Update on the story

Well the pen has stopped flowing since the new year. It is now time to attempt an integration of all the words and thoughts, places and faces, loves and scenes. I must admit to being tongue-tied, perhaps for the first time in my life. With Shel gone and my sister now home with mom and dad I feel alone. But it is said life is about loss and how we deal with it. Maybe I don t deal so well. So be it. But the sojourn continues and I must record the events of my life. I will make an attempt as my dear departed sister advised to get away from the journalism and write a story. We shall see.

Back Home on Prince Edward Island

As a frustrated writer of semi-biographical fiction oft reality merges with dreams and the distortion of long past memories. It has been said that each time we recall a memory that wonderful miracle of our organic brains changes the memory slightly. So when recalling pleasant or terrible memories over and over we alter the record itself. With most of my years of written diaries long gone, I now wonder if the recollection of the past is truth or fiction or a blend of truth and desire.

It was a pleasant decision to return to the island to await the arrival of spring. In full arrival in my southern home, here still a month away despite the arrival and passing of the spring solstice. We had a bright white clean snowfall overnight here on the "summer" side of this island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. My Mary keeps me warm and well fed as I continue to recover from my "traveller's" flu. She is off to work this morning. Having no car, she was glad for a ride on the snow and ice covered roads where she would normally walk several miles, in any weather. My tough Irish girl.

This blog is supposed to be my spot to continue the outline for a combination of works, including "Fishing with my son", "Spring Peepers", and "River Thoughts".

So many interesting events here on PEI over the past 4 years are forcing me to reconsider the fabric and direction of what will be my first published manuscript. It is time to modify the angst of business loss (and success) and the pangs of loves lost and gained into a more joyous expression of a really wonderful life. It has been said that we must embrace our pains and losses as much as we celebrate our joys and triumphs. This is truly difficult even for the most optimistic or pious person.

So the new challenge over the next few months are to integrate the experiences of youth, the existing short stories and essays, as well as my recent Appalachian and Island lives into a unified work.

My son has suggested that I simply create a collection of short stories including semi-biographical and fictional materials that exist on-line. There are also a series of "Jessica" stories that is a fictional account of a fishing trip in Western Pennsylvania where the protagonist meets and marries a young mountain girl. She is the daughter of a handicapped retired railroad worker, disabled due to asbestos exposure.

During my time in Juniata County recently I met a young red-head named Jessica. My host there worked for the Norfolk-Southern railroad. Either prophesy or just an odd coincidence, both events enriched my own concept of the story-right down to the trout-filled creek, a pretty young lady, and my time with her , albeit short along Turkey Ridge.

Thus you can see how reality and fiction blur in the memory. Actual events unfold as if already written in the fabric of space time. Such is the story of my life, and those lives of my yet unborn fictional souls.

The Arizona story is a bit hard to integrate into the other sections. That time of much success with my then young wife among the orange groves and palms remains difficult for me to fictionalize. But the journalistic phase much yield to a more creative one, without a loss of meaning-still grounded in some reality. It is time to step outside my own experience and finally become a writer.

UPDATE

Well I am still working on the conclusion here in Oriental, Juniata County, Pennsylvania.
Just a note that the front page of this blog appears blank. You must actually scroll down and click on the entry dates to view the story as it goes-on and on.

I am trying to repair the way the link shows the first page.


Any and all comments on this and my other projects are most welcome

Thank You

Joe

Disclaimer-work of fiction.

This is fiction. This is an ongoing work of fiction and a writing project about the environmental field, marriage, divorce, and an idyllic childhood. Any similarities to anyone living or dead is a pure coincidence.

Additions to the story

So time passes swiftly with great joy and pain. The island summer, short, sweet and tragic passes into the bright clear and then rainy cold fall. My island home. The wife so described in all the prelude to the joy and pain of my life has gone away to work in a seemingly distant town. My joy at returning to a professional job after amazing all expense paid trips to Vancouver and Calgary quashed for now, for this year, perhaps for always. It is now mid September, 2008. My great rich past, my career and businesses, my love now just bittersweet in my heart.

But the summer was wonderful compared to last year when I was so broke and heartcrushed after the demise of the last trip to New England. That last road trip. This summer I have finally fished for fine, strong mackerel from our city wharf. I love these fighting, fine eating fish. They remind me of small barracuda, but are stronger fighters-they don't give in and must be dragged by strong line still angry and objecting to their death. I like that in a fish-or a man.

There is settlement now with leaving the island, my love and wife of nearly 18 years now, behind. After all I only left Yuma and a great career, now apparently forever lost, to recover my marriage with the only woman I have ever fully loved. But there are new horizons. Returning to Pennsylvania, if the old truck can still take me home, offers the rivers of my youth, the Yellow Breeches, my children and sister.

My children are both working now. Son is in a serious relationship with an attractive spiritual young lady who already has a child. A baby boy. My daughter is working now and may finally be on a journey away to freedom from an oppressive home and mothers ugly man friend. It has only been 3 months since I visited them-in a terror of a trip to attend sons graduation that mother would not allow. But we still took our last years promised fishing trip. A trip promised to be in the original tradition of my trip in my junior year of high school. We didn't make it to all the haunts. But we made it Westline and Kinzua Creek, and Thundershower Run. Finally smiling, my teenage son caught wild glimmering trout in crystal water as we camped. It rained a cold Appalachian plateau summer rain, and we chilled unsleeping our tent, as we had many years ago now on the Arizona rim, at Big Lake. But it was true bonding.

At Homet's Ferry on the Susquehanna I learned that son hated that special place of my youth. To him it represented all the awful times when he, at 5 or 6, was torn apart by the divorce. What a different memory than mine, of idyllic summer days fishing with my father and cousin. As a 9 year old, Wyalusing and the ferry crossing was a fish-filled rural paradise. No matter. We agreed upon my return to the states we find new places special only to us, as Clark's Creek is near Harrisburg, and Yellow Breeches and the fish hatchery are as well. It is interesting as my father introduced me to the breeches in 1965. I think as we had many trips there with both of children during the early Michelle years of 1992 and 1993, his memories are more enjoyable as it pre-dated the ugly and wrong divorce.

But this is about conclusion and moving on. The story has no positive ending, but is not, as yet, a total tragedy. Not yet. You see, as I almost had a very high paying job in hand this summer, Michelle agreed to go with me to Calgary or Vancouver. I would be off to be a Hydrogeologist in the environmental disaster called the oil sands. She would remain as roommate and pseudowife, writing wistful childrens tales of fanciful villages odd people and colourful landscapes. All shaped by her huge heart and love of mirth and children.

But when all of collapsed, and once again my girl was gone and I remained a poor retiree. Alone and for one of the only times in my life-afraid. The agony ceased after the 4 years of losing all I had secular faith in. My own religious conviction strained, as all the signs had been that the world was returning to as a better place than I had left it in March of 2004 when the staggering jail term began because wife one was jealous, and would allow us no quarter and no time with the children my second wife had nurtured and I love so much. Run on sentence intended.

The new plan is still hidden to me. In nightly dreams my mother appears, and sometimes my dad. They are jovial and comforting. My mothers words "Good thoughts and joy for a while. Love is for always. Whatever will be will be". And, "Walk as if you walk hand in hand with God and all things within you will arrange to be well". I have doubted. I have cried the deep cry-when agony is so extreme that no tears flow, and death would have been a welcome respite. But that cry was over my second wife, never over the lost millions, the businesses, homes, cars. my plane. Only a little for the children, as I always knew we would be reunited somewhere, in this or the next life.

Now I am settled that my girl is gone and only a piece of paper constitutes our marriage. Although distant, we are still as close as two people can be, and run to each other when big trials confront us. With all the tears and loss of truth and trust, a bond remains. In all the tears, we are closer than most married couples could ever be or are.

But my pursuit of her and a new professional job are over. At least for this year. I am not sure when or really how I will leave the island. Most of me would be happy once again to curl up in my bed and let the 6 month winter come. But I cannot do that. The process still evades me, both in my soul and materially. But the decision has been made, the line drawn. The old Atlantic fishing map beckons, the voice of my parents, my children. Most of all I will my the beautiful but flawed heart and angel-face of my wife soon not be. Time heals all wounds? No, it does not and cannot. Don't think that if you have the heart of an artist. Maybe if you are a common brute such is possible. I pity and am sometimes envious of the unfeeling. The soulless, the ugly, mean and deceitful. I will continue to love and value that which shaped my being and my life.

But what is a retired scientist who writes poetry and lives on such a rare place as Prince Edward Island. He is me. And I am not changing my soul so someone thinks I am "employable" again. I have too much faith for that. I told son to live in the moment as I have all my life because the moment is all we really have. You can't catch it as it is never there, but passes us by just as we notice it, as a whisper in the wind. He told yesterday "dad, I have lived in the moment and I am happier". A vast step for a bright young man devastated by his mother and by his fathers action and lack of action. But the children know I love them. Perhaps I can still prove it.

SPRING PEEPERS
"After 50 years; a collection of stories"
by:
Joe Manduke
Prelude Page 2
1-Endless winter 3
2-Freedom and the trips 7
3-Wealth 16
4-Thundershower Run 24
5-Citrus and Bombs 25
6-Interlude-Farm 27
7-Family Stuff 27
8-Wyalusing and the cabin 30
9-Farm 32
Prologue II
10-Interlude-River Thoughts..
On The Travels 38
11-Alaska 38
12-The Caribbean 45
13-Tahiti to Hawaii 51
14-Las Vegas 55
15-Russia and the Ukraine 58
(Unwritten)




















--Prelude--

It seems a long time since I decided to call this island home. We picked Atlantic Canada as a vacation spot for two reasons. My father had brought my family here in the 1950’s as, in those days, it was touted as being wild and beautiful. My father loved anything with a Scottish flare, including Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and Robert Burns. Somehow as kids we missed PEI. Perhaps the ferry schedule was not on time. No matter, as PEI is home now, and I have seen the rest and the lives here bonded.

My mom and sister loved to sit and paint rugged beaches, which had taken us to Maine and finally the Cabot trail, the road around the coast of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island. When I was very young, it seemed we were always on a road-trip vacation somewhere. It took us as far as Mexico with pyramids, monkeys, and colourful statues and god-icons in our 1954 Chevy, and to Key West, and the Maritimes. I only have dim memories of these trips, remembering better fantastic journeys as a 7 or 8 year old to the New Jersey Shore at Island Beach Park or, the Pine Barrens or Wharton Tract, or the endless mountains of north central Pennsylvania Wyalusing and Towanda, with a fishing rod in my hand, as some of my earliest memories.

The other reason my second young wife and I came to this island was to augment and facilitate her dream of being a writer. Nearly obsessed with the Anne stories of L.M. Montgomery, my youthful blonde wife fell in love with Prince Edward Island. The idea of it, and the beaches, red-sand cliffs, and seascapes often devoid of people, even at the height of the often-unnoticeable summer tourist season. I should qualify my description of Shel as the "blonde" wife. This is meant with all reverence. No person I have ever seen has been blessed with the mounds of pale-honey straw-coloured curls of this girl. Period. My relationship and marriage to this young woman was the result of a real family tragedy, born in greed, forged in the furnace of true, singular love. Later she would dye her amazing blondness to auburn-brown to gain respect. This is feminist poison and a sacrilege against truth. But it was her hair. I prefer blondes, but by all accounts, I am no gentleman. At least not anymore.
The island was also as far both in climate and in feeling from the desert as we could go. Leaving Phoenix in July and arriving in Manchester, New Hampshire airport each summer or fall at least once, we would drive all night through New England, sipping peppermint schnapps and just enjoying being in love and being in the pursuit of our shared passion, the road trip. We made the same trip so many times that every bump became familiar. We would always stop at the same motel in Skowhegan, Maine to rest. I learned to travel from my parents. To take my time and learn the towns through the places locals ate and where the common man stayed when there. In those trips, mom would always have her trusty and rusty little camp stove. It would be set-up at the roadside table where she would make eggs, a burger, or hotdogs, while my dad would pull a beer from his little green Coleman cooler, drink slowly contemplating the trees or the passing travellers.

Shel was the best of all travelling companions. Always ready with a map, the water bottle, and candy-and being beautiful, youthful company for a confused middle-aged ex-millionaire businessman.
You see, I had given all that away-my children, my homes, my plane and Mercedes, the trappings of excess and my nouveaux-riche life to steal away to Arizona with my Shel to build a new, simpler life based upon a new concept, that our pure joy would be eternal and the bond would remain unbroken until time itself came to an end. It was 1994.
In this, we were to make babies that could never be used as pawns against my heartache, and we would live out our days immortal in the sunshine in blissful poverty, with our love to sustain us.
Our whole world was about our trips, weekend getaways and learning the delights of Mexican food, grilling hatch chilli’s, making tamales, and enjoying long sessions of just being together in our humble home, snuggled under our comforter, saying silly endearments that mean something only to us, the world and all outsiders forbidden- a place no one else could enter.
But my wife of 16 years my junior grew-up. I barely even noticed, and through a whole series of real tragedies she was gone, along with my home, my treasures, and my heart I followed her to this place. Here between the Atlantic and the Northumberland Strait, I came in a hopeless and quixotic quest to recapture something long gone. My journey over the past four years by way of an Appalachian prison, the military base in Yuma, and my first wife’s home in central Pennsylvania with my children for nearly a year, landed me here. And here I have stayed, with little interruption for almost two years.

--1-- Winter seems endless here.

In fact it’s snowing as I pen this. A night in mid winter on an island some see as a resort, some as internment, some as a prison. Such is your point of view. The deep snow forever ploughed. A nearly silent little town on the island’s southern shoreline, oft the only sounds are the various snow machines working into the sunrise to clear paths for those few lucky enough to have, or those motivated enough to go to a job. Most people are poor here. Some fish remain to be caught, lobsters to be trapped, and hardy potato farms produce. -The reality is what welfare or "pogey" here pays to keep the remaining holdouts, those not moved west to the oil patch of Alberta for jobs.
This is good for me as a pensioner, most of my money siphoned away for endless child support; I have plenty of impoverished company. I have what I need. My apartment, which I have maintained for my Shel as long as she has struggled here, is now my home alone. At first, I just paid her rent, as I was fearful that she would be unhappy and have to go home to Colorado to face her cold and judgemental told you-so family. In reality I hoped that my unwavering support for her would demonstrate my best qualities as a man and husband. My unshakeable loyalty would compensate for my attentions to other women, forever unconsummated, and my obsessive hobbies of guns and military memorabilia and role-playing in uniform, with guns bristling. It would have been scary enough, but when I started to face down street thugs at gunpoint near our home in Phoenix, she decided to maybe leave when she got a chance. I hardly blame her.

Everyone told me I was a fool, as far as money and taking care of Shel after she abandoned me when wife number one put me in prison for unpaid child support. 6 Months for civil contempt. Although not a criminal charge, I did more time than many gun touting drug dealers. I owed an outrageous 150 thousand dollars, although both of us had been poor and almost homeless since the loss of our business, HTS, for over 10 years. The point being that the court order had never been changed to relate our new poverty, and just kept adding up. Child support is difficult to enforce across state lines. I still spent time with my kids as I could, and Rhonda played family with me on my visits home, much to new wife’s dismay. But Rhonda was setting a deadly trap thru a smile and our attempts to make nice for the kids. Shel had warned me, but Quixote is an eternal optimist.
Rhonda mentioned that she wanted me punished, and my entire world fractured- and some money, or most from my disability check so her pathological fear of being penniless fell again on my shoulders. I laugh as I sit by the beach in a resort without funds or income as she races around until death parts her from her fears.
So also this is true of Shel. She is perhaps bedded down to achieve an unknown goal, which worked for her mother. Shel has no port o call home without me. She is a ship without rudder, only here on our island thru me and by me. It ends when I cross the bridge, and her independence becomes maximum security, a place with walls as high as the Rockies, and indeed it should be as that.
But it was MY responsibility, not the woman’s to tell the court we were poor. I was poor and Rhonda was homeless. So after all the misery and poverty of the loss of wealth, the doomsday machine that I was somehow on the hook as a millionaire for child-support, although the world that order was based upon was only a distant memory, was iron clad. I was stuck forever to pay as a millionaire pays to a person who destroyed the very source of income that created the obligation. As a man, I had no rights, and the law could not allow any exceptions to reduce the debt. So I never made a dime again legally. There was no point, and I entered the underground economy and became the real and true master of deception, multiple identities. I beat the feminists, the liars, and the cheats-they even learned to love me while I ate the bread right out of their mouths.
What little money I had has been spent to help her, my young wife that my love for created this imbroglio and my hopes were in vain that she would see my actions as heroic on her behalf and Don Quixote’s efforts would be rewarded with a return to our desert and to a place gone from our hearts, renewed.
This past summer, in a last effort to prove myself, I was charged with taking her to the Manchester airport so she could go home to visit family North of Denver and attend her nephew’s high school graduation. In the old days, this would have been an easy task. Shel’s work, illegal in Canada and under the table, at the meat shop, the beach canteen, and house cleaning would not pay the bills for our apartment, much less two roundtrips to New Hampshire. But I had to find a way. It was clear should I not, then my life was to be unbearable with my now roommate-wife, she would throw me out of the place I had so long paid for, and have to migrate south and live either with my selfish sister or hide, as my son suggests, in wife number one’s basement forever borderline homeless, an old lonely man on disability, reliving a colourful past, soon dead of drink and loneliness, or sent back to jail by a wife driven to pay me back for no longer being rich and leaving with "Blondie", as Rhonda would disparagingly call Shel
So this last battle was to mean selling my amateur radio equipment to pay for gas, a symbolic act of sacrifice as the hobby of my youth was converted from fond memories of long nights, chasing global sunrises and sunsets to contact an elusive country in Asia or Africa, to a desperate way to hold on to the illusion of affection.
I thought I might drop her at Manchester and just continue on to Pennsylvania to visit for the two weeks of her trip, returning to grab her on the way back to PEI. My son said I should abandon her now and just come back, while the opportunity exists and I am not fully broken. But this proved untenable, without a place to stay there I could afford, not even a campground was in the budget. So I over drafted my checking account and rented a small car to take her to the airport in an effort to save gas. It took 3 months to make up the shortfall, as my disability payments had shrunk, and of course she was broke and I had to pay for all the rent and food.
The trip down to New Hampshire was fun for us both. The sporty yellow rental car was a joy, as was our traditional stop in Skowhegan. We couldn’t stay at our traditional motel, as it was undergoing renovation but Shel had a new wireless laptop and the motel we found touted wireless access, so she picked the motel. She had become obsessed with finding "Mr. Right" on the on-line dating sites. I had warned about this. We had almost made full transition from husband wife lover to father and daughter. There was always a strong element of that anyway. Perhaps in a mildly perverse way, at least in the eyes of many, it had had the effect of enhancing our romance. And make no mistake-this was a romance.

The 2 weeks alone on the island waiting to go back for her in our apartment were slow. I walked to the library or beach, or the bar for a beer, passing time in endless star trek episodes that I knew line-by-line
The day came, May 30, to return and pick Shel up at the airport. I had to drive my old Blazer, an iconic vehicle, the last possession of my long defunct business, forever our road-trip chariot in Arizona. I had only just enough money to get there. By a miracle of God, my disability payment would come Friday, June 1, instead of the 3rd. Shel had made arrangements to travel without consulting me and her sister bought her ticket. I had planned to try to make the drive from Manchester airport to Plattsburgh, New York where my banks website claimed there was a branch where I could cash a check. This was because I had over drafted my account so much that my debit card got cancelled. I ordered a new one, but it never arrived. -My bank had a country code of "CA" on my account, which to them meant China, -months later I got a spindled packaged marked "error delivery –Beijing"
It was by dumb luck I double-checked the Plattsburgh address only to notice it was a location of an ATM- only. . The closest branch to Manchester was Troy, New York, just East of Albany. So after picking her up, we headed across Vermont and stayed in a fleabag. I had 10 bucks left and no gas, but we had some fast food and I had a half pint of American brandy-which I had sorely missed, and had a nice time together in our room, in our separate beds.
We had always gone out of our way to take ferries-here in Canada, and in Alaska. We love the water, rougher the better. I found a tiny dot on the map in New York, with the "fy" little dotted line across Lake Champlain to Vermont. All along Shel reminding me I had to get her back for work at the meat shop by sunrise-almost 800 miles North and East of Troy. I had really wanted our last road trip together to be special, as I had cash after hitting the bank. The rush put a damper on our trip. But we stopped for sandwiches and enjoyed the rural beauty of Vermont. In Maine we have old traditional stopping points-long established pee breaks, really just turnouts or picnic areas we have always traditionally stopped. In Maine, just South of Calais and the border into New Brunswick is such a spot. That late spring morning, long before sunrise the woods were filled with the din, the chorus of spring peepers. That particular sound always takes me back to my woods on our farm in my childhood and the cool early April mornings fishing with my dad before he died when I was a boy.
The fog was dense, but I had her back for a few hours of sleep before work. The threat of bumping a thousand pound moose through New Brunswick on a foggy night made the trek painfully slow.
Our last trip was bittersweet. A kid on the ferry took our picture together. It’s stored on the memory card in my camera. I refer to it often and can still go there, as often as I wish.
Many if not all of my friends ridiculed me for staying loyal and still providing support during all this. I am quite convinced these people, many very successful, have never been completely and fully in love. My mother would have understood. No one else, but perhaps Quixote. To be honest my generosity has been tainted by my selfishness too. This is so as my motivation was impure due to my heartache.
The summer progressed. Shel finally borrowed money for a small used car, a Toyota Tercel. This finally took the strain off my warhorse Blazer, which Shel had beaten to a pulp on lousy PEI roads last summer. It was then she had left me alone, in arthritic agony, with a bucket for a toilet locked away here unable to feed myself or get to the bathroom, while she played house with a guy somewhere.
Finally in August Shel announced she was getting a male roommate and moving to the huge 3rd floor apartment above us. She had designed it so that I would get stuck for the rent, be jealous of who knows whom, and in a fit of rage be driven away. After all my usefulness was now over. It didn’t occur to her by making me even poorer that I was stranded here. Not enough cash to go or to stay.
I told the landlord to make sure she collected the rent from Shel before allowing her a sudden move upstairs. I was completely honest with our landlord, and Shel had to pay for both apartments. It was a very sad time, as it proved my friends right that there was no affection left in Shel for me. It still bothered me that she had acted so meanly, but it was very hard for her to earn money, and this all broke my fractured heart even more. I have reconciled this, as I know I did my best to prove myself. It is now her failure of character. Her desperate search for a replacement for me, her horror at being alone, although she projects this fear onto me.
Well all this finally took its toll a few months ago. The New Year came, Christmas past in a dark place. All the pain of my youth, the death of my dad on New Years long ago-the growing distance of my children, who only months ago were playing video games and talking with dad for hours were now driving, working, and dating. My own wife daughter had tried to homeless me and crush my heart into the darkest void. I cried for a month, locked away, Shel trying to inflict as much pain as possible to force me off island. I exploded in rage and we fought. She kicked me, I hit her. I threatened her geriatric boyfriend with a slow and painful death. He stayed away.
It wasn’t even me. I was horrified at myself, and forgave Shel as I always have as my selfish wife-daughter was raised in a place of loveless ness, with no forgiveness. Her family says as a mantra, "Everyone has to use somebody sometime".
Well, I have been used. But I am still the winner. A winner in a way that there is never really a winner in a horrific war, just an end to the battles.
I studied books on trauma and depression and designed my own spiritual cure. My recording of audio diaries and writing stories perhaps never to be heard nor read. But someday, maybe others can feel the places I have been.



But the times of my youth, the farm, the streams, college are more important memories than Shel. She has caused me to feel the pain I have avoided for decades, but I have grown aware and strong through her weakness. I will always love her. I only found out through this that she has no clue what love or commitment are. Raised fatherless by brutish siblings and a wanton mother, how could she know anything else? I couldn’t disavow her from her subconscious childhood issues. Nor could I eternally bury my own rage at the injustice it all has been. My mother said, "that love covers a multitude of sins." I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I had stayed in Yuma, and not have been driven, in fervent prayer 4 years ago to be taken to be with my absent wife and save our lives. Mom also warned me about "casting my pearls before swine, lest they turn and devour me." I am devoured, but gaining spiritual meat on my bones now that I am alone. Neither of my wives had any clue as to who I was, where I had been in life, or how I somehow made millions of dollars. Wife one, the mother of my children, was a fractured wreck. Badly tormented by her mother, she lives in constant irrational fear of loneliness and poverty. Not so different than Shel, but educated enough to help me start my business, and to be there to collect the money, and eternally punish me for falling in love with the nanny after I realized she loved my business, but not ME. And certainly not the children she had bore.

My prayers were answered in Yuma. One day I just walked away from a military contracting position I had miraculously landed after doing the time for child support. But I couldn’t think or function. Being a senior scientist on an Army base is no joke. There are tank turrets hanging from giant cranes, bombers dropping ordnance, and men like me that had to find and remove the bombs unexploded, or UXO. This was a bad place to be pining away for a lost love. I was spending hours each day on the phone with her, and she was demanding money. But I knew I would die if I didn’t go to find her, confront my accusers, and at least to seal the breach in this "love of a lifetime". After all, I had given up everything any sane man (and sanity is an issue here) would cherish, to run off with my kid’s nanny.
I often ask why I am still here. But the answer is clear, I prayed for this alone. -My only prayer was to be here with her, on the island. Now it will take all my strength to stay or go. She has been upstairs for 6 months, we made up after our fight, just yesterday eating together, shopping, and getting coffee at Tim Hortons. But there is sadness in her, in her demeanour. Her youth and innocence, my virgin 20-year-old wife of 15 years ago is no more. She also has no ability to tell the truth.
After all I look at the painting my mother made of me at age 4. It’s a small oil above my lamp, by my window on the world. The window reveals an image of an empty Central Street, with a motel and restaurant sign. The sign says "hip of beef" is offered on Friday’s menu. This phrase is one of our private endearments. We both see it everyday.
The painting of the little boy speaks to me. When I was rich and arrogant my mother once tried to explain what a happy, bright charming child I was. She meant, as often she meant by not saying something, that by joining the material pursuit, I had lost what was truly special of me. I feel this way about Shel. She endured a lot, but lacked the character to not listen to her female friends. I had sequestered Shel in our own Arizona world, with frequent but controlled trips to Colorado and family. They finally accepted me. And I kept my then naive wife safe from the taint of knowing the bitterness of the naked world.
These visits to her Colorado family were among our favourite road trips. Her family was 1000 miles from Phoenix. We again have a well-worn path through Northern Arizona, the Navaho lands, the Painted Desert-Monument Valley. Well-known stops along Southern Colorado, Durango, and Alamosa, Fairplay in the high mountains. Every motel, every pullout. Some trips were in summer in the snow-capped Rockies. Others in winter with -30 and blizzards, always or nearly always in the iconic Blazer, which is parked here in the snowy driveway years later.
The past is pulling away from me. My life is slipping in this loveless place. But at least I have felt it. I mean true love. Complete involved devotion. Reckless joy and careless folly as the entire world to anyone not so smitten would be suicidal, unbearable. My genes are holding me together now. Hundreds of years of pioneers, famous too. Mercenary soldiers of obscure wars, battlefield burnouts who somehow built lives and families after witnessing stoically unimaginable death and tragedy.
I have no reason to worry. It will pass, and I was, after all, in love. I am not sure what Shel felt. It has not been expressed to me as of today. Perhaps it never will be. My "Love of a lifetime ‘. That was our first, and only, song.

--2—Freedom and the trips

Summer comes none too soon when you are a teenager armed with a drivers license and a badly abused 1965 Mustang coupe. Vivid still the images, soul- echoes, sounds, and youthful freedom still are a longing in my now distant joy. That first summer I was 16 defined the next 20 years of my life, perhaps all of it. I was fortunate that my surviving parent, my mother, felt that total freedoms so that a child’s imagination and soul could soar were much more important than mindless autocratic discipline. I know now, she had been powerfully changed by my father’s death. Maybe it tugged hard as her Philadelphia politician congressman and Hatfield feud surviving father had left the family years before in a bitter marital conflict. Dad was 44. We all watched, my mom, sister, and I as dad, a strapping WWII Army air corps veteran of the Philippines wasted away from terminal cancer. Mom stood by, tending to him, taking him diligently and always heroically to downtown Philadelphia’s Jefferson medical center for treatment. Only now do I know that I was destined to lead my life as if I would shortly die, at 1000 percent every moment, without abandon, because my dad died so young, and I was sure to follow. Not to miss a thing.
That experience made mom a soldier for us, my sister and me, mom insistently aiding me through college, buying me my first motorcycle and the mustang out of dad’s small life insurance payoff.
It was as if to say, here’s a car, go explore, be careful but don’t be so cautious that you miss life. It has been my code, the way I have lived since I can remember.
The mustang was well worn and we were poor. I had to learn from the corner mechanic, who had been robbing my mother in the repairs to my dad’s Rambler, how to "do it myself". So over time I became quite the expert in keeping a basket case running, eventually painting, rebuilding, and racing my V8 ‘stang. But that was later.
This summer of my junior year was meant for grabbing the old fishing map and a few dollars for gas and finding a stream, lake, river, or pond that could hold fish.
The fishing map had been my fathers. The gas stations put out different theme maps. Dad found a Pennsylvania fishing map at the Chalfont Atlantic station and it became almost an item of worship. This map was used for Dad to conjure various trips for our fishing and family road trips. Not that Dad was much of a fisherman. He grew up in south Philly, and only got to fish rarely as far as I know. He had a boat in Barnegat with an Uncle where they fished the bay and drank beer, but there was an argument when I was little and it ended.

The fishing map was used to find Yellow Breeches Creek and the North Branch of the Susquehanna River. Both became Mecca’s to us then and still today. Islands in the river are named for my children at Homet Ferry, and the Yellow Breeches at Huntsdale have hosted my friends and family during traditional trout and bass seasons for almost 40 years.
So we headed out from Doylestown in the leaky mustang on a mission of pure exploration. My fishing pal and high school buddy Joe riding shotgun. I had installed a tape player in my pony and we had one tape. It was an early Beatles tape, and as I write these words I can still hear odes to the Norwegian woods and the familiar voices of Paul and John.
My thrill was to explore extreme northwestern Pennsylvania. The map claimed big fish in wild sounding places like Kinzua, The Allegheny River, and the Clarion River. Wide areas were delineated as native brook trout country, and home of the Pike and Muskellunge, their fierce cousins up to 4 feet long, and both bristling with teeth.
When dad was alive, the annual trek to the Yellow Breeches south of Carlisle was our big trip. That and a summer trip to Bradford County (Wyalusing) on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River. All year, months before these trips, I would clean and organize tackle, study the maps, dream of trout at the Breeches or sultry summer evenings along the then wild Susquehanna with a stringer of walleyes and smallmouth, to be carefully cleaned and cooked by my mother. Either Breeches trout or Susquehanna fish were a sacred meal.
On our summer trips in high school, the few we took, or the many I took alone, I slept behind summer quiet schools on the bus loading platforms, sleeping bag on still warm summer concrete. I caught and ate fish, and begged and borrowed for gas money.
In my fishing-dream- heart I studied and memorized the special map dad brought home years before. Pennsylvania’s route 6 traverses the most Northern part of the state from the New York state line near Port Jervis, all the way to odd sounding places named Kane, Warren, Corry, Westline…or Tionesta. Images on the map showed trout and toothy pike, tiny towns were I imagined Indians still netted fish and carried babies on their backs.
My fishing friend and fellow high school junior Joe and I were now on the road. Joe was a big athletic blonde kid who the girls liked. In fact I was secretly in love with his cheerleader girl and my neighbour Leslie. I think she thought of me as a combination motor head and nerd.
I had just started to get serious with Carol that summer of 1973. Joe simply said, "I don’t want to hear about that chick on this trip, we are fishing." I had already been ridiculed for taking Carol to a dance.
Our destination, revealed by the sacred fishing map was the Allegheny reservoir. It was to be by way of route 6, that magical path I had only dreamed about. Real rugged trout country. As the Beatles groaned, we finally made it to Renovo on route 120. A dark nearly abandoned railroad town, where people were playing baseball in the main street at 3 AM. It was an odd scene. Out of bravado we drove up over the top of our world on route 144. I hadn’t known the state was this remote, wild. Finally we arrived at route 6 and went west.
The parking area by the reservoir and Kinzua dam is a wild place. They had flooded the corn planter Indian reservation to make the lake, and it made me feel sad. The loud spillway and leaking gas from the mustang’s rusty gas tank kept us up most of the night. By sunrise, a few sleepy fishermen emerged- out of one truck a bewhiskered scrawny old man. While busy at this early hour boiling camp coffee and breakfast of fried walleyes, we asked about the fishing. We became friends with old Bill, and he told us of Kinzua fish and fisherman. He said to go back into town across the old iron river bridge and make the first right. This would take us to the deep hole on the other side of the dam. We slowly drove up the road, as it became rough, boulder strewn. I swerved to avoid a rock and the right edge gave way and there we hung precariously above the trees and the roaring Allegheny below. Joe said he noticed an old jeep parked at a shack back down the hill. We walked back and found a grey tarpaper shack with half a door, the place moonshine was made and bad things happened to out a towners. Joe knocked on the door and appeared a wizened old man, unshaven. He looked to be 100 years old and was in fact, quite toothless. We explained our plight and he yelled to someone in the shack (we thought he was alone) a filthy little boy appeared and was instructed by the old man to "go get the rope yea big around as your pecker". In only a few moments the boy appeared and the antique jeep pulled my mustang right back onto the "road". Joe gave "Gums", as he has been later called, a dollar and the old man jumped for joy, -kicked up his heels. I had never seen someone kick up heels before. We felt as far from home as Mars, or even Arizona.
As a 10 year old living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, whose fishing exploits then, excited trips with dad to the Delaware Canal, river or Cooks Creek in Upper Bucks County, such places were odd and exotic as the Grand Canyon, or even the Desert and Cactus, or salmon streams in Atlantic Canada or Alaska.
So armed with my car and some gas, that old rusty stove I inherited from mom reluctantly (she still used it when the power was off), I ventured next out by myself to Huntsdale, where I had fished with dad since the spring of 1966.
This obscure little town, a right beautiful place as we" Canadians" say, is situated just below South Mountain, in a valley of limestone springs. The old map claimed, "Could be in old Scotland". I had no idea about that, but I now know, as with Cape Breton that single Scottish reference may have been enough to move dad to make the Yellow Breeches our private fishing and family place for the generations. Here was a trout hatchery where the pilgrimage is still made. I actually received a letter from the Fish Commission stating that my family had been signing the guest book at the Huntsdale fish cultural station longer than any other. This is devotion, a living tribute to a place and time past, still resurrected in real life, at a place of powerful genetic and visceral memories.
Perhaps dad loved the stream and South Mountain area for a different reason beyond a Scottish map reference. It may have been genetic. Dad would take us as kids to battlefield re-enactments at Antietam and Gettysburg. Later, this military interest would not only make me an Army contractor, but also cause my young wife fits, hating my interest in memorabilia, military Colt gun collection, uniforms, and parade re-enactments. I never knew then and neither did dad that our ancestor fought in these hills with the 17th New York Infantry, after getting here from fighting as a British officer in the Crimean War (2nd British Foreign Cavalry). It is very tough to live down the past, especially when among your ancestors, on both sides of the family are heroes, pioneers, or actual biographical historical figures. Perhaps I can use that as an excuse for my behaviours, but I doubt it.

In high school, after dad’s death, we, that is my high school crowd, and later the entourage I engendered as a rich businessman, ritualistically put our tent here, and fished the long fish, in hopes of touching the prior, the infinite.
This field of tradition just south of the hatchery my son has called since being very small the "thorn spot". The connotation is obvious. But in this field, it was where my dad and I first drowned bait in the mid-1960’s
Arriving back alone, years later, always puts a fist in my chest. Those days so long past, but not really. The sights, scents. Feelings-even trees now bigger but still where they belong belie the time past but still frozen. Waiting for that first cast, the first fish, the drive home to a familiar place, but still less important than the stream, the friends, and the father.
There is a curve along Pine Road where there was an old farm and an old dam. Probably a colonial mill dam, it was said to me once by a seedy from over the mountain that huge trout lay under the banks along that curve. Year’s prior, in high school, on a trip to pilgrimage here, my friend had said of the spot "I could eat that log". Only a trout fisherman in love with small streams could fully gather that.
Beyond the bend in the stream are the railroad tracks. They are in the wood by a small tributary to the Yellow Breeches. I always imagined as a child huge trout that lay there, at the mouth of the spring-stream, under the railroad bridge, waiting for the life giving food and oxygen that the new water brings, cold, new, fresh. I have never fished there.
The road west was curvy, flat. I always anticipated my sign; it said "Bridle path". By the horse farm just below the thorn spot.
There would be no camp this year. Camping was no longer permitted here. Just I, alone now years later in my rented car, Arizona and business long behind this day, mind full with fish and memories.
The sign marking the town of Huntsdale on the Eastern side is now long gone. Perhaps accident, flood or -just time. I parked in the same spot as 30 years ago, my big old tree still leaning, but without surrender, towards the creek.
The path to my spot of tradition was always wet. This is a valley of pure limestone springs. The stream literally pops out of the ground here, where rock and water meet, the upward pressure makes a spring, the springs the stream, and the home of trout and frog, and of the dreamers. Years ago, spring peepers cried and then would abruptly silence at the first step down my path. In those years the parking lot was full with campers, both over nighters and day-trippers. We all grew to know each other. After dad died in 1972, I came every year as a religion, a pilgrimage and introduced the stream and camping to everyone who was then, or later important in my life.
There were years that I came by myself. It seemed although my rituals stayed intact, at least as far as the fishing ritual, other people changed, and stopped the traditions of their youth. One spring I was camping along there at the spot on Pine Road, just below the hatchery. Most of the Friday night before opening day was spent drinking. Not so much by me, I usually had a case of traditional rolling rock (my dad’s brew, and the official brew of Pennsylvania‘s State related universities), and a small bottle of blackberry brandy. This was my mother’s primary cure-all, for all ailments. And who was I to argue, as my mom was both an Ivy League grad and a medical professional.
It brings to mind a bottle I found on the farm, in the barn in 1965. It was a liniment bottle, which I later found out was from the 1880’s. It still had contents, that smelled like pine tar (probably from Westline, read on), and the label listed that it would cure anything." For man or beast". I think my sister still has some of my bottles-this was my mother’s mantra, the brandy would cure anything, but if it didn’t at least you would feel better about it.

In the old days, one group of Yellow Breeches campers was lead by a fishing sage named Mr. Hamnell. He bellowed incoherently most of the April night. If it was raining, after drinking most of a case of Iron City, he would shout all night "come on rain". I was never sure why. There had been plenty of opening days in a cold, pouring rain. It kept the shirkers away, and left the sacred breeches to her true followers, the real acolytes and sextons, and the holy men of the place. The Hamnels had asked me to eat with them in the camper that was always there, as long as I remembered, on opening weekend. We drank Iron City and ate venison. I love personally shot game-real food as God intended. I don’t trust a man who doesn’t drink and won’t enjoy a fresh trout or deer chop. It’s unmanly, disrespectful, and pussyish. It reminds me of environmental engineers that hate me. After eating the trout, venison and swilling big returnable bottles of Pittsburgh’s finest beer, Mr. Hamnel’s countenance turned somber.

We had talked that I worked for the State’s environmental program, then new. So did many in his family also work for the keystone state, the Fish Commission of all places. They each had a fishing license numbered in the single digits-that’s clout. I can come off a little educated and pompous, I didn’t swear then, and was an intellectual. Thank God that phase is over and I can finally be the brute I really wanted always to be. But Mr. Hamnel looked right at me. He was round, his face drawn and bright red from drink, slurring, he lectured. "Boy, I have been sucked and fucked every way you can imagine and many, boy that you can’t. You better do it while you can, Boy, because the day gonna come when you can’t no more and you will be sorry. You will be sorry you didn’t do it while you had the chance, boy".
This is profound. Life Orders-my nature, my very proof of existence. Perry county wisdom spoken in Cumberland. Wisdom for a lifetime.
The following day afternoon, after a long cool morning of successful fishing, I was sitting in my truck daydreaming. A bunch of girls pulled up, beers open, in a green 1968 Chevy impala that looked like it was towed out of a field. The redhead asked me in that "just over the mountain" twang what I was doing. I explained fishing (as if she didn’t know), whereby she got out of the car and put her arms around me and frenched me under my tree. Well the other girls got out and I guess they knew the Hamnel’s as they were in the camper a long time.
I was about to pull my redheads drawers down behind my car, when she turned her head and unceremoniously beer-barfed saying that she was sorry. Well, so was I.
I really didn’t care. And I have been told that Pine Grove and Newville, Huntsdale aren’t in Appalachia. Hell, I could barely understand this girl. -Maybe she was 16, and it was one of the best fishing days of my life. Caught a few trout too.

The streams contact with my waders was cold. The sunset was now low above the trees and a few ducks left for the pond on the hatchery property just upstream. I was left only to hear the crystal flow of pure limestone water. The waters of my youthful soul. Now with a cast alongside my own island-yes, I had named islands in all my private places for my family, never for myself. There were Joey and Alexis islands for my children in the Susquehanna, at the Homet Ferry crossing. Here there was dad’s island. Maybe it was mine now too as a dad. I had started fishing here that second Saturday of April for over 40 years. Only in recent years have I missed this sacred appointment. Being away in the West, all over the place with the military, or just too poor or love smitten with my daughter-wife to clearly remember the importance of tradition, and of being a free man. Perhaps its time to return to important things, traditions that define a life and a family, its joys and tears, its love.


Here, each insect on the water, silent sound of riffle and play of heart that raises even the first trout and means to tell me that I am still alive. I am not a purest or snobby neophyte fly-fisherman; I fish what works, bait early and deep in murky water to bring up old, noble brown trout of this stream. I’ll spin artificials later and the flicker of a simple gold or silver spinner will fool an aggressive rainbow, placed here and so far from its western mountain home. My cast of the dry fly, a match for what is emerging from the stream and falling to breed and when summer spinners, or mayflies, and all the field bugs become trout food. And I don’t release all my fish. We cook as ritual along the bank our fish. Only what is needed as food for the empty place in the soul. My son and I will cut the first trout of a trip, remove its heart, cut the small organ in two, and share it. In this way we are men, bonded to fish, each, and God. No wimps in my world, never again.
Walking down to the stream across the field is always a walk of time. With each step I walk with my dad, his agonies of death, and my friends and son, along on their individual separations from this place. The stream is shallow, the bottom created from the perfect round pebbles of pale quartz-rock, eroded from the surrounding hills. Those stones were boulders on a long past sandy beach. In no where near time, my very bones would be the finest dust, fairy dust, on the wind when the ground I am buried in becomes dust of air at a time and place as real as the present, but as sad as the past.
Trout in this stream are either native or placed here. Long ago, all fish were native here. But time, farming, and ugliness have made some fine middle-Atlantic trout streams mediocre. I have to say that my Yellow Breeches, of my own father’s fame, is no longer my favourite stream of my youth. I fish around my island where long ago I hooked a brown too strong to hold. Or the long strait riffle where dad and I caught trout and suckers, just below the place of camping with my high school pals.
You see, dad and I never camped here. It was just a drive (2 hours from Doylestown) at first to that place on the fishing map that stated, "Could be in old Scotland, unbelievably beautiful trout". and it even said "Huntsdale". It became ritual; the polishing of hooks and plans for each spring. To actually transfer that feeling to total strangers later was amazing to me. Even before I founded my business and abandoned many of my youthful true passions, I had taken friends to Huntsdale in memoriam to my father and our trips there. And good were and are those that remain of the trout and the place of all.

Somehow the catch was always far less important than the feelings involved. And the sights, the sound of peepers. Dad found a bar on the hill above the stream It was called the Pine Tree Tavern. It was on top of the hill and I had a root beer while dad drank rolling rock and contemplated life.

I understand now. Dad was a mechanical engineer and died an unrealized millionaire, with which even the best recordable tragedy of this family fails to compare. Dad moved from job to job after our family lost everything in bankrupcy in 1963. He took a job at a small firm shortly before his illness in 1970 called MAI-Sorbus. As part of his position as one of the first engineers hired, he received a stock option of 5000 shares. After dad died, I still remember standing at our dining room table with mom looking at the stock papers. "should I sell this?", she asked. Unfortunately in 10th grade I wasn't the savvy businessman I would later become. Raising mice for the pet store at age 7 and collecting old newspapers hardly qualified me at this point in my life. Well, mom sold the options back to the engineering firm. The little company my dad had help start later became Bell Atlantic.

Much later, my young son, still new to fishing at his "thorn spot", the spot of my youth, would drink root beer while I had rolling rock and shots of JD. My son still refers to the old tavern as the "root beer store". Many years later, on a business trip, I diverted to have a burger and beer at the Pine Tree. Well, all that was there was burned rubble. An icon of my youth, a place of dad and the Hamnels, my high school buddies-beer, booze, girls, lies and fish tales-a place of the fall hunter’s nudity ball. The owner would bring Baltimore hookers up before antlered deer season, a de facto state holiday here, and have a party for the hunters. I asked him once why he didn’t do it on trout opener, and never got a good answer. Heck. It’s the same crowd.

My bar and place of worship was no more. I sat along the side of the mountain and cried. A sign stated "Here, in 1930 X, were found 3 babes in the woods". I cried with them. Life is all about loss. Everyone has heard that expression, about babes in the woods, but I never found out about the 3 babes, and the sign is long gone too. It chilled me thinking the water the flowed past their tiny abandoned bodies nourished the trout I had caught and consumed. The truth is that we all feed on death, even vegetarians. A new municipal building now disguises the place of the mountain tavern. It’s barren and meaningless.
I am very glad that one very powerful living memory of the stream stays with me now. Since my son could walk, and even before, I have taken him to see the trout hatchery at Huntsdale. My daughter too, sometimes even more enthusiastic as a child, running up and down the aisles by the outside tanks yelling "fish, feeesh", as only a 3 year old can. Inside the hatchery building is a display area. Years ago, there were fish tanks containing many types of wild Pennsylvania fishes. Well over time, the wall of tanks were replaced with pictures of the fishes and a written description.
There is one large open tank in the floor by a huge window containing truly giant trout. Over the many years, I have sat with friends and family here, placing a careful finger into the tank as the curious trout consider biting it off. The sign above the open display tank says "Angler’s dream". And the sign explains trout in the streams in Pennsylvania rarely get that large. The fish are 5 to 10 pounds in the tank. I have caught one trout that large, a rainbow at Kinzua Creek just before I left the Chimney house for good. I remember that catch, as I was fishing alone.
One special feature of the display tank was the perennial presence of a blue rainbow trout. A rare mutation, a large blue trout, and I mean bright azure blue, intrigued us for years. My son would look forward to the hatchery visits before or after fishing to see his "Blue guy". Well I do think one blue trout, which obviously grew each time we visited, was the same fish for a long time. In later years, the fish is gone. My son is grown and I have been away here in Canada, or Arizona many years. We often think of the giant blue trout, hiding in the river somewhere, awaiting our sacred reunion. It was unthinkable that he died. We hoped he had escaped his confinement or was released, as did occur then, and headed downstream towards the chimney house, and freedom in the mighty Susquehanna.

-----3-----Wealth

The front of the house was a collimated monstrosity. The sellers, I wondered how this old German immigrant with a heavy accent and SS bearing and his wife became builders outside D.C. I have to admit concern as I observed the obviously European classic period original oil paintings covering the walls of the 10000 square foot Georgian mansion, only 2 years old. I have often pictured a train stuffed with booty, heading back to Austria or Germany in 1940. It was 1990 and a bright or even (it helped) dishonest businessman could corrupt enough followers so that paper became real, and the champaign and women flowed. I had invented something. It sounds simple, like a paper chase but it became a major part of every real estate transaction of significance. The other professionals in my field tend to be weak, pansy-assed politically correct wimps, so I shoved a million dollar idea down their proverbial engineering practices asses and went to Tahiti. They hated me; I was called the "Gordon Geckco and the thug" of the environmental business. I invented the Phase One environmental assessment. That is the process every commercial site must endure prior to commercial transfer or finance.

Now you will see why I am a fishing fool-or maybe just a fool. Not only was I arrogant as a 34 year old plane-owning millionaire, I had an affair with my son’s nanny.
The girl, I think number 20 nanny or so for my 2-year-old son and infant daughter. My wife was having an even harder time being rich than I was. No bank in the East could close a loan without sending me thousands of dollars to say it wasn’t (Oh please tell us it’s not) Love Canal. It was a license to steal. And all flowed according to my basest instincts. It was a long way from taking care of my stream, my pets, and my fish that I carefully observed and set free on the farm as a boy. This was pure environmental capitalism, at first noble, and then obscene, it may be perhaps what the environmental field and its obscenity have become today. When those properties failed my test of past use or current nastiness, I could demand tens of thousands of dollars to perform tests and either place my approval upon the deal, or remove the problems. Buried drums, fuel tanks, sludge, or a bad smell. As a particularly nasty polluting criminal and malodorous landfill operator once bellowed at me as a young state environmental cop," it all smells like money". I had become a product of those people I had studied and worked to arrest. I was now making a fortune, like a cancer surgeon, from misery, -the misery of my planet. And no realtor or banker cared for my fish or streams, only about getting my seal to make a deal. I was even more obscene than them or that landfill operator, I was a millionaire on finding filth, so someone could pave the woods, fill the streams, and kill my spring peepers and my fish. This ambiguity caused me to travel, to drink, and cheat on my wife. I spent millions on houses, lavish vacations and parties, my plane, my cars. I wanted to run from it all. And I did. But at least, at first, I was armed with plenty of money.

Back then; from 1988 thru 1994, I just had to say that a subject piece of real estate was clean and that there was little environmental liability. I am the guy who first defined the scope of work that answered that question. I failed to patent my idea as a young fool. If I had done so, I would be rich today beyond the dreams of avarice. There is a good chance I would not be writing this "fishing story" on PEI, poor and alone with my words.
Shel came to us through a nanny agency. She was 19, had recently graduated from a high school with maybe 10 kids on the Colorado prairie, close to Wyoming
Someone picked her up at national, probably my office manager Joyce, and I met her and my wife in Olney at a new trendy restaurant. We always took new domestic staff to Olney to eat, either the Ale House or other places. This was to get to know them before they disappeared into the bowels of the Highland mansion and to clean, bath and feed the kids as we played nouveaux, tanned in the Bahamas, wooed the banks, and found hell.
They hated me for it. I had, along with my wife invested in apartment buildings in Pennsylvania. At the same time I left my job with the state as an environmental cop to pursue the allure and mostly money as a consultant. As a geologist and soon to be licensed and registered, we as a collective discipline had somehow, in those days, trumped the engineers for control of the then non-existent environmental business.
Wow, was I ridiculed. In college at Temple University, my friends entered the oil patch. There was no environmental field…I was going to starve along the trout streams and rivers of my youth.
I left school January 1981, after leaving field camp in Gaspe and New Brunswick, not far from this island, and going back to Philly that fall of 1980 to finish my Geology degree.
I started my first job with the state government in February, Friday the 13th, 1981. The position was a trainee as a geologist in Harrisburg, in the water quality branch. I was thrilled but terrified. Away from home, the first thing I saw as I rolled back the sheet of my downtown YMCA bed was a dead cockroach. I remember going to the pay phone, calling my high school sweetheart Carol and my mom and sister and crying. Mom said come home if I can’t do it.
I stayed. The rest is the true story of my life. During almost 5 years as a government techie, before leaving the state government, I spent a year in Harrisburg central office and then was transferred to Norristown, in Eastern Pennsylvania. It was in the Eastern office, when the new hazardous waste regulations were to be in place, I became an environmental-hydrogeologic cop. I loved the job, but met a woman in 1984, after my high school girl Carol left. The woman who I met in a bar on Route 202 after a Nautilus workout session with my fellow geologists, wanted to start a business. She was tall, attractive, thin, and her name was Rhonda. She bought me dinner, and I chased her to get her number. We hooked up in a week or so, and saw the movie "Ghostbusters". My date laughed so loud and oddly that the whole theatre was laughing at her, not the movie. I swore that was our last date. We moved in together 6 months later.
.
Soon after we were married in May of 1985, Rhonda had a chance to work for a branch of Ross Perot’s company, EDS, and I decided to follow her back to Harrisburg, where I had started my career at the Fulton Bank office building as a lowly (but proud) Geologist Trainee 4 years prior.
One issue was that to work at EDS in those days, you could not "cohabit". We got married in new Cumberland before the JP there, without a ring. Rhonda was very emotional. I was still stung by Carol, but happy to have a nice, hard working attractive wife, who grew up 3 miles from the farm of my childhood. I used to ride my bike by her house and see her and her sisters, but never stopped. But that was 20 years before. This I call another odd coincidence in all of this, the "convergence". We bought a huge Victorian Queen Ann at 301 Market Street in New Cumberland. We both still call it the Vicky. I fondly recall sitting in the parlour drinking wine, just along my Susquehanna River, as Rhonda played ice castles on her grand piano. It always made me cry.
I wept leaving my first environmental job. I had felt like a hero, I had defeated real bad guys-they sent a chopper for me, and I buzzed that profane landfill operator with the State Police, the criminals shaking theirs fists and fingers at me, while tens of thousands of gallons of foul leachate and hazardous waste flowed from their hell into a dead Schuylkill river. I had stopped them. I was an expert witness threatened by solid waste thugs and seduced by women on their payroll. With a concealed weapons permit, I packed a Colt Python. I had been introduced to handguns by one girl from our Geology professsional group named Barrie. She was Bryn Mawr grad, and quite an intelligent beauty. Her dead father had been an arms broker. She is perhaps the woman I should have married, but I let her get away. There was a case of machine gun ammo under her bed.


At my going away party at the Norristown office, my boss Larry presented me with a unique gift. Knowing that I was going into the consulting game, I received the board game "Lie, Cheat, and Steal"-"The game of political power". I had no idea then how appropriate that gift would be. I think it sits today on a shelf at my son’s house, in the room I slept in during my stay there in 2005.

But, I found a place at a kind little engineering firm in Harrisburg that became a school and a home to me after leaving my first government job. They were fine technical people with a heart and I shall never forget them. -They were known as Dunn Geoscience. After that, I was hired to start an environmental practice in Columbia, Maryland for a beltway bandit geotechnical firm, ATEC and Associates. It was Rhonda’s turn to follow me and she landed a great computer job in NOVA, as we say there, Northern Virginia, right on the DC beltway. We sold the Vicky just after a year, and bought a sprawling Dutch colonial home in an upper middle class neighbourhood off Georgia Avenue. This is the Glenwood house. Here both HTS and my son were born. It had 2 big acres, trees, and was backed by a horse farm. It was very nice, and we were moving way too fast. But I was running from my dad’s ghost, running on a fast clock with little time.

At ATEC, I had been given a car, a desk and a phone and said I had 6 months to get this "environmental thing" going, or I was on unemployment. I made them a million in my new department, and trained to do my own thing on their dime. They angered me; we leveraged everything and opened an office and incorporated a business, HTS, in February 1988, with my wife Rhonda as computer jockey and document expert-and she also kept her beltway bandit job so we could eat and pay for our Glenwood home Rhonda and I were the dream 1980’s couple- Boomers with no kids, beltway bandits with a singular purpose and a six-figure income. -Savvy business types, she level and steady and a bit overdriven, and me, the pure entrepreneur who saw the gold in an idea before it was even made by nature.

HTS meant "HydroTech Services". I just liked the name as a groundwater guy. Later when asked who owned the firm by a huge client, I would coyly say "a collection of aging scientists", Harry, Tom, and Sam (HTS). My new office, after the first year at the home office, was right across the street from ATEC in Columbia; in those days low on cash, we ate rice and beans, and hired their staff. My competitor closed their office; I bought an airplane and opened offices in Phoenix and Chicago. I took all their customers and made a million bucks. Ugly and true, but just business. The world is fair.

The Baltimore business magazine, which wrote a disparaging and satirical article about my firm and me in 1993, claimed I "needled" my old employers. Actually, we crushed them. The Baltimore magazine would later publish a retraction, as I had made the INC 500, but also filed chapter 11. In no way did I file chapter 11 due to a lack of money. It was the only way; my crooked attorney’s said I could stop my wife, who was now hell-bent on being CEO, seeing me jailed, and the nanny banished to the shed she was from on the windswept prairie.
I made 103,000 dollars in 1988, mostly in my shorts on my back deck in the sun and a martini in hand, scaring realtors and bankers with tales of unbridled liability, dangerous chemicals, and even jail time. I never felt sorry for the banks, and still don’t. The lawyers are worse. I had my corporate attorney Peter, look at my library of our reports, and almost with tearful resentment stated that he couldn’t believe we made millions just producing paper. It was he and his whimpist minions, those bland souls or business wannabees, who are clueless, who would be my curse and my demise. And Rhonda fell right into their hands.
In the fifth year of my company, 1993, I made the INC 500, made 3 million bucks with nearly 40 staff in the 3 offices, was naked in Tahiti, and fell in love with Shel (I think in Hawaii, Kauai, where I stopped my rental car and made love to my 20 year old son’s nanny overlooking Waimaia canyon and the wettest spot on earth.), then went to the desert to try again, with love, not money or greed or proving a point, as a basis. OK-maybe leaving with a 20-year-old wife was making a point.


. I was really lucky that summer in 1980, before my first job with the state. The field camp in Canada was great, and I had a job before graduation in the so stated non-existent environmental field. Even then my peers hated me, as I would have worked for nothing. Mapping and visiting trout streams. My dream job. I would have worked for free. I could have made 50 grand on a North Sea drilling platform. I was in paradise with 8 bucks an hour and living weekdays at the Harrisburg YMCA, studying long familiar maps of my childhood; my fishing map was now my job. How can anyone be an atheist?

I had an interview that summer of 1980 before the field course in Canada. On the geologist trainee list a full year before, I had great grades in my major, so came up the list as people were hired off it. I was number one when I got my first, timely interview. This old guy in Harrisburg, with thick glasses named Carlisle. The staff made fun of him, as he had to exercise his weak eyes. He had been the state oil and gas geologist, and he was my first and biggest supporter. Without Carlisle, and his staff fishing parties to his York farm to catch pan fish and deplete his farm pond of fecund bluegills, neither HTS nor family, Tahiti cruises or my Shel love affairs would have occurred. Neither of us could be now imprisoned on this island paradise, either.

Well they needed people to map trout streams in the water quality program. I remember that February of 1981, going to the interview with jeans and boots, long hair and probably an engineer’s compass on my belt. There was a room of well-dressed be-tied and be-suited college grads waiting for a chance to work for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Resources. Well, I was, for some reason taken ahead of the rest and interviewed first, underdressed and speaking of my dad, fishing, and computers, I left knowing I had my first job-a water scientist-later environmental cop. Living on the 30 bucks a day and sleeping at the YMCA, going home weekends I was in heaven. The streams of my youth I would defend…my fish, maybe my dog from hunting on the farm, Ollie would resurrect.


It was there in Harrisburg I found the confidence, as my leaders trusted me; my peers as always raged with underhanded jealousy and hated me, to invent a new environmental practice. Combined with my desire for property, I mean real estate and wealth building dreams; I invented a way to protect buyers from polluted ground before the federal government said it had to be so, or at least defined how to do what had to be done. It was 1985, and I wanted more. Before actually starting HTS, I planned and advertised a seminar for realtors to learn about property environmental liability. This, only a year before the Federal Government said such liability existed by just owning or having an interest in property, I had 5 people sign up for that class. By the following year, I will have made my first million with the idea, and had 10 employees as excited and devoted as any entrepreneur could wish. Always the human tragedy, the myth of more.

The chimney house, my second or weekend home during the HTS years, was named by my only and namesake son. It has big brick chimneys and sits on a hill overlooking the Yellow Breeches of my trout fishing life, some 20 miles downstream of the hatchery and thorn spot. This was to be a battlefield in the means of both love and money. In 1994 my young soon to be new wife would give her virginity gently here to me, as my life slipped by as Breeches water to the Susquehanna. My "cabin" was 2 hours north of the main house, "big house", as my son says in Highland, Maryland. Many a party during the cash flush period were held here, while my plane and pilot waited at the New Cumberland airport for the fishing, sex, and booze to wear off.
In all honesty, the Chimney house in Lisburn, Cumberland County, was really a gentle place. It was home of a "super" ham radio station I built. I had friends in Antarctica I could whisper to while eating a breakfast each day. The lights in the house flickered as my power output from my hobby radio even overloaded light bulbs, and made my heart skip beets in the massive magnetic field created by the multi-kilowatt amplifier.
In the garage at this late time were my 2 mustangs. This is 1993. I had a 1983 SVO mustang I bought, along with a KZ 750 Kawasaki, when my high school girl Carol betrayed me after 10 years, and a restored 1966 red Shelby GT350 I kept just to make me hurt when I recalled the car shows I judged or the transmissions I pulled for my first girl in high school. It was my hobby too. And I had become a master mechanic and racer, car show judge and parts dealer- a side benefit of being poor-learning to fix your ride, better than new 25 years later. And I had become an expert racer, both on cars and bikes.

My first job was my dream job. Sitting at maps of the streams of Pennsylvania, looking at water data, and deciding where trout had survived or perished due to mining or other pollution. For me, as a boy who had peered into the crystal pond on our Bucks county farm, loving every bright moving copepod, it was where I was supposed to be.

Carol had been my friend since my father died. That winter in 1971, a lot of my friends just didn’t know what to say. We were young, and to lose a parent then in his or hers 40’s was not known in my little Bucks county town.
So the winter came to an end and mom let me keep my mini-bike that dad had gotten for me the summer before he got sick, before we left our idyllic Stone End Farm to move to New Britain. But the saving grace of New Britain was our dirt track by the trailer park adjacent to our place. Carol lived in the park, and that is how we met. I was impressed as older kids roared around on exotic machines like Husquevarna as, Jawas, and other odd machines. Then Kawasaki was rather new and had these frightfully fast motorcycles we all as school kids dreamed of. Cars went by on the road too.
As a car show person, judge, and pundit later, I still recall million dollar cars like Hemi-Cuda’s and Boss Mustangs simply driving past my house when I was 15. Later I would buy into that culture, but only my first girl understood the value. If I still had my cars today, I would again be a millionaire. Same for guns and stamps. Why do many women hate truly valuable collections? Is it they are masculine??
I saw an ad in the local paper for a Mustang for sale in 1978. I was in college, but had been hit in an accident so was expecting about a thousand dollars. Both Carol and I were by then, long-time car show people, now judging, selling parts, buying selling cars and just fixing our collection of 1964-66 mustang cars and my ‘Cuda.
We went to see this mustang. The guy, who looked like Milner, the racer from American graffiti, had taken the motor, a Ford boss 429 hemi out of his car and put it in a racing boat in Doylestown. The 1970 car sat pristine, with only a few miles on it. This guy got back from ‘Nam and wanted a race boat, and bought this rare car and pulled the motor. The car was dark green, brand new. I knew of the cars as a car show person. About 500 of these mustangs were shipped to a vendor called Kar Kraft by Ford to have this giant hemi 429 CID engine installed and the car otherwise race prepared. These are among the rarest of all collectable racecars.
I offered 2000 dollars and it was accepted.
Well my insurance payment was delayed and I missed the boss 429 car.
It is a million dollar car now-only one of several I touched and played with as a young man, including Cobras, Shelby mustangs, 6-Pak Cuda’s and almost any other race prepped car of the late 60’s or 70’s you can name.
Neither wife would get it-Carol would, although we never married as she had evil desires and plans that are dark and cold. She also had chosen to punish me by abandonment as Shel has tried over and over with comical results. As to teach me a lesson, only later to see her life, as always, dissolve into agony, with her only real supporter gone. I am worried about Shel for this. She hasn’t seen it yet. She is far more alone and desperate than I. I cannot find Carol, or any record of her. She may have died rich with her boyfriend, as she left me, primarily as I was a lowly state employee then and she wanted those bucks. I am glad she didn’t wait around.
She was my first love, right down to the famous first 17-year-old sex in the back of the proverbial dad’s 1965 red Chevy wagon. And Carol had been my first non-family road trip companion. In fact, it was Carol’s model of how she was on a road trip that was one reason I fell in love with Shel. Rhonda didn’t really like long drives to intentionally get lost, find a new motel or burger joint or just be on the road and in love. Carol and Shel did.
Perhaps that’s appropriate to my view of the February Northumberland strait now.
In their beings they, the women of my life, spiritually have a home beneath the ice in the strait, the harbour-far from the stoves of the smelt shacks, and far from any devotion that they deserve. Know I am not as bitter as my ladies say, but it makes for annoyingly good and painful prose.

Remember this tale is not only about my fishing haunts and trips, but also about the fact I made the INC 500, and how all of it twisted my mind and heart, and effected all around me. Yes, from a basement in Glenwood, Maryland I made a million bucks and more. I also messed up my marriage to a great lady, who has stood stalwart with my kids, if not being cold distant, unable to be a mother due to her own tortured childhood. I never would have had my kids if I could not afford the nannies. She just wasn’t up to maternalism or child-rearing at all but still producing my son for me, and cursing the very life of my daughter in her womb. I have video of her with my infant son where I am a neophyte millionaire in Glenwood, overjoyed with my namesake and roman-numeralled son. She looks in those films as if she was just diagnosed with terminal cancer.
In all fairness she has a soft heart inside, and loves animals and will help a stranger. It’s just the pain of her mother’s harshness that chills her. Her mother was from nearby here. Daughter of a drunken Newfie fisherman before being saved by Rhonda’s father, an American air force signalman based in Gander. The pain is transferred across the generations and has hurt my children. To Rhonda’s credit, she still fully thinks my next patent or trademark will again shock the pussy-engineering world and I, in both of their dreams can pay some kind of tribute to each of them to compensate them for my wanton life. Actually, I think Rhonda wants to go back to Bora Bora, and Shel is still mad, as she didn’t stay with me long enough for me to buy her a farmhouse here for her to steal from me
.
And it is said it is much harder to lose money once you have been rich than if you never had it. Shel can’t really quite feel what Rhonda’s life was like. She only had a few trips and limited time in the houses, mostly as a servant herself. She had less than 2 years of being the millionaire’s paramour, as described by Rhonda vicious feminist lawyer-A lawyer who had also been my number 2 managers’ lawyer in his divorce. My own staff smelled blood and plotted for scraps. I would scorch the earth, leave little behind, to go "home" to Arizona. I would steal money, become someone other than myself, and commit various other crimes and misdemeanours to protect my journey with Shel to Arizona. We would disappear, unknown and unfindable into the desert for 10 years, a wanted but illusive now bad-guy.
This is why I must plan my trip from this island carefully. -Another made up trip to a prison could await my desire to abandon my wanton nanny-wife and see my children while there is a little childhood left. I just hope after the 2 years of exile here that there are streams to take my son fishing that still flow. Rhonda could be waiting and planning were her thug of a boyfriend to keep me away from my kids. The kids are on my side, and willing now to hide me, as a Jew in Holland in the 1940’s.


----4------Thundershower Run

The point of this is fishing. Now we will drive along the route to the Allegheny Reservoir. But first we need to camp, with me as a millionaire to soon be not. We are going to camp in Westline.
Off route US 6 if you happen to have an old Atlantic Fishing map is a place called Westline. There is the Westline Inn, a rustic motel and bar with a pretty good restaurant. Many years ago it was the office of a chemical company that made things like turpentine and medicines from Pine tar. The stream there, Kinzua creek was hopelessly polluted by the Pennsylvania oil industry, by salt brine and grease. Over the decades, the stream has been saved and the trout returned.
This is a place of my odd and extreme past, as long ago; I had attended a small car show here after a huge drive around with Carol in1975. Long after forgetting the place, in 1981, I took the job with the state as an environmental geologist. The only business trip we took in 1981, as part of the program I was in, involved a long trip to Bradford, PA and a dinner at Westline Inn. A meeting with oil industry officials who wanted to kill our program.-Bradford was where my boss and fellow fisherman Carlisle Westland had worked in the oil patch, as we geologists say.
Years later, and by surprise, Kinzua Creek and fishing was good again here. Maybe we environmentalists had done some good after all. My son and I call a small tributary stream, behind the actual town of Westline, Thundershower Run, a tributary of Kinzua Creek or the "camping spot," a special place. In Bradford I met those oil officials in 1981. Long ago I was here, this place is now home of my son’s fishing spot, or the camping spot. I am amazed that both Carol with Cars, Rhonda, Shel, and my kids know this spot. It was at the pay phone here Rhonda told me she didn’t want my help to save the business. That was in 1994 when Rhonda and her minions finally killed my company.
"She said. "I don’t think it’s a good idea". We lost 50 million at least that moment, at Westline, Pennsylvania, at that payphone that I plead with Rhonda, right off the route 6 of my youth, in the front of the Westline Inn where I had dinner with oil company brass in 1981. So foreign to all but me, drawing them there. One of my favourite, but sad places. It is sometimes called a convergence, that this out of the way place has been an unlikely center for so many disparate, good and bad, grand and sad events. A friend once told me that I created a "cone of coincidence" that everyone in my world got caught in. So my early years seemed. Now, sitting quietly on the sea here, I wish to start a new whirlwind.





-----5----- Citrus, and Bombs

You really can’t understand Phoenix by just a visit there. Sky Harbour is a great airport, and there are a dozen shuttles to take you to bullshit. I guarantee it isn’t Arizona. I will now explain my Arizona, my reward, my sanctuary after D.C. and the hostility of wealth. As with most places, the valley of the sun, or the surface of the sun, as we say who live here, must be fully experienced.
I escaped in 1994 with about 30 grand that I probably didn’t deserve, and entered a new realm with the young lady I had dishonoured myself and family to be with. It was the dregs of an ill-conceived plan to convert my idea, my multi-million dollar business in to a fairytale life with my young wife. As you might guess, my success was limited-but I did better than you think. Stay with me.
Moving to Phoenix was good. It’s actually Glendale, just west of 43rd Avenue. A tough mixed place, but we had a community pool and later I would be an officer of our condo association. These were the best of years. This is an idyll. My children are east, only later as we will discuss did my son visit my Arizona home and the rim with me, and we would take trout by bucketfuls at places like Big Lake, Luna Lake, and in the Utah Dixie.
Our home in Glendale was a simple two-story town home. I had escaped the wrath of Rhonda and my creditors with just enough to make the down payment on the old condo in Glendale.

Ocotillo Road was to me paradise-a new life with my girl and no one knew where I was. There were the palm trees, and we had a pool out back-but most of all, I was with my girl. In my neighbourhood, we were all working people so I felt ok. Shel, constantly decorating the place, made it paradise.
We would Sunday’s go to the West of Glendale together romantically to seek the orchards. It was much, now, as I think, a bit like grave robbing. But then I didn’t know what I know now. My Shel and I drove out to the end of the paved roads in West valley
East on Bethany Home. If you are from Arizona, you know where the roads stop, and farm land starts-cotton, broccoli, cut flowers-and citrus of every kind. When I worked for the Army we would just go, as I said all was to be demo’ed, to get oranges and grapefruits before the trees would be cut to make way for the endless ticky-tacky homes and malls, sports complexes, and never ending golf courses that sucked the life out of the place. In the midst of it would be the out of place ranch house, usually 1920’s or 30’s vintage, sometimes older. Our little townhouse development had been a pecan ranch up until 1960. The ranch house was small and out of place on 43rd Avenue, now an office, swallowed now by 40 years of building the swelling city. But the pecan trees were still here, several kinds. I would pick buckets full and Shel would make cookies in the late "winter"..

Our trips to the farmland in the west valley were best on Sunday’s. There was less construction traffic and we could watch the jets at Luke AFB. Most all of the farmland now was being cleared for development except a few patches, islands of proud old fruit trees ready to be sacrificed, to provide glorious fresh food no more. In most places beyond the loop 101, they had cut off the water and 70-year-old citrus trees were dying for a drink. My wife and I took a few bushels of fruits and filled our little pick-up truck with what was fresh There were navel oranges, juice oranges, white and red grapefruits, and lemons. I never realized how dead and tasteless store-bought fruit back east was until I had a freshly picked grapefruits or oranges. We would eat them as we picked. Sometimes I would turn the irrigation valve on and sometimes water would flow. This, I thought would give us maybe another weekend or two of fruit picking before the place was demolished.
The access road was partially blocked by equipment, a big front-end loader and dump trucks. As a military ordnance contractor, I had been on the area before to secure the former air base areas and to make way for the new stadium. That was how I found the orchards. I remember cleaning and offering various 50 calibre rounds to local officials after digging up the unexploded chain gun ammunition that was used on the P-51 Mustangs that flew 1000’s of training missions here at the Luke AFB auxiliary airfields. These are clearly seen on topographic maps of the area as triangles in the desert.
The military would pack-up old ammo and put it on wooden pallets in a pit dug in the ground. This is called in my trade OB/OD, or ordnance burn, ordnance disposal. Then it was doused with fuel and set on fire, then run like hell. I can picture the young army air corps guys, soon off to fight the Japs in the pacific, burning old ammo then sitting at a bar. Dad would have worn the same uniform as those kids-but he never trained at Luke. He was in Mississippi and Utah before shipping out to the pacific just after the bomb was dropped.
But I can still taste fresh oranges from the trips while surveying the area, and how that will always affect my heart, as my place is in Arizona. These trees are now gone, and the concrete and asphalt marches west across the desert to make room for retirees and refugees from the past like me.

--6-- Interlude….FARM

The road past the farm was dirt at the end nearest the main road. I will never forget the entire family of pheasants crossing in front of us. My dad’s green rambler wagon, my sister and mom thinking of painting the bucolic landscape, gathering wildflowers that could be still life subjects. I thought of the small stream we past, the animals, my best friend my little mutt ticky, yes, this was to be paradise. I am not sure, but I think my parents moved us to Bucks County for me. I was sick with bronchial disease in the city. And here, under clear velvet blue skies, with my own pond, 88 acres of woods, and neighbouring farm the entire drama of my life would be written. As fast and found as any playwright making a story up as a fiction. My story is the best kind; it is true, the best and worst of humanity has been my stead-extreme poverty and wealth, true love, travel, guns…violence. It’s actually sad I really don’t have to make a story. I just will tell the truth, then we will fish along the breeches or river, or even in Alaska and you will feel better as a reader because you may not have suffered as much as I have. This makes good literature, and your professors, whom never have had any life, can ridicule me. I consider it an honour. Up yours. And enjoy the journey.

--7--Family Stuff

The farm as we called it became the transition point in all of our lives. In 1960, my father was an engineer for General Electric’s weapons unit. Dad had worked long and hard to be an engineer. His father, a World War I veteran, a hero of the rescue of the famed "Lost Battalion", had been hard working but I bet hard on my dad. Dad’s best day was probably when this amazingly beautiful and articulate nurse, Mae Hatfield, stopped by to assist his bed-ridden mom Sara Johnson Manduka. Later sparks flew, there was a kiss in the attic, and Mae Hatfield became Mae Manduke as my father went off to war and my mother to be 10 years later helped her new mother in law with her arthritis, and spread her amazing beauty and charm so that we had a family base after the war when dad got home. It was 1945.
Ten years later I was born, mom says as an accident. Mom had been captain of her Gym team, lied about her illness to become a naval officer and a Lieutentant nurse… But she was told to abort me, as her heart was bad from the rheumatic fever she had as a child. She had fought it, and beaten a fatal disease before penicillin, and she was bright as a star and tough as iron nails. That was my mom. Mom said no. I think both her faith and basic tenacity was the root of this. I know later, despite my business success and failure, that she loved my children so much, knowing if she had followed doctor’s orders, the darkness and loneliness would have eternalized, and my children, and me too. We would not be. Nor would my contemplation to return home and seek my end along the river, where I was once told, all roads lead to Harrisburg.

That winter I made a new business I was mad. Not that any one person there at the engineering firm, which was home, were awful people. They sure lacked passion. My wife and I had finally decided it was my turn to move our venue. That year before, I had tearfully left my government, environmental police job to go private with my friends at Dunn in Mechanicsburg. Now Rhonda had a big beltway chance and with my beltway bandit chance in tow, we bought the big home in Glenwood, Maryland. My great wife had to be absent to go TDY to places like Dallas and Atlanta, as techies must. All in all we made a son, Joe the fourth during this time. What a great night. I had the movie "Patton", in and it was the last movie I saw with my dad before he died that year in 1970. I was 15.
My wife was in the closet looking for clothes. Understand Rhonda is a very cute, tall, pretty woman in those days, although she had gained too much pregnancy weight. She was hiding in the closet and I was moved to assist. She came out and wanted to go to the bathroom. Later she was on the bed watching the TV and I offered a back-rub. She said, "Don’t touch me". I put on my shirt. Rhonda went to the bathroom and was there a while, then came out and went back to the closet to organize. I went into the bathroom to Pee and saw blood in the toilet. I put on my pants.

The little Mercedes 190 I had then was quite a little sports car. It was five speed and we came to the Olney hospital about 15 miles North of D.C. in only about 15 minutes. Old Doc Wagstaff was about to end his practice, but Joe the fourth was born that November 4, 1989 to a millionaire and his wife by C-section. It was only two blocks from where in 1991, about two years later that Shel, the new prince’s nanny would meet the family that were the benefactors of this island dream, that birth that made this all possible. The remorse and full love that made even this story true. Distal Georgia Avenue.

We were in the club. Beltway bandits. And had I made a fortune for my displaced yokel engineering brethren at ATEC. These were good southern folk-drawn up by construction and their suburban Washington drilling and testing work following southern developers into D.C. As to the environment or new rules-no clue. Such was the platform for my rise to the INC 500 in 1993 a new concept in real estate, and my own demise flattered and incredibly rich, tawdry on beaches in Tahiti and later Eleuthera-as a comedy of folly and the best story of all. All in all missing fishing, my streams in the limestone valley of my youth, the simple feelings and purity that made my childhood special. I had become an ugly automaton. Perverted by the American dream, drunk with excess and power, forgetting who I was. Dishonouring my fathers before me.

The first trip that we all took as a family to the North Branch of the Susquehanna was in 1965. I know that only because it was the following year that I started keeping a diary, without fail, on a daily basis for almost 35 years. My father had lost his defence contractor job in New Jersey with General Electric two years before. The house he had built for us in the jersey suburbs was his dream after growing up in a working class family in south Philly, going off to war, and then to Drexel to become an engineer. This had prepared dad to marry, raise kids, and pursue the new American dream of the 1950’s. It was not to last long, and I still think his disappointment eventually killed him. Our New Jersey home, one of the first built in Kingston estates; provided me with then wild surroundings, now unimaginable in that part of south jersey.
As a small boy, I would wander the woods with my ever-pregnant dog ticky in search of frogs, fish, dead (or living) snakes to take home and study. There was soon much construction including the new interstate highway, I-295. The road ran only a mile from my home, thru the woods I wandered. Much of it was marshy, and it was an ugly sight of environmental destruction, long before any rules. I still can see a small group of translucent fresh water clams violently trying to breath in a disappearing muddy puddle. So that part of my youth was transformed into a concrete horror, forever in my mind and heart.
One afternoon I simply walked away from my first grade class and went to the stream by my house. I found a dead black racer snake and dragged it home. Mom, unabashed and well rooted in science, showed me how to skin and salt the snakeskin, which I had for years. In fact it was draped on my ancestor’s sailing ship wheel that has bedecked my bedroom dresser for decades and still does. Nothing was said as to my absence from school, which would be a lifetime of education with my parents. Later, on the farm, I would take a correspondance course in taxidermy and actually each a few bucks doing mounts for local hunters. I was 12.

Mom thought little of public education, and preferred I study at home, just regurgitating enough 50’s B.S. to graduate and go to college. To my parents college was also suspect, but required for the entry into any job worth having. And make no mistake; I was to be a mechanical engineer like my dad, or a medical professional like mom. It was from my mother I learned about nature and animals, from my dad about fishing and later hunting and guns.oh yes, lots of guns.

We lost everything when we lost the house in Cherry Hill. I remember going out one night with my dad in P.J.s, as he plotted to turn the gas valve on and blow the place up to get the insurance. He changed his mind and we moved to a small rented duplex in Upper Darby, the actual town of my birth 9 years before. There mom worked at a doctor’s office and dad sold hearing aids, as the political world of 1965 needed no new defence engineers. Most were now bagging groceries and doing what dad was.
School for me was tough then. The other kid’s would sit and taunt me asking technical questions about astronomy or animals, my favourite subjects. It was only later when my older cousin Dave, my mom’s sisters younger son, that I found out they were making fun of me for knowing about such things. I suspect some of those kids were later the bankers I charged a fortune to look at their property for contamination. Finally the nerd with thick glasses from the back of the class got his day. But I wasn’t always such a podgy nerd.



--8-- Wyalusing Rocks and the Cabin

That summer of 1965 we packed up most of the pets, my above-mentioned cousin Dave (who was a pure city boy) and we wound our way to the place on dad’s fishing map was labelled "Wild River", near Towanda, and a place then called Wyalusing Rocks in Bradford County.
It was late June, school out, and very balmy. The area where the river flowed was farmland. Once, Marie Antoinette had been scheduled to relocate here to avoid the issues of the French Revolution. She didn’t make it, but plenty of other French settled here, including one Charles Homet. He is important here as we asked a local farmer, an ancient Mr. Smith with a still out back where we might rent a summer cabin and maybe a rowboat. Well he happened to have a tiny yellow cabin with a big antique wooden radio and a wood-burning stove at the old Homet’s Ferry crossing.
The back road ended there at the river, but the road obviously continued along the other side. So while my mom and sister painted the mountains, round-pebbled beaches we would, my cousin, dad, and I fish the river.
The river was swift and clean with 2 islands just above the old ferry road. Downstream, the river turned sharply east, moved by an ancient Appalachian mountain I have come to call Joe’s mountain, for all the Joe’s of this tale.
My cousin Dave was a skinny, blonde boy of 12. This was his first trip to the country and he was staying close to dad, his own father driven off by his greedy and downright nasty mother. I had rowed the little aluminium boat that went with our cabin out and shoved the bow onto an island.
Moments later, in the late morning sunlight, I heard my cousin yell in a nasal, shrill voice "Uncle Joe! Uncle Joe! A muskellunge-the first I had ever seen had taken Dave’s red and white spoon and rocketed straight out of the river not 30 feet from me It dwarfed tiny Dave, shaking its head to disgorge the dangling spoon, its dark vertical bars on a greenish background. I had never seen a fish that large. One splash, silent, line broken.
From that day forward, even at that time with 5 years of fishing under my little belt, I was a fisherman. And this spot at Homet’s Ferry is a sacred place of real spirits, ghosts of dad and that fish, that summer of fresh wood-stove cooked walleyes, the smell of manure from the dairy farm, and the smell of a clean, fished filled rural paradise.

We also drove around the area in our green and white rambler wagon looking for other fishing spots. We left the ladies to drive to Terrytown on the other side of the river. The fishing map did show roads along the river course there. We found a spot with a steep bank and caught an almost incredible number and variety of fish. Mostly on the small side, bass, pike, and walleyes, a member of the perch family. We had dinner for sure. Mom would clean, roll in cornmeal and fry them up in nice smelly bacon fat. Imagine these days living thru that to tell about it.
We were getting ready to leave Terrytown to cross back to the cabin when someone drove by in an old truck and yelled. I didn’t hear it, still elated with our catch, but dad said "short pants". Dad usually wore shorts fishing on warm summer days. Apparently this was a taboo in Appalachia, and the two farmers in the pick up had yelled, "faggot, short pants ", at dad. This was unwise of them. Very calmly, saying nothing dad took off with Dave and me in the Rambler. He reached under the seat and pulled out a metal hand axe that we used for camp wood, at least we had. Dad, driving madly in the passing lane, left hand draped on the wheel, his right chopping with the hatchet yelled, "you lousy bastards, I am gonna hack your fucking faces to bits". There was abject terror on the farmer’s faces, who went off the road into the ditch. My heart was pounding. Dad put his axe away quietly and we calmly went back to the Homet Ferry cabin and ate a fish dinner.
Another odd thing occurred that trip. My mom’s parakeet "Peekie" had developed some sort of a bird "cold". Mom sent me to the chicken farm up the hill from the river with two missions, buy a little fresh vegetable to go with our pike and see if they had any bird medicine. Peekie had been an important part of my life as long as I remembered. I would feed him bits of egg and bread at breakfast in the morning, and he would cheerily chirp. Well on approaching the farm I saw a very gaunt elderly man stiffly standing with a rusty hoe. He was wearing striped bib overalls and a cap, like a painting. He was tending yellow wax beans. I asked him how much for the beans, and he gave me a big paper sack full of fresh yellow wax beans for a quarter. Quarters were silver then. As for medicine, he gave me a small bag of red powder and said follow the instructions. He seemed overjoyed to talk with a young person on the subjects of birds and beans. Well our parakeet survived many more years along with my dog Ticky and our cats Mildred and Herman, the other pets that came with us on that trip to the little yellow cabin.
There are three surviving watercolors my mom painted on that trip. One is of the fishing spot at the ferry crossing-near the axe incident. The other is the Homet Ferry store, which still stands but is no longer a store, a short walk from the old cabin. Mom painted another watercolor of me and my sister sitting along route 6 at the Wyalusing Rocks overlook. The river and islands are seen down below in the summer-green valley mists. I go there when I am sad for my son, dad, mom, or my sister who was my first teacher of reading and math. I shall return and maybe stake a claim here again with my children, Shel has also been here, as with everyone else important in my life. How they react to the beauty of the river valley here, and the nostalgia of Yellow Breeches, speaks of their character. These are the places that define who I am.
In fact, just before being sent to prison for child support, I had made a deal to buy a home near the French Azilum valley. It was a dream deal in a dream place. Shel wanted to move to PEI. Rhonda would not have a situation where the kids may want to be with me, and she loses the child support she was collecting and saving for her retirement. This is the real reason Rhonda put me in jail-so I couldn’t move to my Monroeton house and let the kids visit.
I was happy to be coming home and to be starting a new Army contracting business. Rhonda planned with her boyfriend to bury me, scare Shel, and then Shel sold everything and moved here. These memories taint the glory of my youth. I assure you that in the future I will be more careful with whom I trust my joys as well as sorrows. But I would have trusted Shel with my life and did, and trusted Rhonda with the children’s happiness and summers along my river. I had cast pearls; I was wrong, and very sad for them both as I am for a heart of stone. If I do go back this spring, it will be with my son and daughter if she wishes. We will get a small room or camp, as that is all my pension will allow. My adult women will stay in their respective paradises.
My sister would be welcome, as we still talk of those days. My sister Aprille is 9 years older and an art and music prodigy. She has been on disability her entire life. She is brilliant and erratic too. It pains me Shel would not want to be with me there, and Rhonda has no care for it, as there is no money in it. So I will play with my kids in the sun, God willing when I leave my now nice little place here on the island. But it’s a loveless place, too far from that set of memories. Lifetime grows short and I have to make peace with my infinite truths, introduce the children to them, and decide where I will be. I can only hope that our memories will forge the desires and meanings my family has given me. Time is so short-so much wasted on these marital discords, useless empty dreams and greed of them take me and mine to where the fishes leap and the osprey flies, and I can today in the summer, wear shorts along the Susquehanna.



--9--Farm

We had moved to the farm that fall of 1965. I think after our summer experience at the cabin, we were all sick of the city. I had pneumonia several times and the air was awful. I did enjoy walking to the sporting goods store and buying fishing tackle. And I had friends in 4th grade. One, my first or second girlfriend depending on who is asked was one tall brunette, Anastasia Ott. She openly wept on my last day of school. It was a friendly place. But once again we were on the move to a new horizon. This one, almost 30 miles away in a place called Bucks County was a real farm, with acres and a pond, a barn and an fruit orchard and a stream. It was a colonial manor far from the city. The road was partially dirt, and I could have as many pets as I wanted. I opted for a calf, a goat and geese. My mom wanted chickens and cats. My sister grew pumpkins she sold at a little farm market in the nearest town Chalfont; we picked out my Shepard collie, Ollie from the animal shelter. He was to become my best friend. I would soon first shoot the guns and hunt the farm for Thanksgiving pheasant. Ollie would be my hunting dog and the most loyal friend I ever had, other than my own mother.
This is about stone end farm on Curley Mill Road. This is about the best years of life of my family, and how issues and man and the environment, then poorly defined and hazy set my path in life.
Mom wanted me to go to Temple medical school. Dad was almost tearful when I showed no interest in engineering. How proud he would have been to see me rebuild those engines from a tech manual, or manage whole divisions of pesky civil engineers years later, actually having inherited his mechanical savvy and love of design and machines. Although mom; later respected my concern for my streams and fish, our water, and my wealth that it indirectly brought, I somehow always thought she really wanted me to be a doctor. As she had wanted to be, but was held back to due to rheumatic fever, and getting only her B.S. in Medical Technology from Penn.
That fall on the farm I remember very well. The apple orchard was brimming with the fruit of ancient trees. Only much later did I put together the big wooded barrels in the cellar with the fruit trees. As was popular in colonial America, they were making cider. I mean the kind that makes one tipsy cider.
The fall flowers were splendid. I was 10 now (almost) so dad pulled out the 22 rifle that he had shot with mom, and my son still has. I was a good marksman. He bought a 12-gauge shotgun for himself, and a Stevens 20 gauge single shot for me. After endless hours of safety training, we shot clay pigeons. There would be no hunting until I was a good shot. Dad said all it takes is one shot, any more and you are just lousy with a gun. I hold to this truth today and I am still an expert with anything that holds gunpowder and a bullet.
That January of 1966 I started keeping a diary. It was a little brown one-day one-page book. I kept the habit almost 35 years, only to lose all my diaries but a few when I crashed and burned in Yuma years later, sad and longing for what I now know was everything I loved, then in the person of my young wife.
That first diary entry we had just gone shopping on Saturday night, January 22, 1966. Dad had bought a blue Volkswagen Beetle that he loved. He had a far trip to King of Prussia to his engineering job there. It was the first car I later drove on the farm, and almost backed into the barn wall. On this night it was snowing and we had gone to Montgomeryville to an odd place called the Mart. We all packed in to go to this indoor flea market really in the middle of nowhere. There was livestock, chickens and goats, produce; odds and ends-odd food stands run by people speaking German and Polish. Meats, pizza, and drinks. We loved to waddle around with the old farmers there. It was a weekend treat. Today that place is long gone. It was replaced by a modern mall, expensive condos, and lots of asphalt and concrete at the intersection of routes US 202 and US 309.
But I can still smell the popcorn and feel my dad’s V.W. slide off the mart’s driveway into the ditch. Not to worry, we all had family fun. It is clear and a great little memory.

More than anything is my memory of my times exploring our 88 acres with Ollie and/or my sister. The rear of the farm was an open field of green lawn, flowers and dogwoods and cherry trees. Beyond was a 20-acre cornfield rented to our dairy farmer neighbour, Mr. Lewis. Beyond that were swampy woods, more fields and ancient colonial structures begging for investigation. Across the road was the rest of our place. A swampy field, a, stream that had small fish and a dense thicket of a wood, brimming with black raspberries, black berries and stickers that coated Ollie and us.
Far in the Northwestern corner of the land was a pond. It had been excavated long ago. The original part of our home had been a colonial mill and icehouse. The pond was dug when Bucks County was still a British colony. Spring fed and loaded with clear water, colourful water plants and lots of salamanders, frogs, spring peepers and toads, I had my first laboratory. I read every book on pond life and amphibians, and plants that I could.
Once I brought home many salamander eggs to hatch in jars. I had failed and a whole generation of red efts died because of lack of oxygen. I was miserable, remembering the destruction in my New Jersey woods. It was my first lesson. God and nature know best to leave it as it is. Later to my youthful horror I would stock the pond with sunfish, bass, and catfish after intense study. But the pond was too small, ancient, pure and delicate and it actually died, at my hands. I remember seeing a big ball of tiny catfish boil up in what was once my clear pond. Out of balance and control I murdered a treasure. The only saving grace was that this was way before anyone cared but me. They had started to build houses up gradient of my pond and it silted in. Everything but the slime died. I will never forget that sight, only a few years after first studying my pristine pond, it was dead.
In another ill-fated attempt to learn about nature I tried incubating goose eggs in my room, under a bright light. I loved the fat little greenish goslings and wanted to observe their hatching. Well, the light was too bright for me to sleep and I covered the light with a blanket. My room caught fire and almost set the whole house ablaze. I was never so scared and in shock. All of my plastic and wooden models of army planes and navy ships I had built over years were gone, all the clothes, but my wood turtle tut survived hiding behind a door. I had caught him while fishing with dad on French Creek (odd for a land turtle) and now he was like a second dog. It was years later tut would escape and mom feel awful about his box blowing over. It was years later the fire I caused probably caused us to, in an odd way; to have to move from the farm. It was then, after we moved in 1971 dad became sick and died. We all loved that place, to the very core of bone. Mom painted a large oil painting of the beloved flag stone back patio on the farm. It was done with great love, my golden chain tree and its heaven scented blossoms, Ollie and the cats, my sister with fresh sunflowers and a basket of pumpkins grown by her hands, and a little me with my beloved goat kid Hilda on my lap. This painting is missing now and unless it’s hanging in some sharp-eyed Bucks County collector’s room out west, I fear it was lost by me in Yuma, along with the diaries and many family treasures during the time of madness.

Amazingly, I still have the detailed hand-coloured map of the farm I made in 1968. It shows trails named boodles, cuddles, tut, or Ollie. And many other named for pets or places s or people met on those trips we took to fish or hunt, or just characters my sister and I ran into in our new and quaint rural lifestyle.
Dad and I also hunted almost each weekend and I went out each nice day with Ollie in the fall after school. We had pheasants and deer all around; we would shoot pheasants and have spectacular meals mom would prepare of the finest stuffed and roasted bird. The brightly coloured feathers as well as those of my bantam roosters I used in fly tying.
Ollie would always gently bring the bird to us, that wonderful mutt, often embarrassing some neighbours who hunted with us with purebred spaniels that were dumber than bait. Sometimes we had rabbit too. Mom disapproved of hurting the animals, but knew how to make hasenpfeffer.
We never took any big game on our place. Dad and I would suit up and go to Broad Mountain in Carbon County for opening Monday of antlered deer season. It is always the Monday after Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania, and almost no one outside Philly goes to school or work, for days. Trout season, the second Saturday in April as it was in those days is similar, a de facto state holiday. My birthday is November 25 and I was born the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 1956. We could always hunt and celebrate my birthday.
Years after dad died, I would go on pretty rugged winter deer season campouts with some of the same high school buddies from trout season. Except Joe of Kinzua and Gums fame who didn’t approve of hunting.
.Dad bought me a model 94 Winchester for my twelfth birthday that I inexplicably later put a scope on. I loved that powerful 32 special lever action gun. Those trips with dad hunting in the Pocono’s, our breakfasts at Steve’s diner in Jim Thorpe, the cold, the camaraderie, are the he best memories of my life along with the fishing trips. But I turned 12 in 1968, the age to be legal to hunt on our land. And I already had been fishing for years with dad (and mom and Aprille, who went and watched only or painted). Dad died 4 years after he bought me my Winchester, and being too sick to go in the fall of 1971, we really only went deer hunting to the Pocono’s a few times, maybe 4 in all over just two seasons. I have only been hunting with my son once, at the Monroeton house in 2003 before my woman gave me the shaft. That’s 5 years counting this coming season. He has asked to go hunting time and again, as he has the family guns now. It’s been too long since that snowy Bradford county hunting trip at the house soon to be mine, like a dream stolen from us. I had a Browning 7 MM Remington magnum A-bolt then. I had bought the canon for Arizona Elk hunting that never materialized due my March disaster in 2004. Some guns survived packed away in storage for me when I returned the next fall.
I had to sell the guns, including my Colt Python and the Elk rifle to pay for gas when I was stranded in Yuma in 2005, when Rhonda took almost all of my paycheck by surprise in Arizona. I had no money, no place to go but to my kids house. I had a great job but had no legal way or time to solve the problem. I really don’t care about me, it hurt my son, daughter, and Shel My mom died in 2004 when I was just about to get out of prison. Rhonda promised to make nice to me on my mothers deathbed. I know all that killed her too. She had had health problems at 85 years old, but when Shel abandoned me when Rhonda’s boyfriend threatened to have her jailed too, mom was devastated.
She had finally accepted that I truly loved my Shel, even inviting Shel to stay with her until my ordeal was over, which was unprecedented. Shel was always right to come to PEI, although it broke my heart and a dream of the river home, as Rhonda would have made our lives hell with or without prison threats and a thug of a boyfriend. It was much better that Shel be safe, and although what she has wrought is very bad, it is better for me and my family that Shel is safe from Rhonda here. If she wasn’t, all of these past 15 years would truly be in vain, and I would be a true failure as a husband, unable to protect my wife. Although mom always wanted Rhonda and I to get back together, she finally saw the ugliness of the money issues, and pained, as she loved Rhonda too, she died too soon, very sad because off all of our nonsense. Most of all mom loved her two grandchildren profoundly, and will for all of eternity.
It was good that they lived close and got to be with my mother. This is a permanent blessing. It is sad we were all too poor for a funeral, my sister a basket case, and mom’s ashes just gone away with no memorial. I know she really didn’t care, but I would have liked her to be buried by dad in New Britain. Maybe someday I can at least have the stone inscribed. Mae Hatfield Manduke, August 11. 1919 to August 10, 2004. August 11 is also my daughter’s and my father’s father’s birthday. Fate is odd.
.
My son has stopped asking to go hunting with me during my Canadian exile here, and maybe also due to my poverty and his feeling that I may not come home at all (shared and often expressed also by my daughter). Another reason to go home and hit the woods, and the streams before it’s too late for me, too. It has been almost a year as this is written since I have seen my children. No matter what, as I write this essay collection, I feel that a trip away from this island, probably forever is required for both universal justice and my sanity.




-Prologue II

-10--Interlude…River thoughts

So I wanted to tell of a time still vivid of a Pennsylvania river.
It’s not that good of a place to go but it is a fishing story. A time when I caught my mother.
The amber waters of the Juniata are legend among anyone who has fished in the East. My memory is of Mexico and Matawana, places along this river. These are places that my dad had found on the fishing map, places where my daughter Alexis caught her first fish and the place I had first seen a wild small mouth bass.
This river, which finds its outlet to the Susquehanna at Clarks Ferry, derives from truly wonderful mountain trout streams west and North of the places I have named. My dad, always with the fishing map in tow, led us here long ago. We came the first time in the old Rambler to find a place different and yet rural…a place we could visit in a single day out, unlike Wyalusing and Homet ferry. Here, there was a wild river too. The banks here and there with campsites and a really unknown fishing place, as per my dad. It was only the old map that suggested a place for bass.
The shore fishing near Matawana was unknown. Then to a small boy, it seemed liked a raging torrent, muddy and wide, in the mountains, a great accompaniment to the upper Susquehanna, but closer to home.
As a child, I did not know that the backcast could be dangerous.
I cast back and caught my mother, who was sketching, in the eyebrow. There was no harang, my dad, the always battlefield soldier packed my mom off to the hospital in Lewistown, some 20 mile distant. I recall this in great detail. Not for that moment so much, but when I caught a big salmon years later south of Anchorage, Alaska, when a hook flew out of a snagged pink salmon, among the natives and scavenging bears, I found a treble in my face and was taken to the hospital. The laughing doctor said welcome to Alaska, and removed the hook It was 1983, and 1966 all again.
So trout season has come and past here both on the Island and in Pennsylvania. I noticed the season here because the local radio said fishing was on, and although not the big day it once was, many older folk still kept the tradition. For me, an off-islander, it came and went only as a thought of my times past with dad and later friends at the Yellow Breeches. Here, April 15 is set in stone as opening day, as the second Saturday in April of my youth. But here, mid-April sun is hollowed by a cold, ice-driven sea breeze. I picture sluggish trout of the sea as reluctant as I am to wander to a place to call a fishing spot. I saw old folk, at a town hall I cannot name, meeting ritualistically at a time and place accorded, to eat a meal prior to casting a line, now alone. No young ones were there. It was as if an old tradition, slowly dying was being played out. It was on the local TV. It made me feel sad, as if this day I should have been at Yellow Breeches with my children. Even then the fishing would not be as good, and there would be no way to tell anyone why it was different. Here a cold, icy, ocean breeze swept across the street by my home. It is only a few miles to where the old stalwart fisherman, only a few years ahead of me, cast the line on this opening day. I bet each one at the traditional opening breakfast had more memories in their hearts that cannot be told and that of lost friends, fish, and loves. But they really wanted to go out cold and face the sunrise. Memories and stiff, old joints do that. But the warm glow of memory, even on the cast or dreams made for long lost memories will push to the stream banks.
Dad was so excited. Here, along the muddy bank, my father caught his first small mouth, It seemed we could do nothing wrong. He cast a small plug, a rocky junior I think, and in seconds caught an angry small mouth right along the bank of the snow-melted high river. The fish was golden yellow bronze, and about 2 pounds. I asked dad if we could keep him, as I also hooked a smaller fish at the same time. We felt the sacred connection to take the fish and make a meal as in Wyalusing, but the season was closed. My dad was strict on rules, and in a lonely place where only we were, we released our catches until the law and God allowed another encounter. Perhaps until that time I never knew how honourable my father was. On his deathbed, I recounted this. He was weak and pale from cancer, the day before the end. He said, "Luke, I am a fighter. But I may not make it." I was at his bedside. "Take care of your mother and sister". I told him that if I were half the man he was I would be a success.
The next day they took his withered wan form out in a black bag. My sister had announced, "He’s dead". I was 10 feet across the hall. My mom said she saw a thin black smoke arise, the angel of death.
I was 15. I grew up that day. It was the second day of the New Year, 1972.
The past is history. The future has not happened, All we have is the present-the present is our only eternity. To recount life through fishing is a vision that you may not appreciate. But fishing, or the thoughts of fishing are the vehicle, which makes meaning for me. What makes meaning in the chaos for you is your own affair. It’s totally personal. Perhaps, in this, you may find your own meaning.

On the Travels

--11--Alaska

You will never know how small you truly are on this world until you visit and really tour Alaska. I am not talking about a posh cruise to southeast out of Vancouver or Seattle; sipping wine and watching the glaciers melt away. I mean the interior. Fly-in fishing, camping off the trail. The real wilderness.
Just before I graduated from Temple University’s Geology program in 1980, a few of the seniors had a chance for exotic field camps. Our standard field geology class was, that summer, to be coastal New England and maritime Canada. The Canadian portion was like a trip back in time for me, having been a traveller there in the 1950’s with my family.
Well my friend Kate had a departmental scholarship as I did and we got to pick our choice of field camps. She picked the University of Alaska’s class and we were all envious. I decided just to go to Canada, not wanting to be away from family that long.
It was 3 years later, after I had found my dream environmental job with the state of Pennsylvania, and my high school sweetheart had taken off with a good friend, that I needed a serious fishing trip. I called Kate and her boyfriend, who lived just North of Fairbanks in Fox, and said I wanted to visit.
I landed in Fairbanks, after a plane change in Anchorage, on June 20, 1983 at midnight in the bright glow of the low summer sun. Kate worked for the environmental chemistry lab in Fairbanks and her boyfriend was starting a motorcycle rental business for tourists. He had bought a used BMW enduro, which, along with an old stake body truck, were mine to use for my 2-week visit. I would ride the BMW up the pipeline haul road towards the Arctic Circle and chicken out. With the old truck I ground its non-synchronous transmission and just looked around locally.
Kate lived in a log cabin in the woods with no running water or other facilities. The mosquitoes in the outhouse were as thick as dust in a sandstorm. It was very cold at night even with the fire going. Kate was mad that a cow moose had eaten most of her cabbages. I was an arctic neophyte and had never seen a cabbage that huge. The never setting sun grows some HUGE vegetables.
I found Fairbanks to be a rough town. I was still young, and then a bit squeamish. Some places were just best avoided. The pipeline boom had really changed the town I was told. There were new millionaires everywhere to be met. Folks from New England who opened pizza shops, or tool rental places, or brothels..Oh yes, real brothels, at least so I was told. The only experience I had there was in a small bar on "Eskimo row" where I stopped for a beer. A tiny drunken Eskimo woman ran at me and yelled something I was sure was unflattering in a dialect.
We went into town to take our showers at the YMCA and had dinner at the Chena Pump House, a good then nouveaux local eatery. There were a lot of young people there with a lot of money. Pipeline boomers. As a lowly and young state geologist, I felt a little out of place. I remember that everyone was using 100-dollar bills there. Back home, this was rarely seen then. I mentioned it, and a haughty (and pretty) young lady just said if I couldn’t afford it here," just go back to where you are from".
I found similar attitude years later in Arizona. First moving there, the summer heat can be truly shocking in the low desert. Later you learn to enjoy it, as tourists complain, not knowing that they are but 2 hours from a ski slope and the cool mountains.
The Chena River there was mostly glacial silt, so I didn’t do any fishing there.
A high point for the motorhead in me was a drag race in town. In those days, the Alcan, or Alaska Highway that runs thru and to Fairbanks was closed down on a Saturday for drag races. A Corvette rolled and there were serious injuries. The race wasn’t held again. What an amazing thing to witness that would never happen today with insurances, torts, and lawyers.
So went my first short introduction to Fairbanks and that area of Alaska. After leaving Fox and saying farewell to my friends, I had a few days with the rental car and I wanted to drive back to Anchorage and fly back to Philadelphia after seeing the Kenai Peninsula.
Then, the Steese highway from Fairbanks to Anchorage was a muddy, torn-up disaster in many areas. Otherwise it was a good road.
The weather had been amazingly clear, and Denali, or Mt. McKinley jutted up above the rest of the Alaska Range like a giant white triangle. I would learn only later that just to see "the mountain" is often a rare privilege. I would come here many times over the next decade, with friends and family, never seeing Denali out of its clouded top.
You see the mountain is just so damn tall that it creates its own weather systems. People die climbing it often, flying out of Talkeetna, in an attempt to succeed in one of the most dangerous climbs on earth.
Fairbanks is a long day drive from Anchorage. I pressed on down south of the biggest city and found a campground along a little stream called Portage Creek. It was a rugged camp spot, not far from the highway. The valley between Portage glacier and the WWII base and town of Whittier is a wall of waterfalls. This is the best sound to fall asleep to, under the midnight sun and smell of pines and bogs.
A car carrying rail line connects the road at Portage to Whittier and the ferry to Valdez, across Prince William Sound.
My out of state fishing license was very expensive, and I was anxious about my first real life encounter with a salmon. I had grown up with a coffee table book called "The Treasury of Angling". It was a book club item, filled with pictures of exotic things to a 10 year old. I memorized this book. Things about King salmon and Arctic Grayling. Well thanks to God, and a good education and friends, here I was. The best fishing on the planet.
I took a drive up the dirt road about half a mile to a better pullout and stream access. The stream looked just like any eastern trout stream, but with one difference. There were huge fish lined up taking turns, it seemed, at swimming up the riffle there. A few ladies, obviously native American, were doing their always-excellent job of snagging salmon. So too were the Black bears ponderously loping along, just like us, but picking at dead fish. I also the learned Eagles, such a big deal back home, were just the crows here. Flocked together at fish carcasses like and as numerous as crows, our national symbol is just another simple scavenger here. Intentionally snagging a fish would have been illegal for me as a non-native fisherperson. (Most of the natives fishing here were women and girls) But since the Pinks, which were now the run in the stream, I had to try and convince a strike with a big nasty spinner.


Well, a 5 poundish fish, a big hook-jawed male seemed to attack my lure, at least it was in his mouth and I with great difficulty netted the salmon that almost broke my light spinning rod. I know Alaskans and other experienced fisherman now balk at Pink salmon, sometimes called erroneously "Dog salmon"’ as it is and was sled dog food. The same is true of the Grayling, which my Alaskan friends have considered the Carp of the north.
Well it was my first trip and I cooked that salmon with oil and a cornmeal coating and ate about 3 pound s of it. It was great.
Of course, then, I hadn’t had fresh King or even better Red or Sockeye, nor Grayling.
I didn’t return to Alaska after that two-week trip until 1985. My wife to be, who was not an "outdoorsy" woman, came with me to fish and camp, her first time doing those things. Wow-what a great place to start in those pursuits. Unfortunately, she was terrified to sleep in our tent, as there were bear warning signs all around. She did manage to catch her first, and close to only ever fish. I met a guy named Jeff King who was a Kenai River guide. My lady caught and released a nice 45-pound female King salmon that July. We finished our visit with some touring and stays at Anchorage’s nicer hotels. She would return with me a few more times, but usually stayed at the hotel while I was out fishing or camping alone.
She did take a beautiful long hike with me into the Kenai Mountains. We went about 10 miles off the road in the rainforest and found a small lake. It was brimming with Grayling and I caught my first of many Grayling there. We made a small campfire and shared the cooked fish. It is one of my fondest memories of that relationship with the mother of my two beautiful children.

By the way, the Grayling isn’t so bad. Its scientific name, Thymallus, refers to the thyme-like scent of its flesh, which is soft, white, and sweet. Its better that any stocked eastern trout, I assure you, a beautiful and exotic creature. Later, I would find them again at the highest elevations, oddly stocked on Arizona’s eastern rim.
Later I would bring my father in law, friends, and my second wife on a trip that I had down like a tour guide. We would fly into Anchorage and rent a car. Then we drive North to Denali park. Inside the park I had found a mining camp that had rooms near Denali and Wonder Lake. Wonder Lake is a jewel-like place often seen on postcards. The Snow capped mountain reflected into the mirror of this pristine lake is one of the most beautiful experiences and witnesses of my life. The entire road back into Kantishna, along the park access road is almost 100 miles of incredible scenery.
One shrinks and seems to fall away into nothing while viewing distant braided rivers at polychrome pass. There is a visitor center at Eielson, the last civilization, at least back then, until Kantishna.
Kantishna is or was a gold mining camp. I befriended Roberta, the owner, shortly after she broke up with her gold miner husband to start a tourist accommodation, the Kantishna roadhouse. I would return every summer here as the camp grew and Roberta prospered. Eventually it seemed that only Japanese were visiting, so I stopped going there. Not because of the foreign tourists-it had just become too commercial, and very expensive.
A new dining hall and motel were built, the bears and moose, caribous, marmots, eagles (of course), foxes were all there.
When I took that very first trip to Kantishna with my first wife, it required a special travel permit to leave the main park road. It got you away from the ubiquitous buses of summer photo seekers, often approaching and getting mauled by angry grizzly bears. It was a wild ride then, and I miss that Kantishna.
The next stop was Homer. This incredible place is perhaps the most beautiful town on earth. At least if you drive up the hill behind Homer, and view its fishhook like peninsula over the Cook Inlet. Here we would always charter a trip for Halibut. This was a great opportunity to get seasick and catch a truly giant flounder. My biggest was only 108 pounds. But it along with the rest of the catch butchered, packed, and Fedexed back home was fish for an extended family for a year. I don’t eat halibut anymore. I haven’t since I gave away the freezer I especially bought to hold Alaska fish at my home in Mechanicsburg, PA, the chimney house. I gave away the freezer, my well-used collection of Halibut cookbooks and remaining fish before I moved to Arizona in 1994.
The breath-taking ferry ride from Whittier to Valdez is better than the over priced cruises. The 10 hours or so as I recall then was a start at a warm, nice little port with cars loaded on. The food was fist class then at first, but that changed over time.

I was always amused later as the ship progressed that the be-shorted and be-tee-shirted neophytes would soon be scrambling inside as we approached the glaciers and icebergs. I always brought my parka so I could stay out on deck and watch for whales and seals aplenty.
As great as that ferry ride is, the drive out and UP from Valdez (pronounced VAL-DEEZ) and the oil terminal is truly awesome. Writing about this, one truly runs out of dramatic adjectives. None really do it-language fails, go there and see it for yourself.
I remember taking this drive out of Valdez with my second wife for the first time. She is outdoorsier than wife one (not a lot). In the cool morning fog, she shrieked at seeing the absolute wall of snowy rock we were driving towards away from the pipeline terminal. It had no top in the fog, and we crossed across beautiful pond-pocked tundra and down on my next traditional accommodation at Copper Center, after passing an endless array of towering waterfalls.
This rustic little motel was always my stop over place. It was quiet and comfortable and great to stop after a sleepless night on the ferry and the drive over the huge mountains.
The Denali highway goes east to west from the area just north of Copper Center back to Denali Park. This completes the round trip back to the park and back to our starting point, Anchorage. Along this dirt road, the Denali highway traverses amazingly interesting glacial terrain. Geology buffs, like me, get to ride on eskers, on top of kames, and see all kinds of moraines. Also, along her are a plethora of "ditches" containing vast quantities of Grayling and Dolly Varden trout. "Dollies" as they are called, are held in the same "esteem" as Grayling are by Alaskans. But for those of us from "outside", as they say, Dollies may be another new species to catch.
The mid-point for me along the Denali highway was a place called "Denali". Then, it was a support camp for the adjacent gold mine. They had small rooms and a restaurant in a small metal Quonset hut. The food was ample and hearty-the miners were good company for a geologist. It would have been better on those trips to leave the wives home. In the "Sluice Box" café, there are dollar bills everywhere with names of visitors, as well as any other paper currency you can think of. Telling the assembled miners I was an Alaska licensed geologist, the miners offered me 5 ounces of gold to fly up in the chopper with them for a day and look at their placer mining and make suggestions. I couldn’t go along, not wanting to leave my wife alone nor be late for our return flight to Baltimore.
On my last trip to the Kenai River, at Kenai, my wife and I both caught 50-pound class July Kenai Kings. I had an old friend along who hadn’t fished too much. He asked me, "Joe, how will I know when I have a fish?" Back trolling on the wild rushing river is a heavy feeling to the rod. I said, "You’ll know". It was about then he hooked a rocket of a 45-pound doe, tail walking and I think almost scaring my urbanite friend out of our boat. Jeff, our guide, started to call me Jonah Joe.
This is one of my favourite biblical tales, but that is not why he called me that. There were many years I spent good money to combat fish in the Kenai without catching anything. The fish my young wife caught was obtained while I was sleeping, fished-out and being out too long the night before with friends at Charlie’s place in Kenai. Charlie’s was a lot like the Pine Tree Tavern was in my youth in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. Except the owner honoured the entertainment needs of the salmon fishing season and had a uniquely entertaining place. Maybe it’s burned down too in the years I have been away, like the Pine Tree Tavern did near the Yellow Breeches. On one trip with a friend who worked for the federal government, we asked a couple of Charlie’s girls out. The woman he imported from all over were really model-beautiful and it was manly fun at a reasonable price, with a safe, enjoyable attitude. It was on that trip I almost died on the Copper River Delta when my parka’s hood got caught in the pulley of a handcar across a raging glacial torrent, not far from Kennicott.


On another trip in the early 90’s, I would take my father in law to Charlie’s after fishing with Jeff. This my first wife’s father, the air force guy would married the Newfie girl, yielding Rhonda and the rest is history.
I had also had the old geezer white-water rafting on the Nenana and horseback riding at a remote 10000-foot camp. Both almost did him in. I almost died horsebacking when my bridle got caught precariously above a raging river and the horse bucked. All this while Rhonda was back at Highland firing Shel, packing her off to Grover, Colorado and the windswept grass near the Wyoming border.
Well at Charlie’s he hooked up with a teenage beauty queen for a series of nude lap-dances. The poor guy almost croaked. I just watched and drank L.I. teas. Later, he would tell me that he was sure she was a virgin; After all, she had told him so.
Years still after this, I would on occasion fly to Alaska just to get away from the business. Armed with nearly unlimited funds, Alaska became on of my favourite diversions, along with Hawaii, the Caribbean, and later Phoenix. And a rich guy could have a lot of fun in Anchorage. I had a relationship with a young Korean girl who lived with her sister downtown. We were introduced by a taxi driver. When I was in town, I would stop by, and she would feed me Korean food and we would have sex. I lost touch with her years later, an Alaskan friend of mine saying she had legal trouble and went home.
Another favourite place of mine that has since burned-down was the "Hub" in Anchorage. This native bar was one tough place-worse than Chilcoot Charlie’s, another "knock-down drag out" dump in town. It was a very aggressive environment where young native girls came to meet white guys. If you were uncooperative, a fight could ensue, and some of those girls are tough. The bouncer there, "Tiny", liked Shel and offered to take her if I dropped her. He was one of the largest men I had ever seen.
A freshly cut steak from just behind the head of such a catch as a big Kenai King is divine, Mesquite grilled with a good bottle of wine, moose in view among the pines by a little cabin on the river, on Beaver Loop, is where I want to be-right now. Alaskans and serious combat Kenai-King fisherman will know exactly where I mean.
Oh, I like the Jona or Jonas story because for me it meant there is no way to hide from God or to avoid a divinely mandated journey. And when your done, you might just be angry, and get into an argument with God and destiny. This is an argument you shall lose.
I had promised my son a trip there to the Kenai for his graduation from high school. We will have to wait and see. As time has passed, and my priorities have changed, the trips are less frequent. The reality is that they are non-existent. But we will go again. I still have one of my earliest credentials in Geology-A state of Alaska geology license. I only ever did one project there, in Juneau around 1993. It was an underground tank removal. Juneau was a neat town, but a bit touristy. There were salmon in abundance there and a nice glacier. An amazing thing happened at a bar in Juneau. An old friend of mine, the ship the Pacific Princess was in port. In a bar, I heard someone call my name. It was the purser from the ship. He remembered me from the cruise I had taken from Tahiti to Hawaii years before. I surely felt travelled then, the world a smaller place. I guess people remember me. The young man also asked to whom I was talking to on the phone. I told him Joey’s nanny. He understood and congratulated me for "the nanny". It is a unique capital, as you can’t drive there- its on an island. Kind of like here, on PEI. But we have that unsightly bridge.


--12—The Caribbean

As a small child I was fortunate enough to go on the family vacations to Daytona and Key West. In the 1950’s, I was told by my parents that Key West was a rather wild place at the end of U.S. Highway 1’s most southern terminus. I remember very little of those trips, or the trip overland to Mexico in those years. All of my family loved the sea and the beach beyond any other destination. I suppose this all stuck with me, despite the lack of memories, and I have seen images of our journeys in photographs. There is also a surviving old 8 MM movie of us in Key West I had put on VHS tape years ago. I hope my children have that.
After a few years of working and after the departure of Carol from my life in 1983, I was free to travel to other places, finally, other than car shows. The first trip I took as a single man was to Acapulco with another single buddy from my state job. It was a wild time in a poor place, at least dirty and poor if you walked a few blocks into the old city. We ate dark, oily delicious sailfish, drank cloudy tequila, and chased, with some success Canadian tourist girls.
I actually developed a relationship with our petite and lovely room maid at hotel Romano Le Club. The hotel was rather divey and 2 blocks from the beach that faintly smelled of sewerage. Nearly naked boys with Corona beer in bags with a little ice would keep your thirst quenched for a dime. I often thought it funny how the yuppies made such a big deal over the pee-yellow beer when it was ultimately imported to the states. Corona isn’t served with a lime, and it isn’t worth much more than that dime.
The maid’s name was Leonilia. She lived with her mother in a shack outside of town. Most of her teeth were steel, and her big glowing Spanish eyes were jet black. I should have brought her home with me. Only a few years later I would bring Rhonda here, both for our second trip to Acapulco. She had honeymooned here with her first husband Louis, at the posh Princess. On our trip we stayed at the Holiday Inn, as I had developed many priority club points with work travel.
This all has little to do with the Caribbean outside of the Florida references, but I am trying to set the prior events in context just before I started HTS in February 1988 and only a year or so later had a business so stable and successful that I could travel at will anywhere.
It occurred to me last evening that my entire life, loves, money, business, family can all be told from the perspective of my travels or the travels of family to all of these places. Even, or most especially, my work and business centered on travel, geographic expansion, and the exploration of new horizons. HTS was a max travel company. It was a novel idea then, for a consultant to figure out a profitable way to serve his customer anywhere, anytime. In the stodgy and frumpy engineering world, it was unheard of. I remember just before getting fired from ATEC, I excitedly told my boss I had a potential environmental client in California. Being a good old boy from North Carolina, he mockingly said, "What can we possibly do for someone in California". That was just before I started HTS and did many a project in the Western U.S. Lack of vision, I still hate it. Even lately I have told incredulous people (usually other consulting engineers) I have done a project in all of the 50 states except North Dakota and Hawaii.
As boss, I would pick assessment projects in places I wanted to visit. I saw the whole country while making a profit. Later, I allowed my staff the same privilege. Skiing in Colorado, people watching at Venice Beach, hiking in Acadia Park. I didn’t care as long as the work was done. I still plan on a visit to North Dakota. I was close on a road trip with Shel in my vette, at Mt. Rushmore. But that’s another story.
But being nouveaux and in 1990 still a bit unimaginative, but with plenty of cash, I thought that the Bahamas sounded good. In fact, just before we got married I took Rhonda on a "Pre" honeymoon to Freeport. It was a short trip to shop and take a dirty taxi out to eat at "Fat man’s", to eat greasy crack conch and drink a few mamas. But it was a fun trip. It is a good memory with Rhonda; we were in love and young, single and in the money, even before HTS.
After Joey was born in 1989, his first ever out of country trip was to Nassau. Still lacking imagination and ballooning with Holiday Inn points, we often stayed at the big Holiday Inn at Paradise Island. There were cockroaches as big as mice in there, but the lagoon was warm, and cleaner than Mexico. There were plenty of working girls around for entertainment and a snorkel to the edge of the lagoon revealed a drop off, an underwater cliff. Over the edge in deep warm water were all kinds of fish. They were huge, but made small by the great clear depths. It was there I saw my first oceanic sunfish as a yellow sea snake brushed harmlessly by me. Their venom is deadly.
Joey had his first taste of the place in my arms swimming here. Some years later, at age 6, he would really learn to dive and swim first at my favourite Arizona hotel, the Best Western Executive Park in downtown Phoenix. It was our corporate motel and one of the first places I had sex with Shel in the Sauna there in 1992.
Joeys swimming would be perfected at the Kingman, Arizona Holiday Inn. My son now swims like a fish fearlessly. In 2005 on a trip with my two children to Island Beach State Park and Seaside Heights in New Jersey, Joey scared me by simply diving into angry north Atlantic surf and swimming away, disappearing into the sea-troughs.
My daughter hasn’t had the many and exotic travel experiences as my son. For some reason, both children were never allowed to visit me at the same time prior to my return to Pennsylvania in 2005. It is a horrible loss for my daughter, of course due to Rhonda’s irrational fear of either losing child support or control of an uncontrollable situation. But Alexis and I are planning to make up some time soon this summer. But what is lost is lost to the tragedy as told.


A year after Joey as an infant swam in Nassau; we came back with both Nannies. It must have been 1991, before Alexis was born. I remember we were in the big house in Highland and I just felt like a trip. I told the nannies, then Shel and Doni, to pack for the beach. We are going to Nassau. They thought I meant "NASA", and it involved Florida. We of course flew first class to Nassau and got a couple big suites at my Holiday Inn. The girls watched Joey and flirted with the island guys. I had dinner and talked business with my wife and flirted with the hookers. But most of all I like the snorkelling, feeding the fish bread, and petting big friendly grey snappers among curious pipefish. That was a good trip of many similar trips to Nassau.
Well the divorce from Rhonda was on the table by the fall of 1993. I packed up Shel for our penultimate Caribbean trip. Now the former nanny whom I had gone to the prairie to rescue and bring home after Rhonda fired her while I was away fishing in Alaska with her father. I installed Shel at the chimney house in Mechanicsburg, and lead a dual life for a few long months. I would leave a tearful Shel at the big country home along the Yellow Breeches to go to the office. Divorce looming, I would try and console the staff, my loyalists starting to leave as Rhonda populated the main headquarters with corrupt, thieving inept fools.
My solace was my cruise in my 300CE Mercedes or my new red vette convertible. I would take the back way to Columbia from the chimney house west of Harrisburg-Mechanicsburg (Lisburn), usually stopping somewhere well known to numb myself with a few rounds before dealing with it. I would stay sometimes alone in the mansion; alone in the California King bed I had had custom made. The bathroom in my master bedroom was larger than the two-bedroom apartment I am now in here, writing this. My showers and tub was a massive raised marble pillar, enclosed in glass with gold fixtures, Romanesque. I would see the kids rarely, as Rhonda had rented an upscale apartment in Columbia to meet men and plan my coming execution.
I had my business manager Joyce call our travel agent and pick a really special place for us to go. Shel and I had been visiting the island of Eleuthera during this period. We had found an out of the way private resort called Pineapple Cove. Once the only way I could get there was to charter a gutted Cessna 414 from a drug runner to fly us into Gregorytown. The plane was similar to my 414, but mine still had its 7 seats and a bar.

The owner of Pineapple Cove was George. We all became close friends on our trips to Eleuthera. I surmised George might have had some trouble in the states and felt safe in the islands. I can relate to that. But it was a wonderful place staffed by lovely island girls with that beautiful dark skin and soft musical voice among the palms. The food was great. George’s rotund cook made the best pan-fried grouper and conch salad I ever had.
But now the travel agent suggested we go all out and go to Windermere Island. This is really a place over a little bridge on the south side of Eleuthera, not a separate island. This was where the royals went. I can’t remember how much it cost, but I think around a grand a day. But we had this idyllic cabin, a small house really, on the pink sand beach. We also had a personal attendant named Rodney. He took care of all of our needs and fed us at his restaurant. You know, the Bahamian people I have met in these travels are perhaps the nicest, most well spoken, and the most polite of all my journeys.

I brought my amateur radio with me on this trip. It was fun to operate from the island, as some old radio types collect contacts as a hobby from islands. In that club, Eleuthera is island number NA-001. Or, "North America" one. I think it is number one as it was where Columbus discovered the new world. This may be arguable, but a lot of people from all over the planet wanted to talk or "QSO" with me.
It was during an evening pile-up on 20 meters I had a strange call on single sideband (SSB)."Is this Joe Manduke? I have an important message". Well, as hams we cannot take non-amateur message traffic in countries forbidding it. The Bahamas forbids amateur radio use as a telephone. They want their telephone fees. Only in an emergency is it allowed. "Is this emergency traffic?" I asked. "Well yes", the New England station said. "Call your accountant right away". Oh no, another client issue.
It was only when I called my gatekeeper and accountant in Doylestown that I learned the reason Rhonda didn’t want to go with us to Eleuthera. She had filed a divorce ex parte injunction to be in court the next morning in Ellicott City. She knew I was in the Bahamas with Shel, and I, she thought had no way to find out. Apparently, Joyce had heard Rhonda say "I’ll be running HTS tomorrow". Being a loyalist, Joyce called our accountant and he somewhere had a ham radio friend who searched the radio spectrum to find me. The whole scenario always amazed me.
Well unfortunately, I had to run with Shel to Gregorytown and find a plane back to Miami and leave the paradise a few days early. But I was, to the amazement of all in that courtroom outside Baltimore the next day. This destroyed Rhonda and here Jap attorney’s plans, as Rhonda could not prove ownership of HTS. I had never issued stock- a stupid mistake eventually. The injunction made my blood boil. I was to have been removed from the company, banned from my homes, my cars taken, and I was never to see my children again. I then went to war, and adopted a scorched earth policy. It was a matter of honour.
We continued to visit the islands a few more times after the ex parte hearing fiasco. The attorney’s tightened their grip right away, and the writing was on the wall, so I just continued my vacations. Joyce, my loyal office manager slipped me 50 grand for pocket money. We had hired a manager for the company, at the advice of our dishonest lawyers. His name was Frank Hunt, and he paid my salary of 50K a year, which barely paid my bar bill. Frank was a criminal who wanted to steal my "easy looking" business. I knew it right away. Then I thought at least Rhonda wouldn’t get it.

Shel and I took a trip to Abaco Island in the Bahamas. A radio friend of mine had a condo with a ham station on the beach. It was ok, but quite pedestrian compared to Windermere. There was a great little restaurant there and a bakery where a pleasant round smiling very black lady made the best pineapple upside down cake I have even had. Well I wanted to go fishing, and take Shel out beyond the reef to nakedly sunbath. I found a boat for rent from one John Cash. John was a typical stiff white Bahamian, and had a 20 footer to rent. So we cut a deal, packed a lunch and headed out of the bay towards Whale Cay ("key").
It was a beautiful warm day, with a light breeze. I anchored the boat from the rear, cracked a beer, and dropped a line. It was fun to catch such a variety of colourful fish on the reef edge. Sometimes a big (probably a shark) would grab my bait and just break the light line off.
We had a few beers and dozed off naked in the gentle waves.

Hitting my head on the gunnel awakened me. The mid-day swells had given way to stronger late afternoon on-shore winds, thrashing the little boat, anchored far from shore. I told Shel we had to go, and tried to pull the rear stern-secured anchor line up. Well, being a burly guy then, I just pulled the stern down, as the anchor was coral-stuck just as another wave splashed over the engine cutout in the hull. I tried to start the engine, but it was water logged. Suddenly, another splash came over the stern and the boat twisted. I told Shel to jump, as I grabbed the cooler in one hand as a float, and the boat rolled, ejecting us both into the choppy Caribbean. I couldn’t see Shel. She later said she was trapped under the hull and felt a divine hand pull her to safety.
Her Blonde head popped up a few yards away, screaming. "I am going to die"..over and over, hysterical. (I ponder now why she wasn’t concerned enough to scream, "We are going to die"…?) It took what seemed forever to calm her, attach her to the cooler and calm her down. We floated mostly naked with all possessions at the bottom of the sea.
Whale Cay, a little desert island (really!) was about 400 yards distant, swim able. The problem now was we had company. In the clear water, very large and ominous looking barracuda were eyeing us. Actually, they were far more intrigued with the flotilla of bologna sandwiches discharged from the cooler.
There was a large yacht cruising along about a mile distant with obnoxious music blaring. They had watched in entertained enjoyment as I scuttled my boat, and headed our way just long enough for us our screams were to be ignored. Well, a whole boatload of very pale Bahamian lobster collecting rich boys pulled us out of the waters off whale cay.
They gave Shel a T-shirt (later to ask for it back) and tried to right out stubbornly capsized craft, and dove to get Shel’s bag with our keys, ID, and cash, credit cards, etc. Well, we finally had to call John Cash on the radio. He came out with a famous fat man and local guru, "Samson", to assist and tow the upside down boat back to the harbour.
Well it cost me about 3 grand in damages, and Shel won’t boat with me again. I am almost sure this was the event on my last trip to the Bahamas.
Although I tried to make up with Rhonda and save anything on my birthday trip a few months before on the island of Saint Martin, the firm was doomed. I rented a 6000 square foot villa on a mountain outside Marigot, on the French side of Saint Martin. This was to be my lavish party for my 36th birthday. The place was spectacular with a giant pool, a large household staff, and a nude beach at the bottom of our cliff. Hermit crabs roamed to the delight of my son. Rhonda had brought my limo drivers wife Ruby instead of a nanny. I know now it was because she was distancing anyone on my side in this business matter.
I tried to make love to Rhonda and to make up, as I knew the end of our world as we knew it was at hand. But she had surrounded herself with people that assured her that she would get the company. This was because of my inferred affair with Shel, although nothing had been proven, my affection for and the many romantic trips with Shel were sure damning. Rhonda went on many of those trips too.
I knew then that Rhonda didn’t want to be married to me or be a mom. She wanted to become me. I was to disappear onto a park bench, drinking cheap Port out of a brown paper bag, dying alone and poor.
But no one knew that the business I had built was far more intricate and difficult to operate than it appeared. After all if Joe Manduke can do it, it must be easy, I had heard said. With my system I could manage my business anywhere with a fax machine and phone. My management team was totally loyal and I didn’t need to be there. For some reason, that fact irritated all envious on lookers. Well, I bailed when faced with the court and feminist onslaught.
I knew in St. Martin it all had nothing to do with my assumed infidelity. It was about Rhonda getting the business, power, and the money. Everyone save a few at the HTS offices hated Rhonda. She had started to hire a bunch or unqualified "yes people" from a sub-dom group she was into. It’s all really ugly. But it is my fault. After all, I was the captain of this amazing ship.
I married Rhonda for the reasons outlined, and we have great kids. But her only interest in any of it ultimately was to try and get my business. OK our business. But she was totally clueless and 18 months after St. Martin and my pleading for reconciliation, Rhonda was homeless with my children in her parent’s basement in Allentown. I remember near the end sitting with Rhonda in the piano parlour of our mansion at Highland. I told her that if she kept up this divorce nonsense we would lose it all, and she wouldn’t even be able to afford toilet paper. She looked sullen and just said to herself out loud, "I didn’t plan this right".
At that moment I took my young next de facto wife to be and just left. I was to lose my entire material world too, my children for a time, and my reputation. But I still had my old Blazer and my Shel, my education, experience, and memories. That’s all any of us really have at the end, anyway. As so my mother had warned me long ago.
Shel and I had started our new life in Arizona.



--13—Tahiti to Hawaii

About a year before the blonde prairie girl entered our lives, I took Rhonda and my young son on a Pacific cruise. It was very contrarian of me. I was later accused of being a business contrarian by the Baltimore magazine. In this case, I would take the cruise in reverse, pick my own flight not the one offered to port of departure, and bring a two year old on the love boat. Joey would be the only child, to the delight of few and the horror of most on the Pacific Princess. My son was the smallest full-fare passenger on a cruise from Papeete to Hawaii.



We flew out of Baltimore on Air France, in smoky first class in a DC-10. The non-smoking section on a French airplane is an oxymoron. The flight was certainly too long. A monitor in the cabin showed the flight path slowly completing a line from North America. After a short stop in LA, we continued south across the open pacific to land in Tahiti’s capital. I had really wanted to get right on the ship, but we stayed at the Sofhotel because we were a day early, being turned away at the gangplank. The Gaugain museum was closed to my disappointment, and we didn’t get to see much of the capital. To be frank, it looked just like Hawaii, but not as clean.
The cruise seemed forced for Rhonda whom I found out only years later that she resented my selection of travel destinations. As a veteran’s wife, her mother had made one free trip to Europe romantically hanging from straps in a C-130 and always talked of her "Rome". Typical infrequent traveller, once in a lifetime and all that crap. Well I wasn’t that enamoured with Europe after my trip to Russia and the Ukraine 2 years before with a UN group. Then I hadn’t started my family history quest, or things could have been different. I liked the wilder, more ragged destinations. I never knew it then, I have always followed the ghost of captain James Cook. I seem oddly to be drawn to his ports of call, nearly all of them, long before I read his biography only a few short years ago.
The most I can say about this cruise was that we ate a lot of good food. It was an older retired crowd for the most part. Lots of semi-rich blue-collar small business owner types, like builders and plumbing contractors. I enjoyed shooting off the bow, and I won the skeet tournament. I didn’t bother to pick-up my trophy. Joey loved the band and sat on the Philippino guitar players lap at dinner. Rhonda was a bit sullen, reading in our topside cabin as the Pacific passed by. Years later Joey would remember the names of the restaurant manager and chef, Seppi and Luca.
To stay occupied I like to play blackjack in the little casino on the giant ship. I spent most of my time there when not eating or wandering from lounge to lounge. The dealers weren’t very good. One girl named Liberty was particularly cute. But she was a lousy dealer. She had also helped us with Joey and brought things we requested to our cabin. Well, I won nearly all the time at cards. I was playing next to a pretty but burned-out young blonde. I forget her name, but she had money to burn. I found out later she was an heiress to the Seagram’s booze fortune. She said to me one night, "You don’t like me very much, do you?" I told her that a pretty young rich girl shouldn’t be so dissipated. Actually we did like each other. I guess she was about 25.
I ended up with about 3000 bucks in the bank when the boat stopped. It paid all of my incidental charges on the cruise. Things such as the shooting, the spa, phone calls, and booze were extra. Its hard to think it wasn’t all inclusive with one ticket costing almost 10 grand.
I had one phone call on the 10 days at sea. A voice from the bridge announced my name and said I had a satellite call. We were probably 6000 miles from nowhere, in the middle of the Pacific. It was my squeamish office manager at the home office telling me we were losing our biggest client. I called him and it was no problem. That client, Chrysler Corporations real estate group always threatened to pull the contract to get a better price. It was just a game we played.
I remember passing Christmas Island and I had planned to fly back to that remote island to fish. But the divorce came and I never made it there.
We stopped at Bora Bora and Moorea for a day and we rented a car to drive around. It was a third world kind of place, mostly poor unfriendly people. We ate lunch at Marlon Brando’s restaurant and played along with the crowd in that rustic little hut. I have a great photo of Joey naked on the beach there-next to a beached rowboat that says "hotel Bora Bora".

There was a little ceremony at the equator. We were crossing again from the south after flying over it days before. It was no big deal. Some of the crew had cold pasta dumped on their heads and dressed in funny hats, and drank too much. I thought of my dad’s "crossing the line" ceremony certificate I had. It was from when his troop ship, the SS Hughes, took him and a thousand other soldiers to the Philippines in WWII. It was a brightly coloured certificate with a dragon on it. It was lost during the chaos of the divorces.
There was a formal ball to meet the Captain and crew. I had brought my Dior tux for the occasion, looking forward to it with Rhonda and Joey. Well Rhonda refused to go. So I, dressed to kill, be-rolexed and slick went and drank with the crowd. I didn’t stay long; just a little wine and time to enjoy the feel of my formalwear. I would have loved to have dressed Shel up and show her off at that party, but I hadn’t met our demise yet. This may had been the Love Boat, but there was not much romance after Joey was born. I love my son. I think Rhonda deeply resented him. I have thought she meant to destroy my bright son. To be sure, she damaged him later. I must take blame for that. But to harm such an exceptional child. Evil and cruelty, greed, there was no bounds.
Our last stop was Lahaina on Maui. The day was spent in port so the tourists could look around and shop. We had already toured the island, so Rhonda and Joey stayed on board. It is truly a beautiful place, but way too touristy and very expensive. I just decided to shuttle ashore and hang around the harbour. I have always enjoyed looking at the boats and talking to any fisherman that may have been out seeking big billfish.
There is a bar right at the dock there. It’s a small place and at least then was unpretentious. I went in for a beer and quickly struck a conversation at the bar. An unshaven skinny guy a little younger than me started talking about Raro Tonga. I guess because I told him I had just come from Tahiti. He said the fishing was great on that south sea island, and the women friendly. He encouraged me to go someday. After a few rounds, he asked me if I had seen any whales, humpbacks. I told him, a few, at a distance. Well he said he had a fast boat and would take me out into the whale pods outside the harbour. I thought close approach was illegal, but I said sure.
He grabbed a couple girls from the bar he knew, almost like props, and we walked over to his boat. It was around 25 feet long and sported a huge engine. We flew out across the crystal water and only in minutes slowed and approached some whales. He cut the engines. We all cracked beers and exchanged small talk and admired the almost plastic swimsuit model girls with us.
I was concerned about getting back to the Princess. And this guy was in no hurry. I started to think if I missed the boat I would have to take a shuttle flight over to Lihue to meet the boat. It was only minutes to spare, and the Princess, way in the distance a distant tiny white dot, sounded its horn. All aboard. My host seem totally unconcerned. I was starting to panic as he snoozed over the beers, whales, and girls. The whales were right there among us, close enough to touch. It was hard to believe something that huge could be that graceful, gentle.
Finally as I heard the final toot from the ship as he cranked up the engine. Pulling slowly away from the whale pod, he gunned it. The boat was blazingly fast. We flew across the water and in only a few minutes we approached the moving now Princess. The crew at the closing door waved us away angrily. I waved my ticket pass madly and finally, after what seemed eternity we were motioned over to the leaving cruise ship. We pulled along side, the walkway was removed, and 2 burly crewmen lifted me aboard. Many passengers watched this happen from above. After going up to the front observation area people said they had cruised for years and had never seen anything like that before. It was quite a short stop on Maui!
The trip ended for us there in Hawaii. It was supposed to end in Honolulu, but we always stayed in a condo at Poipu, on Kauai, when in Hawaii. So it was a big hassle having to get a customs officer to check us in at the port on Kauai. I had a cab take us to the rental car, and we went for the next 2 weeks to stay at our always condo in Poipu.
It wasn’t our condo on Kauai. I had been visiting Hawaii, all the islands, several years at this point. I always flew first class then. And not using frequent flyer miles-I paid cash. Well that often engenders a friendly response from airline staff. Once making a reservation, an American airlines girl suggested I call a pilot friend of hers, Chuck, who had a place at Poipu. He was never there, and might rent it out. So I called this guy and just sent him a check whenever I wanted to go to Hawaii. He would send a key and we went.
This was the last place, just before Alexis was born, that we all went as a family. I mean Shel as nanny, Rhonda, me, and Joey. I had photos of Joey with the black crabs on the beach.
Another photo is of me holding Joey in my arms on a charter fishing boat. My tired son resting in my arms as I troll for whatever, I think I caught a Bonito that day, which I cooked for dinner back at Chuck’s condo. I love that photo. Most of those albums are lost now, so I cherish what little exists outside my mind.
One of our favourite places was a "cook it yourself" restaurant. They had great steak, fish, or burgers you cooked yourself. There was a fancy resort where we took a small boat to get to the restaurant. I think it was the Hilton there. I remember the food being expensive and disappointing. The waitress referred to Shel as our daughter. It was a common mistake for years.
I never went back to Kauai after hurricane Iniki hit. I wonder what has changed. That island was another home to me, just as Anchorage got to be. I would often go directly from Anchorage to Hawaii if I didn’t feel like going back to work. Well, it wasn’t direct. I had to change planes in Frisco or Seattle.
One of my best Hawaiian memories is a trip alone with Rhonda before my son was born; we stayed at a then nouveaux jet-set place called Kona, at the Hyatt. It was really nice, little cabanas on the beach. Really good 5 star restaurants. Kona is on the big island, so I took her to see Volcano Park and Mauna Loa. It was cute- she was scared of the pocked earth and smoke rising from fumaroles. We stayed at a little lodge, called volcano lodge near the mountaintop. Even in summer it was cold enough for a fireplace at that elevation. It was romantic, and one of my favourite memories with my first wife.
We flew over to Lahina on Maui and I took here out to see Hana, at the end of the road there. It’s a nice twisty ride thru the jungle and pristine beaches, some with black sand and the always-bright blue ocean. We climbed the mountain on Maui to the astronomical observatory. It was in the clouds, on top of the world. It was almost too high for easy breathing. On the way up was a small pub where we stopped for lunch. There were flocks of jewel-like hummingbirds feeding there. We could almost have touched them.
Some years later, I would take Shel to Maui and a stay at the Hyatt in Lahina. We never got out of the room. To be young and in love again!
The little town of Hilo on the big island was like a trip back into the 50’s. I could live there, and still might.
At south point on the big island is the southern most point of the United States. It’s a wild place, at least then. A few WWII bunkers remained. There were electrical windmills there, which the whirring of always scared my son when he was little. Later, Shel and I would have wine and cheese picnics in all these places. We both still love south point, and the memory of it being just Shel, my son, and I. I will always think of that as my real family, although an impossible dream, a spectre of the soul.



--14-- Las Vegas

By 1994 the business was done. Rhonda and her minions had lost the staff and clients, and on June 30, 1994 HTS was converted to chapter 7 and liquidated. I had already purchased the house in Glendale. Initially it was so I could run the Phoenix office and start a new life with Shel. The problem was that the shareholder agreement we had spent all of the cash to agree to, Rhonda had no intention of following. She would run the east, me west. Chicago was closed. But Rhonda had 51% control after the divorce. She just came out to Arizona and fired my 10 loyal western staff. Some wouldn’t leave and locked her out of our building on Central Avenue. Some stayed without pay a week. It was really sad, as it was a promising profitable office earning about 100K per month at the end.
I could have stopped her, her actions were illegal, but I was out of attorney money. She later told me that she had been advised that I had to be buried or I would win back the loyalty in Columbia. The truth was, all I wanted was to run Phoenix in peace. It was February 2, 1994 she ruined Phoenix. I call it the Groundhog Day massacre. So I was out of a job in Phoenix, and running out of cash fast.
So we muddled by living on the final dollars of my hard earned fortune. One day, I got a call. I had started to circulate my resume among a few headhunters. It was good that I was never really technically active in the Phoenix market. My staff did the work. I collected the money and anonymously sat by the pool. Well that was over. A firm in Vegas needed a manager of it petroleum remediation department. It paid 60K. That was my post-bankruptcy salary at HTS, for the year before the company closed. It was nowhere near the 400K of my heyday, but liveable in our little place.
We really planned to move to Vegas. My son was out to visit that summer. Rhonda had gotten fearful when the world, as predicted finally collapsed. She knew I could do it all again. Joey was used as a pawn so I would send money.
He was a great little guy. He at first stayed with Shel in Phoenix while I went to Vegas to work, during the week. I rented a greasy apartment on Fremont Street and gambled at night. It was a pretty rough crowd. After a time, I got tired of the almost 800 mile roundtrip commute each week and Joey and Shel came to Vegas to stay with me. Shel would take Joey to the library. Vegas has a great public library system. I was told of one conversation Joey got into with the librarian. It went something like this: "Hello young man, is this your mommy? (Shel). Joey was an extremely articulate and verbal child, and had a slight British accent; perhaps from his teacher at the Montessori school in Maryland he had attended. "Oh no. She used to be my nanny, but now she is my fathers girlfriend". Leave it to a five year old to say it all.
It was a tough period. Here, Shel taught Joey to read and his numbers. We were broke and ate bad food, gaining weight. I kept pawning my Rolex president for cash between paychecks. I can actually say that, especially before my "family" arrived in Vegas that spring, that I made a living playing blackjack. I had learned how to play the dealers and work with them against the house. This only worked in the seediest place on Fremont Street. The Western Hotel was one such place. It was quite odd that on a visit with my old shooting buddy Bruce to Vegas in late 2004, we went to the Western. The same old dealer and barmaid remembered me from almost 10 years before. I must make a lasting impression on people.
Bruce’s parents lived in Vegas, and he was visiting them and wanted to take me on a trip, as I just got out of Jail and back to Phoenix.
I was deeply depressed over the HTS scandal in Vegas with Shel and Buddy, as I often called my son. At our best, we drove on Friday afternoons (when not headed back to Glendale for the weekend) into a beautiful, wonderful place still in my heart. It is Pine Valley, Utah- North of Cedar City. Here we found a little rustic lodge, the Pine Valley Lodge with food, bearskins on the wall, and a great restaurant across the street. This was Mormon central. The owners had horses to rent, goats that smelled like very ripe cheese, and chickens. It was great fun for all of us. We looked at houses there.
Shel never understood how bad my credit was because of the divorce and bankruptcy. I tried to buy a house in Vegas-they were very reasonable then just before the big boom there. But I couldn’t qualify. It was the main reason I went home to Phoenix. It was still the same problem here when Shel demanded a house on the island. I was proceeding step by step, but it wasn’t fast enough for her. At least Rhonda understood money and real estate. Shel doesn’t, never did, and still, at age 36 now has no clue.
The trout fishing was outstanding in and around Pine Valley and we went as often as we could. Years later, in 1997 Shel and I would come here after a quick Vegas wedding, for our short honeymoon, after finally making our 6 year romance legal.
Joey went back to Harrisburg and his mom and sister to start school that fall in 1995. I only lasted 6 months at the Vegas job. I was pretty messed up. That day is as clear as a bell. I apologized to my wonderful boss, John for quitting. I had even proposed opening a Phoenix office and was denied.
There was a small motel in Boulder City called the Nevada Inn. We had stayed there a few times in transit, and it became our favourite place to stay in Vegas when I was there later on various trips. They had regular rooms or you could cheaply rent a dilapidated old cabin that was really rustic and neat. Shel and I loved the musty old cabins. Later travelling with professional colleagues, I would get strange looks suggesting such a place to stay. No imagination, again.
Boulder City is a great little town about 20 miles east of Vegas built to house the builders of Hoover Dam in the 30’s. Gambling is illegal and you have to drive thru Boulder City and then, over the dam to get back to Phoenix. There was a great Italian restaurant we loved there. Its another town I could call home anytime. And the view of Lake Mead, as Shel says, looks like a fake background, a bluescreen image against brown rugged desert mountains at the Nevada Arizona border.
There is a bridge now there I have never seen, so a trip across the dam is not required. I have a few cassette tapes in the Blazer by the singer Enya. I can still listen to those same tapes and picture Lake Mead, cross the dam, and head thru the desert to my sweet wife, home, a son. I will be there again.
Another always stop for us was the "Dam bar" in Kingman. This was a great steakhouse with sawdust on the floor and off-track dog betting. Later they changed the format a bit but it was still good. I was there on that 2004 trip with Bruce and choked on a piece of meat. It got stuck in my throat. I had to go to the Kingman hospital where it was removed. I spent the night and returned to Phoenix and my little house at 4232 N. 2nd Avenue. It was a few months later I went to work in Yuma, in November 2004.

After leaving the Vegas job, I figured I could go back to Phoenix and collect unemployment and look for something else to do. It all worked out, our bills were low and for the next almost 10 years after leaving Vegas in fall of 1995, I have earned a living.




When I got back to Phoenix that fall of 1995, I went on vacation back to Harrisburg. Joey must have returned in late August from staying with us that year. I took him to Westline just before he went back to school. I still have one photo of Joey there at the spot on Thundershower run. My Buddy. He was a bright, happy, loving boy. He still is. In fact in only about 6 weeks after penning this, my son will graduate from High school.
God willing, we are taking the same trip to Westline we did then. We were there in June of 2006, just before Rhonda kicked me out of her and the kid’s house. I came here the first time to live in my then never have seen apartment (where I am seated now). I hadn’t seen Shel for 2 years, but paid for the apartment here on the island. Now we were roommates for the first time, not lovers. That was February 3, 2006.


--15—Russia and the Ukraine 1990