No Country for Old Men

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
 To the holy city of Byzantium.
 -- Yeats

There have been days and nights when I've looked and felt just like the guy in this picture.  Cormac McCarthy's spiritual battle takes place in the West Texas desert.

Driving Ms. Daisy

I did a lot of hitchhiking in college, thanks to Jack Kerouac convincing me that being On the Road was a romantic adventure.  Kerouac ended up a drunk and hanging out in Gunther's Tap Room,  Northport, Long Island, not far from where I grew up.  I never got around to buying him a beer.

 

A college buddy and I made it to Big Sur one year.  After a summer in California with the Navy near LA, we hitchhiked up Route 1 and got stuck in Santa Barbara where scores of other hitchhikers were trying to score a ride.  We drew ourselves a phony sign with [destination] Boston on it and a guy in a VW van stopped for us right away.  You guys going to Boston.  No, we're from Boston.  We're headed for Big Sur.  The guy replied, sorry, we're going to San Francisco.  We'll drop you off in Salinas.  Ok, thanks.  [Where's Salinas].

Salinas is forty miles from Big Sur, a little north of Monterey.  It's surrounded by miles and miles of vegetable fields.  It was dark and late when we got there so we found a motel to sleep for the night.  We were on the road, but not on the road enough to sleep with the lettuce or real hobos and migrant farm workers.  One of us even had a credit card.

In the morning, my friend, who could strike up a conversation with a refrigerator, comes back to the motel room and announces he has found someone from Holy Cross College, like us, and he's taking us to Big Sur.  Luck of the Irish!

In fact the man has a nephew who went to Holy Cross.  He works for the Diocese of Monterey and has friends who are camping at Big Sur for the weekend.  The Diocese had a Big Sur chapel and since his friends work for the diocese, too, they're using it for a campground.  You can stay with them.  They'll be delighted.


Our host had a lovely family.  They pitched us a tent and we stayed with them on the chapel grounds.  Big Sur was beautiful.  Big trees, big cliffs, big ocean.   Not a hippie girl a la Kerouac and Neal  Cassady in sight.  But we ate well and at the end of the weekend our hosts took us home to Monterey, fed us again, washed our clothes, took us to the famous Monterey Bay Aquarium and then put us on the bus for San Francisco and our ultimate destination in the Canadian west.

*    *    *    *    *

Most of the time, though, I travelled alone on shorter trips.   One night on a trip from Holy Cross back home to Long Island, I got picked up by the head basketball coach, Jack Donohue, a minor celebrity who'd coached Lou Alcindor (aka Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) in high school.    He said he could take me as far as New Haven, where he was spending the night with a friend's family.  Then he launched into a fatherly diatribe about what a bad idea it was to be hitchhiking, especially at night.  I allowed that I was unafraid.  I was experiencing an adventure.  He was blunt: "You don't have to shoot yourself in the head with a .45 pistol to discover it's a bad idea."

He dropped me off on the New England Thruway outside New Haven.   I waited a while for a ride and then three black guys pulled over.   I hesitated, but then thought:  I'm not going to let them think I won't ride with them.  All the trouble is between the old people.  "What a Wonderful World."



We weren't back on the road two minutes when the guy next to me in the backseat says:  "I am Dr. Death and I am going to operate on you."   This was pretty disturbing, but I pegged them for some college guys on the way to NYC from Brown or Yale.  Dr. Death would not let up,  though.  Open up your bag.  Give me your money.  Says I, If I had any money would I be hitchhiking.   In fact I had some money, but if I gave it to Dr. Death, I wouldn't have train fare out of New York City, where hitchhiking was impossible.   Dr. Death is thinking he's having fun with a soft white suburban kid.  I'm thinking if the car gets off the thruway or if he shows a knife I'm going to break his neck before the guys in the front seat can do anything.  I wasn't as tough as I thought I was, but I'd been in street fights before and survived being on the wrong end of knife before.  I was determined to go down fighting.   After about 20 minutes of this, the driver, who's wearing a Joe College tweed jacket, tells Dr. Death to stop bothering me.   There's nothing but silence for the rest of the ride.  They drop me off at the Throgs Neck Bridge and drive off into the darkness without saying a word.

The Cops and the Cannibal

My son's friends (black, white, red and brown) tell him the police are bad, corrupt and pick on people. He says, huh? When have you guys ever been picked on by the police or even stopped by them. Answer: er, like never, dude, but, but, but. The closest they came was one night when they were walking to Best Buy. A cop asks them where they are going. They say to Best Buy. He's, ok, you'll be fine. We're chasing an armed robber. Stay out of the neighborhood over on your right.

A few months later in the neighborhood over on the right, a guy killed his wife and dog and then cut off her head and his own arm.  Then ate part of her.  The cops have a tough job. Thank god for them.  They're the only thing standing between us and the cannibals in the neighborhood.

The Dragon and the Little Gal

Two Sundays ago, after many years off,  I took my teenage son downtown to Andre House where the Catholics feed the homeless.



I ended up working on the serving line, plunking pieces of watermelon on plates, dessert to accompany the main course of rice and beans.   There was no chili this Sunday.   Not enough volunteers to cut up the ingredients,  according to crew chief Lorenzo.

An argument broke out just before the food line shut down.   A large disturbed black man was shouting at a tiny white girl, one of the devout college students who volunteer to spend a year at Andre House.   He had violated one of the house rules and she was telling him to get back in line.  The shouting became very threatening as the large man towered over the little girl.   She stood her ground and didn't waver.   The black lady who like me is helping serve whispers in my ear:  "I'm really scared."  I'm thinking I'm way too old for this and if I say or do anything I'll probably set off a fight.  Wait.  Maybe he'll forget why he's mad or just run out of steam.   Eventually he does and leaves.   The black lady volunteer asks the tiny white girl if she was afraid.   The tiny white girl says... "A little.  Sometimes they punch the male volunteers, but they won't hit a girl."

The majority of the homeless are mentally ill... inherited, bad luck, or induced by addiction, neglect or abuse.   Fifty years ago they'd be locked up in a hospital.   In our benevolence, we've turned them out onto the streets where the cops now have to play psychiatric social worker, a job they are not intended or prepared to do, constantly. 

The crime isn't that some knuckleheads beat up a homeless guy in Boston.  It's that a "benevolent" society has turned the mentally ill out into the streets.

How Did You Spend Your Summer

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One of the Holy Cross NROTC requirements was to spend a summer aboard a ship.  Think eight week internship.  I opted for a small minesweeper based in Long Beach, California, the MSO (minesweeper ocean) Guide.   California was where it was happening.  

Aboard the MSO Guide not much was happening, as I discovered when I got there.  Active duty US ships aren't really prepared to train aspiring Navy officers.  The Guide like many of the Long Beach ships was taking a rest between deployments to Vietnam where she patrolled coastal waters looking for Viet Cong sneaking around by sea. 

Between visits to Vietnam, the Guide never ventured far from port at Long Beach.  It was a little minesweeper, just 700 tons and 170 feet long.  Big destroyers like the USS John Paul Jones weighed in at 4600 tons, were 400 feet long, packed guided missiles and 5-inch artillery that could lob explosive shells at targets 12 miles away.   During the Battle for the Dong Ha Bridge, a 70-lb round from the Jones disintegrated an NVA tank during a firefight at about 1000 yards.  The Guide had a tiny 40mm gun, which wasn't a defense against much of anything in the era of jets, guided missiles and tanks.  It's steering didn't even operate like a big destroyer's.  It had special propellers that could change their angle for better maneuverability.  Guide  was half the size of the USS Constitution, "Old Ironsides", the famous 200-year-old three-masted sailing ship that my parents took me to visit in the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston when I was a little boy.  Consider that the 200-year-old sailing ship outgunned the Guide by a factor of 50 to 1.



The ignominy of it all.   Our first day trip out onto the calm waters on a sunny California day just south of Long Beach and I got seasick.  I couldn't even find privacy and refuge from the shame of it.  I raced inside to the Guide's closest head (restroom) and let loose into the toilet only to discover at the last moment that one of my supervising officers was sitting on it.  Unlucky and messy for him.  ignominy for me. 

Sunny California didn't turn out to be a refuge from the grim reality of the military in a time of war.   I was looking forward to a weekend at the beach one Friday afternoon when all shore leave got cancelled.   The Guide and all remaining hands were to sail immediately for San Diego and help search for a helicopter that had crashed at sea during a training exercise.   Hopefully, the minesweeper's sonar would be able locate the sunken helicopter, and divers would be able to recover the bodies of its crew.

The Guide's sonar was high tech and secret.   There was actually a hole in the bottom of the ship (actually an internal well) that the an/sqq-14 sonar was lowered through.  The sonar rendered a television view of the bottom of the ocean.   When we arrived near where they thought the helicopter had crashed, we lowered the sonar and searched and searched ... and found nothing.  Then the sonar died.  We hauled it up to fix the thing.   This was where my most useful talent came in handy.  Not something I learned at Holy Cross.  The previous summer on an Oregon ranch, I had learned to use wrenches to take things apart.    To the surprise of everyone, especially the ship's captain, I rolled up my sleaves and started helping the chief petty officer take the cover off the sonar internals.  We couldn't fix the sonar, so we bolted the thing back together and went home.  That was the most interesting thing I did all summer, but not really useful.   They never did find the bodies of the helicopter crew. 

I discovered too late that the Navy base at Long Beach wasn't much closer to the beach and California girls than an Oregon ranch.