- Life in Germany, to life in Montana
- Life in Montana
- Life in Spokane, then beyond
- Life in Olympia
Routes and patterns of behaviors
It was Prussia, or East Germany, or Poland. It’s hard to know exactly. Before the World Wars, before cars, and definitely before walls separating West and East. Snow had fallen the night before, dusting the rolling hills and leafless winter trees lining the road ahead of him. The frozen wind hissed across the brown valley dotted with mud, foot tracks, and the occasional tree. A man trudged alone through a small valley, not along any sort of path or road. He walked with his head down, his breath reluctantly leaving his body, and nearly freezing as it dissipated into the cloudy sky. His hands were exposed: blushing, callused and wrinkled from work in the fields, on the fams, and in the trees. His tattered boots squashed the mud on the road beneath him, with frigid water soaking his feet as he entered a nameless town in eastern Germany.
It was morning, and the man had a splitting ache coming from the center of his head, under his hat and through his tangled hair. His eyes felt sore and red, and his mouth was as dry as the cold air around him. He needed something to eat. More importantly, something to drink. He approached a familiar shop in the nearby town that was just opening. He didn’t have a horse to tie up.
“Why are you back here?” the owner snapped from the veranda of the wooden shop.
The man grimaced and wiped his eyes, “I need food.”
“Is that all you need?”
“You gonna open that door for me?”
They both drew the moment and stared at each other. The owner looked in the man’s eyes: he saw anger, pain, and loneliness in his eyes. The owner opened the door reluctantly and walked back to his ledger. The man entered the dark, dusty shop and dragged his tattered boots through the shop to the back corner. He grabbed a small bag of dried beans without looking. He walked aloofly toward the ledger and stopped in front of small shelf stocked with cheap liquor. The shopkeeper stared intensely. The old man looked up and stubbornly stared back. The shopkeeper nervously looked down at his ledger and rearranged a few things on his counter. The old man took a small bottle of Schnapps and put it into his soggy coat. A clink came from inside the man’s coat, from another another bottle he drank from the night before. Or the night before that. He walked to the front of the store, and set the wrinkled bag of beans on the counter.
“Is that all you’re having? Beans?” the shopkeeper asked. He grabbed his pen to write on his ledger.
The man didn’t say anything, and grabbed the beans.
The shopkeeper grabbed his wrist, and pulled his arm. He could smell the man’s drunken breath, “You still owe me 50 Marks,” the shopkeeper prodded.
The man looked at him, and squinted his eyes slightly. The man towered over the owner, and he had hands twice the size of the shopkeeper. He pulled his arm away calmly, and stared back. The shopkeeper turned around. The man left.
As he walked back on the road, he pulled the Schnapps out of his coat, twisted the top off and tossed it into the field. He took a long pull from the bottle and could feel the sharp burn in his throat. The wind blew stronger against his face, but his face grew number.
He walked ten minutes down the road to his one-room farmhouse, situated at the bottom of a small hill in the field. He threw open the door. His son was still sleeping.
“Wake up,” the old man said as he wobbled to the table. The son rubbed his eyes, and sat up with his clothes already on. The old man burped and wiped his mouth, and the son recognized the scent his dad brought in.
“We’ve got some work to do today. I need you to come with me,” the old man told him. “It’s going to take all day.” The son looked down at boots, and started to sigh.
The old man used the table to him stand up, and his blue eyes struck angrily toward his son. He was tall. He clenched his fist, “I don’t want to hear it from you.” The son looked back at him, scared.
They walked out of the house, and the old man walked to the side of the house where he stacked the logs that he chopped everyday. He had a wheel barrel parked next to the stack. And behind his wheel barrel, he pulled out his pike pole. It was taller than the old man, and had a dirty, rusty, hook on one end. He wobbled and started to walk.
They began walking East, back through town. More townspeople were out, and the baker was sweeping the front of his store with the haggard bristles of an old broom. The baker stared at the old man, wary. He stumbled forward without looking back.
“Hurry up, boy,” he told his son. The son shuffled his feet to move closer behind his dad, hiding behind his dad to avoid the looks of disgust and fear from the few townspeople who were up.
As they left town and moved closer to the river, the old man started to slow down. He turned to the son, “We’ve got to move some cargo down the river. It’s going to take until sunset.”
“What are we moving this time?” The son asked.
The old man didn’t say anything.
They approached a stable without animals. The stable was built from dried oak trees, and had spruce logs stacked in the back. The old man looked around, across the fields, and saw only wheat and the muddy road behind them. As he got closer, two younger men walked out of the stable and watched.
“You’ve got a helper today?” one of the men questioned.
“You told me it was big load” the old man retorted.
One of the men motioned to him to come into the stable. All four walked in.
“I need you to move all 12 barrels today. You can use the spruce out back to tie yourself a raft.” The old man looked at the barrels, then walked out of the stable and circled around to inspect the spruce logs. A few paces away was a small creek, with small pieces of ice on the bank. The creek cut through the earth and meandered toward the direction of the river.
“Those Prussian border guards have been causing trouble lately. You better keep an eye out.” one of the men cautioned. He rubbed his neck, “You have any money in case they give you a hard time?”
The old man gazed toward the barren wheatland and rolling hills. He reached into his pants pockets, which he knew were empty. Then, he reached into his coat and grabbed his bottle, and sipped it cooly. “We’ll be fine.”
The two men helped the old man and his son drag the spruce off the stack, then line them next to each other. The boy, who was half their size, carried more than his weight and positioned the logs closely next to each other without instruction. They grabbed rope out of the stable, and the son tightly tied the logs together into a raft, while the old man watched. Once the raft was tied up, they pushed the raft into water, and tied it up to a wood pole along the creek.
“Let’s load it up carefully now.” All four of them went into the stable, started to picked up the small barrels, filled with liquid, and placed them on the raft. Their boots started to soak through.
They took some of the some sticks and smaller spruce logs and stacked them on the barrels to conceal their cargo.
The son looked nervously into the distance. His stomach tightened. The young man grabbed an smaller log, and struggled with his hatchet to cut one end of the log into an makeshift ore. One of the young men grabbed hatchet from him and made it more passable.
“Better get going now,” the other man warned.
The old man looked ahead, then took a sip. He grabbed his pike pole and stared at its sharp, corroded hook, studying its condition. A cold gust struck his red face as the glaze from his eyes dried.
The men helped them untie the raft, and without a word, they began floating down the river. The river was small and windy. The low current kept them safe, but made them slow and vulnerable.
The boy looked at the old man hold his pike pole, pushing angrily off the banks. The old man spit in the water, and wiped his mouth. “You gonna steer or just look around?” the old man snapped.
The boy looked into the water and saw his own face. He saw his eyebrows furrow and lips frown. He couldn’t admit to himself that he was scared.
The sun was coming down faster than expected. It was late afternoon dark, and the clouds were reflecting what little sun was left of the day. He could see a little ways up ahead, but the trees no longer contrasted with the tall grass on the banks. The wind was starting to calm. He could hear the sound of the Old Man’s pole press along the dead trees and branches wedged into the mud.
The river widened, and around the corner was a small group of nearly constructed houses on the left side of the bank. Down on the bank was a man dressed in uniform. Positioning himself closer to the raft.
“Hey! What do you have there?” a voice called out from the bank.
The Old Man looked up, but kept quiet.
“This is the German Border Patrol. Get over here and show me what you have on your raft.”
The Old Man looked back at the Boy, then back at the border guard. The Old Man used his wiry arms to push against a dead stump and pointed the boat to the right side of the river “I’m dropping you off over here. You need to hide behind those bushes aways.”
The Boy felt scared, the Old Man didn’t listen to people very often, and rarely panicked. The boy saw the old man wince, and the long muscles in his neck worked to swallow the nervous energy in his throat. The Boy jumped from the raft onto dark mud dotted by small puddles. He scampered behind a bush positioned next to a large pine tree. And he squatted down and waited. He put his hand on his mouth nervously, and stared down to he ground. He felt a pain in his stomach, he felt lost and worried.
The Old Man moved the raft off the bank and pointed it to the other side of the river, doing his best to feign compliance and innocence. As he moved closer to the river bank, he noticed the border guard crossing his arms and intensely staring. The border guard was standing on his own raft in case he needed to chase the old man. As the Old beached the raft, the Old Man surveyed the scene. It looked like an outpost made for a few border guards. A house to live in, an office of some sort, and a stable for storing goods and supplies. There was only one active border guard on duty, but there had to be a few more guards around.
The border guard grabbed his shirt, and brought the old man face to face. The border guard could smell the sweat of the Old Man’s shirt, and the sterilized smell of his breath. “You got anything to say? Any reason you hesitated to come over here?”
The Old Man smiled, here he was most comfortable. The fragility of men’s egos. Physical dominance. “Why don’t you get your hands off of me?” he cooly told the border guard.
The Border Guard pushed him away, and started to circle around to the back of the raft, wading through the brown river water and soaking his clean boats. “What are you moving on your raft?” the Border Guard asked.
“Logs for a business partner,” the Old Man stated coyly.
“Logs, huh?”
The Border Guard began to pull the dead branches and shrubs off the raft.