All posts by Edward Staskus

Edward Staskus is a freelance writer from Sudbury, Ontario. He lives in Lakewood, Ohio. His crime thrillers "Cross Walk" and "Bomb City" can be found on Amazon.
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Ball and Chain

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By Ed Staskus

   It was wetter than not the front end of summer and too muddy to ride the single tracks in the Rocky River Reservation. It had rained or thunder stormed nine days the first fourteen days of July. One day two inches of rain fell. Instead, I rode my Specialized on the all-purpose trail and left my Schwinn hanging in the garage. The Schwinn was outfitted for dirt, with front shocks and a low stem. The Specialized was outfitted with road tires, knobby on the outside and smooth rolling on the flat side and had a higher stem. It made for better riding on asphalt.

   It made for even faster riding down Hogs Back Lane, which is the entryway off Riverside Dr. into the valley. Hogs Back is laid out on a steep shale hill. It’s about a half-mile to the bottom. When the shale slumps and slides, the two-lane surface crumbles, and it becomes essential to keep your eyes fixed on the road.

   Hunched over the handlebars I could hit 40 MPH going downhill, no problem, unless I feathered the brakes, which I did, lessening the chances of flying over the handlebars at 40 MPH. That would have been a problem, if not the end of me.

   I rode alone most of the time and especially that summer because my brother Rick was getting married. He said he didn’t have time to get on his bike anymore. “I’ve got a lot going on,” he explained. He had been married once before, but it only lasted 57 days. He was determined to make his next marriage work out for the better.

   “I don’t want him racing that crazy hill and crashing,” said his fiancée, Amy Brotherton. She was down on Hogs Back. She didn’t want a train wreck walking down the aisle at her side. She and Rick had met a few months earlier on a blind date. One thing led to another on the one-way street they were on.

   “You be careful, too,” my wife said watching me saddle up in the backyard. “I don’t want you wrecking, either.”

   The summer of 1995 was hot, in the high 80s when it wasn’t in the high 90s, and the air was humid and sluggish. I could have ridden the single tracks, since they had dried up, but I stayed on the all-purpose trails. Towards the end of one week, after getting home from work, I rode twelve miles out, almost all the way to Berea. It was on the way back that I passed a skinny man in a red helmet on a hybrid.

   Inside a few minutes the red helmet was behind me, drafting, but when I slowed down for a car at the crossroads to the entrance of Little Met, he slipped ahead when the car paused to let us go by. The trail goes up a long hill there and I finally caught up at the top.

   He tucked in behind me and we rode fast to where the trail zigzags through some curves, and to where he got sloppy. He tried to pass two young women on roller blades, except on an inside-out curve, and when a biker rode up on the other side, he had to slalom wide on the grass. At the end of the curve a ditch stretches away from the trail to the Valley Parkway, and he backtracked. I waited for him to catch up.

   “That was a good pace,” he said before I peeled away to go back home, while he kept going his own way. Pedaling up Hogs Back is a long hard slog, which is what I did, slog up the long hill. By the time I got close to the crest, I was on the verge of a standstill.

   The next day Rick and I rode downtown. He said he had an appointment for a haircut at Planet 10, on West 9th St., and wanted to ride there. On the way from Lakewood, we spun through Ohio City to Church Street. He pointed out an old church whose rectory had been converted into a recording studio. 

   “That’s where we’re having our reception,” he said. Amy was a sometime actress and singer. She had the looks and the voice. She made a living doing nails, since nailing roles in Cleveland wasn’t a paying proposition.

   They were getting married at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church instead of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, where my wife and I had gotten married. Rick was Lithuanian stock, just like me, but even though Amy was an atheist, her mother wasn’t and wanted her to be married in a church. Amy didn’t like the Lithuanian church in North Collinwood, so it was going to be St. Pete’s in Lakewood.

   We went south on West 25th St., crossed the bridge to Jacobs Field, and rode to the Warehouse District. The bride-to-be was still OK with Rick riding on city streets, but not any farther through the near east side, like I often did, to Cleveland Heights along Cedar Rd. She quashed that, stamping her foot.  

   “I don’t want him getting killed in Fairfax by any porch monkey,” she said.

   Rick pushed his bike into Planet 10’s lobby and I rode away, going my flaneur-like way. After zigzagging around downtown, on my way home, stopping at a narrow strip of grass beside the Hope Memorial Bridge, squeezing a drink from my water bottle, I watched a black woman with shopping bags easing herself down to the ground in front of an RTA sign. She looked up at me and smiled. She had crooked yellow teeth. She was probably going back to Fairfax, maybe thinking of killing Rick if he rode his bike past her house.

   I was standing outside my garage when Rick and Amy pulled up in her baby blue Ford Tempo. His bike was sticking out of the trunk, the trunk bungee corded. “Jerry screwed up Rick’s appointment,” she complained. “He’s so unprofessional.” She was mad. “That’s not how we do business at Artistiques.” It was her friend’s hair and nail salon.

   Planet Ten was owned and operated by a gay man named Jerry who was a junkie. He lived near Gordon Square where he could score smack in the blink of an eye. He was up-and-down on any given day. He was good with clippers and shears, though.

   It was mid-week before I rode back into the park and got on the dirt trails that branch off from the horse stables at Puritas Rd. They were dry where they were level, but they weren’t level over much. I had to ford a stream where a tree had fallen. I jumped some baby stumps, went sideways once, and when I got home got the outdoor hose and sprayed cold water on myself. It was a hot day.

   My wife and I drove to Amy’s bridal shower that weekend, which was at her best friend’s house in Avon Lake. She was a big-faced woman married to an Englishman who was a barge pilot. It was steamy as hell even though it was just barely August. I was sprawled across a leather sofa in the air-conditioned family room when I noticed a small dog on the coffee table. I couldn’t tell if it was a dog dead asleep or a dead dog who had been stuffed. When I reached for whatever the thing was, it snapped at my fingers.

   “You better watch out,” the bridesmaid said. “He’s blind, so he bites at everything.”

   I went for a ride after we got home. Twilight was turning to dusk by the time I got back. Snapper, our Maine Coon cat, came running out of the neighbor’s backyard. Just when I was ready to close the garage door, Rick pulled into the driveway.

   “Can I borrow your lawn mower?” he asked.

   “All right, but don’t break it.”

   My brother was notorious for either busting or never returning borrowed tools. He had Katie, Amy’s three-year-old, with him. I picked her up, held her upside down, and spun her by her heels in tight circles. When we were done, we talked about a nickname for her, finally settling on Skate.

   “It rhymes with Kate,” I said.

   She waved goodbye through the window of the car as Rick pulled out with the lawn mower. If the child hadn’t been with him, I wouldn’t have lent him the mower. That was probably why he brought her along.

   By mid-August cumulus clouds were dotting the sky and the weather was surprisingly cooler than it had been. I rode my Schwinn down Hogs Back and got off the all-purpose trail at Mastik Woods, veering onto the dirt track there. I rode the track for three miles and then double-backed on the horse trail. As I did, I noticed somebody was coming up.

   When he went by, I saw he was wearing a baseball cap instead of a helmet and was on a well-worn Trek. He was riding fast, and even though I followed him as best I could, I couldn’t catch him until he suddenly slowed down. I saw why when he pulled up. Horses were coming around a bend. We waited while the horses cantered past.

   The Trek turned to the right and rode into the trees toward the river and the single tracks on the bank. I followed him, bumping over ruts and logs and through thick underbrush, but soon lost sight of him. He pushed up the hill running along Big Met, then down, and as he came into the clear jumped onto the trail ahead of me. He had gone around and was riding faster than before. We sped through a thicket, then across a baseball field where he widened the gap by jumping a wood guardrail, something I couldn’t do, even if I tried as hard as I could. It would have ended badly. I went around. It went well enough.

   I thought I might catch the Trek on the Detroit Rd. climb out of the valley, except he climbed so fast I lost more ground. I finally caught up to him where he was waiting at a red light on Riverside Dr. We talked while I gulped air.

   “I wasn’t planning on doing much today, but it ended up being a fun ride,” he said. “I saw the Vytis decal on your fender,” he said. There was a red decal of the White Knight on my rear X-Blade fender. 

   “Not many people know what that is,” I said.

   “I know my Lithuanian heroes,” he said, waving goodbye.

   A week before the wedding my brother called and said JoJo was out as their maid of honor. She was Amy’s ex-friend-to-be who arranged the blind date with Rick when Amy had been on the prowl after her latest divorce. She was promised she could be maid of honor if the date led to anything. JoJo was a travel agent. Amy gave her a cash down payment for a Cancun honeymoon. But then the travel agency called and said they were getting anxious about the down payment, since they hadn’t received it, yet.

   When Rick telephoned JoJo, she said she hadn’t gotten any cash, but when Amy heard that she rushed to the phone. There was a long loud argument and JoJo somehow found the money. The honeymoon was back on, but Tammy had to at the last minute find another maid of honor. 

   The next day my brother called.

   “Are you going riding?” he asked.

   “I’m just going out the door,” I said.

   “I’ll be there in ten minutes. I need some fresh air.”

    I was working out the kinks in my lower back when Rick rode up the driveway.

   “Amy’s sick,” he said.

   “What’s wrong with her?”

   “Cramps. I think it’s nerves,” he said.

   “Let’s go,” I said.

   The sky was overcast and gusts from the southwest pushed us around as we rode Riverside Dr. on the rim of the valley. We glided down and rode single tracks. The dirt was late summer dried out and the ruts were bad, but we rode fast enough. My back wheel went in sketchy directions a few times. Rick held back. He didn’t want to face plant.

   “A little out of control there,” he said when we crossed over to a horse path and relaxed.

   “Maybe a little,” I said.

   “I want to make it to the altar in one piece,” he said.

   “Getting married can be risky business,” I said. “Take a look at you and Amy. You were married once, and it lasted for two months. Tammy’s been married twice. She’s got a kid by one of the husbands and a kid by somebody else. You might want to throw yourself down every downhill between now and the wedding day.”

   “I don’t think so,” he said, giving me an aggrieved look. 

   “Then the next best thing is to keep your eyes wide open before the wedding and half-shut afterwards.”

   Coming out of the park on a smooth stretch Rick suddenly slowed down ahead of me when I wasn’t looking. I got tangled up in his rear tire and went over the handlebars. I skinned my knee and put a dent in my helmet, but we were going too slow for much else to happen.

   “Crash test dummies!” a crow watching us from a tree branch squawked.

   I took me longer to put my derailleur chain, which had fallen off, back on than it did to get over my injuries. The chain was trapped against the frame. I had to loosen the rear wheel. I cleaned my greasy hands on some of last year’s fallen leaves.

   The morning of the big day, while my wife went shopping for a gift, I rode down into the valley. I felt good, but a strong crosswind was blowing, and I got tired. The bike felt sloppy, too. Going home I pushed hard because I didn’t want to be late for the show. When I finally got home, I found out I had been riding on a nearly flat back tire.

   Rick’s wedding went off without a hitch, but during the reception, when my wife was congratulating him, he made the shape of a handgun with his hand, with his index finger pressed to his temple.

   The next day I drove to Rick’s house with the gift we had forgotten to bring to the reception. Amy was lounging in the living room in a thick, white bathrobe, poring over Cancun brochures, and Skater Katie was in her pajama’s. While Rick and I talked in the kitchen doorway, Amy’s old dog limped up to me and licked the scrape on my knee.

   By the beginning of October, the park was yellow and maple red. I rode the all-purpose trail every other day. One Sunday morning my wife and I had breakfast at the Borderline Café down the street and went for a walk on the horse trails behind South Mastik. That night, while we were watching a movie on TV, Rick called.

   “I won’t be able to ride anymore,” he said.

   “Amy?” I asked.

   “No,” he said. “It’s my shoulder.”

   I had seen how he couldn’t lift his right arm above his head without trying hard.

   “After any ride,” he said, “any ride at all, bumps or no bumps, my shoulder is in a lot of pain. I’ve been taking Celebrex, but my doctor told me it’s rubbing bone on bone. There’s almost no cartilage left. He said sometime in the next couple of years, depending on how fast the rest of it goes, I’ll need a replacement shoulder.”

   “Oh, man!” I exclaimed.

   The last Saturday of the month was the last day of the year I rode in the valley. It was getting too wet and cold. I was adjusting the strap on my helmet when a gang of neighborhood boys and girls came walking up with rakes, brooms, and a wagon. They asked if they could rake our yard for $5.00. I said sure. They started pushing wet leaves into piles. The biggest of the girls walked up to me.

   “Mister, can I ask you something?” she said.

   “Sure,” I said.

   “That small boy,” she said pointing to a small boy. “He’s having a potty emergency.”

   I rang the doorbell for my wife, and she came outside, saying she would take care of the boy and supervise the raking. “Go before it gets dark,” she said. It was getting dark earlier and earlier.

   Where Hogs Back intersects with the Valley Parkway, I cut across a field and rode onto a single track. The path was littered with twigs and slapdash. A flock of honking Canadian geese went by overhead. I came around a quick bend and the branches of a fallen tree on the side of the track jabbed at my face. I swerved to the left and pulled on the brakes, jumping off the bike when the tree I was going to run into became the tree I ran into. I landed on my feet and the bike was all right when I picked it up.

   On the way home I rode on the road, instead of the all-purpose trail, hugging the shoulder’s white line. A man in a shiny new silver pick-up leaned on his horn behind me, and when he went past, tried to shrug me off the road, giving me his middle finger for good measure. Some people are sons of bitches. There’s no getting around it or doing anything about it. 

   At home I hosed off the Schwinn and hung it up in the garage. I checked the tires. They looked good, although I knew hanging upside down in the garage all winter long all the air would slowly seep out of them.

   I was going to miss riding with Rick, but when you ride with somebody else you have to wait until they’re as ready as you. When you ride by yourself you can go whenever your bike is spit polish lubricated and the tires look good. The White Knight had been a metalhead for crown and country, and even though his decal brought up my rear, going it alone is the real deal. Nobody wants to be alone, but sometimes you just need to be left alone.

   I did yoga at home that winter to give my lower back a break. I went to classes sometimes even though I couldn’t stand the pie in the sky talk. I had an indoor bike and pedaled on it. I would have to pump up my road bike tires again the coming April, before going back into the valley. When I did, I would keep my eyes on the road ahead, not looking back, daffodils blooming and turkey buzzards circling in the warming air, the springtime fine after a long cold winter on Lake Erie.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Ebb Tide

Treasure Island

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By Ed Staskus

   “Mammy, you know how those men dug a hole in the ground for daddy because he wasn’t alive anymore?”

   “Yes, Maggie, we buried his body in the ground but his soul lives with God.” Siobhan said after the funeral for her husband. He had been interred in the boneyard up the hill. She was in the kitchen preparing dinner.

    “I saw daddy dig a hole behind the barn and bury something in it.”

   “Is that the secret you wanted to tell me about?”

   “Yes.”

   “When did you see that?”

   “I saw it when he came back.”

   “Came back from where?”

   “When he left with all the horses that time and came back. Do you think he buried something in the hole for God?”

   Siobhan Foyle rubbed her hands clean on her apron. “Show me where that is,” she said. The widow and her daughter walked out of the kitchen, across the yard, and behind the barn. It was early evening, the sun arcing away from them. 

   “There, mammy, where the fox is digging, that’s by where daddy buried his treasure.”

   A red fox was digging, stopping, listening, and digging again. The animal had long, thin legs, a lean lithe frame, and pointed nose. His tail was bushy. Foxes ate everything, rats, mice, voles, lizards, rabbits and hares, birds, fruits, and bugs. Those on the shoreline ate fish and crabs. There wasn’t anything that wasn’t grist for their mill.

   “What is he doing?” Maggie asked, watching the fox watching and listening.

   “When he stops to listen, he’s listening for a mouse or a rat underground,” Siobhan said.

   The fox cocked his head. “I know you’re down there,” he announced to whatever was down there. “You can’t get away.” He dug deeper, not trying to be quiet. He knew he could dig faster than whatever rodent was soon going to be his breakfast could tunnel to safety.

   The tod was the size of a medium-sized dog. His vixen was probably in the nesting chamber with their pups. They lived in the dunes, in burrows they dug for the family. There were always several ways of getting into and out of the den in the event predators snuck in trying to eat the pups. The tod and vixen stored grub there, pushing it under piles of leaves, spending most of the day in the safe and sound, searching for more food mostly at night.

   The fox looked up. Siobhan knew they could see as well as cats, their vertically slit pupils glinting. If he yipped and turned to go, he would be gone in a flash. They were practically the fastest animals on the island. Many people thought they were cunning. Some people thought they had magical powers. Whatever spells they could cast never helped when a coyote was tracking them.

   When the fox finally got his mouse, he trotted off with it. Siobhan went into the barn and brought back a shovel. Maggie pointed at the spot where to dig. Ten minutes later her mother had a dirty leather tobacco pouch in her hands. She knocked the loose dirt off it and walked to the house, Maggie trailing behind her. They sat on the porch facing Foyle’s Cove. When she opened the pouch and reached inside it, her hand brought out money in bundles held together by elastic bands. She had never seen elastic bands before and never seen that much money, either. When she finished counting it there was $7,000.00 in her lap.

   It was all in fifty-dollar Dominion of Canada bills. The god  Mercury was on the front holding a map of British North America, along with drawings of a harbor, ships, and a train in the background. “50 Dollars Payable at Montreal” was printed on the back. Montreal was where her husband had sold his horses.

    “Somebody is coming,” Maggie said. A two-man horse and buggy was coming down the road, except there were three people in the buggy. There were a man and a woman and a one-year-old girl.

   “It’s Clara and Hugh come down from Clifton with their new-born,” Siobhan said as the buggy got closer. The rest of her children were on the porch watching. She stuffed the cash money back into the leather pouch and handed it to Kieran Jr., her oldest son. “Go to my bedroom and wait for me there. Keep this in your hands and on your lap until I come for it.”

   “Good day,” Siobhan said as the buggy came to a stop. Clara handed the child to her. Hugh walked around and helped his wife down to the ground. Lucy Maud Montgomery looked up at Siobhan and smiled. Siobhan smiled back. The baby girl cut cheese and Siobhan gave her back to her mother.

   “Lucy is a lovely name, but she looks like an Annie to me,” Siobhan said.

   “That’s odd, because you’re the second person who has said the same thing,” Clara said.

   “We wanted to stop and pay our condolences,” Hugh said.

   “Thank you,” Siobhan said.

   “Kieran was a good man.”

   “Yes, he was.”

   Hugh fed and watered the horse. The grown-ups sat and talked on the porch. The children played with the baby. When the sun started to set Hugh and Clara got ready to go to North Rustico where they planned to spend the night with relations.

   “Come and have dinner with us,” Clara said.

   “I would love that,” Siobhan said and that is what she did, but not before walking upstairs to her bedroom with Kieran Jr. and Sean, her second-oldest son. “I won’t be back tonight,” she said to them. “Put the other children to bed once it gets dark. Don’t light anything. Keep this bag in this bed with you tight between the two of you until we decide what to do with it tomorrow.” She kissed her sons, and the other children downstairs, and once outside walked alongside the buggy towards town. She carried the baby, cooing at the child as they walked past the burying ground.

   The next morning, she made breakfast for her children. When they were done eating, she and the girls cleaned up while the boys tended to their chores. Michael was too small to do much, but Kieran Jr. and Sean were strong boys who knew their way around animals and farmland. Next summer she would add on to the house, adding two bedrooms so when the boys and girls grew up, they could have separate bedrooms. She would improve the fields and fences. She would hire a farmhand, but not increase the size of her herd overmuch. Her husband had wanted to eventually keep a hundred horses, but she didn’t think the land would keep that many. She would devote three hundred acres to the horses and thought forty or fifty of them would be best. 

   She didn’t believe in continuous grazing. Horses had a bad habit of grazing their favorite grass close to the ground, then returning to eat the regrowth as soon as it came back. As the year went on there wasn’t enough of it left to capture sunlight. It had to use stored energy to regrow. If horses kept eating in the same place, energy stores ran out and the grass died.

   Horses liked orchard grass, smooth brome, and timothy the best. They could eat it all day long down to the bare earth which was when weeds started to grow in their place. Siobhan had heard of rotational grazing and that was what she was going to do. She would move the horses to one pasture and let the other pastures recover. Each of the pastures would be left empty for at least several weeks at a time. That was how long it took for forage regrowth after grazing to happen.

   She had four paddocks connected to a sacrifice lot. The lot had a shelter, a feeder, and a water source so that the paddocks didn’t need to have their own. The horses could get to the sacrifice lot anytime they wanted. They liked it that way. Siobhan was determined to keep draft horses. She wasn’t a racing horse woman. Prince Edward Island was a farming island and farmers needed draft horses more than anything else.

   When Friday came and before it went, she told the children they would be going to Charlottetown the next day, and staying overnight, so they could buy clothes, shoes, boots, tools, small barrels, utensils, dishes, a new table and chairs, and as many household necessities as they could carry back. Winter would be upon them soon enough.

   Her team could go at 15 KPH if they had to and get them to Charlottetown in two-and-a-half hours, or die trying. The road wasn’t especially rough or hilly, but it wasn’t smooth and flat, either. If the team plodded they could get to the city and live to tell the tale, although it would take them five hours-or-more. She would take the four youngest children with her and leave the two oldest behind. She stood Kieran Jr. and Sean on flattened brown paper and traced their bare feet for new shoes. She rolled the paper up and tied it with a string. She measured their arms and legs and height for new jackets and trousers.

   The five of them going all together would weigh less than 400 pounds. They would be markedly heavier coming back, but the horses could pull ten times and more that weight with no trouble and do it all day if the going was slow and steady. She hitched the horses to their farm wagon and started before dawn. Maggie and Michael, the two youngest, sat up front with her. Biddy and Kate knelt in the back on the floor of the wagon leaning on the tailgate, looking back at the way they were leaving behind. 

   When coming into Charlottetown she asked the children if they wanted to see Fanningbank. “Yes, please!” They were unanimous that they wanted to see it. “Our teacher told us it is the Government House,” Biddy said when she saw it. “Why do you call it Fanningbank?”

   “It’s because a hundred years ago Edmund Fanning, who was going to become the governor, set this land on the riverbank aside for the building of a residence for the governor,” Siobhan said. “The land was his and known as Fanning Bank then, and that is what it has stayed to this day.”

   Fanningbank was a large Georgian style house. It was the kind of architecture popular in England in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Georgian style valued classical balance. John Harvey was the second governor to live there. After the start of the new year of 1837, in the dead of winter, he held the first dress-up party in the elegant house. 

   “An entertainment upon a splendid scale was given by Sir John and Lady Harvey at Government House on Thursday evening last,” the Royal Gazette reported. “As this was the first occasion the rooms were thrown open to a large evening party, no pains were spared to give full effect. At ten o’clock dancing commenced, which was continued with great spirit and animation until after one o’clock. The rooms were brilliantly lighted, and this, added to the crown of beauty and fashion with which they were thronged, exhibited their handsome proportions and striking appearance to peculiar advantage.”

   The dancing, mingling, gossiping, and back-slapping took place in the Grand Ballroom, a high-ceilinged room surrounded by eight columns. When the party was over His Excellency and Lady went upstairs and rooted around under the covers in the Sovereign’s Bedroom. The party was the talk of the season that year. When the baby was born in September he was told all about the party.

   In 1864 the delegates to the Charlottetown Conference came to the house in the evening for an official dinner and dance given by Governor George Dundas. They had a grand time excited by their grand plans, although none of them had any illusions about what it would take to make their plans come true.

   “Mammy, why do they call them excellencies?” Maggie asked. “Are they better than us?”

   “I will tell you when you are a little bit older,” Siobhan said.

   They went on to the south side of Queen Square, one of Charlottetown’s main commercial streets. It was where Siobhan knew there was tailoring, the selling of dry goods, and the manufacture and sale of rubber boots and furniture. What she didn’t know was that a fire had swept through the section destroying all but one building on the corner of Richmond and Queen. Where wood had stood brick was being laid, but nothing  was ready yet to provide her with what she wanted and needed.

   Charlottetown was a small city but with big enough business, and she had no great difficulty finding the clothes and goods she was looking for elsewhere. One merchant’s loss was another merchant’s gain. The first merchant she visited was the shoemaker Thomas Strangman and Sons. A shoe stitching machine had been invented by an American in 1856. It was known as the McKay Stitching Machine and Thomas Strangman was the first man on Prince Edward Island to have one. Sole cuts tailored to fit the right or left foot were still on the way. In the meantime, it was make them shape up on your own.

   When she was ready to pay for the shoes and boots for her children and herself, she showed one of the fifty-dollar bills to Tom Strangman.

   “Is my money good here?”

   He looked at the front and back of the bill.

   “Yes, ma’am, your money is good here.” He would take it next door to the dry goods store, which was also an exchange bank, among other things.

   She bought rice, sugar, and coffee. She bought cotton socks, wool socks, undershirts, under garments, shirts, denim pants, and blankets. She bought rolls of calico, brown shirting, domestic gingham, and bleached cotton. She bought a heavy plaid shawl for $3.00. She bought a dining room table and eight chairs for $45.00. 

   On the way back to Foyle’s Cove the following Sunday morning the children sat on the chairs at the table in the back of the farm wagon all the way home, waving to everybody they saw, pointing out a cross-eyed cow, another cow who brayed like a crow, and singing songs. They took turns sitting at the head of the table. They sang parlor songs and minstrel songs. They sang “The Maple Leaf Forever” and “The Red River Valley.” They sang loud and off-key.

   They sang a sad song. “From this valley they say you are going, I shall miss your bright eyes and sweet smile, for alas you take with the sunshine, that has brightened my pathway awhile.” Siobhan kept her eyes fixed on the track ahead of her while her children sang. She let her horses find their own way.

Photograph: Charlottetown, PEI, in the 1870s.

Excerpted from “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Cape Cod

Beating the Bushes

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cape-cod.jpg

By Ed Staskus

   “Nobody would talk to me at the Lighthouse the first winter I lived in Wellfleet,” said Susan Rarick. “All the other tables were yukking it up, laughing away, having a good time. I sat there alone slouched over a beer, night after night, and nobody would talk to me.”

   The Lighthouse was a bar and restaurant in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. It had been there forty-some years at the far end of the peninsula called the Outer Cape. A scale replica of the Nauset Beach lighthouse jutted up from the roof and the menu didn’t lack for crab cakes, littlenecks, and PBR’s. The only towns farther out on the Cape are Truro and Provincetown, on the far fist end of the Cape, which is 14 miles north of Wellfleet.

   The Pilgrims, when they landed in North America in 1620, landed in Provincetown. It is where they first shook hands with the locals and signed the Mayflower Compact. When Thanksgiving was over and done, they shook a holy fist at the locals and went south for better living quarters.

   “It wasn’t until Barbara Jordan, who was then the social director of the town, started talking to me that everybody else did, too,” said Suzie.  “I had only moved to Wellfleet from Provincetown, but it’s very local here, big time. Any small town is like that. But, once you’re in, you’re in for life.”

   Fewer than three thousand people live in Wellfleet, once known as Oyster Port, although in summer the population swells to nearly twenty thousand. Almost half of the town is part of the Cape Cod National Seashore. The rest of the place is a one-horse middle of town, winding residential neighborhoods, and a large harbor.

   The town clock on the top of the Congregational Church is the only bell clock in the world that still rings on ship’s time. The Wellfleet Drive-In is one of the few still standing in the USA. It’s the only outdoor screen on the same coastline where the movie was shot that shows the movie “Jaws” under the stars. The Beachcomber at Cahoon’s Hollow is the only beach bar high on top a Cape Cod dune overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

   The Incredible Casuals, featuring a transvestite drummer, were the Sunday afternoon house band for many years. But, like the band, not all of Cape Cod where the Beachcomber stands is still there. “When I was a kid, we had to walk forever from the car, lugging all our stuff, to the beach,” said Suzie. “Not anymore. It’s being washed away. The winter before last we had a storm that caused twenty years’ worth of erosion.” The Beachcomber lost its last row of parking. It collapsed into the Atlantic Ocean.

   “It’s extremely fragile here. That’s one reason it’s so special, besides the people. Where else can you live where many people don’t necessarily lock their doors? It’s like going back in time,” she said. Recent FBI crime statistics show that Cape Cod is below the national average in everything, while the murder risk, at a third, and the robbery risk, at a fourth, are both far below the national average.

   “I feel safe wherever I go, even in the woods, at least right up to hunting season, when you have to start being a little careful,” Suzie said.

   You can go everywhere in a small town like Wellfleet, although small towns aren’t for everybody. Since many of them don’t have places to go that you shouldn’t necessarily go to, they are sometimes thought of as small-minded. But no matter where you go, even the world’s big cities, it is only small minds that cling to small things.

   Small town life is like working at home, where everybody knows you and you know everybody. “I know everybody here in the winter,” Suzie said. “New Englanders are private, not show-offy, which sometimes comes off as cold, but I know all the local stories now.”

   Zsuzsanna Rarick vacationed on Cape Cod in the 1950s as a child, after her parents immigrated to the United States in the aftermath of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. “My parents didn’t even speak English. They said the Massachusetts climate was similar to Hungary’s, so that was where they settled. They went to Framingham with nothing but the clothes on their back. It was a different time to come to the United States. People were welcoming, very welcoming.”

   She has spent every summer or lived year-round on Cape Cod since she was four years old. “My friends had families with summer homes, but our family camped. I always loved it. There’s a picture of me at the top of the Provincetown Monument, my front teeth missing. I used to cry going home over the bridge, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go, I cried. I would lick the sea salt off my skin to get the last little taste of the Cape.”

   It is in places like Cape Cod that something is everything to somebody.

   After whaling slowly died off in the 18th century tourism began to be promoted in the 19th century. The Cape became a summer place for well-off city folk coming from Boston by packet boat and stagecoach.  When Route 6 was finished as far as Provincetown in the 1950s, and President Kennedy signed legislation creating the Cape Cod National Seashore, the sandy peninsula became a go-to vacation spot for many families up and down the Northeast.

   “I always tell people when they say how much they like Wellfleet, only tell your very best friends about us. It still has character and it’s still a real community.” Some of the townsfolk wear t-shirts saying, “So Many Tourists, So Few Sharks.”  Nevertheless, the driving force behind much of Wellfleet’s economy is off-Cape dollars. Seasonal residents, second-home owners, and tourism account for the better part of the town’s annual income.

   “There’s not a lot of year-round work here, so in the summer everybody is working crazy hours. We’re all complaining about it, too. The roads are a parking lot. All your errands you do on your off hours, somehow or other, or not at all. You go for groceries at the Stop-n-Shop in Provincetown at midnight.”

   It’s where to gossip with your neighbors who you never see in season.

   “But we have to make money, although after September it’s our reward time. We get to be with each other. Cape Cod is your private playground then. You can throw a snowball down the street in January, and you won’t hit a thing.”

   Everybody has to come in from the playground sometime, though, and that’s one of the problems of living in Wellfleet, as well as Truro and Provincetown.

   “There are people who live here who can’t find a place to live,” Suzie said. “If you have a house already, you’re OK.  But, if you’re trying to find a house here, like me, you’re bitter, like me.” Spring, summer, and fall Susan Rarick lives in a three-season cottage, a dwelling without sufficient land around it to qualify as an all-season’s condo. In the winter she is compelled to move to a rental in Eastham, farther south on the Outer Cape. There is a dearth of housing because housing prices have soared, while wages have stagnated.

   “Over the past ten years the median cost of a house rose $200,000 while income rose only $10,000,” said Paul Cullity, the pastor of Wellfleet’s Congregational Church and member of the local housing partnership trust. “Not only are people barely earning more than they did ten years ago, but they can actually buy less and less housing each year.”

   By standards common to the state of Massachusetts the town of Wellfleet should have 140 affordable homes. “But, we have less than 20,” said Pastor Cullity. The problem is so acute that there is an annual “Housing with Love Walk” to raise money and awareness for Cape Cod housing agencies.

   “It’s so friggin’ expensive here, and then, 80%, maybe 90% of the houses are empty,” said Suzie. “The baby boomers are buying everything up. It’s just summer homes for them, someplace where they’ll have a good spot for the 4th of July parade. They don’t live here all year. They live someplace else.” In the race between living and living it up, living it up is winning. “You have to be a certain type of person to live here year-round. We’re not the fast track and our track is disappearing because of real estate. In the 80s a half-acre might have cost $40,000. Today it’s closer to $240,000, or more, if you can find one.”

   Real estate land listings in the spring of 2016 in Wellfleet included 1.4 acres on Route 6, Cape Cod’s spinal highway, for $399,000 and 1.2 waterfront acres on Pine Pond Road for $895,000, while 2.3 acres on Perch Pond Way was a steal at $389,000. Almost half of the homes listed for sale in 2015 in Wellfleet were asking over a million dollars. One of the least expensive was a Sears kit house, the kind folks used to buy from the catalog, priced at $329,000.

   “Wellfleet was a cottage community, but then people started buying the cottages and making them over into million-dollar structures that they use three weeks out of the year,” Suzie said. “It’s good for our taxes and it’s actually not bad either that they’re not here most of the time.”

Far away makes the heart grow fonder.

   “The only saving grace we have is the National Seashore, thank God. Otherwise, there would be condos up and down that shoreline. At least we’re not Provincetown. It’s so sad. There’s nothing there anymore. Twenty years ago, it was a year-round community. It was so much fun. Everybody got along and you could get cheap rentals for the summer. Now, forget it. All the Portuguese sold their family homes for big bucks, walked away, and went somewhere else. You can’t find anything to rent. Everything’s been bought up.”

   Always a popular summer resort town, Provincetown has become increasingly popular since the 90s, so much so that no one lives there anymore. “Locals have been relocating,” said Bob O’Malley of Beachfront Realty. “The prices are driving them out of the market.”

   Although most of the new homeowners don’t live in town in the off-season, they are the newcomers who have more money, much more money, than the locals. “A lot of people had to leave town because they couldn’t find housing, any housing,” said Michelle Jarusiewicz, the Community Housing Specialist for Provincetown.

   “There’s no old-timers, there’s hardly any locals left, at all. There are practically no births anymore and the high school closed,” Suzie said. The last senior class at the Provincetown High School, after more than 150 years of senior classes, graduated in 2013. That was the end of that future.

   In the spring of 2015 Kristin Hatch, a volunteer member of the Provincetown Housing Authority, found the shoe on the other foot when she found out she was going to have to vacate her two-bedroom condo. “The landlord sent me an e-mail that he’s going to sell,” she said. “Hopefully something comes up.” In the meantime, she was moving her possessions into storage and staying with a friend.

   “Living here is not for everybody,” Suzie said. “What is kind of funny is that in the summertime the tourists are all sitting up here and thinking it’s like this all the time, but it’s not. I was doing a catering event in Truro, at a big, modern house that they got out of a magazine, and one of the guys I was working with said, ‘Come winter I’ll be sitting right here on this deck looking out at the sunset because there ain’t gonna be anybody else here.’”

   In winter the shore towns of the Outer Cape go from bustling to evacuated. In summer you can’t park anywhere. In winter you can park anywhere you want. The suddenly empty beaches of the Cape Cod National Seashore are anyone’s for the taking, so long as you take along a heavy coat, boots, and a friendly dog to keep you company.

   In winter in Wellfleet there might not be anything better than spending an hour or two in a neighborhood bar. “It’s a small community,” Suzie said. “One winter when it was bad there were three guys who always sat at a big table at the Lighthouse telling jokes. We would sit around, and they would start telling jokes. They each had a repertoire of fifty of them, maybe more, and they told them for hours. We thought it was great. It’s pretty isolated here in the winter.”

   “Did I ever tell you how Harvey and I tried to set up an anarchist community here in the 1960s, but we couldn’t make it work because nobody would obey the rules,” one of the good old boys drawled between pulls on a Pabst Blue Ribbon.

   “But, if you’re in trouble, somebody’s boat sinks in the harbor, the community is there,” Suzie said. “I was going to drive to Florida one time and there was something wrong with my car. The dealer said it was going to be five, maybe six hundred dollars. I took it to my friend, one of the men who used to tell jokes at the Lighthouse, and he looked at it, said it was no big deal, fixed it, and didn’t charge me. That’s what they are, salt of the earth people.”

   But, before joining the salt of the earth, one needs a little bit of the earth for oneself.

   “I love it here, although you give up a lot to live here. You have got to like yourself because there aren’t many distractions. But I need a house, that’s the biggest thing. I have just got to get a house. I’m crazy about it. I’m obsessed with it. I’ve been looking for years.”

   Of all home remedies, a good home is the best. While it may be true that everybody is stuck with themselves at home, it is where everybody usually feels better than anywhere else. Home is where one starts from early in the morning and ends up at the tail end of the day, where there’s always a candle burning in the window.

   “I’ll get it,” Susan Rarick said. “I’m getting closer, getting closer, and I’ll get there soon.”

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

Walk of Life

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By Ed Staskus

“War is hell.”  William Tecumseh Sherman

Wars are armed conflicts. We have been marching off to them for the past 14,000 years. Since the rise of the nation-state as we know it tens of thousands of wars have been fought, costing more than 3.5 billion human lives. Other deaths, like those of horses, mules, and camels are incalculable.

The Confederate cavalryman J. O. Shelby had 24 horses shot out from under him in two-and-a-half years during the Civil War. He survived every warhorse he ever rode. General Shelby died of old age in 1897.

Nearly all people all societies all states have gone to war with one another. 95% of all known societies have either fought wars or fought wars constantly. In the past 14,000 years there have been only approximately 300 years of non-raising Cain.

“The condition of man is a condition of everyone against everyone,” said Thomas Hobbes some 400 years ago. When it comes time to taking care of business it’s about banging heads with iron and blood, no matter what century it is. “Force and fraud are in war cardinal virtues.” In other words, no one gives a hoot for the other man, woman, or child. It’s every Man for himself and God against all.

It’s every horse mule camel for himself, too.

All faiths beliefs persuasions have crossed swords, from Jews to Buddhists to Christians. The European Wars of Religion in the 16thand 17th centuries cost more than 15 million souls. Islam has been at it since just about Day 1. In Sri Lanka the Tamil Tigers and hard-line Buddhists have been fighting tooth and nail for several years.

They were and are fighting for their beliefs, their beliefs being a ball and chain. Non-violence can be a disaster when it doesn’t work. The only bigger disaster is violence when it works.

More than 230 million people died in the wars of the 20th century. “It was a beastly century,” said Margaret Drabble. It’s impossible to say how many were injured displaced disappeared. At the end of the day, at the end of the century, who’s to say who was right and who was wrong? Whoever is left is who says.

The verdict is still out on the 21st century.

In the 5,000-year history of yoga, however, there are no recorded battlefield deaths of any man or woman true-blue to the eight limbs of the practice. There are no war stories of getting off the mat and duking it out with someone across the street who doesn’t see it your way. Even though there is a standing pose called Warrior, there are no thrust and parry, no AK-47’s, no nuclear arsenal. There are no bronze memorials of stern men on horseback sword in hand in any yoga studio anywhere.

Wars are fought for many reasons, but those reasons can be boiled down to nationalism, revenge, and material gain, both economic and territorial. The wages of war are swinish dark bottomless. Yoga is practiced for one reason, uniting body spirit mind. The wages of yoga are breath light energy.

Going to war may be the easiest thing to explain and the hardest thing to do. “Battle is an orgy of disorder. There is only attack and attack and attack some more,” said George ‘Old Blood and Guts’ Patton, who commanded the U. S. Third Army during WW2. Yoga may be the hardest thing to explain and the easiest thing to do. “Just do,” said K. Pattabhi Jois, the man who originated Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga.

General Patton often said battle was the “most magnificent” undertaking known to man. It can be one hell of an undertaking. A chest full of medals sparkles when you’re successful. Six feet of loose dirt covers up your failures.

“The real trouble with modern war is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people,” said Ezra Pound.

Old Blood and Guts died in an automobile accident. The Army private chauffeuring his Cadillac limousine was uninjured. K. Pattabhi Jois died of natural causes. “He was fearless about combining the path of yoga with the path of the participant “ said David Life, the co-founder of Jivamukti Yoga.

Since yoga doesn’t self-identify with any nation-state, doesn’t live by the eye for an eye of the tiger, and isn’t interested in looting all your stuff, it doesn’t issue declarations and ultimatums. It doesn’t blow its stack, launching smart bombs, armed drones, and coming to your world soon, fully autonomous weapons systems.

Practicing yoga is practicing getting your hands on freedom, no matter how elusive it may be. It’s not about getting your hands on the other guy’s cargo, no matter how bright and shiny and phenomenal it is. More cargo more loot more territory means keeping your nose to the grindstone in order to keep it all in your corner of the world. Yoga means sloughing off the wet dream of more glory more prizes more pride in victory.

Freedom isn’t about riding the merry-go-round and grabbing grasping snatching at the brass ring. Hell, what would you do with it anyway?

The Totenkopf military hat features a human skull, mandible, and two crossed long bones. The black-clad Hussar cavalry of Frederick the Great were the first to wear them. The death-head hats scared the hell out of the other guys, making it clear what was at stake.

Even though the Dalai Lama has said, “Awareness of death is the very bedrock of the path,” death-head hats are never worn by anyone at any time anywhere in any yoga class.

If Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II had taken off his skull and crossbones hat in 1902, put his hair up into a bun, and gotten on a yoga mat instead of scowling all the time, he might not have walked off the plank right into WW1. But, he didn’t, and 12 years later it was Time for Trench Warfare. Since WW2 was a direct consequence of the War to End All Wars, maybe that wouldn’t have happened, either.

In 1938, just before the start of WW2, French biologist Jean Rostond said, “Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.”

What a difference a hat can make, not just in fashion, but in what determines the fate of birds on the wing, too. The last German Emperor abdicated in 1918, grew a beard, and spent the rest of his life chopping wood and hunting birds. He bagged tens of thousands of them in the next twenty years. The neighborhood flocks thought he was an avenging angel.

Only one man has ever returned Uncle Sam’s Medal of Honor.

Charlie Liteky, a combat chaplain, without a weapon, flak jacket, or helmet, dragged 23 wounded soldiers out of a Viet Cong ambush in 1967, evacuating them to safety. He later opposed the war, and other wars, such as the invasions of Iraq. “I think it’s more of a patriotic duty of citizens of this country to stand up and say that this is wrong, that this is immoral,” he said.

But, one man’s immorality is another man’s morality, especially if those men are Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. The three largest defense companies in the world are USA companies. “You fasten all the triggers, for the others to fire,” sang Bob Dylan in ‘Masters of War’.

The United States controls more than 50% of the global weaponry market. Yoga controls 100% of the global yoga mat market. Only you control whether the world that’s always trying to make you something else gets its way.

Violence is the bread and butter of war. Warfare is a dangerous world filled with rough men, and lately, rough women, too. It is a world where the end justifies the means. Ahimsa, or non-violence, is the bread and butter of yoga The practice does not abjure self-defense, but it doesn’t propagate violence as a means, no matter what the end might be.

Non-violence is the first article of the first limb of yoga. Ahimsa in action is not doing harm. It’s simple enough, but easier said than done. The first step is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Unless you’re a psychopath, the doing will be non-violent. The next step might be to not march in ideological lockstep with anybody’s army. It doesn’t matter if it’s President Trump or President Putin or President Xi Jinping. Their interests are not necessarily in your best interest.

It’s pointless to complain about the weather. War is a longtime turmoil as old as the weather, as old as our gods. “May God have mercy on my enemies, because I won’t,” said George Patton. Sometimes it seems like there is no resisting the winds of war. It would be like trying to win a hurricane. When the Junior Bush and Elder Cheney administration wanted to invade Iraq over nothing Iraq had done, there was no stopping it.

If it all sounds like a shell game, that’s because it is. The shells of rockets’ red glare, the litter of shells the damage done, and political military industrial hacks shelling out pipe dreams of heroism. When you’re dead as a doornail it doesn’t matter who won the war.

The side of the moon facing away from the earth is the far side, the flip side. It is the side facing out to the cosmos. The bright side is what makes some moonstruck, making them go crazy when there’s a full moon.

John Bell Hood was a General in the Civil War on the Confederate side. He was notoriously brave and aggressive, and a madman. His troops routinely suffered staggering losses staging frontal assaults they were routinely ordered into. During the Seven Days Battle in 1862 every single officer in his brigade was either killed or wounded. In 1863 at Gettysburg Hood’s left arm was severely injured and he lost use of it for the rest of his life. In 1864 at Chickamauga his right leg had to be amputated just below the hip.

For the rest of the Civil War he rode into battle with his left arm tied to his body and his body tied to the body of his horse. “He has body enough left,” one witness remarked, watching Johnny Reb lock horns with the Yankees again.

The macabre spectacle of the one-armed one-legged Hood, trailed by an orderly carrying his replacement cork leg, was not his alone. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides of the Civil War lost arms and legs. That’s the damage all wars do, civil or not so civil, lopping off limbs, scrambling brains, filling up cemeteries.

Yoga, on the other hand, is not only a practice intent on keeping your arms and legs attached to your body, it is a practice that conjures additional limbs to those willing to take up the mantle of the mat. The discipline in the classic sense is an eight-limb practice. The limbs are restraint, observance, posture, breath control, sense withdrawal, concentration, meditation, and samadhi, which means standing inside of.

The walk of life can be hard enough with two arms and two legs. It’s much harder when missing an arm or a leg, or both. It’s much easier with eight extra limbs.

“When we talk about war we’re talking about peace,” said President George W. Bush. In the world of doublespeak slavery is freedom and war is known as peace. In the world of yoga freedom is freedom and non-war is known as peace. No fooling. Only fools try to fool themselves.

The masters of war would have you believe that taking up the gun will solve all the problems of taking up the gun. “The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over,” said William Tecumseh Sherman. General Sherman is known for the Savannah Campaign of 1864, slashing through Georgia and South Carolina, innovating what is now known as scorched earth warfare. “Yoga is not easy!” said K. Pattabhi Jois. “But, it leads to freedom.” He is known for inspiring and influencing the way yoga is taught and practiced all over the world.

Warrior pose on the yoga mat is about fighting the good fight, not fighting the other guy. It’s about challenge strength fortitude.

Standing on one leg in a yoga class may be cruel and unusual punishment, but at least you’re standing. Not only that, the standing is getting you somewhere. Getting anywhere in the Fog of War is up for grabs, at best, and on a collision course with Hell, at worse.

When it comes to getting on the good side of the Pearly Gates, war doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

A version of this story appeared in International Yoga Journal.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Atlantic Canada

Show on the Road

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By Ed Staskus

Erin McQueen isn’t a blonde, doesn’t often wear pearls carry a silk hand fan or suit up in gilded dresses with bows at the breast and puffed sleeves, and rarely looks perplexed. She does, however, speak with an English accent, which comes in handy when you’re a blonde sporting a string of pearls in a posh dress in the Restoration-era play “The Man of Mode.”

Staged by the Fountain School of Performing Arts at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the comedy by George Etherege is about a notorious man-about-town trying to slip-slide out of his love affairs and win over the young spunky seemingly virtuous heiress Harriet.

The play hit the bright lights way back when at just the right time. William Shakespeare had died 60 years earlier. The screws tightened by the Puritans had been recently loosened and women were finally being allowed to play female roles on stage.

There’s nothing like a gal in a gal’s role, rather than some scruffy cross-dresser.

“The make up and costumes are totally different from any other show we’ve done,” said Erin, then in her final year at the school. “Having the period costumes is really exciting. It’s a total transformation. The play truly is an authentic glimpse inside the intricate dating scene of 1676.”

Although she paced her prowling at a good trot, cast arched looks in the stagecraft of 17thcentury love stories, and had at it with barbed one-liners, like everyone else in a play that is all innuendo and intrigue, unlike everyone else in the play her English accent was neither feigned nor all wrong.

Even though she graduated from high school in Canada, spent four years at Dalhousie University, earning a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Theatre, lives in Victoria on the south shore of Prince Edward Island, and her father is Canadian, she isn’t, not entirely Canadian, not exactly.

Erin McQueen is British, born and bred in Bristol.

“It’s right on the border with Wales,” said Erin.

Iron Age hill forts and remnants of Roman villas dot the southwestern British landscape. In the 11thcentury the town was known as Brycgstow, easier to pronounce then than it is now. The port was the starting point for many of the voyages of discovery to the New World in the 15thcentury. Today the modern economy of the city is built on aerospace, electronics, and creative media.

Unlike most cities, it has its own money, the Bristol pound, which is pegged to the Pound sterling. “Our town, our money,” is what they say in Bristol. Since money is a matter of belief, it’s best to believe in what you’ve got.

“There are a lot of art festivals,” said Erin.

“They do a scavenger hunt every summer with ceramic animals. They started with gorillas, giving giant ceramic gorillas to artists, who painted them, and businesses sponsored them in their shops and on sidewalks, where you had to find them. They have a theatre festival, too, but that only started when we left.”

She was 16-years-old.

“The first time we came to Canada we went to see Halifax, where my father was born. It also happened to be the 150thanniversary of ‘Anne of Green Gables.’ My sister Caitlin was a massive fan. My parents finally said, ‘OK, we are in Halifax anyway, we’ll just pop over to Prince Edward Island.’”

She was 11-years-old.

“We did the tour, all the Anne of Green Gables things,” said Caitlin McQueen. They stayed in Victoria, a small village of maybe one hundred residents near the Westmoreland River. It is much, much smaller than Bristol, which is the 8thlargest urban area in England, home to nearly a million.

”I remember saying to Erin, I know I’ve never been here before, but I feel like I am coming home. I feel like I am supposed to be here. It is a dream come true.”

“I don’t really know what happened after that,” said Erin, “but the next year and for a couple of years after, we came back, and we always ended up in Victoria.”

While on a return trip, Andy and Tania McQueen, Erin and Caitlin’s parents, bought a lot overlooking the village harbor. In 2012 the family immigrated to Canada. They commissioned a house to be built, to be completed for occupancy the following spring. That winter was the winter they almost went back to the UK, back to England, back to Bristol.

“We spent a year living in Hampton, just up the road, in a rented house that had no central heating,” said Erin. ”I’m honestly surprised we didn’t move home that winter, because it was horrible.”

The winter months on PEI can be cold, temperatures averaging below zero in January and February. There are many storms, veering from freezing cold rain to freezing cold blizzards. The February 2013 North American blizzard started in the Northern Plains of the United States. By the third day of its arrival in the Maritimes there was heavy snowfall, wind gusts were hitting 100 MPH, more than a thousand flights had been cancelled across eastern Canada, and all Marine Atlantic ferries were suspended.

There was nowhere to go, anyway.  There are few things as democratic as a snowstorm. It’s the same everyone everywhere.

“I feel like many people on this island have done that, lived without central heating, but British people aren’t cut out for Canadian winters in unheated houses. I had a comforter on my bed and many, many blankets. I often wore two pairs of pajamas.”

The McQueen family stuck it out.

“The main reason we didn’t move back to England was probably pride,” said Erin. “Obviously, you can’t move back after five months because your whole family back home would be saying, ‘Oh, so that didn’t go well?’”

The McQueen family cats stuck it out, too.

“They are rescue cats, Callie and Zebedee, and we got their vaccination papers together, and applied for pet passports. My uncle said, ‘Why don’t you just get new cats?’”

“You did not just say that!” said Tania McQueen. “They’re part of the family.”

“Let me tell you, though, cats do not like emigrating,” said Erin. “It traumatized them a little. The only other animals on the plane the eight-hour flight were two dogs, a little thing that barked all the time, and a big, quiet German shepherd. We’re still making up for it six years later.”

The cats slept in front of the fireplace in the living room in the rented house from morning to every next morning from the beginning to the end of winter. Unlike the upstairs rooms, there were no doors downstairs shutting the living room off from the kitchen and two back rooms. They made doors out of blankets to conserve the heat in the living room. The cat litter box was in one of the small rooms, behind a blanket door.

“They would wait quite a long time, and then dart behind the blanket, and as soon as they were done, run back in to the fireplace.”

The school buses stayed the course. Erin enrolled at Bluefield High School to complete her last two years. The family had waited leaving England until she finished her first set of high school exams there.

“It’s a big thing,” she said. “Everyone in the country takes the same exams. You study for them for two years. It’s what you’re working up to that whole time.”

Bluefield High School is in the small town of Hampshire. A $2 million dollar addition in 2000 enlarged and modernized the school, which as well as secondary education trains in carpentry, welding, and applied technology. All of its classrooms feature SmartBoards and there are two computer labs. The sports teams from badminton to hockey are all called the Bluefield Bobcats.

The school is thirteen miles and 90 minutes from Victoria.

“The bus went everywhere, so by the time I got there I didn’t really know where I was, because we had gone all over the island. My first day we did orienteering, even though the school is just surrounded by forest and potato fields. It wasn’t like you ever came across any houses. It was very different from Bristol.”

Her plan had been to study fashion design and costume, but her plans changed. “They didn’t have any sewing or couture classes. They did have drama, so I thought, I guess drama is where my theatrical tendencies are going to have to go.”

After graduation she enrolled at Dalhousie University, majoring in anthropology, keeping acting in the back of her mind. “I took acting as an elective and later auditioned for the program. If I get in, I’ll think about it, I thought. I didn’t think I actually would. And then I did.”

In order to find the unexpected it’s best to expect it. You can’t plan for it, but it’s what often changes your life. ”All creative people want to do the unexpected,” said Hedy Lamarr, the glamorous Hollywood starlet and designer of a patented frequency-hopping radio guidance system for torpedoes. Even though she once said, “Any girl can be glamorous, all you have to do is stand still and look stupid,” her smart invention was the precursor to GPS, secure WiFi, and Bluetooth technology.

“My sister is the anthropologist, no acting, although she’s fascinated by actors,” said Erin. “She thinks she might do a research project about them one day. Actors never know what the future holds. They’re rarely employed for a long time, always on the way to their next role. It’s living on the edge. It’s the idea that you could love doing something so much that you choose that over stability or financial security.

“That’s what I want to do.”

It’s taking the show on the road. “I’m just going to start auditioning in Halifax. There are so many small weird theatre spaces. I’m thinking of potentially writing a fringe play.” She has no plans of pursuing the discipline of anthropology.

Her four years studying the arts and sciences of theater at Dalhousie University were matched by four summers working in theater in her newly adopted hometown.

“My parents saw there was a job at the Victoria Playhouse. I needed to work in the village. It was the perfect job, since although I do now drive, I couldn’t drive at the time. I could meet people in the industry, too.”

The Victoria Playhouse, in the middle of town, in what used to be the Victoria Hall, seats about 150, and has been producing and presenting live theater and performance events for thirty-seven seasons. In 2007 it was designated a ‘Historic Place’ on the Canadian Register of Historic Places. History gets made every summer seven days a week on its stage.

She worked the refreshment stand her first two summers.

“I don’t do that so much anymore,” she said last summer. “You could say I’ve moved up.”

She worked part-time in the box office, then went full-time, and worked front of the house. Odd jobs became must-do jobs. “I helped one of the actors run their lines, and then I did that a couple more times.” When the stage manager was conscripted to do lighting cues, she went backstage. “I gave the actors their places, which was exciting. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the show goes on.”

Sometimes the lighting cues are on the sturm und drang side of the curtain, occasioning careful calculation. Higher than normal water temperatures in the Gulf of St. Lawrence can and do morph into massive thunderstorms, roiling the island. It is batten down the hatches and check the flashlights.

“In villages like this, in bad thunderstorms, power goes out,” said Erin. “The doors are going to open in twenty minutes, the power keeps flickering off and on, and the management has to make a call about whether you think you can make it through the show.”

She became one of the emcees at the front of the stage, pointing out the exits, encouraging donations to the theater, and introducing the play. After the show was over was her favorite time. “It might sound corny, but at the end of the show, when we get to open the curtain and the applause, and afterwards the actors are happy, a kind of high, even with small crowds, that they brought a story to life and created some magic for the audience.”

After her employment contract at the Victoria Playhouse expired at the end of October, she moved back to Halifax, where she went to university, and where there is a red-blooded theatre scene. It is zesty and diverse, ranging from Zuppa Theatre, whose performances defy categorization, to the Neptune Theatre, whose performances outpace categorization.

“Some of the actors who worked at the Playhouse live in Halifax, so that’s quite cool,” she said. “They came to my shows at Dalhousie and I went to their shows.

“Acting, that’s my plan.”

If in the event a professional acting career doesn’t pan out, she is determined to keep her foot on the boards, front back or in the wings. ”If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be a secret agent,” said Thornton Wilder. Erin’s secret is all parts of the theater business interest her, from acting to directing to writing to the nuts and bolts.

“If I’m not acting, I will definitely be doing something in theatre. It’s plow ahead.”

It’s keeping your hand on the gospel plow.

“A part of me is intrigued by stage management,” she said. “Stage managers are another level of human being. They’re like super people with super powers. They’re the people you go to if you have any issues, personal, professional, or logistical. One of my stage managers at Dalhousie had a locker full of extra clothes and every kind of medicine you could imagine. They are prepared for anything.”

A career in the arts often means being a jack-of-all-trades.

“I am very into doing whatever I can,” said Erin.

If you want to accomplish anything something everything, you have to be willing to do whatever it takes, maybe not blood, but certainly sweat, and probably a locker loaded for bear, to make it work, to make it happen.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

West Park Blues

Stitch in Time

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By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell met Steve De Luca, her husband-to-be who was more-or-less living in Little Italy, when he wasn’t in jailbird trouble, a week after he got thrown out of a Columbus court and came home for his father’s funeral. Meanwhile, she was being thrown out of the family house in Bay Village after her own father died and she threatened to kill her sister.

   They met at Mad Anthony’s, and later Steve followed her to the Tick Tock Tavern on Clifton Boulevard, on a night when she was out with her friends. The stars were sparkling in a west side Cleveland sky. “I needed to get loose that night. Elaine and I had gotten into a fight at mom and dad’s house and when she tried to choke me, I told her I was going to punch her in the face and kill her if she ever put her hands around my neck again.”

   “What did you say?” Elaine shrieked.

   “I know how to break your nose and shove it up into your brain,” Maggie screamed when she pushed her older sister off. “I will do that if you try choking me one more time. I will lay you out flat.” Elaine never touched Maggie after that, but the threat of death didn’t go down well.

   Steve had been a bartender at the Tick Tock Tavern once, slinging shots and shooting the bull. He worked there forever, although since it opened in 1939 it hadn’t been forever. Whenever anybody mentioned anybody’s name to Steve at the bar he always said, “Oh, I know him.” It didn’t matter who it was, famous, infamous, or unknown.

   “Food, spirits, and characters” is what they say at the Tick Tock.

   After the fight with Elaine, Maggie went to her church, Bay Presbyterian, to talk to the pastor. She was contrite but seething. “I was born a Christian and raised a Christian. I have always gone to Bay Presbyterian, and I still go there. But goddamn my family to hell.”

   She had been going to counseling for years, but still not accepted the fact that her sisters and brother and she had been roughed up as children. She was upset that her roughing-it-up father had died, and was upset, too, about her ex-boyfriend-to-be, Craig, who was the mayor of Lorain, which was along the lake near her Bay Village hometown. 

   They had been seeing each other for twelve years, but there was no re-election on the horizon. Even if there had been, Maggie’s chances of higher office were slim to none. Craig had his eye on future choices and chances.

   “What are you doing with Craig?” her minister asked.

   “Why would you ask me such a thing?”

   “Why do you stay with him?” he asked.

   “You really want to know? I’ll let you know! I made a promise a long time ago, when I was a Young Lifer, that I would never have pre-marital sex. When I met Craig, a couple of years into our relationship, I started having sex with him. I said to myself, well, I’ve made my bed and I’m going to lie in it.”

   “No, no, no,” he said. “That’s not the life the Lord wants for you.”

   They started praying for the kind of man she wanted to meet, from eye color to personality. What she didn’t know was that Steve was hoping and praying to meet someone at the same time. He wasn’t being as specific as Maggie, though.

   After Steve got loose after driving too fast too drunk and arguing with the police, and shortly after his dad died, Fat Freddie, his brother, begged him to stay with him in Little Italy, so he did. Steve was a full-blown addict by then. When she met him, he was drinking nearly a fifth of Yukon with beer chasers and snorting coke day in and day out so he could keep drinking.

   He had started thinking his life totally sucked. He hadn’t had a girl to talk to for more than two years, because he was an obnoxious drunk, and he was down, if not down and out. One day while he was walking the dogs, dogs that his brother and he rescued at their used car lot, he started praying, which was something he had never done before.

   “God, if you can, bring me a woman. Please make that happen. I’m lonely, I’m miserable, and I hate my life. Please show me someone who can show me how to love you as much as I can love her.” He was willing to hold hands with the Lord so long as he could hold hands with a woman.

   Shortly after that Maggie’s friends and she were out having fun at Mad Anthony’s. Steve walked in and as he went by, locked eyes with her. After he walked past, she was talking to her friends when she got a creepy feeling that someone was staring at her. After another drink she kept feeling that long steep stare. She went over to where Steve was sitting alone.

   “I’m pretty sure we went to high school together,” she said.

   “Yeah, Bay High,” he said. “I was two classes ahead of you. You worked at the pool.” Oh, Lord, you done good, he wanted to say. Maggie was a fine-looking gal with ruby red lips and jet-black hair.

   Steve asked her out on a date and one more, too.

   “Really, dude, two dates before we’ve even had one date?”

   He wanted Maggie to go with him to the wedding of a sportswriter friend of his, but he thought they should go out first, to test the waters.

   “Alright, alright,” she said, finally. “We’ll see what happens.” She gave him her phone number. She could always hang up if she had to.

   “We’re going to the next bar,” her friends said.

   “It was nice meeting you,” she said to Steve. “Call me.”

   He followed them out. By the time they got to the Tick Tock Tavern he was a different man than the man she had been talking to at Mad Anthony’s, getting obnoxious and louder by the minute. By then his brain was drowning in Yukon. His life preserver was coke. But he was out of the powder. It was all downhill from there.

   “I’m leaving, so piss off,” she finally told him.

   “Jenny, why don’t you come home with me?”

   “Whoa, dude, you’re a jackass.”

   “Jenny, Jenny, why are you going?”

   “Because my name’s Maggie and that’s why I’m not going home with you.”

   As she went through the door, she shot him a look. “Great, he’s got my phone number,” she thought. But she gave him a second look. “He could be really handsome if we got rid of that huge monobrow.”

   The next morning, he called her.

   “What do you want?” she asked, ready willing able to hang up.

   “Don’t hang up, don’t hang up,” he said.

   “I have drugs and alcohol in my family,” she said. “The last thing I want to do is put up with it in a boyfriend. It’s not going to happen, pal.”

   “No, no, no, I’m good,” he said.

   They talked some more. When Steve wasn’t drinking like a drunkard, he was charming. He charmed her into a date and then another one, and even another one. They always went out with a group because she wouldn’t go out with him by herself. She was leery skittish cautious. Every time she went out with him, she left him at the bar at the end of the night after their argument.

   “You’re an idiot.” 

   When she was done running him down, she would leave, stamping her feet. He usually walked the railroad tracks home. He had lost his car to a court order and was footloose. But he started to get better, slowly surely, and as he did, they got better together, and the clock in Maggie’s head kept time to the times that might be on the way.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Atlantic Canada

Road Map

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By Ed Staskus

   There are more than six thousand kilometers of two-lane roads from one end of Prince Edward Island to the other end. There are some fast roads but most of them are laid-back. Tractors cows dogs slow the going down. About two thousand of the kilometers are unpaved and even slower, even if it was a motorcycle or a sports car trying to get up to speed. The ruts and chuckholes would make short work of them. All the unpaved roads are red clay dirt. Most of the paved roads are reddish to the naked eye.

   “At one time there was island stone and beach sand that was used in concrete,” explained Jamie Reid, the PEI operations manager for USCO Concrete.

   The landscape of Prince Edward Island is layered over sandstone bedrock. The sandstone is leavened with iron oxide, or rust, giving the countryside a distinctive red color beneath blue skies overlooking green fields. The natives who lived on the island before European colonization called their land Epekwitk. They thought Glooscap, who was their god, after he finished making the rest of the world, mixed all his colors with a final flourish and made their island.

   Sandstone can be dug up by backhoes and is still sometimes used for local and seasonal roads. Wet weather transforms unpaved byways and tractor paths into what some islanders call baby poop. 

   “When I was a kid most of the roads around here were dirt,” said Kelly Doyle. “Sometimes after a bad winter storm you couldn’t go anywhere for a day-or-two.”

     The first roads on PEI were built in the late 1760s. At the turn of the 20th century cars were banned on most roads most of the time, especially on market days. It didn’t have anything to do with drunk driving. There was a total ban on alcohol on the island. A Red Flag law was legislated, ordering there be a man at the front of every car with a red flag, ready to wave it just in case things got out of hand. Twenty years later the law was thrown out , the red flags were put away and cars went anywhere they wanted so long as there was a throughway that they could handle without breaking an axle.

   Kelly Doyle has lived in North Rustico, a small town on a natural harbor on the north-central side of Prince Edward Island along the Gulf of St. Lawrence, most of his life. He owns the Coastline Cottages on Doyle’s Cove on the National Seashore, operates PEI Select Tours, and was a lobster fisherman for many fishing seasons.

   “I grew up on a mixed farm. It wasn’t anything elaborate, basically turnips, which is a rutabaga, and we grew grain, barley, and wheat. My father was the farmer.” Mixed farms are for families who need a farmer three times a day, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

   Tom and Doris “Dottie” Doyle farmed 100 acres, although at one time the family had almost 400 acres. “Most of our land is rented,” said Kelly Doyle. “We used to have seven fields on our one hundred acres, but now it’s three fields.”

   By the early 1900s PEI’s dense forests had been largely cleared and ninety percent of the island’s land was being farmed. There were more than 12,000 farms, almost all of them between fifty to one hundred acres. The land was sub-divided by dikes, which are walls built of rocks dug up from the fields.

   “Those dikes were full of berries,” said Kelly. “Our mom used to send us back in the fields with buckets. We’d come back with them full of wild raspberries and blueberries.” 

   After World War Two technology and tractors led to modernization and bigger farms. One-crop planting became common. By 2006 there were only 1,700 working farms on Prince Edward Island and more than half of them were growing potatoes.  PEI is sometimes called the Million Acre Farm. Other times it’s just called Spud Island.

   “Fields were smaller fifty years ago,” said Kelly. “Maybe it should have stayed that way. Now they’ve ripped out all the dikes and sprays kill all the wild berries. It’s a shame to see it.”

   Tom Doyle, however, was the only Doyle who ever farmed.

   “They were boat people from Ireland in 1847,” said Kelly. “It was on his third sailing here that my great-great-grandfather landed and stayed. He did something so that the Queen, or somebody, granted him land, and two shore lots.” 

   By 1850 a quarter of the people on Prince Edward Island were Irish. The last wave of immigrants was from County Monaghan. They usually paid their own way to North America and usually made their own way once on the island, rather than submitting to tenant farming.

   Most freeholders farmed and controlled livestock. By the mid-1800s PEI was already exporting surplus foodstuff all over eastern Canada and to Great Britain. The Doyle’s, however, raised horses and propagated thoroughbreds. The family later took advantage of fashion and bred black silver foxes for their pelts.

   The riddle of breeding foxes was solved in the late 19th century on Prince Edward Island. Twenty years later single pelts sold for as much as $2000.00, at a time when farm laborers made about a dollar a day. In 1913 the provincial government estimated foxes were worth twice as much as “all of the cattle, horses, sheep, swine, and poultry” on the island.

   Whenever fish and crop prices went south, men turned to fox breeding. No one overly minded the stink, the skunk-like smell of the fox farms. The fur bubble burst on the eve of WW2. “When they went out of style my dad let all his animals out and he became a farmer.” By the early 1950s the fox industry was finished.

   Kelly grew up on the family farm and went to the nearby Stella Maris School, across the street from the Church of Stella Maris Roman Catholic Church. The school was built in 1940 and burned to the ground in 1954. “We stood looking utterly helpless in our misery,” a nun at the nearby Stella Maris Convent wrote in her diary. A year later, a year before Kelly’s birth, the town re-built their school. “It is the most modern fourteen room school in the province,” the Guardian newspaper touted in its feature article.

   “I went grades one through nine. Almost everybody my age quit in grade nine. It was the 60s and 70s. There was no need of education around here. Fathers would tell their kids, you’re not going to do anything in school, get to work in the boat. All of us said we’ve got better things to do and banged out of there.” 

   As a young man he wasn’t ready for boat work, or steady work of any kind, instead roaming Lower Canada, living in Montreal and sowing a bushel full of wild oats, until returning to North Rustico. He built a cottage on family land on a hillside overlooking Doyle’s Cove, but couldn’t find work.

   High unemployment in Atlantic Canada has been a constant since the 1950s. The eastern provinces are more invested in  seasonal jobs, like agriculture, fishing, and tourism, than Canada’s other regions, leading to seasonal lay-offs and involuntary part-time work.

   “Back in the 70s and 80s, she was pretty lean here. There was no money around for years.” 

   In the 1980s the gross domestic product of Prince Edward Island was the lowest in Canada, only 56% of the national average. Next to Newfoundland, the province had the lowest per capita income in the country. There was the fruit of the sea, though. When Kelly was offered work on a fishing boat putting out of the town harbor, he took it.

   “When I first started fishing everyone had a gasoline engine in an old wooden boat. Everything was done manually, except for hydraulics to haul gear off the bottom. The steering was even done by chains. Then everything went fiberglass, everything went diesel, and everything went hydraulics.” 

   As late as the 1980s fish men went door-to-door, making a living selling cod, until a ban on the taking of ground fish was put in place. Fish stocks had been over-exploited for decades up and down Atlantic Canada. They were severely depleted.

   “When I started fishing, people were baiting hooks and hauling trawls for halibut, haddock, and cod. Then the moratorium came in. All we were allowed was lobster.” 

   Kelly harvested hundreds of thousands of lobsters for almost three decades.

   “Lobster traps were invented a while ago and they’re as simple as mousetraps,” he said. Except, unlike mousetraps, lobster traps are remarkably half-baked, even though they almost always get the job done. Invented just more than one hundred years ago, they have changed little in the interim. Even though entrances to the traps are one-way, any lobster that tries to escape can get away, if it has a mind to.

   “My theory is there are two ways lobsters get caught,” said Kelly. “One way is what I call simple mindedness.” Since lobster brains are less than the size of the tip of a fountain pen, he might be right.

   “Lobsters won’t usually back out the same way they’ve come in. They crawl up the net, there’s a flap on it, then once they’re in that they can’t go back. The other way they get caught is they just stay too long in the trap eating bait, and when we jerk it out of the water, they get tossed into the back by the sheer momentum of us pulling it up with the hauler.” 

   Since lobsters spend almost all day and night racking their brains about where their next meal is coming from, crawling on their walking legs to get to it, and finally eating all the crabs, mollusks, fish, and even other lobsters they can get, it lends credence to Kelly’s second theory about overeating.

   Kelly Doyle’s brothers, John, Mike, and Kenny, all fished. “We weren’t farmers, exactly, but we weren’t fishermen, exactly, either, although I think it was naturally in our blood, since every one of us was at ease on the water.”

   John Doyle fished for several years before marrying and moving to Ontario to raise a family. Mike Doyle was one of the first satellite television providers on PEI. “Mike had rubber boots and oil gear and he went out, too, but then he got into TV’s.”  He later transitioned from catching lobsters to serving them at his Blue Mussel Café, a seafood restaurant, at the far end of the harbor.

   Kenny Doyle spent fifteen years fishing on local boats, and the next ten years fishing commercially with his brother, Kelly. “He’s captained deep-sea fishing boats out of Rustico for fifteen years, too. Kenny’s an able man behind the wheel.”

   Cathy and Elaine, the Doyle sisters, stayed on dry land. They did so for good reason. In North America fishing boats sink to the bottom of the sea at the rate of one every three days. Unpredictable storms roil the ocean. “You get black and bruised,” said Kelly. “During those seas, you do everything slower. You have to be a lot more careful with your gear, your traps, and the rope under your feet. You always have to watch your P’s and Q’s.”

   Kelly fished with his partner, Paul Doiron, a man he’s known since they were youngsters, although nine years separates them. “Paul, that’s my buddy, that’s my partner in crime.” Their boat was the Flying Spray, a modern, high-bowed 40-foot fiberglass craft built in nearby Kensington. “Paul’s roundish, built a bit like a buoy. He lives right here in the crick.”

   North Rustico has been known as ‘The Crick’ for many years. “There was a creek that ran right through the village,” said Kelly. “The people from Charlottetown either didn’t know what a creek was, or misunderstood, and ended up calling it the crick, so we ended up being nicknamed that.”

   There are only three houses on the shore lots on the northwestern side of Doyle’s Cove. One of them is a newer house built by Kenny Doyle, the other is the old Doyle family house, and the house nearest the cove was Andy’s Surfside Inn. Andy Doyle was Kelly Doyle’s uncle. “Andy turned 90 a couple of years ago and was still over there.” When he passed away, a cousin took over the house, renovating it.

   Kelly’s all-year cottage, large sliding glass doors fronting red cliffs and the curving shoreline, is on the field side of the Gulf Shore Parkway, the National Park roadway between Cavendish and North Rustico. Since the late-1980s he has one by one built five seasonal cottages adjacent to his, which are the Coastline Cottages, on the crest of the hill overlooking Doyle’s Cove. In the new century he added a kidney-shaped saltwater swimming pool. 

   “People thought, I’m turning it into a tourist trap,” he laughed.

   “Most of my friends ended up getting married. I ended up having cottages and getting in debt.” He is not on the rocks, but “there was no money around here for years. We’re all making a living now, but there still isn’t any great amount of it.”

   He owned and operated Amanda’s, a fresh seafood diner, in town across from the market, for many years. It wasn’t in his blood, but it was. During the 1960s his parents had a small restaurant in nearby Cavendish. 

   “It was 7 cents for pop, 30 cents for a hamburger, and 17 cents for fries back then,” he said. “That was the kind of money you made in 1964. There were six kids in our family. Some of those French Acadian families around here had a dozen births. It was no different for anyone.”

   Besides his cottages and fishing for lobster the months of May and June, like many men and women on Prince Edward Island he has always had other jobs to keep his head above water. He operates PEI Select, a tour guide service catering to Japanese tourists visiting Anne’s Land, the home of “Anne of Green Gables”. The series of books by Lucy Maud Montgomery, about a plucky red-haired girl, are big in Japan. In 2014 a Japanese-language version of the “Anne of Green Gables” musical wrapped up a sold-out nationwide tour by playing in Tokyo.

   In the spring he rents his farmland to neighboring farmers for hay, grain, and soybeans. He doesn’t let potatoes be planted on his land. “I let them grow food that uses the least amount of herbicides and pesticides,” he explained.

   Coastline Cottages, the Doyle houses, and the cove are in the National Park, but are not the National Park. The park was established in 1937 and encompasses more than five thousand acres of coastal headlands, sand dunes, and beaches. The Doyle’s didn’t sell their land when the park was being created on the central north shore of Prince Edward Island. 

   “But they have the patience to wait everybody out,” said Kelly. “That’s the beauty of the National Park. You don’t want to sell right now? That’s fine. Your son will want to sell, and if he doesn’t want to, his son will. If it takes two hundred years, we will get you out of this park.”

   Only change is unchanging, even though when times change it sometimes seems like not much is different. “There’ve been a lot of changes around the island, but it’s nice to go home and say it hasn’t changed much right here. That’s another beauty of the National Park. Since it’s a national park, it stays the same.”

   About 285 million years ago Prince Edward Island was a mountain range. Over time it evolved into a low-lying basin as glaciers advanced and retreated. Most of the ice was gone by 10,000 years ago and the island slowly took shape. Living in a traditional farming and fishing community, looking past the sandstone cliffs of Doyle’s Cove and out over the Atlantic Ocean, from the vantage point of Kelly Doyle’s deck it can seem like only a little has changed in a long time.

   “Only the rabbits and trees get bigger,” he said.

    Before the rebuilt Gulf Shore Parkway, which features a new all-purpose trail as it winds down a long highland past the cove, there was the old Gulf Shore Parkway, and before that there were tracks, and before that there weren’t any roads, at all. 

   “When the road came in sometime in the 1950s it cut our farm in half,” said Kelly. Before it was a road it was a hillside. When it rained in early spring or late fall, and especially when it rained all day, the slope that is now a road turned into a slippery slope of PEI sandstone, red clay goop slippery as an eel.

   The Doyle’s still always got to where they had to go. Getting somewhere is staying on your feet, knowing the drive, trimming your sails. Sometimes any road, or even no road at all, will get you where you want to go.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

800 Pound Gorilla

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By Ed Staskus

Theatre patron: “Say, what is it, anyhow?” 2nd Theatre patron: “I hear it’s a kind of gorilla.” Theatre patron: “Gee, ain’t we got enough of them in New York?”  King Kong

I never thought I would see an 800-pound gorilla in headstand, but then again, I never thought I would see a fleet of gold SUV’s filling up the parking lot of the yoga studio in Rocky River, Ohio, that I sometimes practice at, either.

The car repair lot next door, where no one is supposed to park, was filled, too. I parked across the street. It was early March, but winter had been mild, either because of climate change or El Nino, and there were no snowdrifts to climb over or icy sidewalks to flat foot across.

The SUV’s were parked in a line along the front of the building. As I squeezed past the lead one I glanced inside and saw a red baseball cap on the passenger seat.

Donald Trump? I thought.

I knew the Ohio GOP primary was coming up soon, I knew it was Donald Trump’s chance to derail John Kasich, our governor still in the race, and I also knew what Marco Rubio had said about Donald Trump during the FOX News debate in Detroit a few days earlier.

“He’s very flexible,” said Marco Rubio, pointing out that Donald Trump was primed for yoga because of his cherry picking politics. I wasn’t sure I agreed with Senator Rubio. Donald Trump’s policy positions seemed more like blobs of mercury, impossible to pin down and toxic, too.

At the top of the stairs, the yoga studio being on the second floor, two burly security men in dark glasses and darker suits looked me up and down. They asked me to unroll my mat for their inspection.

“Democrat or Republican?” they asked as I was rolling up my mat again.

“Canadian,” I said, lying.

They smiled, grimly.

I stepped into the studio wondering if Canada might ever build a wall from their side of the border to keep out their scary neighbors. When did the United States become the scary neighbor?

The yoga room was packed to the gills.

I had several times attended workshops staged by celebrity teachers, one with Janet Stone and another led by Max Strom, and thought then that the room was packed to the gills. I was wrong. If it all comes down to turnout, as is often said about elections, it was “Mission Accomplished”.

Both of my favorite spots in the yoga room were overflowing. The only available spot I saw was one in front, my least favorite place to be, but beggars can’t be choosers. I set up camp next to a vacant, extra-thick, extra-long, tangerine-flecked purple mat that faced the teacher’s mat.

Where do 800-pound gorillas practice yoga?

Anywhere they want to.

Donald Trump was in the center of the room. He wore a gold Speedo and nothing else, not even a headband. He was surrounded by a crowd and speaking, waving his arms as he spoke.

“I was always a good athlete,” he said. “I was always the captain of my teams. Staying in shape is very important. If you’re physically happy and healthy, it’s a lot easier to keep a relationship going. Taking care of your body is a great thing for love.

“Don’t even think about Marco Rubio saying my hands are small, and if they’re small something else must be small. My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body.” He pointed to the front of his Speedo. “I guarantee you there’s no problem.”

Some of the women in the crowd being regaled by Donald Trump lifted their eyes from his gold Speedo, gathered up their mats, and left the yoga room. One of them stopped and asked the teacher, “What is that?”

“That’s Donald Trump, the Republican running for president.”

“I know,” she said. “Did you lose a bet?”

“Of course not. This is part of our yoga on and off the mat program.”

“This is the same man who said women were dogs, slobs, fat pigs, and disgusting animals, right?”

“It’s all yoga,” said the teacher, looking increasingly uncomfortable.

“Blah,” said the woman, slipping out the door.

Since the yoga room was less crowded at the start of class than it had been beforehand, everyone rearranged their mats. The teacher cued her iPod and class began.

“Before we start,” said the teacher, “I’d like to welcome Donald Trump to our studio and say that I really believe in the essential goodness of Republicans.”

“Wait a minute, not all goodness,” exclaimed Donald Trump, jumping up out of Easy Pose. “There’s Lying Ted, he’s an unstable person. His whole deal is he will lie. He will lie and after the lie takes place he will apologize. Little Marco, he’s always hiding his palm sweat. Once a choker always a choker. Kasich, he’s a nice guy, but he’s a baby. He can’t be president.”

My mat was next to Donald Trump’s, giving me an up-from-your-bootstraps view of the man as he stood straddling his mat. He was tall, over six foot, and big, well over 200 pounds. He had large feet, size 12 or 13. It was clear he had recently gotten a pedicure.

As he sat back down I heard muttering behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw another dozen-or-so people leaving the yoga room. “Mitt Romney was right when he talked about your bullying and absurd third grade theatrics,” said a middle-aged man, pausing as he passed by.

“Get him out of here,” said Donald Trump, tilting his chin up to one of his security men. “They’re always sticking a certain finger up in the air. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to protestors like that when they got out of line. They’d be carried away on a stretcher, folks.”

There was a low moan from the back and a few more people walked out. The yoga room had gone half empty and class hadn’t even actually started. Our teacher, looking out at what had been a multitude just minutes earlier, hurriedly got us on our feet for sun salutations, a traditional warm-up.

We were midway through our second sequence of sun salutations when Donald Trump jumped out of down dog to the front of his mat, but instead of staying in the sequence he stood upright and began flapping his arms.

“What language is that?” he demanded to know.

The teacher had been speaking partly in Sanskrit, the classical Indian language used in yoga to define poses.

“Is that Mexican? That’s bad. When Mexico sends people, they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. I will build a great wall. Nobody builds walls better than me. I’ll make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”

“Oh, man, that’s all I can take.” It was a voice I recognized, although I hadn’t seen her in the room. When Lola stormed to the front I was sure there was going to be a confrontation. She grew up in a Polish-American neighborhood on Cleveland’s south side and taught high school in Lorain, a nearby rust belt town. Many of her students were either first or second-generation immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America.

“It’s scary to actually think about what you in office would mean for equality,” she said, standing high on her toes to get up into his suntanned face. Although, when I looked closely, it looked like he was using a self-tanner. The color was orangey.

“The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted,” said James Madison.

“Nobody’s done so much for equality as I have,” said Donald Trump. “When it comes to my $100,000.00 membership club, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, it’s totally open to everybody. I set a new standard in Palm Beach.”

“Yikes,” she said and stormed out, followed by what was now a throng.

“How did she get that close to me?” asked Donald Trump, glaring at his security men. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

He turned to face what was left of the class. “We need strong borders. We need a wall. I’m the king of building buildings, the king of building walls. Nobody can build them like Donald Trump.” He was starting to slip into the third person, as though there were two of him. “I’m opposed to new people coming in. We need Predator drones.”

By this time there weren’t many darker-skinned people of any kind left in the room, only a handful of women, and no one who practiced yoga for more than the exercise. Most of the remainder, scattered in the corners and shadows, were either younger men or older men. They began chanting, but not OM, the chant most commonly heard in yoga classes.

“USA! USA! USA!”

“We’re going make our country rich again,” Donald Trump shouted over the din. “We’re going make our country great again and we need the rich in order to make the great.”

“USA! USA! USA!”

“It’s better to live one day as a lion than one hundred years as a sheep,” he shouted, even louder. “I know who said it, Mussolini, OK. But what difference does it make?”

“USA! USA! USA!”

The teacher tried to regain control of the class, but it was too late, in more ways than one. If yoga is about focus, the focus of everyone left in the room was elsewhere. All eyes were on Donald Trump. He whirled on the teacher.

“You’re fired, done,” said the King of Skull Island. “What a moron, lightweight.”

He gathered up his mat and unfurled it where the teacher’s had been, perpendicular to the class.

“I promise you I’m much smarter than her. I focus exclusively on the present. I’m speaking with myself,” said Donald Trump.

“I’m the super genius of all time. I was a great student. I was good at everything. We need a president with tremendous intelligence, smarts, and cunning. My whole life is about winning. I don’t like losers. Everybody loves me. The haters and losers refuse to acknowledge it, but I do not wear a wig. My hair may not be perfect, but it’s mine.

“It’s all about living your words, walking your talk, and talking your walk.”

Our yoga class was almost over. Since he had flipped the GOP head over heels this campaign season, Donald Trump said we were going to finish by doing an inversion. He spun his hair into a bun and to my astonishment lifted up into a pinpoint headstand, his new updo making a comfy cushion.

Most people who practice headstand hold the pose for about a minute. If they stick with it and get seasoned, some hold headstand for up to five minutes. Donald Trump’s eyes were open and his gaze straight ahead. His legs were parallel and butt tucked in.

Five minutes later everyone had rolled up their mats and left the room. Donald Trump was still in headstand. His security men stared out the windows. Ten minutes later the yoga receptionist cracked open the door and peeked in.

“Mr. Trump, I don’t mean to interrupt,” she said. “Our next class is scheduled, we’re running late, and everyone’s waiting out here in the lobby.”

“That’s so inappropriate,” he said. “You’re a flunkie, treating me very badly.”

She closed the door softly behind her.

I lay on my mat in corpse pose. I could hear Donald Trump’s breathing next to me, slow and steady. When I was finished I rolled my mat up, nodded to the bored-looking security men, and left the yoga room. Everyone’s eyes fell on me as I stepped into the lobby.

“Is he still in there?” someone asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“When is he going to be done?”

If there’s an 800-pound gorilla in the room, the yoga class is over when the beast says so.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

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By Ed Staskus

   I knew some bits and pieces about Dennis Kucinich, even though I had never met him. I knew what I knew because I was living in Cleveland, Ohio, and he was the mayor. He was the youngest mayor in the history of the city. He was the youngest mayor of any major American city. He was 31 years old but still looked milk-fed.

    I hadn’t voted for him. I never voted for anybody. I thought of myself as an anarchist. I wasn’t the bomb throwing kind though. I liked the idea of anarchism more than the risk-taking of anarchism. I wasn’t ready and willing to end up behind bars.

   The new mayor was born and bred in Cleveland, the oldest of seven children in a Catholic family. He was 23 years old when he won a seat on Cleveland’s city council. After he got a master’s degree from Case Western Reserve University, he ran for mayor in 1977. He surprised himself and everybody else when he won. When he did his troubles started and went on and on.

   Cleveland was a mess in 1977. A year earlier The Cleveland Plain Dealer splashed “Bombing Business Booming Here” across its front page. The old-school Italian families and the new-school Celtic Club were fighting it out for control of the rackets. Car bombs were the preferred ways and means of debate. All the evidence was usually blown to bits, which suited everybody involved, since they were all in. It didn’t suit the police, who were left out in the cold.

   The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms set up a new headquarters in town. When asked why they said since Cleveland was “Bomb City USA” they were obliged to do something about it. Within a year they doubled their staff.

   It wasn’t just bombs, either. Trash collection and street repairs were slipping fast. The parks were more litter and dopeheads than fun and games. Corporations and manufacturers were pulling up stakes. Racial polarization was staying put. Whites hated the busing that was coming and made sure everybody knew it. “We Say, No Way, No Bus for Us” is what their banners said. As the 1970s kicked off murders in the city set a record with 333 of them. Ten years earlier there had been 59. Environmentalists declared the Cuyahoga River dead and Lake Erie not far behind. The city lost a quarter of its population during the Me Decade. 

   The city didn’t lose me. I moved back to Cleveland after growing up in North Collinwood and Euclid. My parents didn’t like it. They believed in the American Dream and thought I was back tracking. They told me so from their suburban home. They thought the metropolis was a nightmare.

   I lived a block from Lakeshore Blvd. and two blocks from Lake Erie. Bratenahl was three blocks west. I rode the 39B bus through the posh village Monday through Friday on my way downtown to Cleveland State University. I always sat in the last row so that nobody could sit behind me. I didn’t have to worry about the swells, since they never rode the bus, but the same wasn’t true of some of my east side neighbors.

   Dennis Kucinich got started with a bang when he was elected in November. He championed the public good and made sure everybody understood he wasn’t going to auction off the city’s assets. He was sick and tired of corporate collusion and tax abatements. Everybody was sick and tired of the old mayor Ralph Perk. Dennis Kucinich was a breath of fresh air.

   It was snowing when he was inaugurated in January. It kept snowing and the new leader of the pack was forced to declare the metropolitan area a “disaster zone.” Before the month ended the city was hit with the worst blizzard in its history. Things went from bad to worse when he fired his police chief two months later.

   Dennis Kucinich had appointed Richard Hongisto, a former San Francisco sheriff, to be chief of police as soon as he became the mayor elect. It seemed like a smart choice, especially after the head honcho in blue saved a man from a snowbank during the Great Blizzard of 1978. He was acclaimed by the press and public as a man’s man.

   The mayor didn’t see it that way. When the police chief wouldn’t go along with his plans, which included rewarding his supporters with jobs, he charged him with insubordination. The chief responded by saying he wasn’t going to commit any “unethical acts.” On Easter weekend in front of live TV cameras the mayor fired his top cop. One thing led to another, and even though he was in a hole, he couldn’t stop digging. When business and civic leaders lost confidence in him, momentum grew for a recall election. When they started calling him Dennis the Menace the momentum became the real deal.

   I didn’t meet Terese Schaser until the late 1980s. It happened soon after I met her daughter, who was going to become my wife-to-be, although none of us knew it at the time. In 1978 Terese was living in Park Centre. She had left her husband and was making her way as a restaurateur. The twin 23-story downtown towers were less than ten years old, built with raw cement features in a Brutalist style, where the best people lived. Richard Hongisto lived in the same building as my mother-in-law in the making.

   She was in her mid-30s and getting on a roll. When she heard about the recall effort, she got behind it and helped roll the ball forward. She wasn’t much older than the boy mayor but believed he was an upstart, his inexperience getting in the way of his governing ability. Her friend the ex-police chief agreed with her. Neither of them gave a hoot about his populist philosophy.

   Cleveland was on the verge of default. Dennis Kucinich did the best he could to fend off his naysayers, but he was a Democrat, not a member of any intelligible political party. He shouldn’t have been allowed to deal with the devil in the first place. He was taking his lumps from all sides. Even his own city council was at his throat.

   He called them “a group of lunatics” and “a bunch of buffoons.” He said, “it’s hard to believe that so many people can be so stupid.” He added insult to injury by saying, “if they’re not stupid then they are crooked.” That summer he ordered more police patrols in the projects to counter rising crime. The police department refused to obey the order. Thirteen police were disciplined and suspended which led to a police strike. Among other things it was another first for the city.

   The Kucinich administration was making history right and left.

   When the weather warmed up Terese was in summer dresses and flat shoes helping with the recall petition. She had great legs from her dancing days. Towards the end of May the effort was short of the required signatures. She threw herself into the work explaining cajoling and demanding. She never got tired and wore people out. She had a big personality. Ten years later she wore me out. Her children ate cold cereal in the morning and cold leftovers at night. By the deadline of June 1st more than enough signatures had been gotten. 

   The mayor refused to resign, saying “Bring on the recall.” He handed out bumper stickers saying, “Support Kucinich, the Peoples’ Mayor.” The people would have their say soon enough. Terese’s kids breathed a sigh of relief, but the hot meals didn’t last long. The recall election was scheduled for mid-August. The canvasser redoubled her efforts.

   She had pizzazz to spare and didn’t spare any of it during the recall campaign. She didn’t just rub two sticks together. She made sure one of them was a match. The lady lit a fire under everybody she talked to. Working on a political campaign means about half the electorate is going to hate you day in day out. She didn’t let it get her down. She had an agenda and a bogeyman. At night she made her plans for the next day while singing along to lurid Italian operas. 

   “My mother was an enthusiastic but terrible singer,” her daughter said.

   When Dennis Kucinich stalled on demands to sell Municipal Power, the city’s publicly owned electric utility, not only did lawyers get involved the Cleveland Mob got involved, too. They brought in a hit man from Maryland to shoot him during a parade. Nothing came of it when the mayor was hospitalized for a few days and missed the event. He never really liked parades, anyway. 

   As the recall campaign got into full swing, Council President George Forbes and Dennis Kucinich argued about the merits of building a new ore dock for Republic Steel, except their arguments had nothing to do with the ore dock.

   “Stick to the issue,” George Forbes said.

   “Mr. Chairman, I determine the issue,” Dennis Kucinich said.

   “Not in this chamber,” George Forbes retorted.

   “You will permit me to continue my remarks,” Dennis Kucinich said.

   “Just one moment,” George Forbes complained. 

   “You have no ability to censor my remarks,” Dennis Kucinich explained.

   George Forbes didn’t like that. His dark face got darker. He ordered the mayor’s microphone shut off. Dennis Kucinich and his aides stormed out. When all the hot air was said and done, Republic Steel walked away from Cleveland and built a new ore dock in Lorain.

   “The best and longest running show in town isn’t at Playhouse Square,” Roldo Bartimole, who wrote the newsletter Point of View, said. “It’s at Cleveland City Hall. The admission is free.”

   When recall day arrived more than 120,000 Clevelanders voted. Dennis Kucinich took a nap. He knew staying up wasn’t going to change the result if he lost. He also knew if he won, he had another tough day in front of him, and needed the rest. He prevailed by a margin of 236 votes. Terese’s kids ate well the next day when it was all over.

   Towards the end of the year Cleveland s banks refused to roll over the city’s debts. They assured the mayor it would be business as usual if they could do what they wanted with Municipal Power. He refused, and the city went into default, the first city since the Great Depression to find itself unable to meet its financial obligations.

   He lost his reelection bid in 1979. It was one and done. He wasn’t going to be the jackass in a hailstorm anymore. Everybody was sick and tired of confrontational politics. George Voinovich took his place. He got Cleveland going on the road to ‘The Comeback City.’ When the century came to an end historian Melvin Hollis put Dennis Kucinich on his list of ten worst big-city mayors of all time in his book “The American Mayor: The Best & Worst of the Big-City Leaders.”

   Terese remarried and moved to a corner apartment on an upper floor of Park Centre. The family barbecued on the balcony and watched the air show over Lake Erie every September. The Blue Angels cut the corner across their roof pirouetting back to Burke Lakefront Airport. She gave up governmental enthusiasms, concentrating on foodstuffs. She opened a restaurant and then another one. She worked as a pastry chef on both sides of town. She catered weddings and served food at funerals.

   At the end of the day, kicking back, she liked to paraphrase Mark Twain. “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a politician, but I repeat myself.” It always got a big laugh over dessert, especially when she added, “Put them in charge of the Sahara Desert and in a couple of years there will be a shortage of sand.”

   I moved to Lakewood, Cleveland’s second-oldest suburb on its western border. The town’s mayor kept his nose to the grindstone, focusing on safety, schools, and city services.  They weren’t running out of sand anytime soon.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Cross Walk

In the Rough

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By Ed Staskus

   “It’s a good day for it,” Dwight Eisenhower said, smiling his disarming trademark smile.

   It was going to be his first full round of golf since June. He had suffered a heart attack last year. Then when this summer rounded into shape, he needed surgery for ileitis. The past week had been filled to the brim with the Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, Even though he had been unopposed, no need for a stampede, there had been some hard campaigning trying to get Richard Nixon off the ticket, to no avail.

   Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t overly enthusiastic about being president. He did it because he thought of the work as a duty. “This desk of mine is one at which a man may die, but from which he cannot resign,” he said. Richard Nixon wanted to be president. He didn’t think of it as a duty. He wanted it for himself, himself in the executive’s chair, at the top, giving orders and being obeyed. The conniving public official didn’t think it had anything to do with civil service.

   “Any man who wants to be president is either an egomaniac or crazy,” Dwight Eisenhower told Turk Archdeacon, his caddy standing next to him with a bag of clubs. Turk thought he was simply shifty, but didn’t say so. It wasn’t his place.

   Nat King Cole the Negro singer had spoken at the Cow Palace yesterday, the last day of the convention, to some cheers and more jeers. The president made the speech happen, no matter the carping about it. He knew he had to give in on his second-in-command, who was a hardline anti-Communist, who the rank-and-file supported with cheers and campaign donations. “I don’t want those Commie bastards to be successful,” Richard Nixon always said. But the president knew he didn’t have to give in to Jim Crow, at least not always. He could take the high road and leave the jeering to the dirty tricks gang.

   They drove up to Pebble Beach before the convention ended, before his VP could invite him to dinner. Besides, Richard Nixon’s father was seriously ill. The president urged him to go see him before it was too late. The VP mumbled something and in the end was almost too late. The night he visited his father, Frank Nixon said, “Good night, Dick. I don’t think I’ll be here in the morning.” He died in the morning. Dick wasn’t there. The funeral was three days later at the East Whittier Friends Meeting House. Richard Nixon had to ask for directions. The Quakers had become a lost heritage to him.

  There were three cars full of Secret Service men fore and aft. Charlie Taylor, who’d been at it for many years, was in one of the cars. One night when the president was having trouble opening his safe, and asked for help, his agents told him safecracking wasn’t part of their training. He was beside himself, giving them his ten-pound hammer look. Charlie got the cranky combination to give in without a struggle. He had been an anti-submarine officer during the war. Safes weren’t safe when he got his hands on them.

    “I won’t know whether to trust you, or not, after this,” Dwight Eisenhower told him, glancing at the trim crew-cut man.

   Dwight Eisenhower was driven to his golf outing in a black Lincoln Cosmopolitan. It was one of ten presidential touring cars. They all had extra headroom to accommodate the tall silk hat the president wore on formal occasions. The cars were almost 20 feet long, with Hydra-Matic transmissions, and heavily armored, weighing in at close to ten thousand pounds. One of them, a convertible, a 1950 model built for Harry Truman, had been fitted with a Plexiglas top. The president called it the Bubble Top. Charlie Taylor called it a pain-in-the-ass. Mamie Eisenhower didn’t like sitting under a plastic dome, but she put up with it, like she did with everything else.

   It was a clear day, sunny, the high sky dotted with seashore clouds. A steady breeze blew up from the water. It was refreshing. Dwight Eisenhower nodded at the man standing behind him.

   “It’s a pleasure, Mr. President,” Turk said.

   “Why, that’s fine,” President Eisenhower said.

   Turk had been caddying at Cypress Point since he was nine years-old, from almost 40 years ago. They walked to the practice tee. The president started whacking balls into the distance. He played Bobby Jones woods with his official five-star insignia engraved on their heads. At the putting green he lined up three balls 20-some feet away from the cup. He sank all three.

   “I should quit right here,” he grinned.

   “Yes, sir,” Turk said.

   Dwight Eisenhower had been practicing on a green on the White House grounds, hitting wedges, irons, and 3-woods, sometimes sending balls sky-high over the south fence. Whenever he did, he sent his valet to retrieve them. The squirrels that prowled the lawn dug up his putting green, burying acorns, nuts, and hardtack. When they buried their loot they left small craters behind. One morning the president finally had enough. “The next time you see one of those goddamned squirrels go near my putting green, take a gun and shoot it!” The Secret Service asked the groundskeepers to trap the squirrels, instead, and release them in a park somewhere far away.

   In a week August would be come and gone.  He would be 66 years-old soon. “I’m saving my rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am,” he said, pointing to the rocker in the Oval Office. More days than not, he felt like that day was creeping closer, step by step, and there was no stopping it.

   His birthday was in October. CBS was planning a “Person to Person” TV show the night beforehand. Eddie Fisher was going to sing ‘Counting Your Blessings Instead of Sheep.’  Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel were going to sing ‘Down Among the Sheltering Palms.’ Nat King Cole, with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra, was going to sing ‘It’s Just a Little Street Where Old Friends Meet.’ He was looking forward to it.

   In six weeks, he would be throwing out the first pitch for the first game of the World Series. There were five or six teams in the hunt, although the New York Yankees looked like a lock, at least to get there. If he were a betting man, which he was, he would be putting his money on the Bronx Bombers to take the kaboodle. He wouldn’t be at the game in the Bubble Top, either, but in the Cream Puff, which didn’t have a dome. He would be  getting some sunshine and fresh air, at least what there was of it in New York City.

   He liked Cypress Point because it was set in coastal dunes, wandered into the Del Monte forest along the front nine, and then reemerged on the rocky Pacific coastline. The last holes played right along the ocean. He’d played golf on many courses around the world. This was one of the best of them.

   Dwight Eisenhower looked out over the par-5 10th hole. He had taken off his tan sweater, but still had a white cap on his head. Seven months ago, Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson, professional living legends, had taken on the talented amateurs Ken Venturi and Harvie Ward in a white-knuckle not-so- friendly foursome at the same Cypress Point. The same 10th hole turned out to be the key to unlocking the contest.

   “I bet they can beat anybody,” said San Francisco car dealer Eddie Lowery about the two amateurs, who were his employees. He was talking to fellow millionaire George Coleman. The bet and the match were on in that minute. The bet was in the four figures.

   Harvie Ward was a two-time U.S. Amateur champion. Three months later Ken Venturi came within one stroke of winning the Masters. The cypress-strewn rolling dunes of the course on the wind-swept coast, the deep ravines, knee-deep grass, sand on all sides of the fairways, weren’t redoubtable, not to them.

   Ben Hogan turned the corner on the 10th when he rolled in a wedge shot for a 3. The eagle and 27 overall birdies testified to the competiveness of the match. The drinks at the bar afterwards rubber-stamped the camaraderie. There were backslaps about made shots and groans about missed shots.

   Dwight Eisenhower was playing with Harry Hunt, the president of Cypress Point, Sam Morse, a one-time football star who had developed Pebble Beach, and John McCone, a businessman who had been the undersecretary of the Air Force. He was partnered with Harry Hunt. They were playing a dollar-dollar-dollar Nassau bet. It was even-steven at the halfway mark, even though the president had stunk up the 8th hole.

   “Where is it?” he asked getting there, searching for the green on the 8th somewhere across the dogleg.

   He sliced his tee shot into sand. When he got to it, he hit it less than ten feet further on. Then he hit it fat, the ball limping head-high less than twenty feet, and falling into somebody’s heel print.

   “I’ve had it, pick it up,” he said.

    “Having a little trouble?” Sam Morse asked.

   “Not a little,” he said. “A lot.”

   On the tee of the 17th hole Dwight Eisenhower lined up his shot. Sea lions on the rocks below him barked. “It’s hard to hit a shot and listen to those seals at the same time,” he complained, but not so either of the Secret Service agents with them could hear him. He didn’t want them taking unnecessary potshots at the seals.

   Dwight Eisenhower was accustomed to having bodyguards around him, during the campaign in North Africa, and later as commander of the Allied Army in Europe. The Nazis had tried to kill him several times. Secret Service agents near his person nearly every minute of the day felt like a second skin. He knew what it took to save his skin. When he moved into the White House he didn’t mingle mindlessly, shake hands in crowds, or do anything foolish.

   “Protecting Ike works like clockwork,” said agent Gerald Blaine.

   Mamie Eisenhower gave her Secret Service men nicknames. One of them, who was a good dancer, was called ‘Twinkletoes.’ He asked Mamie to keep it between themselves. Some of the bodyhuards called her mom. Other bodyguards had never had mothers and called her Mrs. President.

   “You don’t have to worry about me, but don’t let anything happen to my grandchildren,” the president told Secret Service chief U. E. Baughman. The Diaper Detail guarded the four kids. Dwight Eisenhower changed the name of the presidential retreat in Maryland from Shangri-La to Camp David in 1953. “Shangri-La is just a little fancy for a Kansas farm boy,” he said. He renamed it in honor of his 5-year-old grandson, David. When Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union boss man, visited the retreat he said the name sounded like a place where “stray dogs are sent to die.” 

   Dwight Eisenhower looked for the fairway on the 18th hole. “Where do we aim here?” he asked.

   “Keep it away from the left,” Harry Hunt said. There was a stand of pine trees on the left. “That’s the Iron Curtain. You’ll never get through that stuff.” The president laughed and hit a long drive. His next shot was a 4-iron and he nailed it onto the green, 20 feet short of the pin. He was going out with a bang.

   In 1954 eighty people were convicted of threatening the president and sent to prison or locked away as madmen. In 1955 nearly two thousand threats were made against Dwight Eisenhower’s life. The year before, the Russian KGB officer Peter Deryabin, after defecting, told the CIA about a Soviet plot to kill the president in 1952. “We were preparing an operation to assassinate Eisenhower during his visit to Korea in order to create panic among the Americans and win the war there.”

   Whenever he played golf, bad-tempered men with good eyesight and high-powered rifles took up vantage points on hills, surveying the course with telescopic sights. Other men, dressed in golf clothes, carried guns and ammo in their golf bags as they tagged along. The Queen Mary, a specially outfitted armored car, was their rolling command center.  

   Shortly after Mother’s Day the Secret Service had investigated a threat to plant two boxes of explosives at a baseball park where the president was planning on taking in a game. “Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, and assassination,” Adolf Hitler had said not very many years before. “This is the war of the future.” Dwight Eisenhower and the Allied Army derailed the Nazi night train. No one was going to take him by surprise. He was planning on sitting in his rocking chair one day, rocking back and forth, watching his grandchildren trundle on the carpeting.

   He served in the armed forces from one end of his adult life to the other. After he retired, he was dean at Columbia University, and then president of the country. He was still the president and, he was sure, he was going to beat Adlai Stevenson like he had four years ago. Adlai didn’t know how to get close to folks. He was full of sanctimonious bull.

   Even though he’d commanded millions of men in the last war, Dwight Eisenhower thought war was rarely worth going to war for. He hated it. “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

   “Didn’t you once say that we are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it?” Harry Hunt slyly asked.

   “When we have to, but always remember, the most terrible job in the world is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you’re on the battlefield. There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs. When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it themselves.” 

   The Cold War wasn’t nearly as hot as it had been ever since Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin’s cult of personality earlier in the year, as well as admitting the Man of Steel’s crimes, and the outrages committed against Mother Russia. The iron door had been cracked open. The president had long thought war settles nothing, even when it’s all over. He was worried about the arms race, which was a race towards nuclear catastrophe.

   “You just can’t have that kind of war,” he told his inner circle. “There aren’t enough bulldozers in the world that could ever scrape all the bodies off the streets.”

   “Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative” is what he had written in his daybook and wanted to say at the Cow Palace, but didn’t, not with Richard Nixon and the Red Scare and the military hand-in-hand with industry. He wanted to call it what it was, a military-industrial complex that was always crying “fire” in a crowded theater. But he couldn’t, at least not until after he was re-elected. In the meantime, he planned on speaking softly and carrying a big stick, even if it was only a long shaft wood driver, the biggest stick he had in his golf club bag.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Cross Walk.”

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