Be Inspired ...

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall be duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Amendment XIII to the Constitution of the United States of America
Ratified December 6, 1865

5

THERE’S NO END TO THIS LIFE

When will we be free?

* * *

On my high school graduation Sunday, Fullo and I were sitting in his living room, when with great concern for my future, he casually asked me:

“Would you like to continue to work here?”

I wanted to shout, “Are you full o’ it?”

“I guess so,” I mumbled instead, while shrugging my shoulders. Did I just seal my fate for life?

I had no choice, either stay here or secretly live in a barn somewhere, to feed with cows. But that would not be much different from what I was doing now. I was still too intimidated to ask how much he would pay me or about anything else related to my employment. For my two years of work for him, he’d never paid me one cent, except twenty cents for school lunches and dimes for the church collection plate. He even had stolen what little German money I had brought with me and had displayed it at the county fair, along with Houwke’s vegetables, to win a blue ribbon. My only reward from him had been minimal room and board and an occasional whack on my head. In addition, I was also allowed a few days to pick beans and strawberries at nearby farms so I could buy some clothes and school supplies for myself.

Siggi and I did not even know who had paid for our passage to America. It was very doubtful that it had been Pa or Ma. Many years later Maxo would tell Siggi that he had paid for it, and that Fullo had pressured him for me to reimburse him for my trip. This was akin to a plantation master asking his slaves to pay for their voyage into the unknown after their arrival there.

In some ways, Siggi and I were worse off than the earlier slaves because we were completely alone in a new land. We were isolated and could not draw strength in numbers from companions in suffering. Like them, we were torn from our homeland, had to work hard without pay and could not escape to freedom. And we could not derive hope from an underground railroad or a war that might liberate us.

We became slaves in a foreign land as a direct result of our Progenitors’ War. When our parents should have supported, counseled and guided us, they were fighting each other. And against us. Pa never paid any attention to us; Ma’s whip paid too much attention to us. By the time our war would end with a bizarre peace in the mid-sixties, Siggi and I would be strafed in the crossfire of at least twenty lawsuits, involving at least two dozen lawyers and judges that I someday would identify by name. The foundations of our lives were not cemented with friends and family ties or fortified by religion. Missing were the steel re-bars that prevented the collapse of concrete buildings during earthquakes. Will the constant tremors someday collapse Siggi and me?

I still had no money, no car, no friends and no means or a place to which to escape. Fullo never suggested a wage and nothing more was said about this subject, so my status quo was maintained for the time being. I did not know if Siggi had any plans or if someone had made such for him after he graduated. However, a few days after Fullo’s generous offer to me, his brother Maxo visited us. He had hooked Siggi and me with delectable virtual bait to land us in America and now needed somebody to work for him. Was this why he had acquired us in the first place?

“Jiminy cricket, doesn’t anybody want to work anymore? What is this world coming to? The Communists are corrupting this country!” expressed political Maxo. I learned that “jiminy cricket” was Maxo’s favorite expression. He could cuss in a highbrow fashion because nobody would know what a “jiminy” was, and everyone would think that he flew to India to play cricket. He owned several thousand acres of tideland that his parents had bought long ago for pennies an acre from our distant relatives, the Bursmas. While we were still living in Simonswolde, we once had visited a Bursma family in the nearby city of Norden. I remember that they had given Siggi and me each one Deutsche mark so we could ride a carousel at a nearby carnival. Eventually Maxo became the sole owner of the tideland. When one stood at one end on a clear day, and had good eyesight, one could barely see the high structures at the opposite end of his land.

Every day the tides covered this marshland as they had for eons. Maxo wanted to farm some of it and the salty tidewater had to be stopped from flooding in. During the previous summer he had hired a nice man, nicknamed Bud, to build a dike around several hundred acres with his dragline shovel. Bud had dug clay out of the ground to build it, and in the process created canals on both sides of the dike. However, during the winter, the fierce storms and high tides had eroded it substantially and had washed a long section of it out into the bay. Did this require an environmental impact study? Or qualify for taxpayer-sponsored disaster aid?

This washed out dirt and the sediments coming down from the rivers and shorelines helped build up the undiked portion of Maxo’s tideland, thereby enlarging it because it was officially recorded to extend out to the waterline of the lowest tide. The more sediment that built up on this mudflat, the further into the bay moved its boundary. Since it was so flat, it did not require much rise of the land to extend the run a long ways out into the bay.

Now Maxo wanted to fill in this gap in the dike and strengthen it along its entire length. He and Fullo agreed that I would help with this project. I suspect that this was their arrangement from the very beginning, but they had left me clueless. Slaves, like children, do not need to know what is planned for them, especially since such information might encourage rebellion. But for obvious reasons I was ready for a different kind of work.

Siggi was already working on the dike when I arrived there, and he and Maxo were staying in a little old house on Freddy Bursma’s farm. I was sure that by moving there, I would increase my chances of gaining freedom. We had little money but were allowed to pump gas from Maxo’s tank for Siggi’s car. Sometimes he even would give us a few dollars so we could see a movie.

But now Siggi and I worked harder than ever, mostly building a new bulwark of lumber on the outside of the dike to protect its clay from erosion. Bud drove pilings into the ground with a pile driver at regular intervals. In the areas where the dike was the lowest, Siggi and I pushed posts into the ground with Maxo’s bulldozer. During high tides, which also occurred at night, we floated truckloads of boards down the nearby river to intermittent places along the dike. Floating was the best way to transport the great quantities needed to build this two-mile long revetment because trucks could not easily access this muddy area. We spent most of the summer nailing planks to these posts and pilings. Afterwards Bud filled in the resulting space behind this board wall with more clay from the borrow pits.

We also cleared the big tree roots and trunks that had been deposited over the years and had gotten stuck in the mud. We sawed them apart and blasted them with dynamite to be able to bulldoze them into piles for burning, because the ones outside of the dike could be set adrift to damage it again during subsequent storms.

On hot afternoons, Maxo brought us ice cream cones to boost our blood sugar in order to sustain our production. Even though we worked hard, I did not mind this so much because we were mostly without supervision and could smell the sea air and often bathe in sunshine. Mud was better than manure, and we could eat all we desired. Maxo was a good cook, compared to mother, and fed us a lot.

Uncle Deepo’s son, our cousin Willem, also helped us for several weeks and Maxo paid him one dollar per hour. Had I known this, and had I had the courage, I would have requested to also be paid a specific wage on a regular basis.

Later in the season after our work diminished, I did occasional yard work for Bud and his wife. She made a note in her cookbook that “Ami will make good someday.” Years later, I would visit them again with my bride, and Bud’s wife would show her prediction to us to confirm that she had been right.

* * *

One evening we were having dinner in the unfinished basement of Freddy’s house where Maxo prepared our meals. We discussed our progress and what we had to do next. He had a sample of his cooking stuck to the corner of his mouth, where he usually kept a specimen until it fell off. Frequently he also decorated his shirts and pants with various soups, sauces and beverages. His designs were arranged in an artistic fashion on his shirt and around his zipper, where his fly advertised that he peed more often than he re-zipped.

After a greasy dinner our talk became serious. Our bellies were full, and Maxo savored his usual coffee but shouldn’t have. His blood pressure increased to the point that it created a pink patch of a map of his tideland on his balding forehead, at a scale of twenty thousand to one. He acted like a jet setter, leaned back in his chair, pensively drawing on his cigarette much like a plantation owner would smoke a cigar. He talked importantly about politics and drew upon his vast education and experiences to observe that Washington D.C. was corrupt. There were goons who were interfering with his freedom to build a dike, to develop clam beds and also were stealing the fruits of his labors. There were mysterious events happening in the nation’s capitol. When we asked him for specifics he became nervous and vague. This indicated that there could be some basis for his claims, or he could be paranoid, since he never mentioned names but always referred to everyone as “they.” He traveled to the East every winter but always was very secretive about what he did there, so I asked him directly, “What do you do in Washington, D.C.?”

“I work for the State Department.”

“Doing what?” I questioned him further.

“Oh, I travel to Eastern Europe and write reports,” he answered, looking at the table as if it had asked him that question, while the map on his forehead became more defined.

He was always so nebulous about his employment that people teased him that he worked for the CIA. He never denied it because he liked to play the spy role, as well as the professor role and implied by his demeanor that this might be the case. This image was reinforced in that he never smoked before he left but was always very nervous and smoked heavily upon returning. We could tell that there was something troublesome in the nation’s capitol. Was it its politics or was it simply the rat’s race of its traffic, especially because he was a very inattentive and inept driver? Whenever Siggi or I rode with him, we worried greatly for our safety because he ground gears, drove too slowly and drifted out of lanes. But after a few weeks back on his tideland, he would always quit smoking and calm down again, although his driving would improve little because of his lack of attention.

* * *

That summer Siggi applied for admission to Washington State University and was accepted. I had no idea how he could pay for it, did not ask him, and gave little thought of attending college myself. The scores from my grade prediction test were too low, I never had much confidence in my academic abilities, and I had no money. In Germany only the elite attended the Gymnasium. We had been lucky in that respect, even though we had to struggle to meet the academic standards, and I more so than Siggi. I also thought that only the elite attended college in America and dairy cowboys were not quite the elite. After Siggi entered college my desire for freedom intensified, and I told Maxo that I would also like to get more education.

“What can I do for a living? Should I go to college?” I asked him, instead of “how much will you pay me?”

I watched Maxo’s face grow dark while he gazed at the food that he was preparing. My instinct told me that I had said something unpleasant to him. He continued to fix his stare on his work while the electro-chemical activities inside his skull increased dramatically. He appeared to be thinking:

“How can I tell him that I want him to work for me forever?”

Instead, he humanely told me that I was a little lazy and stood around a lot. He expected me to wrestle and pound more vigorously, and to emphasize his remarks he continued that Willem also had that opinion. I weigh one hundred and fifty pounds. My hammer is heavy. Reward has nothing to do with one’s drive to succeed in slavery.

Then he cheered me: “Let me see your grade report.”

Obediently I dug out my final grades from high school and showed them to him.

Then he landed his final punch, such as I had suffered before.

“You are not smart enough to go to college.”

My heart dropped into my dirty shorts, then bounced back into my dry throat. I believed him and had no reason to think otherwise. Often I hesitated before responding to others, to fill in the words that I had not been able to hear clearly, to construct the meaning of indeterminate sounds. When you don’t hear well, stupid people will conclude that you are stupid and some will also tell you so.

For as long as I could remember, a heaviness hung over my soul, but I could not define it. I did not know what it was or where it resided. A blackness often burdened me and interfered with most cognitive thoughts, but I did not realize that this was so, and that most people did not suffer from such a state of mind. I did not recognize my SSS, Scorched Soul Syndrome, which surely must have contributed to my poor performance in school.

* * *

One day during late summer Maxo had another brilliant insight:

“Why don’t you buy your brother’s car to help him with college?”

Maxo paid me intermittently only a few dollars, and I didn’t know how much per hour, or if my pay were in arrears. We did not keep time sheets, and he was always vague about our work, our pay and our future.

“Help with what?” I shot back at him.

“We’ll work it out,” said Maxo.

“I don’t want to buy it. The tires are bald and the springs are sagging.”

“You should help out your brother,” Maxo insisted.

He had a strange sense of humor, had no clue about reality, knew too much about reality, had a perverted thought process, wanted to exploit me, or a combination thereof. My net worth could not have been more than twenty dollars, he probably had more than a million, and Siggi worked for him and not for me. He did not explain how I was to help Siggi. His plan was to retain me permanently on his new farm. He did not tell me this at the time, but oddly enough, he told me this when he visited my wife and me long after I had left his tideland. He knew that an ignorant slave was easier to manipulate. To give hope in lieu of pay, he dangled virtual carrots before us with vague promises of help. He was single and often lonely and retained a few friends and relatives in contact with him by implying that some day they might inherit some of his wealth. His method worked quite well because it attracted them like, ouch, I bit my tongue again, honey attracts flies.

As it had been on the dairy farms, Siggi and I did not know if we’d ever get paid a fair wage, and we did not even know what a fair wage would be. I was still held captive with invisible chains, while Siggi was quickly loosening his. I worked without complaint and was ignorant of such basics as wages, paid vacation, health insurance, and Maxo kept quiet about tangible compensation for us. But intermittently he made insinuations about future rewards. Since Siggi and I were isolated from the outside world, his vague suggestions were singular, powerful incentives for young people with little hope in a foreign land.

I had no means to help my brother with college. We never received any help from anybody, expected none, and did not know if and where it was available. Our mother’s court battles with our father had always provided insufficient means for our living, and therefore we knew how difficult it was to get money. Ma had fought for it like the devil, and our labors on the dairy farms earned us not even enough food. Now, as before, the one I lived with and worked for kept me intentionally isolated and ignorant.

* * *

That September I drove Siggi across the state with the old Ford to take him to college. The question of its ownership was not resolved because it was still registered in Maxo’s name. Long after this, Siggi told me that I never paid him for it, and I insisted that I had not bought it. I did not pay him personally and Maxo apparently did not pay him enough on my behalf. At this time I had signed no transfer papers for this car. The vague idea of its ownership was part of Maxo’s manipulation to keep me befuddled and tied to his land, while at the same time making me think that he was paying me a decent wage by implying that the Ford was part of my wages because I was allowed to drive it.

I did not know how much Siggi earned from Maxo. Since neither one of us received a regular wage, I thought that the Ford was a reward for work that Siggi had done during the previous summer. Now it became my reward. Occasionally Maxo gave us some money in the spirit of making a gift, which it was not. We more than earned his gifts with our hard work on his tideland. Nevertheless, Siggi and I appreciated whatever little he paid us because otherwise we would have continued to have nothing.

* * *

Before he left for his annual trip to the East, Maxo drove with me to the employment office in Everett to find a job for me. Or so he said.

“What kind of work would you like to do?” he asked me on the way.

I did not tell him that I wanted to be an astronomer and count the stars to compute the size of the universe because I did not know how to go about becoming one. I did not know what I was or what I could be. I was dumbfounded because I had not given this much consideration. I mainly had had experience in cow and nutrient management and spike hammering and lots of it. I barely had had any outside contact and was not the world’s greatest listener or conversationalist.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged.

“Would you like to be a grocery clerk?”

“Maybe,” I answered uncertainly.

I felt uneasy about having to work with the public. It meant having to smile politely, cluelessly, when someone asked me a question that I did not hear well enough. It meant being ignored when my slow monotone speech put someone into a trance. A future friend would tell me that I sounded like actor Peter Lorre. I was born on the edge of the Black Forest; he was born in the shadow of Dracula’s mountains in Hungary. He had a low voice and a slow speech also. Even so, he became a famous movie star, and therefore there might be hope for me also.

Maxo led our way into the employment office.

“Do you have a grocery clerk job?” he asked the officer.

The bureaucrat searched his files.

“No, we don’t have anything around here, but there is an opening in Pasco.”

“Is that in Texas?” I inquired hopefully, confusing it with El Paso from a Western song.

“No, it’s in Eastern Washington, one of the Tri-Cities.”

I felt ignorant, I was ignorant. It was one of the worst traits in a human being, to be ignorant. But I did not know this because I was ignorant.

Maxo did not ask about other types of jobs or what other openings there might be, and we filled out no papers. If he really wanted me to get one, he would have told me to apply for the Pasco job or for anything else that was available that I would be able to do, no matter in what city or state it might be.

On the way back to the tideland, he informed me, “I have to fly to Washington D.C. next week. I want you to stay on the tideland and keep an eye on the dike.”

“OK.”

“Also, I want you to take my mother from the nursing home twice a month and drive her for a visit with Uncle Deepo.”

“OK.”

Freddy’s house where we had stayed for the summer was located several miles from Maxo’s land. Now he informed me that he wanted me to live on his tideland and drove me to the abode that he was going to move there. By now I had learned not to expect too much in my new homes. Rather than getting hyper again, I acted disinterested. Unlike our homes in Rheinfelden, this one was not a mansion. It was not a mobile home, trailer house or cozy attic. It was a shack. I had never seen such a dilapidated hut in my whole life even though there had been severe poverty and a great housing shortage in Germany. This contraption was built of pressed fiberboard decades before and had expired long ago.

It was to be my American Dream but became my German nightmare. I felt severely homesick because it was so much like my sick old home in the attic. It had no electricity, no water, no telephone, and worst of all, there was not even an outhouse. My father didn’t think that his children needed a toilet, so there was no reason that a slave should expect to have one.

After we hauled my new home to the tideland, we placed it behind the old dike on the neighbor’s field. We placed it exactly square with the world, so it would not look so out of place, so there’d be a hint that an architect might have designed it. This location would also provide some protection from the frequent southwestern storms and serve as a scarecrow for destructive hunters. Maxo wanted me to observe his dike during the winter, not only because of Mother Nature, but also because humanoids, euphemistically honored as Vandals, were destroying his property. In the past someone had thrown dirt into the fuel tanks of the equipment, and hunters had either mistaken his boat for a spruce goose or had wanted to titillate themselves with Schadenfreude.

After we protected my new mobile home estate with Lifetime Warranty, Gold Bond quality roof covering, I moved into it with my keepsakes. To go potty, I just went out to the frequently wet and/or muddy field and let it all hang and fall out, au naturel, always cognizant of which way the cold wind was blowing. There were no bushes or trees where I could hide, and unlike our attic, I had no neighbors whose toilet I could use now. As in the good old days, I could not wash my hands or take showers. To get fresh air into my new home, I kept the windows closed because they leaked so generously. Although I had moved yet again, I still felt so much at home.

All winter long I brought in drinking water in an old milk can, timed between storms, when I could spin and slide the Ford all the way to my in-the-mud hut. My standard of living was now lower than ever, when I had been sure that this would have been impossible. Now I was a lonely, powerless, waterless, toiletless stick stuck in the mud. I thought that I had reached the zenith of my accomplishments when I had belonged to the virtual Boys Club in high school long before I grew facial fuzz. And as yet, I still did not have to shave even though I was almost twenty years old.

* * *

I was getting desperate about earning an income so I could become independent and begin my life. Anyone would be desperate in such a situation unless one was like Mahatma Ghandi. I was not, or not yet, and I wanted to discover what I could be. I now had a car that I could drive and a little money that Maxo occasionally “gave” me. This allowed me a taste of freedom. Do I have enough confidence, intelligence to overcome my lack of guidance, knowledge and support to escape to freedom?

After my eighteenth birthday, Fullo had taken me to a draft board to register me for the Selective Service. I could be selected to be drafted because I was classified 1-A, the category to be called up first during man-made crises. From my perspective from the mud flats, I saw no other employment options, so I visited the Army recruiter who smiled from a poster. If I had to work, I might as well earn some money and serve my new country as well. The recruiter wanted me to serve inside a tank of a tank corps. I knew that I’d suffer severe claustrophobia inside a tank because it would be a mobile bunker, but nevertheless I agreed to enlist.

I rode a bus with a group of draftees to the Seattle induction center for the required examinations. There we had to take written tests and fill out lots of papers that also required our health histories. The soldier in charge said that anybody who lived in the Seattle area should add “sinus trouble” as an existing ailment. Since coming to the Evergreen State, I had had a lot of bloody snot that continued to worry me a lot because I had never had such before. I even had told my secret to Aunt Houwke, and she had assured me that this was normal, and I had seen daily DristanÓ ads in the newspapers that made me wonder if everyone had to sniff it in order to keep breathing.

I was not sure of all the diseases that I had had as a child, but there had been many. After completing our paperwork, we prospective servicemen were herded into a big room, told to shed all clothes and assemble in a queue to be inspected. In this queue were thin ones, fat ones, tall ones, short ones, and some with short ones and some with long ones.

I stared at the floor. This place stinks like a high school locker room. How can a mass of flesh, such as this, annihilate other masses of flesh such as this? And for what? Land? Power? Tomatoes? The rules of the Geneva Convention have to be amended that all wars be fought by naked men. And naked women. I'll volunteer without pay…

“Bend over!” came from behind.

I snapped my butt to attention.

This was not worth fighting for. I squeezed shut, fearing to offend the inspector of the assembly line.

“Spread your cheeks,” he ordered me.

A man I had never seen before ordered me. I was stark naked and yet he ordered me. Everyone always gave me orders, whether I was fully dressed or stark naked.

“Good. Next.”

I straightened up again, blushing. Blood had rushed to my head from bending over. Down the line came another orifices inspector and stuck a funnel into my left ear. Shone a light through it.

“OK. Right ear.”

“Jees!”

You mean cheese, Mon?

He removed the funnel and replaced it with a clean one.

“You have a problem,” he advised me as he made a note on his clipboard and continued his inspection down the line.

Later a Uniform mumbled something to me.

“Pardon me,” I asked. He was authority.

He did not repeat what he had said to me. Important men do not repeat; they can throw tantrums. Uniform threw the papers to the floor. He must have asked me to take my papers that he had handed to me. Naked, I stood under the gaze of naked men. Befuddled, not having heard his request, I said nothing, nor did I pick the papers. Uniform did and gruffly handed them to me. This lesson was not lost on me. I had disobeyed an order, but only because I had not understood it. I did not have to obey everyone, not even Uniform.

After the physical exams, our herd dressed again and was led into a corral without windows where we had to wait. Sometime later a herdsman wearing a spiffy uniform and a snow-white cap arrived with the results of the tests for which everyone was anxiously waiting. The first call came.

“Neuman.” That was I.

“Here,” proudly I rose, waved my hand and stood at attention.

“Get your ugly face out of here,” is how this important man shocked me.

Only Germans had insulted me in such a manner before. No one had ever done so in America, except my uncle Fullo. I will remember forever what he had said to me because he prevented my escape. Unfathomable wisdom had to be remembered, to be passed on down through the ages. Maybe someday someone will find the answer because I have not yet discovered the association between what was in my orifices and my appearance. Was it only because I was ugly that I could not escape?

When I was told that I was ugly, the draftees cheered because they hoped to receive this message for themselves. They didn’t care if they were ugly as long as they did not have to kill or be killed. I came here seeking a job, even though I might have to scrub latrines in the service of my new country, as I had scrubbed my adoptive cows. Since this man had called me ugly, I remained in the corral to see if anyone else would be ugly because I had to wait for my bus anyway. But he found no one else to be so. Oddly, after he called up most of the names, he called me again, and I again raised my hand.

He said to me: “I thought I told you to get your ugly face out of here.”

I had learned enough now, so I traveled back to the womb of my pressed-board shack. Back to my homestead with hair-trigger dynamite under my bed. I had never entertained the idea that I could use this dynamite to express myself to get people’s attention. If I did, people dumber than I or less experienced in heroism than I, would just think, what is wrong with this boy? Is he crazy? Not, why is he blowing up the world? Who caused him to do that? What drove him to desperation? Who should be punished? Who should be sued?

* * *

A few weeks after Maxo left for the East Coast, he wrote me the following:

“I was sure happy to receive your letter and hear that everything is O.K. and that you are still going strong in spite of your troubles. I remember when I had my first car. It was an old jalopy, and needed many repairs, but I found later on that I knew a lot more about the cars after I was through fixing them.”

“You mentioned that the road had not been graveled. My plans are to close all of the hunting and the travel on the road, if those people using it do not put gravel on it, as they promised.

“If no one comes by the first part of December, you may let me know and I shall write to Tiffany to put on enough so that you can get in and out with your car or truck. If I have to put gravel on, then you should put up ‘No Trespassing’ signs where my road starts. To the devil with the hunters if they want to treat us that way. That will end the hunting in years to come too.”

“I can well imagine you cannot do anything with the Caterpillar, and it may be best to let it go until the weather clears up.”

“However, if there is a chance to make some cedar fence posts, you could try and split a couple hundred. Only if you are out of work. I would like to have you clean up the tracks on the cat and paint them with used oil to keep them from becoming rusty. Perhaps you have done it already. Then take out the batteries and throw an old canvas or plastic or something around it for the winter. I believe Uncle Deepo can help you get an old canvas. Then it is just about in as good a shape as if we had it in a shed.

“You mentioned what should be done with the dynamite. Ask my sister how much of the dynamite she wants and take it to her, and take a little extra down there in case we need some. If there is any left, let Mike have the rest. He can also get the black powder that is in Freddy’s shed. The powder is dangerous because it takes only a spark to ignite it. However, I am not aware that dynamite is that dangerous. Dynamite should not be thrown around…

“Now with Siggi. Your brother wrote me a letter saying that he was well and coming along well in school. Do you think he should go the next semester to school (if he does well)?”

“Would you want to help him out if he does not have enough money? Maybe he should work after the first year and help you get started, if you want to go to college? Actually he should find a fair job, if he does well in school. I will let you think it over and perhaps you should talk it over with Siggi.”

“I see where you had an 11.7 ft. tide at 6:46 this morning. (I have the tidebook lying next to me.) Have you had any storms? Has the revetment been hurt any? I am interested in this and in you. Please write as soon as you can.

“Give my regards to Freddy! Do you still have food and money? If you lack you should talk to my sister.”

“I will try to get a pair of binoculars to be used on the dike. Would this help you?

Sincerely your Uncle Maxo”

Have to research the “uncle” part.

Since Maxo H. H. Schitzma thought that dynamite was not that dangerous, I was not too concerned about it. I kept it under my bed because that was the only place where there was room for it since my hut was the only shelter on his tideland. However, this dynamite became so mushy that I could push a finger into it. I assumed that the watery pearls on the surface of the sticks were condensation because of the damp air in my cold hut.

The hut had an oil stove next to its exit door. This stove had a three- or four-gallon tank attached to its back and was located about three feet from my mousy arsenal bed. But I rarely fired it up because, like my groceries and drinking water, I also would have to bring in the fuel oil. It was just too troublesome, especially when I had to carry it several hundred feet over slippery mud when it was raining and that was practically all winter long.

In my constant struggle to become civilized, I mostly wore pajamas to bed instead of muddy clothes. One night I woke up freezing, so I attempted to light the stove. To do this I opened a valve to drain some oil into its firebox. It was too dark to see if, and how much, oil entered it, so I had to guess how far and for how long I had to keep this valve open. Intermittently I threw lighted matches or burning paper into this oil that was not very volatile because it was so cold. Frustrated that it would not light, I stuffed newspapers into the stove and lit it. After the fire finally started with a roar, I adjusted the flow control and returned to bed.

The stove and pipe began to thunder, pop and crackle and became very hot. I jumped out of bed, shut off the oil valve and dove out of my hut. Outside, roaring, flickering shadows told me to keep running. How hot can stovepipes get? How hot can dynamite get? When I turned around I saw that the chimney was a giant torch lighting up the night. Barefoot and shivering at a great distance, I did not return to bed until the stove burned itself out.

Because of my warming experience in this cold night, I thought it to be a good idea to carry out Maxo’s request, so the following day I carried his dynamite to the trunk of the jalopy. To do so I had to embrace the box to hold its soggy bottom together. Getting it to the respective parties required me to drive on a bumpy road. Only years later did I learn that I might have been dancing with the devil, when the following article in my local newspaper enlightened me:

“MOSCOW, (IDAHO) (AP) Andy Shemline did not want officials burning his barn to dispose of old, possibly dangerous dynamite. So he took care of it himself…

“Latah County sheriff’s deputies spent most of Thursday searching for Shemline and the dynamite…

“Shemline said he decided to tell deputies what he had done Friday. But he made detectives sign a form saying they would not prosecute him if he revealed the whereabouts of the dynamite.

“Sheriff’s Lt. Vern Moses said officials thought the public safety factor was more important than charging Shemline.

“The decision to burn the barn was made after explosives officials from Washington’s Spokane County advised Moses that it would be dangerous to move the dynamite.

“‘No one wanted to burn the barn, but compared to risking an explosives technician’s life, there was no question what we had to do,’ Moses said.

“Instead, Shemline disposed of the dynamite by dousing it with petroleum to neutralize it and then removed it from the barn and burned it, he said. He went to the University of Idaho to research the matter and learned how to dispose of the dynamite himself.”

When I told Siggi about this article, he confirmed that one could wipe off the drops that formed on aging dynamite sticks and fling them to the ground to make them explode. The liquid beads were not moisture but highly unstable nitroglycerin. He also informed me that during his first summer on the tideland, while carrying a box with dynamite on his head, a not-too-distant explosion that was set off by someone else shook him.

Our guardian angels had protected us as they had so many times before. They had saved us from bombs, bullets, head-rot and Ma’s high altitude boiling. They had safeguarded us during many serious illnesses and starvation, from our father and his Teufi, from our bomb making, from spoiled and E. coli-charged foods and unwashed fingers. They had protected us on a raging ocean, from raging bulls, and who knows how many other attempts to reduce us to dust. And now they had protected us from ignorance. But why had they blessed us with so many lawyers?

Our send-off to heaven would have been in such a unique fashion. Blow our bodies into little bits, sending them flaming into the sky, to rain back down like brilliant rockets on the fourth of July. But we would not have been wasted because our stir-fried parts would have landed in big circles to feed our little friends, the mice, foxes, ducks, geese, crows and magpies.

All of this was nearly accomplished without forethought. But what a thrilling afterthought!

Although my life was spared again, and I could not shower on the tideland, I did take an unexpected bath that also could have done me in. After it had been raining heavily all night, I was driving to town and crossing a big hump in the road that was part of an old dike, when my car splashed into a swirling sea of muddy brown water. Unbeknownst to me, the nearby river had risen over its banks. I waited and pondered how I could continue my journey. Because I grew impatient I put on the rubber hip boots that I always carried with me in the car, entered the flood and continued float-walking, trying to follow the submarine roadway as best as I could. But the current became too strong and I floundered into a hole, immersed to my armpits. Afraid that I would be sucked down the river, I struggled back to the car and drove home to dry out again. Is there no end to this life?

* * *

Although I had missed a lot of chances to depart from Earth, I observed others coming down from the sky to lose their lives during another brief relief from my boring existence on the tideland. While I was returning there late one afternoon, I observed a large airplane descending into the mountains far from an airport. I kept watching it until it disappeared over a forested peak, barely missing it. Since it appeared that this plane was in trouble, I turned toward the direction of its flight to investigate further. I reasoned that this plane was unable to control its path because it did not change its course to land in the open pastures at the bottom of the foothills.

Before long, the car radio confirmed that a Boeing 707 on a training flight had just crashed. A couple of vehicles with “Press” decals passed me at great speed, and I tried to follow them, thinking that since this was a very low population area, they were also heading there. Although they left me in the dust, I later found them parked by the edge of a forest, along with a few other cars. I looked for a road or trailhead but could not find any. So I took a chance and simply went straight into the thicket, in the direction the vehicles were facing, to struggle through the underbrush, hoping to find the crash site. Within a few hundred yards I came to a clearing, a huge disaster area around a small river. Only a few people had arrived here as yet. Like everyone else, I was browsing around the widely scattered debris when a sheriff announced that anyone who was not with the press or on official duty had to leave this scene immediately. Dutifully I headed back into the woods to where I thought I had entered. But night had settled quickly, and I encountered such a dark forest that I could not even see my hand in front of my face. I felt and beat my way through thick brush. There were no lights or stars, and the only sound that I heard was my thrashing about. I had no idea if I remained on a straight course or if I were just struggling through a random pattern to be lost forever. Strangely, I did not worry about this, or that I might fall off a cliff, and miraculously exited the forest within a short distance from my car.

* * *

Maxo’s apparent concerns for Siggi and me in some of his letters were part of his scheme to keep me on the tideland under the guise of actually wanting to help me. He only hinted about helping us but always evaded my probing questions with his own questions. He advised me only superficially and did not do anything useful to help me. His artificial concerns were like Pa’s occasional interest to fool someone. Maxo, like Pa, had a few words of support but never followed them up with concrete actions. Siggi told me that during his first summer on the tideland, Maxo and he had had long discussions about various subjects. Therefore I decided to impress him with my intellect and simply asked him:

“How does a person think? Does one ask questions?”

His face formed the same worrisome expression and the pink map appeared on his forehead, just like the time when I had told him that I wanted to get more education, and he just mumbled:

“No. I don’t think so.”

That was the end of our debate, and I could tell by his demeanor that he did not want to talk about this subject under the principle of “let sleeping dogs lie,” let slaves be ignorant. Again I read his thoughts: “I can’t let him start thinking.”

In his letters he wrote me that he was worried about the storms destroying his dike. Coffee intensified his worries because it stimulated his nerves and brain enough to create vivid nightmares. He once told Siggi that he had never slept through an entire night for as far back as he could remember. I confirmed this problem years later when I stayed with him in his house for a few nights, and he would wake me with his shouting dreams.

I followed Maxo’s suggestion and enrolled in night school at a junior college, now community college and soon to be a university. Eventually it might become something that hasn’t been thought of yet, maybe something like intergalactic super-cyber university. I enrolled in mechanical drafting and descriptive geometry and did well in these subjects.

One evening, during my commute to the intergalactic super-cyber university, I felt that my steering felt soft or wobbly. I inspected my tires and discovered that one front one was worn through and its inner tube was bulging out. I did not know for how long I had been driving on air, and it was a miracle that it had not blown out, especially at highway speed. Although it was getting late in the day, a stranger stopped to help me. Since I did not have a spare tire, he drove me to the tideland and back again, and when I offered to pay him he refused to accept anything. He told me that if I’d help someone else, he’d be satisfied.

* * *

Often the field to my shack became impassable because frequent rains turned it into sticky, slippery mud. After the jalopy buried itself to its axles, I pulled it out with Maxo’s Caterpillar. This packed clay into the very tracks that I had cleaned and oiled so well. From then on I parked the car at the end of the gravel road and changed into rubber hip boots to be able to walk back and forth between my hut and car. Mud would ball up on my soles and travel up the sides of my boots. At times the wind would howl and cold rain would blast me when I returned home from school late at night. Inside Villa Schitzma in the Mud, mud accumulated faster than I could sweep it out. I quit brooming and shoveled it whenever it became too deep because it would dry into concrete-like slabs or wear into a fine powder.

I noticed that I did not live alone because the decor inside my villa was further enhanced by the black rice that my mostly invisible little pets generously sprinkled over everything, including on my bed and kitchen surfaces where I prepared uncooked, straight-out-of-the-can, gourmet-type meals. So far my little decorators had always scurried into hiding whenever I entered, and I did not realize until the darkest of winter that I also did not sleep alone. One morning I opened my eyes when a mouse bolted away from my face. Thereafter I was determined to kill them immediately, vigorously and mercilessly before they pierced my ears or other sensitive organs. But I could never stop them from coming.

Besides furry pets, I also had feathery friends that were afraid of me. There were dozens of swans, hundreds of ducks and thousands of snow geese. They did not want to be shot out of the sky, so they landed on the tideland only at dusk or during great storms. Sometimes I’d sneak up to the geese from behind the dike and slowly peek over the top so as not to scare them. It did not take them long to spot me, however, and then their racket would start. With honking and screeching that could be heard for miles, acres of white, flapping and fluttering feathers rose to circle the fields, rising ever higher to sail away into the sky.

* * *

To provide me with companionship, Maxo thoughtfully had left me an old car radio and battery before he departed on his annual winter trip. But within a day or two this battery went dead. I resumed reading and occasionally visited Freddy’s in the evenings to watch television. Maxo also bought me a subscription to The Christian Science Monitor and sent me a paperback book, Ethics. I did not know the meaning of this word and found it puzzling that he expected me to read or understand these publications. Was he looking at me as a college man or as a slave master?

I read these publications religiously with a dictionary close at hand. Initially I was unable to comprehend the meaning of Ethics but doggedly worked my way through this book, underlining the words that I did not know. I looked them up and reviewed them later so I’d remember them. From the Monitor I learned the words “ultramontane” and “insurgents.” I felt that I should become one but did not have the courage to be a lone rebel.

At night, a camp lantern provided a gloomy light in my shack. It was more luxurious than a candle, and I didn’t like candles anymore, especially at Christmas time. But this lantern was supposed to be used only outdoors because it produced a lot of soot. In the black deposit on the ceiling, I traced with my finger “HOME SWEET HOME.” My deeply ignored message went to the sanitary landfill when Maxo discarded my sweet home after my escape from it. Great health benefits far in my future?

* * *

One day I was driving the Ford across a single-lane bridge when a farm truck came onto it from the other direction, and we stopped bumper to bumper in the middle. Since the driver was very beautiful, I did not back up to let her pass because I was still not civilized. She smiled, I waved, and she backed up her big truck to let me through. I noticed the name of a food processor on the truck’s cab and later called there to find out her name. A voice at the other end of the wire told me that they didn’t give out information about their employees, and I wished that she hadn’t smiled at me because I never saw her again.

Occasionally I went to church with Maxo’s sister near Monroe. There was a tall, blue-eyed, blonde girl in attendance that I had to meet. After the sermon I inquired about her name and wrote her a letter to ask her for a date. She accepted and we dated for a couple of months. I was almost in heaven until I found out that she was still dating her old boyfriend as well. Keeping a girlfriend was as difficult as earning a dollar. What could I expect, I didn’t even have a toilet. To acquire a flushing toilet and a shower with warm water became the goals of my life.

* * *

Maxo did not communicate well verbally, even though he had almost earned a master’s degree, having completed everything except his dissertation. His verbal discourse could be very ambiguous because he’d use pronouns without identifying the person or object referred to, as in “they did this,” “he did that,” causing the listeners to wonder who did what. Frequently this became even more confusing when he did not introduce the subject matter or changed subjects without transitions. Often he also spoke while walking away from the person he was addressing or did not finish his sentences. A banker once told Siggi that Maxo must be very intelligent because so often he could not comprehend what he was talking about. His unique method of bamboozling people could be as confounding as legal and insurance documents, and it did not require much intelligence.

Maxo’s friend Mike asked me to help him build a loafing shed for his, gulp, dairy cows. They both had given me the definite impression that they had an agreement about this. I wanted to get paid every week but did not receive anything from either one of them. I mentioned this to the carpenter whom I was helping on this project, and this started a grapevine that eventually reached Maxo in the nation’s capitol or beyond.

Up to this time Maxo had written me friendly letters because he worried that his dike would be destroyed again and wanted to make sure that I quickly repaired any damage. It had cost him, or the Unknown Taxpayer to whom a monument has yet to be built, a lot of money to restore it after the previous winter storms. He wrote me instructions and demanded that I inform him weekly of the status of his dike, tides and weather. But I did not write him often enough because I did not like to write, as words did not come easily to me. I was struggling with my soul and the forces of nature, constantly repairing his dike by filling hundreds of sacks with clay and driving hundreds of stakes with a sledgehammer, often in the wind and rain. In December, after Maxo learned that I was complaining to someone about my pay, I received a letter from him, wherein he skillfully tugged my chain to make sure that it still was secure, while intimidating me with the most powerful method available to him:

“Apparently you don’t find it necessary to write me a letter to tell me about the project, and how you are getting along at least every second Sunday (taking mother along and back to Snohomish). This was agreed between us and you could and should talk over the problems and difficulties you have with my sister. Instead you act and do towards my friends as if I were responsible for your troubles, etc. This is something that Americans (and good people in Europe) don’t do either. I am not going to stand for this. Actually you act like a boy, when you should act your age. For this reason I am telling you in all seriousness to do the following, or else I am through with you. If you don’t do the following I will write to Uncle Fullo immediately and you will have to go back to him. He is your guardian and he sponsored you to come to America. He is responsible for you.”

“…So now it is up to you; either you do the things you agreed to and follow directions, or I am through with you and you go back to your guardian.

“Sincerely,

“Maxo Schitzma”

Earlier I had written him about his concerns, and that I was working hard to protect his dike, but our letters must have crossed in the mail. I also sent him photos showing some of the eroded areas of the dike. After he received them, he wrote the following letter to his protégé but in a different vein from the previous one. He seemed to be more concerned about my happiness and offered me greater virtual rewards than in the past. What he had learned from me greatly worried him; the dissipation of his dike and the possible escape of his slave:

“…and going often to my sister and discussing your personal problems with her. I have made arrangements with her as I told you before, and she can help you. You must not keep things within you, because they work themselves up to a regular explosion of bitterness. I like your last letter particularly because you tell me a lot about yourself and the dike. As you know you can get up to $50 a month from my sister, and your tuition, gas, food, etc. This is all I can afford at the present, but I think you can help prepare yourself for life by studying and at the same time look out for my interest. You can be sure, if you look out for my interests there, I will do all I can for you.

“I want you to eat well and get your meat and eggs from my sister and let her buy you canned goods. You should become a fine cook, and by eating well you’ll feel better especially on the work on the dike. Eat meat, eggs, vegetables and milk every day, and plenty of them and not so many sweets.”

“Now as to the dike. The pictures shocked me when I saw them and it is probably more serious than you realize. If one or two storms did that what will happen when the storms come between Christmas and the 20th of January?

“…By all means do a lot of visiting, when invited, and in Monroe also go when not invited. I would like to have you go there every Sunday, if you can. Santa brought you something here, and I am going to send it to my sister, because you will probably spend Christmas there. I hope you like it.”

“Now see that you get the revetment in order, and write me every week how much progress you are making.

“Sincerely, your uncle,

Maxo Schitzma”

The tone of this letter was opposite from the one before because he knew that his dike was disintegrating, and he needed me to repair it during the continuing storms and high tides. I was cheap labor, and in my humble opinion, greed and hypocrisy seemed to be the primary traits of the Schitzmas. Another growing season would be lost if his land flooded again with saltwater. Even though he was wealthy and expressed concern for me, suggesting what I should eat and finding a girlfriend, he made no effort to improve my living conditions.

Although some of the hairs on my head now seem to be growing in a reverse direction and are pushing out of other places, I am still waiting for Maxo to help me all he can as he had promised. When he died recently, I hoped to reap my reward, to receive the pay that I had earned so long ago and was happy to learn that a lawyer had prepared a will for him. Will he reimburse me for my labor and my deprivation of a toilet and other civilized conveniences?

I did my best to do everything that he requested me to do. I inspected the dike frequently, especially during storms and high tides. Since most of it faced squarely into the prevailing winds, the waves assaulted it with great force, washing it out in many places. The sea rolled in from the open bay and crashed abruptly against the boards, blasting through the gaps between them. The highest tides also washed over its bare top, diminishing it somewhat in height. I worked alone filling hundreds of gunnysacks with clay to plug the holes in the dike. I did so by hanging these sacks in a wood frame to hold them open so I could shovel dirt into them. After tying them shut, I dragged them, and dropped them into the washouts behind and in front of the lumber bulkhead, some of which I had to re-nail first because it had been smashed from the pilings.

And so I continued to live and work from day to day, alone on the tideland, miles from nowhere. Deepo, brother of Maxo, came to visit me. Once. I was glad to have company, any kind of company, but he did not help me, offered no help, and therefore I was not very hospitable. I did not offer him lunch and did not demonstrate how I had to prepare food in my fine gourmet kitchen: gracefully wipe black mouse rice from the counter, plunk lunchmeat on bread with flair, and pour milk down my gullet from a carton. I could not be debonair.

* * *

Since Maxo had ordered me to take his mother to Deepo’s farm, I picked up my date at the nursing home and drove her there. She was in her eighties, had dementia and often did not recognize anyone anymore. She sat next to me in my jalopy and just kept staring and smiling at me, and strangely, seemed to like me.

One early spring day, while returning from such a date, I drove past the pulp and paper mills in Everett and almost impulsively turned down the road toward the plants. They did not look or smell very inviting, and I wondered why anyone would want to work there. But I was curious about the myriad buildings, tanks, pipes and machinery from which all the smoke, steam and stink were coming and was stopped at the guardhouse at the end of its entrance road.

“May I help you?” asked the guard, the dreaded authority.

“I am looking for a job,” I replied uncertainly. I did not anticipate being stopped and questioned, so I gave a legitimate reason for entering these premises.

The guard gave me directions to the office, and I went in to fill out an employment form. Again I was required to supply the health history and therefore was sure that I would not get a job here. If the Army won’t hire me, why would anybody else? Ma had sent me the health history that I had requested, and I dutifully recorded everything: whooping cough, measles, diphtheria, Rotsucht (red craze or rash), Nesselsucht (nettle rash) and mumps. And of course the chronic middle ear infection and long-term exposure to tuberculosis. I could not remember having had consumption per se, but when a doctor in Aurich had looked at my lungs with a fluoroscope, he had reacted with an enthusiastic good-grief-like comment because my lungs appeared to be scarred. Even though I must have been a potential corpse, the factory hired me.

* * *

At the age of twenty I had my first paying job. Hurrah, hurrah! I decided to move out of Maxo’s shack and into an apartment in Everett close to the mill. It had a bathroom! My first and my own real bathroom! Hurrah, hurrah! To pay for the first month’s rent, damage deposit and expenses, I applied for a seventy-five dollar loan at a nearby bank, which was more money than I had ever had at any one time.

The bank teller advised me:

“You have to see that loan officer over there.”

I walked over to his desk where he asked me to sit down. I felt uncomfortable in the opulence of his office, his Herrenzimmer.

“I would like to borrow seventy-five dollars.”

“What do you have for collateral?” the loan officer asked me while handing me a form.

“What’s collateral?”

“It is something that you pledge as a security for your loan.”

“Nothing,” I said.

I could read the banker’s face. “Where did this guy come from? I wish he would get out of here.”

“You mean absolutely nothing?”

“These clothes here.”

“Do you have a job?” queried the banker.

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Screech and Stench Pulp ‘n Paper.”

“How long have you worked there?”

“I am starting next week.”

He phoned the company to confirm this fact, thereby implying that I might be a liar, little did he know, and wrote me a check. I was elated. I had made one of the biggest decisions in my life, a decision that was not made for me by other people, to borrow money, had acted on that decision and gotten results.

That weekend, feeling exuberant with new freedom, I visited Fullo’s family where Aunt Houwke served tea. I announced that I now had a paying job, and we caught up on important family news that was worthless for me. But it was not long before Fullo asked me if I could help him for a minute. “Sure,” I said magnanimously. I was independent now and could not be chained again. Besides I was wearing nice clothes, so I could not get too deep into Fullo’s ubiquitous doodoo.

He led the way down to his slaughterhouse barn. Again. When people lead you to their barns, especially if they don’t tell you why, watch out. I didn’t because I was becoming a trusting soul again, or was still a shy one. There he picked up a pitchfork and handed me a shovel. As we walked over to the milkhouse the air decayed. I suffocated.

There it was.

My spirit decayed.

There was a mass of crawling, wiggling maggots reveling in the putrid carcass of a onetime cow. Fullo had butchered her weeks before and had ostentatiously left her leftovers near the milkhouse by the highway. To advertise his business? In the meantime these leftovers had come back to life. When life got out of control, he must have been overcome with doubts, and therefore asked me to help him bury life.

An opportunity was knocking on my noggin that I could replace my nausea with the greatest of joys, Schadenfreude. To permanently cure his habit of exploiting defenseless imported slaves, I impulsively grabbed Fullo with a chokehold, flung him to the ground and sat on him. Then I pushed his face into the stinking, squirming remains and vigorously pounded it repeatedly into them, in order to squish a lot of maggots up his nose and ears. And into his soul.

But I didn’t because I didn’t think of it. Instead I held my breath, dug a hole as fast as I could to bury the squirming carcass.

Again, as always before, he did not thank me for helping him because he couldn’t get a life, but fortunately, I was almost beginning mine.

* * *

The personnel officer at Screech and Stench did not interview me, nor told me what I would have to do, and I didn’t ask him. But I was impressed that his company paid a doctor to give me a physical exam and a hearing test, free of charge.

I reported to work on a Monday evening because I chose to work swing shift as it paid a few cents, a lot, an hour more. After I was asked to buy leather gloves and a long leather apron, meaning that I was not going to work in a Musak-enhanced, climate-controlled office, Boss led me deeply into a huge windowless building, into the bowels of screaming hell. I followed him up and down various levels, through a labyrinth of posts and beams, cranes and stacks of lumber. Slabs of tree trunks were screeching through saws and screaming planers. Wheels were spinning, chains and belts were squeaking; thousands of boards were resting, stacking and moving hither and yon.

I resisted the impulse to run back out. Not here, God, please not here.

We neared the other end of the building; I could see daylight ahead. I was relieved when we went back out and into a long open-sided shelter covering a river of boards, laid side by side, on a set of moving parallel chains bringing them out of a dark cavern at the far end. Except for the squeaking of the chains and the clapping of the boards, it was quiet here. Men scurrying along the riverbanks were pulling them from the chains, to load them onto stacks, by length and grade. My guide stopped here and spent a few minutes explaining to me the various grade marks on this lumber. Since I was a quick learner, I needed no further instructions for my lifelong career. I was to catch selected boards from the river and stack them on the riverbank behind me. This was the extent of my training, and he did not introduce me to the others because they had no time to stop wrestling big ones from the cellulose river.

I took my station between two human robots that paid little attention to me. I donned my gloves and apron, strapping down its leggings, feeling armored and invincible like the knights of medieval Europe. I lifted the end of a board in order to pull it onto a stack. Are these made of iron?

It was heavier than any board that I had ever lifted, and I had lugged hundreds of them for Maxo’s dike. This board was full of sap, rough-sawn, and had been part of a log not too long before. I lifted the twenty-foot long two-by-twelve over the rollers mounted at the edge of the waist-high platform, pulled it off, guided it unto a stack and dropped it with a clap. Turned around, grabbed the next one, pulled it off, threw it into place, turned around, dashed to the left, pulled it off, smashed it into place, dashed to the right … all night long.

When the sun set that evening, it dawned on me that I was working on the “green chain,” which I had heard about in high school as being the toughest job in town. But what I despised most in my new professional life was the lack of interaction with the robots around me. While I wanted to be friends, to enlarge my tiny family circle, they did not talk.

When my body-morphing, character-warping encounter was over at two o’clock in the morning, I followed the robots out of our disassembly plant. As soon as I reached level ground without obstacles, I ran to my jalopy even though I was dead tired and my legs were rubbery. My arms felt inches longer, my legs somewhat shorter, and my back crooked, ready to break. When I arrived home I fixed dinner: five bowls of corn flakes with milk and sugar. While I ate, I read, because I thought I had wasted the night, for I had not yet rejoiced in the night that the Lord had made.

The next evening I returned to my station on the wooden river, and I was doubtful that I could last very long doing this heavy work. My body was aching. The boards never stopped coming. At times I could barely keep up with the flow, running back and forth along the river, lifting boards, while making male guttural grunts, at various locations to remove them. I was using every cell in my body, all but my brain cells, which were cocooned as always.

These boards were sawn from beautiful trees ripped from the balding mountains. Trucks had brought down their corpses and dumped them into a mass-grave pond at the mill, whence they traveled on a chain to be denuded. A giant arm moved along them, blasting them with jets of high-pressure water, to explode off their bark. The pale, naked trunks then moved single file into the sawmill and through giant saws with dragon teeth. Butchers pushed buttons, moved levers to shuttle them back and forth to rip them repeatedly. After each cut they decided how to turn the remaining trunks for best economy, to send them back and forth again to cut more planks. These then traveled to the “green chain” for the historic event, to be sorted by robots, the first humanoids ever to touch them.

And so the weeks dragged on. Night after night after my shift, I ran back to my jalopy, no matter how exhausted I was, because I could not wait to get out of this hell. I wondered why others did not run out also. Are they crazy? Or am I? Can they not run anymore? Had their hopes been sawed to dust?

* * *

Siggi returned from college for his summer vacation and moved into my sparsely furnished apartment. We finally had our own apartment, freedom and toilet. It had not been easy to acquire this.

And we had motivation.

After I arrived home from work at night, I always wolfed down cereal while reading, then fell into bed at three or four o’clock in the morning. Siggi would be asleep, and we saw each other only on weekends because he had a day job for a generous one dollar sixty-eight an hour in a camper factory far outside of Everett. Besides earning a few cents an hour more, another advantage of working nights was that it was cooler then. Sweat was a by-product of my labors, therefore the Screech and Stench salt mine company supplied us free salt tablets from vending machines. Candy bars cost a dime.

Again our bed sheets changed from white to gray but not as much as before, a hint of old home style. We were too tired and too independent to waste time, effort or money to wash them regularly at a self-service laundry. Nor were we making much effort to cook or do dishes. When we were thirsty, we drank out of a milk carton. When hungry, we opened a can of peas or beans, warmed it on the stove and ate directly from it. I often had four Danish rolls for dessert. Or six. Our diet was as routine and junky as our work. Ma never had cooked but once, so we had no interest in it, and our spare time was too precious to do more work that we did not like.

Our small apartment on Broadway in Everett was the top of a two-story shack with a flat, black roof and dark brown siding. Or it could have been cowy green. The rising summer sun quickly heated it to afford us the ambience of the tropics. Humid heat often woke me in the mornings, and my muddy sheets would often be tangled around me. This was the setting of “On Broadway” that we listened to on the radio.

I usually rose by noon and was home alone because Siggi was at work. We could not afford a TV, so I got a quick fix for my anomie by reading and eating. Again, while reading, I devoured cereal, boiled eggs and drank from Hi-C cans or paper cartons. We never drank soda or alcohol because they were too expensive, and we had no peers who pressured us to do so. We had not yet found friends here with common interests and the same concerns for the problems in this world, and the papers said there were many. During these days people built shelters in the ground for a possible atomic war, and I thought this to be silly. I did not want to bury myself alive in a bunker because I had done that before, and I didn’t like it. If the missiles came I wanted to be their first target.

* * *

After several weeks on the green chain, I was transferred to the planing mill. This was the last place I wanted to spend eight hours a night. This was where I had asked God to keep me away from when I passed through here on my first day on the job. Here I had to do the same kind of work, pulling and stacking boards from conveyor chains. These did not weigh as much after having been trimmed, kiln-dried and planed smooth, so my work became somewhat easier, but my torture became much greater, although I was harpooned by far fewer slivers. I was now totally immersed in the one hundred-plus decibel shrieking of wood planers, music from hell. It was louder than jets during take off, as painful as the screaming of air raid sirens that had been stretched into one continuous, unwavering note, evoking the unending, soul-piercing agony of yore, nights of shuddering tremors.

Inside our huge bunker several jets shot out wooden missiles in ceaseless salvos. Their noise joined with that from other machinery to send vibrations that quivered every molecule in our world. I could not escape from them. They quivered every cell in my body, and I could hear them without an ear; I felt them in my bones. To talk, we robots shouted directly into each other’s ears but mostly communicated with a simple, crude sign language that was punctuated by the bird.

The Company did not provide us with ear protection because this did not yet exist. Or did it? I never saw anyone wearing earmuffs. To dampen hell, I stuffed a wad of cotton into each ear, which made no difference in the sound exploding inside my head. After leaving work, I always removed waxy cotton from my whistling ear, rotten cotton from my silent ear. I always checked this cotton to assess the state of my health, to assess how rotten I was. The nightly cacophony would diminish my hearing acuity considerably later in life, gradually being replaced by permanent whistling instead. Now I continuously hear the screeching of tiny planers, distant echoes from hell, with my only and withering ear. In lieu of a gold watch, this was my fringe benefit from the Company for my faithful and outstanding service.

Most of the lumber we produced was a nominal two inches thick, but occasionally three-inch thick beams came down the chain. These had sharp edges and were dripping wet. We also had to remove them from the conveyor and drop them skillfully onto stacks like all the other boards. To do so, I had to let them slide through my hands to be able to keep up with the production, and before too long, their knifelike edges sliced through the rubber gloves that I always had to buy myself, like my leather gloves and aprons, pickling my hands with preservative or pesticide. Can I be preserved until I die and long thereafter? Can I remain forever with King Tut, or better yet, with Nefertiti?

I worked overtime every chance I had in order to earn enough to attend college in the fall. Therefore I once rearranged tons of lumber for three and a-half consecutive shifts. By the time I finished my second one, I could barely crawl. On Saturday morning, on my way to my final shift, after about three hours of restless sleep, I put on my boots and staggered out of our apartment to another off-Broadway performance. Siggi bid me adieu with an intensely serious face, “You walk like an old man, Neuman.”

I was going back into the bowels of hell and, therefore, needed a lot of encouragement.

Rare were the signs, “Warning. Ripping Dragon Teeth” or “You May Get Squashed Like A Bug Area.” There were so many hazards that there would be signs everywhere. Some robots might spend their entire shifts trying to read them all and produce nothing.

Over the time that I was drawn nightly to this mill by my desire to further my education, while keeping a toilet, I observed differently modified robots. One occasionally rotated through the nearby “You May Get Squashed Like A Bug Area” area. A crane had dumped a load of lumber on him and broken his spine, which had been repaired with bones cut from his legs. This shortened them and when he walked, they appeared to move in a rapid rotary motion under his rigid spine. At this stage he was still not wearing a hard hat or visible back support. Not many robots did and neither did I.

A few weeks into summer I witnessed another robot modify himself. His job was to cut defective portions out of the boards that the lumber grader diverted to him. He pulled these from his left side and placed them squarely in front of a constantly spinning circular saw. To make a cut, he stepped on a button on the floor that caused this buzzing saw to jump forward through the board. And finally through his fingers. Panicked, this robot stumbled around. I became almost paralyzed and could not help because I did not know how. I could not even become a gawker because I could not leave my station at the lumber conveyor. Fortunately several robots were hunters and helped him; they had practiced with sawed off bones before.

The wooden rivers never stopped flowing because there could be no slowing of profit. The highest standard of living in the world had to be maintained and what are a few digits of a robot? If one becomes useless, we can always get another, and he’ll be thankful to work here.

* * *

Since I was a chip off the old block I was horny. A bleached blonde who had had to get married at the age of fifteen, bore twins in Texas and divorced at seventeen, was living next door to us. In the afternoons, the three of them sometimes came over to sit on the lawn with me. Her little girls called each other “peehole.” I was not used to such loose talk from someone so young, although I heard much worse from robots.

Blondie was also horny as well as aggressive. One afternoon she visited me, and we started kissing on the couch. Oh, did I want to. Oh, did I have to. And she even more so because before I knew what was happening, she unzipped my pants and grabbed me around my muscular chest and said… What did she mean by that? Was that a compliment?

Apparently to encourage me, she continued, and her exact words were, “The only time I’m ambitious is when I’m pregnant.”

Even though another body part was in total control over my actions by now, oddly, my brain kicked in. My conscience would not allow me to create another “peehole,” one that I could not support, or she would not love. I wrestled her to re-zip, she wrestled me to unzip, and so it went until it dawned on me that something could get caught in my zipper or somewhere else. Therefore I ran out of the apartment before I got caught or lost control over myself. Wearing only her bra on top, and I can’t remember what on the bottom, she followed me out into the alley. Flipping me off, she yelled after me, “You expletive-deleted expletive-deleted,” for all the neighbors to hear and to see. Fortunately she was chasing me, or they might have thought that I had attacked her. Would anyone ever believe that she was trying to do me?

* * *

I worked at the planing mill until fall. In the interim, I had applied at Washington State University and much to my surprise was accepted. In the middle of September, Siggi and I drove across the state to Pullman in the old Ford that neither one of us owned. We carried no insurance for the jalopy, or for our bodies, but for now it was mine to keep. It was still in Maxo’s name, and Siggi still thought I had not paid him for it. I never owned it, never signed any papers, and I had not been paid enough by Maxo for my work on his tideland. Was he also encouraging real brotherly love?

We took turns driving across the state and after several hours when Siggi was driving through the middle of nowhere, I said to him: “Stop a minute, I have to get out.”

He stopped, I squirted. Before I could get back into the car, he drove off. He stopped. I ran after him. He drove off. He stopped, he laughed, we laughed. He drove away. I walked. Finally he let me back in. It was a happy time under the expansive blue sky of America, and we were off to college.

We arrived in LaCrosse and Siggi was still driving. Suddenly, as we approached a stop sign, our car swerved around and screeched to a halt, almost square with the road.

“What did you do?” I asked frightfully.

“Nothing. I didn’t do anything,” Siggi replied with worry.

We got out and discovered that a steering arm had come undone, causing our front wheels to cross in LaCrosse.

“Wow! If that’d happened at sixty, we’d be dead now,” I philosophized, feeling that our guardian angel was still with us.

We found a service station and the mechanic who fixed our steering told us: “You are lucky guys.”

* * *

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