Old Men And Infidels Books

Book Tok in San Francisco May 2023

2023-06-11

https://bit.ly/BookTok-Walter

The Fourth Wise Man

2022-12-23

The real story of the wisemen as imagined by the author

Pulling the Trigger

2022-09-29

Thoughts on moving from my home of 25 years to a cabin in the woods, on Dog and God and my place in the universe.

Diary of My First Tattoo

2017-01-14

Tattoos in history and as a closing of days.

Lost Weekend

2020-05-18

This is a memoir of events in November 1993 and true in all particulars save the name of my companion

Food is, after a long day of hiking over rough terrain with heavy packs and disappointments, a thing to be savored. The sharing of sustenance, no doubt a primitive acknowledgment of commonality and non-aggression, is cherished on every trail I have trod over six decades and six continents.

The wind, boiling up out of the Great Gulf to funnel into the narrowing defile, pummeled its way up toward us and engaged the thousand-foot headwall within the small swale. We heard it start within minutes of the early sunset. Before we finished scraping cookpots clean with handfuls of grit, before we tied down the tent, and well before we crawled into cold sleeping bags, we heard trees crash within the forest below.

It was not the first time I had tried to climb this mountain. Solo, the previous year, I had made an attempt in early spring. Skiing in from the west, I hoped to use a trail of huts to reach the “fishhook” crest of the Presidentials. I never made it that far. Stream crossings in winter depend on the continued hostility of the weather. Congenial weather turn snow bridges traitor; I escaped with a soaking.

This time, in early November, I came with company. Dan, then like me in his mid-forties and well-acquainted with hiking and climbing, had first climbed Mount Washington on his return from Viet Nam. Even so, we had spent that morning on a futile attempt to climb the Six-Husbands Trail, named for a much-married Native American. Faced with a slush-covered trail canting up and out into thin air, we retreated. We had equipment for a hike but none for an early-winter ice-climb.

Backtracking to the Peabody River, looking more like an ice-rimmed creek, we turned up its valley, the Great Gulf, toward the headwall. We could then make a long day of it tomorrow. Summiting and then going down through Alpine Garden and Tuckerman’s Ravine, we could return to our car at the Adirondak Loj, the official spelling, before sundown.

That afternoon, our progress was steady, even with the last sharp climb next to a desultory waterfall. Arriving late in the day, we entered a small swale, dry and dead, almost surrounded by the glowering headwall of the mountain, its top lost in fog. In the middle of the swale we found a sign nailed to its one remaining but lifeless tree: CAMP HERE ONLY.

So, we did—well away from that widow-maker tree. Despite the wind’s wild tumult, sleep eventually found us, waking us only briefly when waves of rain began to crash against the tent. Fatigue triumphing over tempest, we slept on until, in the grayness that is not dawn, Dan rolled over.

We both awoke to the sensation of floating on choppy seas.

“What’s wrong with this picture?”

“Water under the tent. Get out!”

Dan rolled out first while I packed essential gear. Before I could emerge, water, cascading white across the low sill of the tent, began to fill the small space. I chose to exit forthwith. We started that day soaked, the temperature hovering around fifty.

Overnight, the swale had transformed. Instead of yesterday’s dry deadness, it was alive with surging water, seemingly coming from all directions. Surrounded by the unclimbable rock of the headwall, the swale, like a cup, had filled to overflowing. All the equipment left outside, save a single pot, was gone. Within fifteen minutes, carrying water-heavy packs, we waded back, knee-deep, the way we had come the evening before. Yesterday, our entrance had been marked by the desultory waterfall and a small stream, its flow not even deep enough to top the toes of my boot.

A roaring current, twenty-feet wide had swallowed the creek whole. To our front, roots from a fallen tree swirled in the water, lashing out at us in seeming anger. To our right, the little dribble of a waterfall had become a cataract, spouting white water four feet out from the verge into the unseen valley below.

“Let me see how deep it is,” I said. Wading into the current, I retreated when soaked to the armpits and feeling the suck of water trying to fling me into the void. Standing in cold water, surrounded by rock and torrent, we were trapped.

“Let’s follow the stream uphill. Get high enough to cross and then downclimb from there?”

“Oughta work. Lead on.”

It did not work. A huge blow-down, a tree, roots undermined by the water and then toppled with the wind, blocked our path within fifty feet uphill of the waterfall. We could see several more ahead of the first. Each would require us to take off our packs and negotiate the chaos of branches emerging at all angles from the chest-high tree trunk. If successful, we then must haul our forty-pound packs through this thicket before we could take a few more steps to the next blow-down.

“Not gonna work. Maybe we can use it as a bridge?”

“Could,” agreed Dan. “My turn,” he said, shooing me back. Dan approached the stream with the trunk upstream of him, keeping his pack on, for the extra weight. Each handhold, stubs of broken branches, looked solid as Dan moved from one to the next in the waist-deep flow.

Fifteen feet away from me the current swept him away. Turning in the stream and looking back, we locked eyes. His face never changed. My immediate thought was, “Dan is dead,” followed instantly by “We both are.”

Dan carried the tent.

Breaking my gaze, I turned and ran. Slipping, slogging, accepting body-blows from trees and falls from hidden holes, rising from scraped knees and hands with but a dim idea of a goal, I stopped only when the abyss of the waterfall loomed in front of me. Dan, held up momentarily by the entangling roots of the downed tree, was no more than ten feet from me on the opposite bank. Within a minute, we were back to where we started.

Submerged and then pressed to the snag-laden bottom, Dan had given up any hope of rescue until an errant current brought him to the surface near the downed tree roots. Scraped, bludgeoned, and water-logged, he’d arrived at the waterfall just as I did.

There was no leaving that day. Finding the one spot in the entire swale above water, a few feet downstream from a downed log, I pitched the tent. Despite having to stake one corner in running water, the tent would shelter us from the wind and wet, if not the cold. Wringing out Dan’s sleeping bag and stuffing him into it, I went back to improve our position, adjusting logs and wedging others to secure them. Admiring my handiwork, I began shivering. After winter storms, the temperature usually drops, earning Washington its title of “most dangerous small mountain in the world.”.

Getting back to the tent entrance, I found Dan responsive but dealing with the pain of his injuries, a bad headache, and nausea. After stripping myself to the skin at the entrance and wringing out each article of clothing before replacing it, I eventually shuffled into my own damp sleeping bag. We were finally both out of the wind but no warmer.

We took stock. Among the casualties lost to the flood was my camp stove, floating off with its attached fuel bottle for buoyancy. No stove—no cooked food. We shucked out pockets and packs to collect all trail food, what we could eat cold. It made a miserably small pile of granola bars, chocolate, and jerky. Pride of place went to the Kudu bars, more candy than granola, and among Dan’s favorites. He insisted we share out everything evenly. The little meals disappeared into the many pockets of our clothes and jackets.

Despite its current abundance, water was another matter. Even this high in the mountains, water would be fouled from the flood. For the weight-conscious hiker, iodine remains the most efficient water purifier. However, to work at this low temperature, iodine requires five hours to work. An active hiker uses about four to five liters a day in cold weather. With four liter-bottles in our possession, we each had one bottle to drink and one to treat—as long as we were careful.

The temperature continued to drop; my shivering became constant. Fire inside a tent is dangerous: nylon burns and everything is nylon. Regardless, I retrieved a candle from a kit at the bottom of my pack. Thrown in years ago, “just in case,” the fat white paraffin candle had lived there ever since. Oddly, my butane lighter, carried on a lanyard and worn next to the skin, would not light; neither did my “back-up” matches. Dan’s were no more useful.

Years before, I had also thrown into my pack a modern take on a “flint-and-steel” tinderbox. It was one more neat little camping gadget of which the catalogs are full. Now shivering violently, I tried with that, the second time in all those years I had ever used it. Each attempt failed as my uncontrolled shaking made my attempts to get a big fat spark useless. Finally, hyperventilating several times to stop the juddering convulsions briefly, I succeeded. Bringing the small yellow flame to my candle and watching it come to life, I began to breathe again. Placed in the bottom of our one remaining pot, it sputtered out eighteen hours later.

From noon on Sunday to dawn Monday, we stayed in the tent. I woke Dan at regular intervals: “Who are you? Where are you? Who am I?”

And we talked through that long, ever colder day and night.

We told stories: true, false, and improved.

“Never travel with a bad liar or a good memory.” Good liars and a poor memory for stories you might have heard a hundred times before are much to be preferred.

We talked about politics and religion. We talked about money. We talked about The Distant Mirror by Tuchman, a book Dan had just finished and about Skinwalkers by Tony Hillerman, one I had just finished. Dan slept, troubled in his sleep, as he frequently is, by memories of a mostly forgotten war. It got colder. Each time I flicked on my light, frost lining walls of the tent had crept closer from its drowned foot towards our heads.

By dawn, emerging like writhing jointed caterpillars, we found the landscape transformed once more. Now drained of the flood, overnight the swale had frozen into the brittle silence of ice. At ten degrees Fahrenheit, the cold had frozen the waterlogged ground, making it good for walking—bad for much else. The tentpoles, twelve-feet-long and made up of jointed sections, had frozen into a single piece, impossible to pack. Fortunately, I had not emptied my bladder. A little experimentation and we had an “on-the-job” fix, melting the joints quickly despite the loss of a water-bottle in the process. Dan laughed.

We spent most of the morning crossing the once-more negligible brook, down-climbing beside the frozen waterfall, and negotiating blow-downs. Trading progress for dwindling reserves of energy, our hike became, in the parlance of hikers, a “death march.” Since time is short and food is scare, there will be no rest until the end of things.

We marched on into an abandoned landscape, meeting no one. Below the sounds of our boots ringing on the icy trail, the hills groaned and snapped with the sounds of trees surrendering to their burdens of ice. I recovered my stove. Hung up in a leafless bush high above the now calm river, it was adorned with a four-foot-long icy stalactite of ice. We ate and drank what little we had while walking. We no longer talked.

By late afternoon, we left the Great Gulf to walk overland to the Loj, a long dry slog over a well-marked and gentle grade. By this time, I was out of water, having missed my last chance to resupply before leaving the Peabody. No great obstacles remained other than to cover the distance in the time remaining. Strangely energized, I let my mind wander.

Feeling like a man in a bear pit, to survive I must keep Fatigue and Hunger at bay. Watching my adversaries quietly, giving nothing away, I waited for the least telltale that one or the other would make a dash at my welfare. Walking in that unthinking reverie of the moment, I imagined the creatures coming out of the darkness toward me. At first, I could see only their eyes, red in the uncertain light, blinking out when I shifted an illusory spear. Slowly the dark coarse forms separated from the blackness, huge bearlike creatures, unnaturally heavy in the shoulders with saber-like fangs, bared for my inspection. I was adjusting my grip as Fatigue clawed the gravel in preparation for a charge—when I thought to look behind me.

Dan, fading along with the light, was now a hundred yards behind me. Exhausted, in pain, and nauseated from the effort, his face flaccid of expression, he said nothing as I joined him.

“We can’t walk in like this.”

“Right,” he said vacantly.

After wordlessly buttoning all buttons, zippering all zippers, and tabbing all tabs, we walked on arm-in-arm. Arriving among the out-buildings of the Loj in the dark, we trudged through the maze of unlit structures to the entrance. In doing so, we met a young man in shirt-sleeves, running between buildings on an errand, and exchanged brief greetings.

After going on his way for a few paces, he turned back to us and asked me, “Hey, are you Dan?”

“No. He’s Dan,” I said, pointing.

“Yo, Dan! Your wife called.”

And indeed, Susan had. We turned the corner to the front porch to find it covered with about twenty people, rigging their packs in preparation to rescue us—or recover our bodies. The storm had already claimed eight lives elsewhere. The squad leader made the friendly suggestion that we might get lost “a little,” so that his squad could get a little practice. We declined.

After a shower, the best two dollars I have ever spent, we made a trip through the commissary line at the Loj minutes before it closed. In the midst of dinner, a state ranger approached us. He explained that, as a rescue had been called, he had to complete a report. Going through a long list of questions, including what equipment we had, what maps we used, and where we had roosted above the flood, he finished by asking about food.

“No. No food left,” said Dan, just as I showed my one remaining Kudu bar from an outside pocket.

Dan looked at me in disbelief and horror, “You had food?”

Puzzled at the response, I could only say, “Just in case it got bad.”

We have never spoken about that despite our many subsequent trips with their own stories and their own lies.

I no longer am entrusted with Kudu bars.

End Game Contest

2018-06-29

No One Aspires to Being Old.

Growing old-- going in the direction-- but not arriving. The body gives out. What you could do without thought just a while ago is now a trial. Door knobs dodge your grip. Hair distribution is off. Places have that should not and have not when they should. Things fall to the floor too often.

Friends give out. They turn into a clutch of old geezers with funny colored hair, the one that still have some. Then they up an die.

Institutions give out. Orgainizations you thought stood for something decide that they would rather up skirts and go have a smoke over there.

Very trying.

All of which brings me to ask the question:

What are you aiming at in OLD AGE, however you define it.

AIM SMALL, MISS SMALL. Send your contribution to Mwajani@Gmail.Com and I'll post the best and give the very best a free ebook of the NEW EXILE"S ESCAPE.

Observations on an Eclipse

2017-08-21

I saw the eclipse. A few millions of my fellow Americans did as well.

I argued and fretted with a company who contracts with me to allow me to arrive about twelve hours earlier than required in order for me to view the eclipse. They fretted and argued back and thus it was that I ponied up the extra $645 to make it to Saint Louis at 9:45, after nearly missing my connection in Atlanta due in part to a cabin attendant who must have been trained by the Gestapo.

I got to the car rental joint and stood in line for forty-five minutes to get my Corolla. 11:21:15 Apparently, I am not the only one who had made an assignation with the moon. Heading south, absent breakfast and lunch, I was contemplating famishment, going through my carry on, one-handedly searching for my emergency strip of wintergreen chewing gum to stave off hypoglycemic coma. I had chosen the hamlet of Festus, Missouri as my goal. Nearly along the line of maximum duration, Festus had the advantage of being off the beaten track. After a short repast at the local Burger King, I made for Sunset Park, attracted by its public status, ease of navigation, and absence of tree-cover.

I chose well. When I arrived at 12:15, a little over an hour before the Event, a few dozen people had already set up. I donned my bona fide sun gazer’s goggles and could already see that a good solid bite had been taken out of the sun’s disk. The air was hot and humid but in my gypsy lifestyle, a large selection of garb is not generally possible. I lounged in my trousers and long shirt on the grass, a victim to small crawly things and sweat. The crowd swelled to maybe three score. Listening to a green-haired siren with a voice that could etch glass, I learned she had driven down with her unfortunately bearded companion from Chicago. She interrogated those within my earshot. The winner of the distance contest was a dark, intense and constantly busy man from Dubai who had set up shop on an abandoned basketball court. I heard Mandarin spoken from a small group behind me. A middle-aged guy with three daughters had brought a Sunspotter Scope, projecting a six-inch image onto a paper screen. He was the star of the show.

12:47 Closer. The bite had become a gulp and now the slice of the sun is about half gone. Nothing else has changed. The sun feels just as hot. The sweat is as sticky. I lie back to view through my glasses, over-warm but still comfortable except for the sweat. The crowd is no larger even as Sunspotter Man holds forth about sunspots as they are eclipsed. Dubai Guy is quietly busy, taking photos with a large camera, holding his generous sun-filter in front of the lens with each shot. I tried the same with my cell-phone with no success.

13: 15 The slice has passed through sliver to become a serpiginous smiley-face. Cicadas and cricket have started up. It has become cooler, a breeze has sprung up. My place on the grass is quite comfortable. The Mandarin boys are impressed. The light is odd, seemingly just as brilliant but without there being enough to go around. The grass under the trees is dappled with flights of overlapping crescents. The street lights have come on. I turn back to the smiley-face and discover I am wrong. The smiley face is not a smooth line but has become knobbly, the extremites almost like a string of beads, in this case, Baily’s Beads. The sun, shining between the high passes in the mountains of the moon, seen in profile blossom into brilliance along the thin limbs of the decreasing crescent. It is cooler now. Momentarily I am happy for my long-sleeved shirt. A voice over a loudspeaker counts down the last ten seconds to 13:17:07. I watch as the sun’s light is turned down, as if by a rheostat, until it is dark. Inside my goggles, I can see nothing. I rip them off to see the magnificent corona, unsuspected until the last of the last sliver is obscured. It shines out against a dark sky where a few stars peek out. I think I can see Mercury. The light once more has changed, not twilight, odd, the sky still giving it illumination, if only slightly. The corona, a ring around the absolute black of the moon, changes while I watch, almost as if on fire. The loudspeaker cuts in giving a countdown for the last ten seconds to 13:19:45. I regret I did not drive fifteen minutes further to have it last 3 seconds more. The light breaks out as if anxious to escape. Immediately, the light changes again, brightening second by second to what looks, but does not feel, like full sun. People arise and collect their blankets, walking under the hickories and their flights of crescents.

Green-haired Girl and Beard have left Dubai Guy, Sunspotter Man and me to the remainder of the Event. I rise to leave, looking up briefly to see the other parenthesis has appeared, to join, belatedly and unsuccessfully, the first one.

Driving back through the celestially-created traffic jam, I have more than enough time to contemplate. Millions of American have spent the greater part of a day to view a transient solar accident: almost three minutes where we can actually look at our life-giving sun without protection or damage. During any of the other 12,107,280 three-minute periods of my life, looking at the sun for even a few seconds would have struck me blind. Yet, without this deadly irradiation, our world is itself dead, cold, airless, waterless and desolate. When I thought about it, however, we cannot live long on most of this globe we presume to call home. We can stay but hours aloft and mere months afloat without assistance from the smallest portion, dry land. We cannot breathe water, although other creatures do. We cannot even drink from the largest collection of water, it is a poison to humans, driving us mad before we die. Vast portions of the water are unusable even for travel during much of the year, frozen into a hazard we can barely maneuver within. Any water we do drink must be carefully treated and tended lest the effluvia of our fellow creatures kill us.

Air is available in immense quantities without purification or storage, yet a man can walk to the very edge of breathability. We dwell at the bottom of a shallow pool, five miles deep or so, the distance a “wee stretch of the legs” for a fit person.

The inherent hostility of our dwelling, like a hammock over a viper-pit, should be telling us something about the care put into our creation, and upkeep.

What Good the Retarded?

2017-05-29

What good are the retarded?

America has done much to improve the lives of the “intellectually challenged,” the currently acceptable designation of those who were designated “mentally retarded” when I was a child, as “idiot” when my parents were children and “moron” when my grandparents were children. No doubt, we will have another euphemism in the next generation when we have used up the current one, when the disdain from the old term has been fully transferred to the new term.

Since the mid-seventies the “Intellectually challenged” have undergone mainstreaming in public education, being placed in classes based on their abilities rather than a global classification of intellect. Whether this has improved the education of the ninety-and-nine normal children in the class was not considered important by the social experimenters in that age of the triumph of Science (All Science, mind you). Each new wrinkle of advance which could generate a pilot project and its attendant grant money, was embraced as timeless educational doctrine.

Not surprisingly, the cost per capita of public education has skyrocketed, almost doubling (in inflation controlled dollars) in thirty years (1970-2000). This is during a time when the college board scores fell precipitously, even requiring a “resetting” of the score in the mid-1990s, and high school graduation rates fell. With little to show for the policy of mainstreaming, one wonders why it has continued, save for inanition and momentum.

Last Saturday, I went shopping at a grocery story. It was relatively crowded and there was a fair amount of backing and filling of carts to allow people to navigate up and down the narrow aisles of the Schnucks Store of Nowhere, Missouri. I started down an aisle and noticed that another man and cart were coming my way. I pulled over and motioned for the man to come on. He did it clumsily. The reason for this was that on his arm was teenage girl.

The man was small, slim, and middle-aged (as opposed to my own age, bordering on the elderly) dressed in a neat button-down plaid shirt and slacks. On his arm was a girl, taller than he by perhaps three inches, overweight, lumpish and drab … except for her face, which smiled at me as she turned the corner.

“I going shopping with my daddy,” she said to me as our eyes met.

“Yes, you are!” said I. “How lucky for you,” I thought.

I looked back at the duo as they proceeded slowly up the narrow aisle past me, stopping every once in a while to look at one thing or another.

I was mostly done and checked out almost immediately. Carrying my few purchases across the front of the store toward the exit, I looked back to see if I could find and capture the eyes of the girl who was shopping with her daddy. I did and waved to her. She did not see me, having eyes for her father. Her father did see me and waved back at me. When I got to my car I wept, for no great reason.

Our care for the disabled, our love for those who may never be able to pay us back in kind, seems to me to be assessed wrongly. We do not do it for them so much as for ourselves, to remind us all that our selfless care is a boon to all mankind and a joy to the hearts of us all

Saint Patrick’s Prayer for the Faithful

2017-03-16

May the Strength of God guide us.

May the Power of God preserve us.

May the Wisdom of God instruct us.

May the Hand of God protect us.

May the Way of God direct us.

May the Shield of God defend us.

May the Angels of God guard us.

– Against the snares of the evil one.

May Christ be with us!

May Christ be before us!

May Christ be in us,

Christ be over all!

May Thy Grace, Lord,

Always be ours,

This day, O Lord, and forevermore.

Amen.

Green Card, Please.

2017-02-28

Via “Immigration Woes, Miami, Florida” By Carl D’Agostino — I Know I Made You Smile