By Ed Staskus

   It was a late morning in May when Frank and Betty Glass went visiting Barron Cannon, who they hadn’t seen much since they first ran into him picketing Cleveland Vegan, a café and bakery near where they lived in Lakewood, Ohio. They had dropped by his yurt, which was on a bluff overlooking the Rocky River Metropark Reservation, once in November but after winter got cold and snowy had not paid him another social call, not that Betty minded, or even gave it a thought.

   The first time they ever saw Barron had been the past September, when they were attracted by the red and blue flashing lights of a Ford Police Interceptor at the vegan eatery, and were greeted by the sight of a slender pony-tailed man in his early 30s waving a picket sign on a stick. Faces peered through the plate glass windows. Passersby stopped to see what was going on. There was a single word scrawled on the placard. The word was HYPOCRITES! It was in capital letters. It was written in blood red crayon. 

   The exasperated policeman who had been called to the scene by one of the outraged servers was telling him he had to call it a day. He told him protesting without a permit wasn’t permitted. Although Barron maintained he had more than enough reason, and cited his first amendment rights, making an impromptu speech about animal rights, he finally agreed to go home and strode off, his picket sign bouncing up and down on his shoulder.

   The bemused policeman walked away shaking his head. “He’s like the cranky old guy who’s always on his front porch yelling at the neighborhood kids,” he said to the offended server standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips.

   Barron was going the same way as Frank and Betty, up West Clifton Blvd., and after falling into step with him were astonished to find out he was himself a vegan. “Eating is an act of nourishing my body and soul,” he said. “I choose to do no harm to myself or other living beings.”

   He did not eat animals, drink their milk, or wear their hides. He eschewed all animal products. He didn’t eat anything deep-fried and never snacked on refined sugar. He avoided Worcestershire sauce because it contained anchovies. He considered eating honey exploitive. He had more reasons to not eat something than most people had to eat anything.

   “I can’t stomach people who eat animals, and since that’s just about everybody, and since that is not changing anytime soon, that’s that, and here I am, a lonely voice in the wilderness. At least I don’t have to live with them.” At least as long as they weren’t his parents. Although he lived alone, he lived with his parents. He lived in their backyard.

   “My parents are as bad as the worst. They are always bringing chicken, pork, and ground beef home from the grocery. I see them in their kitchen every day, sticking forks into decomposing flesh and animal secretions. They chew on Slim Jim’s while they watch the TV news, which is full of Trump’s lies and misery in general. Then there are all the fast food commercials. Everybody worries about terrorism. Maybe twenty or thirty people are killed by terrorists in the United States in any given year. Almost half a million people die from obesity issues in the United States every year.”

   Barron lived overlooking the Metropark Reservation, about a mile-and-a-half south of Lake Erie. He had built a Mongolian-style wigwam for himself. He didn’t have a job, a car, a refrigerator, a wife, or any pets.

   “Don’t even get me started on pet slavery,” he said.

  Betty gave him a sharp look. She and Frank had two house cats, who were Mr. Moto and Sky King. They slept with them on their bed most nights. The cats were rescues. She didn’t think of them as slaves and was sure they didn’t think of themselves as slaves, either.

   “Have we met before?” Frank asked as they stopped at the corner of their side street off Riverside Dr. while Barron went his own way to where he lived on the south side of I-90.

   “I don’t think so. I would know. I have an excellent memory.”

   A college graduate with a master’s degree in philosophy and a hundred thousand dollars in unpaid student debt, Barron was unqualified for nearly any job, even if he had been remotely interested in seeking employment. He didn’t vote, although he enjoyed public sector antics whenever he heard about them. “Suppose I was talking about a grifter, and suppose I was talking about a politician, but I repeat myself,” he said. He disdained pro sports, calling the athletes “millionaires throwing, catching, and kicking some kind of damn ball.”  He didn’t read anything popular or know anything about current trends. He dressed like the 21^st century had never happened.

   He didn’t take any drugs, over or under the counter. “By FDA requirement,” he explained, “each and every pharmaceutical is tested on animals. Insurance, HMO’s, meds, doctors, it’s all a racket so the silk stockings can live the high life.” He was a vegan purist, pursuing his ideals to their logical conclusion. Betty thought of his pursuit as a dead end, but didn’t say so.

   Barron didn’t have a bank account or any credit cards. He had few friends, other than some bicycle-riding neo-hippies and a handful of retirees in the neighborhood for whom he did odd jobs on a cash basis. He only worked for them if they could prove they didn’t have cars and agreed never to talk about their problems, especially their health problems.

   The one time Frank and Betty had visited Barron they had walked, because if he knew they had driven to see him he would have refused to see them. Burning fossil fuels was anathema to him. “That is some queer duck who lives at the top of Hogsback Lane,” Betty said. Hogsback Lane was an entry road down to the river valley and the Metropark Reservation.

   “Can’t we just drive and park a block away?” she asked.

   “No, he’s got a sixth sense about it.”

   Barron lived on an allowance his parents begrudged him. He shopped at a once-a-week farmer’s market. He had recently gotten his yurt connected to his parent’s power supply. Unbeknownst to them, he had gone on-line at the Lakewood Library, read about the work he had in mind, and dug a trench from the back of their house to his yurt. He buried a transmission line in the trench.

   “They got a solar roof last year and got off the methane and coal, which I will tell you is a blessing,” he said. “It gets dark and cold in this yurt in the middle of winter. I used to heat with firewood from the park. I had to collect it at night, otherwise the park rangers gave me grief. I don’t think they like me.”

   He now heated his big top with a 5,000 BTU infrared quartz heater and LED’s were strung  overhead in a kind of loopy chandelier. He put his vegan candles, made of plant-based wax, away. He cooked on a Cuisinart 2-burner cast iron hot plate. He had long refused to use either electricity or natural gas, on the premise that both are petroleum products, in which are mixed innumerable marine organisms.

   “That’s one of the things I can’t stand about those leaf-eaters at the restaurant, cooking their so-called vegan cuisine with gas made from the bodies of dead fish,” he said. “They’re too busy ringing up the cash register to know or care.”

   Vegetarians drew his ire, too, although he tolerated them. “I can put up with vegetarians if I have to,” he said, which Frank reluctantly admitted to being when Barron quizzed him. Barron gave Frank a mirthless grin. “At least your’re only half lying to yourself.”

   Betty, who described herself as an omnivore, on the side of free range and organic, shot a bright smile at Barron, keeping her eating habits to herself while gnashing her teeth at the same time. Frank knew his wife was savvy enough to know when to bite her tongue.

   As they approached Hogsback Lane they saw a sea of green treetops in the valley below. It was always a welcome sight after a long winter. Barron’s yurt was at the far end of a sprawling backyard on the edge of the valley, where the long downhill of the road intersects with Stinchcomb Hill, named after the founder of the park system. It is a bucolic spot in the middle of the big city. Frank was reluctant to mention that William Stinchcomb had been a pork roast and beef tenderloin man in his day, as well as president of the Cleveland Automobile Club, so he didn’t mention it.

   “Vegans are as bad as my parents, the whole lot of them,” Barron said. “Show me a vegan who isn’t an elitist, or someone who spouts veganism who is not a do-gooder, or making boatloads of money from it, explaining how it’s all one big happy family, yoga and veganism and new-age capitalism and flying to their immersions in the Bahamas, and everywhere else around the planet on their holiday retreats, never mind the carbon footprint, and I’ll show you the sanctimonious side of who’s burning up the planet.”

   Since Barron didn’t have a doorbell they had been glad to find him out of doors, although Betty was less happy about it than Frank. She had been hoping to find him away. Barron was laying out rows of seeds and tubers outside his yurt. They joined him, sitting down on canvas field chairs. He had opened the flap over the roof hole of the yurt. Betty poked her head inside it, remarking how pleasant and breezy it was inside his house.

   “Inside your tent, I mean,” she said.

   “It’s a yurt,” he said.

   It was round and fronted by a half-circle of large white stones, like what children do at summer camps in front of their tents.

   “Whatever,” Betty said under her breath.

   Frank was nonplussed to see a new Apple laptop on a small reading table.

   “I keep up, especially now that I have power,” Barron said. “It’s not like I’m a caveman.”

   Frank noticed a rolled up yoga mat, a strap, and two blocks in the shade of a sweet gum tree.

   “Where do you practice yoga?” 

   “Here in the backyard, every day, and sometimes at the studio on Lake Road in Rocky River. The owner and I trade cleaning the studio for classes.”

   “That’s probably where I’ve seen you before,” Frank said.

   “Maybe,” Barron said, not bothering trying to remember.

   “I thought you were down on yoga, you know, burning all that carbon.”

   “I’m down on the phonies who practice it, not the practice itself,” Barron said.

   He led them to his new garden. He had dug up most of his mother’s backyard, uprooting her wild roses and rhododendrons and was planting rows of root crops, including beets, onions, and potatoes. He was especially proud of his celery.

   “I cover my celery with paper, boards, and loose soil. They will have a nutty flavor when I dig them up at the end of the year. I don’t eat anything from factory farms. They make you a chattel to the supermarket.”

   Neither Frank nor Betty knew what to say. As they got ready to leave Barron scooped handfuls of birdseed from a large barrel into a brown paper bag and handed the bag to Frank. He was still unsure about Betty. She seemed to always be giving him the stink eye.

   “You should take every chance to feed the birds and other animals you see outside your house,” he said. “Give them good food, organic food, not processed. It will make such a difference in their lives.”

   On the driveway of his parent’s ranch-style house at the top of Hogsback Lane, looking across the valley towards the Hilliard Bridge, Barron tapped the brim of his dog-earred Chief Wahoo baseball cap in farewell.

   “Be a real vegan,” he said. “That’s the best thing any of us can do.”

   Frank and Betty walked the long way around before circling back to home, first crossing the Hilliard Bridge to Rocky River, from where they would make for Lakewood. The nine hundred foot long concrete bridge wasn’t the first one at that spot. The first one was known as the “Swinging Bridge.” It was a rope bridge with wooden planks that was used by school children and pedestrians to cross the river back then. It hung thirty feet above the water and swayed in strong winds. Sometimes a child fell into the river and had to be saved from fate.

   Betty was unusually quiet. She was usually a talkative woman. Frank gave her an inquisitive glance. As they came upon the Erie Island Coffee Co. on Detroit Road., where there was outdoor seating, she suggested they stop for refreshments, since Barron hadn’t offered them any.

   “Man, oh man, I know chocolate brownies have eggs in them,” Betty said, “and cappuccino has milk in it, and I know Barron would have a cow, but right now I think I need to sit down and enjoy myself for a few minutes, not thinking about that joker and his deck of cards.”

   They agreed that the vegans they knew were ethical and compassionate, their lives complementing their health, humanitarian, and environmental concerns. They could not agree on whether Barron Cannon was a determined idealist, a mad ideologue, or simply lived in an alternate universe. Or maybe he was just his own incarnation of the cranky old guy on the porch.

   They sat at a small metal table outside the entrance door. They had espresso and cappuccino, scones with gobs of butter, and chocolate brownies. They people-watched and admired a 1950s Chevy Bel Air when it cruised past. The V8 engine rumbled. They watched the sun slip in and out of the springtime clouds and walked the rest of the way home in the late afternoon in good cheer.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows looking for a straight answer.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication