and humor to manipulate my surroundings is: “
English may not be a very warm or poetic language, but, to me, it is a very friendly language in a very important way. In a conversation conducted in English, I can become immediately attuned to the thoughts and arguments of a person I have just met, without the need to overcome barriers erected, by the language itself, for the purpose of projecting a deferential, diplomatic tone to a person outside one’s immediate circle of friends. English has long since abandoned the practice, still maintained by German, its parent language, of providing formal and informal modes for addressing another person. In German, inquiring after one’s age, you would ask a close friend: ”Wie alt bist du?”, and someone you are interviewing for a job: “Wie alt sind sie?” Similarly, in Latvian, it is important to distinguish between the informal “tu” and the formal “jus” (pronounced ‘yoos’), as in: “Ka tev iet?” vs. “Ka jums iet?” to say what in English is always the single form, namely: “How are you?”
Let’s travel to 30 August 1947, to the Displaced Persons (DP) Camp in Muhldorf, southern Germany, between Munich and the Alps. I’m sitting in a classroom with four of my classmates. The five of us comprise the fifth grade. My father is our mathematics teacher, and today is his birthday. He turns to me and asks: “What day is today?” I reply: “Tuesday.” “But what else is it today?” I know he wants me to say that it’s his birthday, but I have a problem. He is the teacher, everyone else addresses him formally, using ‘jus’ constructions, but I address him as ‘tu’ at home, and have so far avoided having to choose between ‘tu’ and ‘jus’ at school. But now I am forced to make a choice. I squirm, I clear my throat. I don’t want to be disrespectful by using the informal ‘tu’, but it also doesn’t feel right to use the formal ‘jus’. Finally, I can’t wait any longer. I say: “It’s your birthday,” using the formal ‘jus’. He looks at me, puzzled, and says: “Why ‘jus’?” End of flashback. You might say: ”What’s the big deal?” But for me it was a big enough deal so that scene and its excruciating level of discomfort stand out vividly in my memory when much else has faded and disappeared. I am still not fully comfortable conversing with someone in Latvian, using the formal mode. Apparently young people in Latvia are pragmatically abandoning the practice, but, for me, meeting a Latvian who has just arrived in the United States and is most likely quite highly educated, is still an occasion to feel a barrier that needs to be overcome before real communication is possible. Contrast that with English, which has no equivalent built-in barriers to stand in the way of understanding, cooperation, collaboration, and setting up a working environment in which plans for common goals can be discussed and pursued. The purity of the Latvian language is the concern of many scholarly institutions in Latvia, and I don’t expect acceptance of major changes to make the language more user-friendly. Just as French and Italian languages have maintained purity through the efforts of their “language police” at the expense of losing out to English as the ‘lingua franca’, so the Latvian language, in my perception, serves cultural purposes better than it serves business purposes.
I am frequently asked: “Do you think in English or Latvian?” Let me think about that. Chuckle. The answer is – neither. Even considering a direct answer to this question, the process in my mind feels more like the juxtaposition of a series of pictures, symbols, icons representing hierarchies of directories, but not words, English or Latvian. When I serve as real-time interpreter between English and Latvian speakers, I build an internal scene based on the input being presented to me in one language and proceed to describe it in the other language, almost as rapidly as the persons are speaking. Same with translating a newspaper article. Say that I have just returned from a trip. I can describe what happened in Latvian to a Latvian speaker or I can describe it to another person in English. The story will be different for each telling, because I am not translating a text but describing an internal scene, which, in repeated retelling, may reinforce permanent features on the account based on key verbal anchors such as, for example, the story about Pika having tiny eyes.
I cannot assume, however, that everyone's brain cells are wired the same way regarding language. Last week, early November 2004, at the SAE World Aviation Congress in Reno, where I was presenting an overview of Boeing research on Active Flow Control, a young man approached me, looked at my badge, which said “Valdis” in big letters, rather than my usual, abbreviated “Val”, smiled brightly, and said: “Labdien!” Born in Riga, in 1957, and currently a resident of New Jersey, Lev Sorkin’s first language was Russian, the second Latvian, and third English. We proceeded to talk animatedly in Latvian, and he related a story about languages that ‘blew my mind’. He had been talking on the telephone in Latvian very intensely for 30 minutes. Immediately after hanging up, the telephone rang again. It was his doctor calling about test results, talking, of course, in English. Lev attempted to answer, in English, and found that he couldn't. English had disappeared from his brain. He motioned to his wife, and said, in Latvian: “You talk to him, I can't speak English right now.” Go figure.
I started life thinking of myself as third person singular Pika. Gradually I switched to the first person pronoun, ‘I’. Then, my Latvian schoolmates called me Valdis, properly conjugated in Latvian. Next came my schoolmates and teachers in the little country school in Belen, Mississippi. They too called me Valdis, except it sounded more like ‘Vauldis’ or ‘Vouldis’. But the problem was that they used the same word for every declension, namely, Valdis, even though this is proper usage in English. Thus, in English, ‘his name is John, I see John, I speak with John, I throw the ball to John, I get a present from John, I go to the movies with John’. But, in Latvian, ‘his name is Valdis, I see Valdi, I speak with Valdi, I throw the ball to Valdim, I get a present from Valza, I go to the movies with Valdi’. When I hear my full name, always the same, namely, Valdis, being used in the various declension forms in English, I feel an inner leaning, trying to drive the pronunciation toward the correct Latvian form, just as I would lean with my entire body to keep a baseball from crossing the foul line, but it never works. Then, in the summer of 1952, on a tennis court at the Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, while I was being taught how to perform an overhead serve with a racquet and a tennis ball by Robert Larrabie, a young instructor, my self-image and my name changed once more. Robert Larrabie looked at me and said: “Valdis is too difficult a name. Do you mind if I call you Val?” It had never before occurred to me to abbreviate my name. I thought about it and said: “That would be okay.” And so I became Val. Except to my family. And to Nancy, my first wife, who adopted the use of my nickname, Pika, except that she occasionally changed it to Piks. She discouraged my friends in graduate school from using that name for me, reserving it for herself. So, for the next decades I was Val. It was okay, because now the declension difficulty didn't come up. But I still was not very happy with my name, except when I was in Latvian society, when I could say: “My name is Valdis Kibens”, and pronounce my last name properly, using a long E and a soft K - it sounds like a combined TY sound when pronounced correctly. When I call somebody on the telephone and say: “Hello, this is Val Kibens speaking,” I have learned to pronounce my first name very slowly and leave an interval between my first and last names if I am to have half a chance of someone with a good ear actually getting my name correctly. And I loathe the phone calls that start with: “Hello, may I speak with, um, uhh, Valdeez Kaibens?” How nice it would be to have a name that is easy to pronounce like Betty’s. “Hello, this is Betty Burns.” Never an answer of: “How do you spell that?” Ah, well. There's always Johnny Cash’s ‘boy named Sue’. Or Crystal Chanda Lear. Or how about Ima Hogg!
And then, three weeks ago in Reno, the registration lady wrote my full name, Valdis, in big block letters as the one-name identifier that could be spotted from across the room, instead of Val, which I had written down for a nickname, and it was spotted and identified as being Latvian by, probably, the only other Latvian at the conference. So being Valdis has its advantages too. Maybe I should start using it more often. So who exactly am I? And which name represents me most accurately? When I really think about it, my identity was stamped on me indelibly in that often retold exchange with my parents when I couldn't pronounce the Latvian name for boy, and, deep down, that's who I still really am. So, if you want to address me by my true name, call me Pika.
2. How I Learned to Ride a Bicycle
As my grandfather used to say: ”Childhood begins when you learn to ride a bicycle.” I remember almost nothing about the time before I learned to ride a bicycle at age six. Crossing this fundamental childhood passage is very important, even if, or especially if, you are a six-year-old boy, the bicycle belongs to your father, and there is no way for you to sit on the seat or even straddle the crossbar. Here is what you do. You put your left foot on the left pedal, kick with the right foot, hang on to the handlebars, balance skillfully, and glide forward gracefully, you hope. Then you try to jump clear of the wreckage, pick up yourself and the bicycle, and start all over again. You do this many, many times, until practice matches expectation. Then comes the second stage, in which you push off a couple of times to gain speed and quickly put your right foot under the crossbar, onto the right pedal, lean the bicycle away from you and very carefully push down with your right foot, and then again with your left, balance and steer at the same time, make sure your right leg does not touch the bicycle frame, and do your best to propel the bicycle forward, you hope. Or, at the very least, don’t hit anything. One summer day, around age six plus, feeling quite accomplished, having reached an advanced level of the second stage of riding an adult bicycle, I got a good starting run from the courtyard, through the long arched passage, tall enough to pass a horse-drawn carriage, which was the only entrance to the castle and could be closed by two very formidable doors, and started a gentle left turn along the road, down the slight
incline leading to the bridge over the small stream feeding the lake. The sun was warm, the wind was brushing against me as the bicycle built up speed, and I was feeling ready for the Tour de France. Wait, that story comes 60 years later. On my right, just past the heavy doors, was a low stone wall, and beyond it a grassy slope with trees, dropping some dozen feet to the lake that surrounded the castle grounds on three sides. Against the wall was a large pile of wood, ready for burning in the various fireplaces and stoves. My spirits suddenly sank and I got an early hint that the pile of wood might become very important in my immediate future, as I attempted to glide in a gentle left turn and slow down at the same time. I knew that, in principle, I had to get my right foot slightly ahead of my left foot and then step backward on my left foot. Or, conversely, let my left foot get somewhat ahead of my right foot and then step forward on my right foot. While balancing in a left turn. At a continuously changing inclination, while steering toward the bridge and away from the wood pile. At this time everything started happening very slowly. I knew all the individual things I needed to do, but, as I watched the wood pile line up on me and my bicycle and start moving toward us in a slow, inexorable motion, I also knew that I was not yet ready to do them all at the same time. It was a formidable pile of wood, and our immediate and intimate encounter was memorable. I was not in the least concerned with my own safety. I was worried about the bicycle and about the inevitability of having to explain why most of the wood was down the slope and the rest was on top of my bicycle. Or, rather, my father’s bicycle. That is where the memory ends. And that is how I learned to ride a bicycle.
Jaunpils
Jaunpils translates into English as Newcastle, or Neuburg in German. It was built in the year 1301, and is a typical knight’s fortress of that era, with water on three sides as part of the fortifications. Outer wall thickness is 2.1 meters. The Teutonic and Livonian orders dominated the so-called Baltic crusades for 300 years, starting with founding of the city of Riga in the year 1204. By the year 1500, the local tribes had been subjugated and the transitional period in the Baltic region ended. Jaunpils had been built only 100 years after the arrival of the German knights. It started as one of many military strong points designed to protect the German interests against incursions from Lithuania. With time it became a dwelling for a single German line of nobility. Baron von der Rekke’s name is associated with the castle since the middle of the 16th century. In 1548 an adjacent church was built that stands to this day.
I lived in an historical monument that had stood for 700 years, from whose vantage point, through direct observation, one could describe the interaction of primary forces shaping the region from Germany to Russia over that time. Enter ‘Jaunpils’ into Google to find the photographs that I included in this book. However, personally I remember only brief childhood scenes while my father, or ‘Tete’, as we called him, was director of the Agricultural Institute, which was housed in the castle, along with classrooms, a dormitory for the students, and living quarters for our family. I attended second grade in the Jaunpils elementary school. I remember nothing of it save the performance of “Lolitas Brinumputns” – “Lolita’s Wonder-Bird”. I and my playmate, the son of the janitor, whose last name was Rieksts, or Nut in Latvian, caused a small fire behind the tennis courts and had some serious consequences visited upon us. All else has vanished – a glimpse of me in the large hall, picking out melodies on the piano – obscured from view -- descended into the depths of the past like a Brigadoon or a sunken castle that rises from the depths once every century.
At 1500 ft. above ground level, North West of St. Charles, over Golden Eagle, Illinois, headed for Brussels between the Mississippi and the Illinois rivers, having trimmed my Cessna 150 for slow flight, I pull the nose up and cut back the throttle until the buzzer starts to sound, warning of stall. Every time I do this maneuver, my heart pounds in anticipation of the sudden nose-down drop and either the left or right wing dipping at the same time. Once it happens, I am all right – I roll the airplane to get the wings level, keep its nose down, advance the throttle to build up flying speed, pull up to straight and level, and resume my training flight. After 30 minutes of exercises, I drop to 500 ft. above ground level and head north, with the Mississippi River on my left. The land with its green and brown shadings, according to what is being planted, grown, and harvested, farm buildings, silos, fences, country roads – all drift below me in a hypnotic stream. Gradually the drone of the airplane disappears and is replaced by the regular swishing sound of many powerful wings beating rhythmically and the occasional honking sound of a migrating goose calling to another. I am sitting on the back of a large white gander, with my legs on each side on his neck just forward of the plunging wings. My weight is of small concern to Martin - so the gander is named – because, standing up, my height would be on a par with that of my steed. We are flying over southern Sweden, the Skona district, on the yearly migratory trip to the arctic circle. Our leader, Akka from Kjebnekaise, is a veteran of many flights, with wisdom to match her age and experience. She addresses me as Nils, and indeed that is my name – Nils Holgerson – a farm boy
punished by the house elf for many misdeeds, who had turned me into an elf of the same size as the farmyard animals I had mistreated as a full-sized 14-year-old. The flight
takes six months and leads to the very northern parts of Sweden and back again. We land on lakes to be safe from foxes, though there are encounters full of danger despite the care with which Akka guides us. In Karlskrona, the naval museum is the scene of an encounter with King Charles the XIth whose tales of Swedish naval history seem very real – or am I dreaming? The months of travel and adventure, the ties of trust forged with my companions, the history and mythology and geography of Sweden, the learning and maturing as a person, all resonate to the beat of wings and the gradual drift of the checkered blanket of land beneath our flight path. But I am no longer flying with the geese, nor am I in an airplane. Instead, I am seven years old, I am back in Jaunpils, and I am at a table in my room, reading “Niels Holgerson’s Wonderful Travels with the Wild Geese” by Selma Lagerloef, translated from the Swedish into Latvian by Alma Gobniece and published in 1938. My sister, Maija, is across the table from me – she learned to write upside down by watching me from across the table. These images fly through my consciousness in seconds as I steer my way north along the Mississippi, and yet they are timeless and constitute the foundation for my choices that eventually led me to study aerodynamics and that sooner or later would lead me to learning how to fly an airplane. It completely amazes me that I should remember only snatches of events that happened in Jaunpils – the school, students, teachers, public events, the coming of war, fleeing from the Russians – and yet I carry with me, in exquisite detail, the story that I read in Jaunpils as a 7-year-old, of an adventure that incorporates the gentle wisdom of one of Sweden’s great writers, the wonder of flight, a mature outlook on life and history, and the sensation of having lived personally through a life-shaping experience.
In the “The Good War” Studs Terkel interviews generals and privates, Rosie the riveter, people who stayed at home, people who went to war, Americans, Germans, Japanese, Russians. Anyone who participated in or was influenced by World War II. And who was not? Terkel used only one strictly enforced screening qualification for those he interviewed: they had to be alive. You had to be a survivor to be in his book. I qualified, but I didn’t make it into his book, so I’m writing my own. Because I surely was there. So I was a kid. Terkel did not interview kids. But I was transplanted, influenced, diverted, transformed, sent off along a totally different life trajectory than anyone could have imagined for me at my birth, along with the rest of my age group, plus or minus two years, probably more profoundly than anyone else. Forget about asking who or what I would have become, had the war not happened. Because of our specific age, we were the truly bi- or tri-cultural, multilinguistic products of the war. Some years older, and we would have been uprooted refugees with a small chance to regain the promise of our previous lives. My parents, Tete and Mammit to me and my two sisters, were indeed uprooted, broken refugees and always remained such. Some years younger, and we would have been Americans of Latvian descent. I learned Latvian as my mother tongue, was marinaded during the pre-consciousness years up to age seven in the psychological environment generated by my parents in response to the impending and later the ongoing war, lived in Germany starting October 1944, moved to the state of Mississippi in Sept 1949, learned English overnight, it seemed, spent the summer of 1952 at the Phillips Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, and, in September of 1952, found myself a freshman at Yale University. At age 15, to turn 16 on the 22nd of October. With a vague sense, derived from well meant admonitions, that I was at the beginning of a great opportunity to do something, I was not quite sure exactly what. I spent one year on the Freshman Campus, and four years in Davenport residential college, the same one later having as a member the current President of the United States, George W. Bush. I emerged in the spring of 1957, at the advanced age of 20, with a degree in mechanical engineering, and not really much more of an understanding of life in engineering, life in the United States, or life, period. Today, almost 50 years later, I compare my arrival at Yale with that of George Bush, his father, and his grandfather. The President, or rather the teenager who eventually would be President, arrived at Yale some seven years after I graduated. His father graduated from Yale in 1948, four years before I got there, his grandfather, Prescott Bush, in 1917. In my experience, it takes six years to fully absorb a society. It takes six years from birth to consciousness. It takes six years in a new country before you really see more than just the scenery and begin to recognize the vectors of power, conflict, ambition, and advancement. It takes six years before you know in which direction to turn your ambition should you want to pursue power. So, I arrived at Yale totally innocent of any appreciation of the potential of the University as anything more than a place to learn history, philosophy, architecture, Shakespeare, history of art, and calculus, which is what I did the first two years in a very intensive directed studies program. George Bush knew from childhood that he would be going to Yale some day and that Yale represented a stepping stone to what was expected of him, namely, to become rich and to enter politics. If one grows up with a swimming pool in the back yard, goes to school that has an Olympic size pool, sees young people compete and to go on to win medals through hard work, then one can readily get the idea that it is possible to set an Olympic medal as a goal, train hard for years and years, swim 10 laps in a time that is one second shorter than anybody else in the world, and wind up with a gold medal. If one grows up on a raft that is tossing in an ocean and has to deal with storms every other month, then swimming will have only the very practical purpose, namely, to enable climbing back on the raft if one falls off. Never would one conceive of building an Olympic swimming pool and training for years and years to be able to swim 10 laps faster than anyone else in the world. So, one of the reasons for World War II, among others, I will grant, was to provide me with a superb education on how the world works, by direct immersion, the first lesson of which consisted of the emphatic message that the organizing principles for my life would need to come from a different source than those for a typical American kid. Or Latvian kid. Namely, learn your environment, which, hopefully, stands still long enough to be examined for what levers one uses to be successful, and then proceed to pick a goal and work hard to achieve it. Be a little daring, creative, and ambitious, and all good things will come to you. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. The principle that my environment sent me was, instead: ”Nothing ventured, nothing lost.” Not exactly damaged goods, I certainly had a properly disadvantaged background from which to recover, if I was going to stabilize and achieve a reasonable trajectory. Certainly the idea that the world owed me something or that I was entitled to something, never occurred to me. Conversely, being blind to “one’s station in life” had the effect that I tended to see people without rank or titles, simply because I was not trained to see power structures. I think back to the contrasts inherent in my first wedding. Married in Dwight Chapel at Yale, the same one where some years earlier I had gone forward and knelt before the altar with 12 other young Yale men to see if Billy Graham could light the flame of Christianity within me – it did not take – by the Rev. John Oliver Nelson, a Yale divinity school professor, with my new father-in-law, an army general, doing the honors – we then proceeded to drive to Cromwell, Connecticut, for a reception at my parents’ house, a very humble half of a duplex next to the greenhouses were they worked. My mother and her sister, Aunt Emma, had provided a typical lavish Latvian spread, featuring delicacies such as ‘galerts’, or pickled pigs feet with horseradish and vinegar, black bread with butter and plenty of hard Salami, and homemade pickles, to mention my favorites. Here the whole group reassembled, in a setting that couldn’t be more of a contrast to the “ivied halls” from which we had just come. My point in recalling this episode is that the contrast is visible to me only now, in retrospect. Back then I introduced my parents as equals to the people they did not know. I’m sure that the contrast was quite perceivable to everyone else, and it could well be that Nancy, my first wife, considered my Yale degree as just barely compensating for my humble origins.
5. White Sands and Time Travel
250 million years ago -- read and weep, James Michener -- Tularosa Basin, New Mexico, did not exist. (All right, maybe Michener reached farther back to describe Colorado in Centennial and, certainly, Hawaii in his book by the same name). Instead, there was a shallow sea that existed for 100 million years or so, which eventually dried up, and, 70 million years ago, its gypsum-bearing marine deposits were uplifted into a giant dome forming southern New Mexico when the Rocky Mountains emerged. 10 million years ago, the center of the dome started to collapse and eventually created the Tularosa Basin, ringed by the San Andres and Sacramento mountain ranges, which present the astonishing sights of thousand foot vertical cliff walls rising after miles and miles of perfectly flat desert land and displaying, on the rock face, striated sedimentary deposit layers for several hundred vertical feet starting slightly below the top of the range. In this region one finds the Trinity Site, where the first nuclear weapon was tested on July 16, 1945. The site was part of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, now the White Sands Missile Range. The test site is at the northern end of the Range, between the towns of Carrizozo and Socorro, New Mexico, in the Jornada del Muerto desert. This is where one also finds, near the town of Alamogordo, the Holloman Air Force Base, and, not too far, Roswell, New Mexico, where, as everyone knows, the aliens landed in 1947 and were immediately swept up and kept in a secret location by the United States Air Force ever since. Except, of course, the ones on display in the Alien Artifacts Museum in Roswell. But, to get back to the Basin – the rain and snow dissolve gypsum, a form of calcium sulfate, and wash it down into the Basin, where it remains as the water evaporates, because there are no rivers leading out to the sea.
The gypsum is deposited on the surface, and eventually is ground by wind and freezing and thawing action into fine particles of white sand. The sand is continually shaped by the wind into dunes, which are some 30 ft. tall. They travel about 30 ft. each year under its influence, cover some 350 mi.² of ground near Alamogordo, and comprise the White Sands National Monument. Some of the plants develop ingenious strategies to avoid burial by the moving sand. The soaptree yucca can elongate its stem to keep its leaves above the sand, growing upward of as much as a foot per year.
The week before last, late October, 2004, Gene Myers and I paid three dollars each to the lady at the entrance of the park, about half an hour before sunset, and drove onto the White Sands Monument to climb the dunes and take pictures. We were unwinding after a day’s discussions with personnel from the Holloman 164th Test Squadron, our home base the Boeing Phantom Works Technology Development Division. Our objective was to advance plans for experiments that simulate Mach 2 aircraft flight, using a rocket-powered sled, to be conducted in 2005 on the 10 mi. test track at the Holloman Air Force Base, said to be the world’s straightest and most level, taking into account, of course, the curvature of the earth’s surface over a 10 mi. distance.
We are working with weapon systems that are obviously much more sophisticated than those observed above a Latvian pasture by two boys in the summer of 1944. The time is almost exactly 60 years later than that of our previous military episode. The moving indicator on the ribbon of time is exactly at the location we like to call the present.
The banister of time, perhaps? But that implies motion in a fixed direction and possibly accelerating as we go. Neither of those images fits here, especially since we are about to introduce the concept of time travel.
The present is when and where we talk to each other, when and where we observe what we are accustomed to call reality, and when and where we learn truth, or facts. Do you hear the overbearing certainty in the last sentence that signals that perhaps all is not as it appears? As for the two boys in 1944, they are not part of reality2004, although they were indeed part of reality, or, perhaps, part of my reality1944. Slippery concept, this reality. Could there not be an infinity of them, since reality can be perceived only in the present, and each moment in the past had a different reality which morphed into the present reality, which, in turn, will become a future reality at a time of our choosing, which could be four years from now (President Bush was just reelected in 2004), four days from now, four milliseconds from now, etc. Am I restricted to living in the present? Can I communicate with the past or the future? Can I communicate with my past or my future? Why not assume that the answer is yes and see where that leads us.
Let us then travel to the past once more – if that is indeed what we have been doing – and look in on Valdis and Janka, residing in reality1944. Perhaps I should refer to him as Valdis44, to correspond to Valdis04, namely, myself living in reality2004. Is there significance in the fact that my ISP assigned the nameValdis19 to me? Oh, it means Internet Service Provider. The screen swirls and gradually an image of reality44 takes shape once more, the aerial battle is still the focus of excitement for the day, and the figures of my parents and my grandparents drift in and out of view. Freeze frame. What hints can I see in reality1944 predicting reality2004 and, in particular, how did I evolve from Valdis44? Travel by air, ala Nils Holgerson, air combat, and chaos of war are three elements that are strong features that must be accommodated by any intervening realities that lead to reality2004 and to you and me watching a screen showing reality1944 from the peak of a sand dune in New Mexico. Or visiting reality44? Did we just just commit time travel?
There is one last reason why we are in New Mexico, thinking about time. Suppose I show you my back yard in St. Charles, Missouri, and say: “This may look like a forest right now, but 10 years ago, when Betty and I built this place, she insisted on planting trees all around the house. That’s why we have this marvelous privacy that we enjoy so much.” Next, here we are in New Mexico and I say to you: ”Look at these sand dunes! We are enjoying them today, but it took 250 million years to get them just right. In fact, the planning began 250 million years ago, when the Tularosa Basin did not even exist…” To me, looking at the dunes and the sedimentary striations in the cliffs gives a personal, direct, intimate, and subjective sense of what 250 million years means. It’s the time it took to grow my rock garden in New Mexico, just as 10 years is the time it took to grow my forest in Missouri and 60 years is the time for my reality44 to transform into my reality04.
6. One Thousand B -29's
On 10 October 1944 the German army abandons Riga. It's time to move on. We are in the last German-occupied southwest corner of Latvia and the Russian army is advancing. Everything gets loaded onto my grandfather's horse-drawn wagon - suitcases and sturdy wooden crates, manageable by two people but too heavy for one person. There must be two or three of them. Coming with us is the Nils Holgerson book, a leather-covered copy of “Lacplesis”, the Latvian epic whose title means “Bearslayer”, and one or two others, some photographs, the clock that used to sit on top of the wardrobe, and mother’s foot-pedal driven, Swedish-made, ‘Husqvarna’ sewing machine that followed us through the next 60 years and is now one of Maija's treasured memorabilia. The Nils Holgerson book is on my desk as I write in 2004. There is jostling on the pier. Eventually everything is on board and we depart late in the evening for a night-time trip across the southeast corner of the Baltic Sea to Gdinya, or Gottenhafen, as the Germans call the small seaport near Danzig, in the Polish corridor, that later became famous because Lech Walesa started his union activities there. My memories of that trip are very spotty. Zaiga, who is four years younger than I, recalled clear images and events during that passage, including a tense episode during which our ship barely avoided some Russian torpedoes - but her memory had a special quality, and that is part of another story.
In Gdinya we board a train that becomes our home for the next month and eventually deposits us in the small southern German town of Altoetting, from where we finally make our way to a Bavarian farm where we remain until the summer of 1945. The train heads due south to the Polish city of Lodz.
The second-largest Jewish ghetto, after Warsaw, was established in Lodz on February 8, 1940. The 230,000 Jews living in Lodz were ordered to move into a sectioned-off area, surrounded by a fence, that constituted only 4.3 square kilometers. In 1941, 20,000 more Jews and 5000 Roma (Gypsies) were moved into the Lodz ghetto. Beginning on January 6, 1942, approximately one thousand people per day were taken on trains to the Chelmno death camp and gassed by carbon monoxide in trucks. By September, 1942, all the sick, the old, and the children had been deported. On June 10, 1944, Heinrich Himmler ordered the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto. The residents were told that workers were needed in Germany to repair the damages caused by air raids. The first transport left on June 23, with many others following until July 15. On July 15, 1944 the transports halted. The decision had been made to liquidate Chelmno because Soviet troops were getting close. Unfortunately, this only created a two week hiatus, for the remaining transports would be sent to Auschwitz. By August 1944, the Lodz ghetto had been liquidated. Five months later, on January 19, 1945, the Soviets liberated the Lodz ghetto. Of the 230,000 Lodz Jews plus the 25,000 people transported in, only 877 remained. (From Jennifer Rosenberg, the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2004).
On October 15, 1944, our train pulls into Lodz. The announcement is made that we are making a delousing stop. Everyone gets off the train. We are herded into large barracks with adjoining showers, men and women in separate buildings. We strip naked, march into a huge space with many showers, and proceed to scrub clean. Large women in white smocks, all named ‘Helga’, march in, holding shaker-dispenser cans and apply generous clouds of flea powder to our crotches and armpits. We get dressed and get back on the train. I made up the part about them all being named ‘Helga’. Actually they remind me of Rosa Klebb with poisoned knives in the toes of her shoes, played by Lotte Lenya in “From Russia with Love”.
In 2004, viewing these images on the screen of my somewhat imperfect time-travel machine, I shudder as I see myself in 1944 having traveled so very close - just miles - to the dwelling place of true evil. How many movie scenes have I not seen in which the delousing scene ends with gas pouring from the shower heads. Yet, I moved through those scenes without being scathed. Two months before I passed through, killing was proceeding unabated. Three months after I had left, the Russians put an end to one kind of madness, only to replace it with another.
My time-machine screen proceeds to show the train departing on a leisurely journey of several days westward across the breadth of Germany to the banks of the Rhine River and a small town called ‘Wesel an den Rhein’. The sounds and smells of the train are the most vivid parts of the trip. The slowly increasing rhythm: “Clack, clack, schoosh, clack-clack-clack, schoosh, schoosh…” as the sounds of the locomotive and the clicking of the wheels hitting the rail junctions synchronize to an ever faster pace and finally settle down to a monotonous ‘clickety-click-click, clickety-click-click…’ that slowly fades from one's consciousness because of its unchanging nature. And, of course, the ‘whoo-oo-oosh’ of the whistle and the smell of the smoke from the engine. The windows of the train can be opened and one of my favorite pastimes is to stick my head out the window, look in the direction of travel, and wait for a curve in the tracks so that I can see the locomotive many cars ahead of ours. And catch the occasional delightful whiff of coal smoke wafting back from the engine stack! And always - the houses, the back yards, clothes lines, vegetable gardens, and people standing and watching the train pass. Trains enter and leave cities through the back doors, past the private, intimate scenes, seldom seen in any other form of travel. Always the question: ‘who are these people, what is life like for them?’ - and always the mood, pensive, but not necessarily sad: ‘I will never see them again.” The incredible richness of detail of all that is fleeing in front of my window! But then, occasionally, the train stops and outside the window are antiaircraft guns. We are never attacked, and I never see the guns firing. After a while we resume travel. The train has lavatories with stools with demure covers on them. When I open the cover, a loud, characteristic clacking and whooshing sound emanates from the pipe that leads from the bowl straight down to the tracks. We are told not to use the lavatories when approaching a station. I appreciate the reason for this admonishment. Finally we are in Wesel. As the train pulls into the Bahnhof, I see a large number of small blimps straining upward against the tension of cables that are anchoring them at an altitude of some 50 feet. I find out later that these are so-called barrage balloons that are elevated to thousands of feet to prevent low-flying aircraft from attacking because their propellers would get tangled up in the cables. We spend over a week in Wesel, our accommodations being German army Kasernes, or multistory concrete dormitories.
It is in Wesel that I witness one of the most awesome sights and sounds of World War II, not just in my young person's perception, but also, I think, measured on an absolute scale. The time is perhaps an hour after sunset. Standing in front of the Kaserne, I hear the beginnings of a faint, low-pitched rumble. I see nothing, until suddenly a slash of white light in a pencil beam stabs at the sky and begins to swing back and forth as if someone with a flashlight were looking to find something high up. But this is like no flashlight I have ever seen - in fact, my first encounter with a real flashlight is still several years into the future. The beam is joined by a second, then a third, and soon the dark sky is literally crisscrossed by steadily waving beams of light. The sound is much louder now. It keeps growing louder still and is like nothing I have ever experienced before. It is very low- pitched, very loud, with a lot of waviness to it - that's how I describe it to myself.
I am told we are hearing an overflight of a fleet of Allied aircraft, on its way from England to some distant location, perhaps the Ploesti oilfields in Romania. These might be B-29’s and their numbers could be in the thousands. The searchlights are trying to pick out the bombers at an altitude of 20-plus thousand feet. No guns are sounding. After a half hour, the searchlights go out and the noise slowly diminishes to silence.
Back in the safety of 2004, I reflect on the superposition of noise generation patterns from a large fleet of multi-engine aircraft, each individually characterized by essentially the same acoustic spectral signature and jointly producing an aliasing or beating pattern. And I reflect on the fact that I am an expert about such things. Indeed, it is very simple to distinguish the noise of a single engine propeller aircraft from that of a twin-engine aircraft.
Whereas a single engine airplane produces a steady, fixed-pitch drone, the noise from a twin-engine aircraft is completely different because the two engines do not have precisely the same RPM, and therefore there is a beating between the contributions from each engine that gives a characteristic, slow, wavering pulsation to the sound that is easily identified. For a four-engine plane, the pattern varies more. Piano tuners listen to the beats between two or three strings to determine when a string is tensioned properly. Imagine a piano with an A two octaves below middle C that is sounded not by strings but by 4000 airplane engines, four per airplane, each tuned to a slightly different pitch, all together generating a cumulative beating pattern. I can't either. But, I also can’t imagine that it should be purely coincidental that in 1944 I am reading a fantasy book about flying with wild geese, observing the flight of airplanes, and listening to the sound of an overflight of B-29s, at the impressionable age of seven, and in 2004 I am a Boeing Technical Fellow, working at the company that built the B-29's in Seattle and in Wichita, with a specialty in the Active Flow Control techniques for modifying the flight characteristics of airplanes and modifying/reducing sounds generated by airplane, missile, and rocket engines. In a word, a rocket scientist. All right, two words. As my grandfather used to say: “There are three kinds of people in this world. There are those who know how to count. And then there are those who don't.” Somehow, the path from 1944 to 2004 did not look all that self-evident when viewed from 1944, certainly, nor 1954, or, for that matter 1964 or 74. But it certainly looks obvious today.
7. How I became a Democrat
It is 10 May, 1992. I am on my way to the 14 th AIAA Aeroacoustics Conference in Aachen, Germany, the site of the crowning of Charlemagne as the first Holy Roman Emperor in the year 800 and the first major German city to be taken by the Allied forces in October 1944. I will present a scientific paper, meet the mayor of Aachen in the grand hall of the Rathaus, have my picture taken next to a statue of Charlemagne, and later introduce my Indian colleague, Professor Yulu Krothapalli, from Florida State University, to a native dish called Blutwurst in the traditional Ratskeller restaurant in the basement below the grand hall. I confess to him that Blutwurst means blood sausage in German before he commits to the order. He does not flinch. I am impressed.
My flight is scheduled to land, early in the afternoon, in Düsseldorf, on the Rhine, perhaps 60 miles south of Wesel. You do remember Wesel, I am sure, and can anticipate, I think, the space- and time-coordinates we will select for our next time-machine venture. But before we do that, let's look out the window and watch the approach to Düsseldorf. We overfly the river, the outskirts of the city, and are circling toward the airport when a few thousand feet below us appear many large, multi-acre square patches of ground that are a pure, brilliant yellow in color. No lines or patches of any other shade. Just pure, bright yellow. We land. I proceed to my conference in Aachen and in due time find out that the patches of yellow are fields of mustard and that the region around Düsseldorf produces most of Germany's mustard. In fact, it is referred to as German, or Düsseldorf mustard, and is usually dark in color and has a sweet-and-sour flavor. “How does one best use Düsseldorf mustard?” you ask. Well, then I must also tell you about cooking with beer, which is a German tradition best appreciated through experience. Hence, when Oktoberfest comes around in your town, consider the following recipe.
Beer-Basted Sausage with Caramelized Onions and German Mustard
8 sausages, such as bratwurst, knackwurst or wieners
4 oz. Oktoberfest beer
2 oz. hot Dusseldorf mustard
3 oz. canola oil
16 oz. yellow onion, peeled,
quartered and sliced very thin
Place canola oil in a large, nonstick skillet (12-in. diameter) and add the sliced onions. Saute over low heat, stirring often, until onions are golden brown, soft and caramelized. Do not let burn. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and stir in the hot Dusseldorf mustard. Set aside. Prepare a grill, and cook sausages, basting with Oktoberfest beer every minute or so. Serve the grilled sausages with the mustard-seasoned onions. (Note: you may prefer the traditional sauerkraut, which is delicious when heated with whole brown mustard seeds). From: Cooking with Beer, Taste-Tempting Recipes and Creative Ideas for Matching Beer & Food, by Lucy Saunders, 1996, Time-Life Books.
The common denominator here is, of course, the date, October 1944. In times of pure chaos, stories that start out, for example, with “We left Latvia in the fall of 1944 and…” can and do differ vastly, the differences amplifying as serial critical bifurcations lead to disastrous or benign outcomes. We crossed the Baltic and passed through Poland without crises. We left Düsseldorf days before the major offensive that captured Aachen on October 21, the day before my eighth birthday. The overflight I witnessed in Wesel was small compared to Operation Varsity, the airborne support for the 9th US and 2th British Armies' crossing of the Rhein. On the morning of 24 March 1945, an enormous air armada crossed the River Rhein near Wesel. The column of aircraft, two-and-a-half hours long, consisted of more than 1,500 IX Troop Carrier Command airplanes and gliders. To their left were about 1,200 RAF airplanes and gliders; the entire armada was supported by 880 US and RAF fighters. A total of nearly 4000 aircraft from the 6th Airborne Division and the 17th US Airborne Division deposited fighting men behind enemy lines, East of the River Rhine. Their mission was to capture key points and so assist the advance of the ground troops. By 26 March 1945, the entire western front of Europe was east of the Rhine River. (Historical material from: http://www.euronet.nl/users/wilfried/ww2/1945.htm; Copyright © 1997-2002 Wilfried Braakhuis.) But, by this time we are in Bavaria, on a small farm named Hilgersode, safely out of harm's way, living a hard but rational life helping “Mutti” take care of the farm while her son, Hans, and all other men are off to the war.
Time: 19 October, 1944. Place: Dusseldorf Bahnhof, passenger building. We have detrained to await assembly of a new combination of carriages, including the ones on which all our possessions still remain, for the purpose of transporting us to Munich. It is a large space, people are milling about, a double door is open to the tracks. A tall German soldier walks in through the door. He is wearing the classical black uniform with medals, a peaked cap, shiny jackboots, and is carrying the inevitable riding crop in his right hand. Until I encountered Darth Vader, this was the image I carried of the embodiment of pure evil. Without much pause, the German raps loudly on a metal cabinet with his riding crop, rocks back on his heels, and imperiously intones the single word, stretched out over what seemed like one full minute: “HEEEERRRRRAAAAUUUUSSSS!” Translated, adding the soldier’s demeanor and obvious disdain for the crowd he is facing, the equivalent effect in English could be obtained by an equally loud intonation of the phrase: “Get the fuck out!” The crowd understands perfectly and quickly complies with the order.
Back to the present. This episode describes my one and only personal encounter with Nazi officialdom. You might say, and I would agree, emphatically, that it is difficult to imagine a less devastating encounter. Let's not even talk about killing or torture. This experience did not even include violence - just some overbearing, gratuitous disrespect, discourtesy, and insult. Yet, for me, this image is built into the foundations of my value system, supporting my personal concept of how one interacts with people, and when I see it reflected in the actions of my fellow humans, I come the very closest to acting out of pure, red rage, with no reference to reason. You would think that I would ever after associate this behavior with Nazis or perhaps Germans in general, but that's not so. I hung it on policemen instead. To this day I am prejudiced against policemen. Yes, I know about enforcing the law and the dangers that law-enforcement officers suffer on our behalf. But to me, until proved otherwise, a policeman is a guy who took the job so he could wear a gun and be gratuitously disrespectful to people, reflecting the image of my paradigm for this kind of person, namely, the jackbooted German in Düsseldorf in 1944.
That is how I became a lifelong Democrat, if by that one means that I cheer for the underdog and have a great distaste for attitudes that reflect the Nazi concept of “Ubermensch”, which, in the context of the United States is best illustrated by Jim Crow mentality originating in the attitude of slave owners toward their property, the slaves.
My degree of democratization goes even as far as to consider the possibility that the German in Düsseldorf, who was the source of my indelible reaction, may, in a broader sense, be exonerated of the charges on which my 1944 ego arraigned on him. It was no secret to him, certainly, that the third Reich was toppling and that his personal future was not very bright. Let me continue this line of thinking with a more recent example.
It is January 15, 1975. I am sitting in my office in Building 33 on Lindbergh Ave., an employee of the McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories. The door opens, without announcement, and Don Kotansky walks in, accompanied by Bill Bower. These are my colleagues in the laboratory, of approximately similar rank. Don sees me sitting at my desk and says brusquely: ”This is company property, we need a private place to talk.” I walk out the door. Skip forward, perhaps one year later. I have just come out of a conference room where I have heard a seminar by Don Kotansky regarding rotating machinery, which is his specialty since his days at MIT, when he worked with Jack Kerrebrock at the MIT Gas Turbine Laboratories. I had learned quite a bit about the subject from the seminar, and had asked several questions on technical issues I did not understand, which Don proceeded to clarify to my benefit and satisfaction. On the way out the door he taps me on the shoulder and says, in a confidential, hushed tone: “Val, you sure do ask naïve questions.” I am taken aback: “How so, Don?” “They're so simple.” I reply: ”I ask questions about things I don't understand.” And Donald Kotansky proceeds to speak one of the most chilling sentences that I have ever heard in my life: “I never ask a question unless I know the answer.” I remember that sentence verbatim, and I also remember my chilling sense of dealing with a mentality operating under totally different guidelines than anything I knew previously.
To finish the story, Don Kotansky was a member of a volunteer, adjunct civilian police force in St. Louis county. In this capacity he was issued a police uniform, and a 38 caliber police side-arm, which he was trained to use. He spent several Saturdays a month partnered with a full-time policeman, patrolling the streets of St. Louis County, conducting police business as part of the team. One day in the mid-80s I came in to work in the morning to be greeted with the news that Don Kotansky had killed himself the previous afternoon, with his police revolver, in the basement of his home, where his wife had found him upon returning from her workplace. End of story. What conclusions to draw? Don confided to colleagues that he enjoyed the sense of personal power his uniform and gun provided. But it is almost impossible to envision the enormous, devastating conflicts and tensions that we must ascribe to his internal world if we are to understand his action from the very few pieces of data that I have listed here!
So, to finally draw full circle, today I am much less ready to condemn the German in Dusseldorf in 1944. Who knows, perhaps he too ended his own life with an army-issue revolver.
8. Donnerwetter, Kruzifix
“Scheisse! (Shit!)”
“Scheisse!”
“Gut. Donnerwetter! (Good. Thunderweather!)”
“Dunnerweter!”
“Nein. Donnerwetter!”
“Donnerwetter!”
“Richtig. (Right.)” This from Heribert, my new friend and teacher. Also 8 years old, he is teaching me the essentials of German, or German from the bottom up. We are sitting on the doorstep of the people part of the Bauernhof (farmhouse), which “Mutti” (a diminutive of Mutter, or mother, in German), calls Hilgersoed. A single, long building, built according to Bavarian tradition, it has stalls for horses on one end, a two-story part for people in the middle, with a second-story balcony running the length of it, and, on the other end, stalls for oxen. In front of us is a 5 foot wide concrete walkway, spanning the full length of the building, and separated by a sturdy wooden railing from a 6 foot deep manure pit, whose far side is level with the yard, and which stores the material output of the inhabitants of both ends of the structure and from the cow barn across the yard from us. Pigs? They are in the other end of the cow barn. I suppose the pit had pig manure in it also. Let's leave the discussion of how all this smelled for a later time. The place is run by Mutti, the very old, to my eye, mother of her only son, Hans Perseis, who would normally be overseeing the work and hiring farm workers to help him and his family, but who can't do so because he is away at war. And whom, by the way, I met in 1962 when I went back to Bavaria and stayed overnight at Hilgersode. She does so with the help of Ottilia, a maid, Emil, a French prisoner of war assigned to the farm, twice as big as Mutti and perfectly capable of running away anytime he wants to, who nonetheless does not, and now us, my father, mother, two sisters, and me. From Munich to Altoetting, a couple of days in another barracks, then to the farm. It is early November 1944. We are about 100 miles east of Munich and about 50 miles north of Chiemsee, just outside a small town called Lohkirchen, 10 miles from Muhldorf-am-Inn, in the middle of beautiful, rolling countryside with the Alps visible as a white, jagged slash on the horizon, in Austria. This is picture postcard country.
It is hard for me to travel back to 1944 and leave behind all that I know in 2004 about the Nazis, the atrocities, and the evils sanctioned and practiced by one of the world's most modern countries. Especially so because in 1944 the Muhldorf region is rife with slave labor camps associated administratively with the Dachau death camp, just 20 miles north of Munich. The typical slave laborer’s useful working life expectancy is four months. Then he or she becomes redundant and is transferred to Dachau for disposal. Let's look at the time line for this period. The Normandy invasion was on 6 June, 1944, while we are still in Latvia. By November we arrive in Bavaria. On November 14, B-29’s begin to bomb Tokyo from bases in the Mariana islands. On December 16 the Germans attack in the Ardennes and the “Battle of the Bulge” begins. On January 9, 1945 the Marines land in Luzon, Philippines. On January 23, the Russians reach Germany itself at the Oder River and, on January 27 they liberate the Auschwitz death camp. On February 13 the Russians occupy Budapest, Hungary. Dresden is bombed. On April 6, the Marines land in Okinawa. On April 12, President Roosevelt dies. On 19 March, at 0830 hrs, 39 Boeing B-24 Liberator bombers of the 484th Bomber Group take off from Torretto Airfield, Italy, escorted by 40 P-51’s. At 1259 hours, they drop 1,498 one hundred pound bombs (74.9 tons) from 17,000 feet on the Muhldorf railroad marshalling yards, 10 miles from our Bauernhof, to interdict one of the major Munich-Vienna railroad lines. I see the escort fighters overhead. They all have white, five-pointed stars on the wings and fuselages. No flak is encountered during the mission. 38 aircraft return to Torretto at 1615 hours. One aircraft lands at Zara on the Adriatic. During these last months of the war, slave labor camps near Muhldorf are emptied by forced marches terminating in Dachau, where the survivors are gassed. On 6 May, Hitler is dead, and the new German Fuehrer, Admiral Doenitz, surrenders Germany. All U-boats are ordered home and all armies are ordered to cease fire.
During these last months of the war, while all the interlinked European and Pacific theater campaigns are coming to a close, we are living, all told, under very civilized conditions, not unlike those we would have experienced had the Bauernhof belonged to a family member and we had moved there to help out with the chores and to wait out the war in safety. In a very attenuated form, I experience an inner conflict in writing about my experiences as an eight-year-old that must be similar to those of a German of my age, thinking about his childhood in the context of what he has learned about his own country and people as he grew into an adult. Picture yourself as a German parent, having to explain to your eight-year-old about Germany's role in the just-finished war. You might expect this to be a topic that is not visited frequently. And there are few Germans of my age who can not point to a family member who was directly involved in one of the nightmares of the civilized world. Eight years is just about the age limit beyond which realities of the world cannot be shut out. An eight-year-old in Germany would be joining the Hitler Youth movement, and teenagers very likely would have experienced the war in a very direct fashion. It's not surprising that some escape this conflict by denying the Holocaust, denying the atrocities, as if wishing would make it all go away.
This time, I will follow the instructions on the time-travel screen that plainly say ‘best results will be obtained if you precede your session with relaxation exercises such as meditation, for example, which will place you in an altered state, similar to hypnosis, allowing you to experience conditions at your targeted time and space coordinates in a manner indistinguishable from the original experience.’
“Sakrament!”
“Sakrament!”
“Gut. Kruzifix!”
“Kruzifix!”
“Sehr gut. Verflucht! (Very good. Damn!)”
“Verflucht!”
Our lessons are proceeding famously. It's winter, and Heribert is going to school in Lohkirchen, one valley over from ours. It is decided that I will go also. I attend the little German grammar school in Lohkirchen with Heribert for several months, but all that remains in memory is my surprise at being handed a small slate tablet with a wooden frame on it and a stylus that appears made of stone, with a point on one end, with which one can write on the tablet and, at the end of the exercise, erase all that had been written, to start over again with the next lesson.
One lesson sticks in my mind indelibly, and it has nothing to do with school. It is an observation I make on the way to school. It is a bright, cold morning with snow on the ground. There is no wind and everything is very still and quiet. I am walking toward school, alone, up the hill, away from the farmhouse. I am perhaps a half mile away, when I look back at the sound of wood being chopped. Indeed, there is my father with an axe, getting ready to swing it overhead, aiming for the log, propped up on its end, ready to be split. And indeed, I watch the axe travel the arc over his head and connect with the log, which obediently parts into two separate pieces. This is all as it should be except for one thing. There is no sound at the moment when the axe connects with the log. Instead, I hear the noise only as my father reaches over and begins to arrange the next log to be split. I check once more. Yes, indeed, it is true. I hear the sound at a time that is several seconds later than when I see the motion. I walk up the hill and keep looking back, and the time interval between the chop and the noise increases. At that moment the concept of sound propagation solidifies in my mind, and the essence of it hasn't changed in 60 years. I experience the internal ‘aha’ moment as this new information solidifies into one module that eventually becomes part of my internal model of how the world works and joins a previous observation concerning the flight of airplanes. As I watched the fighter planes overhead in Latvia and watch them now in Bavaria, I am puzzled that the apparent location of the airplane, according to the sound I hear, is always considerably behind the location of the airplane as determined by my eyes. These two observations are still with me and are the indelible foundation of the theories of aeroacoustics that I have since learned, and many of which I have since forgotten. And when Kurt calls me on the telephone and says: “Dad, tell me again how you figure out how far the lightning is by counting the number of seconds it takes to hear the thunder after you see the flash,” I explain that the speed of sound is approximately 1100 fps, a mile is 5280 feet long, and therefore you count 1001, 1002, 1003, etc. and for every five seconds duration you assign the approximate distance of 1 mile between you and the lightning strike. But, in the back of my mind, it is again a bright Bavarian morning and I am alive to my last fiber, fascinated that it should take almost 3 seconds for the sound of the axe hitting the log to reach me on the snowy hillside.
One Sunday Heribert and I go to church in Lohkirchen. Many young people of our age are at the service. It is a modest country church, with a very tall spire, Catholic by denomination. Heribert and I are sitting in a pew. I watch all the goings on with great interest. There is much color, many candles burn on the altar, and the priest is swinging a chain with a little basket attached, from which fragrant smoke emanates. He talks in a singsong manner, people sing, and I understand nothing. Suddenly, Heribert stands up next to me, along with other children, and starts slowly moving out of the pew. I stand up also, intending to go with him. He motions to me, with some urgency, to sit down, but I don't understand what he is whispering to me. My plan is to stick close to him and do whatever he does. So the two of us, with me following close on Heribert’s heels, slowly walk up the aisle toward the altar, along with other young people. Heribert kneels down by the railing in front of the altar, and so do I. I can't imagine what's going to happen next, but here we are, some 15 youngsters, all kneeling, facing the priest, who proceeds to talk some more, and the young people all answer him in unison several times. Finally, he takes a small gold dish from the altar, goes to the end of the row of kneeling figures, slowly takes something from the dish and moves it toward the mouth of the first person, who opens his mouth, the priest puts something in it, upon which the recipient closes his mouth and proceeds to chew slowly. He then goes to the next one, and the next one, and repeats the procedure until he gets to Heribert, who is kneeling next to me. I know I will finally find out what is on the little dish. This, however, is not to be, because, having finished with Heribert, the priest walks past me without giving me anything, and goes to the next youngster on my other side. Once he is done with the whole group, he puts the dish back on the altar and picks up a gold cup from which he proceeds to give something to drink to everyone. By now I know what to expect, and, sure enough, he skips me again and goes to the next person until once again he's finished with the last one. A little more talk, a little more singing, and we all get up and walk back to our pews again. I feel puzzled, understanding that I have just received the message that I don't belong, although I don't understand what it is that I don't belong to. While the priest delivered the message with no particular unkindness or intensity, he did so with undeniable clarity. Heribert and I walk home and resume our German lessons.
I have often thought about the priest’s reaction upon finding unexpectedly a strange child in the middle of his group of little communicants. I used to think that he would have said that, being a good soldier in God's Army, he was just obeying orders, the same answer as that given by soldiers in Hitler's army, though I would have thought that God might have given different orders. With time, however, I have come to think more kindly of him. For me, however, this early encounter with organized religion, while not repelling me entirely from the institution, indicated even then that my chances of turning into a standard churchgoer were not very promising.
9. The Unlucky Chicken
Low-flying airplanes become more and more a part of the scene as the winter wears on. They fly low enough so that I can distinguish their markings. There are two kinds, one with white stars, and the other with blue and red bull's-eye markings on the wings and fuselage. Now and then I see my favorite airplane of the war - not much larger than the others, this one has twin tails and two engines, and the Germans refer to it as “Tiefflieger” (Deep-flyer). Although I have never been there, I am told that on the other side of the other hill, in the opposite direction from school, is an airfield. Indeed, the star and bull's-eye airplanes appear to be strafing the airfield. They circle high in the sky above the farmhouse and then descend as they disappear over the hill. In preparation for their strafing runs, many of them drop large, elongated objects. I know these are not bombs, because I have seen bombs being dropped and I know they whistle as they descend, and these make no noise at that distance. Besides, they are much larger than bombs. I stand on the second-story balcony, watching the airplanes some distance away, dropping what turn out to be wing-mounted fuel tanks, and follow their trajectories to the ground. But I never see the one that almost kills me. I watch leisurely as the air show unfolds. I think I hear a light, rushing sound that is different from the previous mix. Nothing has changed in my field of vision. I glance down. A chicken is scratching busily at the edge of the manure pit. The sound very rapidly increases to a loud “whoosh” and terminates in a very loud bang at the same time as an object flashesby, downward, 10 feet in front of my face, and impacts the manure pit, nose first, on the very same, precise spot that had, up to that moment, been occupied by the hapless chicken. My immediate thought is that a large explosion is about to follow, and I instinctively stick my index fingers in my ears so that the noise will not hurt them. My experience has not taught me about explosions damaging anything, so I feel I have covered all contingencies and return my attention to the object that just dropped from the sky and clobbered the hell out of my chicken. Mutti’s chicken, that is. I watch without undue anxiety but with great interest as the object rests for a while on its crushed nose, just like Columbus’s boiled egg in front of Queen Isabella's admirals, slowly tips to one side, and falls over with a loud rattling noise, rocks back and forth on its rounded side, and comes to rest. There is no explosion. I pull my fingers out of my ears.
Today I know that I was watching North American P-51 Mustangs with 108 gallon wing-mounted drop tanks, carrying both US and British markings, and that the twin-tailed dive bomber was a Lockheed P-38Lightning. The Mustang’s range was extended to to 2100 miles by the use of drop tanks, and it dominated the sky over all of Germany by early 1945. I also know that the presence of British markings indicates that the airplanes were based in England. The fact that they were dropping their wing tanks meant that they were empty and the mission had only one leg left, namely, to return home. I don't know if they ever dropped just one tank -- I surely would not want to fly with that unbalanced a load. I also know that, to make sure there was a clean separation of the tank from the airplane, the feedline contained a glass segment mounted in such a way that it broke upon separation.
The eight-year-old in me, however, still carries vividly the scenes of the aircraft wheeling in the sky, unencumbered by any knowledge of their intent or effect, totally unconcerned with the possibility of injury, fascinated with the ongoing, private, instructional exhibits being presented to me, one after another, by a world that has chosen to provide me with a superb and unique education at untold cost. Junior-year-abroad pales in comparison. One striking theme runs through Terkel’s “The Good War”, namely, that a large number of those interviewed thought of the war as the biggest, life-transforming, positive event that they could possibly have experienced. As one industry tycoon said from his 50th floor corner office overlooking New York City: “If it had not been for a World War II, I would still be driving a tractor in Kansas.” Of course, getting killed by machine-gun bullets is also life-transforming. But, Terkel did not talk to any dead people.
10. The Crystal Palace
As my grandfather used to say: “Nostalgia is like manure. A little is fine as fertilizer, but one should not wallow in it.” Living in the past becomes easier and, therefore, more difficult to avoid, as one accumulates more and more of it. So far, I have described everything that I can remember, which is astonishingly little, considering that in the years leading up to age 7 or 8 one learns a language, a culture, how to read, how to write, and how to pick up after oneself, maybe. Perhaps one accumulates tools before one accumulates memories. Learning the tools doesn't count as a memory. But now that we’re getting into the years after the tools have been learned, I find that the memories pile up and will need to be redacted, to keep the length of the analysis shorter than the length of the experience itself. Why is a red light flashing on my monitor? Oh, the time-travel software. The screen reads DO YOU WISH TO DISCONNECT FROM THE SERVICE? No, I do not wish. PLEASE ENTER DESIRED SPACE AND TIME COORDINATES. OK, OK! Munich, 2 November, 1944. Fade to… Munich Bahnhof. We are just pulling into the station. Something is wrong. I look up at the ceiling of the enclosure. What looks like a gigantic, vaulted greenhouse roof has twisted pieces of checkerboard trusses hanging with a few shards of glass still clinging to the wreckage. Look at the neighboring track through the window on the opposite side! All the tracks except ours and one other are buried under twisted and jumbled railroad equipment. Most outlandish is the sight of a locomotive with all 24 wheels pointing skyward and the front-end canted at an angle, resting on a crushed passenger car. This is what's left of the famous Munich railroad station that was fashioned after the Crystal Palace, the focus of The Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park in London, as were half the railroad stations in Europe, so profound was the influence of the building that was intended merely to display the exhibits of interest. Conceived by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's German husband, it was designed by Sir Joseph Paxton in only 10 days, viewed by over 6 million visitors to the exhibition, and showcased over 13,000 exhibits. Among the exhibits were the Jacquard loom, an envelope machine, tools, kitchen appliances, steel-making displays, and a reaping machine from the United States. The Palace’s huge arched Center Transcept contained the world's largest organ and also housed a circus and was the scene of daring feats by world-famous acts. National exhibitions were also staged within its glass and iron walls, including the world's first aeronautical exhibition (held in 1868) and the First National motor show, plus cat shows, dog shows, pigeon shows, honey, flower, and other shows. But it was the building itself that contributed, for 140 years, to Britain's social, scientific and sporting history, until November 30, 1936, when it was destroyed by fire.
It is clear that our perusal of the wreckage of Munich's once elegant Bahnhof is being conducted on my monitor in the safety of my study in 2004 and holds none of the shock and sense of impending danger of the original experience. Let's take a small detour, therefore, in Betty's brand new, shiny, black 2005 Lexus ES 330, complete with his and her climate controls and a her-button that raises the drivers seat, adjusts the rearview mirrors, AND, incredible as it may sound, raises the pedals so that she can sit high enough to use the visor to keep the sun out of her eyes while having the brake and gas pedals at an elevation where she can reach them. And, of course, a his-button that returns it all to settings that I find most comfortable. Down Elm street, take a right on 5th Street, a left on Riverside Drive, and arrive at The Ameristar Casino, the showcase and financial sugar daddy of St. Charles, Missouri, positioned delicately on the western bank of the Missouri River with one “toe” demurely stuck in the water to comply with the requirement that gambling in Missouri may only be conducted on riverboats. Originally, the law stated that, while gambling was taking place, the boats had to be in motion on the river. Several scary accidents led to a more pragmatic concession to our delicate Bible Belt delicate sensibilities, and now no Missouri gambling customer is in danger of drowning while spending Sunday mornings feeding pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters (dollars, anybody?) into slot machines which accommodate your preferences by permitting you to pull the bandit’s single arm in the time-honored fashion, or to push one of several buttons that do the same thing. As we walk into the structure, let me point out the 20-acre “front porch”, festooned with endless strings of light bulbs, past the fountain that shoots perfectly round and smooth sausages of water at each other at various angles, illuminated by internal laser lights, down the entrance hallway, lined with stores, restaurants, video game parlors, and a theater sporting the latest and greatest in musical entertainment, into, finally, the Center Transcept of the 1851 Crystal Palace.
“You pushed the wrong button and we are now in 1851,” you say to me.
“No, look more closely and compare what you see here in St. Charles with the photograph of the real Crystal Palace which I, knowing ahead of time that there would be a need for it, brought with me.” And, indeed, the differences soon become apparent. The tree is gone and, where in 1851 there used to be shops on the left side, now there is discrete iron work shielding the twin elevators that take customers to the luxurious Star Club, reserved only for Elite Members. How do you become an Elite Member? That, at least, has not changed in 153 years. The answer is - you spend enough money to earn 10,000 points in six months according to a complicated formula that keeps track of all your gambling activities in the Casino and you become an Elite Member. Betty is worried that she may not be able to remain an Elite Member because the casino raised the threshold from 8000 points last year to 10,000 points this year. I rub my rabbit's foot assiduously, but so far it hasn't helped much.
11. The Glow of Embers
Some 3 or 4 miles from Eichfeld, as the camp is named, generally following the railroad tracks to the river Inn, just beyond the railroad bridge, on the riverbank lies a good, flat meadow, edged by a civilized forest, whose wild, jungle aspects have long since been tamed by centuries of human attention, bisected by a brook that holds little danger and offers drinkable water. The distance is just right so that the orderly column of scouts, perhaps 20 to 30 young men marching two by two, singing as we go, can reach it in a comfortable march of 45 minutes early on Friday afternoon. The tents, cooking gear, food, and other necessaries have been transported ahead of time and await us at the destination. Our scout leader, Osvalds Klavenieks, is an ex-soldier and walks with a slight limp. He is a lively, organized person with a ready smile, and organizes the setting up of tents, cooking stations, digging latrines, and, most important of all, preparing the site of the campfire. Our intention is to spend two nights camping, and to return late Sunday afternoon. Scouting consumes that part of my time that is not taken by school, studying, reading, piano, ping-pong, basketball, choir practice, and other, mainly supervised, activities. It is a source of self-respect for me. I am proud to belong to an organized, disciplined group with slightly military overtones, in the sense that we march in a column rather than wandering as a crowd, and we sing as we march, somewhat like US soldiers at boot camp, although I have never seen marching songs in the U.S. Army used the way we used them in Boy Scouts, namely, to accompany the cadences of long, orderly periods of marching. The activities of the camp move forward, there are games, competitions, study assignments, meals, and, finally, after the sun has set, comes the magic of the campfire period. There are speeches by the scoutmaster/s, songs sung by everyone, skits and performances by various groups of scouts, all performed while sitting in a semicircle on one side of the campfire, with enough room between the fire and the group so that the intervening space can serve as a stage. The fire starts out as an imposing conflagration, built initially to a respectable level, and burns steadily to produce illumination, and crackling, and warmth. In the hour and a half that it takes to go through the evening’s program, it has subsided considerably, the evening has grown cool, and it is clear that the day is coming to an end. Then comes the magic moment that, for me, ties the entire experience of being a Boy Scout over the period of four years in southern Germany into one symbolic memory. It is the singing of the traditional song that ends each day at a Latvian Boy Scout camp, in the light of the dying fire, slow, wistful, in a minor key, gentle, affirmative, always the same. When it ends, we rise, someone banks the fire, a guard is posted, and we retire to our tents. It is a more personal and emotional equivalent of the single trumpet, blowing taps. The song is the following. I give the first verse here, because I don't remember the rest verbatim. The rough translation in parentheses follows the exact text.
“Kad ugunskura beidz kvelot ogles, (When the embers in the fire stop glowing)
Un sarga mozais skats apkart klist. (And the guard’s sight roams the grounds)
Kad augs’t pie debess beidz spidet zvaigznes, (When, high above, the stars cease shining)
Un siks siks lietins maigi list. (And a fine, fine mist begins to fall.)”
In singable form, using a loosely transliterated English text, along with the chord notation, it becomes the following:
|| 4/4 || The glow of
Am
|| embers is slowly || dying, The guard is || watchful, the forest || still The stars in ||
Dm Am E7 Am
|| heaven the clouds are || hiding, And softly || falls a gentle || mist. : ||
The melody is simple. Any musician can construct a series adequate singable musical phrases to match the harmonic and rhythmic structure given above. The words go on to affirm a scout’s role in helping to make life better for himself and his fellow man.
Why does this simple song constitute the core of my memories of Scouting? Or, to put the question in a different form, how is it possible that it should do so? It is a symbol, an icon at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of specific experiences, faces, names, activities. I did not get to go to the so-called scouting jamboree, which was reinstated in 1947 or 1948, and which was held for the first time in the postwar years in Paris. But somewhere under that symbolic icon is my recollection that I belonged to a Latvian Scouting group that did send a representative to Paris that year, and the corresponding pride that this should have happened.
Let us leave the campfire for now, return to the present, and propose the following hypothesis. Is it possible, that the effect I just described is, in fact, one of the central mechanisms for transmitting an oral culture? Committing long texts to memory was a skill that was necessary when wisdom was passed from generation to generation orally. The capability for remembering extremely long melodic and rhythmic passages is one of the very remarkable characteristics of the human mind. How, for example, can a piano student remember an entire Beethoven Sonata? Is it any wonder that the compilation of teachings that one generation wishes to pass to the next should make use of the efficiencies of transmittal made possible by compacting a lesson into, first, the form of a rhythmic, four-line poem, and, secondly, selecting a subset of poems to be combined with a melodic structure, assuring that the inherent properties of the mind are used to the utmost in guaranteeing that the message transmitted will be retained in permanent storage and will be given an emotional emphasis through the natural attraction of the mind to an aesthetic musical experience. As I look back on the significant events and experiences that shaped me during the years I spent in Eichfeld, I count being a Boy Scout as one of the primary positive, beneficial influences. And when I touch that bank of memories in my mind, I am always carried back to the banks of the river Inn, it is a late hour of the evening, the campfire is low, and I hear the melody, in a minor key, that whispers to me across the years: “The glow of embers is slowly dying…”
12. Life in Hilgersoed
We sleep upstairs in the farmhouse. It is winter, with snow on the ground, but the windows stay open all night. The beds are covered with Federbetten, or eiderdown quilts, with matching pillows. I am burrowed in like a squirrel in a nest with only my nose sticking out. Sleeping is grand. The facilities are outdoors, across the yard -- a proper one-holer -- or was it two? -- outhouse. But there is no need to make the trip, should the call come during the night. There is a chamber pot under the bed. But the call doesn't come that often. Supper is the smaller of the two major meals, and foraging at the fridge is a concept that doesn't arrive in my life for many years to come. Hence, when one goes to sleep, digestion has long since been completed, and all that is left is restful sleep for the entire night.
As spring arrives, work begins on the fields. I am not of much help, but I am usually in the field anyway. I don't remember what we do for breakfast, but at 10 o'clock in the morning comes “die Brotzeit” – bread-time, literally. Ottilia comes up the hillside, carrying a basket. In it are sandwiches consisting of a 3/4" slice of black German bread, the same kind we used to eat in Latvia, covered with a quarter inch of salted butter, to be held in one hand and eaten, while the other hand hefts a bottle of half-percent, if that much, beer in a fliptop glass bottle with a ceramic cork. The beer is so weak that it is considered an OK drink for children. This combination remains one of my all-time gourmet highlights. I have recently found Grolsch beer here in St. Louis, which is also sold in green glass bottles with fliptop ceramic corks, which actually turn out to be made of plastic, as evidenced by the one that melted when it got too close to the heating coil in the dishwasher, and fat, red, rubber washers, the whole top held down by a cleverly levered heavy wire locking mechanism. I use the bottles to store cold water in the refrigerator, which I consume throughout the day. There's no point to opening my water bottles with any flair, but, back during Brotzeit on the Bavarian hillside, there is a distinct protocol to opening a beer bottle. One lifts it in one hand, shakes the bottle vigorously, then positions both thumbs on each side of the release mechanism and pushes rapidly, whereupon the cork flips off the bottle and the whole procedure results in a satisfyingly loud and cheerful popping noise. I tell this story because that is precisely the technique that the first person to open one at the beer tasting uses on the bottle containing beer that my father has brewed, according to an old Latvian recipe that he had inherited genetically from his father, I’m sure, later in the spring, and filled into several cases of standard green beer bottles that have the appearance identical to our regular Brotzeit beer bottles. But this is anything but our regular Brotzeit beer. The tasting is held outdoors, in the yard, late in the afternoon, and it's a good thing, because the standard bottle-opening procedure has a very nonstandard sequel. The requisite pop is there, though much louder and more authoritative than usual. The cork clicks loudly against the neck of the bottle, having been ejected, very forcefully, by some seriously aggravated beer. The totally unexpected, nonstandard result is the white, foaming fountain that issues from the neck of the bottle, as if from a fire hose, and reaches easily a height of 25 feet in the air. When the astonished potential beer drinker looks at the bottle again, it is totally empty. No one again uses the standard technique for opening beer bottles that evening.
I admired my father for many skills he possessed that I have not learned to this day. These included brewing beer, pickling cucumbers, making sauerkraut, making butter, making curdled milk, making little cones of stinky cheese that he would put on the windowsill to cure -- they were ready to eat when the sides were dripping with teary rivulets of stinky goo; a kind of Latvian Camembert, or better yet, a version of what is referred to universally as THE stinky German cheese, namely, Limburger -- making soap, butchering pigs, and one skill that he possessed, which I think I would just as soon omit from my list of things I wish I knew how to do. I observed him exercise this skill with respect to one of Mutti’s horses that was in major distress. From something he and eaten, the horse had blown up like a balloon, with his belly sticking out as if he were about to have triplets. But what he was actually about to do was die from a ruptured stomach instead. Horses have internal plumbing that is not all that different from humans. The horse is a nonruminant herbivore, which means that horses do not have a multicompartmented stomach as cattle do. The horse esophagus terminates with the muscles of the cardiac sphincter valve, leading into the stomach, which are very strong, so that it is almost impossible for a horse to vomit. Therefore, if a horse is in digestive trouble, it is quite possible that his stomach may rupture. At this point veterinarian schoolbooks delicately suggest “surgical intervention may be required”. Well, my father actually knew the procedure, having taught it to students in the agricultural college that he headed. He asked for a bottle of alcohol. He used a clean cloth soaked in alcohol to clean a spot on the horse’s belly. Then he pulled out his pocketknife, cleaned the shorter of the two blades, and carefully placed the blade against the spot on the horse's belly that he had cleaned previously. Having prepared everything, he proceeded to make a very quick jab into the horse's side, rapidly pushing the blade in to the hilt and drawing it out again. The effect was one of having punctured a balloon. A whooshing sound of gas escaping was accompanied by a visible decrease in the size of the horse's belly. The horse, instead of complaining, appeared to be grateful for the decreased pressure in his stomach. He recovered fully and continued to perform valuable service. My father’s stature, I'm sure, rose considerably in Mutti’s eyes, who would otherwise have lost a valuable horse.
Spring is advancing and the war is grinding to a halt. Now and then we still have overflights of fighter planes. If we, the children, are in the yard, and if the airplanes are directly overhead, mother pulls us into a makeshift bomb shelter next to the huge pear tree by the well. It is merely a hole in the ground, deep enough so that we can duck our heads below ground level. We jump out as soon as the airplanes are gone. They do not present a sense of danger to me. One day, late in March, I see two tanks with white stars on their sides crossing the valley in the direction of the airfield. They come as near as a couple of hundred yards from the farmhouse, continue by without stopping, and disappear across the hill. As of that moment we live, without a single tremor designating the transition, in American-occupied territory, as opposed to living within the boundaries of the Third Reich. That is the extent of the ruckus in Hilgersoed connected with the Allied front advancing through southern Germany and World War II finally ending on 6 May 1945. Nobody “liberates” us, although our status up to then has been that of slave laborers. The farm is totally independent of the rest of the world, and life goes on without change into the summer of 1945. Even Emil, the French prisoner, remains where he is, thinking correctly, I suppose, that setting out to go back to France, on foot, is not the wisest thing to do at the moment. Mutti does not know where her son, Hans, is, and when or if he will be coming home from the eastern front. But the farm work still needs doing, and the season is moving along. Hay needs to be harvested, the fields need to be fertilized, and the spring wheat needs to be seeded. The hay has been cut and has dried on the fields. I “help” by driving the hay wagon, drawn by two oxen, out to the field where it gets piled up with fresh, fragrant hay. I sit on top of the haystack while my father drives the wagon back to the barn, where the hay is hefted, using three-pronged pitchforks, into the upper level, from where it is distributed for storage throughout the barn. Pretty soon all the hay has been harvested and a new crop of inhabitants moves into the barn. These are the barnyard hens that feel the time is right to start raising families. To this end, each hen crawls along the space between the hay and the side of the barn until she finds a nice pocket, where she proceeds to make a nest. Before long, the barn is an apartment building for a whole cackle of hens (if I'm the first to invent what seems a very appropriate descriptive name for a bunch of hens, I want full credit for it!). Now, hens are just grown-up chickens, and chickens are not very smart. Neither are hens. Without fail, as soon as she lays an egg, the hen announces the happy event with a full one-minute cackling solo. Mozart it is not, but loud, yes. Not very smart, though, because I and Heribert, Maija, and Zaiga now know exactly what we need to know to carry out our prime assignment, namely, to collect eggs for the pantry. Our instructions are to leave two or three eggs in each nest so as not to discourage the hen, I suppose, and to make sure that there are always enough eggs for breakfast and other cooking needs. The hen can’t count, by the way. She never misses the eggs we have taken, but continues to produce one egg per day in the expectation that there will be, eventually, enough eggs so she can stop laying more and start sitting on them to hatch her new family. So we get pretty good at crawling throughout the hay-filled barn in search of eggs. Not all the eggs make it to the pantry. Heribert teaches me the gentle art of “drinking” eggs. Remember the phrase “don't try to teach your grandmother how to suck eggs?” Well, did you ever wonder where your grandmother learned how to do it? I don't know about your grandmother, but I learned it from Heribert. Here's how you do it. First, get out your pocketknife. I don't know where or when I got my first one, but I can't remember ever a time in my life when, reaching into my pocket, I did not reliably come into contact with man's most useful tool, next to fire, a mace, a bow and arrow, and one or two others I can think of, namely, a pocket knife. You can imagine the deep, emasculating, psychological impact I suffer when, as part of my post - 9/11 travel preparations, I get to the item on my travel checklist that says “leave Swiss Army knife on dresser.” The first thing I do at my destination airport is to go into the news stand and buy a cheap throwaway pocketknife for $3.99 to serve in the interim, and I feel like a man again. So, you take your pocket knife, open up the blade, hold the egg in your left hand, if you are right-handed, and carefully prick a small hole in one end of the egg. It doesn't matter which end, because, next, you turn the egg around, holding your finger carefully over the hole you just made, and make a slightly larger hole in the other end. Then you put your mouth over the larger hole, tip your head back, and suck! The smaller hole is your vent-hole to keep the egg shell from collapsing. I must confess that raw egg white is not my favorite consumable, so I swallow it quickly until the yolk starts coming out of the hole. Now, that is another matter entirely. To this day, raw egg yolk to me is one of life’s major delicacies. When consumed according to the proper European method for eating boiled eggs, the egg is boiled only until the egg white around the yolk has just finished turning white, but the yolk is still completely liquid. The pointy end of the egg is peeled, and the other end set into an egg holder, which sometimes is made of silver in the shape of a small cup sitting on a little pedestal. An egg spoon, also of silver, of course, is then used to delicately convey a mix of approximately one half egg white and one half runny yolk to the mouth. A little salt is usually preferred. That's how it's done properly. But, if you are roughing it in southern Germany, just a couple of weeks after World War II has ended, and if you come across a nest full of eggs that have just been certified fresh by the cackling of its dumb proprietress, sucking a couple of raw eggs is almost as good as the real thing. And, what the butler doesn't know won't hurt the butler, don't you know, old chap. Anyway, this way he won't have to polish the silver.
We stay on the farm well into the summer and early fall. The time spent in the Bavarian countryside, living with a German family, constitutes the major impact of German culture on my development. The four or so years after that are spent in a hybrid environment that mixes Latvian as the largest part with German the smaller, and American smaller still. But at the Bauernhaus the environment is primarily German, or, rather, Bavarian. There is a difference. This is where I learn basic German, find out about German farm life, about foods and customs. We spend one Christmas there, with a tree decorated with real candles and anti-radar chaff, ejected from Allied aircraft, that we have picked up from the ground where it has fallen in the form of long, thin, individual strips of aluminum foil, or sometimes, if the package did not open, as an entire bundle, wrapped in the middle with a wide paper band, just as one might buy Christmas tree ornamentation in a drugstore in the United States. During the months of May and June I go, with Maija and Zaiga, to hunt for raspberries, blackberries, and, especially, wild strawberries in the nearby forest. But the main attraction is mushroom hunting. We have been trained thoroughly to recognize good mushrooms and avoid poisonous ones. The best of the good ones are called Steinpilze in German, Barvikas in Latvian; Boletus Edulis is their formal Latin name. Called Boletes by American mushroom hunters, they look like a sliced hamburger bun stuck on a hefty handle. The biggest caps can be 5 or 6 inches in diameter and they make marvelous eating when sliced and fried with butter. The ones to be especially avoided are called “fly-death” in Latvian, referring to ordinary household flies. They are about an inch and a half in diameter, red, with white dots. They serve a useful purpose, as indicated by their name, when they are boiled and the liquid is placed on shallow dishes with a little bit of sugar added. Flies flock to the dish when placed on a tabletop, and, having enjoyed a quick sip, never flock to anything else ever after. Flies are a major nuisance inside the house, especially in the kitchen. I learn a technique of capturing flies bare handed by estimating their takeoff trajectory, usually in the direction in which they are facing, placing my cupped hand slightly ahead of their resting position, and swooping it rapidly so that my hand almost touches the tabletop. If all works well, the unfortunate fly sees the approaching danger, jumps into the air and starts flying forward, thus being in a perfect position to hit the very middle of my hand, which I close as soon as I feel the impact of my captive. At age 8 one’s palm is very flexible, and there is no chance for the fly to escape. The fly is still perfectly flight-worthy, but this is no time to become squeamish and perhaps carry it outside and let it go, because it will just turn around and fly right back inside again. The thing to do is to work the thumb of your left hand in the to the cavity holding the fly, without letting it escape, until you finally contact and manage to dispatch it without, how shall I say it inoffensively, mashing it excessively. As the lesson comes across time and time again, a farm is not the place that will teach delicate sensibilities about the sacredness of life of the very smallest bug in creation. Once you have personally performed the full procedure for transforming a hen or rooster from a noisy, scratching, defecating beastie into chicken noodle soup, you are never the same again. Or, better yet, have taken part in butchering a pig. Popular Bavarian dishes such as Oxenschwanzsuppe (ox-tail soup), Blutwurst (blood sausage), and geroestete Zunge (roasted tongue) taste a lot better to the ordinary American city-dweller turned tourist in Bavaria if the ingredients are kept unmentioned.
Mutti’s cooking consisted of Knoedel recipes and Dampfnudel recipes, the first for lunch, which was the main meal of the day, and the second for supper. Knoedeln were served in a beef broth soup with vegetables, or as a main course with potatoes and sauerkraut. A Knoedel is a fancy way to prepare leftovers. You start with stale bread or rolls, torn into three-quarter-inch bits, pour hot milk over them and let them cool for 30 minutes. The other ingredients include butter, sautéed onion, beef or pork liver (substitute any other meat that you happen to have on hand), two eggs, garlic, parsley, marjoram, grated lemon rind and fresh nutmeg. The ingredients all converge into a mixture that is compressed into 2 1/2 inch diameter Knoedel balls, which are dropped into the simmering broth to cook for about 15 minutes. I'm sure Mutti did not always have all of these ingredients, but the basic theme of lunch was always Knoedel. It was a hefty, hearty, tasty meal. The evening meal, just as reliably, consisted of Dampfnudeln, usually prepared without meat, but rather with something sweet. Dampfnudel in German means steamed dumplings, and the ingredients are flour, butter, eggs, milk, sugar, and yeast. The slightly risen product is steamed in a closed container in a preheated oven and served with plum preserves and a glass of milk.
I am reluctant to leave childhood. Despite the war, the six months spent on the Bavarian farm are, for me, an island free of any real trauma, full of exploration and excitement. I know that when I'm finished with this segment, I will be diving into a much more complex and conflicted world and describing my passage through a multicultural mix of environments, events, coincidences, opportunities taken and opportunities missed, all of which led to Valdis2004, Pika2004, to this exploration of where I have been, who I am, and where I am going. It constitutes a prelude to the present and future. It enables my future by solidifying my past. Already it has changed my future. Going back, with my time machine, may not have influenced the events between 1945 and 2004, but it has influenced the events starting with 2004. So once more I ask the question - did I really travel in time?
But before we leave, let's stay here at the Bauernhaus just a little longer, to address the one item we have been postponing, being sensitive, civilized city-folk, namely, the smell. I once asked a tour guide at Williamsburg: “What do you think is the biggest difference between what we see today and the way it was back in the 18th century?” She answered without hesitation: “The smell.” It is time to fertilize the fields at the farm. First, let me introduce you to “Holtzschuhe,” wooden shoes, or clogs, as we might call them. Carved out of a single piece of wood, they are exactly what they sound like, namely, loose-fitting shoes whose main characteristic is that they are impervious to liquids, having been smeared with tar on the outside to keep moisture from penetrating the wood. They also have thick soles and correspondingly elevated heels, and sides that reach up from the sole to just below the ankle bone, so that if you should happen to walk, let us say, in mud (I'm just easing into the idea that eventually we will be walking in stuff described by that other m-word, oh what the hell, I'll say it, manure, which is a polite word for cow-shit), it would have to be at least 3 inches deep before you would begin to ship the stuff into your shoes. My father handles the trip to the field, standing on the wagon frame behind the two oxen, just in front of the special conveyance designed to haul a load of manure, with me standing next to him. The spreading is done by means that have blissfully escaped my memory. But the trip back to the farmyard is where I am in my glory. I stand, wearing my Holtzschuhe, inside the empty wagon, slippery with the remnants of our previous load, feeling surefooted and brave, because slipping and falling would be a messy and undignified experience and totally unthinkable in my all-powerful and invincible state, and guide the two oxen masterfully back to the manure pit. I, with a doubly capital I, am in charge. I'm sure that my presence is of small concern to the oxen, because they are the precursors of the autopilot, knowing exactly where they need to go, at the grand speed of 2 miles an hour, whether I am there or not, but it makes me feel very important to think that this small part of the world is, for the moment, fully under my control. So we repeat the trips until the job is done. Now, what about the smell? I hate to have stretched this into a shaggy dog story, but the truth of it is, it is not really all that bad. I know, I know, just the very thought of it could make a city person throw up. And, frankly, I don't want to go into the chemistry of the herbivore digestive tract and the reactions that transform into manure something that started out as green grass. But the upshot of it is that the smell of cow manure being spread on fields in the spring falls in the same category as that of leaves being burned in the fall. It's a distinctive smell, not at all unpleasant, which, as it wafts across your open car window as you drive by the fields, would immediately evoke awareness and knowledge of its origin, but, despite the queasiness of city-folk, would bring that acute awareness of being connected to and positioned right smack-dab in the middle of reality that can only be achieved through the triggering of an olfactory vision, be it the smell of hay, apples, roses, strawberries, jasmine blossoms, or, wonder of wonders, cow manure. So, I find myself thinking again of my grandfather’s admonishment about treating nostalgia in the same way one treats cow manure, but, believe it or not, here I am being nostalgic about cow manure! Go figure.
It's time to go. With regrets. Ontogeny follows phylogeny? Did I have regrets about leaving the farm? Transitional thoughts, entertained with an overtone of fondness. I looked up Lohkirchen on the Internet. There, on the real-estate-available-for-sale page, is a map showing land for sale right next to Hilgersod. So the farm still exists under the same name. And, under town government for Lohkirchen, I find one Johann Perseis jun., CSU und Freie Wahlgemeinschaft (whatever that means), Landwirt (farmer), Hilgersod 1, 84494 Lohkirchen, Tel. 08637/7084. So this must be Hans’s son, running the farm and taking part in local government. I’m sure Mutti is long gone, probably Hans also. I wonder if the six poplar trees that my parents planted are still growing. In 1962 they had already stretched well above the roof of the farmhouse. Once, when my father suggested a new way of doing something, Mutti’s answer was: “We have always done it this way, and this is how we will continue doing it.” In 1962 I could not notice any substantial change at the Bauernhof over the intervening 17 years. I wonder what the place looks like now. Ah, I can find out if I really want to, can't I? It gives me a sense of reassurance and stability to know that it is still there, unlike my Mississippi dwelling place, which I visited a year ago after an interval of more than 50 years. There is no sign that we, or anyone else, had ever lived on the very spot that was the center of my world for three years of my life. In Latvian mythology a popular theme is the sunken castle. Jaunpils, according to the myth, was built at a location not far from the ancient castle housing the tribal king, which had sunk deep into an adjacent lake, to appear again and send forth the king and his fighting men at a time when Latvia would be in great danger and great need. If in the intervening 700 years the king has not yet found times of dire enough need, for Latvia, to make his appearance, one begins to wonder just what he is waiting for. In Mississippi, it is quite clear that an ancient Brigadoon, in the form of a couple of sharecropper huts and an old barn, is not waiting to emerge from the Delta mist, regardless of times of need or abundance. As a blues refrain might say it, “it’s gone, baby, just plain gone.” But this story must wait.
Looking bravely into the future is not a part of Latvian culture or tradition, oral or otherwise. The culture soaks one from an early age in a nostalgic -- oh, what does it matter, life has always been tough, and always will be tough – marinade. As we move along, I will start getting into the musical aspects of my life, because it will be easiest to look at the links and changes between me then and me now by looking at attitudes and values that were transferred to me through music. Not instrumental, but vocal, sung by my mother, one-on-one, my father, people who came to visit -- every single social gathering that I ever attended sooner or later came to the singing part. There were so-called folk songs, or ‘dainas’, which were excerpts from the oral tradition that transferred all the wisdom, often in very simple informational packets designed to teach survival tactics, compacted into simple poems, sometimes put to music, during centuries of Latvian history in the absence of writing. And there were also the popular songs that dealt with the topic that all popular songs deal with, namely, love, longing for love, loss of love, struggling for and regaining love, but in a much more poetic and less clinical format than what I found in America. They often tended to be melancholy and reflect the low expectation levels as people proceeded through life: “Life, oh life, I sway in your branches; much have you promised but little delivered -- is it not all the same, after all.” And nostalgia - looking back on days when life was better, which usually meant the days of one's youth, when all seemed possible, love was in the air, and disappointments yet to be fully accepted.
And along this line, let me take you back to Jaunpils yet one more time. I am seven years old and I am very much attracted to melodies and songs. I know many, and I pick out the melodies on the piano in the great hall. I have just learned a new song about looking back on one's youth and I really like the melody. As soon as I get my music notation software, I will play it for you. The lyrics, translated fairly directly, are as follows: “Return, oh return to me just one more time, my lovely childhood, (youth-hood?) I miss you so!” Here I am, just barely 7 years old, walking around in the castle, singing this song in full voice, to the amusement of my elders to whom my age does not appear yet to be sufficient to warrant such nostalgia. And the funny thing is, even I myself, as I'm singing this song, think to myself: “Gee, you’re just a kid, isn't it a bit early to be singing a song about looking back at lost youth and how marvelous it all was?” So, even as I am laying down the foundations for a proper, melancholic, Baltic outlook, I am sneaking a peek sideways at the lesson, saying: “Isn't all this just a little bit ridiculous? Pretty soon you will be starting to teach me that I shouldn't expect any large rewards in this life, but there will be major recompense in the next life.” I think that even then the foundations of a fundamental irreverence were being laid down, and I certainly relate, sitting here in 2004, to the signs of healthy skepticism developing in my young predecessor.
Throughout this exercise, the adult world and reality barge in periodically, and I resent the intrusion, on the perfectly fine, naïve accounting of an exciting and educational childhood as seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy. Here I am, having just recovered from losing my peace of mind while thinking about the ghettos of Lodz and the slave labor camps of Muhldorf, and I come across the diary, written by my uncle, Jekabs Vikmanis, starting on 20 September 1944, just before leaving the Latvian farmhouse in Naukseni, near Valka on the Estonian border, which he had taken over from his father and which is his life’s work and the source of all the sustenance and support he provides for his family and the basis of all their hopes for the future. He and his wife, Teresa, leave, with a wagon, drawn by a couple of horses, five cows tied to the wagon, and five sheep being driven alongside by the children. But it turns out that they have waited too long. It is barely 3 weeks until the German army abandons Riga, and Jekabs and his family are still some hundreds of miles northeast of Riga. After two days of traveling along roads that are jammed impossibly with army units and their vehicles as well as other refugees, Teresa no longer wants to continue. The family caucuses at the roadside, still only tens of miles from their starting point. The choice for Jekabs is clear. He must leave. He had been the head of county government, and he would automatically be considered a criminal and deported to Siberia, if not shot outright. The children, Vilnis, born 20 April 1928, Aija, 8 April 1929, Jekabs, 20 November 1931, Aivars, 1 February 1934, from 10 to 16 years old, are divided in opinion. The two older ones want to continue, especially Vilnis. The others want to stay. The decision is made that Jekabs and Vilnis will continue on their bicycles, and Teresa and the three other children will drive the wagon into the forest, wait out the passage of the dividing line between the Russian and German armies, and return home to await whatever the future brings. This is the last time Jekabs, age 45 at the time, sees his wife and the rest of his children. To get ahead of our story, Vilnis dies of meningitis on 3 March 1947 in southern Germany. That is the reality that I, as a child, do not know and am not capable of understanding. Nor does anyone ask me to participate in the continuous decision-making required to stay ahead of two armies, try to find passage to Germany, and try to relocate in a safe spot until the war ends and we can all return to Latvia -- no one ever doubts that this will happen and that we are leaving for only a short time until the turbulence settles. But, neither am I excluded from discussions. I am ignored by my elders, along with other children, once our safety is assured. I absorb whatever an eight-year-old absorbs, mainly the tone and emotion, which uniformly reflect the extraordinary tensions experienced by refugees in wartime caught in the back-and-forth sloshing of three large armies. Had I been eight years older, like my cousin Vilnis, I too would have taken full part in planning, information gathering, and decisions, and today I would have been a totally different person than I am now. Uncle Jekabs and Vilnis manage, on 30 September, to meet up with our family at Kibji , my grandfather's farm near Tadaiki and Liepaja, a seaport on the Baltic Sea, at the southwest corner of the country. My uncle Valdis, my mother's youngest brother, who lives in Liepaja, is very helpful in our final arrangements for transport by sea. On Friday, 20 October, at 10 in the morning, we leave for the Liepaja seaport. By 7 in the evening our baggage is loaded on the freighter “Bucharest”, and at 8:30 we leave the harbor. People on the deck are singing the national anthem, “God bless Latvia”. The next morning, on the 21st, we are in the vicinity of Gottenhafen, or Gdinya. At 2:30 in the afternoon we enter the harbor, tie up, and begin unloading cargo. We stay overnight aboard the ship, and on the 22nd of October 1944, as we step foot on German/Polish ground, I turn eight.
Uncle Jekabs and Vilnis are with us on the trip across Germany to the Rhine River, and then South to Bavaria. They stay at a different farmhouse until the spring of 1945. Then, they join us at Hilgersod. Vilnis signs on for high school later in the year at the DP camp in Neuotting. We move to the DP camp in Muhldorf, which will house nearly 600 Latvians for the next five years. Uncle Jekabs also comes with us and lives in the same apartment for the next four years. Our address is 13 Skagerak Strasse, Mhldorf am Inn, Deutschland.
At this point, with great relief, I propose to abandon adulthood and immerse myself in the fall of 1945, in Muhldorf, Germany. I am eight, about to turn nine. From now until September 1949, I will undergo a rigorous education, both formal and informal, as I advance into the early stages of reason and independent thought. I will study in a Latvian elementary school, taught by excellent teachers according to the traditional curricula established in the Latvian educational system. I will finish the seventh grade, which is the last grade in the Latvian system before going into a four-year high school. I will be prepared to a level sufficient that I will be classed as a genius in mathematics in the Belen, Mississippi, school in which I will enroll, in the eighth grade, upon coming to the United States. I will study German and English as foreign languages, with German available for practice any time I walk into the town of Muhldorf or go back to visit the Bauernhof, and English being an abstract language which no one speaks except Mrs. Elza Potapovs, our English teacher. I will be a Boy Scout, and will take piano lessons. I will sing in a school chorus, learn how to play an accordion, learn countless Latvian folk songs and pop songs. I will go to many visiting Latvian plays, concerts, ballets, movies, and attend periodic church services conducted by the Reverend Alberts Galins, who died not too long ago in Boston, Massachusetts, and who preached sermons that were pure poetry to my ear and that of everyone else too. I will be the last sober musician playing the accordion at Latvian camp dances and will read every book in the not very extensive camp library. I will acquire a bicycle with a slightly bent frame, on whose structural members is displayed the name “Victoria”, and which, try as I might, cannot be controlled and pedaled at the same time without holding on to the handlebars. I will envy other more fortunate young men (we don't think of ourselves as boys anymore), whose bicycle frames are not bent, who can leisurely pedal their bicycles while holding their hands in their pockets. That looks really, superbly, enviably cool, to borrow a term that would not enter my life until another culture, another language, and 40 years downstream. Pretty snazzy too! Cool, man, cool!
13. The Day I Met Bill Neutzling
The one and only time I met Bill Neutzling was late in the morning on 19 March, 1945. Even then, it wasn't a real meeting, with introductions and “nice to meetcha’s”. The conditions for our meeting were unconventional, to say the least. But more about that later. Bill was a Technical Sergeant in the 15th Army Air Force and served as a radio operator and waist gunner on 1st Lt. Robert Boone's crew, flying a Boeing B-24 Liberator, assigned to the 484th Bomb Group (H), 825th bomb squadron (H), 49th Wing, based in Cerignola (Torretta) Italy. 20 years old, he was senior to me by 12 years, and you might think we would not have had much interest in each other, especially since he spoke English, I spoke Latvian, and neither of us could understand a word of the other's language. Nor did we attempt to bridge the language gap, then. But he left a lasting impression on me and I on him, nonetheless. In a manner of speaking. On 19 March 1945, around 11 o'clock in the morning, Bill Neutzling flew over our Bauernhof, Hilgersod, with me watching from below, at an altitude of 17,000 feet, on a bombing run whose purpose was to destroy the marshaling yards at the Muhldorf rail center. At the time, I could only look up and, in my imagination, see people in the airplanes overhead and wonder who they were and where they came from. Almost 60 years later I found the answer. Not all of it. Only that Bill Neutzling, radio operator and waist gunner, along with Robert Boone, pilot, and six or seven other young Americans had been in one of the airplanes, looking down on the countryside and wondering who were the people down below. Standing idly next to his machine gun, since no German planes were to be seen, Bill was observing the craters left by the bombs during the total of eight passes over the railroad yards. As he later wrote in an e-mail: “We found ourselves over a Bauernhof. I could see the road and a nearby barn. One bomb hit about 50 m to the right of the barn and another one before the main house. They did not damage anything, but I had the feeling that the inhabitants probably thought that we damned Americans came to kill their cows. We did not want to do that. The cows just were at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He wished there were a way to let the people at the Bauernhof know that he had not intended to bomb them, even though he was not the bombardier. 40 years passed. The crew kept in touch with each other, and, finally, in 1985, they had their first reunion in Wisconsin. They have been holding yearly reunions ever since. Another dozen or so years passed. Bill Neutzling continued to carry the images in his head from that March 19, 1945 morning over Muhldorf. Finally, in 1999, he sent an e-mail to the City Hall at Muhldorf, saying that 54 years ago he had been in one of the planes that had bombed the city and wanted to find out more about the people who had been on the ground under his airplane that day. And among them, of course, was I. That is the sense in which I met Bill Neutzling 60 years ago in southern Germany. The e-mail exchange resulted in an article in the Muhldorf Wochenblatt on 19 January 2000. The excerpt shows Bill Neutzling as he looks today and the title reads: “Bill Neutzling sat in this bomber in 1945. US soldier shows a destroyed Muhldorf on the Internet.”
That one hour over Muhldorf was evidently extremely significant to Bill Neutzling. Perhaps it came to represent the entire World War II experience for him. He had copies of the mission orders, weapons load documentation, and ground photographs of the Muhldorf raid -- sufficient material to develop a very thorough web site documenting the mission to Muhldorf, including a description of the crew and their life in the Torreta air base in Italy, his own training experience, his trips to Rome and other sightseeing, etc. Just as I visit those precise coordinates using my time machine, so does Bill Neutzling. For both of us this represents one event from a life-altering series of experiences, but, even though the coordinates were identical, the view on my screen is totally different from the view on his. And yet, they are complementary pairs -- he is looking at me and I am looking at him. It is the first intersection of our respective life paths. I went on to learn English, to learn research, and to have children and grandchildren whose interest in my past led me to search the Internet in writing my autobiography. Bill Neutzling went back to the US, married, had a career and children and grandchildren, and created a web site describing the mission to Muhldorf. My research, by finding Neutzling's web site,
constituted the second intersection of our life paths. To be more precise, the second intersection made me aware that the first one had taken place. Both were very indirect interactions -- I have not met Bill Neutzling in person -- what physicists would describe as action at a distance. Yet, the same physicists will also say that the very smallest event that happens to the tiniest particle of the universe is instantly known to every other particle, even the very smallest one. Thornton Wilder put the concept in the following form: “Some say that to the Gods we are like flies that boys idly swat on a summer day. Others say that not a feather from a sparrow falls to the ground without the will of the Heavenly Father.” The first interaction changed the course of my life path in such a way that, taking into account that it also changed Bill Neutzling's path, the second intersection became possible, and finally actually took place. I saw his web site and I said: “Wow! This guy was actually up there in an airplane when I was a kid on the Bauernhof, looking at the sky and all the airplanes with the funny markings.” Would I like, someday, to meet Bill Neutzling? Sure. But I have no great desire or need to drive up to Wisconsin to meet him in person. It suffices me to record this account as one of the many experiences that trigger a strong sense of wonder in me, right along with intergalactic distances, subatomic particles, and the fact that my genetic and intellectual legacy already guarantee me a modest immortality, although I will definitely sign up for Raymond Kurzweil’s bridges to the future. The fact is that, while I have described only one very specialized and tentative life path intersection pair, I continually experience, and have experienced, since my birth, and perhaps earlier, a countless number, much larger than Sagan's billions and billions, of relationships and interactions -- with people, ideas, concepts, languages, Bordeaux wine recommendations, cheese selections, Verdi arias, Latvian folk songs, blues improvisation, my children and grandchildren, Boggle strategies, and pebbles on the beach… A sense of wonder at the intricacy and complexity of MY universe and THE universe is always with me. Now and then it flares up with special intensity, as, for example, when Kurt’s simple request for information about my childhood generates a brand new intellectual and spiritual adventure. I sit back, think of where I have been, whom I have met, what I have seen, what I have done, and what's coming next, and I feel alive, vital, and connected. And I say, aloud: “Thank you, God!”
14. How I Became a Piano Player
The chain has just come off my sprocket wheel! This is not good. I'm moving too fast to jump off and I have no brakes whatsoever on my old Victoria - a clunker of a bicycle that won't even go straight on its own if I take my hands off the handle bars. I'm riding down the steep part of Main Street, Muhldorf, heading for the main gate into the city that consists of an arched passageway through a building that otherwise blocks the entire street. Think! What to do? I turn the pedals backward once more to check the brakes, but the chain just rattles loosely in the mudguard. I look forward over my handlebars at the spinning front tire: there is just a short wheel cover extension on the front wheel; maybe my feet could reach that far. I scoot forward on the seat and stretch my feet toward the front wheel; now, if I could just get my shoes to touch the wheel - they do, thankfully - all I have to do now is to hold both feet against the opposite sides of the spinning tire with enough force to keep me from reaching such a speed that I will lose control and crash. I am committed to a plan. This will either work, or there is going to be the crash of all crashes. My feet make a loud buzzing noise against the tire and the bicycle feels on the verge of instability, but at least I am not speeding up any more. If I can just hang on a bit more, the road will level out…please…It works. My shoes are a scuffed up mess and they feel hot on my feet, my knees are shaking, but I did not crash. I stop, put the chain back on the sprockets -- I must adjust the tension when I get home -- and proceed to pedal down Main Street, past the milk store where I usually go to pick up a liter of milk, carrying my tin milk can by its wooden handle, and turn left to go home to 13 Skagerak Strasse, which is just a quarter-mile walk from Eichfeld, the Displaced Persons Camp where I will spend the next four years of my life.
The reason I have been riding down the hill to Main Street has to do with my piano lessons. I do this twice a week, coming home from practicing on a very nice mahogany baby grand. My mother has made arrangements with a German family to trade American cigarettes -- I don't know the exact number, but the common currency of exchange is definitely single cigarettes, and a full pack amounts to a rather high denomination -- for allowing me to come for two two-hour practice sessions each week. This is one of three places where I can practice. The second is in the camp barracks, which is an open hall, used for community events such as concerts, church services, or, during most days when nothing else is going on, there are two ping-pong tables on which one can play, provided one can get a hold of a ping-pong ball. Brand new ping-pong balls are rare. Most have cracked at least once. The way to check a ping-pong ball is to put it on the table and to roll it about with the rubber facing of the paddle. If it is broken, there is a nasty crackling sound that means that it's time for repairs, which consist of cutting a thin strip from a totally defunct ping-pong ball, trimming it carefully to fit over the extent of the crack, and then using acetone to glue the strip onto the cracked ball. The results vary widely, depending on the skill of the craftsman, but at best, playing with a repaired ball is a challenging experience because it wobbles and rebounds in a very unpredictable manner. Practicing piano here means competing with the noise of the ping-pong players, and, in the winter, coping with the cold. On some days the best strategy is to leave one's gloves on to keep the fingers from freezing. The third place to practice piano is in the school building, a converted restaurant on the main drag out of town, which is just a two-lane road on which one might see bicyclists and an occasional automobile. This piano is more difficult to access, because it is used for lessons by the two piano teachers who divide between them the few dozens of potential Paderewskis in the camp. Mrs. Tregeris is my teacher, and over the three or so years that we spend together I learn the joys of scales, Hanon exercises, Czerny, and, of course, “Fur Elise,” among other ice cream truck standards. There are some nice Brahms waltzes, a little Czerny, Beethoven, Schuman, etc. I am Mrs. Tregeris’s star pupil and do my best to make her look good at recitals. I think I'm pretty hot stuff, and that is why, when my Godfather, Voldemars Sitka, visits, and I am asked to play for him, his comment is not at all what I expected. He listens to my 10 minutes or so of playing and says, “Well, that's a pretty good beginning.” Good beginning? I thought I was great!
When I think about it, there really was no reason for me to think otherwise, because I had nothing to which I could compare my playing. Today’s students have heard classical music played on the piano by the greats and not so greats, all the way from Horowitz to Yanni. Betty has a seven CD collection containing all of Mozart's piano works from which she can play the student's assignment as performed by Arthur Rubinstein. No, even this comparison is not apt, because until I came to the United States, at age 13, I had not had the opportunity to listen to any kind of music on a radio, and I didn't see my first television set until I was in college, which, admittedly, was only three years later. Any music that I heard, and there was lots of it, was sung or performed by people around me. Therefore, the best classical music that I heard being played on a piano was played by… me! No wonder I thought I was great.
I had a secret life -- such a clause, used by an eight-year-old, usually begins true confessions regarding stealing or sneaking out after curfew -- but mine concerned music. I played all the assigned classical pieces when practicing at the camp piano, but, when I was off to my private German practice room, I would work on something far more interesting. I had discovered that every melody that I learned, folk songs, Boy Scout songs, hymns, pop songs, had one and only one sequence of three note chords that would sound good when played in the left-hand while the right hand played the melody. This miscreant behavior remained secret for only a short while. I discovered that I could play any Latvian pop tune using this scheme, and when I did so, people would gather around and start singing. And then of course there was the accordion. That is where I learned the circle of fifths without knowing that that's what it's called. From the key of C to G to F to G. And then the excitement when I learned how to do sequences such as CEADGCFC. Later in life, when I learned how to improvise, I always created in my mind, for each piece I played, a local geography with a path that guided me from one chord change to the next. This local geography, while difficult to describe, was based on the layout of the buttons on the accordion. And so I set out into musical paths: one consisting of classical music, and the other of improvisation. For my classical training I had a series of teachers reaching well into my early 20s and I got to where I could play a couple of Beethoven sonatas reasonably well. The other, however, was a private endeavor for which I had no instruction, and which developed as I moved from playing everything in the key of C to realizing that I could actually play in any key, and finally settling on the key of B flat for just sitting down and having fun at the piano. With time, the amount of practicing a devoted to classical music shrank to zero, and all that remained was a moderate skill at playing a tune that somebody would whistle for me. The good thing of course is that while lapsed pianists hardly ever touched a piano, my skill gave me pleasure at any time of day and any degree of sobriety. And that's how I became a piano player instead of a pianist.
15. Latvian school in Germany
The clock is coming to the top of the hour. We are sitting in our classroom chairs, waiting for the teacher. The room is just big enough for our classroom furniture, a teacher’s table, and two blackboards. A second story window looks out over the awning of the entrance to the school, and on the opposite wall a door leads out to the rest of the building. It's early spring. The door is open. Suddenly we start sniffing at an unpleasant smell that comes in through the door. Before long we have identified it as ammonia. We start through the door, but the smell is much stronger there and we retreat to the classroom. We open the window and quickly decide that the only way to maintain a breathable environment is to crawl through the open window onto the top of the awning which has the shape of a small porch outside our window. It takes a good hour before the refrigeration system can be adjusted so that the ammonia stops leaking and we can crawl back into our classroom and resume some semblance of the day’s schedule.
This is our DP (displaced persons) camp school in Muhldorf, established in what used to be a restaurant. We use the main dining hall for schoolwide events, and the smaller rooms on the second story as classrooms. Most classes are on the order of 5 to 8 students. The curriculum is the same as it used to be in secondary school education in Latvia. There are more than enough people with teaching experience to staff a full-fledged Latvian language primary and secondary school in the camp of 500 Latvians. My father had been director of an agricultural high school, and is my math teacher in our camp school. Other classes include study of Latvian and two foreign languages, namely, German and English. Also history, geography, and “teaching of the faith”, a Lutheran religion class. My own preparedness for religion classes was illustrated by the first question the teacher asked me. He said What’s the fifth commandment, and I replied What's a commandment?
All exams are oral. You stand up before the teacher and he asks you questions and you perform, or not. The most rigorous of these exams is the one at the end of the seventh grade, which is the highest grade in the Latvian system before going into high school, and the one which I completed in Germany. The content of the test is known ahead of time. All questions are written out on 12 tickets, each of which consists of a list of 12 questions. The temptation exists to pick out two or three tickets and study only those, in the hope that you will draw a ticket that you have studied. Many of the questions consist of a request to recite a given Latvian poem from memory. There is no way of faking that. I knew many Latvian poems at that time by heart.
Finally, a major part of my education during the four years in Germany consisted of reading books in the camp library. Latvian being a phonetic language, the reading levels by young people reading Latvian tend to be higher than those who have to master English in order to read the classics. By the time we left the camp, I had read every book in the library.
As I write this text in 2009, I think back on the standard European requirement that two foreign languages need to be a part of the student’s curriculum, in addition to his native tongue. Certainly, from personal experience traveling through Europe since those early years, I have come to admire the language skills in European countries, especially Holland and Sweden. The Dutch travel guides are almost fluent in English, German, and French. I don't know the particulars of how they achieved their expertise in languages, but I know that when I arrived in the United States school systems, my three years of English preparation was sufficient so that I learned fluent English in a matter of months. From my experience and with my preparation, secondary education in a full immersion English environment was ideal and successful for me. Teaching all subjects in Latvian and maintaining English studies as a separate course in American secondary school was a strategy that never even occurred to me as a possibility, and, of course was not a possibility in my case at all. I suspect that it was a great advantage to be the only foreign student in all my classes. If the ratio were to be 50 -- 50, as I understand it can be in some California schools, the results might be different. I do recall my first exposure to English spoken by native speakers. One day during school recess a military truck arrived in our schoolyard, full of American soldiers, both black and white. First, it was the first time I had ever seen a black person in my life. Secondly, my impression upon listening to them speak was that they all had colds because they spoke as if their noses were stuffed up. I think they were from Kansas.
16. Life in DP camp and emigration to USA.
Can you imagine life without toilet paper? Travelers to Eastern Europe routinely take along rolls of it, indicating how drastic its absence is considered to be and how little they think of the local provisions. Such indeed is life in the DP camp immediately after World War II while we are under the care of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), and toilet paper is not considered to be an essential commodity. For that matter, can you imagine life without a telephone, radio, or television? How can one possibly live like that? But, of course, it's different if you don't even realize they exist. As to the obvious question regarding toilet paper -- the answer is that you take a newspaper and crumple it up until it's acceptably smooth. Even pages from glossy publications can be adequately processed. I think it was not until some considerable time after we got to the United States that toilet paper wound up being a regular item on the shopping list.
The displaced persons camp in Muhldorf, Bavaria, is assigned a remote cluster of buildings about a half-mile outside the town, which itself is tucked in a bend in the river Inn. Isolated from the German community, it consists of about 600 Latvian-speaking refugees. We live there from 1945 until 1949. Supplies from the UNRRA constitute our entire subsistence, and the only commercial interaction with the local German community is through the commonly accepted currency of American cigarettes, which, ironically enough, are on the list of essential commodities supplied by the agency. Being a smoker means that you are burning pure money. Mother makes regular rounds of local farms in search of eggs and other produce to supplement our diet. It is also a wide practice to grow a pig in the basement and some rabbits in the fenced-in backyard. The pig constitutes the organic disposall for all food leftovers. It eventually is stunned with the blunt end of an axe and slaughtered in the bathroom, providing a fine addition to our not-so-gourmet table. I still vividly remember the blood pouring from the pig's neck into the bowl. The delicacies generated by the demise of the family pig start, of course, with blood sausage, referred to in German as ‘blutwurst’. The pig is not ever regarded as a pet. This is not the case with the rabbits. One big yellow buck rabbit becomes a family favorite and causes a good bit of personal misery to us kids when time comes to fulfill its destiny. For a long time his yellow pelt is a tablethrow under an ornamental candleholder.
This is my life for four years and I consider it a normal one. Little do I know that life will change drastically at the end of this period.
My father is an inveterate gardener, which in turn makes me an inveterate weed puller -- not by choice. My job is to weed the garden, consisting of a large strawberry patch, cucumbers, radishes, onions, and lingonberry bushes. Little known in this country, lingonberry leaves are a crucial ingredient for a sublime dill pickle which is a delicacy that my father makes. There is no allowance or payment involved. This is my job, and I do not even think about the connection between work and pay. It is understood that weeding is my duty as a member of the family.
We live in a one family house on Skagerrak Strasse that has been arranged to service two families plus uncle Jacob, who lives with us on the first story, taking up one of the bedrooms. That leaves another bedroom for my parents and the three of us kids. Zaiga and Maija sleep in the lower bunk and I sleep in the upper one. The kitchen , with enough room for a wood stove and a breakfast table, also serves as a living room. One of my favorite foods is herring cooked in the wood stove. The procedure involves wrapping fish in newspaper, soaking the paper in water, and placing it all on smoldering coals until the paper starts burning. Again, all this to me is normal living, although I'm sure to my parents it's a major change from our previous life. The upper story is occupied by the Grods family, who have two children our age. The house is about a quarter-mile from the main camp area and is separated from it by a grassy field and a railroad track. As soon as the weather is warm enough to go barefoot, I do so and spend the entire summer without shoes. It takes about two weeks for the pain in my calves to go away and about an equal time for the bottoms of my feet to get used to walking across the crushed stone railroad embankment. All activities such as school, Boy Scouts, and sports events take place in the camp proper, which means that I travel the path across the field and the railroad tracks several times a day. I resent the fact that my parents will not let me go back to the camp after supper, because that's where my buddies are all congregating and getting into various sorts of trouble, although I can see, from their viewpoint, that our physical separation from the main camp area made it easier to discipline us children.
We are on good terms with “Mutti”, the elderly lady on whose farm we lived before coming to the camp. The 10 mile distance is just right for a bicycle trip and now and then my father takes me on the bicycle crossbar for a trip to visit “Mutti”. We come back with fruit from her huge pear tree and other supplies. Mutti winds up with a handful of American cigarettes, which is the only accepted currency of the day.
For the four years of our life in Muhldorf I feel restricted in my activities because my parents will not let me roam across the countryside along with my peers who live in the camp proper. I cannot, for example, go to the town’s swimming pool because my mother fears that there is danger of contracting cholera. Her general advice is Don't take chances, something bad might happen. I take this as truth, and in later life have had to work hard at undoing this basic world outlook. I spend a lot of time reading books from the camp library.
Summers are busy with Boy Scouts, excursions, and camps. We visit all of “crazy Ludwig’s” castles, including Schloss Chiemsee, Schloss Neuschwanstein, and Schloss Linderhof. We also go to various tourist attractions such as Hitler's aerie in Berchtesgaden and various alpine tourist spots such as the Partnachklamm, a roaring mountain stream that has cut a 200 ft deep gorge through the mountains, and the Wank-Bahn, where one takes a 1500 foot gondola ride to the top of the mountain, which is where I learned that a particular contortion of my face will eliminate the pain in my ears that is caused by the change in pressure as the gondola ascends or descends. I also spend two weeks in a YMCA- sponsored camp in Austria where I learn Row, row, row your boat, and Kookaburra sits in an old oak tree.
Camp life includes regular church services headed by the Rev. Alberts Galins whom I remember as giving superb sermons that even a kid my age can understand. After about a year, touring Latvian artists’ groups begin to visit Muhldorf. I remember having ballet dancers and opera singers performing regularly. Quite often my mother would organize dinner for the visitors at our house. My parents are known as good entertainers for celebrities and often have the chance to prove it. All social events eventually wind up with singing, and I learn much of the repertoire of Latvian songs popular at the time. Occasionally I fill in for the accordion player at dances. Since there is no radio available to us, I learn some German songs, but not very many. “Lili Marlene” was one of them, of course, and another one was called “Heimat, deine Sterne.”
Around 1948 discussions begin about emigration to other countries. There is opportunity to return to Latvia, but very few people consider that a viable option. My father's name had been on a second level list of deportees by the Russian regime during its occupation of Latvia, and it is clear that he cannot return. There are people whose preference is to remain in Germany, but most want to emigrate. Options include the United States, Canada, Venezuela, Argentina, France, England, and Australia. United States, Canada, and Australia eventually turn out to accept the largest numbers of immigrants. It is a requirement to arrange for a guaranteed job offer before emigration can proceed. My father's specialty is agriculture, and he corresponds with two potential job givers -- one in Mississippi and the other in Edmonton, Canada. The choice is made to accept the offer by the Barksdale Plantation in Marks, Mississippi, where his expertise would be put to use in developing, as a sideline to growing cotton, a herd of farm animals, starting with pigs.
As preparations mount for emigration to various lands, a small cottage industry grows in the camp, consisting of the fabrication of wooden crates into which belongings could be packed in such a way that they would survive the rough passage in the cargo hold of a ship. The preparations are finally complete and travel ensues, first to Munich, where we spend an interim two weeks while the ship manifests are being completed, and then to Bremerhaven, the port from which the ocean travel originates. While in Munich, my father takes me to a music store to buy an accordion, the thinking being that it may be a long time before we have access to a piano in Mississippi. The trip to the music store is by streetcar, slowly moving through areas where the rubble of the destroyed housing has been cleared from the streetcar tracks and piled in a slanting embankment on both sides of the tracks.
Finally, a trip to Bremerhaven, a brief stay of a couple of days in yet another German military barracks, and finally we board the ship, the USNS General R.L. Howze, a troop transport ship capable of holding approximately 1000 persons.
The only landmark between Germany and New Orleans is the passage of the British channel and a good view of the White Cliffs of Dover. Otherwise, we settle into an approximately 14 day trip that is largely uneventful. The sea, while not calm, is not dramatically stormy either, although for many people, including myself, our sea legs are tried severely on several occasions during the trip. I recall sitting in the dining room of the ship, with items on the table just beginning to slide of their own volition, eating a lunch whose main ingredient is a hot dog. When I get to the dessert, which is green Jell-O, the awful truth hits, and it becomes clear that I have only a short time before having to feed the fish, and there are two flights of stairs between me and the ships railing, which is the only socially acceptable spot for such activities. I won the race, but not by much. I sleep in the men's dormitory, on the third level bunk, with an air-conditioning duct sticking in my side as I turn over. One of the diversions is a dishwashing job that I acquire, the pay being one square of ice cream wrapped in a piece of wax paper. I am satisfied with the deal, especially since it lets me ride the ships elevator, a first in my short life, to the large walk-in refrigerator to collect my pay.
About halfway into the trip it occurs to me that I will need to face the inevitability of having to speak English in my new country and it might be wise to evaluate my prowess at it. I find an old copy of Reader's Digest and eagerly open it, hoping to be able to read it, since my background includes three years of English. The result is disappointing in that I cannot understand enough of the words to make out the gist of the articles. I'm not upset or distressed by this conclusion, merely noting it for future action.
Finally, the day comes when we expect to see American mainland, and everyone keeps an eye in the appropriate direction. And indeed it happens -- the city of Miami comes in view from some many miles offshore; the details are not clearly visible but the entire skyline is filled with white buildings. Long after Miami has disappeared, we begin to swing West, and finally North in order to proceed up the Mississippi Delta into the Port of New Orleans. I expect rivers to have high banks, but that is not the case with the Mississippi. Very shallow banks, an occasional palm tree, and other channels visible off to the sides of the ship characterize our path up the Mississippi to New Orleans. We meet an occasional ship going South, but no other signs of human activity are visible as we proceed upriver. Finally, New Orleans comes into view, we take on board the harbor pilot who will move us slowly and safely to our berthing place and, after a long trip, we are finally in America. The date is September 3, 1949; the time early afternoon.
We disembark from the General Howze in an orderly fashion, are led to a large processing hall, are sorted, registered, fingerprinted, fussed over by ladies distributing paper cups of cold water and finally find out what happens next. About 30 of us are designated for the Barksdale plantation in the upper part of the state of Mississippi and are assigned to a Greyhound bus that will take us there. We leave in the late afternoon, drive for most of the night, and arrive by early morning. Since most of our trip takes place during the night, I have no chance to form impressions of the countryside leading to our new home. Had I had a chance to look into a good atlas such as Google Earth, I would have seen that we have been driving through what is referred to as the Mississippi Delta. My impression of a delta, from my geography classes, is that it is the immediate outflow region where a river meets the sea. And this is indeed the case, except that we are dealing with one of the world's largest rivers, and its entrance into the Gulf of Mexico has been forming over many millennia. The river has changed its course many, many times as is visible from the loops, oxbow lakes and bayous that appear on the map. The region of the upper Mississippi Delta stretches almost as far as Memphis, and Quitman County is in the middle of a vast region that looks as though someone had taken a mixmaster to try to blend vanilla and chocolate ingredients and had not quite finished the job. We arrive at the Barksdale plantation, located on State Road 6 between Clarksdale and Marks, early in the morning. Our immediate surroundings comprise a rather large building clad with galvanized corrugated steel that turns out to be a cotton gin, a smaller building across a clay road with a bright red Coca-Cola machine next to its door, a warehouse, and a cluster of smaller buildings in the distance which turn out to be housing for the laborers. Most of the arc that the eye sweeps contains rows and rows of waist-high bushes with green leaves and specks of white which turn out to be cotton plants. Since in Latvian cotton is referred to as tree wool, I had been expecting something more like a tree. I would soon find out that had cotton grown on trees, it's harvesting would be quite complicated.
In short order we find ourselves on a closed bed truck, driving along a clay surface road, creating a spume of clay dust that won't settle down for a half hour, as we are taken to our respective housing units. My father, in corresponding with Mr. Barksdale, had been assured that there would be housing that would not be spacious, but would have the modern amenities of electricity, flowing water, and a sanitary system. Now, for the first time, we have the opportunity to see the promised accommodations. It's a one-story house with a porch in the front and a large tree immediately in front of the house, set on pilings with open space under the house. There are three rooms in the house, arranged linearly so that two rooms are on each end of the house and the kitchen and bathroom are in the middle. The most immediate thing that strikes us about the house is that it is incredibly dirty and run down. There are mountains of chewing gum under some built-in benches, and, until we correct the situation, one can see the loose ceiling wallpaper sink as mice crisscross it. For a 13-year-old the unfolding story holds a certain amount of adventure and excitement, but I am sure that for my parents this must have been a downer of major proportions to find themselves in the middle of nowhere, preparing to live in an empty, unbelievably dirty sharecroppers hut.
With time, the housing situation improves. The boss provides the materials, we provide the labor, and the walls finally acquire gypsum sheets and wallpaper, the chewing gum disappears, and we gradually acquire such furniture as required for a family of five. Including even an upright piano! More about that later.
Today, if you want to see the typical shotgun shack that served as sharecropper housing in the upper Delta, stop in at the “Shack up Inn” which is a motel built on the old Hopson plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi. All housing is in individual units consisting of old sharecropper huts reconditioned to contain modern amenities.
By the time the first year has passed, the house is livable, and the surroundings begin to slowly change. My father, ever the gardener, has started a vegetable garden the following spring and has planted a dozen peach trees that hold promise of an early crop in the warm Mississippi climate. A chicken house is taking shape, and pretty soon a car full of 2000 yellow egg-sized chickens shows up. They are distributed among four artificial mothers, consisting of umbrella-like structures that are kept warm by a propane burner, and the Swift company delivers bags of chicken feed that are made from colorful sack cloth that serves well as material for shirts and dresses that mother turns out on her venerated Husqvarna foot-operated sewing machine. It would be instructive to do slow motion photography showing how day by day the chickens grow, the warming shelters disappear, and far from seeming to be four small handfuls of endearing little creatures, they begin to fill out the sawdust covered floor until there is literally no sawdust to be seen -- in part because the multitude of chickens fill the 30’x 90' chicken house until it feels as though it could not hold a single additional chicken and in part because 12 weeks of chicken manure mixed with sawdust is no longer sawdust. Occasionally customers stop by in response to the roadside sign that says “Mrs. Kibens Roasters and Fryers,” but the bulk of the chickens get shipped to Jackson and sold to a meat processing plant. The process of putting the chickens on the truck involves opening the small lid on top of a chicken box that has plenty of slots for ventilation, reaching out and grabbing three chickens by their legs, stuffing them upside down into the box and quickly closing the lid before they can sort themselves out and try to escape. Each box holds six to eight chickens. The entire cycle takes about 12 weeks, and the chickens weigh anywhere from 2 to 2.5 pounds. While ventilation has kept the smell bearable while the chickens were still in residence, the clean up is distinctly improved if one happens to have a cold that severely suppresses the sense of smell. Raising chickens is under my mother’s care, and every three months there is a small profit that is shared with Mr. Barksdale.
Letters to uncle Alfred in Montréal and to uncle Jacob in Tacoma elicit offers to help find work in a more civilized location. I enclose here letters that my parents wrote to uncle Jacob describing the conditions in Mississippi.
25 February 1951
Barksdale
Greetings,
Thanks for thinking of us. This time we will not take advantage of either yours or Alfred's offers of help -- perhaps later. It's not that it is impossible to live here. Generally, if one speaks in rural conditions, and especially about Mississippi, then we are in one of the better positions. It is true that farmers all, to a certain extent, exploit people, but that is true in city jobs as well. If we wanted to complain to our boss with respect to anything, then only that he gave us an entirely empty and incredibly dirty house. The house itself, as is customary even in the owner's houses, is constructed extremely lightly -- two layers of boards and an air gap in between. If the boards on both sides have cracks, then not only the wind comes through, but the light shines through as well. But now things are different. All of the outer walls have been covered with gypsum sheets so they are now solid and wallpapered. But during the cold winter it was necessary to burn the stove all day and all night -- then it was not cold.
With respect to work, both I and Olga I are generally in a fairly good situation since the boss does not stand behind our back with a whip. The other good thing is that I have work all the time as opposed to tractor drivers as well as others who get only occasional work during the winter. This winter, beginning with November, until now, no special work is available. If we had the same conditions, then we would have to leave here, the sooner the better. Generally, Latvians this winter are working full-time at construction work -- then subsistence can be earned even during winter. My work consists of taking care of the bosses hogs. I began last year in March with 10 breeding sows, one boar, and some 30 piglets. Now we have many more -- five breeding hogs were purchased, the rest were selected here, and together now I have 66 breeding hogs and three boars. The piglets are received in the barn in cubicles with a concrete floor. During the winter, the wind blows through. In order that the piglets should not freeze, each separate area has a heating stove, and the piglets spend their time there beginning with their second or third day. During the first day it is a problem to figure out how to save them all. By 1 to 2 weeks age, the piglets are let into the corral. When they are six weeks old, they are inoculated against a variety of ills, including cholera. At 10 weeks age they are separated from the mother, 12 weeks old -- they get worm medicine and they are raised until they reach about 200 pounds and then they are sold. My work now is to await the piglets. In February 12 breeding mothers had piglets. In March some 20 more will have them. So there's plenty of work.
This year we are thinking of remaining here. And if we consider remaining in farm work, then there's not much hope to get anything better. If it turns out that the climate will force us to change the location, then we will not stay longer. It is said that coming summer will be hotter than the last one. At the moment we have not considered work in the city because of the hustle and bustle. Maybe it's better to be out in the country
With greetings,
Andris
The following is a letter from my mother to her brother Jacob written at the same time and describes the situation from her viewpoint
24 February 1951
Barksdale
Greetings,
A good bit of time has passed since we received your letter. First, many thanks for your readiness to help us. It's not at all bad to have hope of help in times of need. But so far we do not plan to impose on your good heart. It's possible that at some time we will need to do that. We haven't yet done any exploration as to where we might go. The other thing is that we have promised Mr. Barksdale to remain here until next Christmas. He asks all the workers that question around Christmas. There were people who promised to stay, but left nonetheless. They had promised only so that until their departure they would have work even though they already had new destinations secured. Then the boss was really angry, promised to send them back to Germany, but nothing came of it. So we have decided that it's better to call to our promise and to try to endure.
During the time between the end of January and the beginning of February we had extremely unusual cold weather that had not been seen here since 1862, namely, -25°C! Even in Latvia that is extremely cold. There was also a considerable amount of snow. It's a good thing that it all only lasted about one week. Just imagine how the animals felt who had no shelter. Three hogs died and the rest somehow survived. The hens had frozen combs and some had frozen feet. Several died and the rest got diarrhea and stopped laying eggs. The barn is unsuited for them even during an ordinary winter and is totally inadequate for such a cold spell. They are beginning to lay eggs slowly again. Today we had over 50 eggs. Normally they lay between 200 to 250 eggs per day. Thus my egg business went down the tubes. It was good that during the cold spell our chickens were already big enough to need to be sold. But there was another problem: the truck could not drive because of the snow and so there was no way to get the chickens to Jackson. We had to wait an extra week before we could transport them. The chickens were unusually big -- average weight 3.08 pounds. Until now the largest average weight had been 2.71 pounds. And as it turned out the whole profit was only $121.85 -- that's for 11 weeks of work and then still one week of cleaning the chicken house. On 14 February we got new chickens -- 2100 in total. These again will be grown as laying hens. About 600 will be chosen and the rest will be sold. And for these chickens I will not be paid anything. So another 11 weeks for nothing. The price of the chickens was $.26 per pound, which is why so little profit was made. The boss sold chickens from one of his houses a week later than we even though the chickens were as old as ours had been (received on the same day) for 27.5 cents and he had had a $139 loss. Thus we could be quite satisfied with our house with a total income of $243 at a lower price. So much for the hens. As for the hogs, about all I know is that we have approximately 126 piglets, and in March we will have approximately an equal number in addition. Then the piglet birthing takes place at night as well as during the day. During the cold spell we had the piglets into the house because the pig barn was much too cold. The boss put in a large coal furnace, but, as Andris told the bosses, if they had too much coal, we can burn it for them, but it's not possible to heat all of Mississippi. In the room where the furnace is, it is warm, but in the next room the water in the trough has frozen. So the days pass for us, all alike, weekdays in no way are different from Sundays and no kind of holidays are possible. In addition, because of the location of our hut, (20 minute walk from the center of the plantation), we are in a sort of Robinson Crusoe position. But, it's possible to get used to it. By now the boss again has mainly black workers. There are a few American families, but the black color nonetheless right now is the dominating one. The black people are not bad but unusual by their looks and living style they are nonetheless compared to whites.
Today it's again warm, and the men are working in shirtsleeves. The fields are beginning to be cultivated, though only the driest ones. In the months of March the plowing will start during the day and the night both not excepting Sundays. That will continue until everything will be plowed and planted. The land is not plowed here in the autumn because then the rain during the winter will carry away the soil. When it rains here, then it is so that the hogs in one corral are halfway submerged in water. It often rains all night. Next to our hut is a dead elm tree. Before the big freeze all the trees had ice on them and there was also a great wind. One of the branches of the elm tree broke and fell on our roof. What's more, it happened at night. What a noise that was! I was afraid that the roof would be bent but luckily it had mainly slid to one side. One window was broken out. Next morning with effort we got the entire branch off the roof. I really hate wind, rain, and thunder. All that here is much more powerful than I had experienced before. Now and then it seems that our hut is going to fly like a feather through the air, but so far that has not happened and it has held up. The inside of my house I have managed to change according to my desires. We threw out the old fireplace and covered the walls with gypsum plates and wallpapered it all. It looks pretty good now. Who says that you can't make porridge from an axe handle!
So, if nothing else happens, we will try to fight on here until next Christmas.
Greetings to you from all of us.
Olga
There's no doubt that under these kind of circumstances it helps to be 13 years old and to be able to merge into the local preparatory process for life that all the kids receive as part of their education. Though they never showed it, I'm sure that my parents have moments of pure despair and that the streets in the New World are far from being paved with gold.
Walk out our front door, avoid the big pecan tree directly in front of the house, go east, past the peach orchard, vegetable garden, and the chicken house, over the culvert carrying the creek that could usually be counted on a warm day to be displaying a dozen turtles sitting on a log, past the house occupied by Dave Williams’, a tall, elderly black man who walks incredibly slowly, and after a few yards you will be standing by the side of Mississippi State Rd. #6, a two-lane paved highway carrying a traffic density of one car per minute during rush hour between Marks and Clarksdale. Route six is our connection to the rest of the world, whether it be school in Belen and Marks or the Kroger’s in Clarksdale, eliciting our first major positive cultural adjustment in the New World. Neon signs, food laid out on sloping shelves including refrigerated bins and signs pointing to various displays -- all in total contrast with the European stores we are used to, each of which was devoted to a certain commodity, such as milk, or bread, or meat, and in which a clerk behind a long counter would hand you the wrapped order and charge you for the purchase. Every Saturday one of the plantation trucks would drive us to Clarksdale, because no one has a personal automobile, although that is the first major purchase everyone is planning for.
On 6 September 1949, three days after we arrive at Barksdale, we are picked up in the morning by our special school bus, which is Mrs. Smith driving her light green 1949 Ford sedan to pick up the few outlying students. The first modern car that I have seen in the United States, with a gearshift on the steering wheel instead of the floor, running as quietly as a mouse, the 1949 Ford with its single bullet nose has always remained my iconic image of the elegant American car, especially when compared with the boxy, crank-started cars I had seen in Germany, some of which even had an external wood burner that looked like a water heater clamped to the side of the car for providing combustible gas to the engine. Mrs. Smith would deliver us every morning safe and sound to the Belen elementary school, one of the old style schools with more than one class per room. At this point I can only report that I dove into a one-year long immersion process, in the eighth grade, at the end of which I could speak good English and had no trouble conversing with my peers or teachers. It helped, no doubt, that I was white, blond, and the only foreigner in my classroom and was repeating eighth grade in that in Latvian school the material in seventh grade, which I had completed, in mathematics, geography, English, and other areas was equivalent to that in American eighth grade. I recall learning how to obey the local classroom rules. I have been chewing gum in class when the teacher asks me Valdis are you chewing gum? I nod my head whereupon the teacher says Get rid of it, which I promptly proceed to do, except in a manner she had not anticipated. I take the gum from my mouth, wad it up, and toss it over the heads of seven students through a 10 inch crack at the bottom of one of the windows, which feat I accomplish with efficiency and precision deserving a medal. It needs no saying to know that I do not receive a medal for my feat, but I do learn a lesson which after all is what I am in school for.
Another intensive learning episode in Mississippi involves Latvian music. Since the culture involves social singing so intimately, it is assumed that everyone knows the melodies of all the popular songs as well as the folk songs, and that the only help needed is with the words. Hence, many small format books are issued containing the words of all these songs, without melodies. For me it is entirely true that I can't remember words and also that there are many songs for which I don't know the melodies. Here's where my mother enters. Her memory for words and melodies is truly remarkable. Our procedure is that I would get one of the small wordbooks and go through it song by song, and if I didn't know the melody then mother would supply it for me and I, in turn, would write it down in music notation in the margins of the book. Thus, in one intensely musical summer I learn most of the Latvian popular repertoire.
I always wanted to learn how to swim. It had never occurred to me to swim when I was a kid living in the castle although we were surrounded by a lake. So I lost my chance to learn there. Later, in the DP camp, there was an opportunity to go to the city swimming pool, and the rest of the kids occasionally did so. Mother, however, thought that there was a danger of catching typhus, so I lost out on that opportunity as well. Camping out for scouts took place right next to the river Inn, but it was clearly too fast and turbulent for swimming.
Then came the years when I found myself in Mississippi, and finally was not to be deterred from swimming. If you peruse the Google map of my Mississippi neighborhood shown below, you will see a lot of oxbow lakes that have been left behind by the meanderings of the Mississippi river. Even though now I would not set foot in it, I learned how to swim in a bayou, a swampy arm of such an oxbow lake, full of old cedar stumps and snapping turtles. And snakes, for all I know. But I do know for sure there was at least one snapping turtle in the swamp because I saw him in all his 16 inch glory with a beak like that of a huge owl being hauled out on shore by a pair of intrepid fishermen. This happened after I had already learned to swim, because, having seen the turtle, I would never again go into the swamp. I even shudder now to think of how I did it, namely, stepping gingerly into the muddy shore, squishing my way to deeper water, and then setting out at a vigorous dog paddle until I reached the cedar trunk about 20 feet from shore. Then I would turn around and paddle back. I shudder to think back on it now, but I did convince myself that I could cover a distance of 20 feet of water without sinking.
Having such a solid foundation in dog paddling, I was well prepared for the two-week YMCA camp where swimming was a daily activity. There I learned that it is possible to lie on one's back in the water, having filled one’s lungs to capacity with air, and just float. From then on my progress was rapid with breaststroke and what we used to call the Australian crawl or, as it is now known, the freestyle.
My next experience with swimming was at the Phillips Exeter Academy, an all-boys school, where I spent the summer of 1952. I mentioned that it was an all-boys school because swimming in the indoor pool was alfresco -- no swimming trunks, or completely nekkid, as Huckleberry Finn would say. The same was true of the Yale gymnasium, which had the added feature of requiring that all entrants to the pool were required to take a shower and then proceed to a small hallway on whose floor was mounted a long low structure that was to be straddled and walked along so that the water spraying upward from its peak could do the final job of sanitizing one's personal parts.
The fall of 1950 I enter in ninth grade in the Marks Mississippi high school. Again, school is not difficult; I enjoy mathematics, taught by Mr. Fred Gordy, and spend a lot of time taking photographs of school situations, which I develop and print using a Sears and Roebuck catalog purchased darkroom set and arranged on the floor of the pump house next to our artesian well, the only reliably dark place I can find. Some of the pictures wind up in the yearbook, some in the school newspaper.
During the summer, starting with work for which I get paid, and ending with things that I do out of interest and a desire to learn new things, my activities range from picking cotton, plowing the fields on the big tractors, driving my two wheeled mule cart to deliver loads of corn to various corrals, building corn silos, hauling dead pigs behind my mule cart to the swamp, and driving the bosses jeep when he's not looking. The latter is how I learned to drive a car. When Louis Barksdale, the younger boss, would come to visit my father for a conference, he would park the Jeep right next to our house and go inside for a discussion, whereupon I would climb in the driver’s seat, thinking that he could not see me which, I'm sure, is not the case. I systematically test the effect of all of the controls, being sure that I know first of all where the brake is so that I could stop if something untoward should happen. Then I learn how the clutch works and how I can let it out slowly and control the speed with the gas pedal. I back up about 100 yards along our clay road, and then come forward again, learning how to switch gears in the process. That is the extent of my driver’s education, and I still think that the old army style Jeep with its windshield folded down on top of the hood is my top-of-the-list choice for open convertible transportation.
As for hauling dead pigs to the swamp, the process consisted of tying a hauling rope around the hind legs of the pig and hoping that its date of demise was not so far in the past that the friction with the ground would rip off sizable chunks of the rotting pig and let its guts spill out on the road, although there is an automatic backup plan always in place in the form of circling vultures that promise to clean up the mess no matter where I leave it.
Of all the activities associated with Mississippi, picking cotton is the classical one in which I gain a moderate level of skill. The main implement for picking cotton is an 8 foot long canvas bag with 4 feet of one side of the lower end tarred for reinforcement. The bag has a shoulder strap on the upper end which one places around one's neck and proceeds between the rows of cotton plants. For those of my readers who have never had the pleasure of picking cotton, the right state of ripeness is one when the cotton boll, which has a hard shell when not ripe, has opened in four sections and the cotton, attached to the seeds, is ready to be carried by the wind to fulfill its original purpose, which is to transport the seed to a new planting location. The trick here is to take all five fingers and drape them over the open boll, grasp the cotton, and pull it out, seeds and all. It only takes one pass of the hand to do the job. The cotton is deposited in the bag and the process repeated. When the bag is too heavy to pull comfortably, one goes to the wagon to have the load weighed and deposited with the rest of the cotton picked. Typically a dozen people so equipped proceed down the rows of cotton, which are spaced far enough apart so that a comfortable distance exists for a person to pass between the adjacent rows.
Of the other activities, driving the tractors was the most exciting, although I did very little of that. I never did get to drive one of the big cotton picking combines which have a set of revolving fingers that comb through the cotton plants of one row and automatically remove the cotton from the plant. The result is a messier load of cotton, but the process is quick and efficient. The picked cotton goes to the gin which processes the freshly collected cotton into bales of cleaned and combed fibers that contain none of the seeds nor the leaves and sticks that would have been picked up in the process of picking the cotton.
Most of my time is spent driving my mule cart, delivering corn from the silos to the corrals for feeding the pigs. Now and then I gave a hand at constructing the silos.
During the 1952 school year I am approached by Mr. Lomax B. Lamb, a lawyer who practices in Marks. He has consulted with Mr. Young, the high school principal, and would like to ask me to take a few tests. I consent and take the tests without fully understanding what they are for. In the spring of 1952 Mr. Lamb tells me that I have been accepted for a summer session at the Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the tests having been given for the purpose of evaluating my academic achievements for Exeter. I accept, and shortly after finishing 10th grade at Marks High School I enter Phillips Exeter for the summer term. My first impression at Exeter is that I like the climate much better than in Mississippi. The summer is very pleasant, I learn how to play tennis, how to do the Australian crawl in swimming, and I acquire in the name Val, because one of the teachers decides that Valdis is too long and unwieldy. I agree with him. Toward the middle of the summer I receive a letter from the Ford Foundation, explaining that I have been accepted for the Ford Foundation Preinduction Program, which places students into universities after finishing either the 10th or 11th grades so that they would avoid going into the army before going to college. I had a selection of four universities to consider: University of Wisconsin in Madison, University of Chicago, Columbia, and Yale. In a quick letter exchange with my parents, we decide that University of Wisconsin is too far, University of Chicago and Columbia are in big cities and therefore undesirable, which leaves Yale, being in a smaller city on the seacoast, and perhaps therefore more suitable for my needs. So the choice turns out to be between Yale and Exeter, and very quickly the decision is made that the opportunity to go to a university on full scholarship should not be passed up, and that I would accept the offer from Yale for the fall of 1952. In September of 1952 I show up at Yale, 15 years old, my birthday being on October 22, barely a month after I first heard of Yale University, taking all these developments in stride as a part of the sequence of events that the world has deigned to bestow on me for lo these many years.
It is another story from here on, namely, what happened to the 15-year-old freshman at Yale and how life developed after having been redirected from the original tracks upon which set out. Let's leave that for the next memoir. Time travel Channel 1 -- signing off.
