Friday, January 9, 2009
Cold water flat
At Herr and Frau Wieland's, where we lived in the upstairs apartment, the only way to warm water was to build a fire using coal briquettes under a rocketship of a water heater next to a claw foot tub. One fire was good for one bath so Karen and I would, for the most part, take our baths together, at least once a week.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Velma
Laying out weekend plans when I didn't have duty, Karen and I would pick a point on the map--Zurich or Baden-Baden or Paris or Amsterdam--and hunker down over Michelin guides and other books, mapping out our course.
I'd grab some bedrolls at the kaserne (even though we almost always landed in a bed and breakfast) and she would launch the weekend late on Friday by driving up next to my office window. From the ledge, I'd toss out gear to throw in Velma's back end. Other than loose luggage, our main provisions were gas stamps and paper marks, lush and important-looking, and army personnel cross-border papers a friend in S-1 would set up for us.
Velma, a 1966 VW station wagon I bought for something like $600 within a month of joining the unit, clearly made three for the road, all of whom had to cooperate to reach any kind of cartographic objective. If the wind or weather didn't suit we'd have to purr encouragements to her in French, English or German in hopes of cresting the next rise or finding the next gas station. She was German but she had the soul of a French woman--unpredictable, clever and disarming.
On her maiden voyage of consequence--to pick up Karen in Frankfurt--she demonstrated initial jealousy by suddenly, for no apparent reason, setting up a constant blast of her horn outside B Battery barracks. There were probably some soldiers that day who thought it was a sickly version of a hit-the-decks siren prior to nuclear attack. For the boys in the motor pool, however, it was a no-brainer fix and I eventually got on the autobahn, having messed with Velma a good hour, running a good hour late. In a fortuitous synchronicity, Karen's plane was also off schedule, so I made it, flowers in hand, just in the nick of time for her first steps on European soil.
In subsequent months, Velma ran through two engines and began to show serious signs of undercarriage salt damage. A veteran of a number of winter expeditions into the Black Forest and Swiss Alps, she began to show some spectacular rusted sections. We decided to hide the "see through zones" with bondo and a new paint job inspired by the color of Manhattan taxis.
Toward the end of the Velma era, after a long night in the Hofbrau tent at Octoberfest in Munich, hung-over in the middle of the night, I woke up, sat bolt upright, and knocked myself out on the rear door frame.
I bought a second car during our two years in Germany--a well-used Porsche named Maurice--though we clung to Velma for a good while and eventually sold her to another G.I. It's still worth pondering if a car of such stubbornness could ever actually die. That same question has also trailed after a number of French women with no clear answer.
I'd grab some bedrolls at the kaserne (even though we almost always landed in a bed and breakfast) and she would launch the weekend late on Friday by driving up next to my office window. From the ledge, I'd toss out gear to throw in Velma's back end. Other than loose luggage, our main provisions were gas stamps and paper marks, lush and important-looking, and army personnel cross-border papers a friend in S-1 would set up for us.
Velma, a 1966 VW station wagon I bought for something like $600 within a month of joining the unit, clearly made three for the road, all of whom had to cooperate to reach any kind of cartographic objective. If the wind or weather didn't suit we'd have to purr encouragements to her in French, English or German in hopes of cresting the next rise or finding the next gas station. She was German but she had the soul of a French woman--unpredictable, clever and disarming.
On her maiden voyage of consequence--to pick up Karen in Frankfurt--she demonstrated initial jealousy by suddenly, for no apparent reason, setting up a constant blast of her horn outside B Battery barracks. There were probably some soldiers that day who thought it was a sickly version of a hit-the-decks siren prior to nuclear attack. For the boys in the motor pool, however, it was a no-brainer fix and I eventually got on the autobahn, having messed with Velma a good hour, running a good hour late. In a fortuitous synchronicity, Karen's plane was also off schedule, so I made it, flowers in hand, just in the nick of time for her first steps on European soil.
In subsequent months, Velma ran through two engines and began to show serious signs of undercarriage salt damage. A veteran of a number of winter expeditions into the Black Forest and Swiss Alps, she began to show some spectacular rusted sections. We decided to hide the "see through zones" with bondo and a new paint job inspired by the color of Manhattan taxis.
Toward the end of the Velma era, after a long night in the Hofbrau tent at Octoberfest in Munich, hung-over in the middle of the night, I woke up, sat bolt upright, and knocked myself out on the rear door frame.
I bought a second car during our two years in Germany--a well-used Porsche named Maurice--though we clung to Velma for a good while and eventually sold her to another G.I. It's still worth pondering if a car of such stubbornness could ever actually die. That same question has also trailed after a number of French women with no clear answer.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Wedged between war and peace
I remember yellow-green, rounded, lantern-lit grassy knolls pearled by moonlight--the well-tended grounds of a U.S. Army hospital in Stuttgart in the early spring of 1971.
A friend, Fred Walker, and I had just arrived in Europe from the states as army privates. With a weekend off, we caught a train to Stuttgart to experience heavy mugs of German beer and the bright excitement of a major city carnival. That night we stayed in hospital beds, arranged by corpsmen we befriended at a "whoohoo" mini car circuit.
It was grand to be loose and not know what might happen. Suddenly, so it seemed, in Europe, with two years ahead of us split off from family, uncorked from whatever had gone down in a previous life, for better or for worse, on the other side of a great divide.
At the same time, in a place far away, the Vietnam War shuffled on, leaving in its tracks a debris of death and dark karma. Jimmy Farmer, left tackle when I was a senior at Virginia High School, died in the jungle. So did Jack Ruggles, a childhood friend who I hugely admired. And so many others.
To be in the army in Europe in the early seventies, connected to Vietnam by a chain of command, meant that you shared, because you were American and in uniform, in a bitter, enormously fucked up cause.
Older Germans, the ones who had lived through Hitler--after all they’d experienced--seemed genuinely glad to have NATO troops as close-by neighbors. They lived with memories of an apocryphal time.
The younger Europeans, in their late teens and twenties, wanted the Americans out of Vietnam (as did most everyone I knew), and out of West Germany, along with the Canadians, the British, the Aussies, the Italians, the Turks or any other foreign force. As a consequence, being in Europe was partly about living with a split in the generations.
At the same time, on a different level, it was about simply living--and using up every spare moment in the most creative, richly imagined way possible.
A friend, Fred Walker, and I had just arrived in Europe from the states as army privates. With a weekend off, we caught a train to Stuttgart to experience heavy mugs of German beer and the bright excitement of a major city carnival. That night we stayed in hospital beds, arranged by corpsmen we befriended at a "whoohoo" mini car circuit.
It was grand to be loose and not know what might happen. Suddenly, so it seemed, in Europe, with two years ahead of us split off from family, uncorked from whatever had gone down in a previous life, for better or for worse, on the other side of a great divide.
At the same time, in a place far away, the Vietnam War shuffled on, leaving in its tracks a debris of death and dark karma. Jimmy Farmer, left tackle when I was a senior at Virginia High School, died in the jungle. So did Jack Ruggles, a childhood friend who I hugely admired. And so many others.
To be in the army in Europe in the early seventies, connected to Vietnam by a chain of command, meant that you shared, because you were American and in uniform, in a bitter, enormously fucked up cause.
Older Germans, the ones who had lived through Hitler--after all they’d experienced--seemed genuinely glad to have NATO troops as close-by neighbors. They lived with memories of an apocryphal time.
The younger Europeans, in their late teens and twenties, wanted the Americans out of Vietnam (as did most everyone I knew), and out of West Germany, along with the Canadians, the British, the Aussies, the Italians, the Turks or any other foreign force. As a consequence, being in Europe was partly about living with a split in the generations.
At the same time, on a different level, it was about simply living--and using up every spare moment in the most creative, richly imagined way possible.
Running the vineyards, Neckar River
At the end of a day of army life, I would veer my VW toward home, past the flower markets of Neckarsulm where cut roses piled up in every imaginable color, past the rounded hills of grapevines, flush and crazy with green, on through the valleys to Affaltrach where Karen waited with dinner. In the warm months, I’d look for a place to run, slipping on shorts in the car and a pair of white, cardboard-stiff Adidas. Finding an obscure truck road into a vineyard, I'd pull over, jump out and begin loping along through curved rows of vines, breathing in the soft notes of green leaves and the tumult of the terrain itself, worked up into scalloped hillsides.
Between the plants, glimpses of the horizon let me know I was well off the valley floor, up among the higher rows. I was always afraid of being chased off, which never happened, so I’d get back to my car grateful, sweaty and full of wonder.
The ‘71 Rieslings of the Neckar Valley were considered the best of the century through some amazing improvisations of rain, sun, soil and vine. To taste one was to enter into an agreement that you would never complain about anything again. Or at least until the next morning, when assignments were handed out in front of Battery B.
Between the plants, glimpses of the horizon let me know I was well off the valley floor, up among the higher rows. I was always afraid of being chased off, which never happened, so I’d get back to my car grateful, sweaty and full of wonder.
The ‘71 Rieslings of the Neckar Valley were considered the best of the century through some amazing improvisations of rain, sun, soil and vine. To taste one was to enter into an agreement that you would never complain about anything again. Or at least until the next morning, when assignments were handed out in front of Battery B.
Alte Muhle, 1971, U.S. Army Europe
One of the great secrets of the Cold War went down as the Alte Muhle Pact, or the exact location of an old mill somewhere north of the Neckar River that some imaginative German had converted into a dance bar in the middle of nowhere. Aside from how hard the place was to find, it was also nearly impossible to know about, since maps and directions were passed along from person to person in our battery on a sacred basis. If you were told about it, let’s say by Al Bowerman or Greg Perla, there was a certain implication that you were judged as having the integrity to keep the secret for the rest of your life. I'm fairly certain the Alte Muhle, with its hodge-podge of European bop rock and Motown, eventually went to the same grave as disco. But, even if I could tell you where the old mill was 35 years after the fact (which I couldn't do in a million years), I would still be honor bound to kill you.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
