It was 1968. April.

i had flown on a military flight out of Charleston to Rota, Spain with way too much personal crap in a plywood cruise box.

i was reporting to my first ship, if i ever got there. The USS Hawkins (DD-873) was somewhere in the Mediterranean. Being completely naive (damn near my permanent state, sometimes a blessing, sometimes a curse), i expected an overnight in Rota and being flown to my first ship in some romantic spot like Rome the next day. But they couldn’t find my ship…or something. Who the hell knows. My overnight turned into two weeks.

i cannot describe my loneliness. i hooked up with another junior officer and took a bus to Seville for the day: a bullfight and wandering around the city not having a clue as to what to see and what to do. That was about it except a couple of stories to save for later.

i was lonely. i had no clue as to what would happen when i actually did report to my ship. My world had tumbled upside down. i was out of place. But on the ride back from Seville, i looked out the bus window at the agrarian landscape. i was longing for calmness, order and for a brief moment, i found it.

southwestern spain

there are no rocks here;
there are just rolling hills of fields and fields;
there are no woods here:
one just feels a calm.

don’t stay long; it could get dull;
dullness could be an affixation of the mind:
one moment of one day, the dullness
turns to calm which can suffocate my kind;

it could be solitary here;
try not to think of this
amidst the military people,
it grows into left-right bliss.

people have no quarrels here;
at least, with life itself they live;
most people seem not to notice;
perhaps it irks their souls too much.

the fields are green here;
the ocean rolls softly in the bay;
the trees are green here;
spring’s coolness precedes summer days.

the bullfights are clean things
people watch to see men face
death for nothing more than an ear or more;
it is satisfying to the crowd and perhaps the matador.

the roads are curved here;
no super highways sever the countryside;
the world is clean here
as if the rest of the world has died.

there are no rocks here,
just rolling hills of fields;
there are no woods here;
i feel the calm.

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,
Home again, home again, dancing a jig;
To market, to market, to buy a fat hog;
Home again, home again, jiggety-jog;
To market, to market, to buy a plum bun,
Home again, home again, market is done.
— Mother Goose

It was a cool 55 when i left Flagstaff just before six. Tom Suby came out to dump some trash from the house above my studio and we said goodbye again. While we were talking, i commented i smelled smoke and there was a smoky haze. He said it was the Kendrick fire, about 10,000 acres. When he realized i didn’t know about the fire, he was incredulous. “You really have been doing anything but writing, haven’t you?” he asked.

Yes, i had isolated myself that much. No television. No news except the exchanges with friends of the Fitzgerald collision, something we Navy surface types will be talking about for a long, long time. But that and some Facebook exchanges. After all, i was trying to get to somewhere.

Friday morning, i had found somewhere i wanted to be and i was taking it home.

It was old Jewell traveling again. My little Mazda 3 was packed pretty full, not jammed like i have traveled many other times, but full. i rolled onto old US 66 and shortly hit I-17, down, down, down the mountain. The vistas of pines in the rolling mountains was beautiful. And rolling down those curves, the highway folks had put up one of those temporary flashing signs that warned, “Look out for Elk.” i took that to mean meeting an elk on the two lanes down could be imminent. i had this thing in me that wanted to pull off at a safe spot and go look for elk. Of course,  i didn’t. Just kept rolling like i always do.

By the time i got to Phoenix, she was rising (okay, who makes that connection?). i called and told her i was coming home and i had found somewhere. By now the mountains and the hills and the pines were but hazy visions on the horizon. The landscape of Arizona is varied and always interesting. If only i could slow and study it some more. Of course, i didn’t. i just kept rolling. As always.

i cut west on state route 101, maybe there a long time but now a four-lane escape from Phoenix traffic, going south to I-10, then a quick jog to state route 85 to I-8 in Gila Bend, the land that i…, no i don’t love it, but i have had a number of adventures featuring Gila Bend, and i’ve always been amazed anyone would choose to live there and now even more amazed because it’s growing.

Now, i was in familiar territory: I-8, the ribbon of highway to San Diego. Been on this crazy route more times than i can count. 80 miles per hour, maybe more if i think the highway patrol isn’t hiding in the bushes somewhere west. Not much there to Yuma except exits to towns that don’t even have dots on the exit signs: Smurr, Theba, Piedra, Tarton, Stanwix, Aztec, Dateland, Mohawk, Tacna, Ligurta. Maybe a gas station and convenience store for the travelers, a couple of houses, most with no vegetation, a couple with tree breaks. That’s it. Not much to El Centro and ’bout the same until the road begins to climb just west of Ocotillo where i had to turn around once and spend an extra night (in El Centro where i dined at a Thai place run by Mexican-Americans, nice folk but their fried rice had a hint of salsa). Then up the mountains past Dos Cabezos until you feel like you just might be on the top of the world, that ribbon of highway launching across spans of nothingness looking down into valleys so deep you can’t see the bottom and looking up to the sky so close it feels like you could touch it. Then down, down, down where the names look familiar where there are now a grunch of casinos on the reservations until i hit the eastern edges of the city and the traffic looks familiar as i jockey for position to get the hell off this ribbon of highway gone lunatic and jiggety jog to home.

“Market is done.”

i’ve found somewhere, and i am home.

My little Mazda has done good. It will get a detail tomorrow. i was beat, worthless for the evening. Maureen puts up with me and we eat tapas down the hill, watch a bit of the ballgame recorded earlier and go to bed.

This morning, i arise and launch into old routines with the additional unpacking, organizing, washing. You know. Then before Maureen comes out of the bedroom, i assess where i’ve been. The trip home beat me down a bit more than before. But i am older. Someday in the future, i will have to stop such power drives to somewhere.

Somewhere? i found it. It isn’t exactly what i was expecting to find. The sequestered sojourn was not exactly the way i planned. But it did accomplish what i wished to accomplish. i know where i am. Somewhere. i’ll be a bit different now. i’m not sure exactly sure who that will be, but it will be different.

And i’m fine.

After all, when i walked out the kitchen door to fill Maureen’s garden water pail, i found this:

It’s good to be home, jiggity jig.

It is a lovely place, this someplace i have found.

Since i’ve found it, i’m moving on, back home where i belong.

i’ve checked out the car to leave a day early, early in fact tomorrow morning.

i’ve checked the car fluids, etc. as my dear bride asked me to do. i knew they were okay, but one of the primary drives in my life is to make her not worry. i’ve enough gas to get within a half-hour of Bonita, but i’ll stop somewhere after a couple of hours to fill ‘er up and go the rest of the way non-stop. My kind of driving. Just under 500 miles, seven to eight hours through the desert at its hottest. Done it too many times to remember them all. Do recall the old Toyota Corona station wagon through Arizona in July when i had to turn on the heat to keep it from overheating in 120-plus temperatures and then stopping in El Centro around 6:00 in the evening, thinking how cool it was only to see a bank sign thermometer reading 118. May get something of a repeat as the Southwest between Fredericksburg, Texas and El Centro, California is relishing in heat way above 100 degrees.

But it’s time to go. i spent today spinning wheels. i finally realized the sequestered sojourn to somewhere was over. i mean i got somewhere. i know where it is now, and i’m damn tired of the sequestered part. i was gonna gut it out through tomorrow. Then i talked to Maureen. That did it. i missed her. Flat missed her.

As for the writing retreat as i have called it, i got done what i needed. It’ll be a book sometime. It may or may not be published. Some folks will get a copy regardless. We’ll see.

It was good for me, this somewhere.  i will take somewhere with me when i leave tomorrow, but i’ll leave behind a wonderful workout/walk/interval training/run thing in the mountains. i think the introductory photo captures it.

But it’s time to go home.

This morning as usual, i read “The Writer’s Almanac” in my daily email. One item struck me. Today is the birthday of Erich Maria Remarque, the German who at twenty was in the trenches during World War I. He’s the guy who wrote All’s Quiet on the Western Front. If you haven’t read it, you should.

As i read the item, i was struck with similarities between now and the time of Erich’s quote and the time of the item’s description of the later reaction in his home country of Germany. i have my vision of how it relates to now (and it wasn’t just ISIS), but i’ll let you come to your own conclusions about who, what, and how:

Remarque’s quote:

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.

The excerpt from the article:

The novel sold more than a million copies in Germany in its first year of publication. Nazis were beginning their rise to power at the time, and they hated the book because it portrayed World War I as misguided and pointless. It was one of the books they publicly burned in 1933. When the film version of the book premiered in Berlin, Nazi gangs attacked the theater. Remarque lost his German citizenship in 1938 and eventually moved to the United States.

i found the similarities terribly sad. Why can’t we learn from the past?

Please, please, please, as James Brown, the hardest working man in show business, used to scream, please, please please don’t tell my wife about this post.

This, obviously, will take some explaining.

You see, i am up in these mountains attempting to be reclusive, monk style, and write. i am surprised i’ve been pretty damn good at it. But there were a couple of things causing me…okay, okay, it was my choice…to wander from my monk-hood discipline of writing with walk/hike/runs breaks and otherwise isolation. As most of you already know, my last column was published in The Lebanon Democrat today. And one of my best friends ever, the Shreq of the Shreq and Donkey duo of which i was…yep, Donkey, Pete Toennies came home from the hospital today after shoulder replacement surgery yesterday. Pete, if you don’t know retired as a Navy SEAL captain. He and i met on a legendary 1979-80 deployment to WESTPAC.

So i thought i would celebrate a good run with my hometown paper and honor Pete.

Now there are many ways i could do this. If i thought hard enough, i could have probably conjured from the originally overstocked and fast dwindling groceries in the refrigerator and the cupboard. So i assessed. And i remembered. The assessment function revealed i still had a package of ground beef i had not touched in the refrigerator. i remembered a dish Pete and i revel in. Unfortunately, neither of our wives are thrilled with its nutritional value. Mine is downright revulsed.

In the early part of this decade, Pete and i were marketing to the Navy a product that made a lot of sense, would have helped the Navy meet some requirements, and would have saved a lot of money. So of course, the stakeholders eventually decided they didn’t want it. After all, it would be treading on their territory and they might (which they never did) figure out a way to do it in house. But in the course of our marketing, our old friend and shipmate in that long ago deployment, OW Wright, arranged for the two of us to brief a whole bunch of Navy security types in Pearl Harbor.

Pete and i flew in  and rented a car the day before the brief. It was past midday and we were hungry. We tried to find the monkey bar in Pearl City, but it had been quite a while and we couldn’t locate it, if it still exists, which is not likely. Not finding it was probably a good thing because someone later told me PETA or some other well-intended but misguided organization had gotten rid of the monkeys (hmm, wonder if they used one of those relocation services). Finally, we stopped at a a place advertising great food. It turned out to be a bowling alley restaurant on the overhanging balcony of the lanes. We checked the menu and weren’t particularly impressed. But we both wondered about the special, Loco Moco. The waitress described it, and we didn’t blink an eye ordering Loco Moco.

You see, Loco Moco is  a modern local Hawaiian dish on a bed of rice covering a dinner plate. Then there is a half-pound or more of cooked ground beef. On top of that is one or two fried eggs (you can get three eggs if you let the waitress know that’s what you want). All of this is covered with a shellacking of brown gravy. i now know why there are a lot of really big native Hawaiians.

Several years later, Pete and his wife Nancy began to have us join them on a Kauai vacation. It has become an almost every other year tradition. One reason is the four of us are good golf partners. Also Pete and i like to play when the women are pursuing more cultured activities. Our favorite course in Kauai is Kiahuna. There are short lava rock fences supposedly created by the Menehune, a Hawaiian version of Leprechauns. On the back nine between fairways is the remains of the rock home of the Portugee, a guy who became like an overseer of a good chunk of the island. The remains of his rock tomb vault is several paces behind the home ruins. Fascinating but off point.

However, on a day when the ladies were being cultural, Pete and i stopped for lunch in between a day of two rounds. And there on the menu much to our surprise (delight) was “Joe’s Loco Moco.” i am happy to report Joe’s is just as good if not better than the bowling alley version.  Of course, that could be influenced by the fact we washed Joe’s down with two mai tai’s, another thing Joe is very good at.

So tonight, i went back to the grocery and bought some packaged microwaveable rice and ready to mix and serve brown gravy. i made a dent on that refrigerated ground beef and decreased the number of way too many eggs and made my version of Loco Moco. It wasn’t bad and absolutely of no real nutritional value. So of course, i loved it, wished for Pete and hoped to god, Maureen wouldn’t find out.

It wasn’t quite as good as Joe’s on Kauai because i washed it down, gulp, with Pellegrino, not a mai tai.