Tales of a Seaside Inn continues below from Part Four in August.
... Martin Johnson Heade.
"Mikey, I gotta priority project. Top secret. Hush hush and all that." Mike raised his eyebrows. That stupid talk could only mean that some broad was involved, but he owed him one, although this was strictly speaking against naval policy.
He disappeared into the small stifling darkroom next to the reeking fuel bunkers. As he swished the developer tray the image of Ensign Hector Morris, USN appeared, seemingly standing on a wave in the waters of the Pacific.
Hector and Justine wrote each other daily, sometimes several times, throughout the rest of the war. Long letters passed in an unbroken flow between Broken Bow and the Cassin Young, although often going astray and not arriving, lost on the seas to the fog of war.
In the passage of time Hector, his date of demob finally set, proposed and Justine accepted at once, for by now she too had long been certain they must marry. A date was set in Broken Bow, to which he took the first train smoking when the ship finally berthed in San Diego.
They were married at a little church at a crossroads out on the prairie. She wore the white dress in the snapshot and Tom was his best man.
As a wedding present, Tom hired a photographer from Omaha. She arrived in a red 1941 Packard station wagon, road-worn and dust-covered that looked like it had been down every highway and byway in Nebraska. In fact, it almost had, to photograph high school classes, college graduations, county fairs, political rallies, funerals, cattle drives and weddings - plus following her personal passion of photographing the prairie before it and the small hollowed-out towns all disappeared.
The Packard was groaning with paraphenalia - cameras, tripods, lenses, lights, backdrops, ladders - all the impedimenta a professional might require. Tom walked her to the little rise behind the church where mamma's original photograph had been taken, she nodded and then extracted the biggest camera anyone had ever seen from the back of the car, a beautifully crafted teak and brass construction with a lens the size of a softball, a black skirt that hung behind its back and screwed to a rugged oak tripod.
It was quite intimidating, as if she were going into battle and real shooting might resume.
One imagined such strange things as the war was winding down. Rumors, and not unreasonable ones, were already flying that the next 'big one' might be fought against Russia, our largest ally from the one just ending. We might forever be a world at war, with our friends as the next enemies and our current foes as our next front line allied against them. And the weapons of that war, it was clear, would be far more terrifying, bigger than the atomic bombs used against Japan which brought Hector and Tom home alive from a possible hell in the Pacific, bad enough as it had been.
But the photographer had a voice with a musical French accent and almost balletic motions seeming to suggest that flowing through life with grace, ease and precision was a natural part of her job.
Soon everyone else was at ease too, laughing at their fears and enjoying the bigness of the little moment about to be recorded forever.
The newlyweds stood together on the little rise with the prairie grass waving at their feet, she in the white dress, Hector beside her in his full navy dress uniform, gazing down at the wedding guests and now out toward the horizon under a sky of billowing cumulus. The lady disappeared under the black cloth several times and there they were, arm in arm together, standing atop a wave on an endless ocean, lost in the clouds for all eternity.
The deed and the long day done, with much weeping, wailing and kissing of kin, they caught another eastbound train and rode it until it ran out of tracks by the Atlantic, then a local line up to Rowley.
They obviously wasted no time in getting down to the rhythm of the rails. Nine months later there I was, swinging in a cradle suspended from a bough of one of the tall elms flanking the front of the inn, rocking happily like a dory in a tideway to the flickering light filtered through the leaves on an ocean of wind.
Three years after, Patience arrived and three later Herb. Who's appearance, I suspect, was a bit impromptu and unplanned. Not that, given a choice, he'd ever have had it any other way, these words practically define my brother.
But by then Justine had finally assumed command of a demanding kitchen after a long, often fraught apprenticeship under Hector's mother. Wilhelmina reluctantly retired from the field of battle nearing ninety, buried clutching her stained, war-torn copy of Fannie Farmer. I don't think Herb was exactly in the cards.
He was an attentive and apt, I'd almost say rapt, pupil from an early age. Perched on a high chair in a corner of the kitchen, he absorbed, ate and studied all that Justine had to offer - with a curious but critical eye. By seven he was our part-time, after-school, sous chef and in his teens it appeared to both of them that the apprentice had now overtaken the master.
But he was restless, wanted more, like most of us, and joined the navy. Which is sort of a family tradition, a calling of the sea; either that, the merchant marine or commercial fishing.
Armed with his recipes from the Saltmarsh Inn, he captained galleys and manned gun stations on several ships patrolling the Vietnam littoral and deltas as that sad war finally wound down to less than nothing. Futility, a mere blip to be forgotten on the radar screen of futurity.
Before forgetting he gave it plenty of thought, however. But before we hear his thinking, though, I'd like to say a few words about and for sailors in general.
Sailors, in my experience - which, as Thoreau cautions us, must necessarily be limited and partial - are among the most thoughtful and well-read of people. Which is probably the polar opposite of what most landsmen, if anything, imagine.
But consider - ocean passages take time. They are journeys through time as much as space, as one soon becomes aware when taking to the sea. One of the things that seamen have that's denied most landsmen is plenty of time to think things over on long lonely watches - and read widely. Yes, even wisely, because depth is required upon on the deep. Shallows are quickly apparent and to be avoided as dangerous wastes of time on passage.
Sailors are immersed in the poetry of reality, that is to say, face to face with nature - whether bearing her beauty or baring her fangs. And so they tend to love, read and recite poetry, which, with science, is our language to talk about the natural world.
Good reading can lead to good writing and good writing certainly requires good reading. As a result, many seamen are excellent writers as well. Why? Voyages or tours of duty may last weeks, maybe months. Letters, or nowadays emails, are frequently the only contact they have with family and friends for long periods of time.
In the days of sail - hunting whales or trading with China - voyages might even take years. So when you wrote, you wanted to get it right - and still do. It was a point of pride and love, which didn't diminish by oceans of separation or the seas of time.
In fact, to quote one of Captain Leander's favorite maxims, of which he had an ample supply for any situation, "Absinthe maketh the heart grow fonder." And it still doth.
Another thing to consider is that seamen are also citizens of the world. Almost all great cities on earth have a seaport or a deep navigable river leading to them from the ocean. At one time or another he, or increasingly she, will touch at many of them, some over and over as if visiting old friends. Sailors are true cosmopolitans, tolerant of, and by necessity students of, the scope and strangeness of human nature, enjoying an unending education. So let's put to rest the sad calumny that sailors are stupid, drunks and lechers. There are no dumb sailors - except dead ones. Homer, Sir Francis Drake, Herman Melville, Joshua Slocum, Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Erskine Childers, Samuel Elliot Morrison, Alaine Gerbault, Ernest Hemingway, Jacques Cousteau, Tristan Jones, Patrick O'Brien and William F. Buckley - all tell a different tale. And with that, I've said my piece. For now.
Another thing to consider is that seamen are also citizens of the world. Almost all great cities on earth have a seaport or a deep navigable river leading to it from the ocean. At one time or another he, or increasingly she, will touch at many of them, some over and over as if visiting old friends. Sailors are true cosmopolitans, tolerant of, and by necessity students of, the scope and strangeness of human nature, enjoying an unending education.
So let's put to rest the sad calumny that sailors are stupid, drunks and lechers. There are no dumb sailors - except dead ones. Homer, Sir Francis Drake, Herman Melville, Joshua Slocum, Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Erskine Childers, Samuel Elliot Morrison, Alaine Gerbault, Ernest Hemingway, Jacques Cousteau, Tristan Jones, Patrick O'Brien and William F. Buckley - all tell a different tale. And with that, I've said my piece. For now.
What Herb had to say took time. Hector was even slower to speak and only opened up about 'his war', a lifetime earlier, after Herb had. Maybe that's typical. The guys who saw the real shit go down really didn't want to talk about it. They wanted to forget in fact, get on with their lives and seize back the time war had stolen from them.
Were they wounded? Yes. Hector narrowly survived a kamikaze attack, drowning after being swept overboard in a typhoon and a shell explosion in his gun turret. None of which he mentioned in his letters to Justine. I have two large bundles of them, his and hers, in the cabin behind the inn where I retreat to write. Not a word. There were battles mentioned, yes, but with no real details and seemingly lots of sunny tropical sailing with shore leave in between. Which I doubt.
Hector carried shrapnel from the suicide attack in his left shoulder from then on. Doctors of the day considered it too deep and dangerous to remove, so it remained. And it would cause him an agony of aching again and again. He told us it was from a bicycle accident he'd had on one of the narrow Rowley dirt roads. And of course kids believe anything uncritically, although they do harbor their unspoken, even unthought, suspicions.
Herb was luckier in his war, partly because medical treatment, like much of technology, had advanced so far in the wake of two world wars. In great part because of them. Yes, war teaches many lessons. Most benignly, how to save those who must wage war. But mostly lessons we never knew we needed to know, and might be happier overall for not knowing, although I suppose evil can be converted to good in some cases.
Vietnam was a far lower intensity war, of course, a series of jungle skirmishes by comparison. Herb came through relatively unscathed, although he hovered near death for days at one time from malaria contracted in the Mekong.
But does anyone come through war unscathed? Observing my dad and brother (and other sailors I've served with), I think not. Both bore scars. Mental ones, if not physical, below the surface, kept hidden out of sight, especially from impressionable children, for whom reality is such a tenuous concept anyway.
Hector's was a just and noble, a global war, that's true. Clearly a war that had to be fought, against massive, mechanized stupidity, cruelty and greed. No doubt. All war is a crime, however, waged for whatever noble motives and by whatever means.
There are no war crimes. War itself is the crime. There are no war criminals. All the participants are culpable criminals. Some go on trial at the conclusion of the conflict, but the war itself goes on trial well after the fact in the craven court of history.
Where, even with the perspective of time, the best one can do is shake one's head and wonder, "what the fuck was that all about?" A valid question with no real answer. Only silence can withstand such a frontal assault. Somewhat. With never any firm verdicts, the guilt falling so freely on all sides.
Herb's war was different, although it was a difference without any real distinction. War is war, and like all stupidity everywhere it tends to wear one common boring mask with only slightly shifting shadings of disguise.
War is diplomacy by other means. A nicety for when the niceties of diplomacy break down in the hands of our chosen, or unchosen, leaders. 'Means' means killing - death, destruction, crippling, rape, plunder and terror. That's what war means. That is both its costs and bottom line, exquisitely fused. It is what it is. You can't put lipstick on the war pig.
Tales of a Seaside Inn continues with Part Six in September
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